107: How Airbnb Expert Scaled A Coaching Program to $33 Million With Brian Page

Today, I’m joined by Brian Page, an entrepreneur, online educator, and passive income expert who built BNB Formula, the world’s best-selling Airbnb coaching program.

Prior to creating BNB Formula, Brian became a millionaire in real estate before age 30. Soon after, he lost it all as the real estate bubble popped, eventually owing the IRS $1.3 million.

After attending Russell Brunson’s Funnel Hacking Live conference, Brian saw the potential in online courses and webinars. On the first night of launching BNB Formula, he made $65,000. Within 43 days, he hit $1 million. The program has now helped 25,000+ students in 47 countries, and generated $33 million in revenue in 2022.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear how to monetize your own webinar ideas, strategies for generating traffic without paying for ads, and the tax and income advantages of passive real estate investing.

Inspiring Quotes

• “Do more of what works and then protect your upside and protect your nest egg by making sure it’s in as many places as possible.” – Brian Page

• “Stop innovating … Most entrepreneurs can just get there by modeling success.” – Brian Page

• “Would you rather make $1 million a year doing nothing, having all your time to choose to spend your day however you want it, or $5 million – $10 million a year working your ass off in your company?” – Brian Page

• “For me, wealth is cash flow plus time plus free choice. If you’re very wealthy, you have lots and lots of money, but you have no time to enjoy it, how wealthy are you, really?” – Brian Page

• “Happiness is not correlated to your net worth.” – Brian Page

• “At the end of our lives, all that really matters is people.” – Brian Page

• “The rich get richer because the rules are in favor of amassing and keeping more and more wealth. So rather than complain about it, just go get rich.” – Brian Page

• How Brian made and lost $1M
• Diversifying your investments
• Leaning on cash flow for financial freedom
• How Airbnb changed real estate investing
• Making $1M+ through webinars
• How to drive traffic without paid ads
• Unlocking growth by reevaluating your vehicles
• 8-figure skill sets
• Building around your version of wealth
• The social media trap
• Passive real estate investing
• The tax advantages of owning a yacht
• Brian’s book, “Don’t Start a Side Hustle”

Brad Weimert: Brian Page, thank you so much for carving out time, man. You’ve got the best backdrop of anybody I’ve ever seen, actually.

Brian Page: Not a bad virtual, right?

Brad Weimert: I had to ask you if it was real or not. So, anybody that’s listening to this in audio, you have to go check out the YouTube channel because Brian, he said he’s in his office and that means that he is sitting on his yacht, which he does every day.

Brian Page: Yes. This is for real. So, we don’t know. Hopefully, everybody will be clothed when they go by in the boats here behind me but I can’t promise that.

Brad Weimert: I’m not wishing for that personally. Well, it depends. I don’t know who your neighbors are there. So, Brian, we’ve known each other for a few years, and there are a lot of cool things about you and there’s a lot that we could dig into but you are known for really popularizing Airbnb investing. I mean, you really got in early relative to teaching people how to do this. You were the first. You were probably the biggest. And it’s an interesting business model. Before we get to like the actual model itself, can you give me some background on kind of how you grew up in business and what brought you to that point?

Brian Page: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I have to go back to high school days because I remember a conversation I had with my father where he said, “Son, what are you going to do when you go to college? What are you going to study? What do you want to do when you grow up? And who are you going to work for?” And I remember telling him, I said, “I don’t know, dad, but I know a job is not my future.” And at the time, I didn’t know that meant I was probably born to be an entrepreneur but I really couldn’t see myself working for anyone else. I was always looking for a way to, I guess, avoid that kind of responsibility of having a job. And I just figured there had to be another way. I credit my early days in network marketing and MLM, which I was never successful at but I remember them teaching me that a job stands for Just Over Broke. And I remember thinking at that time, okay, the future for me, if I want to become wealthy and I want to become wealthy was I have to own my own business. I have to be an entrepreneur of some kind.

And that was kind of the path that set me in that direction. And then I became a real estate investor in my 20s, set a goal for myself to become a millionaire before the age of 30, and I did that, the real estate. And little did I know that I was in the middle of a real estate bubble and no one really knew it at the time.

Brad Weimert: This is what, ’07, ’08?

Brian Page: This was ’07, ’08. Yeah. I lost my entire real estate portfolio, my personal home, my BMW. I basically went from being a millionaire, young millionaire to being a negative millionaire. I got a letter from the IRS that said I owe them $1.3 million I needed to pay it immediately. So, that was a rough time. Yeah. That’s kind of my, I guess, riches to rags story and that kind of, yeah, that was the most difficult time of my life, I would say.

Brad Weimert: So, I want to ask you a couple of things about that because both of those are super, super interesting opportunities to learn. The first is the MLM side of things. So, I grew up selling Cutco, which is not an MLM, but it’s direct marketing training.

Brian Page: It’s great training. World-class training. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: It’s amazing training and I think that MLM has the same thing to offer but similar to Cutco, the vast majority don’t actually focus on learning and don’t come out of it with amazing skill sets. You said you never really got it to work. What were the lessons you took away from it and what didn’t work?

Brian Page: I never got it to work but the number one thing that instilled in me and this was early age 15, 16 I first got involved is I had a sponsor that sponsored me into the company. And he was kind of like this guy that I look up to and kind of a father figure. And he just taught me basically that whatever you dream of is possible. Your dreams are not silly. Your dreams are not outlandish. Even though people, my own family and friends, would say, “You’re kind of crazy to not want to go the traditional route and have all these big dreams, what you want to do, these grandiose ideas.” And he just basically said, “It’s all possible for you and it’s possible in a much shorter timeframe than you think, the three to five-year plan versus the three to five-decade plan.” And so, that kind of stuck with me and I just absolutely instilled a love for learning and for books. I remember I never read a book in high school or in college that I wasn’t assigned. I just hated books.

When I got out of college, I read 100 books my first summer out of school on real estate in particular, and I just fell in love with learning because I was like I can self-educate. And so, that was where I began the path of kind of learning on my own and trying to educate myself on whatever I didn’t know. And so, that was the number one thing instilled in me is the idea of thinking big and not be afraid to think big and just to speak about what you want in your dreams and then find the right vehicle to make that happen.

Brad Weimert: And at the time, you thought that real estate was the right vehicle and you started investing and we went into the bubble. I can relate to this because I got into real estate in ‘06. What type of investing were you doing? And I could guess based on the ultimate collapse but what type of investing were you doing and how did you find it?

Brian Page: Well, I got into flipping. What happened is I got out of college and I was doing an internship in order to get my degree. I had to do an internship at Hilton Hotels that Hilton had in South Carolina. And while the other kids were going and partying every night, I went to Barnes & Noble and would read through the stock investing section and the real estate investing section. There were two main sections. There was also entrepreneurship, but those were the two main things that there seemed to be a million books about. And the stocks didn’t appeal to me. It seemed boring, it seemed technical, but the real estate really appealed to me and I found that that was kind of the number one easiest way for people to get to millionaire status for the average person would be real estate. So, I just kind of focused in on that and I just fell in love with this idea of flipping properties. Now, this was back in, gosh, this was back in 2001 maybe. And so, there were no shows on TV about flipping. Nobody knew what it was. It wasn’t ever talked about.

In fact, I started flipping properties that summer and my friends were like, “That’s illegal.” I say, “What’s illegal about it? I’m buying a property and I’m selling it, fixing it up.” So, I was flipping properties left and right and I did really well at that and then I started acquiring properties I could rent out for cash flow. And so, it was right around right before I was 30, I was 29 years old, I quit my job. I was living off the cash. I didn’t have a lot but I had enough to pay my bills and I lived off my little portfolio and I started traveling the world. I just had this incredible lifestyle. And so, all my friends were going to their jobs. I had no job and I had succeeded at what I told my dad I wanted to do, which was essentially be able to call my own shots and not have to work for a living. And so, that was kind of the first taste of true financial freedom. But then after the whole crash, when I lost everything, I had to go back and get a job just to make ends meet. That was extremely painful, extremely humbling.

Brad Weimert: Can you give me some details on how you lost it? Because the mechanics of that, I think, are important for people when they’re getting into investing. So, like, how did you fund the properties and what was the financial model that led to you being presumably upside down and losing the portfolio?

Brian Page: Yeah. So, what happened is for those who didn’t live through this in 2008, real estate ground to a halt, and by that, it means nobody was selling properties. The values of properties were dropping precipitously, sometimes 50% or more in certain markets. What I have done is I had moved from just renting properties out and covering my mortgage and making cash flow, which is a pretty safe model if you don’t overleverage. I moved from that into speculative construction. So, I started building homes at the beach in North Carolina. I built a seven-bedroom, eight-bath house oceanfront with this magnificent pool. It was a multimillion-dollar property. It was built on spec and I was hoping to clear north of seven figures on that first property. I would have had I sold it a couple of months earlier, but when I came to market was right when Lehman Brothers collapsed. And not only could I not cover the mortgage payments on this thing, I couldn’t even rent out. Nobody was traveling. Nobody is going on vacation. Nobody is interested in the oceanfront home. At that time, the world was ending.

And so, everything ground to a halt. So, I had that property plus other ones at the beach. I was doing speculative investing. And that is risky. Whenever you get into developing or you’re buying something on speculation hoping that is going to be a buyer, it is a high-risk, high-reward kind of game and I was outside my element. And I remember my attorney once said to me, he said, “You’re doing really well with this flipping thing.” I was doing like two, three, or four properties a month and doing really well with it. And he said, “You should just do more of what works. Don’t jump into something else.” Because most people think real estate is real estate. It’s not. There’s 100 different ways to make money in real estate and they’re different individual, completely different techniques. And sometimes they have different rules and different risks. And I didn’t keep doing what I knew. I moved into something bigger and riskier. So, had I kept doing what I was doing I probably would have been fine.

But I think the number one lesson I took away from that, Brad, was something that sounds really boring but it’s the most important thing for investors to know. It’s called asset allocation. That simply means that you don’t put all your money in one basket. In the basket, I had all my money in with real estate because I was taught real estate can’t go down. Real estate only goes up. And if you believe that, then you’ll put all your money in the one vehicle that you know and that’s what I did. I didn’t put any money…

Brad Weimert: All right, hold on. Hold on because I want to get in your head about how you think about this because you started by saying do more of what you’re good at, which somebody could interpret as keep it all in one basket. And then you said asset allocation, make sure it’s not in one basket. How do you think about that approach and how do you do that at the same time?

Brian Page: Okay. So, what you do to make money is not the same as how you invest. So, investing is where you put your money to grow it or to keep it safe or preserve it. What you do, how you earn your money, whether it’s to your business or your job or your salary is completely different. So, what I was trying to do was do more than one business. And as Robert Kiyosaki says, “Mind your business.” Most people don’t even know what business they’re in. They’re in five different things and they’re always jumping between them, especially serial entrepreneurs, of which I’ve been guilty. So, what I didn’t do is just continue doing something that was working and scale it and make it bigger and better. And I jumped into different businesses that were completely unrelated. So, asset allocation simply means that once you start making money, when you have an excess amount of capital beyond what you need to live or have your lifestyle, now you need to start thinking about where to put it.

And so, that entails not just putting it in one asset class. Like, let’s say you’re in the stocks, you put all your money in stocks and you leave it there and don’t put it in any other asset classes. That’s high risk because you’re now in one asset class and all asset classes go up and they all go down, but they don’t all generally go down together. So, even during the real estate crash, other assets went up. Precious metals went up. There are other things that I could have preserved some of my wealth had I had it in different places, including even cash because I had all my cash in my real estate. If I had cash, I just spend it on more real estate. So, we’re in a time now where we haven’t seen a crash in a little while. I think there’s always one around the corner. If you live long enough, you’ll see that they come in cycles. So, I would just encourage people to think about that, understand what asset allocation is, and understand that you should put your money in more than one place. And if you’re going to get into risky investments, you should also have some very safe investments. You should also allocate for different risks.

And so, that was one of the things I didn’t learn. I probably wouldn’t have had to go nearly bankrupt. I didn’t declare bankruptcy but I was essentially bankrupt at that time had I just been a little smarter with my money but I just thought I knew everything. And of course, a lot of people did. Everybody thought real estate was as safe as can be. And so, we all just went all in on it.

Brad Weimert: Well, I mean, that’s the perpetual challenge of nearly all entrepreneurs is thinking that you know everything and not listening to the people that have been before you.

Brian Page: It’s very humbling. It’s very humbling especially when you lose it all and you have to be willing to lose it all. So, this is what my mentor taught me, a mentor that I had in network marketing. He said, “Brian, would you be willing to go broke two, three, four, or five times if it means at the end of all that you’d be a millionaire? Are you willing to go broke again and again and again in order to succeed?” I was like, “Wow.” He’s like, “What’s the worst that could happen? Like, really, what’s the worst that could happen? The worst that could happen is you go broke trying, right?” So, I said yes. And then the other thing he always said to me is, “Would you be willing to work three to five years like nobody else?” Most people are not willing to work to be completely financially free instead of slaving away for the rest of your life at a job that you hate, which is a lot of Americans. And the answer to both those questions was yes. So, I’m just thankful that I had such wise people in my life that just taught me to think outside of the normal go to school, get a good degree, go get a job in a safe company where you hopefully stay as long as possible and get all your benefits. And for some people that might be right but for me, it wasn’t. And it’s also a much harder road to go if you want to be wealthy.

Brad Weimert: And ironically, it’s not safe. Ironically, you’re still…

Brian Page: Nowadays it’s not safe. Yeah. Nobody’s got job security for life anymore.

Brad Weimert: You’re putting your hands in somebody else’s reins, ultimately. So, what I heard there was your ultimate where you landed and the guidance was to go deep and focus on your money-making mechanism and distribute and allocate assets across different things for investing.

Brian Page: Yeah. Do what works, do more of what works, and then protect your upside, protect your nest egg by making sure it’s in as many places as possible, many asset classes as possible. And most people don’t do more of what works. So, as entrepreneurs, we do something, it works, we’re like, “Yay, we got this thing working. Now, we’re excited about starting something new, doing another company, doing this other thing.” And there are some of us that can do that. Elon Musk is an example. Most of us aren’t Elon where we can go into completely different industries and just crush each one of them. Most of us are just merely human and we have only so many hours in the day. For me, at least, lifestyle’s very important. And so, I know that if you find something that really works and there’s a lot of industries that you can make a lot of money in, just choose one. And I talk about that in my book. You have to choose one vehicle and then stick with that vehicle until you reach your goal. And it doesn’t have to be for life. It can be for three to five years. Most financial vehicles can get you there in three to five years. Most businesses you can succeed, launch, and scale in three to five years, I believe, if you’re in the right vehicle.

So, that kind of brought me full circle, Brad, back to when I was broke, when I was sitting there with that letter and owed over $1 million to the IRS. I had no assets of any kind. I had no credit. I had dozens of foreclosures on my credit file. I was essentially a financial fugitive. I mean, it was bad. I didn’t have any ability to invest in anything. So, that was where I started. Like, what am I going to do now? Because I’m not going to work a job anymore. I want to be financially free again. What do I do? And I had to create cash flow. I was like I got to create cash flow. I still believe real estate is the best way to create cash flow for the average person. It’s the fastest way to create cash flow. And at that time, something had appeared on the scene, which was relatively new. That was called short-term rentals. So, that was Airbnb and Vrbo and some of these companies coming up. And so, I just started with what I had. All I had was a two-bedroom apartment I was renting. It wasn’t even mine. I just asked the owner, “Can I list one of the spare bedrooms essentially on Airbnb?” And that’s how I started. It was back in 2015 or so.

And very short order, I made enough money from that one little room to pay for my rent and all my utilities so I had essentially house-hacked. I had hacked my apartment to live for free. Yes, I had strangers coming and going, but I did not care because I knew it was one step closer to being financially free. Again, as Robert Kiyosaki, who I got to sit down with recently, he’s one of my heroes, he says that once your passive income exceeds your monthly expenses, you’re free. That’s it. That’s the rule. Once your money that you don’t work for exceeds your monthly expenses, you are financially free by definition. So, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a certain huge amount of money. It just has to be a certain amount of cash flow. So, I was desperate to figure that out. So, short-term rentals was kind of the saving lifeline for me at that time.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s great. And I think one of the things that I want to highlight there is you ultimately found short-term rentals. And I thought about it earlier but the project that you had on the beach that, ultimately, the real estate market impacted really negatively, one of the things that I try to do when I’m looking at real estate and I’ve heard you talk about this is contingency plan, right? So, when I’m looking at a property, yes, maybe the goal is to flip it. Maybe I’m building on spec and I want to sell it. But what happens if I can’t? And so, I want to think through those scenarios. And the first is, can I just rent it long term? Because that’s the hands-off approach. But at that time when you were building in ’07, ’08, ‘09, the short-term rental market didn’t really exist. Airbnb launched in 2008.

Brian Page: Yeah. And it wasn’t even a thing for at least three or four years. It was so small. It was so niche. And that was my goal. My goal was to rent it out as a vacation rental. Now, vacation rentals have been around forever and it would have been a vacation rental but in 2008 most people blocked it out or too young to remember that nothing was happening. Nobody was traveling like it was like 9/11. Everything just shut down. All travel shut down. All people were not interested in booking anything. So, that wasn’t an option at the time, unfortunately.

Brad Weimert: And you didn’t have a marketplace, right? Like, you didn’t have an easy way to do a vacation rental.

Brian Page: Oh, no, no, you didn’t. I certainly didn’t have the whole online digital short-term rentals that we have now with all these different platforms. But even if I had, I don’t think it would have worked because the economy had just ground to a halt. Everybody was in absolute fear. Everybody was pulling in. It was kind of the end for a while until we kind of got our feet under us as an economy. But no, the thing that Airbnb changed, the way it changed the game is it allowed you not only to make tremendously more cash flow per unit. So, when I owned a one-bedroom condo or two-bedroom little condo or even a house, I could make $200, $300 a month after I paid my mortgage, my utilities, and not the utilities, but pay the mortgage and taxes and all that stuff. But then if one person moved out my tenant moved out at the end of the year and I got to repaint the whole place, I just lost all my cash flow. Whereas when I tried Airbnb for the first time, I was doing $1,000, $2,000 per month net and I didn’t own the property and I didn’t have any repairs. I didn’t put in a down payment on it. It was just like unbelievable to make $20,000 on a little property that I didn’t own and do it immediately, like the first month, start cash flowing it. The only expense I had was maybe furnishing it.

So, to me, it was like I cannot believe I’m making this kind of money on a tiny little apartment behind somebody’s house. This owner that I got on board that said I can use it for that. And so, I started doing the math and I was like, “Oh, it’s only going to take a few of these to replace the income from my job, like four or five of these, and I’m out. I’m free.” So, that was my goal and it took me just a few months, three or four months to be able to get a few of those deals done. Walked away from my job. That was the last job I ever had. It was a high-paying job, too. I had a six-figure job in marketing and I was like I’m done, out, I don’t care. So, I actually left before I had fully made the same amount of money and then started scaling it and started getting properties and doing what they call rental arbitrage. And I didn’t invent it, I don’t think, but it just certainly wasn’t anywhere at the time. It wasn’t online. And actually, I remember going on YouTube and typing in, “How to scale my Airbnb business. How to do rental arbitrage. How to build a portfolio of Airbnbs.” And there wasn’t one result, and not even one result. There was zero results.

And I thought, “This is weird. Like, I couldn’t have been the only person that’s thought of this in the whole world. Like, it’s got to be other people doing this.” But at that moment I had an aha moment. I said, “This, I am on to something big,” because I know people would pay me for my knowledge right now. I have people all the time asking me, “Please teach me what you’re doing,” because at the time I was doing about 300,000, 400,000 a year with my little Airbnb business and just travel the world having this incredible lifestyle, and people were just knocking on my door. So, at that time, I knew I was sitting on something really, really, really big.

Brad Weimert: Amazing. So, ironically or not, in 2015, I had just moved the company to Austin, Easy Pay Direct to Austin and I had five or six Airbnbs that I also was renting and then Airbnbing. And so, I had Easy Pay Direct heavily serve people selling information, courses, coaches, consultants. It’s probably 20% of our portfolio. And so, you know, shiny objects. I had this thought of like maybe I should create the Airbnb course. Well, but here’s the thing. And this is one of the reasons that I was excited to talk to you because creating a course on how to do anything now more than ever is easy to get off the ground, very challenging to effectively scale past a few million bucks a year if that. And you have effectively done multi-eight figures a year in this. So, it’s one thing to say, “Hey, I’ve got a good idea. I’m on to something,” and launch it. It’s quite another to effectively scale it and then also pull yourself out of it, which you’ve done. So, what was the initial path and did you hit a ceiling at some point? Like, what was the beginning journey and the journey of scale?

Brian Page: Yeah, absolutely. Well, sorry. My nose itches me like crazy. I guess somebody is thinking about me here but yeah.

Brad Weimert: Is that what that means?

Brian Page: Yeah. Supposedly. I don’t know if I believe that but that’s what they say. Okay. So, what happened is I had this idea. I’d always wanted to get Internet marketing. I knew all these guys. Over the years, I’ve met different guys that were making just ungodly amounts of money online. I thought the online thing is a great vehicle. It’s a great way to make money, is to become a guru or an educator or create courses or digital products. I just knew there was big money in that and I had never had a good idea. I never thought I had a good idea that I could run with. But when I saw this one, I was like, “This is the idea. This is what I’m running with.” So, I proceeded to create a course. What I did is I locked myself in my house. I actually took my TV and I put it in the attic because I said, “I’m not going to watch TV at all until I make my first million dollars online.” I stopped dating. I was single at the time. No dating, no going out, socializing, no TV.

Literally, cleared all the books. I had a whole library, cleared all the books out of my room except for the two or three books I had on internet marketing. It didn’t seem like there were that many books out there, so I had like two or three books. That’s all I had. And I proceeded to lock myself in the room and start creating this course. So, what I did is I outlined everything I’ve done in my business, everything I learned, how I started, every step, how do you get a property, how do you furnish it, all that stuff. Created this beautiful like entire presentation. Recorded it. It took me maybe six months of full-time work to do this, and I had this masterpiece. Okay. But now I didn’t know how to sell it. And there’s other ways to do this that are much quicker now. I didn’t know at the time, but I created this masterpiece like my heart, blood, sweat, and tears went into this thing. Called it BNB Formula.

And then I went to try to sell it through a presentation online, and I told my friends that I was going to make millions. I actually told people this, which I think sometimes it’s good to kind of get your big mouth out there and kind of say what you’re going to do because it kind of hold yourself accountable to actually trying to go doing that. It makes it real when you’re actually saying it out loud. And so, I went to sell it and I sold like three units. I think I did like $3,000 and I thought I was going to make millions. I was working with somebody that supposedly was going to help me do this. It was a real experience and just flopped. So, I immediately refunded everybody and said, “I’m going to redo this. I don’t know what I did wrong but I’m just going to refund. I’m going to redo the course. I’m going to re-tweak everything.” At the time, I saw an ad by Russell Brunson for DotCom Secrets. I didn’t know who this guy was but I got the book. I said, “That’s what I need. I need the secrets. What are the secrets?”

So, I started reading this book and immediately signed up for his conference, which is Funnel Hacking LIVE. And I went there and I remember walking around the conference and all these people wearing these little badges that said Two Comma Club and I was like, “What does that mean?” And you’re familiar with this, of course. These are people that have done $1 million online through a funnel and I couldn’t believe how many there were. They were everywhere. And so, I started cornering these people and telling them about my Airbnb idea and just like, “What did I do wrong? How can I do this? How can I make $1 million?” And I remember one guy, in particular, I ran into. He heard my idea and he looked at me and he’s like, “This is the best damn idea I’ve heard at this entire conference.” He said, “If you go home and create a webinar, you’re going to make millions of dollars.” He said that and I was like, “Really? You think so?” He’s like, “No, you will. You will make millions of dollars if you can get a webinar and go home and do this.”

And it was just having that permission or that one person to believe in me. It was kind of silly. I had a lot of confidence. I just need one person to say that I could do it. And I went home, created a webinar to sell the product that I already had, and I did my very first webinar and we did $65,000 that first night. I converted 34% of the people on that call. My first time ever doing a presentation, I remember talking to my buddy. I was like, “Is that good?” He’s like, “That’s really good.” And within 43 days I had done $1 million. So, never having sold a prop. Well, of course, that failed first launch that I tried. Having done my very first webinar, 43 days later we did $1 million and then from there it’s millions and millions and millions more came just absolutely took off like wildfire. And so, I jumped from making $1 million in just one industry, which was real estate, to then making over $1 million in short-term rentals and then making another million dollars in digital marketing, which is a whole another business.

And so, that’s kind of been the way that I’ve done it throughout my whole life, just focusing on one thing at a time. And now I’m just proud to say that I have students, tens of thousands of students around the world, many of whom are doing millions of dollars a year themselves, not in digital marketing, but online, like on Airbnb and short-term rental. So, it’s been an incredible, incredible journey.

Brad Weimert: Well, I know many of them and I know the product, the course, and many people that you’ve touched through it. I want to get into like some of the mechanics of the actual scale of the business because it’s changed but I want to start with, great, you made a webinar and did you follow Russell’s general formula to do that?

Brian Page: I actually didn’t. I didn’t follow his perfect webinar. What I did is I reverse-engineered all the best-converting webinars that I can find and look for commonalities between them. I just spent like three months obsessing over every like just becoming a master of webinars as much as you can in 90 days. So, that’s all I focused on. And I found that there were a lot of commonalities between all these great, great-performing webinars. I kind of converge them all into my own and it works. And so, people are like, “You’re brilliant.” I’m like, “Not really. I just stole the best ideas that I could find.” I remember I borrowed really heavily from Mike Dillard. If anybody knows who Mike Dillard is, I borrowed really heavily from his webinar. And then when I actually met him, I was like, “Dude, I kind of borrowed really heavily from you.” He’s like, “That’s cool, dude. That’s what I did.”

So, it’s kind of funny to actually meet some of my heroes and say you really inspired me. There’s a big difference for stealing somebody’s idea and then competing with them and selling the same thing they do versus using somebody’s tried and true strategies to be able to sell your own thing. And so, I urge people all the time, “Watch my webinar. See what I did,” because the best ideas are usually borrowed from other people.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I love that. And Mike is in Austin here. And also, anybody that’s trying to learn webinar stuff, Jason Fladlien, ultimately speaking of…

Brian Page: He’s the master.

Brad Weimert: He is. Speaking of people borrowing Russell’s perfect webinar formula.

Brian Page: I got a story about Jason. So, everybody here should go look up Jason. If you sell anything online and you know how to do a presentation, Jason Fladlien is the greatest of all time and that’s not an understatement.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. He was like our first or second interview on Beyond a Million here so people can check out that episode. It’s killer. Yeah. He’s a client of ours, an awesome friend.

Brian Page: You have to see him. In fact, Russell Brunson would say he’s the best as well, I’m sure. But you got to go see Jason Fladlien and stuff. But I remember at Funnel Hacking Live, I saw him at a table. Everybody rushes in at these tables at the end of one the days, and all these gurus set up these little roundtables and you get to meet them. And I remember Russell was there and all these people were there and people were running all these tables. And I saw Jason sitting there and I knew who he was because I’d already done my research on who the speakers were going to be. And I sat down right next to him, took out my notebook. I was the only person sitting at the table, and I started asking questions about webinars because I knew this guy had done like 60-something million dollars on one webinar. I mean, he was like tens and tens of millions of dollars when he does a presentation.

And I remember all these other people came to the table and it was like 20 people, maybe 30 people around the table and sitting at the table. And I was writing everything he said down and nobody was taking notes. And I was like thinking in my head, “These people are damn idiots because this guy is spewing gold. He’s giving us gold to make millions of dollars.” And at one point I ran out of paper and then I had asked Jason for more paper to take notes because I was taking so many notes. And he looked at me and he’s like, “Yeah. You’re smart that you’re taking notes and nobody else here is doing that.” And I remember that like this guy’s giving us like the keys to the kingdom here and nobody is paying attention to what he’s saying, not taking it seriously. And I took all the notes of everything I’ve learned from the different people I’ve met and applied it to what I was doing to be able to master that new craft of presenting online. I guess a lot of people don’t do that. They don’t take it that seriously and it’s a shame because a lot of the stuff is nearly free or it’s free to find out what these masters know and what they’re doing and be able to copy them and duplicate their success.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. People have a hard time just following instructions from one person that’s done it successfully, much less actually analyzing like the top 30 that have done it and compiling something better.

Brian Page: No, no. And I talk about this all the time. So, a lot of entrepreneurs ask me for advice and I ask them, “What are you up to?” And they say, “Well, I’m doing this and I’m doing that. I’m doing this.” I’m like, “Yeah. What makes you think that those are the right steps?” And they’re like, “I don’t know. I’m just trying a bunch. I’m just doing what I think is right.” Don’t do what you think is right. Don’t innovate. Okay? There are some people that are innovators, again, like Elon Musk. Some people are brilliant innovators. You can make money innovating but it’s very difficult. It’s much easier to make money modeling, modeling people that have gone before you. Just find somebody who’s done what you want to do, learn everything you can from that person, and try to do as closely to their journey as you can with your own. So, have your own ideas of what you want to create and sell and all that kind of stuff. But the path to success is not really a secret. It’s just kind of it’s all laid out if you just watch what people have done in their journey and understand their process.

Stop innovating. Really stop innovating. Unless your job is to create something, you’re an inventor, great. Innovate. But most entrepreneurs can just get there by modeling. Model success. Learn everything you can to borrow, as Steve Jobs says, “A good artist copy. Great artists steal.” That was Steve Jobs, one of the most innovative men who ever lived. He said that. So, I don’t think you should steal but I think you should borrow heavily. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Brad Weimert: So, the gap here for me, and I’m glad we went down the webinar creation rabbit hole, but the gap here is where did you get the traffic? You sold three the first time and then you went to Funnel Hacking LIVE and then you created this magical webinar and invested all this time in making sure it was going to convert. How’d you get people on it?

Brian Page: Believe it or not, I never did one paid ad for the first three years. Tens of millions of dollars, we didn’t do one single paid ad. No paid media of any kind. I did it all through affiliates and I didn’t know what affiliates were. I didn’t even know what that meant but somebody approached me. They saw my really crappy ad on Facebook and he said, “You got an amazing idea here, an amazing hook, but you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. Let me help you because I got a list of several hundred thousand people. They will buy your product if you know how to package it correctly and do the right hook and the right headline and the right offer.” And so, he helped me. He tremendously helped me to kind of became one of my mentors. So, for me, affiliates was great because I had an offer that I can go in front of someone else’s list of people and all I got to do is pay them after the sale. So, there’s zero cost.

So, this is a great way to get started for most people is there are people out there that have a list, a huge email list, and if they like your product, they will put you in front of their list for half the sale or whatever you decide to split with them. And so, that’s what I did. That’s how I got started. And once one or two affiliates were successful and they were like, “Wow. This thing actually sells. This guy can sell,” then the doors just broke open and that’s how I got to meet some of my biggest heroes. And the biggest people in the real estate space came to me and said, “Hey, can I sell your product?” The timing was right. I had a great product, I had a great offer, and it was converting, so they knew they were going to make money. And that’s kind of how the door got kicked open. So, I had actually learned how to do ads much, much later. But I think affiliates is a great way to go. You can find one person with a list. It doesn’t even have to be a big list. Somebody could have 10,000 people on their list and they get 300 people to your webinar or 200 people to your webinar or 100 people on your webinar and you sell 30% of them at a grand each. That’s $30,000. I mean, some Americans don’t make that in a year. You could do that in an evening so if you have the right thing, if you have the right offer. So, that’s kind of how I got started was through affiliates. Very thankful for them. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: So, you started in ‘15. As best you can recall, what are the revenue stats in the initial years? Because it sounds like it just like launched.

Brian Page: It just took off hard. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: But we’re almost ten years later and you’re still moving. And so, at some point, you have to hit a threshold of being able to actually run a company and not just sell a dream. So, what were the initial years in revenue? And then we’ll kind of go from there.

Brian Page: Well, yeah, the first year was actually 2017. In 2017, we did a million I think it was 2 or 3 million that first year. We hit the $10 million mark, which that was the $10 million ClickFunnels Award. That was two and a half years in, something like that. Last year, we did 33 million in total revenue. And so, the path has been up and down. When I ran out of affiliates to promote to, they had all kind of promoted me for a few years. I had to get a new traffic source which was ads. And most people know me through my ads on Instagram and TikTok and all that kind of stuff. So, we had to move to ads. Yeah. So, I had to learn traffic. There’s different sources of traffic. I had to shift between different sources of traffic. But what took me to the next level was offering higher ticket products. So, we do a lot of coaching now. We do high-ticket coaching. We have six and multiple six and seven-figure coaches around the world that are former students and now they work with the next generation of BNBers to help them launch and scale their business.

So, we offer way, way more than just education. We are way more than just a course. The course was the first of many products that we’ve rolled out. So, now we are a full-on educational company. We got a platform. We’ve got a lot of different offers that we do. So, absolutely we’re able to scale but there’s always a limit. You know, I don’t know many people that are billionaires that are in the info marketing space. There’s Grant Cardone but he didn’t make his billions in that. He made his billions and he’s making his big numbers in real estate itself doing investments for people in multifamily. So, there’s always different vehicles that can get you there. And I talk about that in my book is that some vehicles will take you to a million. Some vehicles will take you to eight figures and nine figures. Some will go even further but certain ones, certain vehicles have limits.

So, if you have goals that are way beyond where you’re at right now, you might need to shift vehicles and a lot of people will commit to their vehicle and then they’ll never leave it. And I think vehicles, they only exist to get us to our destination. Okay. So, like we were talking about jets earlier before we started recording. A jet will take you to the destination then you get off the jet. You don’t stay on it until you’re ready to travel again, right? A car can only go so far. A jet can go across the ocean. It’s a different kind of vehicle. It can take you further. So, some people are in the right vehicle. Like, if you’re doing a tech startup, you’re doing a software company, technically, you could take that from zero to billions of dollars to unicorn status because it’s a vehicle that could do that. Right? There are others. If you’re going to do a Subway franchise. I know a guy that tried to do that a few years ago. He got one location, he got a second location, he got a third location then he got burned out because he was limited. He’s talking about brick and mortar. It’s got some limitations. And not that you couldn’t do really well in that, but it’s got limitations because of the vehicle that it is.

So, some people they’re looking at like, okay, I’m doing a few million dollars a year like you mentioned, in a certain type of industry. The question would be how many people do you know that have gotten to whatever your goal, your financial status is in your vehicle? And if you want to be a billionaire and you don’t see anybody being a billionaire in your industry, maybe it’s time to think, “Okay. I’m going to close out this chapter. I’m going to sell the company or I’m going to automate it and remove myself from the operations. I can own the company and then move on and build something else.” So, I think most people are not willing to evaluate their vehicle. This includes people who have jobs that have careers. They’re not willing to say to themselves, “Is there a way for me to be as wealthy as the guy who owns this company?” They don’t even ask that question. And so, they’re just hoping that one day they’re going to just be on a magical ladder that takes them to their financial destiny, not realizing they’re just in the wrong vehicle. It’s not that they’re not smart enough. It’s not that they don’t have the right opportunity. They’re just working in the wrong place.

So, I always tell people to reevaluate your vehicle and maybe shift vehicles or get out of the vehicle that you’re in to give into something that will get you where you want to go. So, for me, this is just one of many vehicles and it’s not the one that I’m going to be in forever. It’s just taking me to where I’m at now. And now I’ve got new vehicles that I’m building and launching that are going to get me to the next goal of where I want to be.

Brad Weimert: I dig it. So, that’s a good transitional point, even though I’m not going to take advantage of it to talk about investing. Okay. But before we actually transition to the investing side of things because it’s super relevant and we were talking about it before we pressed record but I still like there are so many mechanical considerations when you’re looking at running a – and obviously, every industry is different. Models are different. Margins are different. People are different. But running a $5 million information product company versus running a $33 million company and also being the active CEO versus not, I want to hit on those two things before we move into the investing side of things because they’re a challenge for tons of entrepreneurs. A lot of people get stuck in the 5 to 10 million range and this is like a, “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m doing. What I used to do worked, and now it doesn’t work.” What skill sets do you think you were lacking and you had to develop to move into the multi-eight-figure space from the beginning compared to the beginning?

Brian Page: The number one I think is humility. Strangely enough, as entrepreneurs, the only reason that we go on the journey as an entrepreneur is because we believe we can do it. We have this crazy idea that we’re going to go do something that most people can’t do. We’re not afraid of the challenge. We take it on. We succeed. And now we think, “Oh wow, everything I touch turns to gold. So, now I’m going to continue holding the reins really tightly as this thing scales. But to have humility to say, “Okay. I don’t know it all. I can probably hire people that are as smart or smarter than me. I can hire people that are going to work harder than me. I can hire people that are going to take ownership in the company and scale it to where I need to go.” And so, the humility is saying, “I don’t have to be in the driver’s seat anymore. I can be. Do I want to be a CEO? When I was a child, I didn’t dream of being a CEO. I dreamed of all the adventures I wanted to go on. All the dreams that I had had nothing to do with work.”

So, most people forget this. They forget what their dreams were when they were a child. And so, we get into this thing where, “Okay. Now, we’re the CEO. Now, we’re the boss. Now, we’re going 100,000 miles an hour where our health is suffering. Our family’s suffering. We don’t have time. When was the last time we played?” I talked to a really successful entrepreneur the other day. I was like, “When’s the last time you played, dude? When’s the last time you just went with some bros and just had fun?” Like, not going to a conference, just having fun for no other purpose than to have fun.” He’s like, “I don’t know. I can’t even remember the last time I did that.” That’s sad. He’s got the ability to do it but he can’t do it. He’s time-poor. And so, the ability to shift and say, “Okay. I’m going to build a team.” I remember a mentor of mine, he mentors some of the top 50 CEOs in the world and he said to me, he said, “You need to shift from being the CEO to being chief recruiter, chief evangelist. So, recruit your team. Recruit your executive. Recruit and start building your team, executive team, and your leadership team that will be able to take all of the day-to-day off your plate so that eventually you become an owner. You’re no longer a CEO.”

I stepped down as CEO a few months ago, my own company, and it shifted everything for me. And so, it requires you to say if you want to build it bigger then you have to, if you want to be a big boy company, you got to act like a big boy company. You got to start building out an actual team, hiring the people to do the jobs that normally you would do and be like okay with the idea that you don’t have to make decisions anymore. And people come to me sometimes with questions and my team, they’re like, “Hey, Brian, I got to ask you about this. Can I pitch you on this idea? Can we do this?” I’m like, “I don’t make decisions. Talk to the CEO. I’m not the CEO anymore.” So, it’s kind of it’s very freeing to be able to do that but I have that much trust in the leadership team and executive team and my CEO to be able to make those decisions without me. And it frees me up psychically to think, what do I want to do with the next five, ten years of my life? What do I want to do now? I can do anything now. I have a blank slate. I’m free and clear. I can hang out in my boat all day and do nothing, or I can build the next thing that really excites me.

And so, it’s really freed me up to think about what I want to create now. And most entrepreneurs never get to that point. They just get more and more higher levels of stress, bigger and bigger problems, right? And I think there’s a point at which you have to decide, is that really what you want? Is that the lifestyle you want? And some people, they thrive on that. I don’t. I want to get to that in my life and have enjoyed my life thoroughly. Not work harder for myself every day as an entrepreneur than I would work on a job, working 80 hours a week for myself trying to avoid working 40 hours a week enough for someone else.

Brad Weimert: I hear the $5 million entrepreneur saying, “That’s great, Brian. You have an information product company with wild margins doing $30 million a year. Sure. Recruit people, be on the board, and go hang out on your yacht.” Do you think you could have done it sooner? And what size would have been reasonable for you to make that move out of CEO? And kind of what did you have to shift around in your day to make that transition?

Brian Page: Yes, I could’ve done it much sooner, much, much sooner. In fact, my mentor said to me, he said, “Brian, after having met you in person, I can tell you right now you’re not CEO material.” And I was like offended. I was like, “What do you mean I’m not CEO material?” He’s like, “You are not CEO material. You are a visionary. You’re a creator. That’s what you need to step into.” And I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “Well, do you enjoy managing people?” I’m like, “No, I do not.” “Do you like going to meetings?” I was like, “I hate going to meetings. You can’t get me in a meeting. You can barely get me in a Slack channel. I’m just not interested in that crap. I like to create. I like to think. I like to have new ideas. I like to try to execute on new ideas. That kind of stuff is my jam.” And he said, “Yeah, you’re not CEO. So, the first thing is you need to hire a CEO.” And almost any level of a business you can hire someone. It doesn’t have to be a CEO. You don’t have to call him a CEO.

I first started with a manager like just operations manager and said, “Okay. I want you to do everything that I would normally do as much as possible.” And then eventually he got promoted to become COO. Then he got promoted to become CEO. So, you can get, you know, he was the very first hire that I had, the first real serious hire that I had on my leadership team. And just hiring him to hiring that one person changed everything for me. It really took a lot off my shoulders. And I always like to ask people a hypothetical scenario, “Would you rather make $1 million a year doing nothing having all your time to choose to spend your day however you want it, or $5 million or $10 million a year working your ass off in your company? You know, really, what would you have? What’s more important to you?” And I think that a lot of people, they identify and they define wealth as money and net worth. Money, cash flow, net worth, that’s what they brag about. And they don’t think about all the other parts of what is to be wealthy.

And for me, wealth is money or cash flow more notably plus time plus free choice. If you’re very wealthy, you have lots and lots of money but you have no time to enjoy it, how wealthy are you really? And if you don’t have free choice, in other words, you are a slave to someone else, you’re a slave to a company, you don’t get to make your own decisions. You don’t get to decide when you take time off, how much time you take off. You don’t get to decide where you live. That’s not wealthy either. So, it’s got to be all of those things holistically is I believe gives you a wealthy life. And so, most people aren’t thinking about the time value of their money. They’re not thinking, “What is my time really worth? Am I willing to trade my good years, my good days, my months, which it’s all life is, right? Just the short amount of time we’ve got here on this planet. Am I willing to trade all of that for any amount of money?” And my answer is no. My time is so much more infinitely valuable than my money.

So, to me, I’m always looking at how can I gain back and buy back my time by hiring the right people, the right processes, thinking about things I should not be involved in saying no a lot. I don’t even know the last time I did a podcast interview. You’re a friend of mine, so I’m out here doing this podcast interview because I appreciate you and I want to do it but I get offered interviews all the time, but I don’t want to do them often because my time is more valuable to do with other things and I have no need to do them for my ego or anything like that. So, saying no a lot is very important. Most entrepreneurs don’t know how to say no and deciding what it is that you want. Like, what did you dream of as a child? What did you want to be when you were successful? And most people don’t ask that question. They’re just too busy on the grind, they’re too busy hustling, or too busy trying to make the next buck. It’s like talking to the billionaires like, “I’d be happy if I just had 2 billion. I just had 2 billion. I’d be a lot happier than 1 billion.”

It’s like it’s absurd. We’re already all wealthy. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably wealthier than half the planet and yet we always want more. So, you got to be careful to not be in that trap of more, always aiming to grow and push yourself but it can be a trap as well. I see that for a lot of entrepreneurs.

Brad Weimert: No question. Also, you’re just sitting in your f*cking yacht talking to me. What are you talking about? Carving out time for the podcast being a big, laborious activity for you.

Brian Page: No, I love it, man. I mean, it’s funny. I dreamt of this for years. Years and years, I used to visualize and I’m very much a believer in visualization and doing affirmations and thinking through what you want, being crystal clear on what you want. And I used to visualize for years me driving my dream car over to the Marina and getting on my electric scooter, which is sitting out back here right now. My electric scooter is scooting down to my beautiful yacht, and then just do whatever I feel like. Take it out for the day, read, study new things, hang out with friends, entertain. And I’m blessed that I get to do it but I had to design that and say, “What am I going to do to get there?” So, I’m not spending my time in an office. I don’t have any employees here. I mean, I got my employees all over the world but I have nobody here. So, it gives me the ability to just be peaceful. My day is peaceful. My day is however I choose to unfold. And to me, that’s worth any amount of money.

And so, not that there isn’t a time to work hard. Don’t get me wrong. Remember, I put my TV in the attic. I didn’t date. I didn’t go out with friends. I didn’t go drinking. I just focused. And I was willing to put in three to five years of unbelievable determination and focus and sacrifice to be able to enjoy the good life. And so, I think that most people need to make the decision, are you willing to pay the price? There’s always going to be a price. Are you willing to pay the price to get what you want? And then when you get what you want, what are you going to do then? Are you just going to want more and more and more and more and burn yourself into the ground and alienate everyone in your life to get more of what you think you want? Or is there an end goal? Is there something that you’re like, “I have to think holistically about my life and what I want and not just chasing the dollar,” which is I’m talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs? So, we all love money but there’s a balance there because happiness is not correlated to your net worth. It’s just not. So, yeah, that’s my philosophy.

Brad Weimert: I think clarity of outcome is one of the most challenging things that entrepreneurs face, specifically in a world of shiny objects, attention-stealing mechanisms, dopamine rushes, FOMO.

Brian Page: Yeah. I mean, Think and Grow Rich, one of my favorite books of all time. I was told to read it every year. I have been pretty good about that. I think everyone should read that book every single year. If you only had one book in your library, that would be the book for me, personally. Think and Grow Rich, the short premise of the book is definiteness of purpose is the only thing. Definiteness of purpose, you have a definite outcome, a definite predefined, predetermined with an end date goal that has been decided on where you’re like, “I don’t care about anything else. I’m not going to do anything else. I’m going to execute until this is a reality.” That’s the master key of success. And most people just can’t get there. They can’t get into that. Most people aren’t even clear on what kind of relationship they want. What kind of people do they want to date? What are their minimum standards for the kind of friends they have in their life? How do they want to show up in the world? What’s their minimum standards for their health and their fitness?

They don’t make decisions. They’re just kind of like floating through life, hoping that something magical day is going to happen where money falls in their lap or success falls in their lap. And that’s just not the way it works. Being crystal, crystal clear about what you are going to do and aren’t going to do, and what you were willing to accept and not accept, and who you’re going to show up as every day, that’s it. That’s the game. It’s a discipline but it’s really not any more complicated than that because if you’re the kind of person that decides and then you follow through, you actually do what you say you’re going to do, not to other people but to yourself, anything’s possible. Most people just can’t do that. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. “I’m going to do this,” and then a month later they’re tired and they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know. I’m kind of demotivated now.”

Brad Weimert: No question about it. No question about it. Well, hiding that TV or in this era hiding social media from your phone or whatever is…

Brian Page: Oh, let’s talk about that for a second.

Brad Weimert: Clearing out distractions.

Brian Page: Are we talking about social media?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Let’s go.

Brian Page: Okay. So, this is going to blow up in most people’s minds. I don’t have any social media apps on my phone. This is my phone. I have no social media apps on my phone. I don’t even know the last time I went on most of the social networks unless I’m maybe at my desktop and I’m doing it for work purposes. Now, that sounds crazy because if you go look on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, you’re going to see my content but that’s not me. That’s my team putting it out. I’m not on there. I don’t care what the comments are. I’m not in there like messaging trying to figure out if I’m cool or not or how many likes I have. I just don’t care about that stuff. I’m too busy enjoying my real life. And so, to me, social media is an absolute trap in many ways because you’re the product. Go watch the documentary on Netflix. You understand that you are the product and it’s an absolute time suck. It’s an attention suck. There’s no net positive generally unless you’re using it as a tool. And I use it for marketing. I use it to sell my products. It’s great for that purpose.

But I have done a detox from social media because to me it’s just an absolute, it’s just like the last place I need to be to be able to live the life I want to live. And so, most people are shocked by that because they’re like, “You’re not on there?” Like, “No, I’m not on there.” And I would encourage people, especially during the building phase, that they need to just cut all that BS out. Unless you’re on Facebook because you’re launching your ad, there’s no reason to be on Facebook. There’s no reason to be on Instagram unless you’re on there like actually making money. And even if you know you’re addicted to it, give it to somebody in your team and don’t be in there. Just don’t be in there because it is an absolute. The average American is average because they’re consumers. They’re not producing anything. And producers get paid, consumers don’t. Consumers are the ones paying the producers. You know, you produce a course, you produce a place for somebody to stay in a short-term rental. You produce jobs in their company. Producers get paid.

And if you start consuming, you went on that rabbit hole, you become a victim of the algorithm. I just heard an interview with Elon Musk and he said he was freaked out by his first use of TikTok because he could see the algorithm reading his mind. He’s like, “I’m done. I’m out.” Although he did admit he’s addicted to Twitter or X. So, I think that most people could free up an enormous amount of time psychically and energy in their life if they just cut out social media, they cut out all the nonsense, they cut out the partying or whatever it is that is a distraction for you to get about, get busy about what it is that you need to be about, putting in the time to be able to build something that you can eventually step back from and they’ll feed you for life.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think it’s relevant to check in on those things on a routine basis and audit how you’re spending your time and audit what’s actually productive.

Brian Page: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Many, many, many people I know are incredibly busy and they’re busy with things that aren’t actually in the important quadrant.

Brian Page: So true.

Brad Weimert: And they rationalize it.

Brian Page: Yeah. It’s a dopamine hit, right? We need that dopamine hit and these apps are designed, they’re technically designed by very smart people, and these very powerful algorithms to keep giving you dopamine hits so you become an addict. It’s no different than drugs. That is just as highly addictive as drugs. And then we get into this thing where we’re like, “I can’t believe how much of my life I’m giving to watching streaming shows on Netflix or being on social media or being virtually with people. I’m texting people and I’m not actually sitting down with another human face-to-face. When’s the last time we just sat down with a friend and just spent the entire day with them, half a day with them or whatever? And most people don’t do that these days. They’re saying that younger people are not even dating these days. They don’t date in the sense that they get together. Is anybody even having sex anymore? I saw that. It was a line from a funny movie I saw, “Is anybody even having sex anymore?” because everybody’s like separated by their devices and by these black mirrors, so to speak.

So, I think that once you start getting out of that matrix, that is the new matrix. The new matrix is distraction. That’s the new matrix. It’s attention and it’s distraction. And when you start removing yourself from it, you’re like, “Wow. Okay. I know what’s important in life.” It’s not what other people think. It’s not how popular I am. It’s not showing the world that I have this incredible life and lifestyle. I’m too busy enjoying the actual life that I have. I don’t have to show it to anybody. So, the new flex to me is not flexing. And you see this when you go to countries. You go to third-world countries like I spent quite a bit of time in India. I’ve been there a few times. You see these people have nothing and they generally appear to be joyous. They truly have nothing because all they have is each other. All they do is spend all their time living in the frickin same room in some little tiny little hovel and they’re truly happy and joyous because they have people in their lives. And ultimately, at the end of the world, end of our lives, that’s all that really matters is people. Honestly, it’s relationships we have. That’s all that matters. So, I think we just forget it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Totally agree.

Brian Page: We think that all of this is real and it’s not real.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, and without question, the real flex is not flexing.

Brian Page: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: No question about it. The most successful wealthy people in the world are not the flashiest.

Brian Page: They’re not the ones that anybody knows about. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: No. Some of the richest people I know aren’t public. Don’t want you to know it. Don’t wear fancy sh*t. You’d never know unless they told you, right? So, let’s talk about getting ultra-wealthy and investing a little bit before we wrap because we hit on core focus in producing income versus preserving income and growing or preserving wealth and growing it and sort of allocating your wealth across different asset classes but heavily focusing on one to produce it. So, you focused on this Airbnb information and coaching product company, BNB Formula, to produce a bunch of income. At some point then, you have to do something with the money if you don’t want to just give it to the government. And even if you do give it to the government, you still have to do something with the rest of it. So, one, presumably, you had at least at some point had a portfolio of real estate that you were also doing the Airbnb model with. Where else did you park cash and what did you do from a tax perspective and investing perspective?

Brian Page: Okay. So, this is a very good question. So, one of the first things that I did is I started looking for what asset class can I put my money into where it’ll be as safe as possible, grow over time, and give me huge tax advantages. And so, for me, real estate was still the answer, will always be the answer. I can argue that it’s the perfect investment in many ways. And so, what I did is I wanted to get into multifamily because I realized multifamily, I didn’t want to own a bunch of small homes, individual properties, although I had done that throughout my life. I want to get into multifamily but I also didn’t want to get distracted by multifamily because it wasn’t my core business. So, I wasn’t going to try to learn multifamily, which is, again, it’s a mistake of many entrepreneurs will jump from what they’re doing that’s working, right? Okay. So, I’m doing Airbnb. It’s working. I’m doing the online thing and selling digital products. That’s working. Now, I’m going to go jump into multifamily to be able to preserve my money. No, I’m not.

So, what I did is I found somebody that I trust. That is a guy who lives here locally. And he was offering people to come in and invest in his projects. So, he has thousands of doors all over the country. Some people invest with Cardone. Some people invest in these syndicates, essentially. You can invest into multifamily without having to know much about it or go do the deal yourself. You have tax advantages. If you set it up properly, you have cash flow, you have equity growth, you have all these kinds of things. And all it requires is to write a check. Do your due diligence and then write a check, and then you sit back and that’s it, done. It might not be the highest returns in the world but it is relatively safe compared to other asset classes where you’re not going to lose the money that you have. Got the guy here pumping out the boat. You might need to pause.

Brad Weimert: Nice. No, you’re good. You’re good. We’re just proving that this is a real backdrop and not a Zoom backdrop.

Brian Page: He’s got the sh*tty job literally. He’s pumping the sewage out of the boat.

Brad Weimert: Pumping the poop?

Brian Page: Okay. So, you can’t make that up. All right. So, where was I? So, I started investing in multifamily. There’s a private island that I invested into in South Carolina that we’re developing in short-term rentals with little huts all over it. And so, started parking money there. I started investing into private equity, into companies that are going to be going public, going on Nasdaq in the near future, which is really, really exciting. There’s only a few ways that you can make what I consider really big money. One of them is private equity, selling your company, exiting your company as a way to make a huge amount of money. And so, I started investing in companies I didn’t build but I know the founders, I know the creators, and I know the people that own the company. And I’m able to invest a little bit of money in there. So, it’s higher risk but I have potential to make a good return when those companies go public.

Brad Weimert: So, one of the questions that I have there is I am and I think I know where you’re going to go but I want you to elaborate on it. I really like real estate investing. And part of what I like is navigating the game. I like analyzing the deals. I like the physical structure. I like having secondary uses for the building depending on what the investment is. You mentioned just handing the money off and just writing a check and somebody else dealing with it. And then you said, “It’s okay if I don’t get the maximum return.”

Brian Page: Yes.

Brad Weimert: How do you think about when you’re investing in real estate for the sake of wealth preservation and wealth growth? And you mentioned this at the island, but why not just double down on a sh*tload of short-term rentals or other versus literally being hands-off and writing a check?

Brian Page: Well, it depends on where you want to focus your time and energy. So, I have a limited amount of time and energy. I don’t work more than about 15, 20 hours a week, so I have very limited time to be able to actually put into thinking about these kind of things. And my main vehicle is my current company. So, I’m thinking about how do I scale my current company, not how do I go analyze and look up apartment deals and do all that kind of stuff. So, to me, I want to have a place where I can park my money, where it’s going to grow, where I’m going to have tax advantages, where I’m going to be relatively safe for me, that be multifamily, but not have to spend too much time thinking about it, looking at deals, analyzing deals, trying to buy my own first property and all the pitfalls that come along with that. So, for me, I want to place it so I’m focusing on one thing, which is my current company, and growing that and scaling that because quite frankly, I don’t do well when I try to do two things at once.

So, for me, could I have made more by doing my own deal? Potentially. But that’s not my biggest concern. My big payday is going to be with my current company. And so, I’m focusing on my number one jewel, so to speak, and the crown. I’m focusing on that and growing that just as if I ever sold my company, my current company, and moved on to something else, I would focus on that. That would be my primary focus. So, a lot of people that get distracted because they’re jumping from industry to industry to thing to thing, trying to become an expert in many different disparate fields. And they wonder why they’re pulling their hair out. They just want the time or bandwidth to do that. And so, again, as my attorney from many years ago said, “When you find something that works, do more of that.” Don’t do anything else. Just do more of that until you, of course, hit a ceiling or your vehicle outgrows you or you outgrow your vehicle and you’re like, “Alright. I can only make this much money with this vehicle. Maybe it’s time to sell it. Maybe it’s time to put on autopilot and get another vehicle.”

So, for me, it’s all about focusing on one thing at a time. And of course, as I mentioned before, lifestyle’s very important to me. So, I have very limited time to be able to actually work. I mean, I’m already living the life I want. I want to grow my wealth and all that kind of stuff but it’s not going to change my lifestyle a whole lot unless I want to buy a bigger yacht than what I have. So, to me, it’s all balance, right? So, I hope that answers the question.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think so. The biggest return you’re going to get is growing the company and potentially exiting and the other investments you need to park the cash somewhere. So, any return is going to be good as long as you don’t lose the money. But then the other thing you said was tax advantages. So, talk to me about, pick one significant tax vehicle that allowed you to not just give away your money to the IRS.

Brian Page: Okay. Well, I’m sitting on it right here. This is the best thing I ever did. So, I used to rent an office right here on the water. It was $10,000 a month for 600 square feet. So, why don’t I just do the math on that one? That’s like Manhattan prices. It’s ridiculous. But it was a beautiful office and I was like, “Why am I doing this when I could buy a boat?” Because I know there’s tax advantages to buying a yacht and it’s just me. I don’t have employees or whatever, so I only need a spot for me to go work when I am working. So, I looked into it and I had no idea that when you buy a yacht, for example, this is also true with planes, but when you buy a yacht, you get a 100% deduction in year one. So, I bought this last December, so that’s coming up on a year and only owned it for a couple of weeks. I put it in a charter company, LLC. That company charters it. It’s my company as an office. And we had a $2 million deduction last year. So, $2 million right off the top, 100% deduction. I get I think 80% this year. So, my actual cost on this boat is net positive.

I get paid to own the boat, which sounds ludicrous and I’m not an accountant but my accountant would be happy to explain how that works. So, I think it’s net $1,300 a month or something to own the boat versus rent. So, there are all kinds of loopholes like this. This just happens to be one of them. Yachts happen to be one of the best, which is why you see a lot of wealthy people owning huge, massive yachts. I will be upgrading this to something much bigger in the near future and get a bigger deduction. So, I’ll always be moving up, moving up, moving up. And so, I get to have something I really enjoy. I use it all the time and it’s a huge tax deduction and there’s many different ways to do that. But one of the best ways is you buy something that is tax deductible. I get to depreciate this yacht and it’s a huge, huge thing. So, I actually could not believe what I owed in taxes last year. I went to my accountant and I said, “This can’t be right. It’s so low.” He’s like, “No, you bought a yacht.” So, that’s a great way to go, especially somebody…

You know, for me, it worked in a different way than most people because I use it for clients. I do events on it occasionally, and then I use it as an actual office. So, it is a true tax write-off. But there’s other ways, other things you can buy as well. Real estate has huge deductions when you buy real estate, especially multifamily, jets, vehicles, over 5,000 pounds, all these kind of things. So, you can enjoy really good lifestyle and also use those as deductions. Again, I’m not a tax expert but that’s been a really good move for me.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I live in Austin and I don’t think I want to park a yacht in my driveway.

Brian Page: Well, that would be next level, though, wouldn’t it? Like, “Why is that yacht in there? Oh, that’s Brad.” That’s true. But a plane is a great way to go too. There’s a lot of things that – the thing you want to do is spend your money. I do agree with like Cardone talks about that. You should be sitting on a bunch of cash. I totally agree. It’s good to have some cash on hand so you take advantage of things you don’t want to not have “an emergency day fund.” That could be a big, big fund when you’re wealthier. But you shouldn’t sit on all your money in cash because it’s not going to grow. There’s no tax deductions. You’re not buying anything that’s going to help you. So, you should look at buying certain things that will help you to reduce your tax liability. And so, that’s one of the things I’ll always be doing.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Word of warning for people. As they dig into this, first off, I am also not a tax expert. But when you look at these vehicles if you are an entrepreneur that has gotten into the multi-million dollar take-home category and you’re looking at how do I minimize taxes, yachts and planes are super interesting because of the accelerated deductions, depreciation. There’s also carrying cost. So, like a plane, for example, you’ve got heavy carrying costs over the course of the following years. So, great, you’ve got a deduction in your one but you have to think about is your income going to sustain? Does this make sense next year or the year after, the year after? And in your case, you get the win-win because you want to be on the boat all the time because you are a boat connoisseur.

Brian Page: Yeah. It’s a huge win because it’s part of the lifestyle. I’m not the typical yacht owner. I think the typical yacht owner uses their boat two or three times a year. So, they even have these crews on these super yachts down in Miami and they live there and the owner barely ever, almost never shows up. I’m like that is insane. Like, you have a whole crew of people that are sitting around waiting for you to show up in case you want to go on a short trip. So, I use it all the time, which is very unusual. I’m on it almost every single day but, yeah, there are holding costs. But here’s the most brilliant thing about it and I could not believe this. This is why you have to understand investing and you can’t assume that things are true that might not be true. So, I always assume when you buy something like a supercar, it absolutely drops in value like a rock. And sometimes it does during the pandemic. The value of supercars actually went up. My car went up in value where same thing with yachts. You’re assuming you buy a yacht, it’s going to drop in value like a rock.

And so, I got this yacht a year ago and I could sell it today for the same amount of money I bought it for. So, no difference. And I actually talked to some brokers. I was like, “How is that even possible?” And the broker that I’ve been working with, he said, “Well, I just sold my boat that I bought three years ago for the same price.” How is that possible? Like, my brain is like I don’t understand. He said, “Well, Brian, there’s something called inflation and inflation is raging everywhere, and especially in the cost to build yachts. What it cost to build this boat, which has been out for a few years now, the same model, today, every year it goes up by hundreds of thousands of dollars to build the same boat.” So, a buyer comes along and says, “Do I want to buy Brian’s for what he paid for it or do I want to pay $500,000 more for one that’s slightly newer, it’s the exact same model, it looks the same, this thing is still in new condition, or do I want to buy his?” So, as the costs go up on certain things, inflation actually helps the sale of certain things. So, I could actually sell it and lose no money.

So, they always say don’t buy depreciating assets. And I do agree with that but that’s not true if there’s a tax advantage and it’s not true if it doesn’t lose any money. You have to assume that if you buy depreciating assets and they have no income, I’m able to do events on this thing and actually pay for it just for the events that I do if I do occasional mastermind and stuff on the boat. So, there are things you need to understand when you start getting financially literate and understanding how these things work that they kind of go against what you think is true. And when I found that, first of all, I wasn’t going to lose any or nearly any value in the time I’m going to own it and I have a huge tax advantage, it’s silly of me to stay renting an office when I could own this. And it’s really pleasantly surprising. It makes you wonder what these industries have with the government that they’re able to get these loopholes in there? They must be pretty powerful or they’re rich. It’s really not them that’s powerful. It’s just the rich make the rules, right?

The golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. They make the rules so they can go buy all the toys that they want and not pay taxes. I mean, it will never change. It’s always the way it was. It will be the way that it always is. So, that’s why the rich get richer because the rules are in favor of amassing and keeping more and more wealth. So, rather than complain about it, just go get rich and start using these for yourself. And I would encourage people to really, they don’t have to become a tax expert but you need to get an aggressive accountant who understands creative accounting, understands not breaking any rules, but there are many rules that most accountants don’t know about. Get a good team. I spend a lot more money on my accountants than anybody that I know of. I also pay the least amount in taxes legally than anybody I know in my tax bracket. So, that’s what I encourage people to do, too, if they’re investors and they’re making money now.

Brad Weimert: Well, I know we’re coming up on time. You wrote a book called Don’t Start a Side Hustle. Where can people find it?

Brian Page: Just happened to have one right there.

Brad Weimert: I love it. Who should read it and where can they find it?

Brian Page: Okay. Well, we’ve talked about this. A lot of the stuff in the book that I talked about in this interview is right here in this book. You can get it on Amazon. Don’t Start a Side Hustle. Obviously, I kind of lightly brushed on what I do investing and the difference for me. We’re in a hustle culture. Everybody’s telling you to go work your ass off and do a million things and just work harder than everyone else. I don’t agree with that because ultimately you want to have your money work for you, not you working for your money. And so, the opposite of a side hustle is cash flow. That’s it. It’s a book about cash flow. It’s a book about lifestyle. It’s a book about having more time, not just more money, but more time. And so, hustling is not going to be the way to get you there. It might be good for certain stretches. It might be good to build something, but you don’t want to spend your whole life hustling unless you do. That’s your choice, of course. But if you want to learn how not sort of side hustle, start building cash flow, and then having an incredible life and lifestyle and time to enjoy your life, that’s what this book is about.

I don’t know if I’m going to write another book. I think I said everything in here that I want to say. I covered a lot of things and mistakes that I’ve made and warnings that I have for people as they go on their journey of entrepreneurship but very proud of it. And I encourage you to get a copy if you want to kind of dive further into what I was talking about here today.

Brad Weimert: Amazing. Brian Page, I appreciate carving out time. I’ll let you get back to your lifestyle and chill on your boat.

Brian Page: Well, thank you, Brad. I appreciate you and I really enjoy talking to you today.

Brad Weimert: Likewise, man.