Tony Robbins with Richard C. Wilson

[03:31]

"One of the ways that made that shift was to stop asking how to get something done, but ask who can get this done, who would be the best person, who would be the most skilled person, who could do this more rapidly than anyone else."

[06:00]

"If you want to really do well, get in proximity with people playing the game much higher than yourself."

[09:00]

"As a business owner, the number one mistake is staying too long with people that aren't right."

[10:31]

"If you can find 8 to 12 uncorrelated investments that you really believe in, you reduce your risk by 80% and increase your potential returns."

Full transcript

Richard: In 2009, I had the idea to buy billionaires.com.

Narrator: The billionaires.com miniseries is your chance to get hypervaluable and unique takes from celebrity billionaires like Mark Cuban, Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, and many more. This series gives you access to exclusive insights from in-person and audio interviews hosted by none other than the founder of the Family Office Club, Richard C. Wilson. Get started now with an official introduction to the $1 billion plus expert insights miniseries and see what these nationally renowned billionaires have to say about winning and succeeding in the game of capitalism.

Richard: Hey everyone, Richard C. Wilson here at billionaires.com. Super excited to share this interview with Tony Robbins that we just got done. No offense Mark Cuban, but this is the most exciting one I've done to date. Not just because he's an A-list billionaire like Mark Cuban, but so many people have had their lives changed by the insights, the advice, the live events, the books that have been put out by Tony and his team. Recently I read Tony's book Life Force. I had read his book Money: Master the Game before that, and I have read Awaken the Giant Within multiple times, like many of you. You can also get Unleash the Power Within on Amazon or Audible if you want to listen to and watch those resources. So if you haven't gone through them all yet, please do.

None of this would have happened though if it wasn't for Harry, who was at our investor summit yesterday. We had a 700 person event, 70 speakers on stage, and Harry came up when he saw my recommendations of the billionaire books that I've loved best and the 25 billionaires we've interviewed so far for billionaires.com, on our mission to interview 100 of them. And he said, "Hey, would it be helpful to maybe interview Tony Robbins?" And I said, "For sure it would be." So right there, he stepped aside, we recorded an audio message requesting that of Tony, sent him the questions, and literally the same day he got the interview done. It was amazing. Thank you Harry for that. If anyone wants to check out what Harry's doing with Beyond Imagination, his AI robot technology that Tony is involved in, please go and check it out.

So, thank you Harry for making this happen. Thank you, Tony, for answering these interview questions. This is going to be enormously helpful to our 2 million plus social followers and it's making the whole billionaires.com project more valuable. So without any further delay, let's jump right into the interview questions and hear from Tony and his advice. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. My first question is: what was the major turning point, point of increased momentum or a strategic choke point that, once you acquired or completed it, made everything you were doing surge forward?

Tony: I would say making the psychological shift from operator to owner in my business. When you're an operator you're always stressed, you're trying to do it all, you try to supervise everything and everyone, you try to make sure no one makes mistakes, and so it all requires your attention and you can never scale. And the only way you succeed on a large scale financially or in business is by scaling. So one of the ways that made that shift was to stop asking how to get something done, but ask who can get this done, who would be the best person, who would be the most skilled person, who could do this more rapidly than anyone else. I focused on the who versus the how. And that turned me into an owner. And now I have 111 companies and we do over 7 billion in business. At the time, I was stressed with two companies that were doing less than $5 million in business.

Richard: Awesome. That's great, Tony. I appreciate you sharing that. We work with hundreds of doctors and dentists as well as family offices. And I can tell you that I know 100 plus doctors and dentists who work just as many hours, and probably work harder, than a lot of the families that are worth $100 million plus or a billion dollars plus that we serve. And it's because of exactly what you just said. They're in operator mode instead of owner mode, and you just can't scale when you're doing that. So it's not about the number of hours per week that you're working. It's about your time leverage, and leveraging the specialty skills of others who might be much better than you. There's not enough time in the day to do everything. Let's move on to the next question. What is the most valuable strategy, worth far more than $1 million, that you wish somebody had provided you with early on, that you could share here with our listeners?

Tony: Probably the most valuable strategy was understanding that proximity is power. I was visiting at the time with the person who was then the richest person in Canada, and he wanted to help me. He asked me some of my goals and I told him some of them, and he said, "Let me give you the most valuable advice that made me wealthy. Proximity is power." I said, "I think I know what that means, but please tell me what it means." He said, "If you wanted to make a movie today, Tony, you could do it easily. I've seen about 10 movies that you're in, in some little role. The reason is you have so many people in the entertainment business that are your fans: writers, directors, producers, actors, heads of studios. So you're in proximity with them all the time. They're thinking about you." And as a result, my guess is you didn't even have to ask to get put in those movies. This was even before films where I played a bigger role, like Shallow Hal. And he was absolutely right.

He said, "Now, if you wanted to do a deal with IBM, I'm not saying you couldn't do it, but you don't have proximity. Your chances of really making that deal are shrunk massively." Whereas if you look at Bill Gates, his family was directly tied to the board of IBM, and it made the probability of making that deal so much greater. If you are in proximity of people playing the game at a much higher level than you are... think of it this way. If you play tennis with someone and you're better than they are, your game is going down over time because you're not challenged. If you want to really do well, get in proximity with people playing the game much higher than yourself. Using the tennis metaphor, if you're playing against Serena Williams, your game is going to explode just to stay on the court. So getting yourself in proximity with those who are already getting the results that you want, who are playing the game at the highest level, is huge.

By attaching this idea of getting around people, in the case of the advice he gave me, people that were investment bankers, I ended up putting together one of the biggest deals of my life, which at the age of 39 allowed me to take a company public in a reverse merger, and I made over $400 million, whereas I'd worked a lifetime, working 18 to 21 hour days sometimes, and hadn't come close to that. So proximity is power. Understanding that principle can create more momentum faster than almost anything else that I've seen in life and in business.

Richard: Awesome. Yeah, I love this proximity is power concept. If you want, as a family office, to increase the quality of your deal flow, you need to be in proximity of the owners of assets and the CEOs of companies you want to invest in or acquire. If you're looking to get deals done with investors, and you're looking to raise capital and grow a big investment platform, you need to be in proximity of ultra-wealthy individuals, family offices, billionaires, high net worth investors, etc. This is something that comes up at our events quite often. It's the reason why I've been running the Family Office Club for the last 16 years. And it's the reason why, for 12 years starting in 2009, I was chasing billionaires.com. It took me over 150 emails and multiple investment structures to actually get the deal done after negotiating it for 12 years.

That's my motivation for owning billionaires.com and interviewing 100 plus billionaires, and really getting closer to them and building relationships through interviews exactly like this one with you, Tony. But also just to get inside your mind, because I feel like my mental models will be in proximity of your mental models if I can read the 200 books written by billionaires, watch the 700 YouTube videos, and then interview 100 billionaires myself. So I love that answer. This morning I had a call with a group that does $400 million worth of transactions per month. They do 4 to 5 billion plus in deals per year. And last week I spent two hours with a billionaire. Those are just examples of trying to put into practice what you're saying, Tony, and I believe in it 100%. My last and final question, just to respect your time, is: what is the number one most costly mistake that you have made, or seen many investors or business owners make all of the time, which could be easily avoided?

Tony: Well, as a business owner, the number one mistake is staying too long with people that aren't right. Rationalizing versus making decisions quickly. Take time to hire people, to really believe you're right, but then if you know they're wrong, decide quickly. Don't rationalize and stay with them, because they're eating up the time of others. If you have platinum players and you bring somebody on board that's a bronze player, or a person who is not the right team fit, they can suck the energy out of your culture and your environment. When it comes to investments, the biggest mistake again is people not being willing to make a decision to cut their losses. Somebody tries to continue to be optimistic about something, and as an investor that will get you in trouble.

If I want to give you another valuable strategy, it was one I got for investing. I gave you a business one; this one is for investing. It was from Ray Dalio, who I interviewed for my book Money: Master the Game. I interviewed 50 of the smartest people alive in investing: Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, Warren Buffett, Paul Tudor Jones, etc. He's the most successful hedge fund manager in history. He's returned over $50 billion in profits to his clients. He manages over $165 billion. And I said, "In your 40 years plus of investing, what is the holy grail of investing?" And he told me, "Tony, the most important thing is to remember that if you can find 8 to 12 uncorrelated investments that you really believe in, you reduce your risk by 80% and increase your potential returns." Anytime you can reduce your risk 80% and still be in the game, it's priceless. So I've worked on making sure my asset allocation always has at least those uncorrelated assets, which means you can't just have public assets. You have to have private equity and/or private credit or private real estate assets as well.

Richard: Awesome. Yeah, that is super helpful. On the first part of that, about staying too long with bad people and needing to be decisive, be high conviction on decisions and move quickly, that's probably cost our company millions of dollars in revenue. We used to hold on to bad salespeople especially, way too long, that were toxic to our culture. We've gotten much better at that. And at our recent event this actually came up several times. Kevin Harrington, one of the original sharks from Shark Tank, who we've closed two transactions with that we sourced and structured, always talks about working with high velocity entrepreneurs. And you can't be high velocity if you're hanging on to bad people all the time. Paul, who we just had a fireside chat on stage with, manages 39 different clients with an average net worth of $190 million per client. One of the top takeaways from that fireside chat was that you have to be high conviction, move fast, make a decision, and go with it.

Just by chance, last night I was watching billionaire Marcus Lemonis on The Profit, and he respected an entrepreneur who said, "No, I don't need to talk to my team. If I'm comfortable, then we're going to do it." She was being decisive, and he said he really respected that, because in his world too, if he decides that he wants to do something, he's going to do it. It all comes down to high conviction, speed of implementation and being decisive.

On the second part, related to private credit and private deals and having 8 to 12 different investments, I couldn't agree more. I think a lot of people in the family office industry know they need to diversify that way. They want more than just a couple of rental homes and their wealth adviser diversifying them in the markets, and we're always trying to help families get more and more deal flow. The mistake I see, related to what you're saying, is that a lot of them think they're getting diversification by investing in a whole bunch of startups in a whole bunch of different industries. One thing I'd add to what you and Ray Dalio said is that we often tell families: do not invest in really high-risk startups unless you're doing it through a professional venture capital or angel investor fund, or it's in the industry where you made your money. You do not have the insight and the skill set to choose high-risk investments in different niches. It needs to be in the niche where you created your wealth if you're going to go really early stage. Otherwise, invest in things that are already proven, that already have a profit margin, and that are already developed and not at the startup phase.

I definitely appreciate the interview. That was awesome. I think our listeners are going to get a ton of value from the thoughts you've shared. If you have not gone through several of Tony's books, I definitely recommend doing so. If you haven't gone to one of his live events, please try to go out of your way to do so. I'm sure you got value from this interview, so maybe listen to it a second time or share it with somebody else you know. I appreciate you being part of billionaires.com, Tony, and hope we can meet in person sometime soon. Take care.