215: From $750K a Year to Million-Dollar Months with Brian Luebben

Two years ago, Brian Luebben was doing $750K a year. Now he’s posting million-dollar months.

In this conversation, we break down what actually changed. It wasn’t a new tactic or growth hack. It was a shift in how he thinks about goals. That might sound a little woo-woo, but Brian explains why most entrepreneurs unknowingly limit their own growth, and outlines how a single shift in your thinking could completely alter the trajectory of your business.

Not only does this conversation challenge how you think about growth, it also unpacks the operational decisions he made that supported the jump from sub-seven figures to a true eight-figure business.

Mic Drop Moments

• “Instead of using your current reality to set your future goals, use your future goals to set your current reality.” – Brian Luebben

• “Rich is income. Wealthy is assets.“– Brian Luebben

• “You have three types of people that you want to surround yourself with: those you aspire to become, those you conspire with, and those you inspire behind you.” – Brian Luebben

• “If somebody wants to start a community, you don’t know what you’re doing yet. Start off small. Actually, start off for free, help people for free, throw them in a community. That’s how you get your first testimonials. That’s what we did.” – Brian Luebben

• “You must be willing to make a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake to make a million dollars. You must be willing to make a million-dollar mistake to make $10 million.” – Brian Luebben

• 00:00 From $750/Year to $1M/Month
• 04:34 The 3 People You Need to Be Around
• 09:55 Cashflow Investing vs Equity Investing
• 14:20 2 Frameworks from a $250M Mentor
• 17:45 Alex Hormozi Discipline
• 20:27 Long-Form Content To Scale Impact
• 22:51 How Career Capital Translates to Entrepreneurship
• 26:56 The Hires That Led to Million Dollar Months
• 32:00 Course Creation vs. Community Building
• 39:22 Expectations Matter More Than Price
• 44:52 Buy Businesses Then Learn To Run Them
• 49:53 Holding On Too Long Gets Expensive
• 56:33 Passive Income Is Mostly A Lie
• 59:18 Earn Your Summer
• 01:04:29 The Two Week Vacation Test

Brad Weimert: Brian Luebben, killer corporate salesperson, bailed on that, built a little portfolio of single-family homes to build some cash flow, started a podcast that blows up, starts a course, starts a mastermind community. We recorded two years ago.

Brian Luebben: Holy sh*t.

Brad Weimert: When you had just started doing this, and you had done 750K that year. This year, you’re doing million-dollar months.

Brian Luebben: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: What broke first in that process? Your systems, your people, or you personally, and the growth?

Brian Luebben: Yeah, my brain. My brain, my beliefs, my entire way of viewing life and business. I’ll start us off with, actually, something I’m doing recently, and then I’ll take us back because this will help the audience and people watching and listening. As entrepreneurs and as humans, we have a tendency to use our current reality to set our future goals, right? So, we’re like, “What did we do this year? What did we do last year? Add 10%, add 12%, add 15%. Hell, let’s get ambitious. Let’s add 20% and really push ourselves, right?” But the problem with that is that you’re operating off of an operating system that you only know to be true. And so, you’re doing things the best that you can do them, not the best that they can be done.

And so, instead of using your current reality to set your future goals, what you instead do is you use your future goals to work backwards and set your current reality. And so, that’s been a huge frame shift for me over the last couple of years, is I was just like, okay, corporate America, I was the top guy. I was number 8 out of 5,079, made like 252K in a year, right? So, great corporate salary.

Brad Weimert: At age 20 or 22.

Brian Luebben: Oh, yeah, I was 22 to 25. I was doing that. And so, that’s great. That’s great money. And then you go from that to, you’re like, “Okay, cool, like this is the mountaintop.” And then you go into entrepreneurship, and then you’re like, “Oh, okay, cool. I just did 2 million in a year, gross.” And you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s the mountaintop.” And then all of a sudden you take home $2 million, and you’re like, “Now, that’s the mountaintop.” And so, now what I’m doing is now I’m like, “Okay, what’s not the best that I can do, but what’s the best that it can be done?” That’s where all my time, that’s where all my energy, that’s where all my focus goes. So, my focus goes not to who’s closest to my reality, but who’s closest to my dreams and where my dream is their current reality.

And then how do I get in their world, mimic and mirror their behaviors, actions, their business models, bring those back to today, and then that’s how we operate. So, that was probably the biggest frame shift that I’ve had over the last couple of years is just saying like, man, if anybody’s watching this or listening to this, and they’re in business, like you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. All businesses, marketing, sales, fulfillment, legal, and finance, so it’s a conveyor belt. And if you just take all the different bits and pieces from people that have already been successful before you, then you can start to understand the formula where it actually can produce an automated machine that is cranking and turning and churning and actually producing the economic outcome that you want. But my biggest goal overall was in the beginning. I was like, “How do I become rich?”

That’s where we all start. How do I make more money, right? And by the way, side note, there’s a big difference between rich and wealthy. Rich is income. Wealthy is assets. So, wealthy is your equity and then rich is your income. So, in the beginning, you start with, “I want to be rich. How do I become rich? How do I make more money?” Then that quickly shifts to once you get around people that have a lot of money, that’s not the question that they ask. The question that they ask is, how do I provide more value? And then you get compensated at a percentage of the value that you provide to others.

Brad Weimert: Hopefully.

Brian Luebben: Hopefully, if you do it the correct way. And so, that was probably, if to punctuate and land the plane on the opening question, the biggest frame shift I have had over the last couple of years now being an eight-figure owner, is going from, “How can I make more money?” to now, “How can I add more value and capture a percentage of that upside?”

Brad Weimert: So, you said modeling the behaviors of people that are playing a different game functionally, right? One of the ways that I see people get that wrong consistently is modeling the behaviors of people that are at a different stage in life.

Brian Luebben: Oh, that checks out.

Brad Weimert: So, for example, I have a very close friend that his company does several hundred million a year, and they have a healthy margin. He makes a lot of money relative to most people I know. If you model his behavior in his life, you’re going to be a drunk idiot all the time.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, exactly, and you’re not going to get the result.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. A little hyperbole there, but I bring it up because the question is, when you’re modeling somebody that’s ahead of you, how do you gauge that? What behaviors do you look for? What actions do you want to model? What are you not trying to model right now?

Brian Luebben: Yes. No, it’s a great question. It’s like, what’s your litmus test to decide what’s best versus what’s best right now? And I think it’s a wonderful frame of reference. So, I mean, because I think what a lot of people do incorrectly is they look to what’s the meme where it’s like, “$100,000 or dinner with Jay Z, which one would you pick?” You’re like, “There’s nothing that Jay Z will tell you for even from a business perspective that you can implement,” that like you don’t have the ability to implement that stuff at that level, like you don’t want dinner with Richard Branson or Mark Cuban. What are you going to learn from that? So, my best rule of thumb is, I always go two steps ahead.

Two steps ahead is like the best sweet spot to swing the bat for me. And so, maybe, if you’re making six figures, find someone who’s making a couple of million a year. If you’re making a couple of million a year, find somebody that’s at that 10 to 15, or maybe up to that 20 million a year. If you’re doing 20 million a year, look to the 100. If you’re at 100, then you can look up to two to five to a billion. And because at that point, it’s just talent. And so, that’s what I would say, is always look two steps ahead of you. And it’s also in that same coin, but the flip side of it, it’s every single person has value to add to the person that’s two steps behind them. So, you look two steps ahead, and you serve two steps behind.

So, there’s this quote that I love, hopefully, I don’t butcher it, where it’s you have three types of people that you want to surround yourself with: those you aspire to become, those you conspire with, and those you inspire behind you. So, the aspire is that two-step ahead, the conspire is people that are in the same arena as you, at the same revenue level, preferably, having the same types of problems. And then you go behind you to the person that’s just now coming up, and then you throw the rope back down, and you pull them up.

Brad Weimert: I like the two steps behind a lot, because I think if you go one step behind you, what happens is you inevitably start to sort of tell people about the experiments you ran that you can’t really confidently give advice on. You can be like, “Yeah, we did this,” and you’re like, “I don’t know if that’s actually causal.” You’re like, “We got here as a result.” But two people behind you can pretty confidently be like, “No, no, I know where you are right now.” Right? Like, I tried 1,000 things at that moment, and this is how we navigated out of it. And, like this is the mistakes you’re going to make, and I think that you have probably a higher hit rate in giving good advice two steps behind than one.

Brian Luebben: Great example of this is one of my primary offers is we teach people how to buy cash-flowing small businesses. And so, online and in the space, we have another individual here in Austin, Texas that talks a lot about buying cash flow in small businesses.

Brad Weimert: Yes, we do.

Brian Luebben: Right? And so, in the very beginning, I did the same thing. I was like, here’s how you buy it. Here’s how you go through the acquisition process. You look at X amount of deals, you underwrite X amount of deals, you submit offers in X amount, and you close, hopefully on one out of 100, right? That’s the process. It’s just numbers, it’s reps, it’s blocking and tackling. And if you do this, and if you underwrite correctly, and you do the correct diligence process, you will get an asset that prints you a couple of $100,000 net profit per year, which is what most people leaving corporate want. So, that would be the one step behind to your analogy, right? And so, I did that for a couple of years.

We were successful with it, and then we realized, “Oh, now it’s time to get to step two,” which is now people are closing on these assets, and they’re still not free, because congratulations, you just left your engineering job, and now you’re a business owner. And so, me today, three years into the game, four years into the game, I could go run that business more passively, but somebody that’s just coming out, and you’ve never managed a team, you’ve never managed people, you’ve never set OKRs or KPIs or ROKs or whatever system that you’re running. They don’t know how to do systems and structures, so they’re running around, like, “What the f*ck just happened?”

So, to your point about the two-step versus one step, world of difference, because now we’re like, “Dude, it’s not buying the business is half,” maybe probably 20%. 80% is how you run the asset, and that applies to real estate as well. Any acquisition entrepreneurship is how you run and scale the asset, not how you purchase it, but the purchase is where you’re going to give yourself a buffer. And basically, if you buy well, you have more margin to f*ck up.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, right, totally.

Brian Luebben: That’s all you’re buying. That’s all your margin is in the beginning. It’s just your margin of f*ck up.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that I’ve done quite a bit of real estate, and I used to early on, I made mistakes with leverage, and then I moved into it, and part of that was that I didn’t have a margin for f*ck up. No.

Brian Luebben: That’s why you have to buy into the market and all that stuff. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, like, but you really need it. And now, because I’m a better operator, and because I have a lot more padding, I can buy without the margin to f*ck up, knowing, but then I have to underwrite for it and say, “Okay, I don’t have much margin to f*ck up, but it’s fine if I’m just holding it for X period of time because of XYZ, right? Because the appreciation is there, and I believe in it, depreciation makes me money, right? Saves me on taxes, rather, and/or that I’m making enough money elsewhere that it warrants my focus to be there, even if this isn’t optimized in the moment, which is another calculation worth running.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, I’m curious about your perception on this. So, there are two different types of investing. You have cash flow investing and equity investing. And I think a lot of people are thinking that they’re investing for cash flow, but they’re actually investing for equity. It’s a lot of commercial, especially in the last 15 years. People are like, “Oh, I’m going to go buy all this cash flow and become financially free from this passive income.” And even in the commercial space, because we’re building a boutique hotel in South Florida, it’s just like, “Dude, you have so many partners in the deal. We’re doing a $14.2 million deal.” Like, there are so many partners in that that their cash flow is kind of inconsequential. It’s an equity play, it’s an appreciation play, it’s a tax savings play.

And so, people are doing that, and putting all their time, energy, and effort into that, thinking that’s the vehicle that’s going to get them out, where they really should be doing a cash flow play, which is either buying or building a business. And then, to your point, so like, that’s what I did. So, I spent the last couple of years building and buying businesses so that I have the cash flow. And now that I’ve got a tax problem and I’ve got a cash flow machine that’s compounding, now I take that profit, and I distribute that back into real estate as a wealth-building in a tax-saving vehicle. I think that’s the best way to do it. Bonus points if you do a cash flow business that’s attached to real estate.

Brad Weimert: You got it. Yeah, I think first and foremost, it depends on your objectives, right?

Brian Luebben: Absolutely.

Brad Weimert: And that’s tied directly to, in most cases, tied directly to what phase of life or business you’re in, right, where you are in the process. I think your background is, get out of the nine-to-five, right? That’s a narrative. Get out of the nine-to-five. Let me help you move out of the nine-to-five and outcome is own your life, etcetera, etcetera, which obviously resonates with the f*ck ton of people. Cash flow is the most important thing there. How do you replace your cash flow?

Brian Luebben: Buy a burger with mortgage. We can buy burger with your equity.

Brad Weimert: Right. And the highest return items that exist, period, are like an investment in OpenAI at first, in the beginning, unless you’re Elon and then you’re f*cked. But those are the tremendous multi-thousand times multiples, right? But there’s also tremendous failure right there. You can stomach that if that’s a small portion of your whole portfolio, and cash flow is taken care of, and lifestyle is taken care of.

Brian Luebben: Dude, I think success is just how many shots on goal can you confidently take and comfortably take and making more money. And having that income machine is just having a large supply of ammunition versus having a revolver with six shots. Instead, you’ve got boxes of ammo, and you can just pop and pop and pop and pop. All of a sudden, you had a bull’s eye, and then that changes you and your family economically forever, but you just have to have ammo.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I agree with you. I like that analogy, and I think that asset allocation in your investment portfolio, distributing some money for cash flow investments, some money for equity investments, is rational, right? And everybody’s got different risk tolerance and different objectives they want, right? So, some people have tremendous risk tolerance, and they’re okay just throwing money at it and hoping. And in that case, yeah, you hope you have a lot of bullets, right? You hope you have a lot of ammo. But I think that for most people, on the front end, cash flow is the beginning, and then you have enough ammo from the cash flow to look at maybe being a little more speculative.

Brian Luebben: I agree. And then also, the most important thing that you mentioned is you have to know what game you’re playing. So, to go back to your previous question, I think the original question, which is like, what mentor to look for? It’s just like with me personally, there’s no one-size-fits-all. I can only share the advice that works for me. They could take it. They could apply it to their lives that they’re in a similar situation. I was a single dude in corporate, making a lot of money for my means, and I was just like, “Okay, cool. Well, what’s important for me is I want to be able to do what I want, what I want with who I want. I want to build a business around my life, not my life around my business. I want to do something that I’m passionate about, that I’m fired up about, that I can work with really cool people and provide a meaningful outcome.”

Now, we can take the concept of passion, and we can package that and move that to a later part of the conversation. But when I was looking for mentors, I’m looking for mentors that mirror that life. And so, one of my original mentors, me and you both know him, he’s in Austin, is David Osborn, so a couple of 100 million net worth at the point. So, to your point, not a mentor, not a great direct mentor for me, where he’s like the person that’s in the weeds with me.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, you can’t bottle his lifestyle.

Brian Luebben: A great aspirational mentor to where I can look and take operating systems and ideas from him, and he can plant the seed for me. And I can run with that, and I can run the ball, and so I pretty confidently think that I’m running his same playbook in different industries. But he’s got this awesome, he’s got two frames that just completely changed the game for me. So, for people that are just now tuning in, it’s just this now $250 million guy, so a quarter-billion-dollar guy. Here’s the two frameworks I learned. Framework number one was, I do, we do, they do. So, I do the business. We do the business together. So, you’re hiring support staff or people that are kind of at your level, and then they do the business, which is, now you’re hiring talent that is superior to you in different functions, and now they can run and grow the function without you.

That concept just changed my life because I was like, “Wait a second, you’re not ready for scale. We’re still on ‘we do it.’ We’re not even to ‘they do it’ at this one location or this one vertical. Why would we think it’s time for scale yet? Great litmus test, which leads into his second framework, which is plant trees, manage orchards. And that’s how I’ve ran every single business that I’ve started. So, when we started it, the mistake that people make is you go, and you just are planting seeds and planting trees all over the place, and you’re just hoping one sprouts, right? So, that’s somebody that’s bouncing around we call it, what, shiny object syndrome. Somebody’s like, “I’m going to do mobile home parks, and I’m going to buy an Airbnb, and I’m going to look at this plumbing company and, holy sh*t, Codie Sanchez told me to buy a laundromat.”

And so, you’re all over the place, and that’s in a f*cking week, right? And so, you’re doing all of these different things, and your attention is so scattered, and you don’t have the skill sets yet to allow for that luxury of being scattered. You have to be a sniper before you’re a shotgun. And so, you plant all of these seeds, and maybe a few of them begin to sprout. But the problem is you’re not there to protect the sprout as it turns into a sapling. So, the point of planting trees managed orchards is, step one, you plant one tree, and then you guard it as it turns into a sapling. As it starts to mature, you’re shielding it from the wind, from the animals, from the rain, and you’re making sure that it’s okay, bad economic environments, bad operators, bad partnerships, and you’re protecting as it grows into a strong enough fruit-bearing tree where it can stand on its own.

Once it’s standing on its own and it’s bearing fruit, which is now producing income, and it doesn’t need you to protect it, then you move on to the next tree. You take the seeds from those apples, and you start planting more. And then eventually you have so many standalone trees that just takes time that you go hire people to come manage the orchard, and that’s where you have your COOs, that’s where you have your family offices, that’s where you have your different people come in. And that’s how I’ve operated my businesses. And so, it’s kept me singularly focused on a lot of these businesses where I’m like, “Okay, cool. I got to stay with this tree. This tree is not mature yet.”

And I think just focus and consistency is the one thing that most people don’t have. It’s like the meta skill that people don’t have to just do it, because “I’m just going to do this for the next 10 years,” is one thing.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think discipline is another way to say that.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, and discipline is another funny thing, because I’ll give a shout-out to Hormozi. He just reframed how I thought about discipline, because I view myself as a very disciplined person. You have to be to a certain extent to get to the degree that you’re at, that I’m at, anybody that’s listening is at, but he said, “You are doing the things that you’re doing because you enjoy them.” He goes, “How well and how consistently are you doing the sh*t that you hate?” And so, we’re sitting here talking about how disciplined we are in this podcast, but I’ll tell you what, man, I’ve got 30 videos for Instagram that I’m supposed to record that I have not recorded in two weeks. And that’s a critical function of the business.

I need to spend one full day just recording these 30 videos. We’ve got the scripts. We’ve got what I need to do, and I’m just like, “I don’t want to do it.” So, how disciplined am I?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, look, I mean, God, there are so many threads I could pull on there. First off, I think all of the frame that you have, you’re talking about investing and being narrow in your approach to investing, being a sniper before you can be a shotgun. I think before you even consider that, thinking about being an operator in your business and sticking with the same f*cking business for long enough for it to make sense, is relevant, and I think that’s the comparison. That’s a more apt takeaway for the fledgling entrepreneurs than the investing side of things. And your world, obviously, is buying businesses and running them, and that’s part of the product proposition.

But the number of people that I’ve watched in the last 15 years or 20 years of my entrepreneurial cycle, that have done something for three years, then moved to the next thing, done that for five years, moved to the next thing, number of people right now that are AI experts is beautifully indicative of how ridiculous that math is, right? And I just finished recording a conversation with this guy, Will Duke, who built his company for 20 years, then built a software company within it, and then sold both of them. And long story there, but that 20-year arc of learning how to do that one thing is tremendously, tremendously valuable. Second, everybody should listen to Alex Hormozi like he’s just sharp as f*ck.

Brian Luebben: He spends a significant portion of his week and of his year writing. And so, I think there’s an argument that could be made that writing sharpens your thinking. And so, he spends every morning uninterrupted for the last six to ten years writing like that is what he does. And so, it sharpens his thinking. It sharpens everything into frameworks. How do I simplify, simplify, simplify? And so, that’s why he’s able to articulate things so well. And he also spends a full calendar day a week doing content. And so, it’s just like you have to figure out what game that you’re playing. And that’s the discipline that I’m now building. They’re all muscles to be built.

And now I’m building that muscle of the discipline of the content, because I realized that the outcome that I want, which is to help a million people become entrepreneurs, we say, we unlock entrepreneurs. We don’t help people necessarily become entrepreneurs, so to do a quick edit there, because I feel like most people shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, me too.

Brian Luebben: But the 5% of people that are, that are trapped in corporate, and they know they’re like, “Dude, I know I can do this on my own,” I want to be like the lighthouse for those folks, for them to come, and they come hang out with me, and then we can talk about this together. But, dude, like, entrepreneurship is rough. So, like for me, I realized to help a million people do this, I need to have large YouTube presence, I need to write a book that’s a bestseller book, and I need to scale our community, because I realize our community alone is not going to help a million people. But YouTube and a book would be the two sources of long-form content that would produce that result.

And so, how I came to that conclusion, and by the way, for people listening, this isn’t necessarily about content. It’s not necessarily about a book. Think about it like this. I have this macro result that I want to accomplish. What do I do is what we just talked about. I go to the people and the individuals that have accomplished that result, Martell, Hormozi, Vaynerchuk, Dave Ramsey, what do they all have in common? Long-form content, consistent decades worth of long-form content. Dave is still running his radio show for like 30 years now. Even Tony Robbins can be in that same camp.

Brad Weimert: For sure.

Brian Luebben: Vaynerchuk is in the same camp. They have best-selling books, and they have a great source of community. So, in order to impact people at a massive scale, those are the three things that I need to replicate over the next decade. And so, for me, I’m like, “Okay. So, if I just do YouTube, my community, and a book, or write however many books I need to have that book over the next decade, I’ll accomplish my result.” And everything else economically will result from those three things. So, like that’s the goal. So, that’s how I think of things is I work backwards, taking ideas from people, but to your point, you can’t do the blocking and tackling from them.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that, and I like the clarity of framework around the blocking and tackling from them, which is their day-to-day activities.

Brian Luebben: Yep.

Brad Weimert: Let me ask you something. We talked about sort of building the skill set, sticking with one thing, and not spreading yourself too thin, discipline, focus. Do you think that you would have been able to build the company you’ve built if you didn’t have your corporate sales experience?

Brian Luebben: Yes, and it would have been more difficult. I think a lot of people discount greatly the amount of career capital. I think Cal Newport coined that, like career capital, and what they can bring to a company. Man, the corporate America’s biggest hater, which is what I am online, I had a fine time. It was okay. It really wasn’t bad. It really wasn’t bad, I mean, but that’s the point of it all. Like, I don’t like bureaucracy. I don’t like being a number on the spreadsheet. I got into a head-on car collision while I was driving to an appointment, and my GM at the time was like, “Do you know how much money you just f*cking cost me?”

Brad Weimert: Oh, my God.

Brian Luebben: I’m like, “I may kill you, brother.” And that was the moment that I realized I was like, “Oh, cool. I’m a number on a spreadsheet here.” And so, as much as I dislike that, I learned so many valuable sales skills. I learned how to sell everything to everyone, always. And so, that’s what really trained me and built the discipline of going out, doing the door knocking, doing all the cold calls. Just these are the inputs. I think the biggest thing I learned from that wasn’t even the sales skills, but it was the inputs. Like, here are the inputs that yield an outcome. And a lot of people that are engineers or that are in back-end positions don’t understand the input conversations like sales professionals do.

Because for a sales professional, you’re like, “I want to make $200,000, $300,000, $500,000 a year. Here’s the amount of cold calls. Here’s the amount of appointments. Here’s my close rate. Here’s all the economic math I need to yield that.” Back-end people don’t understand that as much. And so, that’s really what served me the most but, man, it’s like, not only that, but then when I started up my podcast, Action Academy, it’s like I was also talking about different coaches I was using. I was talking about different masterminds I was in. And then my whole pitch to the mastermind, GoBundance, you’re familiar with it, was, I was like, “Hey, man, like you guys don’t got like a sales team or anything.”

I’m just traveling around, kind of doing nothing. You know, people are joining organically for my podcast. I’ll just put like a little link, and I’ll just talk to them, my own people, on my podcast, and I just want to cut from whoever joins. And they were like, “Yeah, I would do 10%.” And so, that’s what I did, man. I think I made like $70,000, $80,000 from doing that, like, while traveling around Europe, on top of my other stuff. So, I mean, like, dude, that was like the B2C selling experience. So, I had B2B, B2C. And so, by the time I started up my own thing, I was just like, “Dude, I can do this in my sleep. I did my first 1,000 sales calls myself.”

But dude, when you first start a business, it’s kind of funny, because when you get to, like you, where you’ve been like so far removed from being in that, I mean me, even a couple of years removed from that, it feels like an eternity ago, and you kind of have like this amnesia from it, where it’s like, I guess I’d equate it to like a woman giving birth. They forget how painful it is, because otherwise they wouldn’t give birth again. And so, it’s just like, you forget how much it sucked, but how much it was kind of fun and sucked at the same time. And so, anyways, I think everybody has some natural proclivities that they can utilize. But I think the main piece of advice I would give is just know your strengths.

The biggest difference between corporate and entrepreneurship is that, in corporate, you’re trained to be well-rounded because they want you to be cross-functional, in case, then you just switch to different departments. But in entrepreneurship, it’s best to know what’s your competitive advantage and what’s your world-class strength and skill set, and you just 100X that thing, and you delegate or partner with everything else.

Brad Weimert: Let’s talk about the current model of the business. So, as we started, I said two years ago, you had done $750,000 for the year. Now, we’re on to million-dollar months.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. We did 1.3 million last month.

Brad Weimert: Amazing. It’s awesome. What does the team look like now? And actually, let me set the stage here. When we spoke two years ago, you were like, “Yeah, just have three to five contractors, and it’s great.” And you were traveling all over the world. What’s the makeup of the team now, and what was the first really impactful hire?

Brian Luebben: Yeah. So, I mean, we can label impactful in a couple of different ways to make it easiest. I’ll talk about it in the context of revenue, which is just the easiest, like direct impact to be able to see. So, yeah, the team today looks, I think, about 12, I believe, is our team. So, we’re hiring a lot more on back-end ops. So, we started hiring more on the front end, which is what I probably recommend, is you want to start with your killers. You want to make it rain, bring the commission in, and then once you have the revenue coming in, then you’re able to take that revenue and now distribute it back to fulfillment. So, that’s kind of the model that we did. So, we have two sales reps that are commission only. They’re doing perfectly fine for themselves. I paid one of the guys $51,000 last month. So, he’s doing okay.

Brad Weimert: Awesome.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, so he’s ripping, and got him a Rolex too. That was really cool. I was excited for that.

Brad Weimert: At your birthday?

Brian Luebben: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: I think I saw something on social about that.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. So, that was really cool. I would say that the most meaningful hires went for me, personally, I could just share my experience. When we hired an Instagram setter on marketing, so somebody that was just in my DMs, because I have the benefit of a pretty large personal brand and a lot of people that just weren’t being spoken to in my DMs. So, you can use this same context or logic to whatever underutilized lead channel that you have, but the DMs there added $100,000 a month, immediately.

Brad Weimert: Damn.

Brian Luebben: Immediately, day one, like month one, just because we had more calls on calendar. So, that was crazy. Hiring our sales team like trained, a sales team that was already trained, already killers, an internal sales team. I think it’s banana land whenever somebody tells me they have hired an external company to do their sales for them. I don’t get it.

Brad Weimert: I don’t either.

Brian Luebben: And they’re paying them like 30% of revenue to do this, because they’re just, candidly, you don’t have the spine and the balls to build your own team. Come on now.

Brad Weimert: Or skill set.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. But I mean, dude, I’m like, “What are you doing? Like, what is this? Like, just suck it up and do this thing.” And so, I’ll give them a shout-out. We paid Cole Gordon, and wonderful time, wonderful experience. So, he helped us hire. So, we paid him $20,000 to hire two reps, and they did great. And so, then that added another $200,000 plus per month. We tweaked the offer, and so we tweaked the front-end offer. That added another $200,000 to $300,000 a month. And now we just hired a lot of back-end guys to come in that have got a decade of experience in high ticket. Now, they’re going to build out our back end, which is non-existent, and the back end is going to be how we get to 15 million, 20 million in the core offer.

So, most offers, if you’re in by, I mean, just about anything, especially in the education space, you start with the front end. You can maybe get the front end up to a million a month. Maybe you can get it up to that. That’s like a lot of volume.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, it’s aggressive.

Brian Luebben: And high ticket, but the backend is where you really scale it to 20, 30, 40 million. Like you can’t really front end your way to 20, 30, 40 million in our space at least. So, that’s what we’re working on right now. So, we started kind of with the revenue generating positions, so sales and marketing. Now, we’re building an entire media team and a marketing team. So, that’s kind of retroactive, but then the operations is what we’re taking all that profit and now reinvesting it back into there. So, we’re putting a million dollars into operations right now.

Brad Weimert: Well, like you said, if you don’t have the sales, then you don’t have money to do anything else.

Brian Luebben: My favorite quote from Martell was, there’s not too many problems that writing a check can’t fix.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, there’s a longstanding, I want to say it’s Dan Sullivan that said, if you have a problem that money can solve, you don’t have a problem. Might have been Dan Kennedy, but yeah, same thing.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. Revenue, cash is king, baby.

Brad Weimert: It is. So, I mean, I think a lot of what you just said, you laid out the entire framework for, that your trajectory, which is great. I think that the thing to remember for basically anybody is it doesn’t have to be at those numbers, right? And you’re talking about a high-ticket model in general. And so, all models operate a little differently. The high-ticket model has become tremendously popular. And that’s on the back of the coach, consultant, creator economy.

Brian Luebben: Correct.

Brad Weimert: Now, I have huge questions around where that’s going to go. And that’s two years. And you also mentioned community a bunch of times there. So, what is the difference from your perspective in course creation and community building?

Brian Luebben: I think it’s night and day. I think online courses are dead in the next two years.

Brad Weimert: I do too.

Brian Luebben: But bar none, it’s done. Myself included, I think people have spent enough thousands of dollars on courses. I’m not to say every course is a bad course. There’s a lot of good courses. I spent money on great courses, thousands of dollars. I spent $20,000 on a course to learn YouTube ads. Guess how many YouTube ads I ran?

Brad Weimert: Sure.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. And I didn’t even ask for a refund. I was so embarrassed. And that’s me. So, like taking normal person work at a job, it’s like you’re sitting in front of this computer screen watching this video and you’re thinking, ah, this is going to be it, man. This is going to change everything, but it doesn’t change any of the underlying problems, which is what we identified. And that’s why I think I am ultra, ultra, ultra, a hundred thousand, mega billion, trillion times bullish on community. Obviously, I’m biased, but I’m willing to back it up because throughout human existence, person to person, people to people, like even what was it? It was like Julius Caesar, Pompei and one more individual whose name is escaping me was like the triumvirate. It was the first mastermind where they were all coming together. So, you had a military general, you had politics and you had banking power all together to create something wonderful. So, you have to just be in the room with people.

And so, I’m so, so bullish on that because, especially in acquisition. So, you can’t watch a course to buy and run a business. You really need to be in the room with people that are both going through it with you, and then also those people that are ahead of you that are helping you with diligence and stuff like that. So, I think in the future, I think maybe they have a shelf life of maybe two or three more years, especially these people that are teaching courses on how to build courses, courseception. It’s like whatever, I won’t go down that rabbit hole, but essentially, I think that you just don’t have the reinforcement systems, and so I can just share what we do at Action Academy. It’s just an example of what I’ve seen not work.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Start with the USP for what the community is.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, sure. Sure.

Brad Weimert: And then tell me what mistakes you’ve made along the way.

Brian Luebben: A lot.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, right.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. So, the best way that we could teach this is just going through my own journey here, I mean how we’ve messed up, which is by the way, why I encourage people, a lot of people see, like our ticket right now is 15 for the entry level. A lot of people think that they could just start at 15. I don’t think you should do that. Like, I really don’t think you should do that. Unless you are an absolute expert in this space and you have a lot of brand and domain authority, don’t start there. I started that two grand a year. And then I went up to 5, then I went up to 7, then I went up to 8, then I went up to 9, then I went up to 12, then I went up to 15.

Brad Weimert: When you say start there, you’re talking about if somebody wants to build a community.

Brian Luebben: If somebody wants to start a community, you don’t know what you’re doing yet. Start off smaller. Actually, start off for free, help people for free, throw them in a community. That’s how you get your first testimonials. That’s what we did. So, we started there. Then it’s $1,500 lifetime, and then you’ve got more people and then you tinker and you tinker, and then you build it into a more valuable asset.

Brad Weimert: Let me add a major additional point to that, which is I think what a lot of people hear when they hear you say that is, yeah, but I want to make money right now. And I think, and we see this across the board where people launch a product, but they don’t have the experience to fulfill the product, really. This is the…

Brian Luebben: Most of the online space.

Brad Weimert: You got it. And this is the critique of coaches, consultants, and creators is like, you’re not teaching based on your actual experience.

Brian Luebben: Correct.

Brad Weimert: You’re just teaching because you want to charge $15,000 for something and replace your income.

Brian Luebben: Yes.

Brad Weimert: And I think that new entrepreneurs are doing themselves a disservice by putting that as the bar because you have to deliver a lot more.

Brian Luebben: Significantly.

Brad Weimert: If you charge two grand, the expectations are lower and you’re allowed to learn in that process and fumble through it a little bit more.

Brian Luebben: And I’ll give somebody the marketing hack to close 50% or more on their sales calls at that stage.

Brad Weimert: Awesome.

Brian Luebben: What you do is you say, hey, Mr. Customer, potential customer, this thing that I’m building, you’re in like V1., You’re in the trial. You’re in the first cohort. Like, I don’t know what this is going to be. All I know is it’s going to be 5 or 10 or X thousand dollars more, but because we’re new, I’m going to give it to you for this massive discount in exchange, my one ask, is that you give me vicious feedback throughout the process that I can improve the product, but I will give you this massive discount in exchange for being one of the first members. We did that for like years.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome.

Brian Luebben: And that is the way to do it because the problem that comes with business and the problem that is associated with the high ticket and the online coach and the online course space is a mismanagement of expectations versus delivery. Period. Everyone’s saying you’re going to get a hundred thousand dollars in two months, and then you don’t get that result. And you’re like, well, wait, I just got scammed. But if you set the expectation of, hey, this is going to be really difficult, most difficult thing you’ve ever done, it’s going to be worth it at the end. We’re going to help you. Here’s the step one, step two, step three.

Business, running a good business is just each different customer interaction point, reinforcing the promises that you made. So, hey, your onboarding call is going to be in 24 hours. Your onboarding call needs to be in 24 hours. Reinforce the point. Okay, cool. You’re going to get to this point by this point. Reinforce the point. That’s how you build trust and that’s how you build buy-in with the customer.

So, the problems that we had, when we first started off, so to all the point that I was just saying, we were very anti module. We’re like, modules suck, screw modules. We just want people in here, peer to peer, on the phone, in person, group calls, all this stuff. And we’re going to do multi-asset classes. So, we do commercial real estate and we do business acquisition.

Brad Weimert: Let’s go back to the USP for fun.

Brian Luebben: Oh, for people that are leaving corporate, so my issue was I make a quarter million a year. I’ve got a couple rentals that do a couple thousand bucks. Big delta between that and six figures of cash flow. How do we actually build six figures of cash flow and wealth? So, the real way to do it is commercial real estate and business acquisition. So, there was a gap in the market. Nobody’s talking about that. They’re only talking to high income professionals about how to do it a rental at a time. And so, people wanted to go faster and do what the big boys and the big girls were doing. So, that’s where Action Academy was born.

So, we helped people replace $10,000 to $30,000 a month in income within 12 to 24 months through business acquisition and commercial real estate. That’s the USP. So, our normal person that comes in normally has got a job, 27 to 47, got a couple of kids, couple Airbnbs or rentals, and they’re looking to scale. So, that’s our person that we serve.

Brad Weimert: Great. And so, you initially thought, f*ck modules.

Brian Luebben: F*ck modules. That’s stupid. We’re just going to do Zoom calls, one-on-ones. Like, we’re going to just really be peer to peer, right? And so, in the beginning, we had a bunch of high performers, gangsters, killers that joined, and they were winning. They were thriving. All right, cool. Now, we scale out. And then now, all of a sudden we’re like, okay, now with this scale we have the vets in the group that are the more experienced people. Now, their time is getting taken up too much, they can’t even run their businesses.

So, now that’s where modules did have to be introduced. And we’re like, okay, well, we’ll have the vets record the modules for the people. And we’re like, okay, cool. This is that was V1. So, then we get up to that stage and then we’re like, okay, cool. This is working a little bit better. Now, we have a larger amount of newer people coming in for marketing, and now we have an increasing need for the mentors, but we only have X amount of mentors. How do we widen the availability of the mentor without crashing their business?

So, it became group calls, became weekly cohorts, became like small group coaching in modules. And then eventually, then it went another year, and then we realized, oh, okay, well, not only do we need that, but we need significantly more education in the modules and we need to redo how the modules are done so that it’s way more easy to follow. It’s way more in depth. And then any specific questions that they have that’s not answered by the education, they take it to the mentor or the coach and the one-on-one.

And then now, we finally got to a point, that was last year, now we got to this point where we’re burning all of the modules to the crown again and we’re rebuilding them from scratch, like a Phoenix from the ashes in a way that’s like done better because the modules were ass. The modules were 12 different people filming in 12 different styles, teaching 12 different ways. So discombobulated and awful that people couldn’t follow them. And what we do is this crazy wacky thing called asking the customer for feedback.

So, we asked our customers for feedback and they said the modules suck. Got it. Confirmed feedback. So, then we take that and then now we’re rebuilding the modules. And now, we just hired client success team, so CS team. So, now once you’re up to this stage, now you can start to afford these hires to come in and be your CS directors. So, in tech, a lot of people know what CS is, like CSMs, client success manager. So, now we have those people to now our people join. Then now, we’re like, we really need to hold your hand and drive you through the process because we have a lot of engineers, a lot of CPAs, a lot of accountants that were coming in, and they’re getting all the shiny object and like the program is there and the calls are there, but they’re so overwhelmed that they’re not taking action.

So, that CS director comes in, the CS comes in, and each CS has a hundred members associated to them, and then they help them through the process. So, that’s how we’ve evolved with our delivery. And then the biggest single thing that we realized was everybody started buying the businesses that we were successfully teaching. And then we’re like, yes, we got the result. Yes, yes, yes. You bought a plumbing company. You bought a HVAC company. You bought a roofing company, and then they’re freaking out. Yeah. And we laugh because now we know, like V1, like one step versus two steps, right? I’m like, why are you guys freaking out? What are you talking about? Just like you have your rocks, because we run EOS. We’re like, you just have your rocks, dude. You just have EOS. What are you talking about? Like, do you not have anybody that’s owning the function? Like, what are your rocks? What are your KPIs? They’re like, what’s a KPI? I’m like, f*ck.

Brad Weimert: We don’t know how to run a business.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. And then that’s where we came to the ultimate conclusion, which is, oh, okay, which conveniently, nobody else in the space seems to be doing. Crazy wacky concept, because I was just like, huh, nobody else in the space seems to be helping people buy businesses, and then also teaching them how to run it. So, why don’t we just do that? Why don’t we just include post-acquisition support, and then that’s in the offer. And then we added that into the offer, added an extra $200,000 per month because that’s different. And so, that’s what we’re focusing on. So, those were the key inflection points.

Brad Weimert: Well, it maps onto both your philosophy of sell sh*t first and deal with operations later, and also, is predictable based on coming from a sales background.

Brian Luebben: Very predictable. But the argument can be made that if I didn’t have the sales, I couldn’t have afforded any of this support.

Brad Weimert: Oh, hey, I didn’t say it was wrong. No, it’s interesting to watch that because the general process of like, let’s just get something in place to handle the sales. And like, you’re articulating the arc of, I think tons of entrepreneurs that are like, oh, we need a better system, a better process. But the first thing that you said was f*ck modules. So, somebody that didn’t come from sales probably wouldn’t approach it that way.

Brian Luebben: Well, correct. And then so, who’s the main person that we’re asking for feedback? The engineer.

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah. Interesting.

Brian Luebben: So, we always build the system for the lowest denominator. I know, I’ve seen the engineers are the lowest denominator. I’m saying that you build the networking system for the introvert. You build the accountability system for the person that has the shiny object syndrome and is easily like confused. You build everything for the person that is just like the opposite of you.

And so, an example of this in the inverse, right, would be for somebody like me who’s in sales, you would build the op system and the modules in such a way that I would be able to watch them. So, you build it for the opposite correlative. So, that’s how we do it. And we’re like, how would an introvert like to be introduced to this group? How do we make an introvert social? How do we make an engineer a driver? And how do we make a driver systems oriented, or at least like aware of the problem? And so, that’s how we build the systems for. So, that’s what we’ve been working on.

And it’s been now, we’re seeing more and more results. We just did our annual call Tuesday. And we’re recording this, what’s today? Thursday? Wednesday?

Brad Weimert: Wednesday, yeah.

Brian Luebben: So, I don’t even know anymore. Yeah, so we did $408 million in acquisition. Average member did $1.43 million in acquisition, added $256,000 to their net worth and $41,000 of passive cash flow.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, those are great numbers.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, so, and the coolest part, this is my favorite stat, is 61.7% of the community, which is now like 600 active members, got an acquisition in place and 30% of the members are within their first six months. So, it’s difficult to get any acquisition in six months. And so, we were looking at pre-six months, post-six months. And so, we’ve got about a 9% or 10% delta that did not successfully get an acquisition.

Brad Weimert: What’s the most expensive mistake you made moving from a million a year to 10 plus million a year, financially?

Brian Luebben: Oh, there’s a lot. I’m trying– and the quote comes to mind. So, I’ve got a quote and then there’s another quote that I learned that’s kind of in the same ballpark. My idea is whatever income that you want to make personally take home as an entrepreneur, you must be willing to invest 10% of that into your own skill sets. So, if you want to make a million dollars a year, take home as an entrepreneur, you better be ready to invest a hundred thousand dollars into coaches, masterminds, events, different stuff. If you want to make $10 million a year, you better invest about a million dollars into coaches, masterminds, all the different stuff. And so, I found that to be true in my experience so far.

And then on the flip side of that, it’s you must be willing to make a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake to make a million dollars. You must be willing to make a million-dollar mistake to make $10 million. So, to answer that question, I’m trying to think, because there’s so many different ways that I can answer that. I mean, I think the most expensive mistakes that you’re going to make are your team. So, like for me, I want to be delicate with how much I talk about this, but everybody wants to continue bringing on the first team as you scale. And that doesn’t work a lot of the time. Like, who got you here isn’t going to take you there and you hold on for dear life and it’s really messy when you break up. It’s the best way that I can say that. Hopefully, people understand that.

But it’s just like, that was a hard mistake is like building with someone in the beginning and that everybody knows and loves and then all of a sudden, they’re not the person for the job anymore. So, like now what? So, what I’ve learned with like key team members that are integral to your business, there is no clean way to part ways and it is awful. So, I would say the most expensive mistake I made was hanging on too long. And then also, another one of the most expensive mistakes that I’ve made from loss of members, loss of team members would be the thought that you should give everybody feedback in the same way is incorrect.

Brad Weimert: For sure.

Brian Luebben: And I just learned that lesson. That cost me a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Brad Weimert: Well, I hope everybody heard that because how you deliver feedback or praise for that matter to anybody should be based on who they are, not who you are. Meaning everybody hears things differently, and if you deliver it the same way to everybody, you’re going to get a different response from everybody.

Brian Luebben: Which is going to confuse you, and you’re going to be like, wait, are you not aligned with my culture?

Brad Weimert: Right. Yeah, well, I’m terrible with that.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. I mean, but it’s a great thing to talk about because I did not realize that. And I’ve identified two skill sets to take me, like this year, I’ll make a couple million, like net-net. And for me to make 10 million net-net, there’s two core skill sets, meta-skill sets that I’m working on developing intentionally over the next few years, which one is communication and two is leadership. That’s it.

If I work on my communication and my leadership and I become a 100x version of myself in both of those capacities, then everything else will result as an outcome of that. And so, the main thing I’m working on right now is, I’ve got a lot of, again, most of my team is engineers because you want to balance the portfolio. Because again, like me and you were talking about before where Jeff Bezos went to his team and one of his team members came to him and said, “Jeff, you have enough ideas to kill Amazon.” And so, we had to write out all these ideas. And then his team helped him decide which ones or actually, the 2% that get implemented and the rest have to die and because he can’t do everything at once. And so, that’s been my biggest thing, and so, learning how to give feedback to them versus my sales team versus my community.

I had multiple members leave over a few Facebook comments I made. And I was just like, wait, my first reaction is I can’t make Facebook comments anymore. Like, and my second reaction is, oof, okay, I get it. Because you can crush someone’s world with a few comments. And that’s what I did. I didn’t intend to do that, but I did. And so, it’s important to go to your team and each person in your team, you need to know how they give and receive feedback and tailor the feedback to that individual. It sucks, but I mean, that’s just how you got to do it. Or you have to hire somebody that’s really good at that.

Brad Weimert: Right.

Brian Luebben: And that’s the direct report.

Brad Weimert: Do you think about that in terms of personality profiles or any other measurement system to identify who those people are, or how they operate, rather?

Brian Luebben: Yeah, I mean, we use DiSC, so D-I-S-C. I think there’s another one like Career Visioning or something like that.

Brad Weimert: A whole bunch.

Brian Luebben: Yeah. There’s a bunch of them. I mean, which ones do you guys use?

Brad Weimert: We use DiSC internally, and we also, I think that the framework of love languages, it’s not a business framework, but I think fundamentally, the idea of love languages helps you understand what makes somebody feel cared for. And there’s a corollary inside a business, and there’s actually a business love language thing that hasn’t really caught on that nobody pays attention to, but I think the idea fundamentally is the same, right? If words of affirmation are your love language, guess what? In business…

Brian Luebben: It also applies.

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah, I know how I have to communicate with you to make you feel valued, right? Hopefully, touch isn’t the love language in business, but it depends what business you’re in, I guess.

Brian Luebben: Well, here’s the big, crazy, wacky thing is a lot of people, more money doesn’t motivate them.

Brad Weimert: Right. Oh, that’s almost everybody. The salespeople…

Brian Luebben: Bananas to me.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I know, I get it. Well, it’s because you’re a salesperson, right? Salespeople, it’s money, but the rest of it, I mean, you look at the stats on this stuff and most people stay at their job not because of money but because of growth, praise, and opportunity to learn new things.

Brian Luebben: It’s crazy.

Brad Weimert: Or community or whatever.

Brian Luebben: It’s crazy that you say that because there’s only two reasons why people quit jobs. The two reasons that people quit jobs are, number one, they don’t see any growth potential for them. So, now they feel stuck and that no matter how much more additional work or improvement to their skill sets that they have, it will not yield them more money and a better position. And number two, they dislike their primary boss. So, bad work environment/culture and no upward mobility potential, those are the two reasons that every single high performer leaves.

And so, as an entrepreneur, it is your job. I just did an interview with a high-level guy today, and with my high-level guys and girls, I’m like, my job is to have a vision that’s so large that your vision can fit within it. And so, I need you to continue to tell me your vision so I can make sure that my vision is big enough so that I can continue to swallow that in the best way possible because I’m like, if you’re coming on my team, I got to make sure that you accomplish all of your wildest hopes and dreams. That is the only way to attract talent. Period. Because what I’ve learned now is now that I’m starting to talk to all these six-figure, going into seven-figure, eventually, guys and girls, it’s just like the money is part of it, but what they really want is they want to build sh*t. They want meaningful ability to build and to drive results and to have their hands in something. And so, for them, it’s a lot more than just the pay, it’s the vision for where you’re going.

Brad Weimert: I love that. What advice did you confidently give two years ago that today you’re like, Jesus, what was I doing?

Brian Luebben: Oh, buying a business, passive income.

Brad Weimert: So, the whole framework, you were like, buy the business, you’ll get passive income.

Brian Luebben: Buy a business, get passive income. I mean, because I bought a few and it was good. And we bought more and it wasn’t. And I was just like, huh, well, everyone else is saying that. Why shouldn’t I say that? So, now we are very, very careful to never actually say the word passive income at all. I think passive income’s actually a lie. I don’t think passive income exists, period, at all. The only passive income that I truly believe kind of sort of exists is if you just got your money in dividend stocks or index funds and you’re just getting your distributions from that, like, or maybe if you’re an LP.

Brad Weimert: Very unusual. Also, there’s a business model that I was listening to somebody talk about the other day, which is renting domains. So, people squat on domains, then they rent them to startups, right?

Brian Luebben: Yeah. Especially those dot AIs.

Brad Weimert: That’s about as passive as you can get if you can get that model to work. And I think there’s like one entrepreneur that does it.

Brian Luebben: Well, here’s the other kick too, I mean, and just passive income in general. Passive income, in general, man, because in the beginning, everyone’s won in passive income because like the whole BiggerPockets real estate thing over the last 15 years, and I was the guy, I was in the same camp, but now I talk about cash flow. I’m talking about passive income. I’m talking about cash flow. So, I actually think you need to build massive income before you even think about passive income. So, the massive income is through building and buying businesses. Now, that could be real estate adjacent. That could be storage, could be mobile home, it could be different stuff. Like, no, I think you and Justin do a bunch of mobile home, but it’s just like…

Brad Weimert: I don’t. Justin does. So, the other thing that I think is worth highlighting there is if your head is in passive income, your head is not in the place that it needs to be to create something. So, if you’re looking for the shortcut to have passive income, you’re not actually putting the values to work to create income.

Brian Luebben: You need to be violent. So, yeah, I really like the massive before passive, because now, like there hasn’t been an idea of passive income that has crossed my mind in the last three years. It’s just been, how do I just increase income, increase cash flow, increase cash flow, increase cash flow. Now, how I buy businesses today is actually passive, but I don’t buy businesses in the way that we teach other people to buy businesses. I’m the capital of the business.

So, somebody goes and buys $2 million plumbing company, which is for easy math, $2 million plumbing company, 10% down, $200,000. I’ll beat the $200,000, and then I’ll do a call with them a month or something along those lines to just kind of steer them in the right direction. And so, I get 10% to 12% equity there and 10%, 12% of distributions per year. So, passive, that’s passive income for me.

But I would say for my other operators doing it, they’re making the six figures because they’re actively managing and they’ve got managers beneath them, but they’re in the business running it. So, for me, I think a lot of people are, like, if you’re not making multiple six figures up to seven figures, you shouldn’t even be thinking about passive yet.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Massive before passive. Another question around potential frame changes, when you started things, you were traveling around the world all the time, a few contractors making a lot more than you had in corporate. As you’ve moved into making more money as a company and having more of a structure and an operation that you’re running, how do you see the idea of a nomadic entrepreneurial life, and whether that’s truth or fantasy or fiction?

Brian Luebben: No, still doing it. Still doing it.

Brad Weimert: How has that changed in terms of your responsibilities and how you manage your day to day?

Brian Luebben: Well, Brad, I’m glad you asked. I think everybody, here’s what I do, I do what’s called earn your summer. So, number one, I want to say this, know what game you’re playing and know what you’re optimizing for. There’s two critical things that I focus on in my business, which is, number one, I don’t want to build a business where I’m working with people I don’t like, because what the f*ck’s the point? If you don’t even like who you’re working with and you don’t like who you’re serving and who’s in your community or who’s in your business as your customer, why are you doing it? Like, so number one, we guard that with our lives. And so, we have a really strict hiring process.

Number two is I want to build a business around my life, not my life around my business. I love doing hard sh*t. I want to build hard sh*t. I want to do hard things, but like, man, I love Joe Polish’s framework, Easy, Lucrative, and Fun, E.L.F. So, that’s how I do things and because I’m like, dude, if I delay being worth a hundred million dollars by a decade just because I had a little bit more fun, I’m okay with that. Like we’re chartering this yacht in June next year. It’s $180,000. It’s batsh*t insane. It’s the largest single non-business expense that I’ve done. But I was just like, why wouldn’t I do that and have 10 of my friends come with me on this yacht in the Mediterranean, south of France for a week? Like, what am I going to do, invest that $200,000 to go make more money, to go half the cash to be able to do it?

And so, like how I do things is I work in sprints, so I love Naval Ravikant’s ideas of work, which is what type of work can you do whereby you can do it and just outlast everybody else? And so, I work in sprints, like a cheetah kind of hunting in the wild and taking down the gazelle. So, 90% of the time, the cheetah is just kind of like moving slow, like stalking the prey. And then all of a sudden, as soon as you see the gazelle, you attack, you eat it, you digest, and you kind of stalk again. So, that’s how I do, I work in sprints.

So, I just finished a big sprint right now, which was our Q4 sprint, which is what resulted in the $1.3 million month, and now we’re going into a season more of like, call it navigation versus acceleration. So, now it’s more of a season of navigation in Q1. So, now we work more in our operations. And then I do what’s called earn your summer. So, right before the summer, I set this massive Europe trip every single summer for at least a month, where I’m in Europe.

I’m still doing some work, but for the most part, I’m not working. And I will set the yacht or I’ll set these anchor events and I’ll make it like this, like huge thing. And then I reverse engineer the goals and I say, I just invested all this money up front to do all this stuff as the reward. What’s the goals that will yield and warrant that kind of reward? And then that becomes my sprint for Q2. So, right before summer, I’m working like a hundred hours a week and I’m getting things done to be able to warrant that reward of the summer. Then I go do the summer and then I come back. Q3 is navigation again. And then Q4 is acceleration. So, I have half of my year is navigation and fun, and the other half of the year is sprinting, working a hundred hours a week.

Brad Weimert: Love it.

Brian Luebben: I enjoy that. Ask me again in 10 years how it’s working for me. I’m sure sh*t will change, but for the next three years with me and my girlfriend, we want to travel six months out of the year. We will be working for some of that. Some of it will be off. I’ll probably take a grand total of a month off of just not working. And if that grows my business slower, I’m okay with that, because I enjoy it more, like period.

Brad Weimert: I love it. I love it, man.

Brian Luebben: That’s just the honest truth. Like, what’s it all for? I did a million dollars in a month. What’s the next goal? You’re like, okay, now how do I do a million every month? Then what’s the next goal? 2 million, 5 million, 10 million. You’re just going to keep setting bigger goals. You hit 10 million, you want to do 20. You hit 20, you want to do 50. You hit 50, you want to do 100? It doesn’t stop. So, you might as well figure out what’s your thing.

Other people don’t like to travel as much as I do, but we’re planning now for like, okay, well, when do we want to get married? When do we want to have kids? We decided like 2027, we’d like to get married and start having kids. So, we have a two-year gap where we’re like, all right, let’s go ape sh*t. Let’s go have fun. Like, where do you want to go in the world? Like, let’s plan that. And so, I’ll close all of this with this thought, with something I think is wonderful and it’s changed our business and it’s the two-week vacation test.

So, the two-week vacation test is for two weeks, you tell your team, I’m not here, I’m not even available. You must run this business without me. And you disappear. You do not check email. I delete email off of my phone. I put my phone on airplane mode as much as I possibly can. We have an emergency number and another cell phone, just in case. But for two weeks, you just go have fun or do whatever you want to do. And then at the end of the two weeks, you come back and there’s going to be either (a) things kept moving without you, which means that you’re doing good in the business, you have the systems built out; (b) there’s going to be some things that go wrong in that break. And then those things become the thing that you fix in the business.

So, it’s a great way of identifying what your actual issues are. So, it’s a lot like fasting with your body. So, like when you fast, like your body’s like, oh, okay, well, what? And now I’ve got time to fix things, and like, what do I need to fix? And so, it’s the same thing here. You’re like, okay, now what? And I’m like, oh, lead flow dropped. Sh*t. Key man risk with the marketing. We need to figure out paid ads. So, that’s what we’ve been working on. That was the key thing is lead flow dropped 30% when I just took my foot off the gas. I’m not making content, I’m not doing anything. Lead flow dropped. So, we’re like, we need to introduce paid ads and we have to have other channels producing ads and producing income and leads that are outside of me.

Brad Weimert: Love it. What advice do you have for 25-year-old entrepreneurs right now getting started?

Brian Luebben: I would say get crystal clear about what you want your life and what you want your business to look like. I’d say start with what you want your life to look like, what matters to you. What relationships do you want? How do you want to feel? How do you want to look? What your dream life looks like. I’d say start there. Go find people and entrepreneurs and people that mirror that lifestyle and that have done similar things. Ask them how they did it into your advice. Don’t do what they’re doing today. Do what they did to yield the result and ask them specifically, what did you do back then? Do that thing, execute, and you’ll be just fine.

At 25, you have the ability to f*ck up at least three or four times royally, and you could still be a millionaire at 30. I did. And I was still a millionaire. Not only was I a millionaire at 30, but I hit, it was cool because I can say that not only did I become a millionaire at 30, but about 30 years old, I also had a million dollars a year in the company gross. I also had a million dollars in the company net and also did a million dollars in a month right before I turned 31. So, I can say that I did that at 30. That’s pretty cool.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Where do you want to point people? Where can people find out more about you?

Brian Luebben: Yeah, they can just follow me on Instagram at Brian Luebben. I post two videos a day and then, Action Academy Podcast is our podcast. We still are posting three episodes a week, a little bit down from what we used to do. We used to do an episode a day. Not anymore. I Your boy’s got to rest and actually run his business, so.

Brad Weimert: I love it, man. Well, it’s great to get an update, man.

Brian Luebben: Yeah, appreciate it.

Brad Weimert: Well, we’ll have to keep the story going on.

Brian Luebben: Appreciate it, man. It’s great being on and this is fun.

Brad Weimert: Absolutely.