In this episode of The Mailbox Money Show, host Bronson Hill and co-host Nate Hambrick welcome business strategist Carl J. Cox for a powerful discussion on “The Difference Between a Business and a Very Expensive Job.”
Carl shares practical insights from scaling multiple companies, revealing how to start and grow a real business instead of just creating more work for yourself. Topics include side hustles for safety, leveraging transferable skills, building genuine value with strong margins and cash flow, calculated risk-taking, buying existing businesses, and treating strategic plans as hypotheses to test.
Carl J. Cox is a business strategist, entrepreneur, and CEO of 40 Strategy and 40 Accounting. With extensive experience scaling companies across industries, he is the creator of the Captain Method and author of Lost at CEO: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Strategy. He helps leaders build sustainable, high-performing businesses through strategic planning, succession, and execution.
Packed with actionable advice for aspiring and current business owners, this episode will help you shift from trading time for money to creating real freedom and wealth.
Get my new book: https://bronsonequity.com/fireyourself
Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: All right, welcome. I am your host, Bronson Hill. Welcome to Mailbox Money Show, and we have an amazing guest today.
He’s going to talk about growing and building a business, starting a business, exiting businesses. He is a business consultant. He’s amazing.
I also have my amazing co-host with me today, Nate Hambrick, who’s the two-time bestselling author of, most recently, the book, The 18 Laws of Leverage. Nate, I know you are a business guy. What are you excited about, and what are some things that you’ve kind of wondered about businesses and starting businesses, and you’ve had mobile businesses?
So, talk to us a little bit about that.
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, well, as I’m sure you probably know, Bronson, only 4% to 9% of businesses ever get to the point where they generate a million dollars in revenue a year. And only 1% ever get to 10 mil. So, even though I am friends with lots of entrepreneurs, I’m really excited to chat with Carl, because I’m sure he’s got like 100x, 300x more experience with companies that fail and companies that thrive. So, I’m excited for this interview.
I think it’s going to be really insightful.
Bronson Hill: It’s going to be a good time. You know, I love your statistics. You’ve got like a statistic for everything.
You just are always quilting, spitting different in the statistics. And you know that 75% statistics are actually made up on the spot, right? You know that?
Nate Hambrick: Especially that one.
Bronson Hill: Especially that one. Yeah, for sure.
We’re going to have a good time, guys. Excited you’re here. Excited to our audience.
Carl Cox, welcome. Good to see you, man. I was on your podcast.
Had a great time with you. Just felt like a real connection with you, wanted to bring you on the show. And man, you’ve been doing all kinds of stuff.
You’re a business strategist. You’re an entrepreneur or a CEO. You’ve got 40 strategy, and you really help people with strategic planning, succession, business, and you have the captain method.
You’ve got all kinds of stuff you’ve done. So, excited to have you today. How are you doing today, brother?
Carl J Cox: Bronson, it’s a pleasure. Nate. Great to meet you as well.
It’s a pleasure to be on your show today. Absolutely.
Bronson Hill: Awesome. Awesome. Well, we’re excited.
So, tell us a little bit. I had a question for a lot of people, a lot of our audience are professionals, and people are like, hey, I want to start a business. I want to do a slight hustle.
But there’s a lot of people that start businesses, and they just simply start another job. How does somebody avoid starting a business and not making it be something that just creates more work?
Carl J Cox: It’s an excellent question. And a lot of different paths, of course, to go with that specific piece. But first of all, it’s interesting, most of my businesses that I personally have grown, I started out working as an employee at another business.
So one of the things I do recommend to people is I married young, married my high school sweetheart. I had to be responsible from day one. And so I couldn’t just go off and be an entrepreneur and not make money for three months and eat on top ramen.
That wasn’t going to be susceptible to the youngness. I had to help make sure that I was taking care of things. And so throughout my career, I’ve had, quote unquote, a business, if you may, or I’ve worked as an employee in many companies.
But multiple the spinoffs, multiple businesses that I started out with, I actually started moonlighting, so to speak, as an employee somewhere else. And the beauty behind that is it gives you that security and that freedom of like, hey, I’m still getting a steady paycheck. And I only took off and went off and helped establish it once I had secured enough revenue and income from that business.
So that’s step number one, and a big believer of that. I’m not a huge fan of the people like, I’m just going to go take off and start something. It’s like, well, yeah, you’re going to go bankrupt.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, you’re going to go.
Carl J Cox: Yeah. It’s like, you burn the boats and then you are looking for a job again. But to get in the next point, what you said is, okay, how do you actually create something that is a real business, not just a job for somebody else?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, got it. That’s a big deal. I think I’m a big fan of the side hustle as well.
I did that actually when I was doing medical sales, we started raising capital for real estate deals. Never really launched Bronson equity that was six, seven years ago. Actually, it’s been over by years now. But Nate, I know you’ve had a side business, talk to us about how you’ve scaled your business.
You’ve had some things you’re doing in your, if you’re talking about it, your side.
Nate Hambrick: Sure. Yeah, it is actually one of the 18 Laws of Leverage is ride the coattails of success. And so the way that I frame it is, if you can get hired by somebody and have them pay you to learn all of the mistakes, what not to do, how to do it, and like the narrow niche that you want to carve out for yourself. I mean, I just can’t believe that companies will actually do that, probably because most employees won’t create their own companies, but I’ve had a lot of friends that have done that.
My brother’s actually a really great example. He’s been working for a lending company for the last few years, making a lot of money. Last year he made over $500,000 profit, but he’s starting his own company in a slightly different niche.
But the benefit is he knows exactly what states he can operate in and which ones he can’t because his employer made those mistakes. Every single lawsuit he’s itemized and decided not to do every single one of those things that triggered the lawsuit. So what does that mean for his new company?
Well, it means that he’s going to have a lot less liability than the company he worked for. It means that he’s going to short step all of that. And so for you, Carl, you know, when you’re coaching people, I was curious, what advice do you give to people who say things like, oh, I don’t know what business to start or how can I do that?
Like, what are some baby steps that you give them to help them find the right companies to start and take those first few steps?
Carl J Cox: Well, so number one, I mean, obviously there’s the path and there’s a whole path of you could go down a franchise route and build something that’s already existing and basically you become that path. Let’s not talk about that today. Right.
I’m a believer in you should be heading down something that’s an adjacent pond to what you already know. And moving into something that you have absolutely no idea about is crazy. Now, what’s weird is I have been in multiple different industries, multiple different businesses, and I have hopped around.
But I had carried over skill sets from a previous business. So meaning I started as an accountant, right? Then I opened up a CPA business.
I worked in a company, moved on, worked with the company and helped establish, learned about strategy for a decade. Then I opened up the U.S. office for an Australian strategic planning software company. When that went well, they asked me to be their consultant and create a global consultant company. I went off my own and opened my own. Right.
I had been able to do that from skills that had learned over time. And so I’m personally a big believer in you should be moving over you. It could be theoretically a different industry, but the skills you’re bringing into it, you can apply to that.
I think that’s going to bring you up. I’m a calculated risk taker. Meaning I don’t go into anything with a thought of losing.
And, you know, they have these statistics and they brought up about it like, hey, most people don’t work out, most people don’t hit certain numbers, then why go into it? Right. You should be coming into it that you are going to be the 1%, the 4%, the 7%.
You are going to be going into it. You’re taking a calculated risk. And matter of fact, it’s not really calculated risk.
You know, when Navy SEAL teams go into an event, they don’t think of losing one person. Right. They go into that thinking that every single person is going to come back and survive.
That’s the same type of meticulous planning, effort, blood, sweat and tears that you have to go into it. And you got to expect that you’re going to run into obstacles and you can’t quit when the first obstacle you run into, you have to find a different way to ultimately get to your destination. So that’s going to answer your question specifically.
Like you find something where your skills that you’ve learned, you could bring to somebody different and apply it to a adjacent pond.
Bronson Hill: I think that’s so good. I think for a lot of investors and a lot of business owners, they think, Oh man, I couldn’t do real estate or I couldn’t do a business or something, but a lot of them, it’s like you look at your actual function. You know, for me, I was in medical sales for 10 years, was great sales guy.
And so I realized like you’re raising capital. I kind of fell into it, but it was like, Oh, that’s also a sales role. You know, and we’ll $60 million rateably, we raised a lot of been able to kind of create some things in space.
And now I keep creating new businesses where we started a manufactured home dealer company or we’re building homes, you know, the five of the fires in LA, right? So that’s kind of adjacent to real estate. I love being able to learn and keep re recreated, but it’s great to like, it’s almost like when you go into battle, you don’t want to go in, like hoping it goes well, or you don’t want to go like, Hey, I hope it works out.
You know, if you want to have, what are the best practices, the most things you can control and have a plan so that it will go well. And if not, like, okay, it is a calculated risk, but it’s okay, from what I know. It’s 90, I’m about 90% sure this is going to go really well. And there’s that 10%, I’m going to try to manage, but if the 10% happens, like I don’t die or something, like I don’t like go to jail, like, you know, like they’re manageable risks.
Okay, then I’ll do this, I’ll reevaluate whatever. But it seems a lot of people just think business is going to be easy. But it takes a lot of planning and a lot of thinking.
It reminds me of that quote when Henry Ford, he said, thinking is hard work, which is why so few people do it. So do you like this love to be to be 30s and 40s? Most people are like, I’m in my job is just, it’s autopilot, you have to think about it, right?
Remember being a sales guy, you know, for six to 12 months, it was so automatic. But then I love the idea of keep, just continue to keep learning. So how do people stay sharp once they have a business and they want to keep growing?
What are ways people can stay sharp?
Carl J Cox: Well, you know, it’s funny. You may remember Zig Ziglar, but he said, to be a great leader, you have to be a great reader. And, and so you need to have that insatiable desire of learning consistently.
And you should, I always get concerned with working people to say, I’ve got this, or I’ve got it figured out, or I’ve already read all the books. These are fixed mindset type people, and they typically don’t grow beyond where they have. They’ve decided that they’ve settled, that they can no longer grow.
The beauty of course, with AI, right, is there so many tools we can figure out things so much more faster than we used to. Even a strategic plan, we can, we can come up and create it relatively quickly. We could come up with a plan to actually how to implement it. Now say this though, yes, we could come up probably with an AI plan and how to do heart surgery, but I’m not going to hire either one of you to, to do my heart surgery, right?
Nate Hambrick: Give Bronson a shot, Carl.
Carl J Cox: But my point is, this is like, this is where one side, I think there’s a bit of, I’ll call it silliness, that we think we can just pull something out of chat to be and understand it. Right. And truly you’ve gone through experience of it.
Like we use AI every day. And we constantly use it to accelerate our learning and accelerate our implementation. But this comes from 30 years of experience and being a strategy, operations, execution, right, accounting.
It’s not something that we just took an overnight. And so that’s the, I think that the be careful, right? Be careful of just thinking you could pull up a ChatGPT script and go, oh, I’m going to start a new business because I got this 10 step plan, or I’m going to learn how to be a three point shooter overnight.
It’s like, you know, what do they do in commercials right now? Then all of a sudden you’re going to be everyone’s going to be stuck.
Nate Hambrick: Walk us through this, Carl, when you’re advising people, um, in starting businesses, cause I have a lot of friends who have been employees their whole career. They’re trying to start their own business. And one of the things that I’ve noticed, here’s the way I think about it, but I’d love to hear your thoughts is you kind of have to find a business model. That’s going to be profitable first before you take that big leap. Cause what I see a lot of my friends doing is they’re like, Oh, I really love this thing. So let me figure out how to make this and turn this into a business.
The challenge is, is that framework, unless you’re going to completely uproot it like we did with like Uber or something like that, which is highly unlikely. Whatever structure you’re putting yourself into is going to determine how profitable you are. And so my advice to most of my friends is like, be product agnostic, like go find something that you can figure out how to make it profitable where you’re adding significantly more value to the customer than you’re taking. But the margins have to be amazing.
Otherwise, say no, find 10 business ideas, say no to nine of them, find 100 business ideas, say no to 99 of them. So that’s kind of how I think about it. How do you think about it?
Do you have a similar process or what are some of the things where you tell people just say no more often than you say yes.
Carl J Cox: Yeah, you got to be careful not to fall in love with things, right? When it comes to creating, creating value, the real question you should be asking yourself is would you buy this product or service that you’re creating? Would your friends buy this product or service they’re creating?
Would somebody you don’t know by this product or service that you’re creating, right? That I think is the hardest thing is that you have to create legitimate value that somebody is willing to pay for. If somebody is not willing to pay for it, it’s just a hobby.
It’s not a business, right? And so just to clarify, I think you should go into things that you can be passionate about. But I tell you what, if you could find a way to create cash flow through something to do the things you love or to invest in the other things that you love or to create the freedom that you love, that’s sometimes a better idea, right?
There’s some amazing people that are in very unexciting businesses like Waste Management as example, right, that are very well to do. And so it isn’t always the I’m going to do what I love, right? You got to, you know, no matter what the business you’re in, you’re going to have to put some grit into it.
You know, Bronson said at the beginning, you know, sometimes employees are like, hey, I want to be careful finding something that that’s not like another job. Well, the reality is there is going to be a grind initially in sending anything up, you know, just out of the process, the people, the process in the systems, it’s not luck and it’s not easy.
Bronson Hill: Now, a question to add in here too. So this is getting a counter to what we’ve talked about at this point about having the plan. And I also think that there are certain things that I in life I’ve done.
Well, I call them low risk experiments, right? Where you don’t know how something’s going to turn out, but it doesn’t take a lot. Maybe there’s some learning that goes into it.
It’s like a side project where you’re like exploring, you’re researching, you’re maybe putting something out to the world. So like for me, I have this investor audience and I put things out there and people are like, why are you putting this thing out there? You know, or it’s like I did one recently about getting some of the brand out of the world or being able to get paid to speak or how I’ve done this, whatever.
And, you know, just trying these things because you don’t know, you know, is that going to be something that could become a central part of the business where you’re trying these things that are a little bit adjacent. So what is the role of like if I’m an entrepreneur, I have a business, we will make business and like the business environment’s always changing. What is the role of like being willing to try lots of things, knowing that a lot of them will fail, but that one or two or three things, those might be wildly successful.
So where’s the role of like experimentation in what you’re doing in your business?
Carl J Cox: I’m a big believer that strategic planning as a hypothesis is not a fact. So when you come in that concept that no matter what you’re trying as a hypothesis, you aren’t, forgive me here, you are arrogant that is going to be true. You’re going to prove it to be true.
Then you have a great chance of being successful. We’ve tried, I’ve tried, I’ve been with companies that have tried hundreds of things that have failed at a calculated risk. Yeah, right.
It’s when something’s proven. One of those things, if you may have the hundred or ten or twenty, of course, we don’t have the money of Google. We can’t do everything that fails and celebrate every single loss that happens.
Right. We’re going to run out of money. But when you could take calculated risk of things and you find it works, that’s when you pour your resources into it.
Right. That’s when you scale it. But until you find, once again, that thing that’s adding value to the world.
And once again, for people who don’t know about my background, just just real briefly, not only CEO of 40 strategy and 40 accounting, but I’ve been a part of over 10 different businesses that have doubled in size and they’ve gone from all different ranges from startup to one, startup to two, startup to ten, startup to twenty. Companies gone from nine to thirty five million companies going to twenty five to one hundred million. I’ve had a lot of different scale within companies underneath a hundred million.
So this isn’t a one trick pony, so to speak, when I go through these askers behind it. But there are definitely patterns which help organizations and companies and individuals be more successful. I’ll say this to Bronson and they like what doesn’t work is thinking exactly what you did in the past.
One of the biggest challenges somebody comes from a big company like a Fortune 500 company and they go into a small business and they think they could apply the Fortune 500 principles exactly the way they did in a small business. You know, you just don’t have the resources to do it.
Unless somebody gave you Google money to start it up and they don’t care. You don’t.
You typically don’t even if yourself are successfully, you know, very successful and you have lots of money to pour into it. That doesn’t mean you should. Like that’s a bad idea.
Right. If you were like continuously trying things that are failing. There’s a lot of trust fund people that that start a business.
There’s nothing wrong with you, by the way, if you are in a fortunate situation where you don’t have to work. But often the business does not work. Because you have to have a little bit of passion for it to be successful in the transfer to be created.
Otherwise, you’re like, I’m just going to sit back and relax again. Right. So there’s a component of this grit and this component of aspect of that I found right of adding value and you have to be passionate about adding that value around it.
Otherwise, just enjoy your life. Honestly, right. Enjoy what you have, enjoy being an employee, enjoy watching Netflix each night. It’s funny.
I literally true story here. Yellowstone, right, which has been around for how long? Right.
I just watch the show. Yeah. Thank you.
I just watched a second episode yesterday. Meaning I don’t spend my time watching Netflix.
I spend my time on two things, being growing and creating businesses and consulting with other people who have great businesses. That’s number one, number two, and number three is being with my family.
Those are my passions. And I’ve been really fortunate.
And so I’ve had this flexibility to do and see and grow things. But man, if you, what I don’t suggest is people getting the businesses and not be serious about it and not be passionate about it. It’s like, you’ve got to care because otherwise I said, it just becomes a hobby and hobbies are called a hobby because they don’t make money.
You can’t technically write off a hobby folks. Okay. Like from attack, I’m a CPA as well.
You got to have a plan to have a real business to be able to actually theoretically write off your investments.
Nate Hambrick: Well, I love the way that you phrased it earlier and I wrote it down that strategic planning is a hypothesis, not a fact. Because it reminds me of something I read in the psychology of money where it talks about how business advice is so all over the place where we have, we basically throughout business advice, if it was successful, for example, the client, the customer is always right is business advice we all accept. The customer is always wrong is also accepted. And so it has nothing to do with the actual advice.
If Bezos goes and does something and it fails, we say, what an idiot. He should have never done that. If somebody else does the exact same thing to the T 100% the same, but it works out well, we’re like, wow, we should all follow suit.
And so I think the lesson that I learned from that and what you’re saying, Carl, is sometimes you have to be willing to, first of all, take your advice seriously on what you’re going to follow and whatnot. But the main piece of advice is you have to be willing to take those little risks and then you have to do it in a way that you’re not pushing all your chips in the center. Because even the best advice, even the best scenario in business, just because you did everything perfect does not mean it’s going to work out.
And so you want as many at bats as humanly possible, because one of them will work, but you need to stay in the game to do it. And so with that, I was going to ask you, Carl, how do you think about it from like a funding standpoint? How do you keep the people you coach and yourself in business knowing that some of your best decisions will fail you?
Carl J Cox: Whoo, that’s a good one, right? Funding cash is the reason why most companies fail, right? You know, it’s they will run out of money because of cash.
And so of course, there’s the core things of doing it. There’s bootstrapping it, meaning that’s that’s figuring out how to make money and earning it from actual profits that come from the company. That’s number one, and it’s probably the most common, right?
Number two is getting money from friends or family. And then and then three is actually taking the more serious route of whether it’s seed capital or moving further down to actually getting a Series A or something of that nature, right? But that money doesn’t come for a while.
People forget they hear these amazing stories and it’s like, most Series A capital doesn’t happen from four, three, four, five, six years after a company started, right? And so the reality is you’re probably doing it from your own money or a partner or two who believes in your idea concept, right? That’s going through it.
Once again, I’m a calculated risk taker. So there’s two different kind of paths you could head down towards. You could head down the VC route, which is basically you’re intentionally trying to get as fast as possible of development into a market and they’re hoping it makes profit someday, which means it requires a ton of venture capital to make it work.
There’s something called the 40% rule. And for the most part of a company is growing more than 40% you’re going to need capital to grow it, even if it’s growing 40%.
So it’s like you have to like have the right amount of capital get in. Otherwise you’re going to go broke. You’re going to grow broke.
Even when you’re, even when your sales are growing, it’s what it’s the classic thing of you have one restaurant you go to two, it goes out of business, right? There’s a different whole aspect of that happens. You can’t do the exact same thing when you’re somewhere else, even though, I mean…
Bronson Hill: there’s, I want to visit you like you have a very high profit margins. Like obviously other restaurants, usually pretty thin margins. So if someone has like 50% margins, then you’re going to be a little bit more flexible there as far as scaling.
Carl J Cox: Margins is huge, right? You have to have the right margins right behind it. But the core behind this is like your core.
Let’s just do that example of a restaurant. That restaurant has to make money. Like you’re not going to make it up on volume.
Right. There’s like, Oh, no, no, hey, we’re just going to build 10 stores. If all 10 stores don’t make money, you can’t cover your fixed costs.
Nevermind your financing cost. Right. So I personally, a lot of this comes down to Nate, how quickly do you want to grow?
Right. Capital can accelerate growth. Dumb capital will kill companies.
Right. And so I’ve been with companies. I was with a publicly traded company when we went from 50 million down to seven million in about 18 months.
We were two weeks away from not being able to pay payroll. Like literally, if we didn’t get this tranche of money, we would have been going. We would not have been a going concern and we would have been delisted off NASDAQ.
I mean, I’ve been in those experiences beforehand. Okay. And and why?
Why were we doing that? We were spending stupid money. You know, we were just making dumb.
They we were spending money to look good. Folks, if you’re an entrepreneur, focus on value, not in your office space, not on, there’s a lot of people we do tax returns, we do tax returns for a lot of people who are perceived to be successful. That was the key word there.
I said perceived to be successful. The reality is this is most people are not as successful as their Instagram posters doing or the LinkedIn poster showing. There’s a lot of people that are pretending and it’s okay.
But we, it’s so much better to fundamentally grow a business with real profits. And then you can get the right type of capital. And I do suggest this, Nate, when possible, try not to lose control your company.
Bronson Hill: Hey, let me some of these. Let me jump in here for a second. So you got a lot of nuggets.
You want to make sure we’re dialoguing on this. So I I’ll go by a mall and I’ll see like a restaurant that is in LA. I’m just thinking like, or a store, like a retail store.
I’m like, oh my gosh, like this overhead must be like 30 grand a month or something for this store. I think how many products do you have to sell? And I’ll literally put in ChatGPT.
Okay, I have this barbershop, whatever. They were and it’s like in a prime area and they’re this big where like how much how much in service does this person have to sell? And it was like a million dollars a month or something.
It was like even breakeven. I was like, it’s just crazy. So I’m like the whole thing about Warren Buffett talked about buying a wonderful business, right?
A lot of businesses, they’re just kind of crappy businesses, right? They’re just like mildly profitable at best. And so it’s just like being in a good business.
We’re going to ask you specifically about that. A big trend that’s happened the last couple of years is a lot of boomers are retiring. People are buying businesses, right?
You’re buying a plumbing business and rolling them up where you’re buying. There’s the roll up strategies. Also just, hey, I want to my local area buy a business.
What do you tell people that are like, hey, you know, I’m leaving. Should I buy a business, Carl, or what should I look for in a business that I buy? Why don’t you give us like the three year four made points?
Carl J Cox: Yeah. So number one, make sure we what we do is we do an analysis of companies because most most companies I’m going to sell a sign and go to buy side real quick here, right? So at the sell side, most companies are you want to buy them when they’re less valued, right?
Ideally. And so there’s there’s 25 different metrics we look at and risk and from risk of can the business owner actually go away and will business still happen? If the business goes away, are the customers going to go with them or just stop living with them?
Do they have a real product service that’s having margin? Do they have a sales and marketing engine, right? There’s so there’s so many different key questions that you want to ask.
But the key thing is this is look at their income statement and their tax return. Then you’ll find out how much money they’re really making. That’s number two, ask, talk to actually people that are there, talk to their employees if they have employees and ask them if they’re planning to stay or not.
If you get that opportunity, if you’re buying that business, if you’ve gone down further down from that path, because you need to find out who are the key employees in that business. Okay. Three, make sure that it’s going to last and four, be careful of how much debt you put in the business to buy it.
Most, if you’ve been reading about what’s happening in PE right now, there gets to a point where it doesn’t work. You have to do the math. And if you put too much debt leverage onto a business, you will not be able to have it.
It’s going to eat into your operating capital and profits that you’re basically break even or losing money. And that’s the fool’s gold of a lot of investments. They hide it.
See PE, I love, we work with PE a lot. I love PE, but the people were making the money of the General Partners, Limited Partners are making a little bit of money. And often the people that are selling and they’re not getting a second bite in the Apple.
Whole different discussion here and much more extensive going beyond that. The point is this, you have to be very thoughtful about how you put the equity and capital into business so you can still cash flow it. So many companies get strapped and they can’t afford to pay down the debt.
And they literally in every any trouble in the business whatsoever. Right. If we’ve had a few of them just these past few years, right, from COVID to taxes, to tariffs, to so many supply chain disruptions, they can kill a business.
So I like to make sure when you’re capitalizing a business, you have at least six months of operating cash in the business. This is if you’re buying a business, make sure operating cash, right, two months minimum, six months ideal, then you could get through the storms that you’re really going to hit as you’re trying to scale the company.
Bronson Hill: It’s going to come off for sure. I’m kind of short on time, but I wanted to ask you a couple more little things. Do you have any burning questions you wanted to ask?
Nate Hambrick: Well, it remind me, I was watching a I was watching an interview. I think it was Grant Cardone and Ryan Pineda and they talked about how to really, really become wealthy, like hundreds of millions, billionaire status. And one of the things that Ryan Pineda shared, which I love Ryan, um, is that he doesn’t think of a business.
He doesn’t buy business for the cash flow. But the reason the cash flow is so important is for what you just talked about Carl, the cash flow is what enables you to hold in that business enables you to pay down the debt enables you to do the role of strategy. All the things that that these people who are making hundreds of millions of dollars are doing.
All of that only happens if they have enough cash flow to support the everyday lifestyle. It’s you know, once again, I’m not telling you anything you haven’t experienced a thousand times, but there’s so many businesses that if they pull it off, they’ll be extremely wealthy, but half of them, you know, go straight down the gutter even though they were profitable, just because they don’t have the cash flow to support that. So anyway, that was one thing that I was thinking about, but go ahead Bronson.
I think you had another question on that.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I know I was just going to just kind of celebrate and wrap things up here a bit. But Carl, I really appreciate you man. Obviously you said you’ve had 10 business, 5 or 10 businesses that have doubled in size.
Some of these are pretty sizable businesses. Really impressive. So when you talk to somebody who knows what they’re talking about it, you learn a lot.
And so your audience is grateful for you guys to come and enjoy this conversation as well. Encourage you to reach out to Carl if you need business consulting, that’s what his business is. He does this.
You tell he knows what he’s talking about. So we’d love to have you back for one of these future events. We also have some more virtual panels, whether you’re back for those or whenever we’ll form that’s coming up.
So how can people reach out to you, Carl? How can they follow you and connect with you?
Carl J Cox: Yeah, once again, Bronson, a great questions. Thanks so much for being a guest. This is definitely one of those could be sequential, right?
There’s so many meat nuggets, things of so critical and helping to grow a business. It’s been a pleasure to have a few minutes to talk with your audience, but best ways to connect. Once again, so Carl J. Cox, maybe if you’re familiar with the DJ Carl Cox, don’t look him up.
It’s Carl J. Cox for a reason there. But anyways, ways to connect is 40strategy.com, four zero strategy dot com. Go ahead and check out our website.
You could also check it out on LinkedIn and LinkedIn and particularly once again, Carl Jay Cox. I have a measure success podcast. My podcast, feel free to connect to that.
We’re a top 10 strategic planning podcasts over the last past two years. And then let’s see what else here. Podcast and book, lots of CEO and entrepreneurs got a strategy you could find on Amazon.
So anyways, those are great ways to help connect with us. I’ll even if you’re interested, give you an email. If anyone wants a free book, this is my gift for anyone who is on this, listening to it.
Send me an email to Carl Jay Cox at four zero strategy dot com. Carl Jay Cox at 440 strategy dot com. And I’ll send you and you said you were on the show.
I’ll send you a copy of my book. Lost at CEO, a entrepreneurs guide strategy.
Bronson Hill: Awesome. Thanks Carl Christian. Sit tight for a minute here.
So neat. I thought this was a great show today. Really enjoyed Carl’s input and obviously lots of experience there and you and I are business guys.
We’re always got new things going. What are some takeaways that you took away from this?
Nate Hambrick: So I brought this one up earlier, but I love this quote that strategic planning is a hypothesis, not a fact. And that is so true. Our best plans, right?
We make man makes his best plans and God laughs. And so it’s so important, like we talked about earlier, to make sure that your plan has enough margin and gives you yourself enough that bats that when that strategic plan that is so perfect, it can’t fail fails, you have enough resources, time, effort, energy, capital to keep going. So how about you brought some?
Bronson Hill: I love it. Well, one thing is I’m reminded of just having great people with you or smart advisors. I think when you have a business, there’s going to be things that you don’t know.
And you don’t know what opportunities are there just having outside like fresh eyes come in. And so I can tell someone like Carl, he’ll be able to have that in my business. I’ve, you know, a couple of different consultants I work with right now.
I just to try how can we work on this or we grow cash flow or how to work on growing the wealth form of the things. And so I think it’s really helpful to have, you know, people around your business that may just pick up on things that you don’t see. So it’s something that if you’re doing kind of business by yourself and business does change, it’s very dynamic over time.
And so being willing to reinvent and try you thing. One thing I heard recently about like Facebook ads is that the groups that are really successful at it, they test 11 times more ads than everybody else where they’re just, they’re constantly testing new things all the time. And so in business, you’ve got to be, you got to have your business, what you’re doing, but you have to be willing to just try lots of different things.
And it’s that like getting out of that employee mindset, right, that everything’s got to be perfect or going back to school, like it’s really one right answer. If I do it wrong, I’ll fail versus as an entrepreneur, you got to try a lot of different things and most of them will fail, but that’s okay. And usually getting information and then when you find the thing that makes sense, really double down on it.
So anyway, Nate, appreciate you being here. Thank you as well to our audience. It’s really great.
I’ll thank you for joining us today. If you haven’t joined our investment club, you can check out the link below. We’ll look forward to seeing each of you on the next episode of Mailbox Money Show.
Thanks everyone.
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