MJ DeMarco (03:39):

I would think a big show back in my era. I grew up in the late ’80s, early ’90. Big show back then was the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I’m not sure if you’ve seen that show. It is quite old. I’m kind of aging myself here. But it featured celebrities and athletes and it just showed these lavish luxury lifestyles. I looked at that and I said, “I want that for my life.” I knew this save 10% of your paycheck, put it in index funds. I knew that was not a path to that because none of the people they featured, that’s how they got their wealth. Of course, they were mostly athletes and celebrities, but I did notice a lot of them were entrepreneurs. So that somewhat solidified my decision to become a lifetime entrepreneur because that is the lifestyle I wanted. That is the type of wealth I wanted.

Clay Finck (04:30):

Was your drive to achieve that lifestyle or did you come to find out that you really loved being an entrepreneur? You just loved building businesses and scaling businesses and operating and managing people.

MJ DeMarco (04:43):

I’ve never owned a large company. I mean, let’s be honest. The most number of employees I had in one time was only five. Small businesses here we’re talking about, not these large corporations and investors with series A funding and all that other stuff. I’m a small business owner. I’m not one of these Silicon Valley people who is in some blog or something. But I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur because it offered me what was most important to me, which was control. I didn’t like the idea that I could be fired at any given time by a corporation. I didn’t like the idea that my financial plan was going to be primarily predicated on the stock market. I did not like that.

MJ DeMarco (05:25):

Yeah, entrepreneurship offered me ability to feel like every day of my life is a Saturday. I have not gotten up from an alarm clock or an iPhone ringing in your ear or screaming to wake you up. In the last year, actually it would be the last three years, I’ve had to awake to an alarm clock or an iPhone buzzer twice. And one of those times was because I was speaking to a European group. It was three o’clock in the afternoon there, it was 6:00 AM where I am. That’s why. But that’s the kind of reason why I wanted to be an entrepreneur because it offered just an incredible amount of control and freedom.

Clay Finck (06:06):

It feels like there is almost this assumption in society that being an entrepreneur means you’re Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. You’re almost a super human figure that builds a billion dollar business and comes up with all these new ideas, when in reality, most entrepreneurs are moreso your everyday person that is just really pulling ideas from others and tweaking it a little bit or improving upon it. Most business owners are, like you mentioned, small business owners. And often when you tell someone that you’re starting a business or you’re a new entrepreneur, they will tell you that that’s a very risky thing to do. Do you agree with that or do you think that people have a belief that keeps them from just reaching their full potential?

MJ DeMarco (06:47):

That’s a huge illusion. I will just flat out say it’s false. Entrepreneurship is risky. You want to know what risky is? Risky is going to a job five days a week and expecting to be employed for 40 years. Risky is watching your job disappear because of a COVID lockdown or a COVID pandemic. Risky is devoting your entire net worth into the stock market and hoping it just keeps hyper inflating. These are all aspects of a financial plan that you cannot control. And I realize that it’s probably adverse to a lot of guests that you have, and that’s fine, but I want to control my financial plan.

MJ DeMarco (07:25):

I want to control my existence, and having a corporation in charge of that existence, whether it be the economy and politicians and bureaucrats or the stock market or the Federal Reserve who’s printing money at will and causing inflation, all those dollars you are saving are becoming less and less anyways. I don’t understand how entrepreneurship is risky but here you getting a job is safe. It just makes no sense.

MJ DeMarco (07:52):

Now, I will confess or admit that, yeah, certain aspects of entrepreneurship can be risky. That’s part of my message is, here is how you do not make it risky. Here is what you can do to eliminate some of that risk. And then you’ll discover it is the most fantastic existence. I mean, I pinch myself every morning that this is my life, that I don’t have to worry about money. The word budget is not in my vocabulary. My house is a virtual resort. I never have to leave. And there’s no financial stress associated with that. There’s no Excel spreadsheet saying I can only withdraw 4%. I can only do this. And the rule is 72, I need to do that.

MJ DeMarco (08:34):

There’s none of that in my life because I have complete financial freedom. And it’s all through the power of a particular type of entrepreneurship which I call fastlane entrepreneurship, which is obviously what the book is about. Being able to obtain a lifestyle like that, not in 20, 30 or 40 years, but in five years, maybe seven years, or 10 years, real short period of time. And then you discover that the old adage of, oh, save 10% of your paycheck becomes ridiculous because now you can save 80% of your profit because you’re not making $4,000 a month, you’re making $40,000 a month, you’re making $60,000, $80,000.

MJ DeMarco (09:14):

So then it becomes very easy to stockpile cash and really have investments mean something because if you make a 4% yield on $10,000, that’s not even going to cover inflation nowadays. Regardless of what they’re saying the number is, we all know inflation is not 5% right now, it’s more like 10 or 12%, but they’re not going to tell you that because there’s political agendas in play. The whole idea here is, yeah, we want to save some money, but just saving $100 a month and stop drinking coffee so you can invest that sheds a light on some of the insanity that goes around in this particular space for investing in financial freedom.

Clay Finck (09:52):

I’m really curious, how many years of experimenting with starting businesses did it take for you to align all the pieces to build that first successful business? You mentioned that you had started businesses really young and you had known you had wanted to be an entrepreneur. So how long did that take for you to strike that first big win?

MJ DeMarco (10:11):

Oh, I had many failures right from the beginning. When I graduated from college, I said, “I’m not going to get a job. I’m going to start a business.” There was several years there, and I think it was about three or four years where I started various types of businesses and they all failed. And in hindsight, looking back, the reason why I was failing was pretty clear I was following my passion. We heard that statement before, follow your passion. Well, that’s what I did. I followed my passion for four years. And you know what? The passion disappeared because I couldn’t pay the bills. No one wanted what I was offering or there was too many people offering what I was selling.

MJ DeMarco (10:49):

I remember selling bodybuilding jewelry. That’s because I was passionate about body building and fitness, so let’s do that. Well, I sold nothing on that because the market didn’t want it, but it was something I was passionate about. Then I was passionate about fitness supplements, again, in the same space. Well, that’s what I know, so that’s what I’m going to sell. But the market didn’t even need anything. I didn’t start my own brand. I didn’t start anything with a unique skew. I was just selling someone else’s product trying to make money, chasing money. And you know, I failed miserably for a good three or four years.

MJ DeMarco (11:23):

The Millionaire Fastlane is kind of that book that I wish I had right when I graduated college. It has all the things I wish I would’ve known when I was just getting started. That was a big learning experience for me. As for putting all the pieces together, here’s a reality is the pieces are never put together because entrepreneurship is completely fluid and dynamic. You always have to be learning. When I went through the initial scaling of my business many years ago, the first business, the techniques I used to use back then are completely irrelevant today.

MJ DeMarco (12:00):

And then when I brought it back four or five years later, again, I grew it and the techniques there are completely irrelevant today. It’s always changing. So if I started a business today, I’m actually not at a bigger advantage than the average person because everything is changed. So things change and they’re very dynamic and fluid. So this is why venture capitalists still, they fail 80% of the time because things are always changing, culture is changing, technology is changing. Entrepreneurship is pretty much you’re deciding to become a lifetime problem solver. So that’s an expectation that if anyone in your audience is, “I want to become an entrepreneur. I like what you’re saying.” Well, then you’re deciding to have your career as a lifetime problem solver, or as I call, a scientist, because that process never changes. You’re always having to learn new things.

Clay Finck (12:54):

You mentioned the problem solver aspect, and that just reminds me how so many nine to five jobs, you clock in, you show up and they tell you exactly what you need to do. You need to do this list of tasks. That aligns kind of with the school system where you show up to class and they tell you all the assignments you have to do, whereas when an entrepreneur, there’s nothing like that at all. You have to solve the problems yourself. You don’t know what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. You’re just going to have to test it out and really just figure it out, and the market tells you if you’re right or wrong.

MJ DeMarco (13:25):

Yeah. Their feedback. Yeah, absolutely.

Clay Finck (13:28):

What was the business that ended up taking off for you?

MJ DeMarco (13:32):

I was the CEO and founder of ground transportation company, it was called limos.com, and also an auto, it’s been so long, the selling commercial transportation business. It’s like an auto trader, if that makes sense, but it was for limousines, buses. So I own that. And then I also owned an aggregation site for if you needed a ride in Rome, Italy, from the airport, I could arrange that. I owned that company for about 10 years. After I sold that, sold the site, I sold it twice, after I sold that, I started a publishing company. I started The Fastlane Forum, which is a community of entrepreneurs with about 70,000 people there that discuss fastlane entrepreneurship.

Clay Finck (14:14):

In your book, you talk about how you started an online limousine booking business, sold it around the dotcom bubble and ended up repurchasing it for less than you sold it for. When you have a very profitable internet business, I’m curious about your thought process on how you decided to sell it or if you should have just hung onto it and outsourced much of the day-to-day tasks. What was the deciding factor that led you to sell your booking company again?

MJ DeMarco (14:42):

Actually, when I sold it the first time, it didn’t go well for me because a lot of the purchase price, it was like $1.2 million. And half of that, more than half of that, I think it was $750,000 of that was based on an earnout. Now, if you’re not familiar with earnouts, that means after we buy the company, if your company does X, Y, Z, we’ll pay you another 750. And of course this was way back in the dotcom boom where things were starting to go south. I lost that immediately. That never happened. And then the money that I did get, which was about a half a million dollars, I invested it all in tech stocks. And at the time, there’s a movement today called FIRE. I was familiar with that type of mentality way back then, I mean, 20+ years ago.

MJ DeMarco (15:30):

And I said, “I’m going to do that. I never have to work another day in my life.” And it kind of lit me up and made me realize this is why you don’t want the stock market being your major wealth conduit because eventually I lost a good 60% of that money. And then there was taxes on top of it. So by the time it was all said and done, I had virtually nothing left. That’s certainly something that couldn’t support me for the next 40 or 50 years. And the thing is, people say, well, you shouldn’t have sold. Well, you need to sell if you have to support your life, you have to pay the rent, you have to pay the car bills, you have to pay the health insurance.

MJ DeMarco (16:07):

So at some point you have to sell or something to get that money in order to keep yourself afloat. But the reason why the second time around which I sold was because I realized at that point, because it was a much higher valuation, that I truly could never work another day in my life. And based on without having the stock market as a major contributor to that. So the reason why that becomes a decision is because the day-to-day operations of it was no longer challenging. I suggest that people move around into different things that challenge them. The challenge in that particular business was no longer there. It wasn’t exciting.

MJ DeMarco (16:46):

And also this was right before Uber started getting into my space and I recognized that I needed a significant technological injection into the company, along with multiple more employees. I mentioned I only had five employees. Well, I really didn’t want 10 employees and I really didn’t want to go down that avenue because that just doesn’t appeal to me. I did sell the company to another company out in San Francisco who wanted to, I guess, compete with Uber, which they did not. They did not do that very well.

MJ DeMarco (17:18):

But I think if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you have to align that with your personal goals and how you want to live. So for me, it’s always been, do I want to do this another 5, 7, 10 years? And the answer was no. And actually I wanted to write because I’ve always wrote my entire life. When I was a little boy, I was always writing stories. So I wanted to become a writer and I knew that money was no longer an issue for me. So I could do that without having financial encumbrances or financial worries because writing as a career is kind of a starving artist type of career. It’s not something I would recommend for someone who wants to get wealthy. So having that financial wherewithal allowed me to pursue that, I guess you could say passion of mine, and not worry about not having that passion pay money. That’s kind of the difference there when I frame passion is having a passion and trying to make money off of it and having a passion and just pursuing it because you can’t.

Clay Finck (18:19):

Yeah, I really like that. I think that following your passion when it comes to building a business is probably taking yourself towards the industries that are the most crowded and saturated. It’s going to be the most competitive. You’ll oftentimes hear that the best businesses to start are those that are not sexy and the ones that most people just do not want to deal with at all.

MJ DeMarco (18:39):

And just to reflect on what you just said, the passionate industries are terribly crowded, which means one thing, you have to be excellent. You have to be like the NBA player of that industry. If you follow something that is an unpassionate industry or an unsexy industry, then you just have to execute fairly or well. You don’t have to be the NBA player of that industry. You just have to do well. And if you do well in that unsexy industry, it could set yourself free for a lifetime, and sometimes maybe even the generations that come after you. So this is why I don’t advocate following passions because it is a selfish inclination versus a market centered inclination of finding where there’s actual vacancies and problems and voids in the market that you can attack and exploit.

MJ DeMarco (19:31):

And I always say this, once someone loves your value, you’re going to feel passion no matter what that business is. A good example I always use is native deodorant. There was this deodorant startup I think in 2018. He sold that company for $100 million to I think it was Procter & Gamble. But I guarantee you, he was very passionate about his product. So you can be passionate about your offer, your product, your value. You don’t have to be passionate about the particular space.

Clay Finck (20:02):

Since you mentioned Uber, I looked up how many employees they have just to give reference to how big they actually are. They have 29,000 employees. And I think it’s really cool that as an entrepreneur in the 2000s, you foresaw that there were going to be some problems going ahead for your company. Things like mobile phones coming out and all this new competition coming into the technology space. I think it’s pretty cool that it almost seems like you’ve recognized that. You fulfilled this need in this problem, and there’s probably a lot of competition coming to eat your lunch, so I think that’s pretty cool too.

MJ DeMarco (20:36):

Yeah. And that’s why I said you have to align your business with the market, but it also has to align with yourself. To this day, I still don’t want 10, 20 employees. So I will always be a small business entrepreneur with minimal employees, and you still can make tens of millions of dollars in a system like that if you’re willing to follow what I call the CENTS Framework, which is the cornerstone of my philosophy. There’s some misconceptions out there that, well, you have to be this big business, you have to get funded, you have to do this, you have to do that. And that’s simply not true.

MJ DeMarco (21:13):

My particular neighborhood is surrounded by tech money. It’s like a mini Silicon Valley here. I guarantee, all of them are involved with bigger, larger companies. Me, I’m just a small business entrepreneur trying to tell people that there’s this alternative way to wealth and financial freedom. And again, you have to align that with your person self. For me, freedom is the most important thing I value is my freedom. So getting up at six in the morning and managing 50 employees, I don’t see that contributing to my freedom. So that’s a state I avoid. If I ever built another company that’s not related to my current business and it needed dozens and dozens of employees, I again would seek to sell and find somebody who wanted to take it to the next level.

Clay Finck (22:03):

Recently, we had an episode that covered the idea of what is money. I really enjoyed diving into that subject with Jim Kreider. That is episode 164. For anyone that’s interested in checking out that Millennial Investing episode, episode 164. When I was reading your book, you talked a lot about the definition of wealth and you just alluded to this a little bit. Like the definition of money, I think many people have different definitions of wealth, some of which might not be very constructive. I’d like to ask you to share with our audience what your definition of wealth looks like.

MJ DeMarco (22:38):

Sure. We can talk an hour on this topic. For me, in the book The Millionaire Fastlane, I define wealth as family, freedom and fitness. Obviously having a connection with your community, your family or your relationships. That’s very important. And fitness. You need health. Without health, there is really no wealth because health is wealth. So that’s kind of common sense type stuff, but the ultimate one is freedom. And that’s the focus on my philosophy is freedom. That if you don’t have freedom, life is terribly miserable. And there’s actually been research done on this that the happiest people, not just here in America, in the world have a certain level of autonomy.

MJ DeMarco (23:20):

And autonomy is being able to get up where you want to get up, being able to do what you want, being able to travel when you want, being able to make the decisions you want. Like, oh, I have this idea and I want to pursue it. Well, you can pursue it, or do you have to send it to a boss who sends it to another boss who sends it to another boss? So for me, wealth is really about freedom. And within that, there is financial freedom. And this is where culture is starting to blur the lines. Particular movements now say financial freedom is sitting at home doing nothing, buying nothing. You can’t eat out, you can’t buy your car, you can’t travel.

MJ DeMarco (24:02):

You have to stay in rundown Airbnbs because you have financial freedom. No, that’s not financial freedom. When you’re thinking about money every single day and what you cannot do or what you cannot buy or what you cannot experience, that is not financial freedom. No matter how many people want to say otherwise, it is not financial freedom. So they’re blurring the lines here with time freedom. Time freedom, yes, that’s also very important. Wealth to me is both time freedom, being able to do what you want when you want wherever you want, and financial freedom. I’m talking about being able to extract the word budget out of your life.

MJ DeMarco (24:44):

My philosophy on wealth is time freedom and financial freedom, and having the ability to have that lifestyle while you are young. Having financial freedom when you’re 35, which is when I obtained it. I obtained it actually a little bit earlier than that about 31, 32. But having it when you’re in your 30s is a lot different than financial freedom in 65 or 70 because time depreciates, your youth depreciates. And I give you a good example of this. I just moved to Utah and it is one of the skiing capitals of the world, Park City.

MJ DeMarco (25:24):

And I can tell you right now as a man that is in the back third of his life, I’m over 50 now, having to ski for the first time in my life, I don’t know how to ski, is going to be vastly different than me trying to learn how to ski at 30. Having the freedom to ski the slopes five days a week probably at my age is not a viable option for me because I’ve had multiple orthopedic surgeries, multiple problems with my knees. But at 30, I could’ve done that. So that’s what I’m talking about is your experience to experience life as you get older starts to depreciate.

MJ DeMarco (26:02):

So this idea that you’re going to save money for 40 years and then you’re going to experience life is absolutely ridiculous. And then in some cases, you don’t even experience life. You just retire and then continue to live the same mediocre existence. Money is important for freedom and people often misuse money. That is destructive to freedom. So if you’re buying stuff that you cannot afford, it’s going to erode your freedom. This is a huge conversation as far as what is wealth. Time is a big part of that, and so is financial freedom.

Clay Finck (26:40):

Lot of good lessons in there. Warren Buffett’s worth over $120 billion and he’s 92 years old. Like how much of that wealth can he actually enjoy? I can almost guarantee if you asked him if he’d lose all that money to go back to him being 20 years old again, he’d take it in a heartbeat. Now, how realistic do you think achieving high levels of wealth in a short amount of time is for most people?

MJ DeMarco (27:04):

For your audience, very realistic. For the average audience, not realistic. But the fact that your audience is watching this, they’re interested in expanding their horizons. They’re interested in financial freedom because they’re watching this. It’s very realistic. Now, the key here is to apply yourself if you’re leaning to become an entrepreneur and you’re using that as a vehicle for quick, or I wouldn’t say quick, but asymmetrical wealth. Asymmetrical returns is why we’re entrepreneurs. We haven’t touched on that yet. Asymmetrical returns is basically I started this company with $5,000 and now it’s worth $25 million. That’s asymmetrical returns, and entrepreneurship is the only vehicle that can happen.

MJ DeMarco (27:50):

Cryptocurrency has been on a big boom in the last five years. And the reason why, people never even understand this, the reason why it has enraptured the average person on the web or in culture is because it has experienced this concept of asymmetrical returns. So now a lot of people are just saying, “I’m going to buy Bitcoin. Maybe I can get rich,” because they’re looking for asymmetrical returns.

MJ DeMarco (28:14):

Now, I’m not suggesting don’t invest in crypto or that it’s not a viable business opportunity, but entrepreneurship, namely fastlane entrepreneurship, is a viable conduit to asymmetrical returns. Instead of taking that $5,000 and putting it into an index fund so maybe you could be worth $10,000 five years later while inflation has basically made that a null bet, you turn that $5,000 into a business venture that is now worth five years later $5 million, $10 million, $15 million.

MJ DeMarco (28:47):

So if you’re following the framework that I outline in The Millionaire Fastlane, which is the CENTS Framework, your odds for doing that just dramatically rocket up. So they say the average business, 90% of all new businesses fail in the first five years. So our job, my job is to reduce that to 50% or 30%. And not only that, have that business change your life. A lot of mistake entrepreneurs make is they start a business that all it can do is pay their bills. Pay your bills repeat year after year, month after month, week after week. Okay, that’s the wrong business to be in.

MJ DeMarco (29:25):

You want to be in a business that has this asymmetrical potential which can create these larger wealth events. Even if you don’t even sell it, the ability to earn $100,000 a month. There’s people on my forum always talking about these breakthroughs. “Oh my God, I made $30,000 last month.” And then they all of a sudden realize how foolish the other plan is, not foolish. Like this is just such a better way of achieving wealth than just sucking away my paycheck and hoping for brighter days ahead. Asymmetric returns is the big thing behind my concept of fastlane entrepreneurship, because we want to do this quickly. Yes, we want to do it quickly. We want to do it fast. And we also want to do it in a manner that reflects our personal objectives or our personal goals.

Clay Finck (30:14):

Another idea you hit on a lot in your book is leverage. If you’re running some sort of technology like internet company and you’re able to hit that breakthrough and say double your sales overnight, that’s just not possible with a lot of different business models. I think one of the most overlooked items regarding wealth creation in the manner you’re talking about is the ability to sell the business. For simplicity’s sake, one person might be making $100,000 at their nine to five job while another person might be earning, just to set it equal, $100,000 from their business.

Clay Finck (30:49):

One might say that those two situations are financially the same, but the person with the business might be able to sell it for a 10 or 20 times multiple. So that’s $1 or $2 million right there. Whereas the person at the job, when they walk away from their career, they’re not able to sell what they’ve built or what they’ve worked on for years. So I think that’s like a key distinction that I don’t think many people have connected the dots on.

MJ DeMarco (31:11):

That’s a phenomenal point, and I never even thought of that, that $100,000 in your business and $100,000 at your job are two entirely different things. Because as fastlaners, the way we build wealth is not through the stock market, it is through asset valuation. So if you build $100,000 a year business in profit, that’s not going to make you wealthy very quickly. But if you end up selling that for a million dollars, that’s going to elevate your lifestyle and your comfort just a little bit.

MJ DeMarco (31:39):

So wealthy math is through unit profit in a business that allows unit profit to be scalable. A lot of people misconstrue that for an internet business. Doesn’t have to be an internet business at all. I think people misconstrue that. But if I sell 10 widgets next week, I can sell 1,000 widgets the following week. So one day my income can be $1,000 a week, the next it can be $10,000 a week. And then you have control over that because you have control over your marketing initiatives, you have control over your decisions.

Clay Finck (32:14):

You run a forum where business owners have a chance to ask questions from others and learn from each other. One of the most significant hurdles of starting a business I think is, well, I don’t have any great ideas that nobody else has come up with. And after writing the book and running the forum, I’m curious if there are any interesting businesses or business ideas that you’ve come across that could be implemented about anywhere.

MJ DeMarco (32:39):

I sometimes can’t sleep at night because there are so many opportunities out there. New business owners, new entrepreneurs, they fall into this trap of thinking they need to reinvent the wheel. They need to be the next Alon Musk. They need to invent something that’s never been done before on planet earth, and that’s a big misconception. You can start a business with something that I call value skew. Value skew is anything that you do better than the competition. So all we’re doing here is we’re taking something that exists and we’re improving it in some discernible way that compels a person to give you money, that compels a person to become a client.

MJ DeMarco (33:20):

So value skew is how you start a business. So if you take any particular industry, deodorant, razors, and you skew value, meaning your process is slightly better than the alternative, you will have money flowing into your life. So skew a few variables and you have yourself a business. So if you’re not familiar with value skew, that is anything that compels you to buy a product. Think about the last time you bought something, there was a particular reason. I’m talking about you bought something from a new company. There was a particular reason why you bought. It could be that they had a better feature, they had a better ingredient. Maybe they had an ingredient that wasn’t existing. Maybe they had some better customer service. They answered your email within 10 minutes.

MJ DeMarco (34:05):

So value skew is that, anything that you do better than the opposition or the competition that might compel somebody to buy. A good example is, just the basic simplicity of this is a bag of tortilla chips. I recently bought a bag of tortilla chips and there was a reason why I bought it. It wasn’t the cheapest. It was actually the most expensive bag, but I bought it because I liked the ingredients. There was only four ingredients. It has non-GMO corn. That was another value skew. I looked into their little plexiglass. You can see inside and see the chips. They were white corn and they look like they were big chips. So these are all the things that were going through my mind that made me buy that bag of tortilla chips. That is value skew.

MJ DeMarco (34:48):

Now, tortilla chips are not… This is a saturated business. You don’t have to be looking at business and saying, “Oh my God, everyone is doing it there.” So what? Do it better. Skew some variables in that particular space and you have yourself a business. Now, we talked about Uber. Uber is a billion dollar company because in my particular space, they didn’t disrupt one or two variables, they skewed 10, 12, 14 variables, which is why they blew up. They were doing things better than the taxi industry on multiple angles from pricing to convenience, to being able to get a car within 10 minute. There were so many variables there that they were skewing that that company blew up.

Clay Finck (35:30):

Yeah. In reading your book, I was thinking a lot about, how much better does a business need to be to be successful? And on the one hand, I think about if you’re operating in a massive market and you provide your own niche or your own variation or improvement, then you only need a small slice to be able to make a living. But when it comes to companies like Uber and Tesla and Amazon, these are companies that had an exponential improvement on the current industry and that’s why they were able to just take overall market share. So I think it’s important to be like, okay, what is your value proposition and like what’s your goal with your business?

MJ DeMarco (36:03):

Yeah. And the value, unique selling proposition. That is the primary value skew. But most sales come from secondary value skew or secondary items that compel someone. It could be simple as, and this, again, we were looking for a new veterinarian and one company, their website didn’t have pictures of any vet staff, didn’t have pictures of the vet and he just didn’t get a feel for that particular veterinarian. The other company we went with had pictures and it showed the staff, it showed… It just was designed. That’s a value skew. We went with that company. Not because they were cheapest, but because they presented something that reflected on this particular buyer.

MJ DeMarco (36:42):

Now, other buyers may look at that and go, “Nah, I want the cheapest, or I want this, or I want Y. I want convenience.” All these factors come into play when people are buying something, when people are giving you money. There’s reasons why they give you money and value skew is the anchor behind that. Starting a business is two, three or four of these variables that you do better than the competition.

MJ DeMarco (37:04):

And sometimes, you mentioned, what would you do? There’s huge voids in the trade space. People don’t even answer their phones anymore. I don’t know how many times I’ve called for an electrician and I can’t get anybody on the phone. And then when I do get them on the phone, I can’t get them over here. That’s examples of value skew. Like if you want a plumber, your value skew is you answer the phone. Boom, you have a business. That may not be a scalable business as the way it’s initially constructed, but that’s the essence of starting a business. And you know, the world is filled with problems. The world is filled with bad customer service, bad this, bad that, that’s an opportunity. That’s a wonderful opportunity for you to step in and do something better.

MJ DeMarco (37:52):

We mentioned thefastlaneforum.com. My skew in that particular forum, I’m there every single day, I’m contributing, interacting with readers who read my book. A lot of times my book is more popular actually in France and Korea and internationally. So when they read the book on the other side of the planet and they come to the forum and they see me and they see me actually respond to them, it’s like, “Wow, you actually care. You’re actually here. You’re not shoving me off to some VA or some employee.” So that’s a value skew that I was able to build a forum based on that value skew.

MJ DeMarco (38:31):

And side note, starting a forum is the worst thing you could ever do. I don’t recommend that as a business to anybody. I’m just going to confess that right now. Absolutely worst business you could ever start. I do it because it’s a function of my publishing company, but you never want to start a forum. It is just the absolute, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Clay Finck (38:52):

Your time isn’t scalable. You only have 24 hours in a day to respond.

MJ DeMarco (38:56):

No. No it is not. And it’s funny because I’m doing things today because I don’t have financial burdens. I’m doing things today that I wouldn’t have done 10 years ago. Running a forum is not one of them. Running a publishing business and becoming an author is not one of them. That’s what financial freedom does. It allows you to do things maybe you wouldn’t have normally done because they’re not financially viable or they’re not good returns on your time. But my purpose today is different than it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago, my purpose was to step myself free. Today, it’s to spread my message, to give people this notion that there are some better ways to achieving wealth and doing it in a much quicker timeframe.

Clay Finck (39:36):

I have to ask, if you were 20 or 22 years old today, young and full of energy and just had all of the time in the world, are there any businesses or industries today that you would just love to dive into? You’d look at certain industry and you’re like, man, what an opportunity there for people who have the drive to attack it.

MJ DeMarco (39:56):

I get asked that a lot and I don’t have an answer because my situation, if I was 20 again and broke and whatnot, I’m not sure what I would be engaged in. So a lot of opportunities come up from what you’re engaged in. But I can tell you this, change creates millionaires and billionaires. The crypto space is huge, decentralization, Web 3.0. The plant-based space is growing big. I’ve been plant-based for five, six years and the amount of opportunity I see in that space is just mind boggling. And that’s because I’m engaged in that space. So you see things when you’re engaged in life.

MJ DeMarco (40:33):

My recommendation to your audience is engage yourself in life. You see opportunities when you engage in life. You don’t see opportunities when you’re sitting on the couch playing World of Warcraft or whatever the hot video game is nowadays. What pain points can I solve? What can I do better than the competition? And what can I do to start giving customers the ability to give me money because I’m doing something better for them than they can get somewhere else?

Clay Finck (40:56):

Wow. MJ, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Just so many great insights, and I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation. You really have a way to spark a fire in me I think. It’s really exciting and I’m really glad that you took the time to come on the show. Before we close out the episode, where can the audience go to connect with you and learn more about your work?

MJ DeMarco (41:18):

Sure. I mentioned that forum, I’m the founder of the forum, thefastlaneforum.com. It is a forum with close to a million contributions nowadays that is there to discuss this concept of fastlane entrepreneurship with asymmetrical returns. I can be reached there. Again, I’m there every single day. I’m usually posting every single day, and the usual suspects. I have a YouTube channel, I think it’s Fastlane MJ, that has close to over 50,000 subscribers. The best place is to see me at the forum.

MJ DeMarco (41:47):

If you’re interested in obtaining wealth in a quick period of time through leveraged entrepreneurship, read one of my books. Each one of them is slightly different, but any one of them can be read in any particular order. Millionaire Fastlane is the one that’s probably the most popular, which is interesting because I started writing that about 15 years ago and I don’t even like that book anymore because I wrote it a different era in my life. But a lot of people love that book.

MJ DeMarco (42:12):

Unscripted came after, and the Great Rat Race Escape, which is actually a novel; half novel, half business strategy book where you can see a story. You can witness in real time somebody escaping the rat race and you see how they do it through business. And you see their struggles with the default perception of saving money and putting it into the stock market. You see them go through these trials and how they get out of that and actually set themselves free and live a life they can only dream of.

MJ DeMarco (42:42):

Any of those books are on Amazon. You can pick them up for 10, 15 bucks. I do not sell seminars. I do not sell coaching programs. I have none of that. I have nothing to upsell anybody. That’s a core fundamental principle of my philosophy. I’m an author now. And your way of supporting me is to read one of my books and change your life.

Clay Finck (43:01):

Yeah. It’s funny, I was emailing you in preparation for this and I had a buddy reach out to me. He’s like, “Have you ever read MJ DeMarco’s book, The Millionaire Fastlane?” I’m like, “It’s funny you asked that because I’m actually going to talk to him next week.” But I just think it’s the title of the book. It’s just like a catchy title and I think that’s kind of the way it just kind of clicked with people. But I know a lot of people that have read this book and I’ve really enjoyed it and really glad you were able to come on the show to chat with me. So MJ, thank you so much.

MJ DeMarco (43:30):

Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

Clay Finck (43:32):

All right. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app so you can get these episodes delivered automatically. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, we would really appreciate it if you left us a rating or review on the podcast app you’re on. This will really help us in the search algorithm so others can discover the show as well. And if you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out our website, theinvestorspodcast.com. There you’ll find all of our episodes, some educational resources, as well as our TIP finance tool that Robert and I use to manage our own stock portfolios. And with that, we’ll see you again next time.

Outro (44:09):

Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday, We Study Billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.