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Show Notes
Stuck at 6 or 7 figures? In this episode of Beyond A Million, Brad sits down with Preston Brown to unpack why most entrepreneurs struggle to break the 8-figure ceiling—and what it actually takes to get there. Preston Brown is a highly successful entrepreneur, speaker, and business mentor based in El Paso, Texas. Known for his expertise in scaling and automating businesses, he manages a diverse portfolio of companies that collectively generate over nine figures—more than $200 million—in annual revenue. His ventures span various industries, including real estate and finance. Preston began his entrepreneurial journey while still in college, earning more than his professors and eventually dropping out to focus on building businesses full-time. Preston is celebrated for his innovative approach to business, emphasizing automation and optimization to create sustainable growth. He has mentored hundreds of CEOs and entrepreneurs, helping them scale their companies profitably. In addition to his business achievements, Preston is a sought-after speaker and mentor, sharing insights on entrepreneurship, personal growth, and community impact. In this insight-packed interview, Preston outlines his problem-solving framework and shares the seven stages of entrepreneurship, explaining that each requires different solutions and automation strategies. Tune in!
Inspiring Quotes
- “What seven-figure and six-figure entrepreneurs aren’t doing is learning.” – Preston Brown
- “When you’re a new entrepreneur, say yes to everything. Then, once you figure out what you like, start saying no to the stuff you like less.” – Preston Brown
- “Revenue is vanity. Profits are sanity.” – Preston Brown
- “I don’t believe in perfect 10s—there’s always room for improvement.” – Brad Weimert
- “You wouldn’t go to Walmart and pay for something you don’t want. So why would I pay attention to you if I don’t want the information you’re giving?” – Preston Brown
- “Your problems are your gifts. Your problems are your guides.” – Preston Brown
- “You must do before you delegate.” – Preston Brown
- “Your problems are your gifts. They’re your guides. If you can stop managing by crisis, even for just one hour a day, and step back to look at your business, categorize your problems, and solve the biggest one, it will teach you more than any mentor or mastermind ever could.” – Preston Brown
Key Takeaways
- 00:00:00 Intro
- 00:02:20 What 7-figure entrepreneurs are doing wrong
- 00:05:38 Managing multiple businesses
- 00:15:40 Automating business processes
- 00:31:41 Seven stages of entrepreneurship
- 00:45:00 Focusing on big problems
- 00:53:23 Preston’s problem-solving framework
- 01:06:39 Private jets and lifestyle
- 01:24:07 Outro
Full Transcript
00:00
Preston Brown
ADD is a gift for entrepreneurs because they then know what is the most interesting thing in the room. When you know what the most interesting thing in the room is, that’s what people would also pay for. He was like, what would you charge me to come spend a week in my business? And I was like, I’m not willing to do it. And he’s like, I’ll pay you 50 grand. I was like, you’re going to pay me $50,000 to spend a week in your business? And so he paid me 50 grand and upped his revenue like 15 million.
00:21
Brad Weimert
Jesus.
00:22
Preston Brown
When you’re a new entrepreneur, you should say yes to everything and then you find what you like and you start saying no to all the that you like less. You don’t have to go clean the bathroom to hire a janitor, but you should know that there shouldn’t be shit on the toilet seat.
00:35
Brad Weimert
What are seven figure entrepreneurs not doing that? They should be to get to that 8 or 9 figure mark. Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Wymert and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data with behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today.
01:15
Brad Weimert
In Those multi million, 8, 9 and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Preston Brown. I am so glad that Justin introduced us. I’m looking forward to talking, man.
01:27
Preston Brown
Same here, brother.
01:28
Brad Weimert
You started in a trailer park, literally, and now you have 20 different businesses, many of which you still operate directly, that are doing a couple hundred million a year in revenue. So I understand.
01:37
Preston Brown
Combined. Yes, combined. And we probably oscillate like that was. That was social media clickbait bullshit. I mean I put that out there on TikTok and we did do it. Like it wasn’t bullshit. But like, I think the next year we did much less levels at.
01:54
Brad Weimert
What does much less mean?
01:56
Preston Brown
Like 130, 135 million. And, and so it was like, I think we did like 210 million or something. I said, yeah, $200 million in revenue. And, but like revenue’s vanity. Profits are sanity. The Next year we did way less revenue and we actually made way more money. And so that was all clickbait bullshit. But. But we’re probably averaging 150 to 250.
02:16
Brad Weimert
Yes, but only kind of. I mean it. Click clickbait. Yes. Bullshit. No. I like to ask and I like to be direct because I think that it’s incredibly, first of all, if I ran, you know, 27 miles, I’m not going to say 30. And if I, something in me is going to be like I have to correct myself and say it too. I think it’s really important to know who you’re talking to and know what the foundation is to get advice from them. So I appreciate the clarity. Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of questions around that and around what businesses you have. But before we get into that, couple of quick questions. What are seven figure entrepreneurs not doing that they should be to get to that eight or nine figure mark.
02:53
Preston Brown
There’s not an easy answer to that. Probably the simple one word answer is a lot. But if, like, if we’re going to dive into what our seven figure and frankly six figure and want to be six figure entrepreneurs are not doing to get there. It’s, they’re not learning. They’re stuck in a rut, they’re stuck in a box. They’ve created an identity or a culture which is I guess what they get to be during the day, but also the prison of what they fucking have to be as well. And because they’re in this management by crisis stage, like generally constantly, they’re not seeing the field from the trees like they’re stuck in the weeds if you want. And so the biggest thing they’re not doing right is learning.
03:31
Preston Brown
And if they can isolate out their problems, like I, I guess I have a very simple philosophy. Philosophy here. The meaning of life is twofold. Love is the meaning of life. That’s one. So we have to figure out how to be happy and loving. But then two problems are the meaning of life. Like God sent us here to have problems, okay? And our problems are our gifts and our problems are our guides. And if you’re in business, the sale that you want to make to any customer you have is a solution to their problem. So what are you? You’re a solution center, right? And the way that you can solve more problems for your customers is by knowing what your problems are internally.
04:08
Preston Brown
And if you can stop managing by crisis for like an hour a day and like sit back and look on your business like there’s this like in your business, on your business. That’s so stupid. You need both. You need to be in your business and on your business. And you need to step back, look at your problems, categorize your problems, find the biggest ones. Solve that. It’s going to be your teacher. It’s going to be your guide. Like, it’s more important than any mentor or mastermind you can ever do. I highly recommend mentors and masterminds and all that. But, like, most important, like, your problem should be your mentors. Start learning.
04:39
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I think that, I mean, my experience with myself in life is that I’m sort of always striving for the finish line. And that mentality gets you in trouble because then you feel like you’ve figured it out. If, if there’s a finish line, then you have figured it out. You’ve gotten there. But I think the reality is that you never figure it out. You’re always figuring out new things. If you don’t look for the ways to learn, you end up complacent.
05:03
Preston Brown
Yeah, that’s. I 100% resonate with that. Like, no. And I think part of that’s just being a dude. Like, like we’re, we’re looking for.
05:12
Brad Weimert
You want to win the goal.
05:13
Preston Brown
Like, we’re looking for, how do we win? What’s it look like to win? But then, but then when we win, we immediately have to reboot. I mean, insurance companies say the moment you retire the finish line, you find your finish line, you die in two years. Like, they can track this with anyone that retires. So we’re all, we all, we need a finish line. Like, and we need a new finish line at every moment in life. I mean, but I resemble that remark.
05:37
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Okay, so the other quick question here is you have a lot of businesses and tell me the stats here. I read, I think that you have 20 companies and you’re operating seven. Is that accurate still?
05:49
Preston Brown
Currently, yes. Yeah.
05:51
Brad Weimert
What is the most pain in the ass business you have?
05:54
Preston Brown
Servicing pools.
05:55
Brad Weimert
Service.
05:56
Preston Brown
We’re in the process of getting, I mean, yeah, so I launched it because I couldn’t get my pool serviced. And, you know, I built a pool. And I say I built a pool. I hired a guy to build a pool in my house. I wanted a pool for my kids. And you know, nine months later, he wasn’t done. I was already building homes. Building homes is just a checklist. Like, it’s not that hard. And there’s less items on the checklist of building a pool than there is on a home. Yet for some reason, they’re more cost per foot than a home, which is really interesting. So I was like, wait a minute. Why, like, nine months? It should be three. And it was Covid, but the excuses ran out. So I finished my pool up myself.
06:32
Preston Brown
And then I was like, all right, well, I’ll hire a pool servicer. And those guys were equally disorganized as the pool contractor. And then I got pissed, and I said, you know what these people? And I went out and I looked at all the best pool servicing companies that couldn’t seem to service me, and I hired all their people. And then I went on like the. The MLS for realtors, because I have a real estate brokerage as well, and I. I just started looking up data for people that had just bought homes that had pools. And when you buy a home, you’re really disorganized. So I offered every single one of these people whose information is in the MLS free pool servicing for a month and no obligation. If they didn’t like us, they didn’t have to continue. 90% of them continued.
07:08
Preston Brown
We had a pool servicing company. I serviced my pool for free. But I’ll tell you what, those are the shittiest contractors you ever want to manage. Like, when you’re dealing with foreman, like, I love working with my construction business. Foremen are highly paid, professional guys.
07:23
Brad Weimert
Right.
07:23
Preston Brown
When you’re dealing with pool servicers, you’re like, well, you didn’t smoke crack today, right?
07:29
Brad Weimert
So just quality of workers for that job.
07:32
Preston Brown
Yeah. And it’s kind of an industry issue. Like, I mean, nobody. Nobody’s sitting there thinking, oh, the pool guy is a sophisticated guy. Right?
07:40
Brad Weimert
Like, yeah. Can you train people into that, though? I mean, because. Because you have the same thing in home building, right? You’ve got a good foreman, but then you’ve got all the contractors that have to build out the home.
07:47
Preston Brown
Well, yeah, it’s actually a little different. So, like, the contractors are subcontractors. So they’re. They’re entrepreneurs. They’re. They’re much more trainable. They’re dealing with problem solving. Most homebuilders don’t build the homes. They’re financing companies that know a lot about borrowing money, and they’re organizational companies that know a lot about scheduling people. And like. Like you have foreman who’s kind of the babysitter out there, making sure that everybody does things right and in the right order. But the foreman’s highly professional, and the subcontractors generally, I mean, in most cases manage their guys very well. Otherwise they don’t stay. And especially in markets like this where people need work, it’s just not hard to find good people. Like, you get the creme de la creme pricing really well right now.
08:33
Preston Brown
Pool guys, on the other hand, like when you’re a pool servicing company, you kind of do everything. And so it’s not like you’re farming out generally to a good plumber or a good electrician. You do everything. And when you’re doing everything, like, and you’re trying to get some like 30 or 40,000 a year guy, like after inflation just spiked and there’s not. We’ve actually tried pulling some foreman into the pool industry and just paying them more. But then we find that there’s a cost benefit analysis that I’d rather just build 30 more homes. Because if you build 30 more homes, you make $3 million. But if they service 50 more pools, you make what, six, eight grand a month.
09:17
Brad Weimert
Right?
09:17
Preston Brown
Like, I mean, there’s just. It’s great to own a pool servicing company, unless you own other types of construction companies that make way more money.
09:26
Brad Weimert
So that’s, so that’s the other question here. So you already told me how you started the pool servicing company, which is hilarious and good entrepreneurial story. A very common issue that entrepreneurs have is shiny object syndrome. And they’re chasing too many things at once. Is you’re in. You have a. The home building company, it sounds like, is obviously more profitable than the. Or makes more than the pool servicing. Why do you have so many businesses and is it a distraction for you at this point or do you still like that model?
09:53
Preston Brown
Well, yeah, so you asked a lot of questions there and a lot of good questions there. So I’m going to kind of break them apart and answer them one at a time. My start as an entrepreneur, I mean I was typical entrepreneur looking for a way up, knew enough that jobs were really stupid. And I could measure that people that had jobs did not have great lives later stage. In most cases, there’s the exceptions that prove the rule. But most people’s retirement check does not keep up with inflation anywhere close. So I kind of looked at that and I was like, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And when you start as an entrepreneur, like if you go listen to Grant Cardone, he says, oh, say yes to everything.
10:29
Preston Brown
And you go listen to, you know, Warren Buffett, he’s like, oh, no, one thing. Say no to everything. And so it’s like, wait, what, what the do I do? Where do I start. And the answer’s in both places. If you want to find truth, you gotta look for a paradox. So when you’re a new entrepreneur, you should say yes to everything and then you find what you like and you start saying no to all the shit that you like less. And so I do have a lot of businesses. I probably started in home flip. No, I definitely started in home flipping. I probably mix up the order now, but I think it went brokerage after that and then property management after that and then hard money lending and then title. And I actually got the homebuilding business more recently.
11:07
Preston Brown
That was an acquisition in 2018. Because of market factors that one took off. My brokerage used to be my larger business with all real estate verticals here.
11:16
Brad Weimert
So this actually makes a lot of sense. Like you were stacking up the kind of vertically integrating the real estate sale experience.
11:23
Preston Brown
It worked and it didn’t. It looked really sexy on paper and social media. Yeah, but not on financial statements paper. That was the type of paper that it didn’t look like those you could hang next to the toilet paper. Right. In case you ran out. Yes. But so I, I wound up being like, businesses are like parenting. Like, if you have one kid and you’re a parent and you’re like, hey, I’m gonna go have six more kids, like, that was me. So I had seven kids and I was a terrible parent to all of them. One would be doing well, or three would be doing well and then the others would be doing poorly, but they were well enough to offset it. And I could make a million or a few million a year, and that was better than everybody else was doing.
12:01
Preston Brown
So I was winning, right?
12:02
Brad Weimert
Yep.
12:03
Preston Brown
Then I, I got into home building and I made some of the right moves. And there’s a lot of stories in that. I mean, it. I bought a failing company and I turned it around because I knew how. But with that very quickly, inside of a few years, was making me more money than all of my businesses combined, annually, monthly. And so it was like, oh, maybe I should learn something about this. But it’s sort of like a wife at that point. She’s not really happy about the girlfriends. So I immediately did everything I could to go in and do the focus thing. I said, okay, enough with the Grant Cardone shit. I’m gonna do the Warren Buffett shit.
12:39
Brad Weimert
But you still wanted to keep the girlfriends around.
12:41
Preston Brown
I kept the girlfriends around. But like I went and I hired high paid managers, high paid people, like did everything stupid that I would recommend against now took on partners go run them that I later had to help exit because they were the wrong people. I did anything I could to automate these companies and get them out of my hair in any way. Most of them shrank a lot. Okay. Over the next few years, it took me five years, four and a half, five years to automate the homebuilding company to the point that I could go back and kind of recapture all the places I started. What I’d learned at that point, which I also had some benefits of, I’d opened a travel agency, I’d coached a lot of very high net worth individuals coaching their businesses, you’re learning for your own as well.
13:21
Preston Brown
I developed a lot of frameworks, formulas and that just over my whole life I was like, oh shit, like automation worked here. But if I add this layer to the formula, it’ll work there. And automation of a company is the real way to get rich. Like, anything that you have to do in your business is taking away from automation. Like a good CEO, which every entrepreneur should be once they have the right C suite. Executives should not be doing the work. Like you shouldn’t be doing anything. Like, I mean, in that business, your job is to think, your job is to learn, your job is to anticipate, your job is to get ahead. Your job is to innovate. Like, and the more you’re doing, the less you’re thinking about that. So I automated ZIA Homes in El Paso.
14:03
Preston Brown
I mean, you can look it up. It’s a phenomenal company. And then I started taking back all my other companies and I kind of started one at a time, like at a really fun hard money lending company. Like, we make jokes, our loans are so easy that Brad will make your money hard and you know, a little bit of innuendo there, but it’s playful, it’s fun, and it was a fun business. So I, it wasn’t my most profitable other company. It was the one I had the most fun in. And I like to joke that I put the fu in fun. So I brought that one back and I automated and I put the right team together and I put the right KPIs and I put everything there because I mean, it had fallen to shit.
14:37
Preston Brown
It was costing me money when I took it back over. But it was my fun business. Like, we’d made bad loans. I mean, were dealing with foreclosures, interest rates rising. When you own a hard money company is not always good for you because you’re already high. And so you Hit the market ceiling of what people could pay a lot faster than the banks do. And so it was probably my worst business at that point. But my most fun, we took it back over, became an industry leader again and then just kind of went business by business, taking it back over. So, yes, Now I have 20 companies. 7 are semi automated and then the others are, are fully automated. And I say semi automated because if you’re scaling, you’re not automated.
15:18
Brad Weimert
Right.
15:19
Preston Brown
Like, Zia is still growing. We have a tech company that we’ve created out of Zia Homes that is growing rapidly. Like when you’re parenting a teenager. That’s a lot like dealing with a scaling company. Like, they’re not going to drive the car slowly when you let them start driving, like they’re going to go faster, they’re going to wreck. You need to hope it’s not terminal, you know.
15:40
Brad Weimert
Yeah. So tell me about, I want to talk about kind of the nuances around automation, because some businesses seem like they’d be very easy to automate. Home building does not seem like something that would be very easy to automate. Tell me about the steps to automating Zia so automation.
15:55
Preston Brown
And you’re absolutely right, automation is very critical to I, I call it languaging. Like, home building is a very difficult business to automate and it’s why it’s not automated at this point. So when you’re looking at figuring out all the languages you need to speak in a business, you also need to look at targeting. Like, where do you want the company? Like, if Zia Homes wanted to do 100 homes a year, I could have it automated all day long. Like, you know, we’re doing about 300 homes a year now. We are. You’re not always just scaling size in a company. Sometimes you’re scaling size, sometimes you’re scaling brands, sometimes you’re scaling margin, sometimes you’re scaling sales, sometimes you might be scaling efficiencies.
16:40
Preston Brown
Like, you know, we built a tech and we found out in our warranty company that like not warranty company, it’s department of Zia Homes, that with this technology we’re able to isolate where weren’t the best builder because later on somewhere, say three months, six months into the homeowner’s experience, they’re like, hey, this is breaking.
17:00
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
17:00
Preston Brown
When you’re building a home, whatever your costs are, you want them the lowest. Six months after you’ve closed the home, you’re finding out, maybe I should have spent a little More here.
17:09
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
17:09
Preston Brown
And so when were building 150 homes a year, we had about a $30,000 a month expense and warranty. Like, if you honor your warranty, shit’s gonna break. Like, homes are interesting, right? Like, I’m in El Paso. I like to joke. I’m so Mexican, my last name’s even brown. When people expect your home building company to be perfect, I always tell them, jesus didn’t build this, but Jesus was involved, okay? And so, like, there’s gonna be things wrong. Like, it’s the last product manufactured at that price point in America by human hands.
17:40
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
17:41
Preston Brown
Shit’s gonna go wrong. We now build 300 homes a year plus and our warranty cost has cut to like less than 10,000amonth. And it’s because we’re spending a little more money here, a little less money there. We’re changing a process here, whatever that’s not automated. Like, that’s. We’re still in learning mode. So you’re not necessarily always scaling the same thing. So I say Zia’s semi automated.
18:04
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
18:04
Preston Brown
Can I go away for a month? Yes. Will Trump put tariffs? Yes. Will I have to anticipate what that’s going to do? Yes. So it’s not 100% automated. Does that make sense? Now, the businesses that are easy to automate, like, say, software as a service business.
18:21
Brad Weimert
Well, before you tell me the ones that are easy to automate, what are the things that are automated in Zia that make that you have streamlined through the process.
18:29
Preston Brown
Okay, so what is automated in Zia would be like, now I can say the warranty is automated, at least to a point that we, we can’t innovate further. Okay. We designed Zia homes out and we built 10 different departments of home building. But like I would say our production system is fully automated, but it’s about to not because we’re finishing the production side of our tech. And that’s going to create a level of scope creep where we’re going to learn from that, which will talk to all the other tech stacks and all the other departments and completely unautomated. But, but production is a simple system. Like, you know, a lot of people think, like you’ve done real estate, right? Like home flipping. If you buy a house, it’s like an onion. You got to peel layers back to find out where you’re going.
19:14
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
19:14
Preston Brown
And then once you figure out all the stuff that’s wrong and you’ve peeled all the layers back and all the different areas of the onion you start putting all the layers back better. Okay. Building is so much easier and it’s volume.
19:26
Brad Weimert
Right.
19:26
Preston Brown
We don’t peel any layers back. We start with a dirt lot, we verify the dirt lot is good, then we follow a checklist. Once you’ve figured out how to do a good checklist and you’ve got all the data on that, then you turn around and say, okay, well, I’ve language properly with the soils guy, the properly with the plumber, the electrician, the cement that are properly with the framer. Like everything throughout the process, all the way to cabinets finish, stucco, whatever. Right.
19:49
Brad Weimert
Let me double click on that. So you just used the term I languaged well with them. Do you mean that you’ve just figured out the best way to communicate with those people that drives the right outcome?
19:59
Preston Brown
Yeah, yeah. Everything is a language, right? Like, if you’re going to have a plumber do something in your home, you should learn to speak plumber. Like, if you want to go to Mexico and have people respect you should learn to speak Spanish. There is not the same language or nomenclature in any industry. Like, if you’re going into tech, you have to start understanding what’s going on. Like, so we started getting our data in the company and we got a ton of data on what’s going on, past sales, market data, filtered all that in, created enormous databases, started adding like some machine learning components to see what was happening relative to what else. And when we did that, we realized, oh, shoot, we’re selling too many homes. We don’t have enough plumbers, framers or electricians to build those homes. What do we do?
20:46
Preston Brown
Well, the easiest thought would be go get plumbers, framers and electricians. Right. You know what happens when you try to go get plumbers, framers and electricians In a market where there’s not enough trades, you’re going to pay a lot more. So it’s actually the wrong thing to do, even though that’s what you would common sense want to do. So when you have like some of that machine learning tech and you’re kind of learning from each other in all the different departments, what you know, you actually should do, since you only have the capacity to build that many houses, is raise the price of the homes. Then you raise the price of the homes, you slow the sales a little bit down to where you actually have the productivity available, okay.
21:21
Preston Brown
Then at that point you start bringing in more plumbers, framers, electricians, so that when things change again, you’ve now brought in more. They’re all fighting within your model for more work. They’re willing to compete with each other and lower their own prices. At that point you can turn around and re lower prices and scale again. So it’s like a lot of times the thing you think you need to do, you’re missing a step or two before that and you do those first. Automation is, is interesting, the first thing you need to do to automation. Because I mean, sorry, my wife jokes, I’m either ADD or ADD to it. So I squirrel off because it’s fun.
21:57
Brad Weimert
I think you’re in good company and I think almost everybody that listens to this shit is probably in that boat in some capacity. Oh God, I don’t even really know.
22:04
Preston Brown
I love you all.
22:05
Brad Weimert
Well, I don’t really even know what it means. Like, I feel like we’ve put this label of ADD and people argue this point because they feel like they have it and they want to self identify it as it, but people argue that they have the label and I just don’t think it’s a very helpful label. It’s like, hey, look, we’re all distracted. Let’s just focus on being focused. Let’s just get good at focusing on the thing we want to do when we have to be focused. And if we don’t have to be focused on something, then let’s have fun and have conversation, go wherever it’s going to go. So I will try to keep the thread going in whatever direction makes sense for people to pay attention.
22:34
Preston Brown
Can we swerve into add Real?
22:36
Brad Weimert
Absolutely.
22:36
Preston Brown
So ADD, I think, is fucking awesome. I was the poster child for add. I honestly have a belief that it’s fucking evolution, okay? Like, I think if you have add, you’re smarter. When I was a kid, they wanted to drug me up on Ritalin and all this crazy and did for a while. It made me very angry and I started like getting violent and they quickly took me off because they figured, well, him being a distracted little is better than him being a violent little. And what was interesting is all my teachers did not like that I couldn’t pay attention to them, right? But it wasn’t that I couldn’t pay attention. What I was paying attention to was the most interesting thing in the room, right?
23:12
Preston Brown
ADD is a gift for entrepreneurs because they then know what is the most interesting thing in the room. When you know what the most interesting thing in the room is, that’s what people would also pay for. Go sell it. So add, if your teacher doesn’t like you because you have it or somebody in Your life doesn’t like you because you have it. You should give them a book on how to become more interesting.
23:32
Brad Weimert
Well, I agree with that point. Fundamentally. Mine is mostly just that I don’t think ADD is one thing. I think it’s actually. We throw this label on people and it’s probably 23 different things.
23:44
Preston Brown
I agree.
23:44
Brad Weimert
Personality traits and like, we.
23:46
Preston Brown
I.
23:47
Brad Weimert
But your point is very good, which is don’t hope people will pay more attention to you. Be better, be more interesting.
23:54
Preston Brown
Be more worth while to get attention from them. Or. Yeah, like, they’re. They’re like we say, oh, pay attention. Well, you wouldn’t go to Walmart and pay for something you don’t want. Why am I going to fucking pay my attention to you if I don’t want to get information from you? Like, learning can be fun and should be fun. I like to say I put the fu in fun. And if you make learning fun for me, I’m gonna learn from you. If you don’t make learning fun for me, like, I’m out. And I think that’s most people like. And that’s languaging, that’s communicating. If I show up and I communicate your language, you’re gonna feel respected, you’re gonna feel valued, we’re gonna have rapport. And that’s the same thing. When I’m talking, like plumbers, electricians, or anyone else.
24:37
Preston Brown
Like, I can’t go talk to the plumber, who I talked to the painter. There’s a different level of sophistication. There’s a different level of understanding, education, licensing. And. And they price their products differently, Their units are looked at differently. They want you to speak their language. They’re not showing up for you to speak, like, for. For them to speak yours. They don’t understand yours, most of them. Like, you think about it, like when you’re at a higher level, like, so. So the builder is who all the plumbers want to work for. Right. And so a lot of builders are egotistical fools. And. And the plumber walks in and the builder’s like, waiting for the plumber to speak. Builder. Because he expects the report to be built that way. You know why the oceans are the most powerful bodies of water on the planet?
25:19
Brad Weimert
No.
25:20
Preston Brown
Because they are humble enough to sit beneath the rivers, the lakes, the streams, and everything else, and everything then flows into them. If you drop yourself down and learn to speak plumber and make him your equal, what’s going to happen when inflation hits? He may still raise your price, but it’s going to be last. He’s going to hit every other client first because he likes you the most, because you treat him better. And that’s. That’s all languaging is walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes and learning their world.
25:50
Brad Weimert
Yep. Yeah. I think the in it makes me think of sort of the sales process. And I’m a huge proponent of specifically more complex sales. I’m a huge proponent of scripting. And there’s a. There’s sort of two trains of, or three, but schools of thought around how to teach salespeople or how to run a sales team. One is scripting, one are talk tracks, which are just bullets to follow. And then the third would be like, oh, I’m just a good salesperson. I’m charismatic. In complex sales, starting with a script is super important because it forces the right language. And so until you have a deep understanding or context of a system or structure, it is so easy for you to fuck up the message by swapping words without even realizing it. And that is not being able to speak plumber. Right.
26:35
Brad Weimert
That’s coming in and thinking that your message is accurate and not realizing that you’re just missing the mark. You’re using a different lexicon. Right. You’re talking in different words that they don’t get. More importantly, even if they do get them, they don’t resonate. So you’ve got one of the things that I am fascinated with, and I want to talk about tax a little bit with you too, because you mentioned before we got going that your staff was trying to get you to buy a bigger plane and attack. And there’s a tax element to that. And just private aviation in general is fun to talk about. But before we get to the fun stuff, let’s talk about the 20 businesses, some of which are fun and some are not fun. What. What is a business that you have that you fully automated?
27:14
Preston Brown
Oh, at this point, probably hard money lending.
27:16
Brad Weimert
Okay.
27:16
Preston Brown
Like now, now it’s done. It’s a simple product. We have a very simple process. We have a very specific niche that we serve. So we know who our customer is. We know exactly what they need. Like, it’s not complex. And, and I mean, it just. It just spits out money like it does not need me to be there. I would say in addition to that, property management, that’s a much more complex business than hard money lending, but it’s fully automated now. You know, I’m toying in my head with going into some mergers and acquisitions campaign because I do think I’m very bullish on the real estate market, especially anything with bedrooms over the next 10 years. But you know, if I go into a mergers and acquisitions campaign, it’s not going to be automated.
28:00
Preston Brown
Like, if you’re healthy and everything’s right and then you decide I’m going to be a bodybuilder, you’re going to experience some dynamic physical change.
28:07
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
28:07
Preston Brown
So scaling can immediately remove the idea of automation. But where it’s at today, they’ve got like 600 units. It spits out 50, 60 grand a month. It’s just a wonderful little company. I never have to see it. Like, I go down there, I buy the employees lunch once a month. Like, they’re very nice, you know, I know half of their names, like, but I mean, it’s automated. Like, if I don’t know everybody in the business, it’s automated.
28:31
Brad Weimert
Hard money lending, I think. Well, actually, let me go this direction. So you said something that I think is really important because I think entrepreneurs in general specifically today, think about automation, strive towards automation. But you pointed out something really important, which is that you can automate to the extent that you can until you start growing more. And as you grow, it’s going to break the automation. You should expect that and you should roll with the punches, change, adopt, etc. The one of the things that employees in particular tend to have a hard time with is being told to do something, doing it, and then not using the thing they did and being like, okay, that was great, but it was a little off. Let’s redo the whole fucking thing. And employees tend to be like, what the fuck? That’s so frustrating.
29:17
Brad Weimert
It’s so upsetting. But I think the reality of building systems is that you build them to learn when you’re growing, not because they’re going to last forever. How do you look at sort of the necessity for system and the anticipation of the change of that system?
29:32
Preston Brown
Let me, let me. I, I have a, a good answer, but I’m going to swerve a little bit because I think it’s what your audience is going to need, swerve when I’m looking at automating a business. So I developed this really cool formula, it’s problem solving formula for my companies. And when I opened my travel agency, which I’m no longer involved in, but it was a gift because I started coaching all these other entrepreneurs. My claim to fame was this formula and it was a problem solving formula. And I started giving it out and I started fucking everybody up. Like everybody was failing with my formula. And I was like, what the fuck is wrong with this formula? Like this formula works.
30:09
Preston Brown
And then I realized the formula was fine, but they were solving what they thought their biggest problem was, but it wasn’t their biggest problem at that stage of business. And so that hit me and I was like, oh, I need to go and look at how do we identify what stage of business you’re at and how do you automate there or decide not to, you know, like, and so you have like your kind of non start the entrepreneur. That’s stage one. These people have mindset issues, they have to scale themselves into business.
30:41
Brad Weimert
Right, you’re about to tell me your seven stages of entrepreneurship.
30:44
Preston Brown
Yeah, I’ll give you the quick version. Right. And there’s different unique problem subsets at every stage you solve those problems. But I like to look at it like a staircase. Like if you look at this like a staircase, nobody stays one step. Like that would be dumb to do on a staircase. Right? Like if you’re on a staircase, like you’re generally going to go into multiple steps. Like you’re moving up the staircase. Well, how do you move up the staircase? You solve the problem of the lowest step. You need to get off the lowest step and up to another step. You need to move your leg. Right. So if you’re a non start, you solve your mindset issues. You start, okay, when you’re a startup, you have all sorts of problems and oh shit, this is a race for cash flow.
31:19
Preston Brown
Oh shit, I need to figure out like, do I have the right target customers? Maybe I’m passionate about this, but do my customers like this? I, you know, how do I get into business, solve enough problems to make it a business to generate enough cash flow to feed myself. Right? So then you kind of, after you’ve started and you’ve proved concept, you move into this phase that’s I call it like, you know, operational entrepreneur. You’ve got a business, you’re at least selling stuff, you’re pretty much self employed. You start realizing, oh shit, this is a spectator sport. I need to develop a team. I need to really, you know, start getting more people around me and make this a team sport and have something that’s not dependent on me. If I go to the hospital tomorrow, my business dies.
32:00
Preston Brown
And, and so you stop managing by crisis. You add team members, you start training and whatever. Eventually you kind of get the team, the office, the phone system, the computers, some technology, whatever. You, you build this up hopefully fairly quickly. Some people don’t and that’s really painful. But then you get into this stage called entrepreneur. Congratulations. You have a business. You’ve scaled your revenue and your, your expenses now to where you previously had the revenue without the expenses. Now you have the revenue with the expenses. So you have a business, it does nothing except employ people. And you better learn how to go back. You know, you either need to start learning to scale or get out of this business because you basically have a low paying job.
32:43
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
32:44
Preston Brown
And, and you’re in the same place as before you started. And so then you go into what I call operational mega preneur. Normally this phase has some kind of pivot to it. Like if you’re a home flipper, you’re like, well, shit, I have to peel back layers of the onion. If I’m a home builder, there’s no layers to the onion. It’s just a checklist. I go ground up or hey, if I’m a home flipper, I’ll become a hard money lender. Because money is very easy to scale. Right. So a lot of times when you’re going to operational megapreneur, there’s a pivot operational megapreneur, you’re scaling your sales, you’re scaling your brand, you’re scaling, you’re optimizing your process, which is actually like cutting people. So you’re scaling your efficiency.
33:23
Preston Brown
I mean, there’s so all sorts of steps to scaling and you keep doing this over and over again. And there’s videos on this that I’ll give to your audience. Like they can just message me and I’ll give it to them. That way we don’t have to waste too much time on it on the show. But eventually you fill your plate like you’re a guy in a buffet line and you keep going like a moron and you’re putting more on your plate, more on your plate and shit starts falling off. People around you are looking, you wouldn’t do this at a buffet, but everybody does this in business like morons. So now, well, you have to scale again. You have to scale you. And that’s really hard. That’s where you need to start getting your C suite. Executives.
33:54
Preston Brown
You know, everybody goes out and they’re like, I’m gonna go to CEO. But you don’t have any executives, and that’s a chief executive officer. Why would you get a chief executive officer if you don’t have executives? That’s stupid. But that’s what they all do. Like, I’ve met companies, and they have 10 employees and a CEO. And I’m like, you’re the CEO. Like, get rid of that guy. Like, he shouldn’t be. If he was a CEO, he would have looked at your company and not taken the fucking job. Yeah, okay? Because he would have been like, you have no executives. Like, you need a coo, maybe, you need a cfo, maybe, but you do not need a CEO. You should be the CEO. Like, Elon Musk is still the CEO, but you’re not. Like, fuck off. You know?
34:26
Preston Brown
And so once you start getting all of your C suite executives, you’re the CEO. These people have bought back your time. They’ve made your plate bigger. You’re in this new phase. It’s megapreneur. Your problem is fucking taxes. You have a new business partner. It’s the irs. It’s an acronym. It stands for I really Suck. They take half your shit and they do not like you, but they want half your money. And they’re not going to take half the risk, just half the money. It’s like the worst business partner ever. So now you’re like, wait a minute. What the fuck? What do I got to do here? And you start realizing that all your really rich friends that have been in this chapter that have now jumped to another chapter, I call that the investor philanthropist chapter.
34:59
Preston Brown
Somehow they’ve figured out that politicians need money, too. And if politicians get money, like, nobody would ever give money to a politician. No, Like. Like just for the sake of giving it to them. Like, they’re not that likable. They’re all douchebags. Parties are supposed to be fun. And the parties we have in this country are not fun at all. They just hate on each other. Yet somehow rich people keep giving money to politicians. Like, we have all sorts of problems in the world. You could donate money to stop sex trafficking. You donate money to stop this. Yet people keep giving money to politicians. Why would they do that unless there was a return on investment? And there fucking is. You dig into the tax code, you find out there’s a return on investment. You find out politicians get money for a good reason.
35:36
Preston Brown
There’s shit in the tax code that those politicians have made sure are in there so that their rich friends keep giving them more fucking money so they can keep getting elected. There’s a lot in the news about NGOs right now that even proves at this point got even crazier in the last 10 years. But that’s the investor philanthropist stage. So to automate, you need to solve the problems based on the stage you’re in. Like, if you’re an operational entrepreneur, your goal is to automate to the scale of entrepreneur. Does that make sense?
36:02
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
36:02
Preston Brown
Your goal is not to get to investor philanthropists, at least not yet. Nobody runs at the base of a staircase and it’s like, I’m gonna jump to the top. Like, have you ever heard that phrase? Like, it’s better to aim high and miss than to aim low and hit? Like, I would love to meet the moron that made this statement up. Like, so you’re gonna jump and miss and roll back down the fucking staircase with all sorts of bruises and you could have just sat down. Aiming low and hitting was way fucking better than aiming high and missing. How about we just aim up and hit like that? So there’s generally a middle ground. Like, same as a guy that said, oh, the customer’s always right. Really? Have you met a customer?
36:41
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
36:42
Preston Brown
That guy wants you to work for free. Yeah.
36:44
Brad Weimert
I mean, I think that the sentiment behind those things is good in general, and it’s like, it’s not a bad framework, but I think that you’re right. One of the things that we talk about internally when we’re taking bigger swings at stuff, is that V1 of something which would be getting a base hit or going one step up is not about getting a shitty version of the final product out. It’s getting a really good version of a basic product out. And that’s the base hit. Right. And so getting a little bit done, but doing it in a really good way is the first step for us in the process. Like, if.
37:21
Brad Weimert
If we’re aiming, if we do have a goal of the top, right, and we’re aiming at the top, we have to do a very good version of the first step first to put ourselves in a good position to walk up the stairs. Right. As opposed to, like, your analogy is just trying to jump from the top step and fall on your face.
37:35
Preston Brown
Yeah. And so which kind of correlates to the points were making earlier on automation, I wanted to give the framework, because with automation, you’re never going to be automated as a startup. But if you’re an operational entrepreneur or an operational megapreneur, like either one of those, they’re in some process of scaling and they want to get to a process of automation. Like, a typical healthy entrepreneur business generally has a fairly low margin. The owner has a decent business. If he’s working in the business, like, he’s making some money. If he’s not working in the business, he’s generally making little to no money because it just hasn’t scaled to that point. Like, he, his income is the job or the function. He’s providing for the business and he just happens to own it. So.
38:21
Preston Brown
But the guy who’s an operational entrepreneur, who has 10 jobs would love to be him. Does that make sense? So you’re here, you want to scale to there. If, if you’re at the entrepreneur, you’re like, man, I got a pay cut. Like, I’ve still got a job. I’m not making as much money as I used to. I’m still having to provide a function and work to create a living, but at least I’m not a slave where I’m working 80 hours a week anymore. I. I can see my kids sometimes.
38:45
Brad Weimert
So somebody said another way I, I heard was going through these stages initially, you’re building something up and you put on 10 hats and you’re getting paid because you’ve ramped the business up to a point where you’ve got revenue, but you’re doing everything. And then you say, okay, well, I’m going to hire a whole bunch of people, which eats away all of the profit that you had. And so then you, or most of.
39:05
Preston Brown
It must keep one of those people as yourself. Yes.
39:08
Brad Weimert
Which almost everybody does. Right. So you. But you get rid of a bunch of it, and basically you’re reinvesting the capital, your net profit back into the business to get staff to do things. But there is usually some period of time where you have to wade through that, where you eat up most of what you used to take home in the name of hopefully getting bigger and growing to the next stage.
39:28
Preston Brown
Yes. So, but with a clarification, scaling should always change. And you can never scale more thing at once. More things than one at once. Okay. Sometimes you’re not scaling the size of your company. Like, when we started the podcast, you were like, well, what’s your revenue? And I was like, well, my year two was less than my year one, but my profitability was way higher. Yeah, like my net profits year two went way down. Or not. I mean, way up, but my revenue went way down. Like, and, you know, one of my businesses was a title company. Right. Title companies make jack shit for money, but their revenue is huge.
40:07
Brad Weimert
Why the title is such a fucking scam, man? It’s so fucking expensive to do title, and it’s total nonsense. I don’t, I don’t get it. Why does title even exist right now?
40:16
Preston Brown
It shouldn’t with blockchain and AI and everything else. But like, I mean, it’s there. And look, I don’t want to talk shit because I sold my title company and I’m reopening another one. I’m partnering with Stuart. So, you know, like, I’m going back in, but. Yeah, no, it will be replaced.
40:29
Brad Weimert
Yes.
40:30
Preston Brown
But I can make some money on it now. So I don’t hate it. I love it.
40:33
Brad Weimert
Why is the margin in title so low?
40:35
Preston Brown
Because it’s so fucking easy. Right.
40:36
Brad Weimert
But where does the money go?
40:37
Preston Brown
Like, so you got to look at it like title is about 1% of a transaction. Like, just to give a rough number. It’s not by percentage, but if you wanted to take a rough number, it’s like 1%. Right. So if you do a million dollar transaction, 10,000 is the revenue.
40:51
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
40:51
Preston Brown
You got to pay all your bills for that 10,000. If I build a million dollar home.
40:56
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
40:57
Preston Brown
One percent is not what I’m bringing in.
41:00
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
41:00
Preston Brown
For that million dollars that I build, it might be 30 or 40.
41:03
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
41:04
Preston Brown
Okay, so. And one, I had $10,000 to work with, and in another I had 300,000 to work with to pay my bills.
41:11
Brad Weimert
Sure.
41:12
Preston Brown
So your net profit on that 10,000 doll worth of transactions in the title company could be two to the owner, right?
41:20
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
41:21
Preston Brown
Whereas your net profits building the same million dollars worth of homes, whether it’s one big custom home or like four little homes, might be like 200. Like so. So I mean, that’s where I say, like, revenue is vanity, profits are sanity. Like, Like, I did do like over 200 million that one year, and then the next year I was like, I should focus more here because this really looks good. And I had like a two year, three year revenue decline, but my profits went way up. Like, I went from being a guy with enormous revenue that was making a few million dollars a year to a guy with still enormous, but not as enormous revenue that was making, you know, a few million would have been a huge pay cut to where I’m at now. Like, enormous pay cut.
42:07
Preston Brown
Like, and so when you’re looking at scaling, you have to think, what am I trying to scale? Sometimes you’re scaling your time, sometimes you’re scaling your opportunity, sometimes you’re scaling your sales. Say you and I become buddies and I network you with all my friends, and you network me with all your friends. We would spend time away from our business. But you’re a brilliant guy, Brad. Everybody I know is like, you’re gonna fucking love Brad. And they’re like, he’s gonna love you too. You’re gonna besties. I’m like, fuck, yeah. Like, let’s do this. But like, if we’re doing that, we are now putting our time into each other.
42:45
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
42:45
Preston Brown
Now, there may not be any conditions set on it. Like, but if you hang out with all my friends, tell me you’re not gonna find an opportunity. Yeah, you’re gonna find fucking 20 if I hang out with your friends, probably the same shit, right? Like, and because awesome people get excited about shit when they network with more awesome people. Like, that’s just how things work. We’re scaling our opportunity, but we’re not scaling sales at that point.
43:05
Brad Weimert
Right.
43:06
Preston Brown
So, like, what are you scaling, like, right now? Like, I just spent the last two weeks in Egypt with my family. Okay. And. And I got to carry grandma up the pyramids because it was her dream and she’s 78 and she doesn’t walk well. So I was scaling the size of my legs carrying a 250 pound woman up a pyramid. But I, I was scaling something else. Right. Like, I, I wanted more time with family.
43:28
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
43:29
Preston Brown
I immediately got back, got on a plane and came here. Yeah, I’m looking more now. I mean, I don’t need the money anymore. I want to scale, like my opportunities, my friendships, my relationships. I’m scaling something different. All of that will probably translate to other opportunities to scale. Sometimes you’re scaling efficiencies. When a company goes into layoffs, a major thing in the news media right now, they’re scaling efficiency. They’re taking the worst people in their organization and getting rid of them.
43:59
Brad Weimert
Right.
43:59
Preston Brown
And I hope all your listeners are not affected by that, but if you are, you’re affected by that because you’re not valued at the level that somebody else is. They’re not getting rid of everyone, they’re getting rid of you. And so what are they doing? They’re scaling their efficiency. I mean, there’s different aspects of scaling.
44:16
Brad Weimert
Okay, this is the interruption where I’m supposed to take money and let somebody else advertise on the podcast. But I don’t really want to do that. So I’m going to remind you that I also own EasyPay direct.com. And if you’re a business that’s accepting credit cards or needs to, beyond the fact that we can do a rate review to save you money, beyond the fact that we give you dedicated account reps, world class customer service, world class technology, and can actually optimize the way you accept Payments online. You should understand why we have thousands of people a year come to us off of platforms like Stripe or PayPal, and why they prefer easy Pay Direct. You can check us [email protected] forward/bam. That’s epd.com forward slash bam.
45:00
Brad Weimert
It is prudent as an employee to think about what value you’re not providing that you could be if you are the one that got cut for whatever reason. Right. And entrepreneurs tend to be conditioned to think that way eventually. Because it’s all on you eventually. Eventually you have to ask yourself, what could I have done differently to fix the situation? You keep using the term scaling, and I think that it’s, it makes me think of a couple of things. One is, in the scheme of growing a business or going through your seven stages of entrepreneurship, the term scaling gets used typically at later stages when you’re ramping revenue. But I think the idea of scaling different elements of your business and it’s important to do all of them. You just can’t do all of them at the same time. It’s a really important takeaway.
45:48
Brad Weimert
And the other part of that is that there are always constraints in the world. And I think that’s one of the few absolutes that exist on the planet. But there are always constraints of some sort. And when there are constraints with time or money or energy, you almost necessarily need to drop things in order to focus on something else. Right. So if you want to scale one area, something else has to be let go for some period of time. And I think that’s a really scary thing for a lot of people. But specifically brand new entrepreneurs, are there certain stages in the entrepreneurial steps where you should drop sales for a minute or where it’s okay to shift gears and focus on just systems?
46:38
Preston Brown
Well, sure, I mean, so, and a lot of it’s going to depend on your stage. It’s also going to depend on your problems. And we can dive into the problem solving formula if you want to. But like entrepreneurship is this weird paradox between monogamy and polygamy, right? If, if I’m married, I’m a one woman man. Is that fair?
46:57
Brad Weimert
I mean, I don’t know you, I don’t know how you’re doing things. Okay.
47:00
Preston Brown
It’s fair for me. Yeah, yeah. I love that answer so much. But like, if I’m not married, then, then I don’t have an obligation. Right. And so what you’re doing in your business is not necessarily monogamous. Like you’re not married to one job, one role, one job description, one problem subset. Like, what in business is polygamous, not monogamous. Right. And you can own multiple businesses. Like, it’s not like you’re penalized for having just one. But you can also only do one thing at a time. So that’s the paradox. You need to be paradoxically married to whatever that thing is at that time. So your place in your business is at the highest place of need. Generally, you should either be doing the most important thing or finding the person to do the most important thing.
47:49
Preston Brown
If that person is not you, or for whatever reason, you can’t do it. But you need to go to the highest place of need. Now, there might be five needs, okay? But if you have the people to meet three or four of them, you should not be doing those three or four. You should be allowing them to do those three or four. Trusting those people, even if they’re not as good as you. Yeah, allowing them to do 70% or 80%, whatever. Like, you know, 80 is 100 because it’s 100 of your time bought back. And, and you should be doing the one or two things that you don’t have the people for. Like, once you get that. And we’re going to dive into like delegation versus doing, you must do before you delegate, okay?
48:31
Preston Brown
Like, I’m not a techie person, but I’m building a tech company and I have a techie person that works for me, and I brought him in. I, I love layoff seasons, right? Layoff season is your best fucking hiring opportunity. I hope all your listeners hear that. Because that’s when you hire the best fucking talent.
48:45
Brad Weimert
Because when you say layoff seasons, you mean like economically economic seasons? Yeah, yeah, got it.
48:50
Preston Brown
Like, so when all the tech layoffs started happening a few years ago, I got this fucking genius kid out of New York, brought him to El Paso, flew him in. Like, El Paso is not where you anticipate a tech company coming out of. No, but we have a software for builders that in a year or two will disrupt the home builder market like nobody has ever seen. Because it’s doing that’s right now impossible.
49:11
Brad Weimert
And so you had to sell some kid on coming to El Paso from New York.
49:16
Preston Brown
I got really lucky that his, the girl he was in love with was in the FBI and she was coming to the El Paso area anyway. And it wasn’t a hard sell because of that, but I had to sell him on coming to work with us and not going with some government job or Something like that. And he’d just gotten laid off and like, so I picked him up in my McLaren and Fudgeing drove him around. I mean, like, I mean, but he’s built me like an entire tech department. Like, we have more tech employees than we have any other type of employee. And while I’m not the guy to be doing the database engineering, I’m not the guy to be doing it in machine learning stuff. I’m not the guy to be talking about AI because Zach knows much more than me.
49:54
Preston Brown
I should be the guy finding the right fucking guy. I should be the guy learning what the right guy should know. So I at least know enough about the languaging to talk about it, to find the right guy. Right? Like, so that’s kind of what I mean by what are your largest problems and where should you be? You may not be doing the thing, but you need to find the guy that’s doing the thing.
50:16
Brad Weimert
Well, see, but you open by saying you should do before you delegate.
50:20
Preston Brown
And by do, I’m swimming in the water, but he’s my boat.
50:25
Brad Weimert
Got it.
50:25
Preston Brown
Does that make sense?
50:26
Brad Weimert
It does. So to what end do you go to? Because, like, development’s such a good example. Because there are some things where, you know, marketing, automation, sales, some customer service. Where I’ve done, I’ve sat in the chair and done development. I haven’t. Right. But to your point, then it’s, so you’ve swam in the water. How, how much do you need to do in that situation before you can.
50:49
Preston Brown
Delegate enough to speak the language you don’t need to master? Okay, I, I used to go to these seminars and they would always talk about be an owner, not an operator. And, and I mean, I guess that’s kind of true. And in some cases I am. But, you know, if your business is truly fully automated and you’re retired, like the insurance company says, you die in two years. Like, everybody, every man that retires is dead in two years. So do you really want to be a full owner?
51:14
Brad Weimert
Yeah. There’s also.
51:14
Preston Brown
You want to go back to operating, Right?
51:16
Brad Weimert
And I would say distinction really is investor versus operator, because. And maybe you could call owner, investor, whatever. But like the people that are actually performing in business at the highest levels. You mentioned Elon Musk earlier. He is operating and he’s still all the time.
51:34
Preston Brown
And so he’s following a process. Right? He’s operator. And then he goes into competent in some areas, he goes into mastery, and then he goes into owner, investor. Right. But you need to go at least from operator to competent. I can do some light coding now.
51:55
Brad Weimert
I can do it really poorly.
51:58
Preston Brown
But you have the competence to at least understand the language of it. Like, you don’t have to become the best of the best, but you at least need to understand the world. Like, how many entrepreneurs have got caught in the trap of, like, some SEO salesman selling something and they didn’t know what the acronym meant? Yeah, right. Like, there’s a lot of people out there right now, probably people listening to your show today, that are paying for SEO optimization, that don’t know that SEO stands for search engine optimization. They’re going to write that down as I say it. And, like, they’re giving some asshole 500 to 3,000amonth because they had a really good sales process, a good funnel, and they told them what they were going to do. They have no way of measuring whether it’s working.
52:36
Preston Brown
They don’t have any, like, links that are, like, tracking what’s coming from where, but they’re supposedly SEO optimized. I know real estate companies that are paying for SEO, and I’m like, why would you fucking do that? Do you think you’re going to pass Zillow? Do you think you’re going to pass the national brands? Oh, am I going to beat ReMax? Am I going to beat XP or no? Like, get over yourself, dude. Like, you’re not going to ever pay enough for SEO to beat the trillionaires. It’s just because they don’t know it. Does that make sense?
53:08
Brad Weimert
Sure.
53:09
Preston Brown
So you need to understand enough about what a thing is, how it works, to speak on it, to get in there. You don’t have to do everything. Like, you don’t have to go clean the bathroom to hire a janitor. But you should know that there shouldn’t be shit on the toilet seat.
53:23
Brad Weimert
Okay, so tell me the problem solving framework.
53:26
Preston Brown
Cool. Yeah. So it’s a filter, right? Like, Like, I like staircases and filters. I take a problem and I put it at the top of the filter. The goal of every business is what? It’s one thing. It’s efficiency. Right. And so I like to think. I like to sit and think. And, and. And, like, what does efficiency mean? And. And I came up with, like, when I was. I think I was sitting in a hot tub or a river or something. Generally, I’m thinking and drinking Truly’s, which helps me think somehow.
53:49
Brad Weimert
We could. We could fix that. We could think with Truly’s.
53:52
Preston Brown
It. Truly. Truly’s are a fun way to think. Yeah. You know, the language gets A little worse. But. But you have some fun times thinking. And they’re kind of keto too. But so I was thinking, and I was like, well, efficiency is made up of, like, three things. It’s alignment, it’s simplicity, it’s foresight. And, And. And it could be four things if you’re in a larger business. It’s four, because foresight kind of eventually graduates to forecasting, which is where you’re trying to look down the road long enough to where you need a map. Like, if I’m going to drive from East El Paso to West El Paso or East Austin to West Austin, like, I can generally just figure my way out, like, relatively simply, right? Like, if I know the area, I’ve lived there.
54:29
Preston Brown
But if I want to go to New York, I might need a map. I might need a gps. So you want some forecasting in the. If Your revenue is 10 million or more, start looking into forecasting. I mean, you can find YouTube economists who can help you, but alignment and simplicity are kind of the critical ones. They’re like the. The optimization piece, and then foresight forecasting is the innovation piece. Like, so you kind of take these two metrics, and when you make them up, that’s efficiency. So I’d. I’d put a problem, my largest problem, that I’m dealing with whatever is taking my most time or causing my most stress or sleep, depth formation or whatever, and I drop it in the top of the formula and I allowed it to say, okay, is this an alignment simplicity problem?
55:05
Preston Brown
Because those are the twin sisters of optimization. Anytime I create more simplicity, I’m compromising alignment to somebody in my operation. Anytime I improve alignment, I’m making things less simple. So while they’re both goals, they paradoxically, iron sharpens. Iron sharpen each other, if that makes sense. And so is this an alignment problem, a simplicity problem, or a foresight problem? Are we just not looking where we’re going and we’re bumping into shit? And then once I know what that is, I know that those three goals are the goals of efficiency. Like, we’re sitting here doing a podcast. There’s a table in front of us. Most tables, not this one, strangely. But most tables have four legs, right? And those four legs hold the table up. And the table rests on this thing in business called the market.
55:46
Preston Brown
The market is not like this solid floor we’re sitting on. The market is ever changing. If you were a restaurant or a hotel person, Covid was an interesting market for you. Like, the legs of that table would have Needed to been telescopic to go up and down based on what the market was doing. It’s topsy turvy. Right. Efficiency. Those, those three things which is most of your, your clients that are watching the show need to understand those three. Alignment, simplicity, foresight. Imagine three glasses of water sitting on this table with four legs. Okay, well, those four legs are made up of four things. One leg is culture, one is clarity, one is capacity, one is cash. So once I know, hey, your problem is either alignment, simplicity or foresight.
56:23
Preston Brown
And it could be multiple, it could be all three things, it could be just one thing, then I’m going to say, okay, where is the problem caused? Am I identifying this problem in capacity, culture, clarity, cash? Normally it’s in more than one area. A lot of times I’m finding, most of the time I’m finding the problem in capacity because it’s affecting something in your throughput. But then it might actually be caused in clarity and culture. Does that make sense?
56:49
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
56:49
Preston Brown
So if it’s, that’s funny because that would actually be affecting cash too, because your capacity will affect your cash. So that’s kind of an all four effect. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to address all four equally. Not every leg needs to extend as far as some of the other ones might be a larger issue that you got to change in culture and then a smaller issue you got to change in clarification and communication within your team. And then that’s going to solve for most of, maybe not all within capacity, but then you shift a process around, you fix that and then you go to cash and you. My returns are up. Hello. Right.
57:24
Brad Weimert
So and so said another way, you’ve got these four areas. Capacity, culture, clarity and cash. Right. And when you’re trying to fix a problem inside of your business, there’s probably a bigger lever there, but there’s probably also little things that need to be adjusted for that lever to be effective.
57:42
Preston Brown
Yeah. And, and we don’t have time to go into it on a podcast, but like I said earlier, I am happy to gift all of your listeners. When I did coaching for, I mean I, I coached a few billionaires, I, I coached a lot of Deca and sent to millionaires. Like, you know, our travel agency that we did, it took off, we did phenomenally well. We attracted a crazy high net worth niche. It was a lot of fun. But all of the business coaching I ever had to do, LinkedIn to 14, 15 different coaching sessions like it was the same 14, 15 problems. So I literally made videos about all of them. They’re all 10, 15 minute videos. Any of your listeners, please just put it in the show notes. We’ll give a free link. They can download whichever ones they want.
58:23
Preston Brown
That way it solves the problem. We don’t even have to cover it all here. But just suffice it to say, culture, that’s one leg. There’s a bunch of videos on that. Clarity. There’s a bunch of videos on that. Capacity. There’s a bunch of videos on that. Cash, Bunch of videos on that. And it helps you understand and underwrite. What do I need to solve? Now, what’s beautiful about this is imagine a ball you put into that, like filter and it’s like kind of. You ever put a ball in one of those things with pins and the balls bouncing around?
58:44
Brad Weimert
Yeah, like as a plinko.
58:45
Preston Brown
Yeah, exactly. So as it’s coming down, you’re like.
58:48
Brad Weimert
Okay, I’m a Price is Right guy. I grew up watching prices. Right. When I stayed at Homesick when I was a kid.
58:52
Preston Brown
We’re going to fist bump on that one. I love it. So as the ball is kind of bouncing down, okay, well, it’s alignment and simplicity. Great. Okay, well, it’s culture and clarity and cash. Great. Okay, whatever. Then you get down to what do we do about it? Yeah, business is simple, dude. Like, it’s really easy and people way over complicate things. Like, my wife is not simple. My businesses are all very simple. My wife does not have just a few dials. If I go to my wife’s makeup drawer Today, there’s like 150, 250 items. We haven’t even got to the shoe closet. Okay? Like the shoe closet is bigger than most women’s closet. That woman is sexy as hell. Complexity is seductive, not productive. I love seductivity in my marriage. I love my wife. She’s sexy as hell.
59:37
Preston Brown
I do not want seductivity in my business. Complexity is seductive, not productive. We need simplicity. So in a business doesn’t have 150 dials. It doesn’t have a shoe closet. It doesn’t have time and needs where you have to be present and all this other and hear about her day. Okay? All you got to do is say okay. To address this problem, do I need to adjust which of these six items price, product, people, place, promotion, or process in almost every circumstance, you will always adjust process. I hate using absolutes like always, but almost always you’re going to adjust process and something else.
01:00:12
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Well, look, the process is just woven into everything else and it goes back to your sentiment on automation, which is that as you grow you are going to break automation. And so you have a process in place that’s there. But if you change one thing, something in the process is going to inevitably have to be changed, even if it’s little.
01:00:30
Preston Brown
So in most. I’ve been called out three times now and this is so fun. This is not a business I intended to get into and it doesn’t even pay me enough to do it. But I’ve had fun with it. I’m gonna actually make some social media about it pretty soon here. I’ve had three different businesses call me out in the last few years and one guy called me, it was the first guy, and he was like, well, what would you charge me to come spend a week in my business? And I was like, I’m not willing to do it. And he’s like, I’ll pay you 50 grand. I was like, you’re gonna pay me $50,000 to spend a week in your business? And, and went through a bunch of shit. We, we did like, we did a few things. Okay.
01:01:05
Preston Brown
He, he had a trucking company and he was investing in trailers. But when we got into his business model, and I’m trying to, I didn’t get the rights to use him for social media, so I can’t use his name or his company. But we learned on the, on the second or third one actually. But what we found was he was using his trucking investments like his business. He wasn’t treating the investment business as an investment only business. His magic was in trucking, it was in freight brokerage. It was in all of that. Well, when we separated the containers, the boxes that you can use, his freight brokerage was able to democratize and he was able to sell way more. And so he paid me 50 grand and upped his revenue like 15 million.
01:01:54
Preston Brown
I mean I should have charged that guy 10%, sure, I would have made so much money. But like it’s normally three or four things that you need to do now. Like if you have a good CEO or are a good CEO, what are you doing? You’re finding one to three things, maybe four to five things that you’re changing in a 90 to 180 day period. Does that make sense?
01:02:18
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:02:18
Preston Brown
And like it, you do the right three or four things. Like every industry is there because there’s a demand for it. Like the candle industry, right? Like people used to Use candles for lighting. Has this industry had some fucking changes? Huh. Yeah. We don’t use candles for lighting anymore. But rich women buy them all the time. They’re spiritual now. Right. Like, so, I mean, luxury products, luxury margins. There’s still a candle industry and there’s some people making a lot of money in candles. But they dynamically shifted as the market shifted. They adjusted the legs. They had the foresight and forecast to see what was coming. Horses. People used to ride those guys to work.
01:03:01
Brad Weimert
Yep.
01:03:02
Preston Brown
Like, we still call horsepower. Yeah, that’s in cars. Like at some point. Like, I have a fucking, like Tesla and I have a McLaren. I have a couple airplanes. Like how much horsepower is in a jet engine? When is it insulting to the horse? Like, when can we come up with a new fucking metric that isn’t like such an asshole metric to the horse? Like, let’s get over. It was 100 years ago. It’s like the one that got away. We broke up. Right. But people still buy horses. There’s racehorses. People spend so much money on fucking horses. Your industry will always exist. You should be the best in it. That’s what you should be. And you should get really filthy fucking rich doing it.
01:03:37
Preston Brown
There’s two or three things that you need to be doing right now that will dynamically change your life, that will dynamically change your business, that will shift your stage. And normally you find Those things number 90 days, 180 days. Like, it’s pretty easy to guide and shift the culture. I mean, like, the hardest part is selling the change to your team.
01:03:57
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:03:57
Preston Brown
And communicating it. But as you guide that shift, that move that you’ll see a month over month, enormous shift with two or three things. A lot of the little problems are okay, like you almost. You can’t get rid of them because the problems are the reason the company exists. Like the customer is buying a solution to a problem.
01:04:18
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:04:18
Preston Brown
You know? Yeah.
01:04:20
Brad Weimert
But I think that’s what you just said. I think is. Is the big takeaway for most entrepreneurs there, which is it’s okay to allow the little problems to live and to exist there as long as you focus on the bigger problems. And so many people get trapped. Specifically people that are, I like to call myself a recovering perfectionist. And people I get trapped in, trying to fix all little things instead of being like, here’s a problem. Instead of thinking, yeah, that’s fine, you know, it’s okay to be there. Let me continue to focus on the big thing. I’m like, I Don’t like little problems. Let me go fix that little fucking problem. And then I get distracted. Right. And so staying focused on the big problems is a challenging thing. For a lot of entrepreneurs.
01:04:57
Preston Brown
It is. But, I mean, your problems are your gifts, your challenges, or your problems. Like, I mean, if people don’t believe that, like, let’s look. You know what the leading cause of death for women over the last 40, 000 years of human history was?
01:05:09
Brad Weimert
No. Childbirth. Yeah.
01:05:11
Preston Brown
Problems. You should stop having them. Women, like, immediately stop having kids. What are the best moments in life for people? Overcoming adversity, which is another name for what problems. Yeah, like, if you believe in a God or a heaven. I do. You have to go through this doorway called death. Most people would consider that a prop. So, I mean, like, it’s one of the major meanings of life. Like, you can either go out and learn how to assess your problems and learn how to learn, which is one of the videos that I’ll give away to all your people for free, or. Or you can go hire a guy and. And pay him way too much money to figure out, hey, you should do these three things. And after the fact, like, you might be really grateful that you paid that and found that.
01:05:46
Preston Brown
And you might make a lot more money, but you just didn’t need to.
01:05:49
Brad Weimert
Yeah, like.
01:05:50
Preston Brown
Like, you don’t need to spend the money to go get some expert. Like, when it’s all common sense and you can listen to this podcast and know it. And like, look, somebody might want to call me. Like, it’s fun. Like, let me use you for social media and pay me 50k, I’ll come do it. But like. Or just, like, go learn how to solve your own problems and identify which ones are the worst. Like, look at your industry. Do some studies, like, figure out what’s going on, like, what direction you’re going. How do you make the best alignment, the best simplicity?
01:06:17
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I love it. Well, I love. I love a good frame. I love a good framework. Frameworks are just a helpful mechanism to try to standardize things, to try to get to the bottom of something whether they’re perfect or not. And they never. I mean, nothing’s perfect. But.
01:06:33
Preston Brown
Wait a minute. Don’t say that, bro. My wife might hear this.
01:06:39
Brad Weimert
Like I said, I sparingly use absolutes, but I don’t believe in tens. I just think there’s always room for improvement. I think that is one of the absol. In life.
01:06:48
Preston Brown
Amen.
01:06:50
Brad Weimert
Okay, so last thing I want to talk to you about a bunch of things, but for the, the sake of time here, I want to talk about private aviation. So you mentioned you had a couple planes. I want to talk about the tax side of it and sort of the economic side of it and how they tie together for you along with lifestyle. So basically everybody that I know that has a private plane says financially it doesn’t really make sense to fly private all the time. But it’s a massive shift in lifestyle and every time I fly private I’m like, why the don’t I have a plane? So let me start with what kind of planes you have.
01:07:23
Preston Brown
I have right now a TBM850. I have an SR22 G5 Cirrus Beast. Well, I don’t have it yet, but I’m in flight school and I got really sick of renting airplanes. So were about to close on a little Cessna 182 had title issues. So we’ve now found another one and we’re in contract to close on that. And then flying out here, we realized that my 850, which is, I’m mean it’s.
01:07:47
Brad Weimert
Yeah, give me the size of those because for anybody listening, there’s going to be three people that will know what those are.
01:07:51
Preston Brown
Yeah, the TBM850 is a jet engine turboprop airplane. It’s fast as a, like you can take off in Miami and be in New York in three hours. And, and so it’s how fast does.
01:08:01
Brad Weimert
It fly, how much, how many people does it hold?
01:08:03
Preston Brown
300 knots. Knots, like 1.15 miles per hour to kind of give you the calculation, six people. But when you’re bringing podcast equipment, which we brought all of ours, it’s not very comfortable with four when you include the pilot because it’s small, it’s a bullet. Right. The cirrus is something personal that I can fly. So I’ll probably just keep that forever. The 182, I’m buying that because I don’t want to flight train on my turbocharged Cirrus because it’s bad for the turbos. So I’ll probably have that either for sale or give it to my brother or sister in a few years. I’m now looking at a CJ2 plus and I’m looking at that because the airplane world is interesting. Like it’s not for everyone. My TBM is a, I think it’s French made airplane.
01:08:44
Preston Brown
And you know, when Trump is talking tariffs, it used to be half a million to rebuild a motor. It might be a million to rebuild a motor now and every few years you have to rebuild a motor like once you get a certain amount of hours. If you live in Austin like you do, it’s probably the best place to own an airplane because you have a group out here called Lyft Aviation. They can help you offset some of your costs with leasing and stuff like that. And, and you’re never going to be 100%. Like, you’re never going to be like, hey, I bought an airplane and it’s making me money. Like, you just don’t make money in the airplane world unless you’re a broker in the business or somebody that’s managing a charter operation. Those guys do.
01:09:22
Preston Brown
But like, you don’t get to like, you get to make money what you’re doing. I get to make my money what I’m doing. But airplanes are, you’re buying lifestyle, you’re buying time travel, you’re getting a one year tax break which offsets the fuck you fees that you’re going to pay on maintenance and everything else. Because a screw or a bolt on a car is like two bucks and a screw or a bolt on an airplane is like 200. But once you’ve done it and you have the means, you just won’t want to go back.
01:09:50
Preston Brown
I mean like I, you know, I brought out my girls that helped me run the podcast with me out here and like were coming out of Millionaire in El Paso and there’s all these beautiful private jets and all these old men that own them and they were like, wow, your, your jets not as big. And I was like, yeah, but they got 30 years on me. Like my jet will be that big too one day. But like I have to get that much gray hair and I, I mean I could probably buy a bigger plane. But like there’s, to me there’s other priorities. Like, sure, if I’m gonna go overseas, I, I don’t really need the Gulf stream. Like I’m fine with Emirates. Like Emirates first class is pretty baller.
01:10:28
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:10:28
Preston Brown
So you got to kind of look at the mission. Like if you want to have the best weekends ever and have the best hundred dollar hamburgers and have a, a decent tax break year one. But, but you’re gonna spend a little money, five years that where you’re not going to get that tax break again, then yeah, like do it. But it’s a lifestyle play, it’s a time travel play.
01:10:54
Brad Weimert
Like, well, let’s break that down a little bit. Because the, I think that it’s alluring for basically everybody, for many, many people. It feels out of reach and at some point it’s within reach. Once you start doing well, then the question is, does it make sense? And so I know a whole bunch of guys and a few women that absolutely it’s within reach, but they don’t really know the economics and how it works. So let’s look at like, you know, your six person plane and what was the cost of it? What’s the tax benefit? What’s the cost to operate it? Net.
01:11:27
Preston Brown
Net couple million bucks. I think we bought it for 1.9. That was in 2019. And, and it went up in value a lot to like, you know, I think it was like 2.8 or 2.9 that we got offers on a few years ago back when covet boomed and crazy were low and all that. That’s on timing.
01:11:46
Brad Weimert
Yeah, that’s unusual right now.
01:11:49
Preston Brown
I mean it might be worth much less because being French getting parts and Canada and France and everywhere else, like it’s, we might get tariff. Right. Like, so that airframe, like it’s funny because you’ll see airframes and they’ll come in like there’s a really cool jet called the Premiere and you can go buy them really cheap. And it’s nice and it’s big and it’s fast and it doesn’t have a crazy great range, but it’s a sexy plane, it has a bathroom, it’s got a huge cabin and you can buy it super cheap or the reason you buy it super cheap is nobody makes parts for it anymore. So like it’s going to be on the ground for every year that it’s flying.
01:12:26
Preston Brown
Right now you go buy a CJ2 plus and they’re four or five million dollars for a twin engine jet that’s like a competitor of the Premier. But it’s American made. They make tons of great parts for it. Like, I mean it’s a useful airframe. The TBM was a useful airframe. Well, like I think the group Meridian just came out with a TBM killer. It’s an American made plane. And so TBMS might be a thing in Europe and they might be terrible in America. We might be selling it at a huge discount. So it’s one of those markets where if you’re going to get in and say you’re a smaller entrepreneur, like if you’re making a quarter million A year. And you want to go become a pilot, which awesome. Like anyone can get a Cessna. Like, a Cessna is not that much.
01:13:07
Preston Brown
It’s the price of a Cadillac. Okay. You can go buy a used Cessna and get it for the price of a nice Cadillac. And whether you finance or whatever, like if you’re flying yourself, like, and you’re maintaining it’s not crazy any. If you’re making a quarter million a year of Cessna’s within reach, like a cheap little 182, 172, something like that. And that’s going to make your weekends better. If you want something like, but no range.
01:13:29
Brad Weimert
Right. You’re not taking that across the country.
01:13:31
Preston Brown
Well, I mean, like you’re in Austin. Like Colorado wouldn’t be crazy. Like, I mean, you could go to Scottsdale. Like, it’s gonna cut driving down a lot. Like, if you drive now, flying’s way better. Like, so my cirrus, a little SR22 and. And one of my childhood best friends lives in Dallas and coming here to Austin and not being like geographically oriented, I was like, hey, dude, I’m in Central Texas. Like you like come visit. And he’s like, you’re like four hours away. So I called my airplane manager and I was like, hey, send the cirrus to go get him. Well, he’s here in an hour.
01:14:01
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:14:01
Preston Brown
So on Saturday morning I’m flying him in.
01:14:03
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:14:03
Preston Brown
We’re going on the boat, we’re go surfing, we’re hanging out, we’re have a blast. Yeah. And he’s here in an hour. And on Sunday night I’m flying him back like, so we cut eight hours of drive time to two hours of flight.
01:14:12
Brad Weimert
Right. But you, but at that level, you’re talking so super inexpensive, relatively speaking. But you’re talking about an alternative to driving.
01:14:19
Preston Brown
Yeah.
01:14:19
Brad Weimert
Not an alternative to commercial travel.
01:14:22
Preston Brown
And that’s why I’m saying it depends on your mission.
01:14:25
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:14:25
Preston Brown
Like if you just want to have a great life like in El Paso, Texas.
01:14:30
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:14:31
Preston Brown
Everything is eight hours away.
01:14:33
Brad Weimert
Right.
01:14:34
Preston Brown
Like, it is as easy for me to drive to the Juarez airport and get to Cancun as it is for me to drive to the El Paso airport and get to Dallas or here. But if I want to like drive anywhere, everything is eight hours away.
01:14:48
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:14:49
Preston Brown
So if I don’t want to deal with tsa, I wanted to do anal probe and you know, check my fucking gender and all this shit, then I, I need to own a plane.
01:14:59
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:14:59
Preston Brown
And so a little cirrus that can do A couple hundred knots, like 200 knot plane. Like I mean I could be in Rocky Point, Mexico in a few hours.
01:15:07
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:15:08
Preston Brown
Like that’s not, I’m on a beach in a few hours instead of driving to the airport to get there a few hours early to avoid missing a flight.
01:15:15
Brad Weimert
Let’s talk about the next level up then. So, so we’re in the owner operated plane at that level.
01:15:20
Preston Brown
Yeah. So the next level up is going to be kind of starting at like the tbm, the Meridian and that’s more regional. That’s something faster. That’s a two million and a half, four million dollar plane, brand new. And that’s going to be like, hey, I want to go New York to Florida.
01:15:35
Brad Weimert
Yep.
01:15:35
Preston Brown
You’re generally hiring a pilot. It’s a 800 to a thousand dollar a day pilot. It’s going to cost you if you have a leasing service renting it out for you and a reasonable interest rate, 50 grand a year. If you’re a high interest rate, 80 grand a year to enjoy a plane like that and it’s time travel, it’s worth it.
01:15:56
Brad Weimert
What’s, but what does it cost to operate?
01:15:58
Preston Brown
So that’s it. That’s it.
01:16:01
Brad Weimert
Sorry per hour to operate it.
01:16:04
Preston Brown
So the way I do it is I allow my leasing company to dry lease it, rent it out. And so they rent it out for two or three hundred hours a year which offsets a ton of the operational cost. Like you can go rent my plane right now and you call Lyft and you rent your pilot, you do all that and I think it’s like 1200, $1500 an hour. That’s what they charge you to rent it. For me, the operational cost on, you know, but 400, 300 hours a year. Like if I grab my phone out and I look at what it’s actually, you know, netting out to like because the leasing revenue coming in is offsetting. So if I’m spending, let’s call it because the interest rates have changed since I bought it. Call it 80,000. Right.
01:16:46
Preston Brown
And it’s going for, call it 350 hours, then it’s 228 an hour.
01:16:54
Brad Weimert
Jesus. That’s incredibly cheap.
01:16:58
Preston Brown
But I have the lease revenue coming.
01:17:00
Brad Weimert
Right.
01:17:00
Preston Brown
Okay. Now if I just owned it personally. Now I like the idea of leasing because airplanes are meant to be in the air.
01:17:06
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:17:06
Preston Brown
Okay. What all of my friends tell me that buy the airplane that don’t use it enough is that when it sits on the ground too long, it’s not designed to be on the ground. It’s designed to be at 30,000ft. It’s going to have new leaks, new problems, new this. Like so I’ve found that maintenance is actually lower. If it flies more, okay now it might be more frequent, but it’s lower per hour. So if you fly it yourself, say you buy a TBM, which is designed to be at 30,000ft and you fly it 20 hours a year, you’re doing a disservice to that TBM. Like that thing. Don’t buy an airplane for personal use unless you’re going to fly that thing. Minimum 150 hours a year.
01:17:43
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:17:43
Preston Brown
If you’re not, then you need a leasing service or a charter service that you can like farm it out to that will make sure it flies that much minimum so that every week or two it’s in the air getting what it needs. Right. Like it’s no different than owning like vacation homes. If you don’t see a home for a few years, what’s the chance that it’s going to have a freeze in that market and a pipe’s going to crack and you’re going to show up and be like, oh my God, what happened? Like, they’re like people, they need attention. Like if you marry your wife and don’t talk to her for a year, huh, she ain’t your wife, she’s fucking your friends. So like it’s going to be a little bit of an interesting journey.
01:18:14
Brad Weimert
Like. So when does it make sense to own private jet versus just lease it?
01:18:19
Preston Brown
I would say getting into, if you’re wanting to go into the private jet, the sexy jet, like the sexy twin engine jet, the regional jet that you can use, that’s going to be when you’re in an income, in my opinion of minimum 5 million, okay, you could do it less, but hopefully you’ve invested and saved well because it’s just, it’s an expensive world and when things go wrong, like you can have a million or two million dollar problem.
01:18:47
Brad Weimert
Right, Right.
01:18:48
Preston Brown
Like if we have a million dollar problem on our tbm, I’m gonna be mad.
01:18:51
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:18:52
Preston Brown
But I’m not going to be bankrupt. You know what I mean? If you want to get the Gulf stream at 30 or 60 or 80 million dollars, well you do the math. I’m not there yet, so I shouldn’t be telling you about your income. That. But like it’s just, it’s not like a house where you go buy a 300, 000 house when you make 60 grand a year. Like you want to kind of look at your income should be a multiple of the cost of the plane is the way I look at it. So if you’re making a million a year and you feel like owning a cirrus. Yeah. Do it like hire a pilot who’s also your assistant. Like, you can kind of, you know, cirrus pilots aren’t that hard to find.
01:19:24
Preston Brown
Like you have a personal assistant who’s also your personal pilot and it’s pretty easy to get around. And you have a plane that costs you whatever you’re paying on interest, call it 2500amonth and your pilot 4 grand a month. I mean, for 100 grand a year, you got an assistant, you got an airplane, you got a better lifestyle. If you’re in a regional business that you need to get 600 miles away a few times a week and still be back for dinner, it’s a great airplane. Like, like you can do that making maybe even half a million a year. But if I’m looking at when do I want a CJ or a Gulf Stream? Take your income and you’re going to get a lot of people commenting on this and they’ll disagree or they’ll agree and that’s fine.
01:20:03
Preston Brown
But at least the way I look at it, if your income is three times the cost of the airplane, buy the airplane.
01:20:09
Brad Weimert
Okay, last thing is the tax break here. So you mentioned first year, big incentive.
01:20:14
Preston Brown
Assuming Trump comes out with his tax cuts. Like, so we’re making a foresight forecasting assumption that I, I think is pretty likely. Look, 100 depreciation. You could do that on buildings. You can do that on lots of things. You can do that on vehicles. If they weigh over like £6,000, somebody can go buy a heavy truck and write it off.
01:20:34
Brad Weimert
Yep.
01:20:35
Preston Brown
Like, you know, an airplane. You go buy a five million dollar airplane and you made five million dollars that year. It’s, it’s not a bad thing to do.
01:20:45
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:20:46
Preston Brown
Because assuming Trump passes the tax cuts, then your income according to the IRS is zero.
01:20:53
Brad Weimert
Right.
01:20:53
Preston Brown
But what really happened is you made 5 million, you lived off of 4 million. You put a million down and financed 4 million. Now, are you going to suck wind at 250 a year, 350 a year in debt service for the next few years? Yeah. But you saved what, a million and a half, 2 million in taxes? So you look at that, you can kind of suck wind for the next five years.
01:21:17
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:21:17
Preston Brown
If you’re buying into a good airframe and you’re getting a good plane that you don’t think is going to go down in value too substantially like the tbm. Be careful of those. But like I mean the Citation jets, made in America, great product. Like I, I don’t get any money for advertising. I’m not a paid sponsor or spokesman. And and you know, look at Cirrus, they’re also made in America. Like look at anything made in America right now. It’s probably a really wise thing in the airplane world because people don’t realize how up that world’s about to get with anything not American.
01:21:48
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:21:48
Preston Brown
But you know we can assume with inflation which a ton of it’s going to come that if you buy a good airframe that is going to be reasonably and not delicately but not abusively used that with inflation you’ll be able to get back out of it in a few years. Reasonably so as long as you’re willing to pay the fuck you costs annually which are call it 100 to 300 grand a year depending on what your lifestyle needs are.
01:22:16
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:22:16
Preston Brown
It’s a great way to eliminate your taxes.
01:22:18
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
01:22:19
Preston Brown
So you eliminate 2 million by spending 1 million that you’re going to get back in five years. Yeah. You’re 250 a year. Maybe you eventually wound up paying 250 a year and you, you burnt through 2.25 million to get your million back.
01:22:35
Brad Weimert
Oh yeah. The plane in the meantime.
01:22:36
Preston Brown
And that other 250 a year is still another write off.
01:22:39
Brad Weimert
Right.
01:22:40
Preston Brown
So I mean you’re never going to not pay taxes.
01:22:45
Brad Weimert
Right.
01:22:45
Preston Brown
But you can pay a lot less. And if you’re in a stage of business where you need to do a lot of traveling, you need a lot of growth and it wouldn’t hurt you to save a million bucks on taxes so you could reinvest that into your company. An airplane should absolutely be an asset class you’re looking at if you can find a good leasing pool. There’s a lot of ifs and buts there. So like make sure you do your homework.
01:23:03
Brad Weimert
Complicated. Yeah, complicated conversation. But the nutshell, you kept saying airframe for people. That’s the plane itself and just.
01:23:09
Preston Brown
Yeah. The type like yeah.
01:23:10
Brad Weimert
You have to, you have to replace in airplanes all the time. That’s sort of the rules of the airplane world. Rebuilding the motor, rebuilding basically the whole plane.
01:23:18
Preston Brown
Lots of inspections, gear inspections. Like we have a landing gear inspection coming up and it might cost us 150 grand to rebuild some in the landing gear like.
01:23:26
Brad Weimert
Right.
01:23:26
Preston Brown
They’re always test Strength of this. I mean, the airplane world is actually fairly safe. I mean, there’s only two things that can kill you, like another plane or the ground.
01:23:35
Brad Weimert
Right.
01:23:36
Preston Brown
And. And so. And the way that they do maintenance on airplanes, like, if they did that on cars, Austin would not have bad traffic.
01:23:44
Brad Weimert
Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t think Austin does have bad traffic. I think it’s garbage. Have you ever been to a real city? I mean, Austin. Austin’s traffic is so nothing relative to actual cities.
01:23:53
Preston Brown
I’m spoiled in El Paso. So I think you just said.
01:23:57
Brad Weimert
Yeah, of course I said that.
01:23:58
Preston Brown
Ye. But, man, like, we sat on the highway last night, like, going back, and I was like, what the. Austin. Like, this is not what I expect from Texas.
01:24:07
Brad Weimert
Well, Preston Brown, man, I’ve got a million other things to talk to you about, but where should we point people? Where do people find out more about you, about what you’re doing? Where do you want to send them?
01:24:18
Preston Brown
Any of my social medias. The Preston Brown is my. My social media. I wanted to get Preston Brown, but there’s this really handsome, like, black football player that. That, you know, beat me to my name, so I had to go with the douchebag name of the Preston Brown. But all of my social medias. And then, of course, we’ll provide a link for you for the show notes where they can get access to all of my videos for free. I think we ask them to sign up for our email list if they do that. So it’s not free. We. We have a hook. We want you on the email list. But I have a problems to Profit podcast that we’re about to have you on as a guest. So, you know, come. Come see more there as well.
01:24:51
Brad Weimert
Love that. Love that. Well, I’m looking forward to jumping into that next, brother.
01:24:55
Preston Brown
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.
01:24:57
Brad Weimert
Thank you, man. All right, the episode’s over. If you’re new here and you don’t know me, my name is Brad Wymer. I am also the founder of Easy Pay Direct, which is a payment processing company that serves a tremendous amount of our guests on the show and a ton of our audience people like you. So if you’re accepting credit cards and you would like better service, better rates. Rates and a way to optimize the way that you’re accepting payments, you can check us [email protected] forward/bam. Again, that’s epd.com forward slash bam.
Preston Brown
Preston Brown is a 9-figure entrepreneur, business mentor, and automation strategist who manages a diverse portfolio of companies generating over $200 million in annual revenue. Known for his ability to scale and systematize businesses across real estate, finance, and beyond, Preston has helped hundreds of CEOs break past 7 figures and build sustainable, profitable operations.
In this episode, he shares his seven stages of entrepreneurship, a powerful framework for identifying and solving the right problems at the right time—plus why automation is the key to unlocking next-level growth.
Resources
🔹 Preston’s Business Resources: https://linktr.ee/PrestonResources
[guest_info]
Stuck at 6 or 7 figures?
In this episode of Beyond A Million, Brad sits down with Preston Brown to unpack why most entrepreneurs struggle to break the 8-figure ceiling—and what it actually takes to get there.
Preston Brown is a highly successful entrepreneur, speaker, and business mentor based in El Paso, Texas. Known for his expertise in scaling and automating businesses, he manages a diverse portfolio of companies that collectively generate over nine figures—more than $200 million—in annual revenue. His ventures span various industries, including real estate and finance. Preston began his entrepreneurial journey while still in college, earning more than his professors and eventually dropping out to focus on building businesses full-time. Preston is celebrated for his innovative approach to business, emphasizing automation and optimization to create sustainable growth. He has mentored hundreds of CEOs and entrepreneurs, helping them scale their companies profitably. In addition to his business achievements, Preston is a sought-after speaker and mentor, sharing insights on entrepreneurship, personal growth, and community impact.
In this insight-packed interview, Preston outlines his problem-solving framework and shares the seven stages of entrepreneurship, explaining that each requires different solutions and automation strategies.
Tune in!
Inspiring Quotes
- “What seven-figure and six-figure entrepreneurs aren’t doing is learning.” – Preston Brown
- “When you’re a new entrepreneur, say yes to everything. Then, once you figure out what you like, start saying no to the stuff you like less.” – Preston Brown
- “Revenue is vanity. Profits are sanity.” – Preston Brown
- “I don’t believe in perfect 10s—there’s always room for improvement.” – Brad Weimert
- “You wouldn’t go to Walmart and pay for something you don’t want. So why would I pay attention to you if I don’t want the information you’re giving?” – Preston Brown
- “Your problems are your gifts. Your problems are your guides.” – Preston Brown
- “You must do before you delegate.” – Preston Brown
- “Your problems are your gifts. They’re your guides. If you can stop managing by crisis, even for just one hour a day, and step back to look at your business, categorize your problems, and solve the biggest one, it will teach you more than any mentor or mastermind ever could.” – Preston Brown
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