I Asked 6 Billionaires How To Get Rich

In this special compilation of the BigDeal podcast, six of our billionaire guests share their wisdom with Codie on all things wealth creation, purposeful living, and divergent thinking. From actionable strategies to personal stories, these insights center on becoming indispensable, embracing early risks, and committing to lifelong learning. Whether you’re a young entrepreneur or an experienced business owner, this episode offers valuable lessons to help you achieve your dreams. Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. 00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview 00:06 Billionaire Insights: Secrets to Success 01:33 The Importance of Coaching 03:42 First Principles Thinking 05:16 Founders and Principles 12:34 Taking Risks and Moving Fast MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: ⁠Our community⁠ ⁠Free newsletter⁠ ⁠Biz buying course⁠ ⁠Resibrands⁠ ⁠CT Capital⁠ ⁠Main St Hold Co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Coaches are important. I still have coaches. You have to believe in the end of your story.

• 0:34Codie Sanchez?

  This week's episode is a totally different format. It is going to be multiple billionaire guests that I'm lucky enough to now call friends or have had on the podcast, and we are going to have bite-sized, best-in-class information from each one of them. If you've ever wondered, how do billionaires make all their money? What secrets could I learn from them? Can I get a billionaire mentor? And what does it take to make that crazy level of cash? How do you explain that at a very simplistic level? First principles thinking.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  You say, what are our fundamental assumptions? What are we doing here?

• 1:05Speaker 04

  Running my businesses like a coach would run a team. I became a lot more effective. Where should a young builder start today?

• 1:11Speaker 05

  You serve, serve, serve.

• 1:13Codie Sanchez?

  Would you tell them to go take active risk?

• 1:16Speaker 05

  Well, first of all, the younger you are, the easier it is to take risks and use that to your advantage.

• 1:21Codie Sanchez?

  How do you know if you're moving vast enough on the decisions you want to make in life?

• 1:25Speaker 06

  What happened if you thought about that idea three years ago? What if you executed on that, or where would you be now?

• 1:32Codie Sanchez?

  Welcome back to the Big Deal Podcast. I'm Codie Sanchez. This week is for you. Only the most tactical, most specific stories so that you can learn from these billionaires too, and you can steal my billionaire mentors. Next week, back to regularly scheduled programming with like, well, the fastest-growing AI startup CEO out there. I'm going to save who it is. You guys could try to guess. But that episode is also amazing, and it turns out it's the next two weeks is only Billy's. So we're going to make a lot of money these next two weeks on the Big Deal Podcast. Let's get into it.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Coaches are important. I still have coaches. I just, I have a swim coach. I have...

• 2:10Codie Sanchez?

  You had a Navy SEAL live with you.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  I had a memory coach. I had... Because I wanted to get better at memorizing names. I wasn't great when I met people at remembering their names. So I brought a coach in to help me with that. I've had sales coaches. I've had coaches in so many areas of my life. Because I'm not great at everything. I want to go to people that are amazing in what they do. I lived with Goggins. I lived on a monastery to get better at my spirituality. Like, investing in yourself to get better is so important. If you're working at an organization, two things. One, I think you should make yourself irreplaceable. That's really important. Then you have the leverage. Like, you can't even fire me. I know everybody, every customer. I'm unfireable. Now you have some leverage, which I think is really important.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  And you should learn, network, and sponge as much, absorb, especially when you're young, as much as you can. Do everything, learn everything. Gandhi said it best. He said, "Learn like you'll live forever, live like you'll die tomorrow." So you want to learn and keep getting better, you know, in as many things as you can.

• 3:19Codie Sanchez?

  Did you, do you have a particular way that you lead people? What do you think it is? Is it either you select these people who are going to be high performers? And so you have a selection bias? Or do you have a particular leadership style that you think enables other people to become something bigger?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  I think that you have to put confidence in people. There are so many better. I honestly, Cody, I'm like back-of-the-pack entrepreneur. And I really am. There's so many amazing entrepreneurs. Like, I don't even put myself, I'm not, that's not my strong suit. It's not.

• 3:54Codie Sanchez?

  Interesting.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  It's not. I've had wins. I've had great partners. I've had good ideas, right time, right place. Like, a lot of things happened. But there's so many, I still go to so many entrepreneurs for advice. But... I am good at giving people confidence and belief. And that's really important because you have to believe in the end of your story.

• 4:17Codie Sanchez?

  I think people have beat up this idea quite a bit, but first principles thinking, you know, obviously category were created by Peter Thiel. But then you talk about a lot to this day, this idea of getting back to base level. How do you explain that at a very simplistic level, first principles thinking?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Bridgewater, by the way, was all about this as well, which is a very interesting hedge fund. It has the biggest hedge fund in the world, but it's really important. You've seen this in lots of areas where you go back and you say, what are our fundamental assumptions? What are we doing here? Like, why? Like, what is our firm the best at? Why is there an opportunity here? What are we gonna, like, what's our core capabilities, right? These are really philosophical questions as well as how do you break down the frameworks for who you are? And then say, given these are core capabilities, what are the juxtaposed areas? What are the areas next to it that we can go into that are similar? And it's just, it's a really good exercise to keep coming back to because it reminds you, it reminds you of things. This is why building a deck is really good for an entrepreneur, even if it's a small business,

• 5:14Speaker 03

  is you want to put together, here's 10 pages on who I am, what I'm doing, what the goals are, why it's going to be successful. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs say, oh, I'm just so smart and fast. And why would I do this stupid thing that's for stupid people? It's not for me. And it's actually, it's for everyone because everyone needs to get back to the core of like exactly, like what and why and who and how. And sometimes those principles, you'll notice, have actually changed in a way. You have, maybe you intuitively realize one of them's changed, but you don't really find it until you go back and actually write it down. So it's just such a helpful thing. You know, as a founder, I really admire the founders, not just of companies, but you know, the founders of America as well. And the founders of America were really clear about their principles. And we're very, very lucky about that.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  There's all sorts of debates, there's all sorts of. Writings from that time, I grew up reading something called the London Magazine, which is the founders of America and the people, you know, writing things in Parliament and everything would write it and argue back and forth even as you have all these primary sources of what was going on. And it was the enlightenment, it kind of just happened over the last hundred years. You know, it was really a time where people were really focused on principles in society and what's correct. And so it was a great intellectual breeding ground for founding something like America. But I find founders in general who are the best are similar to the American founders, like really debate these things, really come back to them. And that it kind of refreshes and renews what you're doing.

• 6:33Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it also seems like you have to repeat yourself very, very often as a founder.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  And so you do, because you need to make sure people understand the vision of what's going on. I remember early on a palentier, we'd walk around and talk to a bunch of engineers helping me recruit. And like, what's the mission to you in your words? Why are you excited about it in your words? When you're talking to your smartest friends, and we're going to go over to Stanford or MIT or wherever else we're going to go and recruit, like, like, tell me as if I'm one of them. Let's talk about this practice. And that, you know, it's helpful. You gotta, you gotta do that.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  I think it comes from really where I was, how I was raised. I mean, on a farm, you know, you are raised in that situation. You don't have any guarantees and you figure it out and you work hard until it's done. And I think just that tenacity really saw me through a lot. And, you know, certainly building a career from Wall Street now into the cabinet, you know, from rural America, you know, I think that just really taught me to dig in, keep going, keep learning and keep the curiosity about how things work and keep asking questions and never accept the first no.

• 7:47Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you seem like when we were talking kind of behind the scenes, you're like, I like it. I want to be in there. I want to be like making a difference. And I was like, wasn't it scary to run for Senate? That sounds horrifying. You were like, no, like, put me in, coach. So you got a little of that inner psychopath. I'm into that.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:02Codie Sanchez?

  What about, so you, you owned an MBA, a WNBA team, which seems incredibly hard in just every aspect, you know, not as much funding, lower ticket sales, you know, and then there was inner turmoil in the WNBA. What was the hardest moment for you running that business?

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Well, I think the biggest decision came when my business partner and I, we were 50/50 owners, but before that, we were minority owners. And there came a point where the majority owner decided to sell. And we had to look at each other and say, do we want to step up and be 50/50 owners? And I was running a big part of our publicly traded company at the time. And I had to have confidence in the team that we brought on to really run that business day to day. And also the funding. I mean, it was, you know, it's not an inexpensive endeavor to sink money into that every single year.

• 8:58Codie Sanchez?

  Was it public how much that was?

• 9:00Speaker 04

  No, but it's, I mean, it was a couple million. And it was, you know, we'd hoped to be able to get it to break even. But to the point, you know, back then, the bigger decision was to say, is this a go or no go? And I believe that when life opens a door for you, like to walk through it. And that life had opened a door for me as a professional sports team owner. And walking away at that time didn't seem like a good option. And I'm really glad we walked through it. We owned the team for a decade. And it was very grassroots. In fact, I was working with a reporter one time and pitching a story. I mean, I was, you know, making sure that we got the visibility. I had this vision because of what I'd seen living in Chicago during the Bulls run in

• 9:45Speaker 04

  the 90s. And I thought, my goodness, I see what sports do for a community. They really bring it together. And I think Atlanta can be a great sports town. And so we invested on that basis to not have this as a hobby, but to make this a business and a great community contribution. And we were so glad that we walked through that door and did that for a decade for our fans, for our community, to elevate the sport. And it turned out to be such a good, I learned so much. Being a sports team owner that applied to business, because in business, sometimes you can kick the can on a problem. In sports, you can't do that. Why? Everybody's just yelling at you all day? Well, because in sports, the scoreboard shows the results every single day. The ticket sales show the results every single day.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  The coaching shows the results. And so you have to make those decisions game time. And so I started doing that in business. Running my businesses like a coach would run a team. And I became a lot more effective, decisive, and not afraid about what decisions were around the next corner. It just really emboldened me to make those decisions and keep going. Where should a young builder start today?

• 10:54Speaker 07

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• 11:23Speaker 08

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• 11:50Speaker 08

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• 11:54Speaker 09

  Well, I mean, the first thing that, and I just talked to our team about it this morning at a staff meeting, reminding them yet again, one of our core values here is, if you help enough people, you don't have to worry about money.

• 12:08Speaker 09

  So too many times when we start something, we are enamored with our own idea, our own ability. And the idea is the thing rather than the customer. And what I want to do is I want the person that is not inside the building to be blessed, to be changed, to be served, to have their mind blown. The people inside the building all get their mind blown? Eh, not so much, not so much. You know, that doesn't do anything. What happens is when all those people out there, all over the world, I get the opportunity to help one of them with their budget. I get the opportunity to help one of them with their marriage. I get to help one of them with their spiritual walk. I get to help one of them with their small business. When they, you know, and so we don't build anything for us. We build everything for them. And when you first start, that's not natural.

• 12:53Speaker 09

  That's, uh, that's paradoxical because you're, you're kind of into what you're doing and you're like, oh, I'm kind of good at this and this is kind of cool. And, um, it was for me anyway. And so, I mean, I did the first cassette tapes or VHS tapes, you know? I was like, wow, look at that guy. He's, he's funny and he's good. And, uh, and it kind of started coming to me, no one cares. Except your mama and your wife.

• 13:18Codie Sanchez?

  And they also don't.

• 13:20Speaker 09

  They don't care that much. So, you know, it's like, uh, but that, I think that's a thing. You serve, serve, serve. And, and if you can find a way to make other people's life better and, um, and let them be the hero in the story, as my friend Donald Miller says, don't even have to be the hero, you can be the guide. And, um, you know, that kind of stuff, it, it makes, it, it just makes you have a good quality life and you've got a good philosophical, spiritual underpinning to your business then that you can, okay, we're about service, we're about service. And when you interact with an organization of business that is, uh, that is about themselves, you feel the take rather than the give. And when you interact with a company that is all about service, you, you come away with your mind blown because they're fairly rare.

• 14:04Codie Sanchez?

  How did you get comfortable with risk or how do you think about risk? Especially for young people who maybe haven't had a chance to take it yet. And would you tell them to go take active risk?

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Well, first of all, the younger you are, the easier it is to take risk, right? And use that to your advantage. I started my first company when I was 17.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  And I was in college and, or sorry, I was just entering college and, um,

• 14:34Speaker 05

  I think I had this mindset that like, okay, like I have this thing, college, right? And like, I could do that well, and as long as I'm doing that well, my parents will be okay. So let me go take as much risk as I can take outside of school. And let me go try different things. And I had, I didn't have kids, I didn't, you know, I didn't have to, I was, I was working and paying some of my own bills at the time, but I had, you know, my parents were supporting me. And I use that as an excuse to take more risk. And I think the older you get, the harder it is to take risk. And it like, risk is like a muscle, right?

• 15:16Speaker 05

  It's like the, the, the younger you try new things and the younger, the earlier you, you sort of train your mindset to know that, that like, I'm going to do something. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't work, that's still okay too, because I'm gonna learn from that and I'm gonna leverage that into the next thing.

• 15:39Codie Sanchez?

  How do you think about speed and moving fast? And how do you know if you're moving fast enough on the decisions you want to make in life?

• 15:47Speaker 06

  Well, first I want to say, you know, not a dream crusher, I just want to hold you accountable to your best self, right? Like you, you, you definitely had all the ingredients to, as somebody I would want to bet on. And your, your dreams, your ideas were much bigger than that. You weren't thinking bigger. And, you know, I told you at the time, I said, the money is easy. It's having an idea that you can execute on. There's tons of money, there's tons of rich guys that don't want to work. They just want to invest in somebody and make a good return. Question is, how do we find these executors? And when we find them, they dump cash into them and they go golfing or flying or doing whatever they want to do. And so I wanted you to think big because it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be hard for you to raise money, right? Like after you went around, you were like, trying to cram me down because these other

• 16:32Speaker 06

  guys want to come in, this guy want to come in. I'm like, no, that guy can't get in, right?

• 16:36Codie Sanchez?

  That's what happened.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  What happened if you thought about that idea three years ago? What if you executed on that, you know, a little bit faster? What if you, you know, thought a little bit bigger and moved a little bit faster? Where would you be now? How big would this conference be? How many people would be knocking down your door to figure out how you did it? And so, you know, we're human beings. We're not institutions. We don't live that long. And there's periods in our life. And I just think that life in itself is urgent and important, and your dreams are important. And that advantage of, of action, you know? Speed implies action. You're not just speed running around in a circle. You're moving towards your dreams. And so it's almost taking yourself serious and your dreams seriously by executing. What else should you be doing, right?

• 17:24Speaker 06

  According to your values. And so I think it's very important. And it's, you know, my willingness to take risks and my ability or my willingness to move quickly towards my goals is, are the only advantages I have.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 18:08Speaker 08

  The best part of waking up? A full cup of Folgers coffee and music on full blast.

• 18:34Speaker 08

  Shop Folgers Instant Coffee and more at your nearest retailer.

• 18:37Codie Sanchez?

  I was just looking and it looks like more than 50% of you are not subscribed to the Big Deal Podcast. When you subscribe, first of all, it means we get to bring you bigger and better guests. It's also the number one way you can support this podcast. If you liked it today, subscribe on whatever channel that you're listening to. And I want to tell you something firsthand. You become whatever you allow into your attention span. And what I hope you feel from us every single day is that I value your attention and your time more than anything else. I promise to only bring you things that are going to make you more money, they're going to make you more motivated, to make your life better. So, give me a little solid here. Subscribe to the channel. This is how we grow. Also, leave me a review on what you want better and who you want on. I promise you will do it.

• 19:21Codie Sanchez?

  Hey, if you're a business owner right now and you like the things you were hearing on this podcast, I have something that I haven't talked about publicly before that's just for you. It's called our SMB boardroom. This is for small business owners who want to grow. It is for business owners who are on their way to making at least seven figures a year. If this is you, hit the link down below, talk to our team. This is the place that can be your late night emergency call for the things that go bump in the night in your business. If right now you feel like you're plateauing, or you feel like you don't know how to handle your growth, we got you. So, click the link below, SMB boardroom. We just built it for you builders. Kind of obsessed with it. And I think if you are a builder, there's no place you're going to want to be, except here. Hey, guys.

• 20:03Codie Sanchez?

  If you've ever thought about buying a business, we've built what I think is the best acquisitions in business buying community and education curriculum in the world. If you've ever thought about wanting to buy or own a business, or if you want to add more businesses to the mix, it's called the Contrarian Community. And what this is, is the goal is, we give you the three things that the best business buyers use. Your own advisory team, your own investment committee, and a deal team. We get together each week to review deals live and beat up all the deals that you're currently looking at, while you simultaneously learn the best way possible, which is called modeling, by seeing other people put together deals. This is how private equity buys businesses. This is how investment teams work. And we're stealing the methods from Wall Street and giving them to you.

• 20:45Codie Sanchez?

  If this is interesting to you, go to click the link and you can actually talk to my team direct about if this is a fit or not. We can help guide you. The link is in the show description.