115: The Clever Investor: Blueprint to 8 Figures with Cody Sperber

Today, I’m joined by Cody Sperber, an entrepreneur, educator, and real estate investor who has flipped 1,000s of properties and developed 100s of new build residential and commercial properties over the past 20+ years.

Cody is also the founder of six 8-figure businesses, including Clever Investor, an education program he recently exited that has helped more than 100,000 investors make money in real estate.

As the first real estate influencer in the world to hit 1 million followers on Instagram, Cody is an expert at making money at scale through social media. In this episode, Cody dives into the funnel that made him millions.

You’ll also hear about specific strategies for saving on taxes with real estate, how to find industries that are ripe for disruption, and how to align your actions with your goals.

Inspiring Quotes

• “Real estate has two huge values: cash flow and tax benefits.” – Cody Sperber

• “The point of owning a business is to own the real estate that the business operates in.” – Cody Sperber

• “I would highly recommend anybody who’s making any significant amount of money to go find a single tenant triple-net-lease-type-investment. Something very easy, very safe that you can put your money into where you just get that mailbox money, but you get the depreciation and the tax write-offs.” – Cody Sperber

• “Starve the ponies, feed the stallions. That’s the mantra of an entrepreneur.” – Cody Sperber

• “My job as an entrepreneur is to recruit the greatest talent in humans possible and put them on the team, find the right seat on the bus for them, get them in alignment with my vision, their vision of the future, point them in the right direction, give them the resources and training they need, and get the f*** out of the way.” – Cody Sperber

• “If you have a really strong organic social brand, you can scale very fast with online education.” – Cody Sperber

• “While maybe perfect balance is a myth, I do think that it’s very possible. If you get your psychology right and you go upstream and you just heal your s*** a little bit and you just become a better man, that you can have a great spiritual connection, a great connection with your wife or your husband.” – Cody Sperber

• “Those demons that make you great are the ones that also limit your full potential.” – Cody Sperber

• “Intuition is God’s voice just coming through you.” – Cody Sperber

• “You’re only going to rise your highest level of personal development.” – Cody Sperber

• “Complacency kills progress and motivation.” – Cody Sperber

• How Clever Investor was born from a $10K day
• Real estate tax advantages
• Growing vs. chasing shiny objects
• Why spend $150K when you could spend $80K
• How to hire great talent when bootstrapping
• Making $3M+ a year by giving away an eBook
• Aligning with your purpose
• How to level up your life
• Building mental fortitude
• The variables that make an attractive industry
• Being grateful for hard times

Brad Weimert: Cody Sperber, I really appreciate you carving out time, man. We are in your studio in Tempe, Arizona. And as you can see, it is normally the Clever Investor Show.

Cody Sperber: Yes.

Brad Weimert: But today it’s Beyond a Million.

Cody Sperber: I love it. Thanks for having me on.

Brad Weimert: Absolutely, man.

Cody Sperber: And you got your signature haircut going on.

Brad Weimert: We got to. I do. I do.

Cody Sperber: It’s iconic.

Brad Weimert: How would people recognize me otherwise?

Cody Sperber: Yeah, I love it.

Brad Weimert: You know, it’s funny. When I put a hat on, I refer to it as my Clark Kent because legit, the hat makes me disappear and people don’t recognize me.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. Well, since I’ve met you, pretty much I’m sure you’ve had a mohawk.

Brad Weimert: I mean, I think it’s been like eight years now.

Cody Sperber: Oh, then it wasn’t since I met you.

Brad Weimert: No. Originally, I was a nondescript white guy named Brad.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. Well, it’s iconic now. I love it.

Brad Weimert: I appreciate that. So, I met you years ago I think ultimately through Matt Leitz when you were just starting Clever Investor. I want to talk about that journey a little bit because you built Clever Investor into this monster company where you’ve trained something like, I mean, a phenomenal amount of students on real estate investing.

Cody Sperber: Well over 100,000 people have come through our program.

Brad Weimert: Wild, wild amount of people coming through the program that you’ve taught how to invest in real estate. Before we get into that journey, and you also just sold Clever Investor.

Cody Sperber: Yep.

Brad Weimert: So, I want to talk about that whole thing.

Cody Sperber: Hallelujah. I’m just kidding.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s talk about the whole thing but let’s start with like the bullets of why did you start Clever Investor in the first place. What was the come up on that?

Cody Sperber: Yeah. Well, I had done real estate for about eight years at that point. And I just got really good at it. And real estate changed my life. I was the first millionaire in my family, first multimillionaire, was able to retire my parents because of real estate investing. I loved it. I know a lot of people that get into real estate, they don’t really like real estate. They just want to make money and they think it’s a great vehicle for making money. I not only wanted to make money, I loved real estate like I was oddly into architecture and the design element of it. And like just taking something old and ugly and turning it into something with value, that’s beautiful. And so, I was so bought into the concept of real estate, that’s all I talked about all the time like it drove people crazy. And also, when I was a little kid, if you would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said a history professor because I really love history, and I thought being a teacher would be a great profession.

Unfortunately, when I got out of the military, I went and talked to some history professors at San Diego State University, and I was talking to them about how much money they made. That conversation didn’t end well for me because I was like, “Oh, you got two jobs and you’re barely surviving? Maybe this isn’t a career path for me.” Luckily, I fell into real estate, fell in love with it, knew instantly I was hooked, like I’ll be a real estate guy for the rest of my life. But I got really good at that. I was talking about it so much, driving everybody crazy that everybody in town started to pay attention to me. And over the years, people would come to me and say, “Will you teach me? Will you show me how do you use those systems?” And my military career taught me the value of systems. I wasn’t really a big, organized, detailed systems guy until the military, and they got systems for everything. Like, you want to shine your shoes, there’s a process for that. You make your bed. There’s a process for that. I was in navigation. You want to update your charts and clean your station, there’s a process.

And so, I took that into my business. And for seven years, every Saturday, I did something called System Saturday, where I would spend about 4 to 6 hours alone working on a process in my business and documenting everything. This is before I even knew what an SOP was. I was just trying to mirror what I learned in the military and just get this documentation down because I was hoping at some point I could just fire myself, put somebody else in there, and just kind of elevate up the food chain as an entrepreneur. And one time some dude came to me and said, “I’ll pay you $10,000 to shadow you for a day,” and I was like, “You’re crazy, but okay. Give me your money.” And that’s how Clever Investor was born. It just started off kind of as a side hustle like “Oh f*ck, I’m doing this anyway.” By the way, can I cuss on this podcast?

Brad Weimert: Yes, absolutely.

Cody Sperber: I want to make sure. I don’t want to be rude, but I was like if I’m talking about it anyway and people are going to pay me for it, let’s do this. It fits right in line with my love for teaching and my love for real estate. Little did I know it was going to take off like it did. Clever Investor, we had very early on, we kind of looked at that online education space which was just being birthed. This is 2009. It’s just being birthed. There’s like a little tiny world of like people doing really sh*tty teleseminars and webinars were just coming out and all this stuff was just happening, and I was just kind of at the right place at the right time at the birth of social media, and the transfer of old-school gurus, infomercials, live events to this online model. So, right place, right time, right industry.

Brad Weimert: Well, let me ask you about that for a second because so the space existed, right? But like you said, the transition to social media was the big pivot. Really, it was online. But before that, there was Robert Allen, Ron Legrand, et cetera, etcetera. Were you aware of the info product space before that point in time?

Cody Sperber: I was because during those seven years, how I learned the business is I bought all their sh*t, right? Like, I flew all over the country going to seminars and I bought everybody from Al Lowry to what was the old-school big guy that was on all the infomercials? Carlton Sheets?

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah.

Cody Sperber: I bought all those guys. And I eventually landed with the Jack Miller Group, which was an old-school guru out of Tampa, Florida. Pete Fortunato, Jack Miller, those guys they taught off of like projectors and like old school style, right? Like, nothing was fancy. And I kind of looked at the space and I was like, “Oh, this is perfect for this transition. I’m in the right place for this transition.” And I wanted to make and I had never heard this term before. I don’t believe I made it up, but I was definitely using it in 2009-2010. It was edutainment. Maybe I made it up, I don’t know, because I started saying it very early on and I started saying it on I used to record not even on a good camera. There was these old flip phone, these flip cameras, and camcorders. I would record myself on a whiteboard and just documenting how wholesaling works and how this works. And I would put it up on YouTube or I put it up online and people would go crazy.

Brad Weimert: So, wholesaling was the type of investing you were doing?

Cody Sperber: That was how I started because I didn’t have any money or resources. So, I started where I could. And then I very quickly realized, “Okay. I’m selling properties to people and I make $5,000 and they go off and make $55,000.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And so, the basics of that are you are a lead generation machine, you find the properties, you lock them up with a contract, and then you sell that contract to an investor that actually wants to flip the property.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. I’m a middleman. I’m like Costco. For people who’ve never heard of wholesaling, it’s like being Costco, right? It’s like Costco buys muffins from a person that makes muffins, but they still buy them at a really great price. Like, they’re getting a discount on bulk muffins. And then when they sell them to the retail buyer, they’re still selling at discount, right? And so, everybody in the transaction is feeling like they’re getting a good deal but Costco is like a middleman that’s just making money off the arbitrage of the difference in pricing. And that’s what we’re doing with houses. And if you’re a good marketer, you can find distressed people or distressed properties. You can negotiate a good price, lock them up, flip into a guy who actually has cash, guy or gal that has money. And those cash buyers or landlords are rehabers. And a lot of the times I would sell to rehabers like the people you see on TV that flip houses. And I would make $5,000 or $10,000 and they’d make $50,000 or $60,000 or $100,000. And I’m like, “You know what? I should probably be rehabbing at some point like let me take some more risk now that I’ve done this for a year or two.” And I started rehabbing.

And just like any new business, my wholesaling business took me 14 months to do my first deal. It was a very long learning curve, and I bought $30,000 worth of courses, and I still f*cked it all up. And that’s just because it’s a difficult… And sometimes we get in our own way. Sometimes we think we’re smarter than we are. We listen to too many people. I bought too many courses. It was like drinking from a fire hose, and it just didn’t happen for me until my 14th month. And then it finally happened. And once I did my first deal, everything started to click and it got really easy to do my second deal and third deal. And next thing you know, I’m probably like, I don’t know, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 deals in at this point. But I started with wholesaling and then I started rehabbing and I f*cked that all up for another year and made every mistake under the sun. And then I’m like getting these huge tax bills because now we’re making real money. And I’m like, “Oh my God, I am not even doing the one thing that is like one of the…”

Real estate has two huge values: cash flow and tax benefits. And I realized I’m not even actually doing real estate. It’s like an agent or real estate agent saying, “I’m in real estate.” No, you’re not. You’re a transactional guy that is involved in a real estate transaction but you don’t own the real estate. And when you’re wholesaling, you don’t own the real estate. And even though when you’re rehabbing, you do buy the real estate, it’s only for a very short amount of time. So, I needed to start keeping rental property and my $600,000 tax bills woke me up of like, “Hey, you got to start keeping some of this,” because with real estate you get something called depreciation. And like the building we’re sitting in right now, I paid $4.25 million for this building. When I bought this building two years ago, I would have owed about a couple of million dollars in taxes because of my earned income from my other businesses.

When I bought this commercial building, I had a choice. I had the money set aside to pay my taxes. I could just gave the money to Uncle Sam, right? Let’s call it a million. Let’s say I owed a million to Uncle Sam. I could have paid the money to Uncle Sam or I could go buy a commercial building that my companies can run out of because we’re paying either rent or a mortgage anyway. We need a place to run our companies out of. And by the way, everybody listening, the point of owning a business is to own the real estate that the business operates in. You do not want to be somebody who owns a business that rents your office space if you can avoid it. You want to own it. And here’s why. So, I would have had to owe $1 million anyway. So, instead, I put a million down on this commercial building. I go get a loan. My mortgage is $25,000 a month. This is an 18,000-square-foot commercial space. I’m using about half of it to run my businesses out of. I rent out the other half for $21,000 a month in rental income.

So, now I’m almost running my businesses for free. My businesses, I have five businesses running out of here. Collectively, we pay $4,000 a month to do that. At the same time, I turned one of the spaces in this into another business and I turned it into an event center. Now, one of my companies uses event centers, so I needed that kind of space anyway. But I actually turned it into something that anybody in the public can rent. And I started an event center for rent. This month, so far, that little event center, 3,300 square foot event center, brought in $62,000.

Brad Weimert: Damn.

Cody Sperber: So, one of the spaces I turned into another business that’s bringing in tons of cash. So, now I’m actually positive cash flow on this asset.

Brad Weimert: Yep.

Cody Sperber: And at the same time, I did what’s called a cost segregation study on this commercial building, wiped out $1.9 million in taxes.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. The cost seg component, unfortunately, is degrading right now in our tax code. It’s been a strong play for the last 20 years or I don’t know how long. It’s been a strong play the entire time that I have started to generate wealth. But now we’re this year down to 60% of the write-off and then 40 then 20 then gone. Do you have…

Cody Sperber: That’s for bonus depreciation.

Brad Weimert: Yes, it is.

Cody Sperber: That’s for bonus depreciation. It’s not for the real estate. They’ll never get rid of the depreciation itself. So, commercial real estate you can depreciate over I believe either 39 or 37 years. I don’t remember. It’s one of those two.

Brad Weimert: Something like that.

Cody Sperber: 39 years. It’s 39 years. And then residential I believe is 27 years. And so, there’s normal wear and tear on every building. And so, if you pay $1 million for the building, they give you 39 years to kind of write off that million bucks so you can literally take a million divided by 39 and write that off against your earned income of that asset every year. With a cost segregation study, all we’re doing is we’re… The cost seg study says, “All right. What is the trusses valued at? What is the electrical switches valued at? What are the doorknobs valued at?” And they literally line item almost every piece of the building. And then they assign a value to it. And then you can accelerate the depreciation in the first few years. So, this is why real estate guys like Donald Trump don’t pay taxes. And once that light bulb went on, it took me about five years, six years flipping real estate, making lots of money, paying crazy taxes, finally waking up and going, “I’m so stupid. I’m in the real estate space. I’m not even using the benefits of real estate.”

And then eventually when I started my education company because I’m also doing, I own a development company called Green Elephant Development, I own a wholesaling business called Sell Quick for Cash. I have all these real estate businesses where I spend at least 50% of my time in real estate. In the eyes of the IRS, I’m considered a dealer. So, that means when I started Clever Investor and we scaled to $25 million a year and it was making all this profit, I was offsetting my earned income from this online education business, which we taught real estate, but we weren’t in real estate.

Brad Weimert: Right.

Cody Sperber: I was able to offset that earned income against my real estate holdings over here. And this is why I keep buying commercial assets. This doesn’t work as well with residential. I would highly recommend anybody who’s making any significant amount of money, go find single-tenant triple net leased type investment, something very easy, very safe that you can put your money into where you just get that mailbox money, but you get the depreciation and the tax write-offs associated with it because you need it. If you’re making over $1 million a year in earned income, you need that type of asset to offset it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. In the third thing, you mentioned cash flow and you mentioned tax benefits as real estate as principles for real estate. The third, of course, is appreciation, right, is that you’ve got this baked-in retirement fund that the value of real estate is going to go up and it goes in cycles, right? It goes in waves. And right now, we’re probably in a downstroke, but it’s going to go up over time. My question, the first question is you mentioned a bunch of different businesses. So, you’re doing investing and then you said, “People keep asking me about how to do this,” and you had learned through the old-school gurus. So, you said Clever Investor is the next chapter and you grew Clever Investor to you mentioned 25 million for the info product brand. At what point in that did you take your eye away from Clever Investor and say, “I should open other businesses as well?” Because the idea of diversification against the laser focus is a constant challenge for entrepreneurs.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. So, first off, like I said, for almost ten years, I didn’t do anything but real estate. You know, it was 8 or 9 years before I even started dabbling in education. And so, I am a big fan of saying focus like, starve the ponies, feed the stallions. Like, that’s the mantra of an entrepreneur. Otherwise, we all lie to ourselves and we think we could do everything. And then also we end up doing as a bunch of sh*t averagely, and we die of death by a thousand cuts. So, I agree with you but I was more like strategic vertically. So, like I did real estate and then I asked myself, “Who else makes money from my real estate transactions?” Well, the title company does. Well, let’s go buy a title company. The lending company does. Let’s start a lending company. Well, let’s make sure we’re licensed agents and we build a real estate brokerage in a team. And so, we started verticalizing in our space. The only one I didn’t really get into was insurance. I started to dabble in it, but we never ended up starting or buying a company in it.

So, that was my first start in online education. I was teaching real estate investors in building software and data selling to real estate investors, which was also in the vertical of real estate investing. So, I wasn’t doing real estate and then I jumped over to a whole another industry. I was building my empire in the space because I knew that space very well. So, I did stay somewhat disciplined.

Brad Weimert: So, I love that and I can think of no short of five shiny objects that I would like to go buy that are vertically integrated into my space but would still result in a slowdown in the core business.

Cody Sperber: Only if… See, for me, I learned very early on to… I’m not scared to use money to buy the talent necessary to do the job. So, for me, I knew that I shouldn’t be in the meetings. I knew that I was the problem in my business. This is why I documented and systematized everything. I needed to fire myself, delegate, automate, delete. Get me out of the meetings. I’m a psychopath in meetings. Like, people got so irritated at me that, literally, they did like my own companies would hold a vote and say, “All right. Sperber is not allowed back in the meetings,” because I thought I did a damn good job. I would go up in there and I’d be like, because I’m so crazy about details, “Look at this, and you f*ck this up, and let’s get this better. And we’re going to go over here, we’re going to charge this amount, and da, da, da.” And then I’d leave thinking I did a great job. And then it was pure chaos for the next six hours. My whole company was like in shock. And I didn’t even realize that I was the problem.

And so, I flipped the model to, “Okay, f*ck this. I’m just going to overspend on people I cannot afford and have them tell me how to run this business.” And once I finally started thinking like that, the other businesses got better. And I also got really good at forming partnerships. I used to be scared of partnerships. Now, partnerships are like the key to my whole entire world is I find phenomenal humans that are very talented, much better than me to run those different divisions. And I tell them I’m normally the guy that starts it, right? I’m like the visionary, the glue. So, I enrolled everybody into the vision. That’s my skill set, sales, persuasion, influence, enrolling. And then I say, “This is what we’re going to do. This is how we’re going to do it. This is why we’re going to do it. And this is what’s in it for you if we do it together.” And then I get the f*ck out of the way because that’s what I, you know, like right now I’m starting a… You mentioned I sold Clever Investor.

Brad Weimert: Yes.

Cody Sperber: You know, I’ve owned Clever since 2009, and I just sold it last year to another guy in our space that could take the brand and run with it.

Brad Weimert: I want to talk about the details of that but I want to focus on, before we get there, I want to focus on how you learned the lesson to get the f*ck out of the way and when you started to pay too much for employees, overpay for employees. Because if you’re brand new and you misinterpret that message as, “Let me take more than I have relative to profit to try to buy the best person,” if you’re brand new and you’re at 1 million in revenue and you have a 5% margin, that might bankrupt you.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. Well, you got a sh*tty business anyway. You know, it’s like…

Brad Weimert: That’s fair. Where were you at that point when you got there?

Cody Sperber: Yeah. My thing is we were making money. I should never be the guy with the answers. As the owner of a company, I shouldn’t roll into a meeting and say, “All right, guys, here’s what we’re going to do.” Like, the main vision is this is where we’re going. I have clarity on like we’re going to do this business and we’re going to hire these teams and we’re going to do this stuff. But the technical details down upstream, I should not be involved in like all the details on like making it happen. So, for instance, me getting kicked out of all the meetings, me showing up to meetings and looking at like my C and B squad that I thought these are people I can afford at the time, and I’m realizing, “I know more than all you m***erf***ers. Why am I the one with a solution to the problem? You should be telling me what to do, not me telling you what to do.” So, it was me just failing in with the wrong people and getting pissed off and being like, “Okay. Here’s what I’m going to do.”

My job as an entrepreneur is to recruit the greatest talent in humans possible and put them on the team, find the right seat on the bus for them, get them in alignment with my vision, their vision of the future, point them in the right direction, give them the resources and training they need and get the f*ck out of the way. So, like for instance, take a great operations guy. Maybe I can afford an $80,000-a-year operations guy but I really want to get the $150,000-a-year operations guy. Most people would say, “Well, we can only afford the 80K person, so let’s pull the trigger. It’s a good enough candidate. Let’s try them.” I immediately go, “F*ck that. Let’s get the $150,000 to $200,000-a-year operations guy that we cannot afford. That person has already been running in a business that’s doing ten-plus million dollars a year. We’re at 2 million. The 80K guy has only done $2 million-a-year businesses. They’re at the same f*cking level as us. Like, no, let’s stretch.”

Because the way I think about it is hire slow, fire fast, give them the resources they need. If they suck, they’re two, three months in before I’m sitting them down going, “How the f*ck do you not know what to do,” right? Like you now had enough time to get to know our world. You should be making progress at this point. Just think about it. Any person, doesn’t matter where they are in your organization, if they make $20 an hour and I’m paying you $20 an hour because we’re in a capitalistic system, you’re producing the $80 an hour worth of value or you’re f*cking done like you’re fired. I should never be in a situation where all of the revenue from that $20-an-hour person goes back to that person.

Brad Weimert: With an important role like operations, would you rather have a mediocre person in the role or no person in the role?

Cody Sperber: Why would there be no person in the role?

Brad Weimert: Because if you have a mediocre person and you’re in pursuit of a great person, there might be a gap.

Cody Sperber: Well, a couple of things. In my organizations, my hiring machine, it never shuts off. A lot of people go, “All right. We got a position. We got to fill it. Ramp up the marketing and put out the ads on Indeed and LinkedIn and all this stuff. And let’s go find somebody for it.” Once I find that person, I put him in there, I just keep the ads running in perpetualness. Perpetualness? In perpetuity.

Brad Weimert: Nice.

Cody Sperber: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Well, it got there.

Cody Sperber: Whatever. You get what I’m saying. And that’s because I always want that same the better candidates coming through the door and I literally would parade them by the other operations guy and be like, “Hey, here’s another operations guy. You want to have a meeting with him, see if they’re a good fit for our organization?” “What’s he going to do?” “Whatever the f*ck we need them to do, take us to the next level. Maybe take your job. I don’t know but whatever.” I want the best talent always seeing that there’s great talent coming so they’re always gunning. And so, that’s number one. I don’t think I would be in a position where there’s nobody in the spot. And if there was somebody mediocre, I would keep hustling as hard as I could to fill that role with a better person.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Before you got rid of them or…

Cody Sperber: Yeah. I don’t think there’s ever been a situation where I’ve just outright fired somebody. If they lie to me or steal for me, they’re fired on the spot.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Cody Sperber: Right. So, like those are non-negotiables for me but I’ve never been in a situation where like this space was just empty unless I screwed something up and they left. I had one guy pass away who was a phenomenal marketing guy.

Brad Weimert: Oh my God.

Cody Sperber: That was very hard on the company like our whole company felt that one. But that was the only situation I can ever think of where it was like we weren’t prepared.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, what was your size or scope when you had this huge mindset shift?

Cody Sperber: It was probably like the $3 million or $4 million a year mark. We were doing well. Money was coming in fast. We were scaling every year. We were making $1 million or $2 million more than the previous year. So, we just kept growing and growing. And it’s not like today. Like online education today, you can go from 0 to 40 million in like 2 or 3 years pretty quickly because the blueprint and model is now there. And if you have a really strong organic social brand, you can scale very fast with online education. When I started, there was no framework. It was like me grinding it out, trying different things to see what works. So, I was the trailblazer on the front end of it. So, we would do 2 million next year. We do 4 million next year, 6 million. We kind of stair-stepped up like that. And then finally around the 6th or 7th year is when we finally launched.

But yeah, I think, just listening to this podcast, take a note and just realize your job as the lead entrepreneur is you are the official enroller of your company, and you need to force your people to hire the best and constantly push yourself outside, way outside your comfort zone. Your CFO, if you’re trying to go to 50 million, your CFO should be a $50 million-a-year CFO, not the guy who’s never done that before but you can afford.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. I mean, that’s a good takeaway I think for a lot of people. Do you think that you should, as a bootstrap entrepreneur, do you start by hiring people that are more expensive than you can afford? Or do you wait until some point to do that?

Cody Sperber: Yeah. I would say if you can’t afford them, give them equity. If you’re just starting and you want to do the Lean Entrepreneur startup, give people equity. Don’t be scared to give very highly talented people equity and just have a buyout provision that says, “Look, if sh*t doesn’t work with us, I’ll buy you out. If two years in, you ain’t my guy and I got to use that equity for somebody else, I’ll buy you out.” But equity is the tool to help you do more with less. Otherwise, you can bootstrap it and just try to do the best you can. But then all roads need to focus on sales. A lot of people have it backwards. A lot of people try to get the perfect widget, the perfect product, the perfect online course, and then they go to market hoping that the market wants that project or product. I do the opposite. I kind of test things with marketing to see what it is that the world wants. Then I sell the sh*t out of it and then I go backwards and build it. You know what I’m saying?

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Cody Sperber: Like, I’ll sell something that doesn’t even exist yet and then create it afterwards. It’s kind of like Kanye West right now did something really, really smart. So, he ran a Super Bowl ad, paid millions of dollars for the Super Bowl ad but spent all the money on the ad that he shot like an ad itself just from like his cellphone. He was like, “Hey, it’s Kanye. I got some sh*t for sale on my website. I don’t have anything else to say.” It was like this really short, really organic feeling like conversation. Well, he sold, I don’t know, I don’t remember what it was but it was like $40 million or $30 million, $20 million worth of sh*t instantly. Well, all that stuff…

Brad Weimert: On day one?

Cody Sperber: Instantly.

Brad Weimert: Yep.

Cody Sperber: But it was all preorder. When you actually go through it, what was really smart about it is that he hadn’t even built the product yet. First off, he sold everything on his website for $20. So, imagine if I had five items and they’re all $20, a couple of smart things is happening there. One, I’m going to be able to see if I drive 4 million people to my website overnight because of the Super Bowl ad and I get whatever, 100,000 customers out of it all at $20, it’s like I can see one where all those customers came from. I now have 4 million people that I pixeled from my website that I’m going to follow around forever and sell more sh*t to. I have 100,000 buyers in my database where they have all their contact information I’m going to sell more sh*t to. I’m going to be able to see out of the five products I stacked, all for $20, which one is the one that everybody bought. So, now I’m going, “Oh, they all want the shoes. F*ck these other ones. I’m just going to go and mass production of the shoes.” It’s like market research done in a really creative way and they were all pre-order. So, instead of having to come out of pocket to pre-create all this sh*t, he just does it backwards. Yeah. It’s really a smart move.

Brad Weimert: The other elements of that I didn’t know. I didn’t know that it was $20 each. The market research side of that is really cool. I also didn’t know that it was pre-ordered.

Cody Sperber: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s a trip. Okay. So, I want to talk about the marketing of Clever Investor in ‘09. And you’ve hit on this a couple of times where it’s like there was a previous model for info products, and it was, honestly, you still see the radio ad model that like FortuneBuilders did that did very well in the preview model but you had infomercials and mailers and this was the OG education space. And Tony Robbins came up in that space that way. You started and launched heavy with you were one of the first people that I saw effectively market on Instagram and build a brand.

Cody Sperber: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: What are you doing? And you’re still doing that today in a different way. What has changed in your approach to marketing on Instagram from when you started to today?

Cody Sperber: So, it’s interesting because sales and marketing are the most important things that you could do in your business. Right? But like which one comes first, sales or marketing? And I kind of looked at it like if we could generate enough noise on this new thing called social media through just a barrage of content creation, I was very early on. When Instagram was first coming out, I had seen some other people and those same people now have 10, 12, 14 million followers on their pages. But back when I caught them, they had 100,000, which to me was an insane amount of followers. I’m a guy with 50 followers looking at somebody with 100,000 thinking, “These people aren’t even famous. How did they get this?” And their whole world was built on collaboration. And I realized very quickly that the whole network, and it was like a good old boys’ network, they all collaborated with each other. And if I followed these 20 pages, I realized all 20 pages were what they called it a shoutout. They were shouting each other out. In other words, they were posting each other’s content in a very organized fashion, basically sharing followers amongst the group.

And I saw that and I was like, “Oh, this is a marketing platform. This is, to me, it was never social. It was marketing. If I can create the right type of content to get people excited about real estate, I could pull them off of this social platform into my world. And so, I started creating a whole bunch of lead magnets, e-books, flowcharts, free contract packages, free courses, whatever I can think of that was really good value, and I started creating content that would tease what I was doing. I would build up a story on how I made $30,000 flipping house, and I would create content around it, and then I’d give away a book like a free e-book or something like that. And I was one of the first to do this because it wasn’t really well known in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. I think I really started gunning in 2012, right when Instagram was just like it’s still on chronological feed. And so, I started investing heavily into building that platform. I stopped doing almost everything else. I stopped YouTube. I stopped LinkedIn. I stopped Facebook.

I just said, “I’m going to dominate Instagram and put all my love and attention into it.” And whenever you do that, that platform is going to start to thrive. And so, I made a decision I’m going to post a minimum of three times a day. My goal was six. I’m going to do it every single day of the week regardless of how I feel. I’m going to utilize every feature that Instagram comes out with. So, for instance, like when they came out with lives, I was live all the time. When they came out with stories, I was just posting insane amount of stories, whatever they were pushing. Reels, I started pushing reels really heavy as soon as they came out because I knew that whatever new feature they were coming out with, that’s what they were going to want to promote and get the users used to using. So, I was always like very aware that I was going to outperform everybody on that platform. I started reaching out to all of that good old boy network and buying my way in.

I think about money way different than most people. I was like I can either spend money on a radio ad, a TV ad, a mailer, or I can pay these kids who have 100,000, 300,000, 500,000 followers at the time to shout me out. Because at first, I was like, “Hey, let me in the club.” And they’re like, “Dude, you got 35 followers. We don’t want you in this club.” I was like, “Well, then f*ck you, here’s money.” I was making a lot of money in real estate. Like, I’ll buy my way in and they’re like, “Well, what do you want to pay for a shout-out?” I’m like, “I don’t know, $50.” And they’re like, “F*ck, yeah.” They were thinking like I’m crazy, “You’re going to give me 50? How many times are you going to do this?” “Every day of the week for the next two years.” They’re like, “Cool.” What I didn’t realize is this kid is in 10th grade in his class texting me or DMing me or whatever. We’re negotiating rates of like a shoutout on a page that this high school kid owns.

Brad Weimert: Amazing.

Cody Sperber: And all of a sudden, the shoutout business was born. And I was putting about, at my peak, about $3,000 to $5,000 a day in shoutouts. And this is if you look at my social graph, it’s like 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and I’m at a million followers. So, I was the first real estate influencer in the world to hit a million followers, which is how everybody got to know me. I got that blue checkmark in 2017. I’m not one of these people that paid for it. It just magically appeared one day because I was an influencer in a real estate space. But all along that journey, I created a reinvestment business meaning like I would buy a shoutout, they would shout me out, I’d have all this great content on my page, but then I’d start posting these free e-books and these free giveaways. So, people were pulling off of the platform just as fast as they were following me. And as soon as they downloaded that e-book, they would say, “Hey, congratulations. Your e-book will be in your email inbox in 15 minutes or so. Until then, you’ve earned a free class with Cody.”

And I was one of the first investors in the country to build out an automated webinar funnel, and I was basically just giving away free sh*t that led to an automated webinar that sold a $497 course. And at the time, I was making probably 2015-2016, I was pulling about $3 million to $4 million a year off of just giving away one e-book on Instagram.

Cody Sperber: On Instagram. So, it was like every time I made money, I would turn around and just buy more shoutouts and it just kept the machine going.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, what’s different now? Because you’re still really active on Instagram and now, you’re moving from Clever Investor. You’re about to do it again, right? You’re moving Clever Investor to the officialcodysperber?

Cody Sperber: I’m just elevating the brand. So, anyways, the online education business is a tough business to be in, but it teaches you a lot of great skills. While I was doing the social thing, I was also mastering the purchasing of cold traffic. I was the first big guy in our space to ever heavily advertise on Facebook and YouTube. I had the lambos in front of the bank with my kids. I’m showing up checks. I’m throwing money all over. I’m just making noise.

And like that edutainment model, I was fun, I was crazy, I was wild, I was in your face. And we were spending about $4 million a year on just Facebook ads. All the way up 2014, 2015, 2016, we were outspending everybody. And this is how we scale to 25 million. So, my brand was blowing up. Everybody knew who I was, the Clever Investor. And I was really good at– by the way, you need a hook. Everybody needs a hook. If I meet you and you don’t have your mohawk and you have your hat on and you’re like, “Hey, I’m Brad,” I’m going to forget your name, right?

But if every time I met you, it’s like, “Hey, what’s up? I’m Mohawk Brad,” I’m never going to forget Mohawk Brad. If you say that enough times to me, it’s ingrained in my brain. So, every time somebody talked to me, every time I signed off a video, “Hey, I’m out of here. Cody Sperber, Clever Investor out.” I said it so many times that everybody– people don’t even call me Cody. They’re like, “What’s up, Clever?” It’s like, “Oh, okay, my branding worked.” But I did such a good job that eventually, I sold Clever Investor last year, right?

And now, by the way, still heavily involved in the company. I love my students. I want to continue to always be a teacher at heart. I never want to go too far away from helping people break free using real estate. I love that business. And like I said, we’ve had thousands and thousands of successful testimonials come in because of our work, and I’m very proud of that. But it’s like, who am I? Am I Cody Sperber, the Clever Investor forever? What’s Cody 2.0?

And last year, I went through a divorce. My mom passed away last year. It was a really tough year. And it started a little over a year ago. And then you sell your company and it’s like, what’s my identity? What do I want my future legacy to be? And through that journey, I’ve really put in a lot of work on myself. I used to work all the time, and that was it. Like, I was just so focused and obsessed with kicking ass and hitting my goals and winning the money game. And I think that’s great, and you should. And financially, you should make financial success and obligation.

But I learned through my journey that I also hurt a lot of people along the way. And so, now, I’m kind of like this Cody 2.0. I’ve done insane amount of hours of therapy, EMDR, horse therapy, acting therapy, one-on-one therapy, somatic release breathwork. I’m in a f*cking cold plunge every morning. I’m staring at red lights and running six miles a day. I got my health game on point, my spiritual games on point. I’m closer with my kids than I’ve ever been. And while I want to go out there and murder it, I want to be murdering it in all pillars of my life, not just my business.

And I think I know you can. I used to think that balance was a myth. Like, there’s no f*cking way you can balance. And while maybe perfect balance is a myth, I do think that it’s very possible if you get your psychology right and you go upstream and you just heal your sh*t a little bit, you just become a better man that you can have a great spiritual connection, a great connection with your wife or your husband, be an unbelievable father or mother, murder it financially, and be a good human to your friends and society. You don’t have to pick one and just dominating one.

We do that because we’re in pain. We do that because trauma, we’re hiding, all life is suffering, right? All life is suffering and we either turn to religion, we turn to a short-term thing, like a distraction, art, sports. These are distractions of our real life and our real suffering. Vices like alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling. So, it’s either you’re dealing or doing, though, that really toxic negative sh*t, you’re doing the let me zone the f*ck out and just forget about my sh*t, or you’re getting so heavy in religion. You’re okay, there’s a purpose behind all of this, and I’m going to put my faith in something else that I can’t even see in order to try and feel better about my suffering, right?

And I took the path of like, okay, I’m going to go upstream and I’m just going to heal myself in that way. When I show up as Cody 2.0, I’m going to have a much different conversation than banks, Lamborghinis, f*cking money, real estate. Let’s go, murder it, work, work, work. This is like masculine work ethic type of energy. Now, mine’s more like, I want to work hard and f*ck hard and love hard and be the best friend you’ve ever had in your entire life and I want to give $1 million away to save f*cking elephants. And I’m in alignment with my purpose, I’m in alignment with my words. My integrity is intact. Everything is there.

So, now that I’m there, I’m like, I’m going to– I sold off the Clever Investor page on Instagram and I started officialcodysperber. And it was my opportunity to have a fresh voice and a fresh start. But it’s the same principles, posting multiple times a day, having authentic conversations. I’m not trying to be any other voice than mine. I’m talking about the things that are important to me that I think will advance humanity in a positive way. Not just the money stuff, but I’m talking about my pain. I’m just being very vulnerable and upfront and honest with everybody. And a lot of people are resonating with it.

I’m showing them through my standards in my example that your words are cheap. You need to put in the action, right? So, every morning, they’re watching me go on a six-mile run. They’re watching me go to the gym. They’re watching me do all my morning routines and eating healthy and all that stuff. And then I go here and I show them behind the scenes of, like, me cutting a $30 million real estate deal. And then I go and I spend hours and hours with my kids, and I’m just documenting everything to show people like this is the standard that we need to step up and live up to. My new business is called Floor Daddy.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, I have to double click on the transition to 2.0 Cody. The Floor Daddy thing I want to talk about, too, because I think all business models are fascinating, why you pick one versus another is also fascinating. But the question that comes to mind when you talk about transforming into Cody 2.0 and going from the entrepreneur that’s just driven, focused on business into, you use two words balance and alignment. And I lean very heavily in the direction of alignment over balance because I want things to all work together. But the question is, do you think that when you were launching the business, you could have found the balance and driven it the same way that you did and grew it to the same place you did? Or do you think it was necessary to go to that path?

Cody Sperber: No, and nor would I want it to. I didn’t want to be a great family guy. I didn’t want to have a spiritual connection. And when I said I hid my pain and achievement, I literally only felt comfortable kicking ass and dominating. I had so much crazy, youthful, kickass energy that I literally bulldozed everything in my way. It was like a light switch. If you helped me get closer to my goal, it was on. If you at all impeded on my vision of where I was going and becoming a billionaire and whip an ass, then whatever the consequence to you was going to be the consequence to you. I’ll kill the relationship real fast. That kind of obsessive energy is what it takes to get a company and really scale it.

But I lost a lot by doing that. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs that are on their second and third marriages because of it. The thing that makes you great, those demons that make you great are the ones that also limit your full potential. And unfortunately, we got to learn the lesson. We’re too hard headed. Like, yeah, somebody could have told me, I wouldn’t have listened. I could have got slapped. I would have eventually gone back to my old ways. A guy like me needs ran the f*ck over. I need to lose my family, get a divorce. My mom dies in my arms. I’m a f*cking disaster. I can’t even hold my sh*t together. I have anxiety all the time. I’m pissed off at everything. I’m always angry for me to finally surrender and go, “Okay, this is too much. None of this is worth this for me to live this way.”

On social media, I look like the f*cking man. But behind the scenes, I’m a disaster and I’m unhappy. And I’m like, I’m not going to do this for 40 more years. I just had to get there and to do the therapy because now, like, I process different because I feel different about myself. The big lesson I learned in therapy and the reason my marriage failed and all that, and my business partnerships were okay, but not world, world class, like they could have been, why I never went off and made $1 billion is because I was in my own way. I hurt relationships because you cannot give what you do not have.

And what I mean by that is, like if we were business partners, I couldn’t give you that real unconditional love that you deserve in this partnership because I don’t even unconditionally love me. And so, I walked around with this armor on, always protecting myself a little bit because I was hurt as a kid. And so, it’s like, yeah, we’re going to do okay because we’re two badasses, but we’re never going to be full potential badasses because I was carrying around this sh*t.

Now, I don’t feel any of that weight. There’s no, I don’t do anything, like, I don’t f*cking talk to a girl on a DM. I don’t go to a strip club. I don’t look at porn. I don’t do anything out of alignment of my character. Like, I am so dialed the f*ck in of like, this is who I want to be. I’ve made those mistakes. I’ve lived lies. I’ve done white lies, I’ve done full blown lies. I f*ck stuff up. I set the worst standard for many people in my life. And I look back and I’m like, I don’t regret it, but it hurt a lot of people. And I’m just not willing to go back there ever again.

So, when I say I’m in alignment with my purpose and my words and my thoughts, my actions is the first time in my life I’m fully there. Now, I know I’m going to get to where I want to go. Like, it’s a certainty. I’m not guessing anymore. It’s not like, can I scale my online education business to 50 million instead of 25 million? Well, maybe if we work hard enough and come up with a game plan. I’m like, no, we’re starting and scaling this f*cking flooring business in the home services space and I’m going to sell this in three years for 100 million. And everybody’s going to watch me do it and it’s done deal. Like, I already visualized myself at the bank, $100 million in my account done, three years from today.

Brad Weimert: So, tactically speaking, you go through a lot of pain and trauma, and you’ve outlined some of that relative to divorce, your relationship, family, death, kids. When you look at living in complete alignment and integrity today, was there a process that you can outline or some steps that would help people say, “I’m not sure who I am or what my values are exactly”? How did you get to the point of saying, these are the things that are integrity for me that I have to be in alignment with?

Cody Sperber: Yeah, it’s great question. Look, just think like a traffic signal. We all know what green light behavior is. Green light behavior, you feel great, right? You feel great. You do. You go to the gym, you feel great. You eat good, you feel great. You have a real conversation with your best friend that’s authentic and you’re present, you’re not on your phone and you’re f*cking connecting, you feel great.

We also know what red light behavior is. Red light behavior is you f*cking lied to your wife. And on the way home, you went to a strip club. Okay, we know that that’s a f*cked up thing in a relationship, right? You shouldn’t do that. You should not lie to your loved ones. And then you covered up with more lies. That’s red light behavior.

Where people start f*cking up is in the yellow light space. They get comfortable putting their toe in the red light area, right? It’s like that secret sh*t that nobody else knows. It’s like, okay, if I do this, nobody’s going to f*cking find out. And then you get used to doing that, it gets a little easier. But then that even becomes– I’m out to that and you got to push it a little more and you got to push it a little more. And this is why people become addicted, food and gambling and porn and all this other crazy sh*t, is because it’s not like, you go from zero to a complete sh*t show all in one day. It’s this yellow light behavior.

And so, I would say your intuition is screaming at you right now. You know what you need to be doing. That intuition is God’s voice just coming through you. So, just pay attention and make the decision of what kind of person do you want to be? Do you want to be a person of integrity? Do you keep the promises you made to yourself? Are you one of these weak motherf*ckers that every new year sets a resolution, and then, by the end of January, you’re already off on a tangent because you’re so weak mentally that you cannot even keep the promises you made yourself?

So, a lot of times, we break character because we’re still in pain. We want to get in shape. We want to start and scale that business, but we’re scared to do it. But we want to do it. We want to have a better relationship with our wife. We’re not able to do it because all you’re doing is setting a good intention, but you still have the same you rolling into that goal. You need to go backwards and go heal your sh*t and go, “Okay, how do I show up with a different program?” And a lot of times when I’m working with entrepreneurs, they think I’m going to come in and go, “Okay, here’s the secret to success. We’re going to do this tactical thing one, two, three.”

But really what I do is I try to understand their life. What are your habits? How’s your family life? How’s your spiritual game? How’s your health game? How’s this? How the– and through asking a million questions just about them, I start to unpack, like you’re not even ready for the next level. Even if I told you and put you on game, you’re not there yet. So, I have to just help you shift your psychology one degree to get you there. So, maybe the first six months of our relationship, you think I’m going to go teach you how to be a real estate millionaire and all I do is f*cking make you work out and go to church and be a better human being and go get the EMDR therapy and drink a gallon of water a day and stop being a fat motherf*cker. Like, whatever it is I’m doing is prepping us for that moment in the seventh month where I’m like, all right, now you’re ready to become a real estate millionaire. Get what I’m saying?

Brad Weimert: I do. And are you saying that because you feel like until you’re in that place, you aren’t going to make the right choices when the opportunities come up?

Cody Sperber: Yeah, maybe you will and maybe you won’t. But I demand the best out of you. And my goal, if I’m going to mentor you, is to turn you into a badass motherf*cker that actually can sustain that energy and that– and we’ve all heard this phrase, like, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s like, well, kind of, it’s a marathon full of a bunch of sprints. And so, for me, it’s like, I don’t want to waste my time with somebody that quit halfway through the first sprint because mentally, they can’t handle the pain or the hard work or they can’t stay focused long enough or they have all these bad f*cking habits that are distracting them all the time and pulling them back to their old ways.

And I only know this because I did the exact same thing. And I’m looking around at my rich buddies going, “They’re not better than me, they’re not smarter than me, they’re not faster than me. Why are they so much further ahead than me?” It’s because they have already f*cked up enough stuff to finally do the exact thing that I finally did, and I went and worked on my sh*t. And you’re only going to rise your highest level of personal development. And that’s a lot of times where I start because it’s just, I know, I know I want an outcome for you and you want an outcome for you, but you don’t have the software download to get us there.

Brad Weimert: So, that’s what you’re working on with Cody 2.0.

Cody Sperber: That’s what I’m sharing with Cody 2.0. Cody 2.0., I’ve been working on it for the last two years. I misspoke earlier because I’m used to saying, “My mom died last year.” It was actually two Septembers ago. But it was just like, since that day, I’ve been working on it, and I’ll never stay. It’s a lifelong thing now. I work on it every day. Trust me, I want to pitch out so many times. Like, this morning, I didn’t want to go for my run. The second that little voice started creeping up, I was like, f*ck, just go put your sh*t on. Because the second I’m standing outside in all my sh*t, I’m going, right?

But if I’m sitting in my nice, warm house, and by the way, I go for my runs, I start at like five in the morning, 4:45, 5 a.m. Then, I go early because I watched David Goggins speak one time. And he told a story about how he runs early in the middle of the night when nobody else is up. And as he’s running by houses and everything’s turned off and it looks warm and cozy in the house and the cars are empty and street lights are barely on and he just runs by every house and he just looks in there and he just says, “Yeah, I’m still in your f*cking soul today.” Then he runs by the next house and he goes, “Give me your f*cking soul.” He runs by the next house, “I’m stealing your soul.” And he goes, “I’m just out there running stealing souls in the middle of the night.” I was like, “That’s the baddest ass mofo thing I’ve ever seen. I want to do that.”

Brad Weimert: So, I really, really, really relate to physical analogies because I’ve done a little bit of endurance stuff. And so, I know the crossover between these. Can you give me an example in your world of the kind of persistence that you’re talking about with getting up and running, but in business?

Cody Sperber: Let me make sure I understand what you’re asking me. So, like, how do I apply my mental fortitude and discipline over to business?

Brad Weimert: Yes.

Cody Sperber: Well, originally, it came from pain of being broke, right? Yeah, so the original motivation was never let’s go get rich, it was let’s stop being broke.

Brad Weimert: So, that’s actually one of the most important things for me right now, personally, and for a lot of people that I know. It’s very common for people, entrepreneurs to get to a point where they see success or like, if the first chapter is, how do I not be broke? Then maybe the next chapter is, how could I retire right now if I want to? And then the next chapter is…

Cody Sperber: Yeah, complacency kills progress and motivation.

Brad Weimert: Exactly.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. I’d say we’ve seen this happen dozens of times in businesses. You look at Blockbuster, you look at Kodak, and you’re like, “God, these guys were industry leaders.” But they got complacent, they got comfortable. And comfort and complacency kill all motivation. This is why I never allow myself to lose that underdog energy. I always force myself so far out of my comfort zone, so I’m always against the wall, always feeling uncomfortable, always scared to walk in the room and talk to those people.

I used to think, God, if I invested in a mastermind and it was 10 grand, that’s crazy. And then it was like, well, what are the– I now know the 10 grand people. And I met all them. And I’m like one of them now. What’s the 25 grand mastermind people like? Are they different? And then, I’d be around them, I’m like, “Yeah, they’re a little bit different.” They’re playing a game in a little bit higher level. Well, what is the 100k mastermind people like? Because if they all put 100k into this thing, you got to be a bad motherf*cker. And then I get myself around them and just through proximity, I would level up and got used to that. But I kept putting myself in these rooms where it was so uncomfortable, I didn’t want to talk to anybody because I thought, “F*ck, I’m not supposed to be here.” But I always use money as a tool to force me to be there.

Get an ice bath. If anybody’s listening right now and is like, you know, I’m kind of losing a little bit of that edge, just get a f*cking ice bath and every day, force yourself in it. It’s great for mental fortitude. And it’s a great reminder of like, we operate at our best as entrepreneurs when we’re in the f*cking mud, and everything sucks and nothing’s working. You want to get the most out of Cody Sperber? I need to know that there’s payroll and a credit card bill due in two weeks, right? And I’m going to gun and somehow, someway, I’m going to figure that sh*t out.

Brad Weimert: Got it. Velocity of action. So, you’re just moving things along so that you have to take the next step to keep things pushing forward.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. And so, like, take this new flooring business. I’m really excited to talk about this. Why flooring?

Brad Weimert: Yep. So, just to reset the frame here. You sold Clever Investor, which you had been building for 12 years, something like that?

Cody Sperber: Fourteen years.

Brad Weimert: Fourteen years. And now, you had mentioned earlier, you’ve got an identity thing going on because you’re like, all this sh*t’s transitioning in my life. And as with tons of entrepreneurs, you sell it and your identity is wrapped up in the company that you’ve built for 14 years. So, you’re looking at Cody 2.0, the next chapter, and you decide to get into flooring.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. Why flooring?

Brad Weimert: Why flooring?

Cody Sperber: Well, and I do still own like four other businesses. They’re doing really well. So, this isn’t like I had nothing to do and I decided to go in flooring. I had plenty to do on my real estate sh*t, but I love the flooring business. So, first off, I like to do businesses that are not easily disruptable in the very near future. I like futureproof businesses. That’s why I like real estate. People will always need a place to live. Well, AI is coming out. It’s going to destroy like, at least 50% of every job out there is going to be outsourced to AI, at least white-collar jobs. But the home services industry has a long way to go before AI. You would need full-fledged Elon Musk robots to come along to do this.

So, for now, it’s not going to be disrupted. You’re always going to need a plumber. You’re always going to need a roofer. I was going to need– people will always be upgrading their house, right? And flooring is a great business model. It’s an old industry that is very boring. I love boring industries that I can come and through my marketing creativity, disrupt the sh*t out of them. That’s why I called it Floor Daddy. Sexy floor. It’s affordable price. It’s quality install. I can just picture commercials. Like, we’re already kind of modeling out commercials of, like, how to push kind of the sexiness of it. It’s like, what Floor Daddy do you want to come install your flooring? You want the Mexican Floor Daddy, the Black Floor Daddy? He rolls up with that thick wood, installs it. The wife’s winking in the background. Just being a little playful with it.

But that industry is easily disruptable. It’s tried and true, meaning the business model is the business model. It’s whoever out markets everybody else gets the leads. And then it’s the same business model as my online education business. Identical. You generate an online lead through called traffic or building a brand. It goes to a funnel. A book a call happens. Phone guy goes, “Let’s get a guy out there.” A salesperson comes, does an in-home presentation, and sells a high-ticket item. There’s built-in financing, right? No interest, no payments for 24 months.

The industry is perfect for it right now because housing’s unaffordable, interest rates are high, there’s a lack of inventory, so people are not selling as much as they used to. And their wife is looking at the husband and saying, “Well, you promised me you were going to buy me a new house, but since we’re not moving, fix this sh*t,” right? So, there’s a lot of that going on. And even the ones that buy the new house, “Hey, this is nice, but this isn’t our house. Let’s upgrade it and fix it.” So, it’s a huge industry. Very big market. Very scalable too. I’m going to dominate Arizona. And then we’re going to move to a couple other markets in the southwest.

Brad Weimert: So, the big differences in that model that I see right away are huge human component. You’ve got to have installers, right? The other is…

Cody Sperber: We’re outsourcing that, by the way.

Brad Weimert: Oh, interesting. Okay, so that’s a big part of it. And then inventory is the other, an inventory management.

Cody Sperber: Nope. You think that.

Brad Weimert: I would. I do.

Cody Sperber: Go sign up for Shaw. Go sign up for any of the big flooring companies. They’ll warehouse all your sh*t. They already have the warehouse component infrastructure nationwide. You just need to get qualified to be a rep for them, a distributor for them. But I can roll in with the Mohawk and the Shaw products and all that and do my in-home presentations, sell their sh*t, have a next-day install because they got three giant warehouses here in Phoenix. And that’s in every major metropolitan area. They got every– I probably am signed up with 12 different flooring and carpet and tile companies. I don’t need, to whereas now, eventually, could I get better pricing at scale if I have my own warehouses? Yeah. But in the beginning, I’m not thinking like that. I’m thinking I’m going to out market everybody. I’m a sales and marketing company in the flooring space, and I’m going to scale way faster than everybody else.

And you know what’s going to happen? So, step one was come up with the idea. Step two is build my partnership team because I’m not going to run a flooring company because I remember earlier, I said, fire myself, get myself out. So, I went and found three partners, gave them equity. We all owned the business together. It was my idea. I put up the money, but I gave them equity. We’re all dividing and conquering.

You go handle installations, you go handle operations, you’re going to do the daily CEO-type stuff, right? And then immediately, I looked around and said, “Who are my biggest players, my biggest competitors in the space?” And I’m going to go steal all their f*cking best people. That’s the next phase is tell everybody in town I got more money than you motherf*ckers. I’m going to outspend everybody on the marketing. I’m cooler than you. We’re Floor Daddy.

All of a sudden, the number one sales guy starts jumping over, the number one phone guys, the number one in-person guys, the big operations people from this other thing. Yeah, how much are you making over there? 70 grand. Great. You make 90 grand with me? Let’s f*cking roll. Like, that’s it. I’m not playing games. I had to buy the Floor Daddy domain from some dude who originally said 10 grand. By the time I’m done, he wanted 14 grand. And I’m like, you little f*cking weasel. And I don’t care, because in the bigger picture, I’m selling in three years for $100 million. You think $14,000 is going to stop me? No, I’m not thinking about it. I’m thinking, like, time is valuable. Let’s get momentum. I want to get us to, because we launch to the public in probably, maybe by the time this podcast comes out. It’ll be like two, three weeks from now, we’ll be launching.

I told him if we don’t do a minimum of $100,000 in our first 30 days, the whole team is fired. Like, you’re all f*cking idiots. And I want to get to half a million a month within the first quarter. So, that’s a very aggressive marketing and scaling budget. We have to get a lot of processes down the f*ck in before that. But I’m just stealing talent from other companies. And then I did something that was really smart. I found a big flooring guy in another state that’s doing $2.5 million a month in flooring right now, and they just opened up a window division. And they’re about to go into the blind space as well. And I went and I found this company. And they’re in like two or three states right now. I said, “Hey, I want to hire you.” I cold call this person. “I want to hire you as a consultant for me. I’m over in Arizona starting a flooring business. I just exited another company for eight figures. I’m doing well. I have huge– I own 750 doors, 50 luxury Airbnbs, hundreds of millions dollars’ worth of real estate. I’m that guy. And we’re going to kick ass in the flooring business.”

He’s like, “Okay, I’m listening.” I said, “I want to pay 15 grand a month for a one hour a week phone call with you.” “Why would you do that?” I said, “Because you’re going to buy me someday.” He’s like, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Have you had offers for your business?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Have they been nine-figure offers?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Great. Why didn’t you sell?” “I’m not ready yet. We’re going to expand into these other niches and I’m going to get way more.” I said, “Oh, you’re going to get way more because I’m going to get to 2 million a month and you’re going to acquire me at that moment.”

So, I’m already thinking about the end. Maybe the guy does, maybe he doesn’t, I don’t know, and maybe I want to and maybe I won’t. But I’m already thinking, like, “How do I get this guy to want to give me $100 million three years from today?” Right? Or I’ll roll up into you. We immediately sell to private equity and you get whatever, and I get my 100 million. That’s how I’m thinking about this business.

And then I went out and bought Cabinet Daddy, Solar Daddy, f*cking Roofing Daddy, all the daddies because I’m already thinking about the lead gen infrastructure, so that way as Floor Daddy is scaling and I’m spending $300,000, $400,000 a month on advertising, generating a couple million dollars in business while I’m already in your house, hey, have you thought about getting solar? Have you thought about upgrading this cab– we have Cabinet Daddy or sister company could come put all your cabinets in for you. We got Window Daddy that can come do the windows because windows have a very high margin.

So, I’m just mirroring like the blinds, windows, the things that these other guys that are further along to me and just, okay, let’s just build whatever daddy infrastructure of the lead machine because that’s what’s viable and valuable. Once I build that brand and everybody in town sees those Floor Daddy vehicles driving all over the damn place, it’s game the f*ck over.

Brad Weimert: I love it. I love it. I love seeing the vision.

Cody Sperber: Will you be my merchant processor?

Brad Weimert: I think that we can probably handle that.

Cody Sperber: Yeah?

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Cody Sperber: Okay. I was waiting for you to come here. I really need it.

Brad Weimert: I love it. I love it. We’ll make it happen. All right. I know we’re coming at time here. What would you have done differently through your journey, if anything? So, you just sold Clever. And I want to talk a little bit about that, but we’ve laid out this long path and you are at 2.0. And I heard you both say you can do it all, you can have it all, you can live in alignment. And I also heard you say, “I needed to go through that path to get to where I am today.”

Cody Sperber: Yeah. I wouldn’t change anything. I’m so in love with my life right now. I feel so good about who I am, where I am. I probably pray 25 times a day just being grateful to God of everything, the good, the bad, and everything in between. And I think I feel that way because I have such a great relationship with my new girlfriend. We are so dialed in with our alignment and our energy of where we’re trying to go. I mean, we fight, don’t get me wrong. Like, we still are normal humans, but like, I already know. Like, that’s good. And I’m in a better spot with my kids than I’ve ever been in my life. And I’m making more money than I’ve ever made. So, I kind of feel like I have it all right now. And I wouldn’t have gotten here unless I went through that pain.

If I had a magic wand, it would have been, I should have gone to therapy 20 years ago, healed all my sh*t. We all have a bunch of bullsh*t that happens when we’re kids. If you would ask me when I was younger, do you have a good childhood? I would have probably said, yeah, because I’ve never been raped. My parents didn’t leave me and abandon me. I didn’t grow up in a place with no plumbing. I had just enough. We were poor, but I had just enough to kind of think, like I just had a normal childhood.

But then when you really start unpacking it, it’s like, oh, man, I did move 10 times by the time I hit sixth grade. My dad did cheat on my mom. My mom did cheat on my dad with another woman, and I walked in on it. My grandpa did corner me when he used to live with us in a corner one day. He was a Pentecostal crazy person, and he started speaking in tongues for 10 minutes, and I was crying in the corner. I was probably like, nine years old. And he grabbed me and started shaking me and told me, “Someday you’re going to be a pastor and lead a big flock.” And I was like, “F*ck religion,” from that day forward. And I was like, “Oh, I did have some sh*t that I need to work through. It was my own sh*t.” I did mature late and didn’t even grow until after high school. So, my whole high school was f*cking awful. And I was bullied all the time, and I was super immature looking and little looking, and everybody took advantage of it.

I’m not saying they’ll say all that to say, woe is me. I’m just saying, I had my sh*t just like you have yours. And if I could go back and do anything, it’d be like, go handle that. Get to a place where you do unconditionally love yourself. Create better habits, so that way you’re proud of your actions and they’re in alignment with your words and your thoughts. Because I would be so much farther along today if I would have just stopped hiding and covering it up and just kind of said, “All right, let’s deal with this,” because once you do, it’s like 1,000-pound weight lifted off. And you don’t do the red light sh*t, you don’t get there. You stop at the yellow light and say, “No, this doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to be this guy.”

Brad Weimert: Cody Sperber, if people want to learn more about you, what you’re doing, where do you want to point them?

Cody Sperber: Floor Daddy. No, I was just kidding. @officialcodysperber is my Instagram. I’m super active. It’s great resetting the algorithm. I have a little account. I’m super interactive with it. I’m DMing with people all the time. I would love to hear your story. Whatever I’m saying resonates with you, share your sh*t with me and I’ll support you back. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything from you. But maybe there’s a reason we end up someday in each other’s lives. Who knows? F*ck. But besides that, that’s it.

Brad Weimert: I love it, man. I appreciate you carving out the time.

Cody Sperber: Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show.