Billionaire Lawyer spills his $250M side hustles (pick one)

Get the side hustle ideas database: https://clickhubspot.com/trm Episode 774: Sam Parr ( ⁠https://x.com/theSamParr⁠ ) and Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) talk to America’s richest lawyer John Morgan ( https://x.com/JohnMorganESQ ) about his fly-wheel side hustles. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:08) Wonderworks (7:00) Alcatraz East ($5M/yr) (13:00) John's earliest hustles (17:11) Morgan & Morgan (29:48) The John Morgan School of Branding (33:30) Downtown Flavortown (37:55) WWGD - What would Google do (47:30) What John would chase today (48:58) The winning formula (52:05) Santa's Chocolate Factory (56:11) Malls (1:01:36) Bullets before bombs (1:02:13) “fish first, fish fast” — Links: • WonderWorks - https://www.wonderworksonline.com/ • Alcatraz East - https://www.alcatrazeast.com/ • Morgan and Morgan - https://www.forthepeople.com/ • Litify - https://www.litify.com/ • Practice Made Perfect - https://www.pmpmg.com/ • Mass Torts Made Perfect - https://mtmp.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano //

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I don't hunt deer, I hunt money.

• 0:02Shaan Puri?

  You own one of the biggest, if not the biggest, law firm in the country. We've seen your face on the billboards from Morgan to Morgan. And if you just want to say Morgan, that'd be great, too.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  My big vision was this, what if Google was a law firm? What would it look like?

• 0:18Sam Parr?

  You just became a lawyer to fund your horny ambitions. And that's pretty badass.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  I built an attraction called Alcatraz East, and it just prints money.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  I've got apartment complexes, I've got shopping centers, that prints money, too. He's basically like half Walt Disney, half shark. Where my competition gets beat by me is 95% of them are shit. I'm not hunting cockroaches, I'm hunting big game.

• 0:49Shaan Puri?

  I got goosebumps, Sean, I love that answer, that was incredible.

• 0:59Sam Parr?

  So, first of all, welcome to the pod, you know, we're on. And I'm from the South, from Missouri and Tennessee, I lived in Tennessee for a while. And I've been trying to convey to Sean this idea that I call capital men. And I was like, Sean, I don't know how to explain it, but they just kind of follow the process and they just do thing to thing to thing, and they don't overthink stuff, and they're just ballers. And you are a good example of that. I'm hearing how you talk, and I'm like, you are exactly what I'm talking about, these capital men, these guys who just get into stuff, and it's like an onion, they just have layers of stuff that you don't even know about. And so for this podcast, maybe we can ask you about like the, I think you have like 10 or something different businesses, we can like ask you about each one, because everyone

• 1:41Sam Parr?

  knows you as the law firm guy, but that might not be the most interesting thing about you.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Well, believe it or not, I've tell this to my wife all the time, the thing that I'm most proud of in all my businesses has been Wonderworks, the upside down house. Back in the 90s, my kids were little, we'd go to the Science Center, and it was just, you know, they were shit, they were terrible. And the kids were wanting to leave before they got there. And I had a business where I put on fairs around America, and one of our vendors had this huge tent, and everything in it was interactive, interactive, touching, feeling, before interactivity was a thing.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  And I said, you know, if we built a science center that was interactive, that's what a science center should be, where you're touching, feeling, doing, and that parents would enjoy as much as kids. So I went out around America. As a matter of fact, I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and I found like four things in the Exploratorium. I found in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, I found a bubble room where you make these bubbles. And I'm like, okay, that's something. I found another thing called Recollections. And so I went around the the country looking for interactive things from science centers.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  But I felt like the building had to be great. And this guy comes up to me who had been with Ripley's, and he had a rendering of a building turned upside down. He goes, this is what you should do. You should turn it upside down. I'm like, well, how do you do that? And he starts to tell me, I go, well, hell, if I could do that, I would do that. And so the, so I built the first one in Orlando. It's called Wonder Works. If you Google Wonder Works. It's this right here. There it is. And This is amazing. I've never seen this. Is this near Disney World? One of mine is. My, one, the one in Orlando is very close to Disney World and very close to Universal. Is the inside of the building upside down?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Well, you go in, you walk in, you walk in, and you're standing on the ceiling. Yeah. So you walk through the trusses, and now you're standing on the ceiling. And the storyline is that once upon a time in the Bermuda Triangle, the greatest scientists in the world were working on the greatest experiments in the world to better mankind. They were trying to build their own hurricane. It got out of control. It, the place was located in Bermuda Triangle, lifts it out of the air, spins it, and it crashes down in Orlando, Pigeon Forge, Branson, Missouri. And so then you go in, and now you're on, so you look up and, you know, there's the stairs.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  And now you gotta, now how are you gonna visit it? So you go through an inversion tunnel where we turn you upside down so that when you exit the inversion tunnel, you will be defying gravity and walking upside down. And then you go from gallery to gallery to gallery to gallery. And

• 4:57Speaker 00

  That prints money too. That, that, those things, I have zero debt and I'll do like 33 million in EBITDA this year.

• 5:06Sam Parr?

  That's amazing. You dropped into kind of a bit of gold that you just kind of stepped over, which was before that you had a a national fair?

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Well, we put on fairs around America. We, we weren't, we didn't own the rides. We were the operator. In other words, Brevard County Fair, Pennsylvania State Fair, Long Island Fair, Nassau County Fair, where we just set it up, we'd promote it and then the ride people would come in and we were just, it, it didn't make a lot of money. But, you know, back in those days, listen, I remember the first time me and a guy took a piece of land and flipped it and made 60 grand. We split 60 grand. We went on a two week bender, celebrating our $30,000 profit. You know, those first, those first profits were like, holy shit.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  And it was like a side hustle and I was a lawyer, but I just made an extra 30, getting a piece of land rezoned and flipping it to the developer, so.

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  All right. So John has tons of side hustles, upside down buildings, crime museums, chocolate factories. He's a machine, but here's the thing. Every single one started with him spotting an opportunity others missed. My old company, The Hustle, built a database with hundreds of ideas like this. Some are weird like John's, some are dead simple. If you liked what you just heard, go check out the Side Hustle Ideas Database. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  San Francisco inspired me. I went there once with my wife. We wanted to go see Alcatraz. We go to Alcatraz. Alcatraz is, we get there thinking we're going to walk right in. They go, there's no tickets available. I said, we'll be here a couple more days. When can we go? There's no tickets. It's sold out for the next two weeks. I'm like, the And so the way you, the way you always solve that problem is you pull out two $100 bills to the ticket taker and you say, are you sure you don't have two extra tickets back there? This, this is not for the tickets. This is for you. So I got to go through Alcatraz. And when I went through it, I thought I had this epiphany, you know, have you have these

• 7:22Speaker 00

  epiphanies? And my epiphany is, America is fascinated with crime and punishment like nothing else. TV shows, movies, books, Netflix, all of it. And I was in the attraction business anyway. I said, you know, what about an attraction dedicated to the history of crime and punishment? And so I built an attraction, uh, that's in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee called Alcatraz East. And it's, I built it, it looks like a 1800 prison. And it's the history of crime and punishment. And it just [bleep] prints money.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  How, how big is that business? It, it makes five million bucks a year, net, net. And, and profit?

• 8:14Shaan Puri?

  And how much did it take cost to build it initially?

• 8:16Speaker 00

  It's an interesting thing because you know, I got a speech called Failure Can Be Your Friend. And what happened is I first built it in Washington DC because I thought, you know, the his, you know, I called it the National Museum of Crime and Punishment. And it doesn't, didn't do very well. And the reason it didn't do very well, in my opinion, there's, there's a lot of free stuff in DC to begin with, but more importantly, they wouldn't let me do anything with the facade. So I was just in a building, you know, across from the National Portrait Gallery. I was doing okay. I was limping along, but paying rent and paying just a little bit. But the landlord came in and said, you know,

• 9:01Speaker 00

  You're not doing the numbers per the lease and we're gonna call the lease on you. I'm like, but I'm paying my rent. Why would you do this? They go, we're doing it. So I moved everything and built the structure in Pigeon Forge. Moved a lot of the stuff. So some of the stuff I had, I bet the whole thing from what I had to build and what I took, I think the whole thing probably cost 13 million bucks, 14 million bucks. But like the, at the end of the attraction, I have four things that are just, you just can't believe it when you get there. One, Ted Bundy's VW. Two, Bonnie and Clyde's death car from the movie. Three,

• 9:42Sam Parr?

  OJ?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  OJ's Bronco and four, John Dillinger's sedan. And I just bought John Bonet's bicycle and the Murdochs golf cart. And let me tell you, America's fascination with crime is such that people are in this thing for three and a half, four hours. And it's an easy business to run because it's, it's static, you know, it's not, there's not a lot of interactive.

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at your website right now. I've, I've, um, I've been here, I believe. I'm a huge crime fan. And so when you were waiting to name what you were gonna name, I was like, you're forgetting OJ's car. Uh, this is awesome.

• 10:22Shaan Puri?

  And you made a big bet because after you do the thing in DC, I think the normal entrepreneur sort of starts to doubt the concept, doubt the viability, you know, you're, you're, it didn't go well right away. And yet you, uh, you doubled down in the face of that. Is it just blind faith conviction? Or are you just a stubborn guy?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  That's, it was not that I'm stubborn. It's like, you know, you hear everybody give these speeches about failure is your friend. Failure can be the best thing that ever happens to you, but yet when we lose, we never go near it again. We say that, you know, it sounds good in a speech. But what happened is I had had some investors from Wonderworks invested in this deal. So I had investors. I sent out, my wife kept saying, this is, this is great. It's great. You just got to build it in a place where there's people, more people. And so I sent a letter to all my investors saying, look, I'm going to move it from here to there. And you'll be part of it. And everything was, you know, and not one person took me up on it.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Not one person. They all said, you know, you know, we were taking our loss. And then I, my wife, I said, what do you think? She goes, let's do it ourselves. And, you know, and so the, my new money was like eight million dollars. New money. And I got it back in a year and a half.

• 11:45Shaan Puri?

  Were you, how big was the law firm? Or like, what was your financial situation?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  My financial situation was not bad, but you know, I mean, my financial situation got, the older I get, the better it got, you know, because I was one of these guys that always was pushing my profits into new things. And it was good, but, but I did have eight million bucks.

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. So what's crazy about your story is you're this guy, you own one of the biggest, if not the biggest law firm in the country, right? We've seen your face on the billboards from Morgan to Morgan. Before that, you've done all these other things. So you were talking about Wonder Works, maybe your favorite business that you're most proud of, which was a amusement business. And maybe some of the inspiration from that came from you working at Disney when you were younger. And so like, I guess, where does the story start for you? Does it start when you're like a little kid? Does it start at Disney? Where does the entrepreneurial bug start?

• 12:45Speaker 00

  I think the story started for me probably the same way the story started for you too. Except you're too young for this to happen. There are people that are born with a entrepreneurial seed.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  A seed, it just happens. Now for my generation, you can spot those people because they were paper boys or paper girls. And a paper route was a MF'er because the paper route, you're 10, 11 years old, but it's every single day. It's rain, sleet, snow. If you missed one, you gotta go back, you gotta collect your money. And I'll bet you two guys, if you went back to your 10 or 11 years old, I don't know if there were paper routes when you all were younger, but you were probably doing something hustling money. You two were probably coding or, you know, Selling stuff on eBay. Selling stuff on eBay, whatever. You know, and at my school, I always sold candy. I always,

• 13:45Speaker 00

  I used to wear army pants with all the pockets and I'd have watermelon sticks and bubble gum and not chocolate because that melted. And I would sell candy at school and make like 10 bucks a day.

• 13:57Shaan Puri?

  By the way, John, you know, the evidence for what you're saying?

• 14:00Speaker 00

  What?

• 14:01Shaan Puri?

  Buffett had a paper route plus, you know, sold magazines, gum and coke. Jeff Bezos had a paper route. Sam Walton from Walmart had a paper route. Walt Disney, Peter Drucker, there's like an insane roster of people that did exactly what you're saying.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Oprah. Oprah had a paper route. That's badass. And so the reason I know all these people, because I've written a new book that's being edited right now called Life is Luck. And the thesis of my book is, we wake up, we're born, but we're born lucky. You know, we're born in America, first of all. Warren Buffett calls it, you know, winning the ovarian lottery. Just being born in America. And then you make a thousand left turns and a thousand right turns and a thousand U-turns and then you end up here and one different turn. But part of my thesis is the paper boy, the paper girl,

• 14:55Speaker 00

  these people that were born with that genetic seed of entrepreneurism. And it can't be taught, it's just, it's just in you. And it's such an advantage in life because and it's really nothing we did. We were born with it. Nobody was, rich people do never want to be told that they were lucky. They want to tell us all, I worked my ass off. I deserve every single penny I got. And they are like 100% wrong about that because one different term. I mean Buffett, Buffett's company is basically five stocks.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  If you take, when Charlie Munger died, I read a thing about him yesterday, the other day in the world, you take five stocks away from Berkshire, it's not Berkshire.

• 15:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's like Amex, Coca-Cola, Apple and.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Right. Exactly. But, but, but, but we see him as this great investor and, and his, his greatness has really been his patience and his understanding of, of, of index funds instead of, you know, money managers and time and, and power of compounding interest.

• 16:12Sam Parr?

  I believe what you're saying. I, I believe luck to be true. I think that most people, when they get successful, I actually think that they attribute a fair bit to luck because they realize like, like for example, when I sold my company, the CEO got into a really bad accident, like two weeks after the deal closed. And I'm like, I mean, if that would happen two weeks prior, that could have changed everything. So there is a luck component, but you have, I, I have some research here and I think you have like 10 or 12 things that have worked out really well for you. And so there is some like, there's a lot of good decision-making that, that you have on your side. Were you always doing these little hustles? Like did Morgan and Morgan start as a hustle and turn into a real thing? Or were you trying to build something big from the get go?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Well, I was not trying to build something big from the get go. I mean, look, when I first got out of law school. If somebody had told me they'd pay me a hundred grand and tied to cola, I would have been, you know, give me the pen. I mean, I wasn't even thinking like this. You know, I got into this business because my brother got hurt when I was in college and it kind of, you know, he was, became a quadriplegic from an accident. And so I was in the middle of all that and our family was relatively poor. And when you're poor, you're helpless, hopeless, powerless,

• 17:35Speaker 00

  and then you're watching your brother be, you know, pushed back by the, the big companies. And I became enraged about the way he was treated. And, and so when I went to law school, I knew what I was going to do when I went to law school. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to come back and do this work. I was, I had a lot of job offers other places, but this is all I wanted to do. And this is all I've ever done. But I didn't, there's no way I could have dreamt this because it's too big to dream, it was too big to even dream this.

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's interesting because I would say personal injury lawyers, I think have a pretty bad perception in the public. I think it's, you know, ambulance chasers are seen as sort of a sleazy thing. I think that would, I think that's fair as like mass perception. But the, when you think about what you were actually saying and what you did, right? Like, you know, your brother has this tragic accident on the job, becomes a quadriplegic. You didn't, and, and you know, insurance companies and the, and, and large corporations, they're, you know, they're not trying to pay out, you know, fair compensation or huge settlements to, to, to folks that, that were, that needed it. And you're, in a way, like, you know, you're basically helping somebody who needs the most help, who tends to have the least power

• 18:56Shaan Puri?

  or resources to fight against those who have a lot of power resources. In many ways, that's a very noble thing, but it has the opposite perception. Is that, is that how you see it? Or, you know, what's going on?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, look, it's, it's like this. When I got out of law school, Almost when I got out, you weren't even allowed to advertise. You know, and personal injury lawyers were, like you said, ambulance chasers. That was what they were called. Everybody wants to look down on somebody. So lawyers who had a bad reputation themselves anyway, you know, kill all the lawyers. All of a sudden, they found somebody to look down on, and that was the personal injury lawyer, the ambulance chaser. I'm not an ambulance chaser. And then all of a sudden, you have the advertising lawyers, which is another group to look down on. The P, the personal injury lawyers, well, I don't advertise. I'm above that. I'm down, you know.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  And so what happened was, when I got out of law school, I would have been the last person you would have ever. I was straight and narrow. I was the, you know, the president of everything at the university. I had all these job offers, but I didn't take them because I, I did have a desire to do what I'm doing.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  When I got out, I started going around to people who did advertise, who were kind of shady. And they gave me their business and I took their bad cases. I took their tough cases. But I got inside the belly of the beast and I saw the future. And, you know, a lot of times you get to see the future, you know, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, they saw the future. But if they were born today, that future wouldn't be there for them. That was their luck when they were born. Because if they were born today, Microsoft is already something else. And so I saw it and I sat down with my wife and I said, look, this goes against everything I ever thought I'd be.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  But this train is leaving the station. And that train being advertising for your services? Yes, advertising for my services and to get cases. Because when I was doing it, when I started out. Other lawyers would refer you business and you were paying them a 50% referral fee. So if your, if your fee was a hundred dollars, you had to give your referring lawyer fifty dollars. Well, that's hurts margins and, and all of a sudden you're seeing a different way. Now, it was still iffy when I did it because it hadn't really, hadn't become mainstream at all. So, but it, but it was something, I was so embarrassed about it.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  I didn't even do the commercials myself. I had a friend who was very handsome. And I said, Vance, I want you to be my face and he did it. And then the bar came in and said, well, you can't have spokespeople. You gotta do it yourself. So I had to take my, my fat face and go on TV. There, there I was. Look.

• 21:57Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, man. You look pretty good to me.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  You look, you look sharp. But I didn't like the way I looked.

• 22:02Shaan Puri?

  So, so were people not advertising because they were literally just too proud for it? Or was it, was it a gray area legally of if you could or couldn't?

• 22:09Speaker 00

  It wasn't gray legally, but it was, it was taboo. It was just not done. People who could, who had, wouldn't because they didn't want to be shunned at the country club. People that would didn't have the money to do it. How I got to do it was I went to the bank and borrowed a hundred grand. And went down, did the commercials. You know, when I think back later, you know, and, and by the way, my credit was so good that this TV station would only run my ads if I paid in advance because they, you know, that's how good that my credit was.

• 22:49Shaan Puri?

  Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot and unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com.

• 23:16Shaan Puri?

  So you're saying the order of operations was you graduate as a lawyer, you know what you want to do as a practice, you saw that there were some kind of lawyers at the bottom of the of the social barrel there that were advertising, you didn't advertise yourself, at first you just went and took their cases to like they would catch the fish, you would cook the fish, you would go and actually do the case and you said, you know, you're you said you're in the belly of the beast and you saw, oh, this is the future, these guys are getting a lot of cases, this is how lawyers are going to get business and you decided to do it, what what was it that lets you kind of like go against that kind of the country club mindset? Like, you know, I heard this quote from Larry Ellison, he said one time, they were saying

• 23:56Shaan Puri?

  how successful he was, and he goes, yeah, I had all of the necessary disadvantages you would need to be successful, like, kind of like, I had this chip on my shoulder, no, I wasn't the best student, no, I wasn't the best at this, I had everything I needed to be successful, that's, that's what I needed, what was it that you needed to to kind of break out from the way that other lawyers are doing things?

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Well, I've always been, you know, aggressive and I'm a networker, but I didn't want to do it this way because but paying that 50%, how I looked at it was this, they were throwing me their trash, I felt like I was up in a dumpster, eating a half eaten Whopper that had been thrown up in the dumpster, but guess what, it tasted okay, you know, I was, I was living, but I would rather have just had a fresh Whopper right through the drive through window instead of having to climb into the to the dumpster, and that was my decision, do I just keep, because I knew it was going to happen and I knew first to market was always

• 25:02Speaker 00

  an advantage, and if I could get in there early enough, you know, and become Kleenex instead of, you know, tissue, I had a better chance, and my wife was a securities lawyer, she's very smart, I'm not, I'm, I'm the part of the 50%. Of the law school class that enabled there to be a top 50%. Without me, there's no them. My wife was in the top 2%. The foundation. We call it the foundation. Yes. And so the thing that happened to Tim, it was one of these things where, you know, we're very close.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  And he's in this terrible situation and Disney is really treating him terrible. And the more that we'd fight, the more they were just crushing. And when you're watching somebody you love that much. Get manhandled that way. You just, there's a rage that that came inside of me. And so I always knew what I was gonna do. I mean, I was offered a job of this guy, Mark Halsey, wanted me to come to his firm. And I told him, I said, you know, this is what I want to do. And he helped me get my first job out of law school. And so the good thing about what I've done. And the good thing for people in, in, that are listening to this is.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  When you wake up and work is not work. You, you're a lot better at it. So I woke up every day going this, you know, I'm going to take care of the Tims of the world. So it was never work for me and I wanted to go and get my. Pound of flesh from these people. Who had bullied us. When we were helpless, hopeless and powerless. And so. As time's gone on, it's, to me, it's been very noble. Of what we do. Because. The people we represent didn't do anything wrong. But they had things taken from them. They had their health taken.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  They had their ability to walk taken. They had loss of income. They had things taken. And what we do is we get, give them back as much as we can. Or compensate them as much as we can for what was taken from them.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I like the business. I, listen, I liked Robin Hood when I was a kid. I always, I always liked the Robin Hood story, you know, and so the people I'm going against, you know, look, the tobacco industry, I've had many, many trials against them. What do they do for a living? They are in the business of premeditated murder. They know what they're doing. They're gonna kill us. They're gonna kill a bunch of us this year. And they know it. And the reason they know it in their internal documents, they call it, they call new smokers, replacement smokers. They laced the cigarettes with additives to, to hook us. They gave it to the kids. They gave it to the service people. They're in the business of premeditated murder.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  And so I don't feel bad at all when that's my enemy. I don't feel bad at all when I'm trying to get compensation for people who got hooked and addicted by a very evil company. And by the way, today, those same companies now own our food companies.

• 28:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  And processed food is the new tobacco.

• 28:40Sam Parr?

  In terms of, um, so in a little bit, we wanna ask about all your businesses because you've, you've had so much stuff, but just to add, to, to give us some context into the timeline. When you start advertising, do you remember like the next 10 years of business? Like, how big did your business grow?

• 28:57Speaker 00

  It was, it was gradual, but the way I always looked at it is I had a number of what I thought a case was worth, and then I had the number of cases that, that I would sign up and I would divide the, the number, the average fee into the cases. And as long as that equaled out where I could break even, I kept pouring more money into it. So if a case was, if I, if a case was worth $4,000 and I was spending, uh, you know, well, $4,000 and if I was spending $80,000.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  I had, if I got 20 cases, that was break even. And if I got double that, then that was profit. So that's kind of how I did it in a very simplistic way. And I felt like as long as I'm breaking even, I'm building the brand. And building the brand was very important, too.

• 29:52Shaan Puri?

  When you say building the brand, like, uh, what's the John Morgan School of Brand? If you were going to school us in how you think about brand, what, what do you think about?

• 29:59Speaker 00

  First of all, I want it to be something that's memorable. I wanted, so when I first did it, when I first got into it, I wa, there weren't even computers. I didn't have a computer. I didn't have a URL. The first time I really understood what a URL was, I was at a Yankees game with some lawyers in New York and they all had these devices in their hands called BlackBerries. And I'm like, what are those? You know, it was like, what, what is this? And they're all there, oh my, and they're just thumbing through it the whole game. And I'm like, what are you doing there? We're getting cases. So I went back to home and said, I gotta get a BlackBerry. And then I got the BlackBerry, I said, I gotta get a URL.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  And then, so, so the beginning of it, the beginning of the brand was the URL. And so I wanted my URL to be my mission statement and my branding statement. The two things I came up with in my mind was justice for all and for the people. Those are the two URLs. And I ultimately went with for the people because I was worried that people couldn't spell justice all the time. But I knew that we could all spell for the people. And so when I built my brand, it was I wanted my brand to be my mission statement and my URL. I wanted all to be one thing, so I never had to say something twice.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  I could just say it once. So a lot of the ads then, you know, visit, you know, call Morgan to Morgan, forthepeople.com. So I can say it all just like that. And so, but building the brand was very, very important.

• 31:45Shaan Puri?

  Who did you take inspiration from on building like an iconic memorable brand? Who did you think was doing it well?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Well, the people that I admire in my life is Walt Disney. I worked, I did Magic at Walt Disney World. And so every time I walk out of the Magic store, I'd see Walt Disney holding Mickey's hand on Main Street and they had Dream it do it. And so that was kind of in my mind. It was P T Barnum, Disney, those type of people. So I like the promotion, like when I was building Wonder Works.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  I knew that the building itself, you've heard the slogan, sell the sizzle, not the steak. Well, there's a lot to that. So when I was building Wonder Works, I was thinking, sell the sizzle, not the steak. People will pay just to get behind the curtain. Like they did with P T Barnum. They'll get, they'll pay to get behind the curtain just to see the human pincushion.

• 32:51Shaan Puri?

  How many active companies do you have right now?

• 32:56Speaker 00

  You know, I got so many K ones that I build, I've got shopping centers that I'm, that I've built and I've got apartment complexes that I've built and are under construction. So I, I got that whole part of my life. I've got the attraction businesses that I have. I started building Marriott Hotels about 20 years ago. I've had, I had a billboard company that I sold to Lamar for a lot of money. I had an ad agency for lawyers called Practice Made Perfect that I sold, made and did well. The new thing I've got going right now is you know, the, the guy, you know who Guy Fieri is? He's a California guy.

• 33:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Dave and Buster's kind of has it all to themselves. And so we built our very first, what we call downtown flavor town in Pigeon Forge. And it's basically Dave and Buster's meets Guy Fieri. And we built the, we opened up the first one about a year or so ago. And we're building the second one right now in Pigeon Forge, in Myrtle Beach.

• 34:08Shaan Puri?

  This fascinates me because so many people come on this podcast and their message is you've just got to focus. You gotta, you know, don't get distracted, don't chase the shiny objects. You've got to do one thing and let it compound for a long time. But you kind of seem to have done both, right? Your firm has compounded. I think you guys do like $2 billion in revenue now. This is like a huge firm. But you've had all these other entrepreneurial side quests. So I guess like, kind of square that circle for me. Are you, are you focused? Are you unfocused? How do you, how do you think about that?

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Here's how I think about that. Those people that tell you to focus, they're also doing a lot of this. Hunting, fishing, golfing. All three, off. You know? Now, nothing wrong with off, but there's nothing about business, except maybe a little golf, you can do a little bit there. But hunting, to me, makes no sense. You know, you know, killing an animal right up on an animal makes no sense. Venison, I can, I can taste the fur. I don't want to eat it. So I don't hunt. So I got that.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Fishing, I don't understand. I don't understand catch and release. Let's go out and have a good time. Let's catch a fish. Let's rip its mouth open. Let's tear its eye out and let's throw it back in the water. I don't understand that. And golf, look, it's a great hobby, but I'd rather shoot pool, you know, for an hour than golf. So all that focus that these people, that these people are focusing on, I don't have that distraction. I don't hunt deer. I hunt money. And, and I like it. So instead of collecting stamps, some people collect stamps as a hobby.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  I collect artifacts for Alcatraz East. I hunt.

• 36:11Sam Parr?

  You're, you're a big fan of presidential note cards, you know, presidential flashcards. You just like collecting those bills.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And clipping football. So I am very focused. I'm just not hunting, golfing, or fishing. If you take all that, and listen, I watch sports on TV, but there's people that, that are more interested in than, you know, in Lane Kiffin's new job than they are their own job. Well, I don't have those distractions to my focus.

• 36:46Sam Parr?

  Can, can I ask you about each one of these businesses that I researched? And I want to brag a little bit about you. And also you can tell me if it's true or not.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:57Sam Parr?

  So listen to this, Sean. So tell me if this is true. Okay. So we have Morgan and Morgan. That's a huge, successful thing. You talked a lot about that. But you also have a company called Litify, which I think you sold. So Litify is a tech company for lawyers. And I believe you sold around 60% of the company. You still own 40% at a $600 million valuation. Is that true?

• 37:18Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  Do you, do you have a method where like you do the vision and somebody, you hire a CEO early on? Like what, what makes the system work?

• 37:26Speaker 00

  For that, a guy joined me who was, you know, this guy was one of the smartest guys, a young guy, and he could do anything. And it was like, I could just tell him, I called it magic carpets. I would say, Can you do this? Yeah, I can do this. Can you do that? Can you do this? Can you do that? Yes. When I first brought him in, my vision, and I've written a book called You Can't, I've written two books. One called You Can't Teach Hungary, one called You Can't Teach Vision. My big vision for the law was this. What if Google was a law firm? What would it look like?

• 38:11Speaker 00

  That was a thing that just hit me and I just kept going over and over and over in my mind. Now, the problem for a guy like me is, you know, terrible in math, terrible in science. You know, the idea of coding, you know, I, you know, no idea. But I had that vision. What if Google was a law firm? And then I decided that I was gonna build what I called the Google Law Firm. But I didn't have the, so I'd been close with Obama's team and I was talking to the Obama people, the guys who ran the cave in Chicago, got him Teddy Goff, and there was another guy named Yellen Kriegel. And I'm talking to all of them about the Google Law Firm.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  And when I would talk to them, they're, they're just blank face. Like, what, what do you mean the Google Law Firm? So I found this guy and he got it.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  And the first thing I said to him was, you know, everything we're gonna do, we're gonna ask what Google do. And here's what Google would do if it was a law firm. Google would be everywhere for everybody. And Google wouldn't want some cases, they'd want all the cases. And if they didn't handle their cases in-house, they would refer them out. They would partner with a firm like Uber. So, so I was inspired by Google and Uber. So I wanted to build the Google Law Firm. I'd keep a lot of cases, but I'd refer a whole bunch more out. Well, so then, so I say to the guy, he says, what do you want the most? I said, I want transparency and automation.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Now, we had a software called Client Profiles. It was, was pretty good, but he kept saying, it's not enough. It's not enough. It's not enough. We have to build our own software. And, and that's the last thing I wanted to do because it's just too big. And I'm like, that's not what we do. But he finally convinced me, we gotta build it. And I had gained such trust in him. I was like, well, let's go ahead. So we built Litify for us internally. And we put, and we put it on Salesforce. We, we, we layered on Salesforce. Nobody had ever done that before. So all of a sudden, we got all these engineers.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  We got this, you know, we got a staff of thousands of engineers. Salesforce was interested in us because they hadn't been in the legal space before. And we can change things with, with, we can, we can do whatever we want. So, so we started Litify. And part of the deal, if you want to be, so I refer a bunch of cases out to lawyers across America. But like with the Bloomies, if people want to get my referrals, they gotta be on Litify. Cause that's how we talk to each other. So a case comes in that I'm going to refer out to Des Moines. You know, the case comes in, I got a partner who's on Litify. I refer the case to him. He's got, you know, 12 hours to accept it or decline it.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  If he declines it, it comes back. It goes to a second person, comes back, goes to a third person. And then, and then there's, then it's, so it started as something internal for us. But it's, but then it became, you know, So good that everybody wanted it. So we started selling it.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  What was, how much did you invest in it? And what was the time to exit?

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Well, other people invested in it with this Fortress put some money in. I was on a bank board. I was on the bank board called Esquire Bank, which was a, is a bank for lawyers. Trades on NASDAQ. I sat on the board. Tiger Capital put in some money. I would say from beginning to exit six, seven years.

• 42:02Sam Parr?

  That's incredible.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  I didn't really want to exit, but you know, it was time because like you said, the focus, I needed to focus on the Google law firm. I already had this. I still have a lot of input with Besmer and I sold it to somebody who I thought would be good. I sold it to Besmer and they're very good at this. And so, um, yeah, about six or seven years.

• 42:29Sam Parr?

  Okay. That's amazing.

• 42:30Shaan Puri?

  By the way, it seems like there's a flywheel between these businesses. So you said we built kind of for ourselves and then you used your position and leverage in the market where, hey, if I'm referring you to a case, you got to be using our platform for this to work well. To get more customers. The second business I think Sam's going to bring up is like this ad agency you created.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  The ad agency was, here's how the ad agency was. I called it practice made perfect. So what my idea was is I was going to go out across America and say, if you want to do what I'm doing, I'll write your ads, I'll place your ads, I'll, I'll, and when big cases happen, when mass torts happen, you can put them in and then refer them to me. So I built this company called Mass or Practice Made Perfect at all these lawyers across America. I was charging 15%. So I made money. You know, I was making, I was probably making, you know, eight or nine million bucks a year just running that business. But more importantly, all those lawyers started referring me, you know, when Vioxx would happen or when, you know,

• 43:34Speaker 00

  mass torts would happen, they would send me their cases as well. So I, I built this, I thought of it like, like global cross where I'm laying all this fiber optic across America, but my fiber optic were these law firms across America that I would make money. Be in the ad agency, but I'd make the big money with the cases they would sell.

• 43:55Sam Parr?

  Wait, so was that its own entity and you're saying it was doing eight million in income?

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:00Sam Parr?

  That's incredible. What's, where's it at now?

• 44:03Speaker 00

  I sold it because here's why I had to sell it. As I started to expand across America with all these lawyers, they were all good friends of mine by the end, but I kept, they were, they were like, you know, I had a guy up in Indiana. And he's like, John, you know, you, you're, you're infringing on my territory. I'm like, how? Cause my deal with these, with my clients was this, you don't have to sign a contract with me. You can fire me anytime you want and I'll never compete with you. I'll never compete with you. And it was just a handshake. Well, they were like calling saying, well, John, you know, I saw one of your billboards. I'm like, well, where did you see it? He's like, well, I saw, I was driving to Louisville. I go, were you in Kentucky or Indiana? Well, I was in, I was in Kentucky, but I was driving. I was like, hey, man, you're in Indianapolis. I, I'm in Louisville.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  So I started getting, I was infringing on my clients.

• 44:53Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  And it just became untenable. I, I was at a crossroad and I either had to not grow the Google law firm or keep this other business. So I sold practice made perfect. I, I don't know what's going to happen to it. I'm very worried about it because when they bought it from me, the, the person that came in to run it, they called the person they put in there, the, uh, the resident entrepreneur or something like that. They have some name for the, the guy who's going to run them. I, you know, just give me the money and go do what you want.

• 45:32Sam Parr?

  How much did you sell it for?

• 45:33Speaker 00

  Uh, like 18.

• 45:35Sam Parr?

  Okay. So that's 18 million. All right. Now listen to this, Sean. Is this true? So do you still own this and tell me the story about it? You had a trade show called Mass Tort's Made Perfect and it's a twice a year trade show for, for lawyers. So you're, you're, you basically owned like the networking of law firms. Is that right?

• 45:54Speaker 00

  It's called Mass Tort's Made Perfect. And we put two times a year, people would come to learn about the latest mass torts. It was a play on my, uh, Practice made perfect. I had practice made perfect for my clients and mass torts made perfect for all the lawyers in America. And I stayed with that for a long time. And at a certain point, it was me and two other firms. There was when Johnny Cochran was alive, he was part of it. And I was helping Johnny Cochran map out his national strategy, which also helped me learn about going national. And then another law firm, and but at a certain

• 46:38Speaker 00

  point, back to your focus, you are right about focus. I mean, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, both say focus, focus, focus. At a certain point, mass torch made perfect was not helping me grow my business. And so I sold, I let them have mass torch made perfect. I kept practice made perfect. And we and then I went and spent way more time on the Google law firm. Well, how big was the trade show business? It was big, but it wasn't that profitable. What the the trade show itself made money, but not a lot of money. Practice, practice made perfect. The ad agency was really supplementing

• 47:22Speaker 00

  that. But what we were really looking for were cases. We were really looking for people to say, hey, you know, we're going to send you our cases. So the trade show itself never made money. It was the cases that we got.

• 47:35Shaan Puri?

  Where do you see opportunity today that, you know, a younger, more free John Morgan would actually be able to go and pursue? What would you go chase down?

• 47:44Speaker 00

  If I was young, I would probably, because of AI, because I'm not good at that stuff, I would probably be looking toward the service industries.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  For John Morgan, you know, plumbing, electrical, air conditioning. I think that that's where a person like me could thrive because I'm good at scaling. I'm good at building teams. I'm good at sharing the profits. And so I think that I think I might be in something like that. But the business I really enjoy the most is the entertainment business. And I don't, it's just the great thing about the entertainment business, whether it's the downtown

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Flavortown or Wonder Works or Alcatraz East is you're not fighting.

• 48:46Sam Parr?

  Can you, can you, okay, so Shaan and I are, I guess, sort of in the entertainment business because we have this podcast, but you know, I love the idea of owning an upside down museum. That sounds amazing. It sounds fun. It sounds like it's good for the world. Like it's like a, it's wholesome. It sounds fantastic. It seems cool to touch the things you're working on. Could you teach us how to get into that business and how to operate, run, spot an opportunity? Or what a winning formula looks like?

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Well, winning formula looks like you got to go back to the basics always. Location, location, location. Look, my Orlando store does the best. And then Pigeon Forge does the second best. And then Myrtle Beach does pretty good. And then, but Branson does less than Myrtle Beach. It's all about where your locations are. If you don't have a great location for this, for this type of business. Look, Six Flags is having trouble in America right now because there's just not enough people to go to Six Flags.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  I like these one offs where location based attractions where it's at the corner of Main and Main. You got a lot of people coming with, you know, and when people come with money, they're, they're, they're coming to spend money. When the people come to Orlando, they're coming to spend money. And so that's what I would, that's what I would focus on would be, you know, the, the cities itself.

• 50:17Sam Parr?

  And is the business model just thirty dollar tickets or fifty dollar tickets?

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're not. It's like twenty six dollar tickets. Yeah. And, and the value, the reason I think I'm really doing well is the value's incredible because there's probably four or five things inside of each attraction that if you just went out and paid for it on the street, like I've got these virtual roller coasters.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  In malls, they go for twenty dollars a ride, you know, three minutes, twenty bucks. With me, you can just keep going and going and going. Ropes course, fifteen, twenty bucks a ride. With me, go, you know, laser tag, fifteen, twenty bucks. There's probably five items inside of a Wonder Works that would cost a hundred bucks by each by themselves. But here, a family of four comes in for a hundred bucks. And they leave, you know, with a huge grin on themselves, sweating from all the activities. And, uh, the value is incredible. The thing I love about the business is

• 51:21Speaker 00

  there's really no fighting. Like in, in my law business, you know, I'm competing to get the cases and I'm fighting the insurance company, that I'm fighting the defense lawyers and everything's a fight. The only thing's a fight here is when somebody comes and say, I didn't like it. I want my money back. And we basically look at the ticket and go, how long was, how long were they there? If they were there for an hour or less, here's your money back. When they come and ask for their money back and they were there for three hours, we're like, get the [__] out of here.

• 51:56Sam Parr?

  Is there like a winning, um, strategy? Like, okay, um, the story of an upside down house that got tossed out of the Bermuda Triangle. That's kind of cool. Um, crime and punishment's cool. What other winning story formulas do you like?

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Well, I have one that I'm gonna, that I'm looking to build right now and it's called Santa's Chocolate Factory. So imagine.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  This is Santa's Chocolate Factory. Nice. Okay, and the thing in the middle, so envision, here's that, here's where this came from. Here's where this idea came from. So I'm out at Disney one day and I'm sitting at Jir Deli's. And Jir Deli's is an ice cream chocolate store. Right next door was a Christmas store at Disney Village. I'm sitting there and then I go into the Christmas store. Christmas is, you know, a year-round business in certain places. So then I thought, what could I build that would be phenomenal? So I thought, well, Willy Wonka, you gotta pay IP for Willy Wonka, but you don't have to pay IP for, for Santa Claus.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  So I said, what about Santa's Chocolate Factory? Santa's living there, this is Santa's house. There's a big chocolate factory, there's ice cream, the booths are made out of sleighs. And you got all the merchandise you're gonna sell. You got Santa Claus there in, you know, in his workshop. You got pictures being taken, you got elves working there. And so my idea is to build this complex of Santa's Chocolate Factory, where Santa is and, and on the hour, every hour at midnight, every hour turns into midnight, the clock turns, dun dun dun dun, the lights go down.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  And all of a sudden, the store comes alive, the train starts moving, the bears are moving. It's Christmas time on the hour, kind of a Bellagio moment where people come. It's snowing outside. And so that's the next thing that I'm gonna do. I love it. Have you seen Enchant, Enchant Christmas? Have you seen this business? Yeah, but here, think about this, what I'm thinking about with this. Because the inside's gonna be so phenomenal, I'm thinking about doing something that's never been done ever in the history of the world, charging money to come into a retail store. A dollar to come in.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Now, I don't know if it'll work. If it doesn't work, I'll quit charging the dollar. But I think I can build something inside so spectacular that people will want to get in there to see the clock strike 12. The clock strikes 12, all of a sudden, everybody's up on the counters like Johnny Rockets. They're all singing. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. There's this five-minute interlude every hour. And I think people will pay to come in and see it. So that's my next thing that I'm working on right now.

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  Sam, isn't it crazy that he's basically like half Walt Disney?

• 55:08Sam Parr?

  Yes, shark.

• 55:09Shaan Puri?

  Half lawyer shark, you know, Better Call Saul meets Jeff Bezos. It's like one of the wildest combinations.

• 55:17Sam Parr?

  That's pretty amazing. It's, I mean, you've been in the, it's, it's, it's kind of funny. There's like a joke here of like, you just became a lawyer to fund your carney ambitions. And that's pretty badass, to be honest, because, you know, being a lawyer is cool, and I'm totally on board with helping the little guy. But there's something special about particularly in a world of AI, you know, this is a common theme that Sean and I have talked about, in a world of AI and more digital, it's pretty cool to be out of the house and, and screen-free experiences. And so I actually find your attraction business almost probably more interesting than your huge law firm.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  That's what I told you. I'm, I'm, you know, my wife doesn't understand it. When I tell her I'm, I'm more proud of my attraction business than the law business, just because it's so unlikely.

• 56:00Sam Parr?

  And what do you think? And so that business is 30? What do you think that, do you own the whole thing?

• 56:04Speaker 00

  I'm almost. I had some limited partners. Over time, I've bought a lot of them out. But yeah.

• 56:10Sam Parr?

  So what's that worth?

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Eight X, quarter of a billion. Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 03

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• 57:02Sam Parr?

  What are you doing with malls? Are you doing something interesting with malls?

• 57:06Speaker 00

  So what I'm doing with malls is this, everybody's tearing malls down because malls are no good. So up in Myrtle Beach, I'm gonna, I'm gonna build this, I'm building this new downtown flavor town with Guy Fieri. So there was a, there was a mall that was just on its last legs. There's an out parcel that has a Bass Pro that kicks ass. So that's, that's golden. But the mall, what I really wanted out of the mall was I wanted the JCPenney's location. It's, the, the location's fantastic. The mall's just no good. I wanted the JCPenney's location to build downtown flavor town.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  But then I got stuck with a mall, but I bought the mall, I bought it all for incredibly low price. So now the question's gonna be, do you level the mall or what do you do? What I've decided to do is to do something that's never really been done like this. For your viewers, I'm gonna, now you guys seem you'll know the answer to this. Are you all familiar with the concept of first principle thinking? Okay? Yeah, Elon has popularized this, this term and Aristotle taught Elon the term. So, but, so you take these assumptions and you deconstruct them.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  So right now, the assumption is if you buy a mall, you tear it down because there's nothing you can do with it. So I've decided to do some first principles. I do a lot of first principle thinking in my businesses. So I've decided, what about, what if I take this older mall?

• 58:51Speaker 00

  And with new technology and LED and illusions and all that, what if I take this mall? And I don't tear it down, I just repurpose it, but I make it a gallery. I make the whole mall illusions that, that, you know, like when you're at the Venetian and you see those that the, the, the, you're on the water and there's so many things to do with LEDs. So I'm going to take this mall and I'm going to repurpose it and I'm going to call it the gallery.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  And it's going to be, it's going to be, the mall is going to be a museum. You're going to go to the mall, just like you're going to go to Santa's Chocolate Factory. You're going to go just to see the inside of the mall. You're going to go to see all this and that. I'm going to have a zip line from one end to another. I'll have my ropes courses in the middle. I've got so many cool things. So when you go to this mall, most malls are now just tore down. That's just, that's what you do. I'm going to take Elon's first principle thinking and I'm not going to turn the mall down. I'm going to make the mall the attraction.

• 1:00:07Sam Parr?

  You're fascinating and your wife, your children and some of your close coworkers, what would they say it's like working with you?

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Well, I think they would say that, uh, that I have strong feelings, you know? If I feel like something is, you know, is, I don't want to say my way or the highway because I, I, I, I do a lot with consensus, but once I form my consensus,

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  then I execute. I mean, I'll spend a lot of time going around the horn, but once I figure out what it's going to be.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  I execute. Uh, I would say, you know, procrastination may be what they would say. I might put off a little bit, but I don't see it that way because I'm, I feel like I'm like even on this mall, I'm still thinking of what I'm going to put in it. I mean, over the weekend, I was looking at these buildings where they have painted illusions on these different buildings. And so you pull up to a building and it looks like it's a, you know, it looks like it's something, but it's not. It's an illusion. So like this weekend, I was looking at all these different things. So it's not really procrastination in my mind. It's

• 1:01:22Sam Parr?

  Thinking.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  It's thinking.

• 1:01:24Sam Parr?

  Planning.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Shaan Puri?

  So it seems like you probably meet a lot or talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. If I said to you, man, so many entrepreneurs just don't get it. What is it that they don't get that you've, that you get?

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, it's, I, I have a game that I play when I drive down roads. I'll see a new business coming in and the game is this, is it going to make it or not? So I'll see, I'll see an old Burger King being turned into some, you know, health food store. And you look over here, is that going to make it or not? And it's usually, you know, if they're repurposing an old Burger King, they're probably not going to make it. What I think they make the mistake, they want to do it so badly that they try to put a round peg in a square, you know, it just doesn't work. They want to do it so badly

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  that they forget location, location, location, location.

• 1:02:28Sam Parr?

  So would you summarize that into just, uh, planning in advance or just like, or basically like if you nail one thing, everything else is taken care of?

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and I also believe bullets before bombs. You gotta really test things a little bit. A lot of people try to, you know, build two at once or three at once. You gotta build that first one, that first pilot and really get it down. And, and that's how I do the law firms. Before I really go big in a city, I come in, spend some money with ads, hire a few lawyers, the bullets, and then when I feel it catch it on, then I bring the bombs.

• 1:03:07Shaan Puri?

  And when other people try to compete with you with, uh, cause you know, if I drive, I was in Vegas and in Vegas, every single billboard is a personal injury lawyer. It's like insane. I don't know why, I don't know why that is in Vegas, but there was a lot of competition. And when I think about what you did, I guess my shortcut answer of like, why did he win? Why did you become the largest law firm and then everybody else is, you know, playing for second place? My answer is you were early, you were first, you know, not maybe the first mover, but you were very early. And then once you figured out the secret, meaning like business is about exploiting secrets in a way. You've, you've figured something out before everybody else's, before it's consensus.

• 1:03:47Shaan Puri?

  So you figured out, hey, we can advertise effectively and we can basically like pour money into ads and get people, get cases out of it. You were way more aggressive with that. That even if other people were advertising, they weren't as aggressive with the advertising, meaning either putting money and effort into the creative or just reinvesting capital to build the national brand. And so that, I guess that's what I would say is the, the thing. What am I, is that right? Or am I missing something that was important and why you won and, and everybody else didn't?

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Okay. You're missed. Yes. You're missing a very big piece. I think one of you said, I don't know if you'd heard me say, but one of you's talked about fishing and, and I've got a, in my business, I call it, you know, first of all, you got to fish first and fish fast. So there's two sides of my business. There's catching fish and to catch fish, you got to fish first and fish fast. And then there's cooking fish. The value of the case, where my competition gets beat by me is most of them, 95% of them are shit lawyers.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  They're terrible at what they do. They couldn't try case, many of them, if they wanted to. So they have to take the last best offer. You'll see people bragging, "Hey, we settled this case for a million dollars." Yeah, well, the case was worth $10 million. But the problem for them is they couldn't do it. They didn't know how to do it. What I did when I was going through all this, I started to really look at, where does my money come? 20% of my cases are 80% of my money. But here's where my money really comes. It comes the Friday before trial.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  So they've said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." Now it's Friday before trial. The Friday before trial, a lot of times they'll say, "Okay, here it is." The next time the money comes is during, right after jury selection. We pick a jury, they're like, "Oh, we don't like that jury. We pay us then." The third time our money comes is during the trial. They might say, "Here's the money." And then the fourth comes is the verdict. I get gigantic verdicts, gigantic verdicts. Where they're talking about 500,000? I'm getting, I got a verdict in your city, San Francisco, against Google a couple of weeks ago for 500 million dollars.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I'm not hunting cockroaches. I'm hunting big game. I'm not, I'm not happy just to get a little bit of money. I want to get exactly what it's worth. So where my margins, where I have separated myself from all of them, is results and reputation. And then the other thing they don't do, there's a concept in my law called bad faith. If there's a million dollars in coverage and they don't pay it, they're in bad faith, perhaps. When they come to offer me the million, it's too late. Now, most lawyers, because they need the money, they take the million. I say, "Fuck you."

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  I go get the verdict. I go get the verdict for 10 million. You know, I got one, a representative state senator this year, they were offering us nothing, nothing. They finally offered us a million the day a trial was a death case. I said, you know, "F you," and we got 100 million. And so where the disconnect is, they're not real lawyers. So what have I done? I've got a stable of racehorses that get big verdicts. I got people who that's all they do. They just go around the country. They go from here to here to here to here to here to here. They don't even live in the cities. They just parachute in and I call it the Walter Payton rule.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  When Walter Payton played for the Bears, he got the ball 50 times a game. When it was fourth and goal, he always got it. So I've got my Walter Paytons. I got my Walter Paytons who I parachute in and they get these big verdicts. So my differentiator between me and my competition is most of them are not real lawyers. They're marketing people who take the last best offer there and their margins are terrible. Now, on the more the cases I refer out, the Google law firm, my margins on those cases,

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  my margins in my business is about 30, 35%, but my margins on my referrals is 85, 90%. And that business is getting bigger and bigger and bigger as my national footprint gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So I got two sides of the business. I got the stuff I do internally, but then I got the cases I refer out. And when I refer them out to my Uber drivers, it's not a Uber driver. It's Mario Andretti that I'm referring these, these customers to.

• 1:08:59Shaan Puri?

  I got goosebumps, John. I love that answer. That was incredible. That should be your next infomercial. That was incredible.

• 1:09:05Sam Parr?

  John's a cowboy. I mean, you got this cowboy energy, which we love. We love cowboy. You know, we have a joke. We call ourselves manifest cowboys, uh, cause we like dream up stuff and make it happen.

• 1:09:14Shaan Puri?

  Cause we're hoping other people start to call us that. We, we get to stop saying it ourselves. That'd be great.

• 1:09:18Sam Parr?

  When you nickname yourself, it's not as cool, but I think you actually are the manifest cowboy.

• 1:09:21Shaan Puri?

  Also, law firms can't really be held by non-lawyers, right? So do you own the, I guess it's a partnership, but do you own a huge chunk of this firm yourself? No, there's no investors, right?

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  No, I guess it's mainly me and my family, but I do have a lot of partners in it because I believe. That look, when I look at this firm or all my businesses, I always envision it like I'm building a circus and I want to build the greatest show on the earth. When you see some of these circuses in, in shopping centers, you know, they got an elephant with one tusk and a drunk clown and a seal that's hot and it's a bullshit circus. The circus I'm building is the greatest show on earth. Why do people go to the circus? They go there for two reasons. One, they want to see the lions and the tigers eat the man. They want, that's why they want to, that's why they go. They want to see him and then they want to see the great

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Willenda fall off to his death. That's why they're at the circus. That's why they go to NASCAR. They're hoping that somebody is going to die. How do you not die? Well, with the animals, you feed them and you love them. I've got a lot of partners who make a lot of money because they got a piece of this deal. The second way is you focus. You're up there on that high wire and you got to pay attention. You got to get from here to there. So in building this firm, I got three rules. Love them, feed them, focus, and then you can build the greatest show on earth.

• 1:10:57Sam Parr?

  You're very successful. You've, you've won so many times in life. Has there been a point where the, um, the businesses or the firm, uh, almost went under because you said that you're a pretty risk, risk on person? Has, um, have you almost had to pay the consequences because of that?

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  I don't know about pay the consequences, but I've been, look, I sent a guy up to Atlanta. When I opened up Atlanta, I sent the wrong guy up there. By the time I got him out, we were $14 million in the hole. This, it just kept, you know, and he was a disaster. But, you know, now he's gone and my team, I mean, Atlanta makes some, you know, Prince money. So that was, Atlanta was tough. I've had a couple of cities that didn't do as well as I hoped, like Memphis. So yeah, I've had, I've had some, you know, I've had some things not do well. I had a, uh, I built a small amusement park called Magical

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Midway that I ended up selling, lost a million bucks. But that doesn't bother me because nobody bats a thousand. I mean, if you bat, if you bat 300, you're in the Hall of Fame. All you gotta do is get on base one out of three times and you're in the Hall of Fame. Like we talked about earlier, Warren Buffett has five big stocks. You take those stocks away, he's not Warren Buffett anymore. And he's the one, he's the first person who tells you that. That's why I love him so much. That's why I have so much Berkshire Hathaway stock. I mean, he's my guy.

• 1:12:26Sam Parr?

  You've been doing a lot of media. I saw you on this Jubilee thing and I had known of who you were before that and I was like, what the hell? Why would you want to do that? You came off, you came off pretty good. You came up pretty good. You've got a really good job of judoing like a bunch of these like gotcha moments. So that's been pretty cool. What are you gonna do? You gonna try to run for office one day? I mean, what's going on? Why are you, why do you care about being, uh, why do you care about being out there?

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Fish. I want fish. I want to catch fish and, uh, you know, I do these things called John and 60s, but look. In, I have had some success. Running for office, look, I don't know about that, but, but in Florida. When my brother, the brother I told you about that got hurt, he, he needed marijuana desperately to help his situation. I ran a constitutional amendment twice in Florida to legalize medical marijuana. I spent tens of millions of dollars to, to pass it. And then later, when you, when you have, when you make money, I believe that we have an obligation. A civic obligation, a moral obligation to give back.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  One of the things that is, one of the things that I believe that where the country is headed in the wrong direction. And you're starting to hear about it is affordability. It's all because people aren't paid enough money. That's, that's the affordability problem. The, the, the minimum wage in America is $8 an hour. So what I did with my own money here in Florida is I ran a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  And everybody told me, again, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, that's never gonna happen. Well, it did happen. And so I raised the minimum wage in Florida to fif- from eight dollars to fifteen dollars an hour. So because of those constitutional amendments, I became almost like a politician in this state. And everybody's like, we want him to run for governor. We want you to run for governor. When I go to the, when I would go to the White House, they would take me to the side and show me polling about my poll numbers. So you, you think about it, but then you gotta think about the job itself. I mean, I, I would have trouble with the job itself. I live in Maui, you know, five months out of the year,

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  which I love, I love it out there. And I'm sixty-nine, so I don't know. But really what I'm doing is, in this day and time, it's just being out there. And if somebody sees me and they're, and they are favorably disposed by the Jubilee, or I was just on this thing this weekend that printed called The Business Insider. Yeah, that was a good interview. I saw that. So I just did that. So my thought is, it's kind of back to that, you know, why bother? You know, this, you know, some people are gonna see this, and some people are not gonna like me, but some people are. And look, you can become president with, if fifty-one percent of the people like you. You can get rich as hell if you, fifty-one percent of the people use you.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  So I look at these things as new age marketing, where people get to see me. You know, with my ads, I look like I'm, you know, working at a funeral home, you know, with what I'm selling. So by doing these things, they're like, you know, that guy actually has a personality. He's not a, you know, a, a gravedigger. But-

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  We want to make sure there's enough people watching before I'm gonna gonna do it. So like and subscribe, leave a comment.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  Well, this has been awesome, and I appreciate you coming on. Shout out your new book. It's being edited right now. It's called Life is Lux, The Paper Boy. You're the best. That's it. That's the pod.

• 1:16:32Sam Parr?

  All right, everyone, if you're listening to MFM, you probably want to make more money. Well, I want to tell you about a podcast you might want to check out. It's called The Sales Evangelist, and it's hosted by Donald Kelly. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts who share their strategies to succeed in sales. They share actionable insights and stories that will encourage, challenge, and motivate you to hustle your way to the top. If you're someone looking to raise your income level, check out The Sales Evangelist. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.