I was watching that Mike Black YouTube show again and what he does to generate wealth quickly.
In the beginning what he does is flip items that he finds for free on craigslist and then goes on Facebook marketplace and sells them. He even has the person that’s buying the product go pick it up. He’s basically acting like a broker.
When I saw this it made me think about when you have nothing the best place to start is by flipping. Acting as a broker. If you have no skills, no money, nothing, you can sort of get yourself in between and negotiate a deal to get a piece of that.
What’s interesting though is how he keeps escalating it. And it made me think about the concept of flipping because typically when you think of flipping most people think of houses our big ticket items. They don’t think about flipping small ticket items. So for example he started by flipping small items making $50 or he flipped a bicycle and made $150. That was the equivalent of working minimum-wage for two days. Though there was that was risk involved that he wouldn’t get his money back. But even when the odds were against him flipping, it worked. I think that goes to his salesmanship but it shows you that risk the chances of losing our much lower than probably people attribute to it.
As the show progresses he flips more and more and I believe he takes the same sort of concepts to his living situation and his rent situation.
For example, his big move is to get clients to pay and then get a employee or a contractor to do the work for him. Basically it’s a flip again where you are the intermediary and your selling someone else’s services. It is priced one way and then the person is willing to pay more. Basically the concept of arbitrage done over and over again.
The key is that he is working on freeing up his time and getting cash flow which allows him to do it again do it again do it again and grow.
There’s one episode I watched where he basically flipped his rent situation and once he started getting some money coming in he started working at deals where he could move into a five bedroom house and rent out the other room so that it would cover his rent for the master bedroom.
What’s also interesting about flipping is that there is a risk involved but it also completely removes or is separate from time. The focus is on the flip. There is a risk of lost time versus lost money. We lose track of lost time. Lost money is tangible.
So by introducing a little bit of risk. Combined with some basic risk or a flip knowledge like what flips better than other things then he’s able to leverage that to get money that would normally take someone else hours to earn in an hourly arrangement.
Why don’t people do this? I think fear. I think that you have to be highly self-motivated. It’s much easier to just go to work, get the money, go home, watch TV. And that can be said for not just minimum-wage jobs, but jobs that are well paid, highly well paid, and highly skilled. So I think the key is to break that mindset and I think one way to break that mindset is to make some sort of internal promise your goal to yourself that you will never be in that position. Notably, Mike Black does take on hourly work or more grunt work but it’s always temporary in order to just get a cash infusion to keep him afloat. The key is temporary, not 10 years later.
Targeting a specific audience
One thing that he does to make it easier for him to market and sell his target a specific audience.
For example he has this coffee that he’s targeting towards dog lovers but I think it’s very interesting and unusual but it helps him market coffee.
Then he targets the home rental idea to creators like YouTube and social media people so that it’s not just a home with random people it’s a home with like-minded people
Things don’t work out though he pivots pretty quickly.
Contrast to lawyering
The distinction with lawyering is that the mindset is different. In a business mindset your goal is to flip, make money ,free time, create cash flow. The mindset of a lawyer professional craftsman is to get the work and do the work and do a really good job on the on the work.
The problem is that it’s difficult to do the work and get the work and be focused on all those different hats.
If you create steady cash flow with systems and policies and procedures in place so that certain work is not done by you then you can create the space in your life to do whatever you want including be that more craftsman style attorney.
A good example this is Arnold Schwarzenegger. No doubt craftsman level bodybuilder yet he was focused on creating that cash flow that allowed him to spend more time and focus better in the gym versus another bodybuilder who would be working hourly.
How does this apply to me?
This applies to me because I have capital and I’m probably not playing it right. And not only do I have capital and reserve but I have pipeline. Something is blocking me from using that pipeline capital effectively. I think I’m getting better now thanks to the coaching and speaking to friends who know better but the key is to deploy capital. Don’t be afraid to deploy capital if it makes sense on paper. Do the math look at your cash look at your pipeline and then deploy the capital.
You will also get it wrong and that’s OK. In that show there were times when he was worried about just breaking even. So you learn from the mistakes and then Move On. he almost always was OK.
Even though I am hiring an admin assistant and bringing on a part-time paralegal now I think I could be more conscious, more aware, about the deploying capital and delegating.
It’s probably something I should be more aggressive on actually.
Hiring
After deploying capital the next part is hiring (which is kind of the same thing). And this guy Mike Black clearly knows the importance of hiring good people and he also seems like really fires people quickly.
He talks about steps that he uses to ensure that he hires people. I think it’s important because there are different models that I’ve seen people used to hire people. There is the “I know someone that knows you” or nepotism model for hiring people which I think is the worst model.
Then there is the just posting a job with basic information doing a short interview but with no real objective criteria.
Then there’s the more complicated model where you use perhaps a questionnaire in the beginning of review of some criteria like Mike Black likes. He also uses LinkedIn profile. If they don’t have a Linkedin profile he wont consider them. And then giving a test of some kind. This is obviously more work up front but once you do it properly I think that it’ll save you a lot of time in the backend.
What I liked about the questionnaire was also that it included hard questions like what equipment do you use how much money have you managed etc. rather than bullshit questions.
So when you’re deploying capital by hiring people you need to have a good hiring process because you can blow the capital that you deploy on a bad hire.
Wealth creation
Mike Black and this work I’ve been doing on learning business made me think about this concept of wealth creation.
The way I like to think about it is there are two main ways of creating wealth and I think they interchange or work together also. The first is to make someone wealthier, or more wealthy.
This is common. You need to get money from someone wealthier than you, to use some skill set that you have where you can provide exponential or leveraged value to them that they will use to get more wealthy.
Basically allow them to use you in their own arbitrage style operation that’s for whatever reason you can’t take advantage of because of your position.
It is illustrated in the Mike Black show when he’s being paid by somebody to do social media strategy so they’re leveraging his talent and he’s making this wealthier person richer.
The other way is to provide value to people in general. So not necessarily make a rich person richer but to provide value to the general public and get paid for your services in return for that value. That can be anything like cooking burgers to changing tires to providing legal services or medical services.
Usually behind all those operations though is a separate one where you are borrowing money from someone richer in order to make that richer person even more richer.
Policies and Procedures
In order to successfully arbitrage work situations you need good policies and procedures. Standard operating procedure so that everybody’s working on the same page. What’s really amazing about what Mike Black does is how he carves that time for each one of these elements. He’s not overloading one of the other and he does things he doesn’t want to do.
Progression
Another thing that is important is progression. It’s the idea that there’s continuous growth higher risk taking higher cash flow whatever. There’s no stagnation. I thought about it initially with a bodybuilder talking about how each week he would look at where he was and what the goal was for that week and it was always to do one more to do one thing harder to push it one more thing.
In the Mike Black situation he is progressing his flips, basically he’s progressing the types of flips. So he’s in the beginning he’s just flipping small junk items. Then he’s flipping some work that he’s doing hourly, then flipping to retainer work to get cash flow, then flipping his life situation. He’s also flipping his rent situation to improve his living situation.
Basically how can I flip this to make it better to improve it. That seems to be the question he’s always asking himself. and he’s not afraid to lose because he started from the bottom and he’s not afraid to eat beans. He’s not afraid to share a room. He’s not afraid of any of that and once that fear is removed then taking risks aren’t that bad.
How can I apply progression plus risk plus removal of fear in my own life?
I think to constantly evaluate where I am in different aspects. Figure out and have a small goal to improve and some time equivalent. The goal should align with long-term goals.
I should also be taking risks. Not bet the house risks but calculated risks but also don’t be afraid to make big risks hairy risks and leverage what I have. As long as I don’t lose my health or risk physical well-being. Financial well-being can always change.
Remembering that and basically just not caring make it work is the key.
When goal setting – for improvement. Ask your self what are the small incremental goals and how do I incorporate risk.
Minimum standards versus gold standard
There’s this concept I’ve been thinking about the minimum standard versus gold standard particularly in litigation cases. It comes up because there isn’t an effort versus reward situation in contrast to litigation because it’s very easy to put in way more effort then is needed. Compared to the result you obtain. The key is to find the sweet spot of effort.
You probably see this in all industries but you can drive yourself crazy trying to be perfect.
So for example some people are afraid of defending a deposition but I found that doing the deposition and even doing and not so great a job is better than not doing it. Then of course within the deposition there’s varying degrees of your attention, question preparation, or defending a deposition is varying degrees of aggressiveness, including how interrupting you are.
I know that I’ve been in cases that were the other attorney tore up my client but we were able to settle. I don’t know how much it really is a connection between the quality of the work versus the outcome. Obviously its better to have a good case. Case selection is way better. It is easier to win a easy case then to win a hard case. If all you do are hard cases you are making your life miserable. I think almost as important is that milestones are getting hit. Things are happening in a certain way. As long as it’s not terrible if it’s minimum basic level then you’re probably doing OK.
I don’t know how much there really is a connection between the quality of the work versus
This applies to written discovery. I think as long as you get some of the basic written discovery out asking for witnesses and documents the identity of certain people basic contention questions you’re probably OK. You don’t need to be asking 200 questions about everything under the sun. Likewise in a deposition as long as you follow a basic outline learn to learn about their position the basis for their opinions you’re not gonna win this is really win anything that’s great.
Gold standard would be to do more motions to compel . Long meeting confers. Forcing their discovery to be perfect. And spending a lot of time responding to discovery organizing all the documents perfectly. Gold standard in defending a deposition, I think would be to objecting to every possible objectionable question. Possibly using psychological, interrupting to throw the person off. Gold standard for taking a deposition will be not just getting the bases or the facts of the case but also eliciting eliciting policies and procedure violations and foreseeability.