Speaker 1: What's up everybody? It's Ace Chapman. It's been a little while. So if you're somebody who has ever thought of owning a business and realizes that starting from scratch is just way too risky, then guess what? You are in the right place. Over the last 20 years I've bought and sold over a hundred businesses and actually just in this month alone completed four transactions. And hey, the month is not over yet, so who knows? But definitely a busy month so far. A lot of times people ask what industry is that kind of thing. I'm basically industry agnostic. So that means that I do deals in all types of industries from tech companies to manufacturing, to laundromats, to car washes, to the car wash overseas. So all over the place. I was just speaking in Austin and that was one of the things a lot of people were asking. But in addition to buying these deals, I also help clients buy and sell businesses. And recently I've been helping a lot of them leverage what I call my chairman strategy to do basically collaborative acquisitions would be a great way to describe it. So whether you're an investor, whether you're an entrepreneur, or you're somebody who's just curious about what it takes to scale businesses, before we jump in today, I want to take a second, ask you to subscribe. On this channel, I'll break down everything from deal making to private equity, to becoming an investment bank, to building financial freedom through smart acquisitions. So if you're interested in the space, be sure to subscribe. Now, today I want to talk about the chairman strategy. But before we jump in, I want to step back a little bit to where my journey started, because this will give you some context into how to think about this chairman strategy. So basically, as a lot of you know, when I was 19, I bought my first business. It was an online stock market simulator called Cool Wall Street. And this was at the height of the dot-com bubble. I didn't know anything about private equity. I didn't know anything at all about acquisitions, but since I was young, I had this burning desire to figure out how to generate wealth. Now, I bought the business because I had been trying to go up through trading and was really looking for kind of quick wins in the stock market and that kind of thing. And they had a lot of articles and all that on this stock market simulator. So I was using the site that I ended up acquiring because I was using it to learn how to trade the markets. Little did I know that chasing the elusive day trading dream would lead to me getting into acquisitions and to buying businesses, which was something more tangible than trying to be a trader. And so as I got into buying business, I realized, OK, I can buy these things, I can optimize them, grow them and sell them for more than I bought them for. So back then, I didn't have capital. I had to put together a deal structure for the 70,000 that they actually wanted for this business. And, you know, really on that deal, they ended up financing it because I was a broke college kid at 19. I obviously didn't let that stop me, but we were able to put together this deal and I acquired Wall Street and grew it into a really successful business and eventually realized that owning businesses, especially if you could acquire and grow existing ones, is the quickest way to build wealth. Way better than what I was trying to do with my little short trading career at that point. So that was a huge turning point for me. While everyone else was trying to start companies from scratch, everybody else was trying to trade the markets back then. You know, you had to trade markets, which was risky, you had real estate, which just took a long time. It took years to build wealth. I was focused on buying businesses that already had profits that could pay me today. So they had the customers. So that made it way less risky. It had the systems in place, which was really important to me because I wanted to focus on being a deal breaker and not getting into the operations of the business. So while the money was great, the real ROI from that first deal and becoming a deal maker in general is much more than the money. It's all of the lessons that you learn. And, you know, I want to take the time to kind of tell you about that first deal because it was a great business. It gave me some insight into that period of time with the kind of back end of trading and all of that. And in that business, because I worked with a lot of the stock traders, they were basically the clients of the business. And this was a time when the market was going through some wild swings. You had the eventual dotcom bubble bursting, but obviously the bubble growing before that. Many people were chasing the hottest, most recently hyped stock and hoping to cash in big. And I could see that didn't work. So I learned early on that public markets weren't necessarily the surest path to financial freedom and that they can't be volatile if you try to get too aggressive and very unpredictable. So it helped me realize and see the power that I had just luckily stumbled upon 20 years ago by doing deals on private companies. So with this deal, I had control and I could directly impact the success of the business. And that was something that I was like, OK, this is very powerful. So after that first acquisition, I then look back, I continue to buy and sell businesses, each time kind of refining my strategy and learning how to optimize deals. Over these past few years, I've developed this strategy that's really kind of served me. And it's the one that I want to dig into today called Chairman Strategy. So here is how I think about this strategy. It's basically all around taking the role of an investor and dealmaker and combining. So you're not going to be the person that's running the business day to day. You're not going to be involved in the operations. It's about putting yourself in the chairman position as the one who steers the vision. You're kind of making the big decisions and you leave the operations to kind of a solid management team, which a lot of times could be your partners. But to rewind on kind of how I think about this and some of the lessons learned early on, you know, while everyone else was focused on the stock market, and then we had this big real estate boom, I realized that the real wealth isn't built by investing, even in necessarily someone else's idea. You want to put yourself in control. So I wasn't interested in this like slow grind of the stock, public, private markets. I don't want you to be either trying to save up 40 years for a possible payoff. I want you to take action now. And that's kind of been the core of my strategy doing chairman style deals with proper businesses, using other people's money, which when necessary, most of the time it shouldn't be and growing them into bigger, more valuable assets. And I think people are putting just way more money into deals than necessary. You know, even when you're putting in money, it should be small amounts. So let me talk to you about risk. Like many of you, I had the moments where I was drawn to the excitement of startups. Everyone tells you if you're wanting to make it big, you've got to own your own thing. And mostly most people think, you know, to own your own thing, you've got to start it. But the problem is that 90% of startups fail. So they're risky, they're time-consuming, they drain a lot of your time, energy, and money, and you don't get any return. So I realized early on that startups are basically like this punishment for people who don't understand the statistics and numbers, right? Instead of like focusing on even just acquiring regular businesses, it's more about leveraging the wealth building power of those businesses, not just getting in and operating those businesses and definitely not taking on a ton of risks like SBA loans and all of that. So by focusing on that side of leveraging this small private capital market, you know, which is basically kind of businesses doing half a million dollars to a few million in revenue. Back when I first started, I would use bank loans. Nowadays, you know, whether it's investor capital or that kind of thing, it's just not necessary. But there are a lot of these deals that are available because private equity firms are kind of, they overlook this size of deal. Now, when it comes to my prop, my chairman strategy and taking that to another level over time, I realized that I didn't need to own a hundred percent of the business. Sometimes the most profitable deal meant not even owning any equity at all, depending on the structure. And that gets a little complicated for today's video, but I didn't need to run the business. I didn't need to be involved with operations. Each deal was different, but in a lot of the deals, all I needed was to buy a piece of it, use the dealmaker skillset to go out and find complimentary strategic deals that we could use to explode the growth of that first deal and then install a strong management team and act as chairman of the overall deal structure. So I didn't need to be in the weeds. And in fact, it was very against my interest to be in the weeds. So my role was to be the guide, do the deals, set kind of the vision and be strategic about growth. The thing I love most about this approach is it allows you to scale the business and any business that you're involved in way faster. And you can take on multiple businesses at once without spreading yourself too thin. So there's a reason why so many billionaires have basically built their fortune this way. Once you start to build your wealth and then you're putting that money in other places, like the real source of the wealth, if you look across most billionaires, is private companies and it's having equity in those private companies. And then they start to put the money into those other real estate, stock market, all those things. So they focus on kind of this concentration rather than diversification in the early stages of their wealth building. And then they go all in on a few key deals that are working really well to explode them and only start diversifying once they've built significant wealth. Because of my experience with Cool Wall Street, I didn't diversify early. I concentrated my efforts on buying great businesses, growing them and then exiting them. And I didn't even have 90% of the strategies that I have today. It was only later that I started to get into some of these other things that I used the money from those to get into the stock market, use things like our stock market Stealthful Strategy, get into other private equity deals, investing passive multifamily investments and just all kinds of alternative assets. So here's where the opportunity lies for you. Many of the wealthiest individuals, like the ones in the group like Tiger 21, which you should look up, they actually share some valuable information. And this is a group that requires a minimum net worth of $20 million to join. So some of the things that they've shared, they show that over half the wealth of their members is in private businesses. And yet most of the people that are kind of trying to build wealth, they're doing things in the public market, hoping for kind of that 8%, 7% return. And I'm telling you, it's a difficult way to do it and a lot slower way. You can access deals in the private market, whether it's private real estate, like my hotel deal in Medellin or resort deal that we just came to terms on in Nova Scotia, or you can do private equity business deals or you do private credit deals, which actually I love. It may even be my favorite, but you can use those to achieve a return that you'll never see in some of these other things like stock market and average typical real estate deals. This is also really true since in 2013, they did the jobs act and that opened up a ton more opportunities for just regular investors to get into deals that were basically all reserved for like ultra wealthy people at one point. So the key I feel like is to use this strategy to build a wealth stack. So you can do it using this collaborative deal-making strategy instead of what most people are doing, which is really building like a risk stack. So when you buy a business, you grow it, you eventually exit it, you're using that to contribute to your wealth stack. And so each one of your deals adds to your portfolio with this long-term goal of creating layers of security and multiple layers of passive income and growth. And with the Chairman's Strategy, it's the quickest path that I've seen to transition from being that entrepreneur, business owner in the operations to building generational wealth and focus at that kind of a higher level of how business works. So understanding how to do this is a skill set in and of itself. And I've seen the Chairman's Strategy and especially this particular tactic of collaborative deal-making help my clients to leapfrog to their goals just a lot quicker than they ever imagined. So it's one of the reasons I can get so many deals done. Like I said before, I closed four deals this month. It's because the deals I bring to the table, I basically can bring to the table with a lot of my other collaborative collaborators. They know that each deal has gone through extensive due diligence. I've also spent a lot of time in my deal-making career building my team. And so the team is like the network of legal teams, accountants, business experts in different industries. I talk about industry agnostic, all in the effort to make sure that every deal is as solid as possible. So they know I don't bring an opportunity to the table either if I'm not investing in the deal myself. And that's really the goal is like, hey, we can go out and achieve this really great return together. So at the foundation of the collaborative deal-making tactic, it's pretty simple and pretty obvious, I guess, at the end of the day, just most people don't do it. But my mind is together, we can create much more of an impact that we can do alone. We can also achieve it a lot faster. So that's what you want to spend a lot of time doing is to build a small, tight-knit community of deal-makers who understand the strategies that you can take advantage of together and go out and do deals together. And the thing that I've seen is when you pull together that team, a lot of these things have been reserved for the elite, but this can allow you to move a lot, lot faster and do a lot more deals. So this week we have a live intensive that I'm going to be hosting in the Patreon, doing a deep dive on this chairman strategy. So I hope you will click the link below, come hang out with us. Regardless, I want to thank you for your time today. I'm excited to share this journey with you and see some of the incredible things that each of you can achieve with the chairman strategy. Be sure to like, it costs you nothing, means a lot to me when y'all interact and like, say hello, hello, and click the link if you want to join us this week on the chairman strategy call.