Latest / Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes / Small Business Owners Should Not Buy Stocks.
Transcript
- 0:00If you have a business that does under $1 million in annual revenue, I think it is crazy to invest in anything besides your business.
- 0:08I don't care if it's the stock market, real estate, thinking about diversifying.
- 0:13If you have $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 in annual revenue business, the best use of your money...
- 0:20is spending any cash you have on your business, growing it, getting more customers, investing in marketing, hiring, expanding the amount of crews that you have.
- 0:29And I'm gonna explain why today.
- 0:31Because a lot of us have heard the rhetoric around diversification, investing in a 401k, an IRA.
- 0:39And what we start to do is we start to take the limited funds that we do have and diversify it into five different things.
- 0:45Some in the stock market, then we get a little duplex on the side, then a little side hustle.
- 0:49And all of a sudden we have five little small businesses earning small trickles of income.
- 0:54However, the biggest hack to building wealth in America is having a small business.
- 1:01You're like, well, what about Warren Buffett?
- 1:03He diversifies and he talks about diversification.
- 1:05If you look at how he made his first million dollars, his first $10 million, it was buying Berkshire Hathaway, which at the time wasn't a conglomerate.
- 1:13It was a textile business that was failing.
- 1:15And he went all in high risk on one thing.
- 1:19And so if you're doing two, three, five, $10 million in annual revenue, you have a whole bunch of cash.
- 1:24Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to diversify, use real estate, the stock market, to be able to get around taxes, to be able to diversify your wealth in different areas of the economy and the risk of as you grow your wealth, or you don't know where to put the cash in your business, so you got to put it somewhere so it actually earns some sort of income or grows in value.
- 1:44Great, invest in the stock market.
- 1:46I'm a big fan.
- 1:48But when you're running a business under a million dollars, it is insane that you would spend your money anywhere else than inside of your business, assuming you know your customer acquisition cost, assuming that when you spend a dollar, you're able to make $2 in profit.
- 2:01If you were to take $50,000 and you were to go put that in the stock market for the next 10 years, and let's assume there's no stock market crash, there's no recession, but over the next 10 years, we have an average return of 10%.
- 2:13In 10 years, you'd wake up with about $129,000.
- 2:17So you would have more than doubled your money.
- 2:18Let's go.
- 2:19That would be a phenomenal stock market run.
- 2:23And the problem is in 10 years, having $120,000, okay, it's not life-changing.
- 2:29It doesn't move the needle a whole bunch on like your overall wealth strategy for your whole life, if you wanna go big.
- 2:34And so my proposition to you, if you have 50, $100,000, instead of thinking that you're going to get wealthy, by just putting the stock market or just dollar cost averaging in very slowly, which I'm in favor of, if you have a small business investing into it,
- 2:48Buying more customers, buying more equipment, buying more trucks, and being able to grow and expand it is likely the best use of your money.
- 2:54Why?
- 2:55Because if I take $50,000 a day and I added a new truck, a crew to my existing business, I spent money on advertising and was able to double the amount of customers that I had on a recurring basis inside of my company.
- 3:06If I was able to do that in 10 years, it's a very good likelihood I would not have just made an extra $70,000.
- 3:12I very well could have doubled the size of my business.
- 3:16I could have doubled the amount of profit I was making.
- 3:18It's very likely that that $50,000 invested today in my small business to get it off the ground or ramp it up with marketing, expansion, that $50,000 could very well be paying me $70,000 of profit per year by year 10.
- 3:33I say this because I see so many people that are listening to videos, podcasts, books, and they're listening to people that have made 10 million.
- 3:42$50 million, $100 million, talking about investing into cryptocurrency, real estate, diversification, S&P 500, dollar cost averaging.
- 3:52And I agree with all those things.
- 3:53But when you have a small number, and the reason I talk about this is because I didn't make my original first million dollars in the stock market.
- 4:00I didn't make it in real estate.
- 4:02Why?
- 4:02Because I didn't have any money.
- 4:04And so if you have a lot of money, investing is great in other asset classes, but when you have a small amount of money, you need huge returns.
- 4:11You need 100% year over year return.
- 4:13You need to be able to put in $100 to get a customer and make $3,000 from that customer this year.
- 4:19That kind of return doesn't happen in the stock market.
- 4:21And the only way to really get ahead and go from a couple thousand dollars in your bank account and trying to get to a million, you're not like, go put $1,000 in the stock market, wake up when you're 80, and it's still not gonna be a million dollars.
- 4:33And so if you have a small amount of working capital, if you have a small amount of cash right now, I highly recommend know your numbers enough in your business so where you can confidently put that money in and know you're going to get an expected return.
- 4:46You're going to expect a certain number of customers.
- 4:49You expect a certain amount of revenue increased a certain number of leads if you're doing under a million dollars.
- 4:57I kind of look at wealth creation in three phases.
- 5:00I call it the 3S process.
- 5:02And that is save, then sow, and spread.
- 5:07And I could very well say it's 10 years per.
- 5:11And that is during the save phase, it's kind of like a squirrel hiding acorns.
- 5:15It takes every single acorn and it hides it away and it just stacks away the acorns.
- 5:20That could be 10 years.
- 5:21That could be 10 years of grinding and hustling and saving every single penny, pinching pennies in your personal life to be able to afford the growth in the business.
- 5:29That's the save part.
- 5:31And usually your net worth at this phase, it's not going up very much.
- 5:35It's just time is going by and you're spending a bunch of money on the business.
- 5:38You're investing back into the business.
- 5:40You're saving every dollar in your personal life to be able to put it back into the business.
- 5:43That's the save part.
- 5:45Now, usually after 10 years, you start having momentum.
- 5:47You have skills.
- 5:48You have a leadership team.
- 5:49You've gained skills around leadership.
- 5:51You figured out how to do marketing.
- 5:52You figure out which marketing channels work well in your market.
- 5:55And now you start your so phase.
- 5:57This is where you take the C that you've been saving up for a long time and you start sowing back into the business.
- 6:01And this is the difference between someone that builds a million dollar business and someone who builds a 10, 50, or a hundred million dollar business is, do they sow back into the risk?
- 6:10Do they invest back into the company?
- 6:12So many people are willing to work one year, two years, three years, maybe four years saving, trying to grow the business.
- 6:19And then they get a little momentum and what do they immediately start doing?
- 6:22They start spending it.
- 6:23They start letting off the gas in their business.
- 6:25They never take the seed that was saved and then sow it and multiply it and duplicate it.
- 6:30And this is in the S curve, kind of like save.
- 6:33And then you start the sowing.
- 6:35And all of a sudden the momentum starts to build.
- 6:37This is the part that you put 10 more years in of massive growth.
- 6:42And I'm not saying this is for everyone.
- 6:43I think that the vast majority of people should probably build a business
- 6:47that does about $800,000 to a million dollars in revenue, has six to eight technicians.
- 6:51They can manage it all by themselves.
- 6:53They can take a weekend vacation and everything goes smoothly.
- 6:56Lots of recurring revenue.
- 6:57Most people should do that.
- 6:58But for the crazies out there, the crazies out there that want to grow a bigger business, if that's something you want, don't think you're going to be able to build that in three or four years.
- 7:09If you're starting with 50 grand today, in three or four years, you're not going to have
- 7:14millions and millions of dollars in revenue or millions and millions of dollars of profit.
- 7:17You're not going to.
- 7:18And anyone that tells you that is selling you something.
- 7:21Those 10 years of saving, crucial, important.
- 7:24You need the skills and you need to save that capital to be able to pour back into business.
- 7:28And then during the 10 years of the sewing phase, this is where you have massive expansion, massive amounts of growth, revenue.
- 7:38It seems like all of a sudden talent is coming your way because the size of your business,
- 7:42The momentum is there.
- 7:43Like everything is pushing you towards success.
- 7:46And then, in my opinion, for myself, I look at the third S as spread.
- 7:52That is now I have saved the seed, I have sown the seed, and now I spread the seed.
- 7:57I give it away.
- 7:57It's like at the end of, you know, once the wheat dies, the seed just, it can get blown away.
- 8:03Like it just, the seed gets spread.
- 8:05And I wanna be able to give.
- 8:07I wanna be able to have other people
- 8:09be able to come behind me and do exactly what I've done.
- 8:12I want to be able to give it back to the community or to my family or the people that I love.
- 8:16But a lot of times people I have found try to do all three at the same time.
- 8:20And because of that, they're half pregnant on all three, meaning they try to save money, but at the same time, they kind of try to invest in the business at the same time, they kind of like try to live this lifestyle.
- 8:29At the same time, they kind of like try to give back
- 8:32versus just going all in at this stage of their career where they're currently at.
- 8:37And so oftentimes, businesses will stay under a million dollars because we get distracted with all the other investment opportunities instead of spending on the thing that is actually going to drive the needle and make you the most return, which is going to be your small business.