Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Employee loyalty is a competitive advantage. So how do you keep them? In this episode, John Livesay has the guest who can boil it down to one tip. Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, dives deep into the value of becoming a broker of fairness and what it brings to the industry. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor. Rich emphasizes how being fair to everyone makes you more advantageous in your business. Also in the business of selling himself as a speaker, he then shares why he thinks the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens. If you wish to know how to keep your employees loyal, learn the speaking culture, or simply gain great nuggets for success, then you should not miss this conversation!
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Listen to the podcast here
Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Our guest is Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, a bureau that books the top speakers in the world. He said, “It is important to be a broker of fairness. When you are easy to work with, it becomes a competitive advantage.” Find out his secret sauce to keeping his employees loyal. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Rich Gibbons, who’s a native of Connecticut and Glasgow, Scotland. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He joined Speak Inc in 1991, which is one of the top speaking bureaus, and now serves as the company’s president. He has been closely involved with the International Association of Speakers Bureau, IASB, and is a past president of the organization.
Because of his knowledge and expertise in the industry, he has been sought after as an expert witness on legal issues involving professional speaking. He has also been involved with the Corporate Event Marketing Association, serving as a board member. He and his wife, Heather, have three children. Shout out to Julia, Jackson, and Max. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain biking, road cycling, windsurfing, motorcycling, and skiing. Welcome to the show, Rich.
Thanks for having me, John. That was a fun recitation there.
I’m always curious to have someone tell me their own story of origin of how you get started in the speaking business. You can take us back to being in Scotland and coming to America or wherever you want to start your story. You have been speaking for a long time, which is something we are going to dive into.
I first moved to San Diego, California, 33 years ago. When my wife and I first moved here from New York, we showed up in California. We didn’t have jobs and no contacts. We didn’t know anybody. I went to my alma mater and looked up the alumni directory and thought, “There is got to be somebody from our school out in San Diego.”
Sure enough, I saw that one of my fraternity brothers was out here. He was a couple of years ahead of me. I looked him up and came to learn that his wife, Ruth, had started a speaker’s bureau. I didn’t know what a speaker’s bureau was. When I paid her office a visit, I saw all these books, audio cassette series, and VHS tapes of these fascinating people. Ted speakers weren’t a thing back then. It’s that genre of subject matter experts and a lot of interesting people.
I would say to her on a Monday as I pay her office a visit, “Would you mind if I borrowed this series of audio cassettes? Can I take this book for a week? I want to look at this VHS tape.” It was almost like going to the library. I would check these things out and come back a week or ten days later and return that stuff and walk off with other stuff.
I was a real voracious curious consumer of the content of people like you that have a tradecraft and area of expertise. The arch of their story is endlessly interesting. She and her husband were working closely. When it came time for them to expand and grow the business beyond just her, they thought, “This Gibbons guy seems to be interested in the product.” This summer 2023, it will be 32 years. It must have been an idea whose time had come.
One of the things I found intriguing in your bio is you are being called an expert witness. I’m guessing there is a story there of some of the cases you have been called on. How do they even find you? One of the things that a bureau does, for those people who aren’t familiar, is all the contracts and getting the money upfront. If a speaker doesn’t show up, you have a whole roster of other people for backup, which gives the client peace of mind.
There are a lot of details and now, contracts are getting more complicated, from what I have been hearing. Tell us a little bit about what SpeakInc and your brand’s expertise is in those kinds of contracts. If you have a story of being on trial because we watched those shows on TV. We know how an expert witness is coming up and the defense is going to try to discredit it.
Our company and companies like ours, my brethren in the industry, or industry colleague friends across the lecture circuit, we serve as an intermediary between the companies and the trade associations that engage the talent, and that universe of talent that is out there. We want to be a broker of fairness. We want it to be fair for both parties. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor.
[bctt tweet=”Be a broker of fairness.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Our role is to make sure that there are no areas of ambiguity and that everything is clear. We have all had more familiarity than we would probably like with force majeure provisions coming out of the pandemic. A lot of people pre-pandemic were like, “Force majeure? What is that?” Everybody knows what force majeure is now. We are being an advocate for a level playing field and making sure that expectations are set with a great deal of clarity.
The second thing you asked was about the expert witness thing, which was entirely passive. I received a phone call one day from an attorney locally here in San Diego, California, who had been referred to me by a colleague of mine in Texas. It was related to a medical malpractice case for a popular, prolific, and bestselling author that had been a host of Oprah’s favorite or Oprah’s Book Club.
She had a book club where she would pick a book. She had her favorite things. It could be products to buy during the holiday time. One author that she raved about was Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. She had the whole audience participating in that situation where women have this wake-up call where he is not that into you if he is calling you Friday night to go out Saturday.
It wasn’t the Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. It was a similar author who had his moment in the sun and sold a lot of books. He had a heart event and was purportedly mistreated in the healthcare facility. There was a lawsuit. The insurance company was defending. Oftentimes, expert witnesses are brought in to weigh in on arcane industries or cottage areas of commerce that are not that well understood by people who are extramural to it.
When I was invited to participate, I went to a friend of mine who was a litigator and an attorney. I said, “I got this phone call today. I’m shying away from it.” We found out that I was being collared to be an expert witness. He said, “You should do it.” I’m glad I did it because it was illuminating and fun. His prediction came to pass. That was, “You will be part of a deposition and a dialogue where your area of practice will be the topic of conversation. No one in the room will know what they are talking about except you.”
That was absolutely the case. I was shocked at how authoritative the old expression, “Often wrong, never in doubt.” These attorneys were definitive and authoritative. I would listen to them and think, “That’s not remotely a reality.” There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Most people don’t even have a clue that it exists as a profession. I remember going to a doctor’s office. The doctor is looking at the job title or profession on the medical intake form. I wrote, “Professional speaker.” He goes, “Is that a thing? People make a living speaking.” He couldn’t wrap his head around it.
When I learned that my fraternity brother’s wife had started a speaker’s bureau, I said, “What the heck is a speaker’s bureau?” They were like, “We help these groups and identify talent for the platform.” I thought to myself, “That must be like shooting fish in a barrel. How many companies can be doing that?” You then get into it and you realize, “It is competitive.”
Let’s talk about speaking because what you do that I don’t think people first think of is selling. You are in the business of selling yourself as a bureau to get clients to pick you to find their speakers, and you’re in the business of selling the speakers that you have on your roster as being the right fit. One of the things that stood out for me when I was browsing your website is the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens.
I have a whole belief premise that soft skills, listening, empathy, and storytelling are what make us strong. You got listening on your website. We are on the same page here of how important that is to figure out even if you are the right fit sometimes as a bureau, let alone a speaker. If you could speak to that a little bit about how important listening is, and how you have that be part of your culture.
For a company like ours, as a non-exclusive bureau, we don’t have a backroom with a dozen names under contract that we get gigs for. It is not like that. Our marketing communication, branding, and positioning in the market are not unique to us, but it is the wall we are leaning our strategic ladder against. We can be impartial assets and counselors to those people putting together agendas.
Broker Of Fairness: There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Oftentimes, it’s the number of event stakeholders and executive leaders that want to get their fingerprints on speaker selection. They want to talk about a theme. There’s the almighty budget, and the cross-section and demographic of the audience. These event stakeholders can take 10 to 15 minutes to tell you about one slot, the opening general session or the closing keynote, what they want people to think and feel, and how they want their audience to change their orientation after the program as opposed to before it.
You can take the same briefing and description of all I have mentioned and share it with ten people, and you can get ten different answers. There is a lot to interpretation, follow-up questioning, and understanding of who has worked well in the past and who has maybe not hit the mark. Getting a feeling for the entire fabric of that entire landscape tells you a lot. It becomes the curation process and suggesting candidates that will align well with what is being described. It is not an art form, but it is not going to be reduced to software code anytime soon.
I want to double-click on something you mentioned, “Listening includes deep questions beyond the initial question.” In the world of psychotherapy, would you go to a therapist with your partner and say, “The romance is gone?” That is what is called the presenting problem. People think, “As soon as we get their romance back, everything will be fixed.” The therapist will usually say, “That is the presenting problem. There is something else going on that has caused the romance to go away like lack of trust and hurt feelings.”
That is their job to do that. As a sales keynote speaker, I work with the audience on thinking of themselves as doctors, asking questions like that, and not taking the first problem that a client gives you as, “This is our big problem. If you solve this, we will hire you,” or whatever. Sometimes it is as simple as saying, “Anything else on your mind? Anything else that you want this event to be? Anything else that is a concern to you?”
You get down to another level, especially if they are interviewing you and maybe elder bureaus or maybe other speakers, and I’m the one that said, “Anything else?” Everyone else goes, “You want them to hit their quota. I can do that. Bye.” If I say, “Anything else?” They go, “We also like them not to take rejection personally, be a little more resilient, or whatever else they are struggling with.” I can then go, “I can do this and this.”
If I don’t ask the question, they don’t often give you more than the first-level answer. I thought that is a great example of what you are saying there. With events in particular, there are many moving pieces. They almost need you to be a therapist sometimes and realize you are not alone in this. That is part of the messages.
That’s a great way to put it. I feel a little bit like a fossil making this observation, but so much of what my colleagues and I did when I first got in the business back when dinosaurs roamed the land in the early 1990s, everything was phoned and faxed. I don’t even think the email was a thing back then. There is so much automation, and everything is very digital that I will be diplomatically insistent.
A lot of my colleagues, both my partners here, as well as my industry colleagues, to the point you made two minutes ago about anything else. You can’t ask anything else over email or text. That is got to be eyeball-to-eyeball. That is why having these conversations over Zoom or Teams, there is more of a dialogue. It can be more conversational.
There is a famous speaker who came of age in the late ‘80s. He had a great firm that has stuck with me for three decades that is prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. It’s a lot about that to the extent you are making recommendations before you have heard the whole story and unpack all the nuances of the meeting landscape and direction.
There is such a huge ecosystem there that to have that conversation, and to the point you made asking open-ended questions, “What else would you like me to know about?” The stuff you pick up in those dialogues. Sometimes it is not possible if you are working with an agency or a production company and you are a couple of degrees from Kevin Bacon. You are not right at the coalface. It is a little bit of the telephone game. You don’t get that granular detail.
When you are talking with a CMO or a director of events, and they have a seat at the table, they understand the details and nuance of how they are putting that together with the energy and the theme, and where they sit in the evolution of their company and organization. When you have the dirt under your fingernails familiarity with everything they are dealing with, it makes you pick up these minute details in what they are communicating. To the extent you know the minute details, background, experience, and history of the speakers, you can make those connections that are hard to do when you get a macro, generic, or general brief.
[bctt tweet=”‘Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.'” username=”John_Livesay”]
Sometimes if you are talking about the details, it can be as simple as when you land or get to your hotel, text the bureau and the client. Let everybody know you are there. That is one less thing they have to worry about, especially if there is bad weather, canceled flights, or 100 other things. That requires a speaker to not be self-focused the whole time and realize that you are just one cog in this big wheel. If you can take that, that is one of the easiest things you can do to be known as someone who is easy to work with.
From what I have heard from having the pleasure of being with you in person here in Austin, that is a big criteria on which speakers you recommend. Are they easy to work with? That is one thing you can do to be easy to work with. Are there other things that people should be aware of? Is that a competitive advantage of being responsive and easy to work with? I love you to speak a little bit about that.
If you look at a pie chart of these are the things that the event marketer and meeting professional has to worry about for the annual sales kickoff or the global customer conference, there are enumerable things they have to chase after and that are keeping them up at night. If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
I want to come back to what you said. Are there things that the speaker can do? The days and hours leading up to the start of a huge event are filled with heart attack emergencies and migraine headache-inducing problems that the event owners have to solve in real-time. Meetings start on Thursday morning, and here it is Tuesday afternoon and we have a huge problem. They got to figure that out.
That is not the time for a speaker or a bureau to be in their hair asking about AV tech needs or something that could have been dealt with several weeks earlier, straightforward and simple. We tend to think of that 2-week or 3-week zone leading up to the event. You got airfare, air itineraries, and ground transit. You will be like, “We will figure out the tech check as we get closer.” There are those things that are a bit more plastic in real time. If there is anything that can be taken care of far in advance, it should be taken care of far in advance.
What experience bring is anticipating problems before critical thinking in action. It is what you described. One of the things that I’m also impressed with because I’ve had the privilege of meeting not just you but several other people virtually and then in person, Lisa Warren and Jenna George, is this incredible loyalty. This is the problem that many companies of any industry of any size struggle with. How do we attract good talent? Done. How do we keep them?
The loyalty factor is huge in speaking. I’m sure a lot of people will go, “I got to lean in here.” Rich is the president. He probably sets the tone. There must be some culture that keeps people from being wooed away. For whatever reasons, people leave jobs because people say, “They don’t leave the job. They leave their boss.” I’m guessing reading goes into it as well, making people feel they have concerns and flexibility. If you had to boil it down to one tip you could give people who have employees, what could they do to keep people loyal?
First of all, thank you for your generous observation. The principles of this company are proud of our brand and our reputation. One of the things that we are most proud of, as you rightly noted, is the tenure of our team. Yes, if you have seen my business card, it says president on it. I am lucky to be surrounded by incredibly smart people and partners. It is not remotely a lonely experience because there is a new problem to figure out every day, and I don’t have a patent on being right. My wife would certainly confirm that I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have all the answers.
The extent to which we are a collaborative operation, and this is a long-winded answer to your question. It is a little bit hack need and almost a trope that the proverb like, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We are emblematic of that. We have been in the business for 33 years. We must have some level of tenacity and longevity in the business.
It is a function of going together that every single time we run into something, somebody’s background and industry connection, the way someone is wired, whether it is a fellow agent, colleague, or journalist who is deeply involved in finance. Everybody has their little niche of experience. The collaborative nature certainly helps out. It is certainly not unique to our company or us.
Some of my best friends in the industry at other companies also have ESOPs. They also have some of the key staff that are stakeholders and shareholders in operation. I’m thinking of the company that went flying out of my head, Upstate, New York, a yogurt manufacturer founded by a Turkish entrepreneur. All of his employees are part owners in the company.
Broker Of Fairness: If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
Is it Chobani?
Yes, I see it in the grocery store every time I go. He is looking at the world through a prism of abundance and realizing that you can’t dominate your team and ring their best effort out of them without them coming along for the ride. Any successful operation has that notion of, “We are all in this together. Whether we fail to succeed, this is our success or problem.” If you look at a company like Chobani, it is emblematic of the notion that when people feel like their opinion matters, their perspective is valued, and they have a stake in the action, how can that not breed loyalty in ownership and buying?
I want to take that one step further. Thank you for that wonderful answer, and show it as not just nice to have. You are not spending a lot of time training and interviewing people. One of my favorite phrases as a sales keynote speaker is, “What this means to you is?” When you are presenting your bureau to a big company, and they are saying, “We are looking at you and two other bureaus. One of our big points of differences is we have one of the most, if not the most, loyal teams out there.”
You insert the phrase, “What this means to you is?” You can start painting that picture of if someone has got a turnover all the time and you are working with the bureau that has a different agent servicing you year after year. There are no history and no frame of reference. You are starting from ground zero versus us. We have a history together. That allows us to build on that history together. There is a shortcut in a language we develop and trust. That is the other ROI that people don’t always put together and connect those dots.
Some of my aging colleagues who have these incredibly immersed, deep, and loyal connections where they know the entire events team have spent innumerable hours at these events and chasing after things that are maybe technically one of my principal partners of the last 25 years. I think of him at an event and receiving this celebrity who had traveled to the event with her toddler in the entertainment industry.
He found out at the 11th hour that the car service that had said they had a child’s seat did not have a child’s seat. This car service, like an hour, needed to go pick up this celebrity at the airport. It is like probably a Lincoln Town Car thing. There he was. He was running off to Target to purchase with his company credit card a car seat.
Nowhere in your job description say, “You will be responsible for purchasing a car seat.” There is enormous loyalty that is earned on the part of the agent to the degree they are swimming in the water column with the event pro onsite, “We found out about this problem.” To the degree, we as a team are able to say, “No problem, we will chase it down.” That creates an enormous amount of connection and loyalty that is not unique to us. There are lots of other colleagues I have in the industry that would do the same thing, but I think buyers, to a great degree, understand who is leaning in and who is phoning in it.
Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with, Rich?
My colleagues love to give me heat and static. As my Scottish mother would say, “That is good. It will knock the sharp corners off you.” I don’t have any sharp corners left, but one of the things they tease me about, and it is well earned, and I am guilty as charged, is how somewhat hand-ringing and OCD to the extent to which I overthink things.
One thing I have been trying to embrace and move forward on, and I can’t remember who said it, or it could be a dozen different people that have said it, but the quote I read that stuck with me was, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” That notion of the 1.0 version of whatever you try that is new, might not be your best effort and product. You might be trying, but the end result might not be the best.
As one of your guests shared, when you were talking about speaking with Wayne Dyer’s 74th birthday, “Did I live the same year 74 times in a row or 74 different years?” I’m butchering that quote, but the point is to try new things, get outside your comfort zone, and be okay with doing it poorly because you can’t get to the 6.0 or 7.0 version of anything without doing the 1.0 or 2.0 average mediocre.
[bctt tweet=”Loyal employees create value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That is something that you asked for. Is there anything you like to say in closing? That would be it. All of us during a time of such, it is awfully hack needs observation, but we live in a time where market change, technology change, and all the tools that we have at our disposal are changing fast, radically, and yet so powerfully that we need to be comfortable.
Particularly me, I need to be comfortable with maybe coloring outside the lines once in a while and being okay with imperfection because I’m not like that. I have colleagues who I admire because they are quick to try new things and new approaches. I’m a little too hand-ringing in the corner with a T-square and a protractor. In this day and age, that is not how to be.
Thanks for inspiring us to remember to loosen up a little bit, how to create people who are loyal by letting them feel seen and heard and creating a culture of us, and more importantly, reminding us all that we can all lean in a little bit more instead of phoning it in. Rich, if someone wants to hire speaking, what is the best place to send them to?
They can certainly go to our website, which is SpeakInc.com. We are on social media and everybody’s got an email.
Thanks for sharing your wit and your wisdom with us, Rich.
It is a pleasure, John. I admire how present you are, and it is super fun talking to you.
Likewise.
Important Links
- SpeakInc
- Rich Gibbons – LinkedIn
- International Association of Speakers Bureau
- Corporate Event Marketing Association
- Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus
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Becoming Kings With Johnny King
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Our body is our kingdom. We keep the peace inside our kingdom. In this episode, Johnny King, the author of Becoming Kings, shares his insights on reaching our highest potential to become kings in our kingdom. Our inner kingdom encompasses our mental, emotional, and physical well-being; the outer is our purpose in the world, while the eternal kingdom is the things you take to go beyond our human experience. Once these three kingdoms are in alignment, that is how we reach our highest potential. Johnny also shares some tips on how we can become productive. Tune in to this insightful interview!
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Listen to the podcast here
Becoming Kings With Johnny King
My guest is Johnny King who has some great insights and a description of how to work on your inner, your outer, and your external kingdoms. Enjoy the episode.
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My guest on the show is Johnny King. Before Johnny became a transformational coach for men to help them reach their highest potential, he first had to discover his own. Amidst the recession of 2010, Johnny was broke. In fact, $35,000 in debt, jobless, and picking up the pieces of a failed marriage, he thought he was done. Little did he know it was the start of his journey.
He resolved never to experience hopelessness like that again. For more than a decade, he’s built and sold several successful businesses. He owns multiple short-term rental properties, travels the world, and operates a growing HVAC business. He sells his book Becoming Kings worldwide while producing a podcast that I’ve been fortunate enough to be on called Becoming Kings. Out of the pain of countless losses, he systematically designed his habits and routines to create a life he fell in love with. He’s now teaching others those tools so you can realize your own dreams and truly become the king or queen of your kingdoms. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s a privilege to be on and to connect with you once again.
We were talking before the show about how we spontaneously ran into each other at a dinner in Austin, where I live and you live in Denver, so it was completely unexpected and a lot of fun.
I got you by surprise, for sure.
I don’t know about you, but I put people in categories like this person lives here and I only live here. I’m like a man at the airport and I run into somebody, I’m not as shocked, or at a sporting event or something. You’re like, “There’s a lot of people here.” That was an intimate 30-peer supper club event. What are the odds of that?
As you well know, the longer career we have, the more people we connect with, so the more likely you’re going to run into someone and it’s hard to always connect a name with a face. Along with anything else, that’s a challenge for sure.
For me, moving to Austin years ago at the peak of the pandemic, even though I’ve been here for years, doesn’t feel like that. I feel like I’ve started to find my tribe and my friends. I lived in LA for many years and I would run into people much more frequently there. Anytime anybody knows my name at a grocery store or anything in Austin, I’m always shocked. Tell us a little bit about your own story of origin. Can you go back to where you grew up, college, or school where you got onto this journey of having some success before 2010 came along?
Similar to you, I grew up in the Midwest, primarily in St. Louis. The short of the long ultimately is that I grew up in a relatively traditional blue-collar, white-collar, Midwestern family with four other siblings and was busy and always running from sporting events to choir concerts to everything else. The older I got, the more I realized that there were things going on between my parents and their relationship and how deeply that started to affect my own behavior in relationships, romantic relationships, and my relationships with my parents.
My father was a workaholic and primarily, he was around, but he wasn’t necessarily emotionally present. That’s such a gift to have that level of that connection and that presence. Ultimately, my mom got ill in 2006 and passed away. It was not easy, but the first record scratch in where I thought my life was going in my vision of it.
I had gotten married shortly thereafter. My father came out of the closet the year after that. The year after that, my ex left. Everything that I knew for what my life was going to be on the trajectory I thought it was on was blown up. That started the journey of, clearly, the man that I had become, and the life that I created was all facade, quite frankly.
It was legit, but I was trying to fake it until I make it because I was so insecure. I didn’t know what it meant to be a man. I started to heal myself and my relationship with my father. All those things brought me back to being where I am now, proud of who I am, happy with what I’m creating, and having my father be one of my best friends, which was great.
What a full circle that is.
[bctt tweet=”Productivity is achievable in small steps.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s a huge part of my journey, for sure. That’s the short of the long.
Lots of healing there. It’s funny, I watched the Garth Brooks documentary on his life and you look at that career and you’re like, “Wow.” You don’t realize that even someone at that success level struggled for a long time. They left Oklahoma, went to Nashville, and came back in 24 hours like, “This isn’t for me.” He has this amazing career after getting discovered, and then in the same year, much like you.
This is what I find so fascinating about stories. We don’t have to be a famous person to have these kinds of events, multiple events. A divorce, dad coming out, career, financial challenge, any one of those things by themselves knocks people down and keeps them down for a while. I call it the 1-2 jab. I’m not even fully standing back up from that.
Garth says, “I got divorced after many years. I have kids with this woman. I lost my mom, my closest supporter.” That was devastating. You went through that with your mom getting sick and then finally, he decided to retire from performing because he wanted to spend time with his kids. He goes all in the same year. Talking about losing your identity. That’s why I was like, “Look at you. You had that 1, 2, 3 like Garth did.” For seventeen years, he was not performing. He’s remarried and his new wife said, “I think you should go back on the road.” He said, “Is anybody going to remember me?”
That journey, whether you’re a man or not, of being disrupted and getting knocked down is huge. Your name is King and the title of your book is Becoming Kings. I love some of the takeaways in this book. The one I wanted to start with is how can we avoid this ordinary person mindset and not sabotage our life of abundance.
Becoming Kings: The Modern Man’s Path to Being Powerful, Purpose-Driven, and Fulfilled In A World That Has Taught You Not To Be
Abundance is not, for me, defined strictly by money, but it’s how many friends I have. Do I have an abundance of health? Do I have abundance and joy? I’m asking you to describe, first of all, what abundance is and then what we are doing in our minds to prevent us from feeling like we don’t deserve it, do you think?
Answering your first question, I feel like abundance ties into yes, my last name is King and yes, I’ve played my branding off of that, but I feel like it’s always been something that I’ve been connected with and driven towards. It is wanting to live a life where I have exceptional health physically, emotionally, relationally, and financially. Back in the old days, a king obviously reigns over the kingdom and has riches and everything. I wouldn’t say so much that my definition of being a king is that traditional, let’s say, but more focused on what we as men have control over in our lives.
You could have a lot of things. You could look like you’re a king and yet still be deeply insecure and hurting. You could be addicted to various substances, doing horrible things in the world. That’s certainly not what I feel is a king. That gets to answering the second question, which is what I feel prevents us oftentimes is our own insecurity. That has a lot to do with our upbringing and our lack of mentorship.
That ordinary mindset is, “Who am I to think that I’m going to be successful? Who am I?” It’s almost like impostor syndrome a little bit.
It’s 1 of 2 things. I do feel like there are a lot of people that are “hugely successful” and yet they are so driven by their insecurities. They’re like, “I’m going to prove the haters wrong,” and everything else. My father, too, was driven that way and I can relate to it as well. We have these deep underlying skeletons in our closet that we’re not enough and that we’re not lovable, so I must achieve X, Y, and Z.
I feel like that’s what guys oftentimes do. If I can get this thing, if I can get this person to hitch their wagon to mine, if I can have this many commas in the bank or live in this area of town, then I’ll be set. A lot of times, we get it and then it’s not there. We’re like, “Is this all?” Nothing changes. If anything, we’re more depressed and lonelier.
I remember a friend of mine in LA was an actress and very successful for a period of time, so much so that she could afford to rent a beach house in the Malibu colony. She was on this successful sitcom and she was never more depressed. Nobody wants to hear about it because you’re living the dream. You’re on a sitcom, you’re in the Malibu colony, and you wanted to throw a 4th of July party. What most people don’t realize about Malibu is it’s foggy in July. They call it the gloom June, which extends into the 4th of July holiday.
There you are and you can’t see the fireworks and so nobody wants to come and it’s cold. You think the show you’re on is stupid and it’s not why you became an actress. You’re, again, feeling so isolated that you can’t complain because you’ve got the money. It transcends gender. I used to do that. “As soon as I get out of college, I’ll be happy. As soon as I live in this neighborhood, I’ll be happy.” I remember talking to another friend of mine who lived in Bel Air and she said, “Everyone always says the grass is always greener. What I’ve come to learn is it’s all grass and it all needs to be mowed.”
We’re defining ourselves by our ZIP code and the prestige of our address or our car and all that stuff. That’s why it wears off after a while, doesn’t it? For me, the whole process of buying a house is so arduous, but by the time escrow closes, I’m like, “I don’t care anymore.” Even the new car is fun and then it’s been a couple of months and now, that’s my new norm. What is it that you help people become, as you say, mentally bulletproof so that we’re a little free of all that? That’s one of the things in the book that’s so powerful.
I’ve learned this by having these types of amazing conversations. These are not my original ideas. I have learned that for me, a lot of my healing has come through relationships with myself, with God, with my dad, making amends and various other things, and taking responsibility. A lot of my identity, the way that I viewed myself before, was in my relationships of how I attached to people or attached my value or my sense of self-esteem or self-worth to what they thought of me.
I was somewhat of a chameleon. I was inauthentic in my interactions with them. I was never taking ownership of my own fulfillment, my own sense of self-love, peace, and congruency. I feel for anyone to be ultimately bulletproof would be to get to the point where sticks and stones can break my bones, but words cannot hurt you. It’s because you’re very secure with who you are. That’s ultimately not what I feel like a king or a queen. Not to use those words obviously, but someone who knows themselves through and through has very few craps to give and they love what they do.
They love people, they’re present, and they’re great at what they do. They’re like your 2:00 AM friends who, if you had a busted down car and you needed to call someone, you could rely on them. We’re blessed if we have multiple of those people in our lives. I feel like a lot of guys who didn’t have very great role models in their lives learned to be very pleasing, yes men, if you will, which is inauthentic. We were too worried about getting our feelings hurt or hurting other people’s feelings. At some point, to be bulletproof, you got to know yourself, have done the work, and know that you’re not going to make everyone happy and that’s okay.
Even as a sales keynote speaker, I have to realize that not everyone’s going to resonate with my message or me and that’s okay. When you’re free of being at the effect of other people’s opinions of you, then you’re off that self-esteem rollercoaster. If you’re willing to put yourself out there as you do, where you have these programs for men and helping them become resilient, helping them get fit, and helping them with their mindset, there’s going to be people who critique that.
Whether it’s on a YouTube comment or as a speaker, they usually send out surveys. The odds of all 500 people or however many on the audience loving you, some people are going to go, “He’s okay,” or some people rave, but if you let yourself attach to, “That person liked me so I’m okay and this person didn’t, so I feel bad about myself,” it’s exhausting, isn’t it? I’ve been on it.
It’s relentless. You don’t sleep. You can’t concentrate. You can’t ultimately be present for other people.
You talk about there being three kingdoms that we should each build. Can you tell us what those are?
I talked about them a little bit already without saying the names, but it’s your inner kingdom, which is where you first start. It’s that relationship with yourself where most guys think that, as we were saying earlier, the solution to their problems is an outside-in job. They’re looking for something outside of themselves to solve or fill the big void that’s within. It’s an inside-out job. You’ve got to work on the inner kingdom, the mental, emotional, and physical health.
You have the outer kingdom, which is more about what’s your purpose in the world. What are you here to build and contribute? At the end of the day, the older we get, the more we realize how short life is. What are you here to do? What’s the impact? Your eternal kingdom focuses more on what things you get to take with you beyond this human experience. We don’t get to take our bodies. We don’t get to take any of the things that we acquire, but I believe that we get to take the love, the memories, and the relationships. The eternal, long-lasting, never-ending kingdom is where the juice is. It’s the interactions with people.
It’s a little bit of a legacy that you’re leaving behind. Children, you can still leave a legacy, relationships you’ve built, or something you wrote that inspired someone. I love that you’ve labeled those. You’ve taken that branding to a whole other level. Why I’m impressed by that, Johnny, is it’s memorable. I’m always striving for what I can create and say that is memorable and actionable. You have labeled those in such a way that if something’s not working, we now have a go-to checklist.
Is this an internal thing? Am I not exercising enough or am I so depressed, upset, grieving, or whatever it is that the inner work is not happening? I’m not meditating or doing whatever we need to do. Is it, “I don’t even know what my purpose is?” That’s why people hire you. They go, “I’ve lost my way. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an accountant. Do I have to do this the rest of my life because this is what I know how to do, golden handcuffs? Is there another purpose I could maybe figure out?
People retire and they don’t know what their purpose is if they don’t have that job and that title anymore. There are so many people who need what you do at different stages of their life. I’m pretty disciplined and I know my purpose is this. I went to a friend’s memorial and I realized I don’t have any legacy. I’m blowing all my relationships off the minute work makes one request that I’m so afraid of saying no to because I won’t get that promotion or whatever else. There’s no balance here. I’m painting a picture of all the different scenarios of why people would want to come work with you. Is that pretty close?
[bctt tweet=”Failure to commit is the high cost of low living.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s close because before I’d started working with men, I was working with women for eight years. I was doing a lot of health coaching, which was anything but health coaching. It was all psychiatry and everything else, being like a therapist. I’ve started to realize so many of these women had amazing relationships with their spouses. They were a great mother, and they loved what they did, but their relationship with their physical health and their inner kingdom was blowing up all of it.
It’s similar to my mom. She had so much that was going for it, but because she didn’t take care of her own health, she passed away at 61 years old. A lot of times, when we would get into it, sure enough, there was a rape or an abortion. There was something that was unresolved. That was why they were overeating. We all have our things. That’s a hard one to hide when you have excess weight on you. A lot of us who are, let’s say, healthier can still hide porn addictions, alcohol, sex addictions, or gambling addictions. It’s oftentimes the result of things that we’ve had that are unresolved.
You might have a great body and a great business, but you have no legacy or no one to share life with. You’re like, “What is this all about?” You could have someone who’s amazing in your life and you could have great health, but you have no real passion towards something that you’re building. You have to have all three. I see them as like circles that overlap each other and right in that sweet spot where they all overlap is that congruence. That’s where I feel like a king ultimately lives.
It’s like a three-legged stool. With a missing leg, it’s going to fall over. I see here you also can help people with productivity. You don’t have to have attention deficit disorder to have challenges with distractions. We’re constantly being bombarded with distractions and people go, “I didn’t get anything done. All I did was put off fires.” I hear that often. What is the one little tip that could intrigue people to want to engage you to learn how they could be a little more productive?
I struggle with it too. I’ve attempted to eliminate as many distractions, particularly off my phone. However, because our phones are literally on us pretty much 24/7 when they weren’t twenty years ago, it’s so crazy difficult given that we’re all pretty much connected to devices in general. One simple one that, to me, makes a massive difference because I know of so many people who scroll at night, the first thing they do in the morning is to scroll is putting their phone across the room.
It’s such a simple thing. I charge it across the room so when I put it down and then get into bed, I can’t grab it. That is a big part of allowing yourself to slow down and then be able to focus on what you are aiming towards. This is a lot bigger conversation to do a whole episode on but focuses more on your external outer kingdom. What are you committed to? What are you creating? What’s your impact on the world?
In what way are you going to bed knowing that when you wake up, you have a fire lit underneath you to get those things done? There are so many different hacks that I have in my programs that help you be productive because I’ve had to work for myself for many years. I got no one to whip me or any boss to tell me. I have to get stuff done. Otherwise, there’s no food on the table. There are a lot of things there that we could get into.
You have worked on your own story, your own three kingdoms, and it shows. When I ran into you in Austin, you were happy. Your face lights up and I don’t feel you can’t fake that. When you feel someone’s energy and you don’t know what’s off, you go, “I don’t know what’s on, but everything’s on with this guy. I feel it. It’s not like he’s faking it.”
You’re walking your talk and that’s why people want to work with you. They can start by listening to your podcast. They could buy your book Becoming Kings and then the weekly newsletter. There are lots of ways to work with you. Do we just send everybody to JohnnyKing.com? Is that the best place for everyone to get into your world?
There are so many people obviously that are out there that can support. One of those things that you have to look for is some type of resonance. Do you connect with someone? I work with Christine Hassler and Stefanos, who are down there in Austin as well. They work with Preston and Alexi. I’m always looking for that type of person to connect with. Similar to you, people can look at my website and see what I’m up to and if what I’m doing resonates with them. If not, like connect with me and I’ll put you in touch with some people who are also amazing coaches.
It’s because you come from a place of abundance. That’s what I like about you.
I’m here to serve and connect people with.
It shows. Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with?
Becoming Kings: What prevents us from becoming kings and queens is our insecurity. That has a lot to do with our upbringing and lack of mentorship.
There are several quotes that are up in my room that I look at, but there’s one that says, “Failure to commit is the high cost of low living.” It’s the commitment to improve, the commitment to be, which is scary to get out of the rut of. I know on paper everything looks good, but there’s something missing. It’s scary to upset the apple cart. Start creating healthy boundaries and start doing the work to figure out who we are and who we might love ourselves as. The lack of commitment usually results in a lot of regrets, so I don’t want to live my life that way.
Thank you, Johnny, for being you, for writing your book, and for offering so many ways for people to get all three kingdoms at maximum. Your impact is huge and I’m happy to be someone in a small way to get that out into the world. Thanks for coming to the show.
Thank you. Likewise, your energy is palpable, but it’s contagious. I saw you and people want to be around you. It was fun to connect and so fun to have you on my show. It’s fun to be on yours. Thank you for having me on.
My pleasure. See you soon in Austin.
You bet.
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Investing Legacy With Sal Buscemi
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
With so much information out there, it can be so easy to get confused about what investing is. Sifting through the right ones can put any budding investor off from being in the industry altogether. And what a waste of potential wealth-building avenue that could be. Not to worry because this episode’s guest has compiled years-worth of wisdom around investing that will help your journey. Salvatore Buscemi, the CEO and Co-founder of Dandrew Partners, shares with us his latest book, Investing Legacy: How the .001% Invest. He gives us a fresh view of what legacy means and where stories matter. Plus, Sal also discusses some of the mistakes people make when raising capital and the importance of being relational rather than transactional. Join this conversation and find out more about investing and leaving a legacy.
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Listen to the podcast here
Investing Legacy With Sal Buscemi
In this episode, our guest is Sal Buscemi, the CEO and Cofounder of Dandrew Partners, a private family investment office. He has managed money successfully for several years through the creation of multiple portfolios on various cross-asset platforms. This includes Dandrew Partners, Encore Ventures and many more.
In 2008, Sal launched two separate successful distressed credit platforms that were backed by a $2 billion New York City-based asset manager and a $1 billion commercial real estate investment manager. He is also the author of several books on investing. Two of them are Making The Yield: Real Estate Hard Money Lending Uncovered and Investing Legacy. Sal, welcome to the show.
John, how are you? Thank you. It is a pleasure and a privilege. This will be a lot of fun because we are going to have a lot to talk about as far as pitching deals.
I always love when I do a little dig into someone’s background and when I find mutual friends. Even though we don’t live in the same cities, you are in Miami and I’m in Austin. I see that you were in LA at one time, where I used to live and were interviewed by the wonderful Rob and Aaron Haskell. Those are both very good friends of mine from my days in LA.
That is a great way to kick off this interview because you are in the business of warm introductions and building trust. Before we do a deep dive into how important that is and how you do it, I love to hear a little bit about your background, childhood, college and wherever you want to take us, which led you to where you are. Did you grow up as a young lad going, “I’m going to be involved in helping people invest their money?” How did that all happen?
It is different from that. I was following the lead of people whom I respected at the time growing up who were doctors. It turned out that during the late ‘90s, one of my father’s friends sent me a book. It was Confessions of a Medical Heretic written in 1977. This is 1992. I read it the summer before going to college. I convinced myself I didn’t want to do this anymore but you have that epiphany. I was 22 and I graduated.
I was thankful that my parents paid for my brother and my education, which worked. There was nuance there where I learned how he did that by clipping but at the time, we called zero coupon bonds. He was investing it safely so that we can go to college to do that. I didn’t want to take that for granted. At an early age, I was networking for this surgeon in New York at Beth Israel Hospital shortly after I passed out holding a fibula in the cadaver room. I was like, “This isn’t going to be something for me.”
Sure enough, because of all the hard work I had done for this one doctor, he said to me, “I agree with you. I want to support you. Call my brother. He made partner with Goldman Sachs.” After that, it became learning real quickly that it is not the grades that you get. It is the reputation and network that you have.
I wrote a book about that and continued on all the technical fun stuff, running to institutional funds, now the multifamily office and investing in life sciences earlier stage successfully, especially during a time when tech is dying on the vine. A lot of these more emerging but lower barrier-to-entry businesses like tech are dying on the vine.
We are with the best in class we can around people who have had lots of successful exits because we bet on people, not on ideas. I wrote a book on this because this has been the topic of several conversations you have not just on your esteemed show with your audiences but also on a one-on-one with investors. I will probably be telling the same story at a cocktail party at Faena, meeting some other people. I will go with it over and over.
What I did was I decided to write a book about it. I like to sell the book but we are going to talk about other things. What happened is that a lot of people have gotten confused, especially as it relates to investing. What we have seen, especially over the past several years, is that your status is defined by your wealth and what your assets are. Tell me what you own and I will tell you who you are. That is the whole genesis behind that.
Making The Yield: Real Estate Hard Money Lending Uncovered
Tell me what you own and I will tell you who you are. That is going to be a great quote for you in a tweet. We are going to get into that because it is a nice twist on, “Look at the five people you spend the most time with and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Think about it. There are all these doctors. They are all trading in the same meme stocks and cryptocurrency. None of them get ahead. They like to think they are smarter than the rest but they never evolved because that is all they know. They are hearing, “So and so made $20,000 flipping the stock.”
The other thing you said about when you were in school and interning is, “It is not the grades. It is the network you have.” I want to double-click on that, Sal, because that is an insightful comment. Many of us identify our self-worth by our grades in school, “This is where I went to school. This was my GPA.” We get out of school, college or university. We substitute grades for net worth.
I love to help people get off what I call the self-esteem rollercoaster, where they only feel good if they are winning or they feel bad if they are down. What you are doing for your clients is realizing that things go up and down. You cannot identify your self-esteem or even the performance of someone like you based on a month or quarter.
You have to be easy on yourself, especially if you are a Type-A person like I am. It is very easy to go over the top and commiserate. You have to understand self-pity is probably the lowest form of thinking you can have. You got to reframe it because it is a luxury if you think about it. I think of it as not having the luxury to be able to do that. Make course corrections and move on accordingly.
Let’s get into some of your incredible, valuable insights, especially for people who are founders. You see a lot of deals. One of your criteria and why you are successful is you like to see successful exits under the belts of founders. I have worked with people on their pitches to investors like yourself. I tell them, “If you have that, you need to bring that up upfront. Don’t make them go through slide 7 or 8 to find that out.” In journalism, it is called bearing the lead. You invest in the team more than the idea. We have heard that with the horse and the jockey on all those wonderful analogies. I would love to hear you describe some mistakes people make when raising capital, even if they had a successful exit.
I have moved to Miami and I have been involved in this VC ecosystem. I was involved through a law firm I know well to go to a conference. I got a free ticket to a $2,000 Florida Venture Conference. I was going around and all these guys came to you. It is like if you are wearing a red bat that says, “Investor out here.” I’m like a French fry. What happens when you throw a French fry on the beach? All these eagles come. Even at the urinal, it is awkward. They are like, “You are an investor.” I’m like, “You know I am. Otherwise, you are going to be standing next to me.”
There is a loss of bedside manners. If you look at crypto and go back to Jim Cramer, when people think of investing, they make it much more transactional and it needs to be relational because people are investing in you. They don’t know anything about the idea. They don’t care about the idea. I don’t mean to sound rude but a lot of people think might understand numbers with real estate and you will be surprised how many people don’t understand that. If you communicate it in a way they can understand and tell their spouse, it is an entirely different thing.
It was difficult for me to learn because when you leave the institutional world and you go to the family office world, not a lot of them are real estate or life science families. You have to be able to communicate in a way where you are holding their attention because their attention is that currency. People pay more for attention than they do a barrel of oil on a relational scale.
It is about relationships, not your idea. What I see founders making as a big mistake is they treat investors like a client.
No, like an ATM. It is transactional. It is like, “Do you have money? Let’s talk.” We were joking before you hit the record button but Miami is the land of the next gens and second generations. They are still partying hard but they don’t have any bedside matters. They go around and pitch. Just because you know someone or you are someone who has the discretion to be able to invest, it is almost like an awkward date. It’s like asking for marriage on the first date. I don’t understand how you build a relationship around that. It becomes a turnoff.
I don’t care how successful this kid’s parents were. I call him a kid, he is 37 but if you look at him, he looks like he hasn’t evolved since he was 17. At one point, I had to hold my tongue. I’m like, “Do you want me to take you seriously?” I don’t. New York style can say that. Miami style can’t say that. More or less, the feeling you get is that people are so pushy. It comes across as being desperate.
[bctt tweet=”Self-pity is the lowest form of thought. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I wrote a little guide that is called Calling the Capital: 20 Ways to Incorporate Urgency Into Your Capital Raise. It is on Amazon but also CallingTheCapital.com. It is real stories and case studies in about 26-page booklet that talks about how we were able to do things credibly without sounding cheesy. I wrote it because all these guys had no bedside manners. I went home and was bored. I like to write so I put this together. It saved a lot of people from embarrassment and humiliation who might not have gotten into becoming an entrepreneur or a founder at first because they didn’t know how to ask someone for money without sounding needy or desperate.
I’m hearing two things. Don’t treat investors like ATMs. Build a relationship and don’t be pushy. Third, as I was alluding to, they think if I treat you like a user of my software, let’s say they have an app and start pitching you how this could make your life better, you are like, “No, my criteria for whom I invest in is very different from a customer’s criteria for whether they are going to use your product.” That is what I meant about the mistake I saw made and I’m getting confirmation from you that it is a mistake you see people make sometimes.
John, think about it. Asking someone to part with their life savings is the highest calling of sales in the land. It has been like that since biblical times. This is nothing new. It is that there has been a lot more money around since Genghis Khan. People still are, for lack of a better term, moist robots. They want to be taken care of. They are carbon-based beings. They want a relationship with someone. They blame it on social media and the lack of depth there. If you want to get into this business, you have to have a relationship with your investors. If you don’t have a relationship with your investors, find other people to build a relationship with to be your investors.
In addition to startup founders with successful exits reaching out to you, you also have to walk your talk, which you do when you are wooing families who have generational wealth, who are looking for someone to invest their wealth, that they should pick you versus another family office. Give us a little sense of what that looks like.
There is a lot more charisma that goes into it. That sounds like a bad term but I will give you an example. You got to treat people like they are all the same. I had one family that wanted to invest in a multifamily deal that was value-added, meaning that he would not get paid unless a lot of good things happened. This is how I explained it to him.
Is it the social impact you are talking about?
No, it is even better. You got to understand. A lot of investors read risk like a wine list over to the right and down. If you have the highest return, you are the smartest guy because you found the best investment. That is like doctor and dentist investing. That doesn’t work and it leads to lots of failure and losses. When we were talking to this one investor, he was fixated on the point that this one guy was going to offer him 15% but in my class industrial facility, he was only going to get a 7.5%.
He couldn’t understand why. He thought I was not that smart for even talking about it. I said to him, “This isn’t about credit-adjusted quality or MBA terms. Do you want people poorer than you paying your rent for you and your family? Should you pass on or not? The reason why wealthy people put their money in here is that they are not looking for the last dollar and chasing the highest return. They want to save it and continue it for generations with seven-year leases with people who have been bid business for 200 years like Carrier Air Conditioning and Milwaukee Tool.”
At that point, it crystallized in his head that it wasn’t about the numbers. It was more or less about credit risk. He had a crash course in credit risk. He invested and was very happy because when the pandemic happened, all his other investors got wiped out. All his other investments with that one particular company went bust too. It is all about status. We are working on a deal and it is our second deal. It is with a 2018 Nobel Prize winner, Dr. James Allison, for physiology and medicine. People want a dog pile on top of that because there are smart families in that deal. When you look at like a cap table, that is the soul of the asset.
If you have good strong families there, especially in life sciences, you are going to have a lot of success there. If it is a bunch of fragmented doctors and dentists at 2,000, the denominations would only trigger desperation for a guy looking at it. It doesn’t become appealing. What you have to look at is showing them the strong points for their safety, certainty and narrative format rather than the idea of what could happen for your board of advisors, which doesn’t do anything anyway to anyone.
Many people spend a lot of time and money giving away equity to have these prestigious names on the board. If it is a name only and they are not consulting, it is not valuable.
I’m raising any money. They are not consulting. They are sitting there and they get all these options, which is hope certificates because if it is the founder’s first deal, it is not going to go well. Why wouldn’t they do that? I don’t do that because it is not something I do but you got to look at it from the standpoint and who are the other smart people who are in there. Do they like this guy because money always has a voice?
Making The Yield: Real Estate Hard Money Lending Uncovered
You toggle back and forth. Many people, after the pandemic, are in this hybrid work. Everyone is going back to the office. I work with a lot of architects who are dealing with this new way of working. People are like, “Is commercial real estate as good of an investment as it was pre-pandemic? Do you see all the tech companies in Austin still building these highrise towers?” Is that still going to continue, do you think?
It is going to be much more on a specialized basis. Austin is coming into its own because you have Tesla. There is a lot of industry there. You don’t have that much land-ground rock. That is going to be built up. I could see areas like that that are pro-business and pro-growth being good for areas like offices like that. Texas, Florida, where I am and you are familiar with that.
In cities like New York, what is going to happen is you are starting to see the ephemeral of offices. It is hard. I don’t think it will happen all at once but people are reticent to return to the office because they are lazy by nature. Certain industries do require office space, especially in financial services because you are learning a trade like anything else and you need to be around bosses to do that.
There are a lot of businesses that said, “We don’t need to do this. It is already costing us too much money to keep our employees already.” You will see a lot of these beautiful buildings get condos into residential units. That is what I think. Everybody is worried about the office building. It is going to be replaced with housing. That is the wave of the future. From my context in New York, that seems to be the prevailing tailwind that is happening as a result of the pandemic.
You got your expertise in real estate and life sciences. A lot of companies like Honeywell that make the fans in the operating rooms or Olympus, the camera company, have a whole medical division that makes the equipment. I have spoken to their sales teams about trying to take these very technical speeds and feeds and turn them into some stories that make hospitals and doctors connect. Do you see successful founders in the healthcare space? The ability to get customers, grow and scale is what you are looking for, in addition to all the other tenacity, grit and successful exit backgrounds they have. Do you see storytelling as a skill that you are looking for?
If they are talking to doctors, the doctors are going to worry more about the data rather than the story. There is a doctor they are pitching to. I pitch to other investors. They are going to be more focused on the story and have their friends look at the data. The problem is that a lot of people, when they are entrepreneurs, try to brand themselves around data or IP and say, “This is great.”
I’ve been to so many rubber chicken lunches where I have been pitched like some doctor wants to buy IP. He is at a point in his life where he is bored with his job. He was angry at his wife. He is looking to be an entrepreneur and swing for it. He has no experience except for an ego. I have seen this. He wants us to fund the IP. I’m like, “What are you going to do with the IP?” They were like, “We got to raise money to do research.” This is at the Harvard Club in New York. I said, “This is the difference between a novice and a professional.”
I got up and walked and the guy learned an important lesson. Before you do this with your attitude, you should understand. Don’t ask people for you to do the research and development. You should have an understanding of this. Anybody can go out there. John, you can go out there and buy Medical IP if you want. Whatever you want, it is available. There are IP brokers that do it. What do you do with it? That is the whole point of it. Anybody can have it but what do you do with it afterward?
We are in the middle of closing a huge investment we made into a company called Thrive Bioscience. It will be the CEO’s 15th exit and 8th unicorn. We like that. He has prominent families leading this other than us. One of the things I like about it is he is replacing microscopes around the world. That is a powerful hook for a lot of people, especially doctors. Doctors do not like working with microscopes. It has been around for many years. They have to pull cultures out. They can’t see cells in real-time. His whole thing is, “Uber knows more about ourselves than we know about ourselves.”
We understand there is a need here. It gets into digitization and people can get their heads around that, especially doctors. We don’t have a lot of doctor investors, to be honest with you. If I did have to talk to a doctor, I would be a little heavier on the data but also do a good lead-in, which is what this is, rather than, “Let me talk to you and set up a call. Hold on.” You got to know what it is and study what it is before you talk to someone. Otherwise, you’re losing credibility. I have been known to lose Wi-Fi in stable spaces.
Let’s talk about your book Investing Legacy. Who was this written for when you were sitting down to write this? Is it for people who have generational wealth and trying to avoid mistakes in it?
There is a lot of thought that went into this because this was my third book. Books take a lot of time. It is one thing to write a book but it is an entirely different thing to sell a book. One of the things I noticed over my career is I was receiving a lot of phone calls from women my age who were receiving a lot of money through inheritance or an exit through options. They would read my investment letters, John. They would be like, “Sal, I read your letter. Congratulation, it sounds like things are going great.” I have no idea what the hell any of that means. They were like, “I like to talk to you a little bit. You mentioned something about a friend of yours in California that opened a library and their names are on the side of it. What about that?”
[bctt tweet=”People have made investing much more transactional when it needs to be much more relational because people are investing in you.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You peel back the onion a little bit. What it comes down to is affluent households and there are TV shows about this. Women have most of the discretion when it comes to investment decision-making. Whereas if you also look at it, women are also 70% of book buyers. I narrated my book because a friend named Mel Robbins told me to because it would be more catchy. I met her in the studio when I recorded it. That is when I was doing other media things. I was trying to impress her. I was telling her, “I was going to hire someone to do it like I did my other book.” She said, “No.” I spent two weeks in a studio and there is an Audible version for you as narrated by the author, which means a lot.
When I narrate my book, you have to break it down into chunks. You don’t sit down and record the whole thing in six hours.
Two hours at a time, after the gym, when I was fresh and ready to go in it. We went with a female publisher because I wanted to prove the point that this was for females. Guys go on Reddit. The guys ate in the stocks. They are much more speculative and women aren’t. This was a book for women published by a female, Andrea Albright of Beverly Hills Publishing. She runs a fantastic global firm over there. She has a lot of international clients and does a lot of publishing for them.
As a result of that, it has been easier to create relationships with people I would not have been able to create relationships with. It is a book that I wrote in my voice because I like to write but it is not anything that I ghostwrote or hired anyone to do. There is a lot of what we call silos things in there, which we learn and statement assets.
Those are terms used in the industry. It helps get people familiar to say, “Is this something I want to do? It is making me think about my life.” The hook for that is, “How do you want your kids and grandkids to think of you when you are done? When you die, do you want to be known as the crypto day trader that spends all his time in front of monitors or trading weed stocks? Do you want to be known as someone who is like, ‘Grandma and grandpa did something different and that is why we have a legacy now?’”
A lot of people have been focused on legacy because it is a form of immortality when you think about it. That is why people go to space and our families want to develop cures. They don’t need an extra zero but they need the legitimacy of saying, “Grandma and grandpa also invested in this drug or this therapy.”
That is such an undervalued premise that people think, “We want to get richer.” That is why those people keep working. It is about the legacy you leave behind. You have tapped into it. I have never heard anybody say the way you did, Sal, which is, “In some way, your legacy is what keeps you going on. It is a little form of immortality.”
Legacy and immortality are not always connected like that. That is the emotional connection that makes people make a decision to invest in something and pick you over another family office. I’m a big believer that when we connect and tug at heartstrings, people are willing to go forward and make a choice to pick us versus somebody else.
You always remember the story. You never remember the data. In a post-pandemic election world, people don’t believe facts and figures anymore.
It can all be manipulated. If people want to reach out to you, what is the best website to do that?
They can go to SalvatoreBuscemi.com. If they want to email me, they can email me at [email protected]. If they want to buy an autographed book, they go to InvestingLegacy.com/book. If you go to InvestingLegacy.com, it will take you to where you get a report on horror stories of how people lost all their money. If you want to buy the book, that will come after. You can also get that too on the SalvatoreBuscemi.com site.
Any last thought or favorite quote you have?
Investing Legacy: You always remember the story. You never remember the data.
There is a funny movie that comes to the heart. One of my friends in Chicago reminded me of it and it is corny. I’m not a big movie person but in the movie Ferris Bueller, he takes the day off. One of the things he said is, “You can never go too far.” One of my friends I was talking to in Chicago was like, “Sal, you are like Ferris. You could never go too far.” There are a lot of things that you can do. You just got to put your mind to it. Things will come. You will have some difficult times and great times but it is the effort you put in and being confident enough to do it. That is going to bring you a little more joy later on.
Long-term vision, not immediate gratification. This is my takeaway.
I agree with you there. John, thank you so much,
Thank you for sharing your story and wisdom.
Important Links
- Dandrew Partners
- Making The Yield: Real Estate Hard Money Lending Uncovered
- Investing Legacy
- Confessions of a Medical Heretic
- Calling the Capital: 20 Ways to Incorporate Urgency Into Your Capital Raise
- CallingTheCapital.com
- Thrive Bioscience
- Beverly Hills Publishing
- SalvatoreBuscemi.com
- [email protected]
- InvestingLegacy.com
- https://SalvatoreBuscemi.com/About-Sal/
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