Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Giuseppe Grammatico is the founder of GG The Franchise Guide, where he advises corporate professionals, executives in transition, and military veterans on evaluating and entering franchise ownership as a structured path to business ownership and income diversification.

STORY: Giuseppe explains how he reclaimed his marketing voice and shares a practical framework for evaluating franchises: understand the work, investigate beyond the excitement, and prepare for what can go wrong.

LEARNING: A franchise is not a job, and it is not your passion project. Start with the life you want, then evaluate the business model, financial requirements, and risks.

Giuseppe Grammatico is the founder of GG The Franchise Guide, where he advises corporate professionals, executives in transition, and military veterans on how to evaluate and enter franchise ownership as a structured path to business ownership and income diversification.

Giuseppe joins the podcast for the second time. In his first appearance, episode 762, he described outsourcing his content marketing to an agency that quietly buried his own voice. This time round, he discusses what prospective franchise owners should understand before committing their savings, time, and family’s future to a business.

Giuseppe likens a franchise to a high-performance car. The engine, design, and operational systems may be in place; however, the car will not get anywhere without a driver. This analogy challenges the common perception that buying a known model means instant success.

Giuseppe emphasizes that a franchise remains an operating business with systems owners must follow, performance they must manage, and meaningful attention they must give it. If they don't, then the business will struggle.

When advising an individual on what franchise to buy, Giuseppe starts by finding out what the buyer expects from the business. Having a favored brand might keep buyers from seeing obvious mismatches with what they need. They might end up hiring more employees than they expected, working extra days and even outside office hours, and making a bigger investment than their budget allows. All of those are deviations from the intended objectives.

Giuseppe warns against treating a franchise as an occasional side project, with an hour of attention here and there, because it is not a sound ownership strategy.

Giuseppe says that loving an industry is not reason enough to buy a franchise. Loving a fitness studio's workouts, for example, tells you little about whether you want to handle recruitment, staffing, customer retention, and operating performance as a gym owner. Giuseppe notes that prior industry experience is not always required. What matters is understanding the actual ownership role and the support the franchise provides.

Giuseppe describes how buyers can gradually abandon their requirements once they become attached to a brand. A person who wanted a small team suddenly accepts a large staff. Someone who wanted predictable hours agrees to weekends. The opportunity begins to dictate the goals instead of serving them. All this comes from the excitement of becoming a franchise owner.

He insists on spending enough time doing due diligence so that you can thoroughly vet the

franchise before you commit. This ensures you make decisions from knowledge, not emotion.

Giuseppe asks potential owners to slow down, speak with several franchisees, document special arrangements, and have a franchise attorney review the relevant documents.

From Giuseppe's experience, one can learn that passion does not automatically translate into a good franchise choice. Because he was passionate about soccer in his younger days, he considered investing in a soccer-related franchise. However, the franchise operated on a retail model, which was quite different from playing or watching the sport he loved.

His advice is to choose the business that supports the life you want. Figure out what the ideal business looks like from the standpoint of your skill sets.

• What are you doing day to day?
• How much staff do you truly want to manage?
• Do you want a huge brick-and-mortar, or do you want to run your business from home or maybe a small office?

In short, a business doesn't need to be your passion if it reliably funds the life you actually want.

A business that looks attractive under ideal conditions may become difficult to sustain when opening takes longer, costs rise, or revenue develops slowly. Giuseppe encourages buyers to examine those possibilities before committing. He adds that you have to have the end in mind. This could include setting aside three to six months of business expenses as a buffer instead of spending everything to open the business and then depending on immediate positive cash flow.

Giuseppe talked about a risk that rarely comes up in franchise sales conversations: what happens to the business if the owner is suddenly unable to run it. According to Giuseppe, a real succession plan has two separate parts: who takes over day-to-day operations (which might be a key employee rather than a spouse, if the spouse was never involved in the business) and how ownership of the underlying assets transfers.

He warns against assuming a spouse or an employee will take over. You may have gotten divorced in the process, or that key employee may have left. Update these details annually in your succession plan to make sure you don't miss major changes.

• Try the work before you buy to ensure that what you're doing fits.
• When you really want something, you're in danger because you've got an emotional attachment. You're excited, and you've got to dig deeper before committing.
• For your franchise to be truly successful, you must have acquired a solid cash flow.
• Plan for what can go wrong.

Giuseppe recommends his resources at GG, including the Franchise Guide, his Franchise Freedom book, his podcast, and a 20-minute "right fit" call.

Giuseppe's number one goal for the next 12 months is to continue helping approximately 25 families per year, giving each the time and attention needed to evaluate whether franchise ownership fits their circumstances.

• Linkedin
• X
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Website
• Book
• Podcast

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class

Theory fades fast under pressure; if you evaluate your next deal without a physical tool in front of you, old emotional habits will instantly take over.

In this lesson, twice-voted #1 financial analyst Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA, puts you directly inside a real-world, high-stakes real estate flip gone wrong to test how the 5-step framework protects you in real time.

Reducing risk isn't about finding a magic trick to be right 100% of the time—it's about bridging the gap between passive listening and active, disciplined deal execution using a permanent checklist.

Why You Need to Listen to This Lesson NOW

• The Real Estate Flip Disaster: Walk through a true story where a lack of independent checks, hidden balloon payments, and misplaced trust turned a simple project into an 8-year financial drain.
• Test Your Decision-Making: Practice applying all five steps to a live deal scenario before hearing what went wrong, training your mind to spot hidden traps.
• From Theory to Execution: Learn why knowing the rules is useless unless you actively run them through a structured process before money moves.
• Arm Your Future: Complete the course by anchoring your strategy into a permanent, 1-page physical tool designed to make your next investment your smartest one yet.

Key Takeaway

"The process you have learned is only useful if you actually use it before the money moves."

— Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA

Episode Mentioned:

• Ep593: John Lawson – Turn Your Pain Into Motivation to Make a Change

P.S. Download Your Free 1-Page Risk Checklist

Don't evaluate your next deal on memory alone. Click the link below to download the 1-Page Risk Checklist. Print it out, keep it on your desk, and run all 5 steps before putting any money on the line!

[DOWNLOAD THE 1-PAGE RISK CHECKLIST HERE]

Knowing the rules doesn't stop you from breaking them when internal psychological pressures hijack your judgment.

In this lesson, twice-voted #1 financial analyst Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA, reveals how brilliant economic experts and entrepreneurs ignored glaring red flags because of friendship urgency, ego, or recent financial success.

Reducing risk isn't about finding a magic trick to be right 100% of the time—it's about recognizing the psychological danger states that cause you to abandon your own standards.

Why You Need to Listen to This Lesson NOW

• The Three Dangerous States: Uncover the exact moments smart people compromise: when a trusted friend is involved, when they are already losing and want to prove they're right, or when they've just come into sudden money.
• The Danger of Urgent Deadlines: Learn why artificial deadlines and tearful pleas from trusted friends make a situation more dangerous, not safer.
• The "Get Back to Even" Trap: Discover how chasing losses and letting your thesis migrate causes you to pour good money after bad into failing deals.
• The Overconfidence of Success: See how a 50% winning streak or a sudden business exit can trick you into thinking your rules no longer apply.

Key Takeaway

"Enjoy your success and honor your relationships, but notice when they are loosening your risk standards and pushing you to make emotional exceptions."

— Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA

Episodes Mentioned:

• Ep618: Mike Michalowicz – Stay In Your Lane
• Ep624: Litan Yahav – The Risk of Investing in Single-Family Rental Properties
• Ep628: Shayne Heffernan – Stop Lending Your Money to Friends
• Ep647: Raghav Kapoor – Be on High Alert When You’re Doing Well
• Ep674: Jesse Felder – Don’t Rationalize a Lousy Trade
• Ep794: Michael Episcope – Investing Is About How You Behave and Not What You Know

P.S. Download Your Free 1-Page Risk Checklist

Don't evaluate your next deal on memory alone. Click the link below to download the 1-Page Risk Checklist. Print it out, keep it on your desk, and run all 5 steps before putting any money on the line!

[DOWNLOAD THE 1-PAGE RISK CHECKLIST HERE]

Trusting someone who handles your money is not a control mechanism; when a relationship breaks down, your protections must still hold up.

In this lesson, twice-voted #1 financial analyst Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA, reveals how a successful speaker and author trusted her accountant for years, only to discover blank signed checks led to massive forgery and a total account wipeout.

Reducing risk isn't about finding a magic trick to be right 100% of the time—it's about ensuring you have independent visibility and a practical way to stop problems before your capital disappears.

Why You Need to Listen to This Lesson NOW

• The Blank Check Disaster: Hear the shocking story of an international speaker who lost her entire liquid net worth because she trusted an accountant and signed blank checks.
• Beware of Fake Digital Proof: Learn why screenshots, WhatsApp updates, and dashboards sent directly by operators can be entirely fabricated.
• The Two Vital Control Questions: Discover how to evaluate whether you can see what is happening without asking the person managing it, and whether you can stop it if things go wrong.
• Guarding Against Sophisticated Fraud: See how even experienced corporate boards get fooled by fabricated numbers, and why independent external confirmation is critical.

Key Takeaway

"Make sure your money is in an account or structure you control, or ensure you have independent confirmation completely outside the system you are monitoring."

— Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA

Episodes Mentioned:

• Ep257: Justin Christianson – Listen to Your Intuition and Take It Slow to Enter a Partnership
• Ep271: Oluwatosin Olaseinde – Africa’s Financial Literacy Queen Says Be Careful Who You Trust
• Ep261: Tony Fish – CEOs Can Defraud a Business in Very Hard to Detect Ways
• Ep558: Priya Kumar – Don’t Trust Somebody With Your Money Blindly

P.S. Download Your Free 1-Page Risk Checklist

Don't evaluate your next deal on memory alone. Click the link below to download the 1-Page Risk Checklist. Print it out, keep it on your desk, and run all 5 steps before putting any money on the line!

[DOWNLOAD THE 1-PAGE RISK CHECKLIST HERE]

You can buy an asset in ten minutes, but spend years trying to sell it—or discover there is literally no one on the other side to buy.

In this lesson, twice-voted #1 financial analyst Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA, reveals how a seasoned banker bought luxury overseas property based on hype, only to realize years later that the units were entirely vacant with zero market demand.

Reducing risk isn't about finding a magic trick to be right 100% of the time—it's about verifying your liquidity and exit route before you ever hand over your cash.

Why You Need to Listen to This Lesson NOW

• The Vacant Overseas Condo Trap: Hear the story of a banking managing director who bought large overseas properties that sat completely vacant for years with no buyers in sight.
• Choice vs. Trap: Learn the critical distinction between saying "I could sell, but choose not to" versus "I want to sell, but I cannot".
• The Danger of Multi-Year Lockups: Explore how institutional lockup periods and large ownership stakes can trap your capital when you need it most.
• The Three Exit Questions: Master the exact questions you must answer about your buyers, timeline, and liquidation costs before investing.

Key Takeaway

"Never assume that because someone made it easy for you to put your money in, they will make it easy for you to get your money back."

— Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA

Episodes Mentioned:

• Ep16: Frank Moffatt – Stock Tips Can Work Until They Don’t
• Ep63: Thao Quynh – Don’t Be Afraid to Take Some Gains Off the Table
• Ep245: Mark Moss – Diversify Your Profits to Protect Your Wealth
• Ep583: Eric Sim – Find a Buyer First Before You Buy Property
• Ep627: Brian Portnoy – Financial Wellbeing Is Your Gateway to a Meaningful Life
• Ep735: Swen Lorenz – Carefully Consider Liquidity in Your Portfolio

P.S. Download Your Free 1-Page Risk Checklist

Don't evaluate your next deal on memory alone. Click the link below to download the 1-Page Risk Checklist. Print it out, keep it on your desk, and run all 5 steps before putting any money on the line!

[DOWNLOAD THE 1-PAGE RISK CHECKLIST HERE]

If losing a single investment forces you to change your lifestyle, delay retirement, or lose sleep, you have taken on a dangerous kind of risk.

In this lesson, twice-voted #1 financial analyst Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA, breaks down how an expert investment banker watched 70% of his net worth vanish into a failing major bank because he kept buying more as it fell.

Reducing risk isn't about finding a magic trick to be right 100% of the time—it's about calculating your total exposure so that a 100% total loss never threatens your personal solvency.

Why You Need to Listen to This Lesson NOW

• The 70% Net Worth Wipeout: Hear the staggering true story of an experienced financial professional who poured millions into Washington Mutual and walked around in a daze after it hit zero.
• Calculate Total Exposure: Understand why true risk includes hidden debt, personal guarantees, margin requirements, and emergency capital calls—not just your initial check.
• The Danger of Mental Accounting: Discover how separate trading accounts and options leverage can quietly create obligations much larger than your cash balance.
• Protect Your Sleep: Learn why physical and mental stress indicate that an investment position is simply too large for your financial life.

Key Takeaway

"You cannot control whether every investment succeeds, but you can absolutely control how much one investment is allowed to hurt your life."

— Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA

Episodes Mentioned:

• Ep602: Andrew L. Howell – Don’t Invest in a Business With Family
• Ep610: Conor Riley – Don’t Throw Good Money After Bad Money
• Ep662: Edward McQuarrie – Never Ever Sell Naked Calls
• Ep579: Tony Pawlak – Stop Trying to Get Rich Overnight
• Ep698: Shawn O’Malley – Geopolitics Can Take Your Investment to Zero

P.S. Download Your Free 1-Page Risk Checklist

Don't evaluate your next deal on memory alone. Click the link below to download the 1-Page Risk Checklist. Print it out, keep it on your desk, and run all 5 steps before putting any money on the line!

[DOWNLOAD THE 1-PAGE RISK CHECKLIST HERE]

The moment you get excited about an investment, your brain stops asking if it's a good idea and starts actively collecting reasons why it is.

In this lesson, twice-voted #1 financial analyst Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA, reveals why even seasoned economists and smart professionals fall victim to convincing bull cases while completely ignoring looming dangers.

Reducing risk isn't about finding a magic trick to be right 100% of the time—it's about separating your return case from an independent downside risk evaluation so that excitement doesn't cloud your judgment.

Why You Need to Listen to This Lesson NOW

• The Iraqi Market Trap: Discover how a serious economist with IMF and international banking experience lost half his money in Iraq because he focused entirely on the upside bull case.
• The "Grumpy Person" Strategy: Learn how major institutions like DBS assign someone to deliberately tear down proposals, and how you can apply this exact technique to your own deals.
• Stop Relying on Biased Sources: Learn why trusting seller-provided reports, unverified lawyer summaries, or friendly endorsements without independent verification is a massive red flag.
• Separate Your Work: Master the two-part process of building the return case first, stepping away, and returning with a completely different mindset to find reasons to walk away.

Key Takeaway

"Build the case for why an investment could work, then step away, come back with a different mindset, and actively search for the reasons you should walk away."

— Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA

Episodes Mentioned:

• Ep595: Taimur Baig – Don’t Let the Upsides Distract You From the Downsides
• Ep12: Stuart Leckie – The Cost of Friendship: How Your Friends Impact Your Investment Decision
• Ep585: Ted Leverette – Buy Businesses That Have Fixable Problems
• Ep661: Michelle Leder – Read the 10-K Before You Buy That Stock
• Ep736: William Bernstein – Never Invest Based on the Headlines

P.S. Download Your Free 1-Page Risk Checklist

Don't evaluate your next deal on memory alone. Click the link below to download the 1-Page Risk Checklist. Print it out, keep it on your desk, and run all 5 steps before putting any money on the line!

[DOWNLOAD THE 1-PAGE RISK CHECKLIST HERE]

You can work hard, do serious research, invest in a "great" deal, and still lose everything.

In this opening lesson, twice-voted #1 financial analyst Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA, reveals the hard lesson learned from interviewing 600+ investors about their worst financial mistakes: Intelligence alone will not protect your wealth.

Reducing risk isn't about finding a magic trick to be right 100% of the time—it's about systematically avoiding preventable mistakes so that a single bad decision never alters your lifestyle or wrecks your financial future.

Why You Need to Listen to This Lesson NOW

• Hear the staggering true story of a 30-year veteran investor who did extensive research on a leading stock, watched it double from $80 to $160, and ultimately sold it for less than $1.
• Learn why standard research and high IQ can still leave you completely blind to catastrophic downside risks.
• See how analyzing 600 painful, real-life investment disasters across stocks, real estate, crypto, and private deals led to a proven 5-step risk-reduction engine.
• Shift your mindset from chasing returns to systematically eliminating the hidden traps that trap your money and hand control over to someone else.

Key Takeaway

"The goal is not to become someone who never makes mistakes. The goal is to make fewer mistakes that you could have avoided—and make sure one mistake does not change your life."

— Andrew Stotz, PhD, CFA

Episodes Mentioned:

• Ep597: Lance Depew – You’re Going to Lose Despite Your Best Efforts

P.S. Download Your Free 1-Page Risk Checklist

Don't evaluate your next deal on memory alone. Click the link below to download the 1-Page Risk Checklist. Print it out, keep it on your desk, and run all 5 steps before putting any money on the line!

[DOWNLOAD THE 1-PAGE RISK CHECKLIST HERE]

BIO: As an author, consultant, and international speaker, David C. Barnett has helped thousands of entrepreneurs avoid bad deals and close successful ones.

STORY: Seven years after his first appearance discussing tax-related business losses, David returns for his third visit to unpack the biggest myth in small business acquisitions: that a wave of retiring baby boomers is about to flood the market with cheap businesses for sale. The real numbers tell a very different story, and most of what actually kills a deal has nothing to do with supply and demand.

LEARNING: Value is never a fixed number; it depends entirely on who is asking and why.

As an author, consultant, and international speaker, David C. Barnett has helped thousands of entrepreneurs avoid bad deals and achieve successful business deals. His YouTube channel and podcast reach a global audience of small business buyers and sellers.

David joins the podcast for a third time to discuss his newly released book, Business and Asset Values, and the realities of buying and selling small and mid-sized businesses today.

There is a lot of buzz right now about a coming wave of business sales, driven by baby boomer owners hitting retirement age. David has heard the pitch many times, and he does not buy it. The theory goes that this surplus of retiring owners will flood the market and drive prices down. But supply and demand only work that way if the pool of buyers stays fixed, and in small business, it does not.

David uses his own 17-foot aluminum canoe to make the point: he already owns one, so no price will convince him to buy a second. Most consumer goods work that way. Small business acquisitions do not.

Successful buyers that already own profitable businesses have no limit to how many other new businesses they can also acquire. And so the competitive forces at play when a good private business comes up for sale are just as vigorous as they always have been. The businesses that struggle to sell were always going to struggle, tsunami or not. BizBuySell, one of the largest business-for-sale marketplaces, reports that roughly 70% of listed businesses never sell.

According to David, most listed businesses never sell due to dead capital. These businesses have equipment or assets that cost money but do not generate a return, which makes the business harder to finance and harder to sell. If a buyer would have to borrow money to pay fair value for those assets, and the resulting cash flow doesn't cover the debt service, the deal simply doesn't work, no matter how much the owner believes their business is worth.

David adds that public companies are often valued on their future because investors are buying an experienced leadership team along with a plan. Small businesses, on the other hand, are valued almost entirely on their past, because when the owner leaves, most of the knowledge and relationships that made the business work leave with them. Buyers want to see the history proven out, not projected forward, which is one reason small businesses trade at much lower multiples of cash flow than anything publicly traded.

Another factor that affects a business sale, David says, is seller's discretionary earnings (SDE), which is EBITDA plus the owner's salary. A healthy SDE margin usually falls between 10% and 20%. Above 40% is a red flag worth investigating, and below 5% requires looking for what is off, whether that is pricing, high costs, or high gross margins. Often what turns up is unrecorded sales or personal expenses run through the business to lower its tax bill. That kind of underreporting can make an otherwise sellable business unbankable, since no lender will finance a deal built on numbers the owner cannot legally document.

Financing also shapes a business's price. A business worth $800,000 with only $400,000 in tangible assets might get a loan for $300,000 in Canada or Europe, leaving the buyer to bridge the rest with their own equity and seller financing, often 30% to 40% of the deal. Easier access to credit pushes prices up. The same business in Ontario, Canada, and across the water in upstate New York will typically sell for around 25% more on the American side, simply because more buyers there can access the financing to pay for it.

David's advice for anyone in a conversation about "small business" is to stop and ask for a definition. The Harvard Business Review Guide to Buying a Small Business describes a small business as one with $10 million in revenue, a number that would strike most of David's own clients as anything but small.

He prefers to define businesses by EBITDA rather than revenue. He notes that, mostly, main street businesses run under $500,000 in EBITDA, and the lower middle market stretches up toward $1 to $1.25 million. Revenue alone can be misleading, since a business with high cost of goods sold could post $30 million in revenue while the owner takes home only a couple hundred thousand dollars with a dozen employees, a small, family-run operation in every practical sense.

David drew a distinction between two very different relationships people have with their businesses. Many main street business owners started out simply needing an income, built the business to the point where it supported their lifestyle, and then settled in, sometimes for 15 or 20 years, focused on sustaining what they built rather than growing it further.

An entrepreneur, by David's definition, never really stops adjusting the business, always trying to make it better, faster, leaner, and more profitable. A business that is not growing can still be a perfectly good source of income, but it is playing a different game entirely from one built to keep compounding in value.

David says reading his book Business and Asset Values: How Owners, Buyers, Sellers, Lenders, and Advisors Should Think About Small Business and Equipment Values will help business owners avoid bad value conversations. This is something that David has consistently seen throughout his career, where people will have different advisors give opinions on value, and they'll start arguing about the numbers when, in reality, they need to understand what someone's going to do with the asset. The book will help you think about your purpose, why you want something, what you're willing to do, and how far you're willing to go for it.

David's number one goal for the next 12 months is to get his second child through high school and out of the house, after his daughter left for university. Then he can start doing the things he loves without guilt.

• LinkedIn
• X
• Instagram
• Blog
• Website
• YouTube
• Podcast

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9...

BIO: Pierre Rogers is a founder and author based in Irvine, California. After his first company collapsed, resulting in federal prison and $1.6M in personal debt, he rebuilt from less than zero—launching a new company.

STORY: Pierre hired his best friend as CFO, ignored repeated warnings from his own team, and watched that one decision spiral into a PPP fraud scandal, a federal indictment, and 18 months behind bars.

LEARNING: What you tolerate in the people you lead says more about your judgment than anything you say or do yourself.

Pierre Rogers is a founder and author based in Irvine, California. After his first company's collapse ended in federal prison and $1.6M of personal debt, he rebuilt from less than zero—launching a new company and writing Built by Failures, where he publishes weekly, unedited chapters of his own recovery alongside case studies of famous comebacks like Robert Downey Jr., Martha Stewart, and Tina Turner.

Pierre's worst investment wasn't a stock or a property; it was trusting his best friend as CFO. He founded Yahyn, a software startup designed to let small and mid-sized vineyards sell directly to consumers across the US, a niche complicated by strict alcohol distribution regulations. Pierre invested his capital and reputation into the company. Then he made the biggest mistake of his life; he hired his best friend as CFO, believing that they shared the same values and goals.

They didn't. The CFO routinely showed up late, missed meetings unprepared, used substances during work hours, and went unresponsive for days at a time. Pierre's team members approached him individually to flag the pattern, at real risk to themselves, since criticizing the founder's best friend could easily have cost them their jobs. Pierre dismissed the warnings because personal loyalty clouded his judgment.

This behavior escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when his friend overstated the number of employees to receive money from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). His CFO's fraudulent activity led to a federal investigation, the failure of his business, and Pierre's indictment. That fraud triggered a federal investigation, the company's collapse, and Pierre's own indictment. He takes full ownership: he hired the person, tolerated the behavior, and failed to supervise closely enough to catch it before it became a criminal case that sent him to federal prison for 18 months.

• What you tolerate in the people around you, especially in a leadership role, says more about your own judgment than anything you say.
• A bad hire in a leadership role can cost your company, your reputation, and more.
• If you reinforce negative cognitive biases, you'll see negative things in the world. Try to practice positive self-talk often.
• Make an active choice to focus on the positive things that matter to you, and the things that you can control. Say no to self-pity.
• Structure and daily habits—a five-minute nightly log tracking diet, exercise, and a simple self-score—can rebuild discipline and mental clarity even in the worst circumstances.

• Before you sign important things, slow down because once you put your name on it, it's done.
• When hiring people, try to find people whose values align with yours because misjudging a person's values, not just their skill, can cost you more than money.

Develop a simple daily habit of tracking your own signals-mood, focus, energy-to uncover patterns that influence your judgment and decisions over time. He says that the same structure works just as well for evaluating a business or a hire: track the small signals daily. Patterns that are invisible day to day become obvious in hindsight.

If you're bringing a friend or family member into a leadership role in your business, agree in advance on how you'll raise and handle performance issues, so the relationship doesn't override professional judgment later.

Pierre recommends his own project, Built By Failures, where he publishes weekly, unfiltered chapters of his recovery.

Pierre's number one goal for the next 12 months is to build a stronger, better-equipped sales team for his new company, so it can scale its reach into more enterprise accounts.

• Blog

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Tony Martignetti is the author of the upcoming book, Planned Giving Accelerated. He's been helping small- and mid-size US nonprofits launch Planned Giving fundraising programs since 1997. Tony is a lawyer, but he doesn't write or talk like one. He weaves in his background in stand-up comedy and improv to make Planned Giving easy, accessible, and affordable.

STORY: Tony returns with a different kind of investment story: how he spent eight months writing Planned Giving Accelerated, a book designed to help small and mid-sized nonprofits launch a legacy giving program in as little as one week.

LEARNING: The best fundraising asset most small nonprofits already have is their most loyal, longest-tenured donors, and putting it to work costs nothing but a conversation.

Tony Martignetti is the author of the upcoming book, Planned Giving Accelerated. He's been helping small- and mid-size US nonprofits launch Planned Giving fundraising programs since 1997. Tony is a lawyer, but he doesn't write or talk like one. He weaves in his background in stand-up comedy and improv to make Planned Giving easy, accessible, and affordable.

Tony joins the podcast for the second time. In his first appearance, Ep820: A Flattering Binder and $13,500 Down the Drain, he shared how a $13,500 bet on a flashy Manhattan PR agency taught him to check his ego. This time he returns with the opposite kind of story: a low-cost, three-step system that has helped nonprofits raise nine figures without spending a dollar on PR.

Planned giving fundraising is the practice of securing long-term gifts made through a donor's estate or retirement plan, rather than a check written today. Tony's new book focuses specifically on the simplest and most common form: a bequest, meaning a gift left through a nonprofit inside a supporter's will.

For a nonprofit, these gifts function like seeds planted years or even decades before they mature. Since most bequest donors are in their 60s or 70s when they name a charity in their will, the gift itself may not arrive for another 20 to 30 years. That time horizon is exactly why Tony sees planned giving as the foundation of real organizational sustainability—feeding an endowment a nonprofit can grow indefinitely, rather than a one-time cash infusion that gets spent immediately.

Tony points out that most nonprofits miss donor opportunities because they don't ask. They already have everything they need to start a legacy giving program and simply never ask. Tony's three-step framework, which he calls the Martignetti Three-Step, One-Week Planned Giving Launch, laid out in the first three chapters of his book, is designed to get an organization from zero to a live planned giving program within a week:

• Step one: Identify your top prospects by analyzing donors who have shown consistent giving over at least 10 years, regardless of gift size, to ensure targeted outreach.
• Step two: Start with the simplest planned gift there is, a bequest written into a will, rather than a more complex vehicle.
• Step three: Cultivate and solicit those prospects directly by initiating a personalized, values-based conversation about legacy, making the donor comfortable and engaged.

Tony's point is that a nonprofit does not need a press release, a webpage, or a campaign to say it has launched planned giving. It needs one honest, genuine conversation with the right donor. Have that conversation, and the program is live.

Furthermore, he explains, the size of the gift matters less than its consistency. When a donor has given $5 each year for 20 years, it shows a strong emotional connection to the cause and makes them a better prospect for planned giving than a single large donation made one year ago.

A common excuse Tony often receives is that conversations about planned giving make people feel uncomfortable or even morbid, because bequests are paid out only after a donor dies. However, according to Tony, this is not a conversation about death but about leaving a long-term impact that a donor has already been experiencing.

Planned giving, Tony believes, is different from immediate, urgent appeals based on scarce funds and the need to pay employees' salaries soon. When the conversation starts by mentioning how important it is to keep the nonprofit from running out of money, that is an unsustainable way to fundraise. A nonprofit with enough stability to plan decades in advance is better placed to have a successful planned giving conversation.

Tony cites research from Russell James, a professor at Texas Tech University who has spent decades studying the psychology and economics of bequest giving using quantitative methods rather than anecdotes. One striking finding Tony references is that, on average, about 75% of people who add a nonprofit to their will increase their annual giving to that same organization afterward.

This seems to be an emotional factor, not a financial one at all. Once a donor decides to include a cause in their will alongside family members such as spouses, kids, or grandchildren, they feel an even stronger bond with that cause, and that bond shows up in daily donations as well. This finding clearly counters the fears many fundraisers have about planned giving and the idea that donors might consider their bequest their final donation and give nothing else annually.

First, create your own donor database and filter for longevity rather than monetary contribution, because donors who have been contributing for 15 to 20 years can qualify for planned giving.

When you approach that donor, frame the conversation around the future and sustainability of the work they already support, rather than your organization's current financial needs.

If you're a nonprofit under five years old or without individual donors yet, focus first on building that base.

Tony's number one goal for the next 12 months is to get Planned Giving Accelerated into the hands of 2,000 small and mid-sized nonprofits within a year of launch, with the hope that even half of them implement the three-step framework and successfully launch a planned giving program.

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Podcast

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points

BIO: Dustin Heiner is a real estate investor who quit his job at 37 with financial freedom and passive income from his real estate investing. Through his coaching, podcast, and YouTube channel, he has helped thousands of people invest in real estate.

STORY: In late 2019, Dustin was one signature away from leasing a gym that had nothing to do with real estate, then COVID-19 shut every gym in America and closed the deal for him instead. That near miss led him to a strategy that now runs quietly underneath everything he does: reselling his sawdust.

LEARNING: You do not need a new business to build a new income stream. Look first at what your current one is already producing, and throwing away.

Dustin Heiner is a real estate investor who quit his job at 37 with financial freedom and passive income from his real estate investing. Through his coaching, podcast, and YouTube channel, he has helped thousands of people invest in real estate.

He is also the founder of the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference, where he brings thousands of real estate investors together to connect and grow their investing businesses.

Dustin joins the podcast for the second time to unpack a business mistake he almost made in 2019, and the powerful lesson it taught him about turning overlooked assets into new revenue streams.

He first appeared on episode 144: His Life Went From Loss to Success When He Mastered Passive Income.

When Dustin last appeared on the show, real estate had just freed him from his day job. Years later, the numbers have grown considerably. He now owns more than 30 single-family rental homes and is assembling a further portfolio of nine to twelve properties. Some individual properties bring in around $3,000 a month in passive cash flow.

But Dustin focuses not on the money he makes, but on the mindset behind his investing approach. He does not own a portfolio of properties and hope the market carries them higher, the way you might watch a stock. He runs a business built on real estate, and every property in it earns its place as inventory, not a bet on appreciation.

Dustin's core business has always been real estate. But in 2019, while his rental portfolio was thriving, he took his eye off the ball and chased a passion project: opening a gym. Dustin spent months trying to buy a property to set up the gym, but he couldn't find one worth the price, so he decided to lease space instead.

This business model was completely outside his real estate expertise. He was about to sign the lease when COVID-19 hit, and gyms across the US were declared non-essential and shut down.

If Dustin had signed the lease, he would have been obligated to pay rent for a closed-down business with no income. This would be his worst deal, even though he didn't make it in reality. What Dustin really lost was the time and attention he should have put into investments already making him money.

The lesson Dustin took from this experience is a concept he calls reselling your sawdust, a more practical way to earn passive income. To explain this concept, he describes a sawmill. Its main product is lumber, but it also produces sawdust, a byproduct that usually costs money to burn or haul away.

Instead of treating that sawdust as waste, some sawmills package and sell it as bedding for gerbil cages, compressed fire-starting logs, or filler in other products. The "waste" becomes a second profit center with almost no extra effort, because it was already being produced.

Dustin argues the same opportunity exists inside almost every business. His sawmill is real estate. Everything else—his knowledge, audience, systems, and industry relationships—is sawdust. Instead of chasing an unrelated venture like a gym, he found more value repackaging what his core business was already generating for free.

Dustin's business now includes several ventures that all trace back to the same real estate sawmill:

1. Education: The Master Passive Income podcast and YouTube channel, which grew out of simply teaching people what he already knew about running rental properties like a business.
2. Community: The Inner Circle, an in-person mastermind hosted in Nashville, plus an annual Mastermind in Paradise cruise to the Bahamas that doubles as a tax-deductible retreat.
3. Software: From his internal systems and processes, Dustin built Income Builder, which systematizes the exact process he uses to vet, buy, and manage his own properties, so his coaching clients don't have to guess.
4. Sponsorship revenue: Dustin now has more than 2.3 million podcast downloads and roughly 500,000 followers across social media, including about 300,000 on Instagram alone. This is an audience sponsors pay to reach.
5. Done-for-you investing: The Portfolio Builder Program, a $100,000 white-glove service for people who have money but not time, that delivers 20 cash-flowing properties in 12 months.

Each of these started as a side effect of running his real estate business, not as a planned product line. That's the point: sawdust is rarely obvious until you go looking for it.

Dustin draws a sharp line between investing and speculating. Buying a stock and hoping the price rises is a bet on value appreciation you don't control. In his opinion, buying a rental property, unlike a stock, is like starting a business with recurring monthly revenue, real expenses, and inventory (the properties themselves).

Dustin says he doesn't invest in real estate for appreciation but for monthly cash flow. This means treating each property like inventory that has to earn its place in the business regardless of what happens to its resale value.

Dustin works with several experts (property managers, contractors, and leasing agents) who help him buy property. Before he buys a property, he gets these experts to sign off first. He calls his property manager and describes what he is considering before he owns it, not after. If the manager says the numbers will not work, he walks away and loses nothing but a little time. Buy first and ask questions later, and a bad answer turns an asset into a liability that is already yours.

This upfront vetting is also what lets him spend roughly 30 minutes a month managing more than 30 properties and interests in nearly 1,000 apartment units. Rather than aiming to minimize hours worked, Dustin's goal is to build systems thorough enough that the business runs itself, making the income truly passive.

If you're wondering how to find your sawdust, Dustin's challenge to you is simple: identify what your business (or even your job or hobby) is already producing that you're not capturing. He suggests starting with a basic question: what do you do in your free time, for fun or for work, that other people would pay for or want help with?

For example, if you are a content strategist, consultant, or organizer, the research you compiled for one client, the frameworks you developed for one campaign, or the community you built for one cause could become a standalone product, course, or service if you package it well.

• A strength isn't a competitive advantage until you convert it into cash flow.
• Reselling your sawdust will more likely earn you more than starting something new.

• Audit your own sawdust. List the skills, systems, content, data, or relationships your current work already produces, then ask who would pay for access to them.

Dustin's number one goal for the next 12 months is to scale Income Builder.io, the software that systematizes his real estate coaching, from roughly 100 users to 5,000.

Founder values must be translated into systems: His grandfather's attention to every patient had to become a measurable standard the rest of the hospital could follow.

What clinics can't afford, Wattanapat built: Small clinics can't afford the specialists or the equipment for serious cases. Wattanapat built that capability instead, adding specialists like neurosurgeons and cardiologists.

Local healthcare providers can be partners rather than competitors: Community clinics handle the basic cases and send Wattanapat the ones that need emergency, inpatient, or specialist care. It's not competition; help flows both ways.

Growth requires selective investment: The hospital doesn't try to offer every procedure; it invests where there's real patient need and refers rare cases elsewhere. Even the offices are bare; every baht goes to equipment instead.

People are the real growth constraint: Keeping the right people is what limits growth. On Samui, specialists come from elsewhere and tend to leave. On the mainland, the problem is finding department heads who are managers, not just clinicians.

Subscribe to our free Substack: https://uncoveredthaistocks.com/

LEADER DNA

Chane Laosonthorn had not planned to work in healthcare. He studied management, marketing and accounting in Australia before building experience in finance and human resources. Chane was preparing to accept a promotion in Perth when his grandmother told him that the family hospital was struggling. His grandfather, the hospital's founder, had suffered a health setback, and the family faced a choice between selling, running, or diversifying the business

Chane chose to return to Thailand with no clinical background and limited knowledge of hospital operations. The decision was personal before it was strategic: protecting his grandfather's legacy and testing himself against a genuinely hard problem.

Chane's outsider perspective became an advantage. Rather than approaching the hospital solely as a medical institution, Chane examined its systems, people, finances, and organizational structure. He preserved the founder's commitment to patient satisfaction and quality care while replacing dependence on individual personalities with measurable standards, specialist capacity, and professional management.

His leadership philosophy is to calculate the risks carefully, decide whether the opportunity is worth pursuing, and, once the decision is made, commit to delivering it.

What Chane shared

Founder values must be translated into systems

Values cannot depend entirely on the personality of a founder. Wattanapat translated Dr Wittaya's attention to patients into operating procedures, performance indicators and measurable service standards.

Clinical depth creates a stronger business model

The hospital expanded its specialist and sub-specialist capabilities while investing in biomedical equipment that smaller clinics could not economically provide. This allowed Wattanapat to handle more complex cases and build a strong referral network.

Local healthcare providers can be partners rather than competitors

Community clinics treat basic conditions and refer patients who need emergency, inpatient, or specialist care. Wattanapat supports these clinics instead of trying to replace them, creating a healthcare network that benefits every provider.

Growth requires selective investment

The hospital does not attempt to offer every possible procedure. It invests where there is sufficient patient volume, clinical need, and revenue potential, while referring rare or highly specialized cases to appropriate partners. Also, by design, the management offices at WPH are plain. Every baht saved on non-essentials goes toward biomedical equipment and specialist capacity, the things that actually differentiate patient care.

People, not capital, are the real growth constraint.

Capital and market demand are important, but hospitals cannot grow safely without qualified clinicians, department heads and managers. With hospital financing secured through its stock listing, WPH's bottleneck is finding and retaining the right department heads and specialists, particularly on islands like Samui where staff often relocate away eventually.

Welcome to Business DNA, a chance for us to delve into the essential make-up of business leaders and their organizations. Our focus is not on the short term but instead on understanding the driving forces behind business. Our guest today is Chane Laosonthorn, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Director of Wattanapat Hospital.

Chane: I am currently Deputy CEO and CFO of Wattanapat Hospital. I have worked with the organization for about 11 years. Before returning to Thailand, I studied and worked in Perth, Australia. I did my bachelor's and master's there, then worked for about six years. I studied management and marketing, then a master's in accounting, honestly more out of practicality than passion. I looked at what credentials Australia wanted at the time, which was accounting, and that's what I pursued. I started as an accountant, and when a payroll officer left with no notice, I stepped in and got it right the first time. That opened the door to HR, and eventually another company recruited me into a more senior HR role.

Why did you leave Perth to come back to Thailand?

Chane: I had no intention of ever leaving Perth. One day, my manager came into my office and told me she had very good news. I knew she was about to offer me a promotion. Before she could continue, I went to the bathroom and called my grandmother. She had been telling me that the hospital in Trang was experiencing serious problems and that I needed to return. I asked whether the situation was genuinely that serious. When she confirmed that it was, I returned to my manager and declined the promotion. The decision happened very quickly. I knew nothing about the hospital business, and I had never studied medicine. My grandfather and I were very close. He got sick and could no longer be the doctor he once was, and I wanted to come back and protect his reputation. It was also, I think, a rare kind of opportunity to take something from bad to good. Not many people get that chance.

Tell us about your grandfather and how the hospital started.

Chane: My grandparents founded the hospital. My grandfather was a brilliant student who got top marks in the country in math, science, and physics. He went to study in Bangkok before returning to his home province to start a small clinic, just two rooms. He became so well known that an intersection in Trang is named after him, Dr. Wittaya Intersection. At his peak, around 1,700 patients wanted to see him personally, which obviously wasn't possible, so he referred people to other specialists. That referral instinct became the foundation of how the business runs today.

What shaped his philosophy, and how did it carry through as the business grew?

Chane: Two stories stand out to me because at the time they made no financial sense. He would travel abroad and rack up 300 to 500 baht in phone calls just to check on patients, for a doctor's fee of only 50 to 100 baht. From a financial perspective, the calls made no sense. From his perspective, caring for the patient was more important. And once, he sold a large piece of land, worth hundreds of millions today, to buy the province's first ultrasound machine. The machine was so outdated by the time I returned that its screen was smaller than an iPhone's. I asked him if it was worth it. He said absolutely, because before that machine, Trang had no access to ultrasound at all, and people were dying without it. That's when I understood his DNA. As he aged and the systems around him weakened, we had to translate that same instinct (intense, individual attention to every patient) into strategy, KPIs, and measurable results the whole organization could deliver, not just one person. That is how a founder's philosophy becomes scalable. Patients should receive attention from the moment they enter the hospital.

How does a private hospital generate revenue?

Chane: A hospital's main revenue begins with outpatients. An outpatient visits the hospital, receives a consultation, undergoes diagnostic tests, and may be given medication to take at home. Patients with more serious conditions may be admitted to an inpatient ward. The most serious cases may require intensive care or surgery. Healthcare differs from many service businesses because the customer does not decide the level of service. In a hotel, a guest chooses whether to book a standard room or a villa. In a hospital, the doctor determines whether the patient requires outpatient care, admission, intensive care, or an operation. Referrals are another important revenue source. Approximately 30 percent of our revenue comes from referred patients. These patients may initially visit a primary or secondary care provider that cannot manage the complexity of their condition. They are then transferred to Wattanapat for a higher level of care.

How do you manage a

BIO: Laurie Barkman is a Certified Exit Planner, M&A Advisor, and founder of The Business Transition Sherpa®.

STORY: Laurie explains why it's important to start planning your exit plan five to seven years before and what you need to do during that period.

LEARNING: Don't wait until you're exiting to plan your exit.

Laurie Barkman is a Certified Exit Planner, M&A Advisor, and founder of The Business Transition Sherpa®. As the former CEO who led a $100 million company through acquisition, she helps business owners build valuable, sellable companies and exit on their terms.

Laurie is the Amazon best-selling author of The Business Transition Handbook: How to Avoid Succession Pitfalls and Create Valuable Exit Options and hosts the award-winning podcast Succession Stories, rated in the top 2.5% of podcasts globally.

Get a complimentary business assessment. See how an acquirer would evaluate your business, enabling you to focus today on what will be important down the road. Learn what changes could double the value of your business.

Three years ago, Laurie joined Andrew on Ep727: Quit Often Quit Fast to share her own worst investment ever. This time, she's back with something arguably more valuable: a masterclass on the single most common mistake business owners make: waiting too long to plan their exit.

"I wish I knew this sooner." That phrase, Laurie says, is the number one thing she hears from business owners who've gone through a transition without proper planning. By the time they're ready to sell, it's already too late to improve the business, attract better buyers, or close the wealth gap they've been quietly ignoring.

If you haven't heard Episode 727, go back and listen to Laurie's personal story. In this episode, she brings that same honesty, this time pointed squarely at what you, as a business owner, need to be doing right now.

The most important insight Laurie delivers in this episode is deceptively simple: exit planning needs to start long before you're planning to exit.

If a prospective client tells her they're thinking about selling their business in one to three years, her response is direct: "You're already behind." A well-structured exit takes five to seven years to execute properly. That's not because the paperwork is complicated. It's because building a more attractive, more valuable, more transferable business takes time. And so does getting you personally ready for what comes after.

Laurie works with two very different kinds of readiness:

• Business readiness: Making the business more attractive, more operationally independent, and more valuable to a future buyer.
• Personal readiness: Preparing the owner emotionally and financially for the life that comes after the company. Too many founders kick this can down the road, only to find the finish line overwhelming when it finally arrives.

One of Laurie's most practical tools is what she calls the Exit Timeline Exercise. She sits with clients and literally maps out, year by year, what needs to happen (both in the business and in their personal lives) to set them up for a successful transition.

This isn't a generic checklist. It's built around the owner's specific situation: their age, their family's ages, their life stage, and what they actually want their next chapter to look like.

Laurie walks through two key calculations every business owner should understand:

This is the difference between what you need for retirement and what you currently have. Many business owners have most of their net worth tied up in their company, which means selling the business isn't just an exit; it's a financial planning event. The net proceeds (after taxes, transaction fees, and other costs) need to be factored into the nest egg calculation. As Laurie reminds us, it's the net number that counts, not the headline price.

Once you know your wealth gap, you can figure out what your business needs to be worth—and compare that to what it's actually worth today. The difference is the value gap. Closing that gap is the work of exit planning.

One of Laurie's most counterintuitive insights: when you're selling your business, stop thinking about your products and services. Start thinking about what problem your company solves for another company.

Buyers, particularly strategic buyers, are acquiring capabilities, not catalogs. They might want your customer list, your talent, your geographic footprint, your intellectual property, or your distribution network. A European acquirer once offered Andrew a revenue multiple (not EBITDA) because he didn't care about the coffee margins. He wanted the distribution infrastructure to pour his own volume through.

That's a strategic buyer making a strategic bet. Understanding who might want to buy you, and why, should shape how you build and present your business years before any transaction.

One of the most actionable practices Laurie recommends is a transferable assets audit. Go through every major asset in your business (contracts, customer relationships, intellectual property, talent, equipment) and rate each on a scale of 1 to 5 for how transferable it is to a new owner.

A score of 1 isn't a crisis. It's a to-do item—one you can now address if you start the process early enough.

A common example: contracts that aren't transferable. Many business owners have never thought about whether their agreements include a transferability clause. Without one, a sale can be significantly complicated. With a transferability clause added proactively at renewal, the problem simply goes away.

Another practical piece of advice comes from Andrew's observations of businesses in Thailand, echoed by Laurie's US experience: messy financial records are a serious exit liability.

Buyers expect the last three full years of clean financials, current year data, and a credible forecast. If your monthly books aren't closed, your expense categories are inconsistent across years, or your numbers are tied up with personal expenses, you've created friction in the due diligence process. This friction costs you time, trust, and money.

Laurie recommends moving toward reviewed financials as an early milestone. For many businesses, it's not a high incremental cost, and it signals credibility to buyers.

• Don't wait to plan your exit until you're ready to exit. By that point, it's already too late to make meaningful improvements to the business. Start five to seven years out.
• Personal readiness matters as much as business readiness. Too many owners focus entirely on the company and are blindsided by the emotional and lifestyle changes that come with stepping back.
• Know your wealth gap and your value gap. These two numbers are the foundation of any honest exit plan.
• Buyers buy on their timeline, not yours. When someone comes calling, they're ready. You may not be. The goal of exit planning is to close that readiness gap before the call comes.
• Recurring revenue commands a premium, but know the difference between recurring and reoccurring. Contracted, predictable cash flows are what buyers pay top dollar for.
• Take an inventory of your transferable assets. Find the gaps now, while you still have time to close them.
• Clean, consistent financial records are non-negotiable. Start with reviewed financials and build from there.

• Profitability and growth are both required. Profitability without growth isn't particularly valuable, and growth without profitability doesn't justify the premium either. It's the combination that drives multiple expansion.
• The $25 million revenue threshold is a real inflection point in buyer perception. Businesses that cross it are seen as market-proven in a way that smaller companies, however promising, simply aren't.
• When a strategic buyer sets a revenue multiple, they may...

BIO: Tony Martignetti is the evangelist for Planned Giving fundraising for small- and mid-size nonprofits.

STORY: Two years into building his business, Tony convinced himself he could become the nation's thought leader on planned giving fundraising — not just for nonprofits, but for all Americans. He walked into a swanky Midtown Manhattan PR agency, got dazzled by a four-inch binder, and signed up at $6,750 per month. Two months and $13,500 later, his only return was a single bylined op-ed in a free subway newspaper.

LEARNING: Check your ego. Vet your big ideas with honest, trusted people before spending any money. Understand that PR, even when it works, rarely converts to actual revenue.

Tony Martignetti is the evangelist for Planned Giving fundraising for small- and mid-size nonprofits. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Check out Tony's free How-to Guide on Planned Giving Fundraising.

Two years into running his consultancy, Tony had a big idea. He didn't just want to serve the nonprofit sector; he wanted to reach all Americans and make planned giving a concept that everyday citizens (not just charity insiders) would understand and act on.

To do that, Tony decided he needed PR, the kind that lands you on 60 Minutes and gets Charlie Rose calling.

He found his way to a prestigious agency in Midtown Manhattan, far from his own modest office in the Flatiron neighborhood. They had an 80-story skyscraper overhead to match. At the pitch meeting, they brought out what Tony describes as a four-inch-thick three-ring binder, every page in a plastic sleeve. Client on The Today Show. Client on Good Morning America. Client on 60 Minutes. Client with Charlie Rose.

All this sucked Tony in, and he bought it all—hook, line, and sinker. They kept feeding his ego. He signed on at $6,750 per month.

After two months, Tony canceled the contract. His total return: one bylined op-ed in AM New York, a free newspaper distributed in New York City subway stations. The placement ran on Martin Luther King Day. A federal holiday when subway ridership was a fraction of normal on a Tuesday.

No leads from Good Morning America. No call from 60 Minutes. No magazine profiles. No newspaper reporters are following up. Nothing promising on the horizon. Just $13,500 lighter and one op-ed that almost nobody read.

The agency saw a solo entrepreneur with ideas far bigger than the media landscape could realistically support, and instead of managing Tony's expectations honestly, they kept stoking his enthusiasm to secure the fee. They should have talked him down to what's reasonable to expect. Instead, they completely mismanaged his expectations and kept feeding his ego to capture a fee.

The fundamental problem was that Tony's ambition—to educate ordinary Americans about the value of nonprofits, then about the value of supporting them long-term, then to direct them toward specific giving vehicles—was a multi-step awareness campaign that no single PR placement could accomplish. It was simply too much to ask of the media.

Years after the failed agency experiment, Tony had better PR results. He hired a skilled freelance publicist who secured quotes for him in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the leading trade publication in his sector. Reporters on the nonprofit beat came to know him and called him when they needed a source.

And yet: not one new client ever picked up the phone because they saw Tony's name in the Times. This taught him a lesson: PR is more about reputation and awareness than revenue.

• PR might get done right, and it still won't save you. It can build reputation and awareness over the years. It is not a customer acquisition channel.
• For early-stage founders, the honest question to ask before writing a large check is: Is this actually going to build the business, or is this about making me feel like I've arrived?
• Don't go check your idea with the people who are going to get a fee for capitalizing on your pie-in-the-sky idea. The people most likely to validate an idea are often the ones most financially motivated to tell you it's great. Lawyers, consultants, vendors, agencies—all have a stake in your enthusiasm. The honest input has to come from people with nothing to gain: trusted colleagues, mentors, or experienced friends who will tell you what they actually think.

• Ego investments are a universal founder trap. Almost every entrepreneur who has started a business has made at least one purchase driven more by identity and aspiration than by clear ROI thinking. Naming it "a vanity investment" is the first step to catching it before it costs you.
• PR almost never converts to customers. This is one of the most consistent findings across hundreds of My Worst Investment Ever PR can build credibility and awareness over time. But it is not a sales channel, and expecting it to deliver clients, especially early in a business, is a setup for disappointment.
• The stage of business matters for marketing strategy. Early-stage businesses need direct, efficient client acquisition, not brand awareness campaigns aimed at broad audiences. Align your marketing spend with where you actually are, not where you imagine yourself to be.
• The media landscape has to be ready for your idea. Tony's vision of educating all Americans about planned giving required multiple layers of awareness-building before a single TV segment could have any effect. Even flawless PR execution couldn't shortcut that process.

• Ask yourself: Is this a business investment or an ego investment? Before any significant marketing or PR spend, write down the specific customer acquisition outcome you expect. If you can't describe a clear path from the spend to a paying client, it's probably a vanity investment.
• Match your marketing strategy to your business stage. In the first two to three years, most professional service firms grow through direct outreach, referrals, and relationship-building rather than mass media. Invest accordingly.
• Understand what PR actually does. PR builds reputation and credibility over the long term. If that's your goal, it can be worth it. If your goal is revenue next quarter, look elsewhere.
• If you're going to do PR, set explicit expectations in writing. What placements will they pursue? In what timeframe? What counts as success? If the agency won't commit to specifics, that tells you something important.

Tony's number one goal for the next 12 months is to publish his first self-published book: Planned Giving Accelerated, due out in September. A companion course will follow the book's release.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Podcast

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market

BIO: David Siegel is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has founded more than a dozen companies. He has written five books on technology and business, was once a candidate for the dean of Stanford Business School, and is now an AI thought leader leading an AI startup he hopes will pave the way for the agentic economy.

STORY: Nine months after David's last appearance on the podcast, the conversation has shifted from "what are LLMs?" to agents that act. 60-65% of NYSE trades are already fully machine-to-machine—a preview of where all commerce is headed.

LEARNING: You don't need to know exactly how AI works, but you need to get in the game.

David Siegel is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has founded more than a dozen companies. He has written five books on technology and business, was once a candidate for the dean of Stanford Business School, and is now an AI thought leader leading an AI startup he hopes will pave the way for the agentic economy.

David joins the podcast for the fourth time and discusses his latest progress in AI with Andrew.

Before diving into AI, David opened with an invitation that even Andrew found surprising: a free online water-fasting event starting on April 20, 2026, with a preliminary strategy session on April 12.

What is a water fast? David explains that it's not a diet or a weight-loss tool; it's a physiological reset. For three to six days, your body enters ketosis and "cleans house," activating suppressed systems and energizing you. David does this three to four times per year, emphasizing it's not a monthly practice but a strategic reset aligned with your health journey.

The coaching program makes fasting easier and more fun through group accountability, with no obligation, just information to help anyone at any point in their health journey. Learn about fasting, or just join a group of people doing the same thing at the same time. It's designed for people from the West Coast to Europe. Please register for the event and feel free to invite anyone: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Tk-zp9ZERomWb0643Sypmw.

David's core message centers on a profound shift: we're entering the agentic economy, where machine-to-machine communication replaces human-to-website interaction. He notes that in 20 years, you won't shop on Amazon. There won't be advertising or marketing for humans. All those "Cialdini mind tricks" of urgency, storytelling, and Russell Brunson funnels will vanish. Everything will be machine-to-machine, just like the stock market today, where 65% of NYSE trades open and close in less than one second.

Even driving will be prohibited because human reaction times cannot match the frequency of machine communication. We're in an awkward transitional period where humans and machines must coexist. Nobody likes it, but it's taking us toward a future where drudge work is automated.

David clarified a critical distinction that many miss: LLMs (Large Language Models) talk back, type responses, and generate images and videos—but don't do anything outside your interaction.

AI Agent, on the other hand, is an LLM connected to APIs that can actually take action: send emails, order meals, book travel, make purchases, and run ads. Think of it as a virtual remote assistant working 24/7 while you sleep.

OpenClaw (CLAW = agents, inspired by lobsters from a forward-thinking fiction book) is an open-source framework created by Peter Steinberger on GitHub. It connects LLMs (the thinking entities) to APIs (the conduits for doing).

This is revolutionary because it allows AI to take real-world actions. Previously, AI was confined to conversation. It can now execute tasks across systems. David strongly warns that OpenClaw is highly technical and requires API configuration. It's not designed for humans to use directly. It's for engineers building agent infrastructure.

David explains that agents introduce entirely new cybersecurity vulnerabilities that differ from traditional threats, such as social-engineering attacks against agents. For instance, impersonation via spoofed emails: "David wants a trip to Phoenix, book a flight," or multi-day, persistent attacks in which bots repeatedly try to extract secrets.

David's approach with Claw Studio is to use APIs rather than scraping. Wherever possible, he attaches LLMs to official APIs with guardrails. This is safer and more sustainable than screen scraping, which violates Terms of Service and risks a shutdown.

David's advice is clear: Don't do it yourself. That's suicide. With great power comes great responsibility. An agent can do almost anything, including deleting its own installation, wiping your disk clean, or draining your bank account. You want it to do almost nothing initially, then gradually widen the guardrails.

1. Done-for-you setup like Red Hat for Linux
2. Dedicated Chief of Staff agent with its own phone number
3. Onboarding period of 1-2 weeks, where you download your life into the agent:
4. Birthday, family members' emails, and daily routines
5. It can research you online to build context.
6. Separate setups for personal and business
7. Forever memory, unlike standard LLM context windows that forget:
8. Every Zoom call transcript gets piped in word-for-word.
9. Searchable memory: "Who was I talking to about Tahoe skiing in November?"
10. Agent retrieves exact conversations and can follow up.
11. Reverse prompting—the paradigm shift:
12. Instead of you telling the agent what to do, it tells you.
13. Morning briefing: what happened overnight, what's coming up, what's changed
14. Manages your calendar, project management, and priorities
15. Breaks long-term goals into daily deliverables
16. You're no longer the to-do list keeper.
17. Security architecture:
18. Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, not local machines
19. Two-account system: one for operations, one for immutable backups
20. All logs are piped to a one-way backup account.
21. "Go back six hours" restore button, in case things go wrong.
22. Humans in the loop for critical actions (e.g., agent queues payments, human approves)

To conclude, David talked about the biggest investment mistake everyone is making right now: not appreciating the exponential nature of what we're in and what is coming. He noted that the next 12 months will be unlike any 12 months in business history. He stated that we're entering a recursive self-improvement phase, in which software will write the next generation of itself. The singularity isn't theoretical; it's happening now.

David's advice is to stop thinking six months ahead. The pace is too fast. Instead:

1. Take baby steps to position yourself.
2. Prepare to accelerate like never before
3. Invest in agent infrastructure now, while it "doesn't suck too bad", it will...

BIO: Athena Brownson is a Denver realtor, investor, developer, and former professional skier whose resilience through chronic illness fuels her refined, strategic, and client-focused approach to real estate.

STORY: Athena lost $130,000 in her first development project when a builder she considered a friend vanished with the upfront funds. Her trust and incomplete due diligence led to a total loss, teaching her that personal relationships can create dangerous blind spots in business.

LEARNING: Due diligence is non-negotiable. Trust is a liability.

Athena Brownson is a Denver realtor, investor, developer, and former professional skier whose resilience through chronic illness fuels her refined, strategic, and client-focused approach to real estate.

Athena Brownson entered her first development project with confidence and a seemingly dream team. With a 45-year veteran developer—her father—by her side, she felt prepared. She had saved diligently, owned the land, and chose a builder she’d known for three years, a dear friend’s business partner.

After multiple interviews where her father asked all the right questions, they felt secure. They signed a contract and paid $130,000 upfront for site clearing, asbestos abatement, and foundation work.

Initial excitement turned to unease as progress was glacial. A blue fence went up, and some abatement started, but then communication stopped. Phone lines went dead. Subcontractors began calling Athena directly, asking why they hadn’t been paid.

The devastating truth emerged: the builder had vanished with the funds. Athena later discovered she was one of eight victims of the same scam. Despite her real estate expertise and her father’s decades of experience, they had been outmaneuvered by a trusted contact.

1. Due diligence is non-negotiable: Trust is not a replacement for verification. Athena’s key takeaway was the need for exhaustive due diligence: calling not just a few references, but a comprehensive list of past and current clients to hear the unfiltered story of their experiences.
2. Friendship clouds judgment: A personal connection created a dangerous blind spot. It made her and her experienced team less likely to probe aggressively or assume the worst, a bias scammers often exploit.
3. Assume the worst, hope for the best: The mindset must shift from “I trust you until you prove me wrong” to “Show me consistent, verifiable proof that you are trustworthy.” In business, healthy skepticism is a necessary form of self-defense.
4. Measure twice, cut once: This adage applies to money and contracts. Double and triple-check every detail, every claim, and every line item before funds change hands.

1. Money is life energy: Andrew referenced the classic book Your Money or Your Life, emphasizing that money represents hours of your life traded for it. Guarding it fiercely is an act of self-preservation.
2. Trust is a liability: Stories like Athena’s and others show that misplaced trust is a common thread in catastrophic losses. Systems and verification must replace blind faith.
3. Seek counsel, not confirmation: When making big decisions, actively seek advisors who will challenge you and point out blind spots, not just those who will validate your excitement.

Athena advises investors to do these three things when vetting any partner:

1. Demand a list of 10 past and current clients/vendors and call them all. Don’t settle for 2-3 curated references. Ask specific questions about communication, budgeting, and problem-solving.
2. Before major investments, formally run the deal by a small group of mentors or experienced peers whose explicit role is to find flaws and ask the tough questions you might be avoiding.
3. Impose a mandatory 48-72 hour “cooling-off” period between agreeing to a deal and signing or funding. Use that time to conduct the extra due diligence that your initial excitement may have skipped.

Athena’s number one recommendation is to invest in mentorship and continuous education. Whether through formal coaching, podcasts, masterclasses, or peer groups, constantly feed your knowledge.

She advocates for finding a community that provides both accountability and the ability to see your own blind spots, which are invisible to you alone. For her, this approach, ingrained from her athletic career, is pivotal for professional growth and risk mitigation.

Athena’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to deepen her impact by building a powerful, trusted referral network. She aims to serve more clients in building long-term wealth through strategic real estate and to expand her team. A core part of this mission is to pay forward the mentorship she received by guiding younger agents, helping them avoid the costly pitfalls she endured.

[spp-transcript]

1. LinkedIn
2. Instagram
3. YouTube

1. How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
2. My Worst Investment Ever
3. 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
4. Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

1. Valuation Master Class
2. The Become a Better Investor Community
3. How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
4. Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
5. FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
6. Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence

BIO: Jon is the Founder and CEO of FranBridge Consulting, a 2-time Inc. 5000 company, and a leading franchise consultant.

STORY: Jon believes franchising remains one of the most effective ways to build durable income, especially when investors focus on operational discipline and unit economics. He shares his top franchise categories for 2026.

LEARNING: Look for businesses with repeat customers, operational discipline, proven unit economics, and leadership teams that have already made their mistakes.

Jon Ostenson is the Founder and CEO of FranBridge Consulting, a 2-time Inc. 5000 company, and he is a top 1% franchise consultant. Jon is also the author of the bestselling book, Non-Food Franchising. Jon draws on his experience as a former Inc. 500 Franchise President and Multi-Brand Franchisee in helping his clients select their franchise investments.

For many aspiring business owners, the biggest financial losses don't come from bad intentions. They come from underestimating complexity, overestimating scalability, or betting everything on an unproven idea. Jon Ostenson knows this lesson intimately.

As the founder and CEO of FranBridge Consulting and franchise consultant, Jon has spent years helping entrepreneurs shortcut costly mistakes by investing in proven, non-food franchise models.

In Episode 815: I Built a Million-Dollar Business That Never Made a Profit, he openly shared how he once built a million-dollar business that never made a profit. That experience now informs how he evaluates opportunities with discipline, structure, and risk control.

Looking ahead to 2026, Jon believes franchising remains one of the most effective ways to build a durable income stream, especially when investors focus on operational discipline and unit economics. Below are his top franchise categories for 2026, and more importantly, why they help investors avoid the common traps that sink new businesses.

One of the most common investment errors is assuming passion alone will overcome operational complexity. Many entrepreneurs love an idea but underestimate the systems, staffing, pricing discipline, and capital required to make it profitable.

Franchising addresses this risk by offering something rare: a business model with historical data. Instead of guessing whether pricing works or whether customers will pay, franchisees can examine real-world performance, talk to existing owners, and follow systems that have already survived market cycles, helping investors feel confident in demand-driven, structured opportunities.

Jon emphasizes that franchising is not about eliminating risk. It's about trading unbounded risk for structured risk, supported by systems, training, and benchmarks.

Cost-mitigation franchises help small and medium-sized businesses reduce expenses by analyzing vendor contracts, utility bills, shipping costs, and other fees. Clients pay nothing up front and instead share a percentage of the savings.

What makes this model compelling is its simplicity. There's no inventory, no employees required, and no large infrastructure investment. Franchisees focus on business-to-business sales while the franchisor provides analytical support and benchmarking tools.

From an investment standpoint, this avoids two common mistakes: high fixed costs and overstaffing before revenue stabilizes.

Shipping costs remain a pain point for businesses, and freight brokerage franchises sit neatly between companies and major carriers like UPS, FedEx, and DHL.

Rather than competing on price alone, franchisees act as trusted advisors, simplifying logistics and negotiating better rates using collective buying power. Technology and systems are already in place, preventing the trial-and-error phase that sinks many startups.

This model rewards consultative selling skills while insulating owners from volatile commodity pricing.

Digital billboard franchises install advertising screens in high-traffic locations such as medical offices, oil change centers, and waiting rooms. The screens are free for host businesses, while advertisers pay for exposure.

The appeal here lies in predictable recurring revenue and minimal staffing. Franchisees sell local advertising while the franchisor handles content delivery, technology, and procurement.

It's a classic example of monetizing attention without carrying inventory or managing complex operations.

With thousands of Americans turning 65 every day, senior-focused services remain one of the strongest secular growth trends. One franchise Jon highlights provides on-site stretching and fitness programs inside senior living communities.

Revenue is recurring, demand is non-discretionary, and the business directly improves quality of life. For investors, this reduces reliance on consumer whims and economic cycles.

Another senior-focused opportunity involves installing wheelchair ramps, stair lifts, and bathroom modifications to help seniors stay in their homes longer.

Jon favors this franchise because the leadership team brings decades of industry experience, and market demand is structural rather than trendy. These services align closely with healthcare, reverse mortgages, and long-term aging trends.

For investors, it's a reminder that boring, needs-based businesses often outperform exciting ideas.

Pilates franchises continue to stand out as one of the strongest performers in the wellness space heading into 2026. Unlike trend-driven fitness concepts, Pilates benefits from longevity, broad demographic appeal, and a reputation for low-impact, high-value results. Clients range from young professionals to older adults focused on mobility, posture, and injury prevention.

What makes this model attractive from an investment perspective is its membership-based recurring revenue and disciplined unit economics. Franchise systems have refined pricing, instructor certification, class capacity, and studio layout to maximise margins while maintaining quality. Jon highlights that these brands succeed not because fitness is exciting, but because their business models are structured, repeatable, and proven across multiple markets.

For investors looking to avoid the mistake of underestimating operating complexity, Pilates franchises offer a clear framework for scaling without reinventing the wheel.

Recovery-focused wellness franchises are another category Jon believes will accelerate into 2026. These studios offer services such as cold plunges, infrared saunas, cryotherapy, compression therapy, and contrast bathing, all designed to support recovery, performance, and long-term health.

Unlike traditional spas, these franchises position themselves as ongoing wellness memberships rather than one-off luxury visits. Customers come weekly, sometimes multiple times per week, creating predictable cash flow and strong client retention. Demand is driven by athletes, busy professionals, and aging consumers who prioritise longevity and preventative health.

From an investment standpoint, these franchises succeed when operators follow disciplined rollout plans, resist overbuilding too quickly, and rely on franchisor-tested marketing and pricing strategies. Jon notes that many independent wellness studios fail not because the demand isn't there, but because owners misjudge costs, staffing, or market readiness, mistakes that strong franchise systems are designed to prevent.

Music lesson franchises create centralized spaces where instructors teach children and adults under a standardized curriculum. Parents are willing to invest in their children regardless of economic conditions, making this category resilient.

The franchise advantage lies in marketing systems, scheduling technology, and curriculum design. Owners focus on community engagement rather than building everything from scratch.

In many US states, formal driver education is required for teens to obtain a driver's license. Yet the market remains fragmented and unsophisticated.

Franchised teen driving schools offer standardized training, vetted instructors, and strong brand trust. For parents, safety matters. For investors, regulation-backed demand provides stability.

Jon closes his list with two property services franchises that stand out due to operational innovation. One refinishes hardwood floors in a single day without sanding. The other reimagines junk hauling by charging by...

BIO: David Siegel is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has founded more than a dozen companies. He has written five books on technology and business, was once a candidate for the dean of Stanford Business School, and is now an AI thought leader leading an AI startup he hopes will pave the way for the agentic economy.

STORY: David invested heavily in launching a longevity coaching business, believing people would pay to extend their lives through lifestyle change. Despite strong science, personal results, and significant marketing spend, demand proved nearly nonexistent.

LEARNING: A great idea without real demand is still a bad investment.

David Siegel is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has founded more than a dozen companies. He has written five books on technology and business, was once a candidate for the dean of Stanford Business School, and is now an AI thought leader leading an AI startup he hopes will pave the way for the agentic economy.

After years of building companies and studying major technological shifts, David found himself pulled deeply into the longevity movement. This wasn’t casual curiosity. He read more than 20 books, radically transformed his lifestyle, and developed a deep understanding of insulin resistance, nutrition, exercise, and long-term health.

The results were personal and visible. David was fit, disciplined, and energized. The idea that science could help people live 10 to 15 years longer, with a higher quality of life, felt not only possible but urgent. Helping others do the same seemed like a natural next chapter.

Confident in both the science and his own experience, David decided to turn longevity coaching into a scalable business. His target audience was people in their 50s and 60s, individuals who were pre-diabetic or heading toward serious health issues and stood to benefit the most from early intervention.

He approached the venture like a seasoned entrepreneur. He built funnels, ran Facebook ads, spoke at retirement communities, and spent months on discovery calls explaining how lifestyle changes could dramatically reduce the risk of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes.

This wasn’t guesswork; it was disciplined execution.

Then reality set in.

Despite spending over $100,000 on advertising and investing countless hours in conversations, demand was almost nonexistent. People listened. They nodded. They agreed the logic made sense. Then they walked away.

Many believed the healthcare system would save them. Others hoped for a pill instead of discipline. Even those clearly facing insulin resistance weren’t willing to make sustained lifestyle changes.

The most sobering realization wasn’t about marketing or pricing. It was this: most people don’t actually want to live longer if it requires consistent effort.

In the end, only about one percent of the people David spoke to were already doing the work and didn’t need coaching. Everyone else opted out, fully aware of the consequences.

The investment failed not because the science was wrong, but because the market wasn’t there. David ultimately gave the information away for free and walked away from the business, having learned an expensive but clarifying lesson about belief versus demand.

1. Even the most compelling solution will fail if it requires behavior that people are unwilling to change.
2. Logic, evidence, and outcomes don’t matter if the market emotionally resists effort.
3. A great idea without real demand is still a bad investment.

1. Andrew highlights that people consistently search for shortcuts rather than long-term solutions. Whether in health or investing, most people prefer convenience over discipline, even when the stakes are life-altering.

Before scaling any idea, test for real demand, not polite interest. Ask whether people are willing to pay, change their habits, and put in effort. If behavior change is central to your offering, validate that reality early or risk learning the hard way.

David encourages understanding your own health data, particularly insulin resistance, through proper testing, such as an oral glucose tolerance test. While the business failed, the knowledge remains powerful and freely available for those willing to act.

[spp-transcript]

1. LinkedIn
2. X
3. YouTube
4. Website

1. How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
2. My Worst Investment Ever
3. 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
4. Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

1. Valuation Master Class
2. The Become a Better Investor Community
3. How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
4. Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
5. FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
6. Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
7. Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
8. Achieve Your Goals

1. astotz.com
2. LinkedIn
3. Facebook

BIO: Jon is the Founder and CEO of FranBridge Consulting, a 2-time Inc. 5000 company, and he is a top 1% franchise consultant.

STORY: Jon co-founded a marketing and call-center business that appeared successful on the surface, growing to millions in revenue and dozens of employees. However, excessive customization and an inability to charge prices that matched rising costs meant the business never became sustainably profitable.

LEARNING: Profitability is oxygen. Knowing when to admit you’re wrong matters just as much as knowing how to start.

Jon Ostenson is the Founder and CEO of FranBridge Consulting, a 2-time Inc. 5000 company, and he is a top 1% franchise consultant. Jon is also the author of the bestselling book, Non-Food Franchising. Jon draws on his experience as a former Inc. 500 Franchise President and Multi-Brand Franchisee in helping his clients select their franchise investments.

Leaving the corporate world felt like freedom. After years of structure, predictability, and steady paychecks, you finally get to build something of your own. That was precisely where Jon found himself: grateful for his corporate experience, energized by the idea of business ownership, and eager to prove he could create something meaningful on his own terms.

Shortly after leaving corporate life, Jon partnered with a colleague to launch a marketing and sales company. He owned 60 percent of the business and ran day-to-day operations, while his partner held the remaining 40 percent.

The vision was compelling. The company would help franchise businesses grow by handling their marketing, answering inbound calls through an in-house call center, and booking appointments directly for clients. The promise was simple: make the phones ring and convert those calls into revenue.

At first, it worked. The business grew quickly, attracting a strong leadership team and building a culture Jon was proud of. With around 35 employees and annual revenues of $3 million to $4 million, the company appeared successful from the outside. The team was energized, clients were signing on, and the pace was exciting.

But beneath the surface, there was a quiet, persistent problem.

The business wasn’t profitable.

Despite all the effort, the long hours, and the constant tweaking, the company hovered around breakeven. Some months it lost money. Others it barely scraped by. Payroll was always looming, and profitability felt just out of reach. Jon tried adjusting pricing, shifting emphasis between marketing and call center services, and introducing new technology to increase value.

But every fix only delayed the inevitable question he didn’t want to answer: What if the model itself was broken?

The core issue turned out to be customization. The business was designed to scale by serving franchise systems with repeatable processes. Instead, each franchisee insisted their market was different, their staff was unique, and their customers required special handling. Wanting to please early clients and drive revenue, Jon said yes. Again and again.

Over time, the company became highly customized, operationally complex, and increasingly expensive to run. Pricing no longer matched costs. The more the business grew, the harder it became to make money. What looked like top-line success was masking a model that couldn’t sustain itself.

Eventually, Jon made the difficult decision to wind down the business. There was no dramatic exit or acquisition, but there was integrity. The team helped place employees in new roles and transitioned clients responsibly. Still, it was a painful experience.

The failure wasn’t just financial; it was an ego hit. This was Jon’s first true experience of business ownership, and letting it go meant admitting that the original idea wasn’t as strong as he believed.

1. The biggest lesson came from contrast. After running his own startup without a proven product-market fit, Jon developed a deep appreciation for franchising. Unlike a startup built on assumptions, franchises offer historical data, real performance benchmarks, and access to owners who have already walked the path. You can see results before you ever invest.
2. There were personal lessons, too. Knowing when to admit you’re wrong matters just as much as knowing how to start. Humility, course correction, and the willingness to pivot are not weaknesses in entrepreneurship; they’re survival skills.
3. Profitability, Jon learned, is oxygen. A business that can’t consistently operate in the black eventually suffocates, no matter how exciting the vision or how talented the team.

1. One of the most important disciplines for any business owner is accurately closing the books each month. That means reviewing not just the profit and loss statement, but also the balance sheet. If your accountant can’t do that, it’s time for a new one. Monthly financial clarity allows you to identify problems early, before they become fatal.
2. Another insight comes from scale. Based on analysis of tens of thousands of companies globally, Andrew points to $7.5 million in annual revenue as a critical threshold. Below that level, it’s tough to afford the management talent and infrastructure required to run a scalable business. If you can’t get there efficiently, it may be time to rethink the model.
3. Finally, complexity is the silent killer. Businesses naturally drift toward offering more products, more services, and more custom solutions. Every added layer increases costs and erodes margins. Only disciplined leadership can stop complexity from overwhelming profitability.

If you’re building a business, be honest about whether you’re chasing revenue or building something scalable. Early customization can help you survive, but staying there too long can trap you in a low-margin cycle that’s hard to escape.

Focus on creating profitable top-line growth, not just growth for its own sake. Learn to say no, even when opportunities feel exciting. And remember: there is no perfect time to start a business. The best way to learn is to get in the game early, without betting everything, and build experience that you can compound over time.

Jon recommends starting with education and proven frameworks. He offers a free downloadable copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising, in a concise 90-page guide. The book has received strong feedback and provides practical insights for anyone considering business ownership.

Listeners can download the PDF or audio version by visiting FranBridgeConsulting.com and sharing their email address. Those who prefer a physical copy can purchase it on Amazon, with all proceeds supporting Hope International.

Jon’s goal for the next 12 months is to grow passive income across multiple asset classes, including franchising. His goal is to build sustainable revenue streams that create freedom across all areas of life: faith, family, fitness, finances, and future ventures.

Passive income, for Jon, isn’t just about money. It’s about capacity—the ability to choose how you spend your time and energy.

[spp-transcript]

1. LinkedIn
2. Twitter
3. Facebook

BIO: Edwin Endlich is the Chief Marketing Officer of Wysh and President of the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion.

STORY: Edwin’s worst investment was buying Tilray stock at $143 during the early hype of legal cannabis investing. Swept up in the excitement of a “new frontier,” he held on as the price crashed—eventually selling at around 30 cents and losing over 99% of his investment.

LEARNING: The fundamentals always apply, even in new or exciting industries. Don’t let hype replace due diligence.

Edwin Endlich is the Chief Marketing Officer of Wysh and President of the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion. Edwin has spent his career at the intersection of marketing, fintech, and AI, helping financial institutions tell more human stories in an increasingly digital world. He’s passionate about making financial protection simple, accessible, and even a little more fun — proving you don’t need buzzwords or hype to make banking and technology relevant.

There’s nothing quite like the rush of feeling early—early to a trend, early to a movement, early to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That’s precisely what Edwin felt in 2015–2016, when investing in legal cannabis became possible in parts of the United States.

For the first time, regular people could invest in a newly legalized industry. It felt like history happening in real time, a frontier market ready to explode. Edwin and his friends didn’t want to miss out, especially when companies were going public, and their share prices seemed destined to skyrocket.

One of those stocks was Tilray. At $143 a share, Edwin was convinced he was buying the future. He imagined stock splits, booming demand, and a cannabis empire rising from the ground floor. Instead, he watched that $143 tumble month after month, until he finally sold it for around 30 cents. The emotional rollercoaster of hope, disappointment, and finally acceptance was a journey Edwin will never forget.

A 99.3% loss.

He now calls it his worst investment—not just because of the financial hit, but because of how powerfully excitement and hype clouded his judgment.

• Every investor thinks their situation is unique. But in reality, the same patterns repeat again and again.
• Markets take time to mature.
• Regulation can shift overnight.
• Early doesn’t always mean right.
• Excitement is not a strategy.

• A portfolio isn’t just about diversification by industry or geography; it’s also about diversifying across stages of maturity.
• Stable, well-regulated companies like Coca-Cola or Pepsi behave very differently from early-stage, hype-driven industries, such as the cannabis sector.
• Even large companies, with teams of top analysts, often get it wrong.

If Edwin could offer one piece of advice to anyone starry-eyed over the next big thing, it would be this:

Do your due diligence. Seriously.

Before you invest in anything—especially something exciting, futuristic, or rapidly trending—slow down and ask:

• Has this been done before?
• What can I learn from past bubbles?
• What does history say about similar innovations?
• Am I investing in fundamentals—or feelings?

Whether it’s cannabis in 2016 or AI in 2024, the pattern is the same. Booms become bubbles. Investors overestimate how fast an industry will mature. And emotion often wins over discipline. But with the right mindset and discipline, you can avoid these pitfalls.

Edwin encourages people to empower themselves with real financial knowledge. That’s why he co-founded the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion (NAFLI)—a nonprofit dedicated to helping individuals understand money, investing, and financial products.

Whether you’re new to investing or leading a financial institution, NAFLI offers education, tools, and resources to help individuals make more informed financial decisions.

Edwin’s goal for the next 12 months is to have a full, uninterrupted conversation with his daughter, one that lasts longer than 10 minutes and isn’t broken by phones, notifications, or distractions. Edwin wants to rebuild community and presence—starting at home.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Website

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Scott Alldridge is CEO of IP Services and President of the IT Process Institute, a bestselling author of the VisibleOps series, and a Certified Chief Information Security Officer.

STORY: Scott’s worst investment was a stake in a startup promising to deliver hot coffee by drone. Excited by the futuristic idea, he invested before the concept was proven—but the project quickly crashed when the FAA banned drone deliveries and a prototype failed spectacularly.

LEARNING: Being first doesn’t always mean being right. Due diligence is non-negotiable.

Scott Alldridge is CEO of IP Services and President of the IT Process Institute, a bestselling author of the VisibleOps series, and a Certified Chief Information Security Officer. He holds an MBA in cybersecurity and has over 30 years of experience in IT and cybersecurity leadership. Scott empowers organizations to achieve resilience through process excellence, Zero Trust, and AI-driven security.

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, coffee isn’t just a drink; it’s a way of life. Seattle is home to Starbucks, and in Oregon, coffee culture runs deep. So when Scott was pitched an idea that combined coffee and technology—delivering hot coffee via drone—he couldn’t resist.

The concept sounded revolutionary: push a button on your phone, and a drone drops off your piping-hot Americano right at your doorstep. It felt like the future—part Amazon innovation, part TED Talk dream.

Excited, Scott invested for a 3% stake in the startup. The founders promised a caffeinated empire built on convenience and cutting-edge tech.

But just three months later, the buzz wore off. The FAA issued a cease-and-desist order on all drone delivery experiments, particularly those involving liquids.

And then came the final straw: the company’s prototype drone spilled an entire cup of hot coffee mid-flight, grounding both the drone and Scott’s hopes. The “coffee drone revolution” turned into a $10,000 lesson in wishful thinking. Delivering hot coffee by drone was never going to fly—literally.

• Being first doesn’t always mean being right.
• It’s tempting to jump into the next big idea, especially when it sounds exciting and visionary. However, early-stage innovation carries significant risk, especially when the concept hasn’t been tested or proven.
• Enthusiasm can cloud judgment. Instead of investing based on a slick pitch deck or futuristic concept, it’s smarter to wait until an idea is validated, tested, and compliant with regulations.

• Every idea looks brilliant until reality—and regulation—show up.
• Even in large corporations, where top analysts and executives lead multi-million-dollar mergers, success isn’t guaranteed. Only about 20% of them added value within three to five years.
• Business is hard, and due diligence is non-negotiable.

Always do your due diligence. Before investing in any idea—no matter how exciting—slow down and dig deep:

• Validate the concept. Is there a working prototype, or just a fancy pitch?
• Check the regulations, especially if the business operates in a grey area (like drones or cannabis).
• Assess the risk. What happens if laws, markets, or consumer behaviour change?
• Stay patient. If it’s truly a good idea, it will still be good when it’s proven.

Scott recommends his Amazon bestseller, Visible Ops Cybersecurity: Practical Ways to Enhance Your Cybersecurity Posture, which breaks down complex IT security concepts into real-world strategies that leaders can actually apply.

For executives who don’t speak “tech,” he’s also written The Visible Ops Executive Companion Guide, a concise 105-page edition with zero “geek speak”—just actionable guidance.

And coming soon: Visible Ops AI: Artificial Intelligence Governance with Practical Guidance, where Scott explores how businesses can safely and responsibly integrate AI while protecting data integrity.

Scott’s goal for the next 12 months is to double down on two things: growth and impact.

On the business side, his goal is to expand the top-line revenue of his IT services firm and bring in new client partnerships. But there’s also a bigger mission driving him—making the world a safer place through smarter, more disciplined cybersecurity practices.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Website
• Book

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Thomas J. Powell, founder of The Powell Perspective™, is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and advocate for founders, bringing clarity, strategy, and resilience to leaders building at scale.

STORY: Thomas invested $3.6M in a friend’s cannabis company, where he ignored his own due diligence framework. Because he skipped key governance protections and didn’t document alignment or exit terms, the investment became frustrating, hard to control, and nearly impossible to fix—proving that breaking your own rules is the most expensive mistake.

LEARNING: Never mix friendship and business. Make sure both you and the founder are solving the same problem.

Imagine navigating the high-stakes world of capital, strategy, and legacy with a guide who has raised billions and structured ventures worldwide. Thomas J. Powell, founder of The Powell Perspective™, is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and advocate for founders, bringing clarity, strategy, and resilience to leaders building at scale.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Never mix friendship and business.” Thomas learned that lesson the hard way.

His story starts with good intentions. When his kids’ grandmother battled breast cancer, cannabis was the only thing that eased her treatment side effects. So when medical marijuana became legal in a few US states, investing in the cannabis industry felt like the right thing to do.

But here’s where things went wrong.

A close friend brought him the deal, and because of that personal connection, Thomas skipped many of the due diligence steps he usually followed through his family office. No detailed governance clauses. No proper reporting framework. No accountability structure.

It wasn’t a small investment either—about $3.6 million. As time went on, the cracks began to show. The company missed financial reports, accounting systems were weak, and when COVID hit, things only got messier. To make matters worse, taking over the business wasn’t even an option since he didn’t have a cannabis license. The emotional toll of this situation was significant, as Thomas had to face the reality of his investment failing due to trusting a friend blindly.

The worst part? Having to look a friend in the eye, knowing he’d broken his own investment rules.

• Verify alignment: Make sure both you and the founder are solving the same problem, and that you share the same exit goals. Ask questions like, “If someone offered to buy this company for $25 million today, would you sell?” If your answers don’t match, you’re not aligned.
• Watch the hubris: Just because you’re smart or successful doesn’t mean you can see around every corner. Understand the legal and regulatory landscape before investing, especially in industries like cannabis, where compliance is complex.
• Enforce accountability: Set clear reporting expectations from day one and include consequences for missed deadlines. Thomas admits that if his deal had stricter enforcement clauses, it would’ve saved him time, money, and frustration later on.

• Many startups underpay themselves. It might sound noble, but it actually distorts valuation and creates problems later.
• Make sure founders are paying themselves a market-rate salary. That way, when the business is valued or acquired, there are no nasty surprises about hidden costs.
• Define roles clearly. Being a founder is different from being an employee. A salary compensates for your work; ownership rewards your risk. Mixing the two confuses things.

Align the capital and exit terms from day one—and write them down, even on a napkin. You don’t need a 30-page legal contract to start. Even a handwritten summary that defines the key terms, goals, and triggers for selling or exiting can prevent misunderstandings later. Because once the ink dries, or worse, once the money’s wired, it’s too late to wish you’d had that conversation.

Thomas recommends these books, principles, and resources for smarter investing.

• Read The Richest Man in Babylon – A timeless classic that teaches simple, lasting lessons about money management and investing in what you understand.
• Invest in problems you understand. Don’t chase hype. If you know how an industry works, you’ll see both the risks and opportunities clearly.
• Take advice from people with a “bigger pile.” In other words, learn from those who’ve already achieved more than you in that field. Theory is cheap—experience is priceless.
• Use structured tools. Thomas’s Founders Office provides frameworks that evaluate pitch decks for both founders and investors, helping you spot weaknesses and strengths before committing capital.

Thomas’s goal for the next 12 months is to expand his Founders Office cohort program, connecting entrepreneurs and investors to create better capital alignment. He’s passionate about free enterprise and founder advocacy, believing that capitalism—done right—can lift people out of poverty and fuel innovation worldwide. Whether in the US, Europe, or Sub-Saharan Africa, his mission is the same: empower founders and investors to build lasting, ethical wealth together.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Website
• Master Class

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads

BIO: As Co-Founder & CEO of Mode Mobile, Dan Novaes is leading the transformation of how people interact with technology. His “Earn As You Go” software empowers millions of consumers to turn daily habits into passive income.

STORY: Dan decided to take the bold move of turning his treasury into a long-term crypto strategy. What started as $2 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum ballooned to $30 million, but the 2022 crash and business pressures forced him to liquidate at low prices—missing out on what could have been a $100 million windfall.

LEARNING: Don’t chase aggressive expansion without a clear path to profitability. Stick to your core business. Separate your business from speculative bets.

As Co-Founder & CEO of Mode Mobile, Dan Novaes is leading the transformation of how people interact with technology. His “Earn As You Go” software empowers millions of consumers to turn daily habits into passive income. Under his leadership, Mode achieved 32,481% revenue growth from 2019 to 2022 and ranked #1 in Software on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 in North America.

In today’s rapidly evolving and highly interconnected business world, companies are increasingly relying on external partnerships to drive growth and innovation.

Dan’s story begins in the early days of crypto. His company had raised funds through Bitcoin and Ethereum when Bitcoin was valued at just a few thousand dollars and Ethereum at only a few hundred. This early success in the crypto market was a testament to the potential for significant growth that these investments could bring.

Once the business had a comfortable runway, Dan made a bold move—he turned their treasury, which is the accumulated profits and cash reserves, into a long-term crypto strategy, much like what companies like MicroStrategy would later become known for.

At first, the decision looked genius. That $1–2 million ballooned into $30 million. Dan was on CNBC, celebrating as Bitcoin crossed $10,000, and his company seemed unstoppable. They never had to fundraise again—until the 2022 crash.

In 2022, Bitcoin’s price fell from $63,000 to $18,000, and pressure mounted. Compounding the pain, many of Dan’s advertising partners went bankrupt, leaving unpaid bills. This was a significant blow to the company’s financial stability. To survive, Dan’s company had to liquidate almost the entire treasury at depressed prices.

Had Dan managed his growth and financials more cautiously, that crypto position could have grown to $100 million or more. Instead, he walked away with far less—and a bitter lesson.

• Growth at all costs is dangerous. Chasing aggressive expansion without a clear path to profitability can leave your company vulnerable when market conditions shift.
• Profit-taking matters. Riding the wave without ever securing gains turned paper wealth into a forced liquidation.
• Stick to your core business.
• Discipline is everything. Not letting market euphoria dictate strategy is critical to long-term survival.

• Separate your business from speculative bets. Don’t gamble with your excess cash on foreign exchange trades. Instead, hedge your risks because trading currencies isn’t your core business.
• Have cash discipline for survival through decades of ups and downs.
• Guard your cash, respect your core business, and don’t confuse speculative opportunities with sustainable operations.

Take time every week for deep thinking. When things are going well, take a moment to ask: What could go wrong? By slowing down and imagining worst-case scenarios, you can prepare contingency plans before you get “punched in the face” by reality. This proactive approach to risk management will keep you prepared for any eventuality.

Dan recommends building the habit of scheduled deep thinking. Carve out one or two hours weekly—whether it’s through running or quiet reflection. The practice isn’t just for investing; it sharpens decision-making across life and business.

Dan’s goal for the next 12 months is to double revenue and triple EBITDA through acquiring and growing new businesses. It’s a bold target, but one grounded in the hard lessons of the past. This time, growth will come with more balance, more discipline, and a stronger focus on sustainability.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Website

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Dr. Gilbert  A. Guzmán is a business strategist and systems thinker. He is the founder of IntraQ AI, a SaaS solution designed to eliminate knowledge gaps within the workplace, and the author of Atomic Impact: Systems for Transformative Productivity.

STORY: In 2012, Gilbert  envisioned a portable charger vending system for airports, universities, and theaters—a “Redbox for power.” He over-engineered, over-researched, and waited for “perfect”—while another company launched the same concept. By the time he moved, they dominated airports with a first-mover advantage.

LEARNING: Jump in and get things going. Don’t be afraid to fail. Iterate, and get your product to market.

Dr. Gilbert A. Guzmán is a business strategist and systems thinker. He is the founder of IntraQ AI, a SaaS solution designed to eliminate knowledge gaps within the workplace, and the author of Atomic Impact: Systems for Transformative Productivity, which you can get for free using the code: Stotz.

With a doctorate in business and experience leading large teams, he helps organizations boost productivity through practical systems built for real-world constraints. His work bridges people, data, and technology for lasting operational success.

In 2012, Gilbert  envisioned a portable charger vending system for airports, universities, and theaters—a “Redbox for power.” Users would rent charged batteries and return them to kiosks for reuse.

Ironically, Gilbert is a very impatient man, but when it comes to business ideas, he takes his sweet time, sometimes too long. This is exactly what happened with the portable charger idea.

Gilbert over-engineered, over-researched, and waited for “perfect”—while Fuel Rod launched the same concept. By the time he moved, they dominated airports with a first-mover advantage. He invented the wheel but didn’t roll it.

• Jump in, do what you need to do, stay up late, work hard, do the research, and get things going. Ultimately, everything will come to fruition.
• Manage your risks.
• You can earn back cash, but you can’t earn back lost time.
• In startups, a bad launch always beats no launch. Waiting for no flaws means 100% flaw: no product.
• You can’t be a risk-averse leader.

• MVPs beat masterpieces because if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.
• The market doesn’t care who invented a product—it cares who shipped it.

• Don’t be afraid to fail. Iterate, get your product to market, and find out if it makes sense and is relevant.
• Don’t get scared of the big names, the Googles of the world, and think that they will crush you.
• You don’t have to be horizontal. You can go vertical. You can find a niche and dedicate your time to it.

Gilbert recommends his e-book Atomic Impact: Systems for Transformative Productivity (remember to use code Stotz for a free copy).

He also recommends visiting his website for additional resources. Additionally, reading Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis can help you apply systems thinking to your personal and work life, ultimately changing the way you view life, society, and work, and becoming a little more solution-oriented.

Gilbert’s goal for the next 12 months is to further enhance the success of Atomic Impact and IntraQ AI by creating speaking engagements and workshops that will reinvigorate the concepts he has developed and transform the way people work.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Podcast
• YouTube
• Blog 
• Website
• Books

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they conclude the lessons from the book.

LEARNING: Investing isn’t about chasing the next hot stock—it’s about building a resilient, well-diversified portfolio you can live with in good times and bad.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. In this series, they conclude on the lessons from the book.

If you’ve ever wondered how to cut through the noise of investment hype and build a portfolio that actually works for you, Larry’s Enrich Your Future is the blueprint you’ve been looking for. Here’s a distilled look at the wisdom from his book.

Larry insists there are only a handful of fundamental truths in investing—and if you master them, you’ll avoid most costly mistakes:

• Markets are highly efficient – While not perfect, markets price assets so effectively that consistently beating them on a risk-adjusted basis is near impossible. So don’t engage in individual security selection or market timing.
• All risk assets offer similar risk-adjusted returns – Whether it’s US stocks, Thai stocks, or corporate bonds, the relationship between risk and return holds steady over time. Invest in assets based upon your ability, willingness, and need to take risks. If you’re willing to take more risk and have the ability and maybe the need to, then you can load up on more risky, higher expected-returning assets. It doesn’t mean they’re better assets; rather, they have higher expected returns at the cost of higher risk.
• Diversification is non-negotiable – Since all risk assets have similar risk-adjusted returns, it makes no sense to concentrate all of your risk in one basket. Concentrating your risk in a single asset class or geography is a recipe for trouble.

Forget cookie-cutter solutions—Larry believes the “right” portfolio depends on three factors:

1. Ability to take risk – Your financial capacity to weather market downturns is influenced by factors like investment horizon and job stability.
2. Willingness to take risk – Your psychological comfort level with market volatility.
3. Need to take risk – Whether you require high returns to meet your financial goals.

Larry’s rule? Let the lowest of these three determine your equity exposure. If you don’t need to take big risks, don’t.

A total global market portfolio is an ideal starting point—currently about 65% US, 27% developed international, and 8% emerging markets. Adjust only slightly if you have a reasoned view, but avoid drastic tilts that imply you “know better” than the market.

Larry is a big believer in alternative investments—if you can access them at reasonable costs. These include:

• Private credit – Lending directly to companies, often with double-digit returns and lower volatility than equities.
• Reinsurance – Returns tied to natural disaster risks, uncorrelated with stock markets.
• Infrastructure funds – Assets like toll roads, dams, and utilities with stable cash flows.

His own portfolio now includes a significant allocation to alternatives, reducing reliance on traditional stocks and bonds.

Instead of obsessing over “asset classes,” Larry advises analysing the risks each investment brings—economic cycle risk, credit risk, inflation risk—and blending assets with low correlations to one another.

While factor investing (such as value, small-cap, quality, and momentum) is powerful, buying single-factor funds separately can create costly and contradictory trades. Larry favours integrated factor funds that combine multiple factors into one systematic strategy, reducing costs and improving efficiency.

Even the best portfolio fails if you can’t stick with it. Larry warns that there is no one right portfolio. The right portfolio for you is the one you are most likely to stick with.

That means:

• Avoid assets you can’t hold for at least 10–15 years.
• Expect long stretches of underperformance from every risk asset.
• Continue to buy during downturns to maintain your target allocation.

Less than 1% of investors have the skill, time, and emotional discipline to manage their investments entirely on their own. Larry recommends working with a true fiduciary adviser—one who:

• Is paid only by you (no commissions).
• Invests in the same funds they recommend.
• Backs every decision with empirical evidence.

You don’t need to read all 18 of Larry’s books, but three or four will give you the foundational knowledge to make better decisions. Investing ignorance, he warns, is far costlier than the price of a good book.

Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing isn’t about chasing the next hot stock—it’s about building a resilient, well-diversified portfolio you can live with in good times and bad. Follow Larry’s principles, and you’ll not only protect your wealth but also position yourself for long-term financial peace of mind.

As Larry himself says:

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 41: A Tale of Two Strategies and Chapter 42: How to Identify an Advisor You Can Trust.

LEARNING: Passive investing is still the winner. If something is worth doing, it’s worth paying someone to do it for you.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 41: A Tale of Two Strategies and Chapter 42: How to Identify an Advisor You Can Trust.

In Chapter 41, Larry explains why investors who have implemented the types of passive strategies recommended in his book have experienced “the best of times.” On the other hand, for those who continue to play the game of active investing, it has generally been the “worst of times.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens may have been writing about the French Revolution, but Larry observes that that line rings true for today’s investors, too. Depending on how you approach the market, your experience can feel like either a triumph or a disaster.

According to Larry, people who still believe in the promise of active fund managers as the winning strategy are likely to find themselves in the “season of Darkness.” Over the years, the ability of active managers to consistently outperform has dwindled significantly.

You may be surprised to learn that in 1998, when Charles Ellis wrote his famous book “Winning the Loser’s Game”, about 20% of actively managed funds produced statistically significant returns after adjusting for risk. That figure was already discouraging.

A later study in 2014 (Conviction in Equity Investing) found that the percentage of managers producing any net alpha had dropped from 20% in 1993 to just 1.6%.

Larry reminds investors who are holding on to the hope that active management will deliver the goods that they are swimming against a strong current. The odds aren’t in their favour—and neither are the expenses.

If you’ve embraced passive investing, it’s the best of times. The resounding success of this strategy, backed by a wealth of data and real-world results, should instill a strong sense of confidence in your investment decisions.

For investors who believe that markets are efficient and that passive investing is the winning strategy, it has been the best of times. The availability of passively managed funds—index funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and passive asset class funds-has dramatically increased. These funds cover a broader range of asset classes and factors, giving you more effective tools to diversify your portfolio.

Passive funds are not only inherently more tax-efficient because of their low turnover, but some are also specifically managed with tax efficiency in mind. And if you’re using ETF versions, they become even more efficient.

Then there’s the cost. Famous fund companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity are in fierce competition for your investment dollars. That competition has driven expense ratios down dramatically.

In Chapter 42, Larry provides guidance to those investors who believe they are best served by working with a financial advisor. He shares a roadmap to help them identify one they can trust.

In Larry’s opinion, investing is like home repairs.

There are two types of people: the do-it-yourselfers and those who hire professionals. You might fall into the DIY camp because you believe you can save money or because you enjoy the process.

But, Larry adds, some people who try to do it themselves simply shouldn’t. If you don’t have the right skills, the cost of fixing mistakes can be much greater than hiring a professional in the first place.

Here’s where Larry’s encouragement to use the Swedroe Principle comes in: If something is worth doing, it’s worth paying someone to do it for you. The Swedroe Principle advocates for the use of professional financial advisors for tasks that are complex or require specialized knowledge. This advice can empower you to make confident investment decisions.

You may value your free time. Maybe you just don’t enjoy managing investments. Or maybe, like many, you’ve come to realize that if something can be messed up, you’ll find a way to do it. Whatever the reason, Larry says it’s okay to admit that managing your finances on your own may not be the best route.

Studies show that few individuals possess both the knowledge and the discipline needed to be successful investors. If investing were compared to home repair skills, DIY investors would likely fare worse than DIY handypersons. And the financial consequences of poor investment decisions can be far greater than the cost of fixing a leaky faucet.

On the other hand, if you do recognize your limitations, you can still come out ahead—if you choose the right financial advisor.

Choosing a financial advisor, Larry emphasizes, is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. Surveys show that, in addition to financial expertise, trust is at the top of the list of what people want in an advisor.

Trust is intangible and hard to measure, but it’s crucial. That’s why it’s important to ask the right questions and insist on the right commitments when choosing an advisor.

Larry shares a checklist to guide your decision. He says when interviewing an advisor, ask them to commit to the following:

1. Client-first philosophy: The advisor should demonstrate that their core principle is to act in your best interest.
2. Fiduciary duty: They must follow a fiduciary standard, the highest legal duty of care, which is very different from the “suitability standard” used by many brokers.
3. Fee-only compensation: They should earn no commissions—just fees paid directly by you. This avoids the temptation to recommend products that benefit them more than you.
4. Full disclosure: Any potential conflicts of interest must be clearly disclosed.
5. Evidence-based advice: Their investment philosophy should be grounded in rigorous academic research—not guesswork or opinions.
6. Client-centric service: Their only goal in offering solutions should be to serve your best interest.
7. Personal attention: They should build a strong personal relationship with you and provide access to a team of professionals.
8. Skin in the game: They should invest their own money based on the same principles they recommend to you.
9. Integrated planning: They should help you develop a plan that includes investments, estate planning, taxes, and risk management tailored to your unique needs.
10. Goal-oriented decisions: Every recommendation should be made with your long-term success in mind.
11. Qualified professionals: The people advising you should hold respected credentials like CFP, PFS, or similar.

1. Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, “Luck versus Skill in the Cross-Section of Mutual Fund Returns,” The Journal of Finance (October 2010).
2. Mike Sebastian and Sudhakar Attaluri, “Conviction in Equity Investing,” The Journal of Portfolio Management (Summer 2014).

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and...

BIO: Pieter Slegers is the founder of Compounding Quality Newsletter. Pieter worked for three years as a Belgian asset manager before focusing full-time on his investment newsletter, Compounding Quality, in July 2022. Compounding Quality has over 1 million followers across social media and nearly 500,000 email subscribers. The goal of the newsletter is to help other investors by focusing on Quality Investing.

STORY: At the age of 13, Peter convinced his parents to open a brokerage account. He picked the broker’s newest “hottest pick” stock—an oil/gas transport company. He invested everything, thinking the people running the company knew what they were doing. Weeks later, the 2008 financial crisis hit. Peter sold his stock after a year, taking a 60% loss.

LEARNING: Small losses are better than catastrophic ones. Knowledge is your only edge.

Pieter Slegers is the founder of Compounding Quality Newsletter. Pieter studied Financial Management at the KULeuven and graduated summa cum laude. He worked for three years as a Belgian asset manager before focusing full-time on his investment newsletter, Compounding Quality, in July 2022. Compounding Quality has over 1 million followers across social media and nearly 500,000 email subscribers. The goal of the newsletter is to help other investors by focusing on Quality Investing.

At the age of 13, Peter earned his first paycheck by stocking shelves at a supermarket. Eager to grow his savings, he persuaded his parents to open a brokerage account (a feat for minors in Belgium).

Despite his lack of investing knowledge, he diligently explored his broker’s platform for ideas. A new stock caught his eye on the broker’s “hot picks” list—an oil/gas transport company. He invested all his earnings, believing in the company’s potential.

Peter didn’t conduct any research, despite his limited knowledge of oil and gas and his complete lack of investing experience. He simply trusted the “hot pick”.

Weeks later, the 2008 financial crisis hit. Peter sold his stock after a year, taking a 60% loss. His family was not impressed by his poor investment skills and told him that investing was akin to gambling, and he should consider working for the government instead.

Pieter felt like such a failure. However, that $300 loss was his best investment. It hurt, but it taught him never to follow others blindly.

• Small losses are better than catastrophic ones. Losing $300 at the age of 13 beats losing $300,000 when you’re 40. Early pain builds immunity to big mistakes.
• Knowledge is your only edge: If you don’t understand how a company makes money, you’re gambling, not investing.
• Failure fuels obsession. That loss made Pieter devour investing books, 10-Ks, and financial news. Pain became his mentor.

• Allow young investors to make mistakes with small sums (e.g., companies they understand, such as Netflix or Coca-Cola).
• Humility beats hubris. 90% of professional investors at Goldman Sachs underperform. What makes you different? It’s your checklists, not confidence.
• Read biographies, study market history, and connect patterns. Wisdom compounds like interest.

For parents guiding young investors, start with brands that they are familiar with and use in their daily lives, such as Coca-Cola, Netflix, and McDonald’s. When they drink a Coke, say: “You own a piece of this.”

Cap play money at 5% and limit high-risk bets to cash they can afford to lose. Encourage young investors to do their homework. If they can’t explain the business model in two sentences, they shouldn’t own it.

Pieter recommends reading What I Learned About Investing From Darwin by Pulak Prasad if you want to perfect your investment skills. He also offers numerous free resources on CompoundingQuality.net.

Learning from others’ experiences, whether through books, online resources, or personal advice, is a valuable way to improve your own investing skills.

Pieter’s goal for the next 12 months is to continue his learning journey by reading books, listening to podcasts, and engaging in other educational activities. He understands that continuous learning is the key to successful investing.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn 
• Website

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 40: The Big Rocks.

LEARNING: Passive investing will give you the freedom you need.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 40: The Big Rocks.

In Chapter 40, Larry explains why passive (systematic) investing is the winning strategy in life as well as investing.

Like all the other chapters in the book, this one begins with a story used as an analogy to help understand a financial issue. In this one, a time-management expert fills a mason jar with large rocks. “Full?” she asks. The class agrees. She adds gravel, sand, and water – each filling the spaces between. When a student suggests the lesson is about fitting more into busy schedules, she corrects them:

“If you don’t put the big rocks in first, they’ll never fit at all.”

Larry explains the metaphor’s profound implication for wealth:

• Big rocks = Family, health, growth, legacy
• Gravel = Stock charts, earnings analysis
• Sand = Financial news, market commentary
• Water = Trading forums, portfolio tinkering

Larry explains that active investors start with gravel and sand, leaving insufficient time for the big rocks. They spend much of their precious leisure time watching the latest business news, studying the latest charts, scanning and posting on Internet investment discussion boards, reading financial trade publications and newsletters, and so on. Their jars fill with noise, leaving no room for life’s essentials.

Passive investors, on the other hand, ignore the ”noise” (the sand, the gravel, and the water) and place big rocks first. Their strategy operates quietly, driven by low-cost index funds and disciplined rebalancing. The result? Their jars hold what truly enriches life, giving them a sense of freedom and independence.

During the 1990s bull market, a doctor would spend nights analyzing stocks after 12-hour shifts. He turned $10,000 into $100,000 – but his marriage was on the verge of collapse. His wife no longer had a husband; his child lost a parent to the glow of stock charts. When the tech bubble burst, the money vanished.

The wake-up call was brutal: He had traded first steps and bedtime stories for digits on a screen. After reading Larry’s book, he switched to passive investing, which helped him salvage both his finances and his family. Now, he was playing the winners’ game in life and investing.

A Wharton MBA and corporate treasurer spent decades analyzing stocks after work. Upon adopting passive investing, he calculated a shocking truth: He wasted 6.5 weeks per year on futile research.

Worse, this “gravel” wasn’t neutral – trading fees, taxes, and behavioral errors eroded returns. By eliminating the noise, he reclaimed 500+ annual hours for family and passions.

Larry notes that indexing and passive investing have the ‘disadvantage’ of being boring. However, he continues, investing was never meant to be exciting despite what Wall Street and the financial media want you to believe. Investing is supposed to be about achieving your financial goals with the least amount of risk.

Making the ‘boring’ choice in investing can actually be empowering, as it puts you in control and builds confidence in your financial future. Larry further explains that indexing, and passive investing in general, not only allows you to earn market returns in a low-cost and tax-efficient manner but also frees you from spending any time at all watching CNBC and reading financial publications that are essentially no more than what Jane Bryant Quinn called “investment porn.”

If you find that you need excitement from your investments, consider setting up a separate “entertainment” account. The assets inside that account should not exceed more than a few percent of your total portfolio. Invest the rest of your assets in what I believe to be the winner’s game.

1. Paul Samuelson, Quoted in Jonathan Burton, Investment Titans (McGraw-Hill, 2001).

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play
• Enrich Your Future 13: Past Performance Is Not a Predictor of Future Performance
• Enrich Your Future 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the Horizon
• Enrich Your Future 15: Individual Stocks Are Riskier Than You Believe
• Enrich...

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 39: Enough.

LEARNING: More wealth does not give you more happiness.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 39: Enough.

In Chapter 39, Larry discusses the importance of knowing that you have “enough,” a concept that, once understood, can enlighten and guide your financial decisions.

In 2009, Larry conducted an investment seminar for the Tiger 21 Group, America’s most exclusive wealth management group. One of the issues the group asked him to address was: How do the wealthy think about risk, and how should they approach it? Larry’s answer exposed a terrifying paradox.

According to Larry, self-made wealth follows a predictable script. Fortunes are built through extreme risk-taking: betting everything on one business, ignoring diversification, and trusting instinct over analysis. This breeds a dangerous confidence—the kind that whispers, “If I did it once, I can do it again.”

He explains that the utility of the wealth curve resembles an elephant from the side. It goes up quickly because when you have nothing, even a little extra money can significantly improve your life. If you’re homeless and someone gives you $25 to take a shower, get a meal, and stuff, that will make you much better off. But once you get to some level of net worth, like $2 million or $3 million, or whatever the number is for you, the extra wealth is better than less.

However, as you gain more wealth, your incremental level of happiness—just like the elephant’s back— flattens out. There’s virtually little or no improvement in your state of well-being and happiness.

Larry stresses that wealth building and wealth preservation demand opposite mindsets. Those with the greatest ability to take risks (resources to absorb losses) and willingness (confidence from past wins) often overlook the third critical factor: need. And therein lies the trap.

The wealthiest individuals have a near-zero need for further risk. Yet, they continually strive for more and take on significant risks that may not ultimately lead to an enhanced level of happiness. In reality, they do not need to take such a substantial risk. They can dial down the risk in their portfolio and be much happier, sleep better, not worry about markets, and enjoy their life.

Larry recounts meeting a couple in 2003. Three years earlier, their portfolio stood at $13 million, with a heavy concentration in tech stocks. By 2003? $3 million. An 80% collapse.

“Would doubling to $26 million have changed your lives?” Larry asked.

“No,” they admitted.

“Then why risk everything for gains that wouldn’t matter?”

Their fatal error? Never defining their “enough.” When desires—a larger yacht, a vineyard, or “legacy” projects—morph into perceived needs, they artificially inflate risk tolerance. This ignites a destructive cycle: greater “needs” demand riskier bets, which invite catastrophic losses.

Larry points to research that reshapes wealth psychology: Beyond $75,000 per year (adjusted for inflation), happiness plateaus. After $10 million, diminishing returns accelerate violently. The billionaire’s third home brings no more joy than a latte at the bookstore.

This isn’t a theory. Psychologists confirm that true contentment comes from non-tradable assets. These are the experiences and relationships that money can’t buy. A walk in the park with your partner. Reading to grandchildren. The freedom to control your time. These cost little yet yield everything. A $100 bottle of wine? It can’t compete with a $10 one shared with friends.

Larry prescribes four antidotes for Tiger 21’s members:

• First, ask: “If I lost 80% tomorrow, would my core lifestyle survive? Would my relationships?” If the answer chills you, you’re over-risked.
• Second, map your marginal utility of wealth. Draw a curve tracking wealth against life satisfaction. Where does the line flatten? That’s your “enough.” For most, it’s far lower than imagined.
• Third, build a “fortress portfolio.” Replace concentrated bets with global diversification. Swap illiquid moonshots for Treasury bonds and index funds. Protect capital like a museum guards its masterpieces.
• Fourth, demote desires. Luxury items must never masquerade as needs. That vineyard? A want—funded only if cash flows cover it without gambling capital.

Larry concludes by emphasizing that building wealth requires courage. Preserving it requires the courage to say: “No more.” The difference between the rich and the ruined isn’t intelligence—it’s knowing when you have enough.

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play
• Enrich Your Future 13: Past Performance Is Not a Predictor of Future Performance
• Enrich Your Future 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the...

BIO: Blair LaCorte is a dynamic executive with experience across entertainment, aviation, AI, aerospace, consulting, and more.

STORY: Blair shares three catastrophic investment failures and the life-altering lessons that rewired his approach to wealth.

LEARNING: Chase knowledge, not hype, and don’t let greed hijack logic. Invest with friends only if you’re willing to lose both.

Blair LaCorte is a dynamic executive with experience across entertainment, aviation, AI, aerospace, consulting, and more. He has held CEO roles at companies such as PRG, XOJET, and Autodesk, and led startups to successful IPOs. Currently, he’s training as an astronaut for Virgin Galactic and is Vice Chairman at the Buck Institute.

Fresh out of college at 22, Blair met a smooth-talking investor who flaunted his “lifetime monthly checks” from an oil well. Blinded by dollar signs and zero industry knowledge, he poured his savings into a single well.

Blair ignored basic due diligence, diversification, and warnings about low-quality reserves. It was all about greed. He had seen someone make money where they got paid every month for the rest of their life, as long as the well lasted.

The greed kept him in and kept him investing in the well. At the end of the day, the oil was of below-average quality and was not as much as they thought it would be. Blair’s ignorance caused him a 100% loss. The well underperformed, and his greed trapped him in a sinking ship. Blair even commissioned a plaque to memorialize his shame—a daily reminder that “easy money” is a predator in disguise.

After Blair’s first IPO success in 1999, his roommate pitched him on Coffee.com—a visionary play on single-origin beans (decades before it became trendy). Blair invested early, then panicked as losses mounted. When the roommate begged for more capital, he refused because he did not think it would succeed, but guilt kept him from cutting ties.

After a while, the startup imploded. Worse? Blair’s friend never spoke to him again. He learned the hard truth from this unwise investment: mixing money with friendship is financial suicide.

At the peak of the dot-com boom, Blair had just scored a top-tier IPO. His broker urgently called and advised him to sell immediately at $59.50 as he believed the boom would not last. But pride convinced him that the broker was just chasing commissions.

Blair held stubbornly as the stock bled out to $2. He lost $570,000 in vaporized gains. Blair’s ego had bet against reality, and reality won.

• Chase knowledge, not hype, and don’t let greed hijack logic. If you don’t understand how the money is made, you’re the exit strategy for someone else.
• Friends + money = atomic risk. Invest with friends only if you’re willing to lose both on the same day.
• Pride is the silent portfolio killer. The market doesn’t care about your ego, and exit signals don’t negotiate.
• Your time is your ultimate currency. Grinding your years into a dying venture to ‘prove a point’ is the costliest investment of all.

• Macro trumps micro. Brilliant ideas fail if they’re too early or too late. Always ask: “Is the world ready for this?”
• Preserve capital like your life depends on it. A young you can risk time; an older you must protect capital.
• Passive high-risk bets (like an oil well) are gambling. Invest where you can influence outcomes.

When temptation knocks:

• Demand the “Why You?” clause. If a “sure thing” lands in your lap, ask: Why me? Why now? What do they know that I don’t?
• Map the macro weather by using tools like Google Trends, industry reports, and Fed data to pressure-test timing.
• Cap the bleeding by allocating a max of 5% of net worth to high-risk plays. Set automatic exit triggers (e.g., “Sell if -25%”).
• Sign contracts, define failure clauses, and never mix personal loans with equity, especially if investing with pals.

Blair recommends checking out PPE Mastermind Talks (available for free at PPEmastermind.com) to learn business tactics from battle-tested CEOs. He also recommends reading biographies, examining companies’ histories, and watching documentaries or listening to speakers that prompt you to think differently about things, to accelerate your ability to learn.

Blair’s goal for the next 12 months is radical self-care. Blair wants to do things for himself without feeling guilty.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Website

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 37: Sell in May and Go Away: Financial Astrology and Chapter 38: Chasing Spectacular Fund Performance.

LEARNING: Calendars don’t drive returns. Winners ignore hot funds.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 37: Sell in May and Go Away: Financial Astrology and Chapter 38: Chasing Spectacular Fund Performance.

In chapter 37, Larry explains why the idea of selling stocks in May and switching to cash, then buying back in November, is not a sound strategy.

What financial advisers insist on repeating, in Larry’s view, is: “Sell in May, go to cash, and reinvest in November.” It makes sense and is even logical. And, as the adage has it, numbers don’t lie. Figures, backed by reliable data, show that stocks gain more from November through April (a 5.7% average premium) than from May through October (a 2.6% average premium). So why not time the market?

Larry dismantles this advice, revealing that the ‘Sell in May’ strategy, despite its apparent logic, is a myth. He points out that stocks still outperform cash even during the May to October period, with stocks beating T-bills by 2.6% annually.

Selling stocks prematurely leads to missed gains, and the strategy of switching investments underperforms a simple buy-and-hold approach. In fact, a ‘Sell in May’ strategy yielded an average annual return of 8.3% from 1926 to 2023, while simply holding the S&P 500 returned 10.2%—a significant 1.9% yearly gap.

Larry adds that Taxes and fees make the strategy worse. Trading converts long-term gains (lower tax) into short-term gains (higher tax). Transaction costs always pile up.

Additionally, this strategy is rarely effective. Before 2022, the last “win” was 2011. A single outlier (2022’s bear market) does not make a strategy worthwhile.

According to Larry, one of the fundamental rules of finance is that expected return and risk are positively correlated. So if stocks actually do worse than cash between May and October, they’d need to be less risky for these six months, which is absurd because volatility doesn’t take summer vacations.

Larry notes four reasons why people still believe in this flawed investment strategy:

• Recency bias: Media hypes the strategy after rare wins (like 2022).
• Pattern-seeking: Humans confuse coincidence with cause.
• “Free lunch” fantasy: Active investors crave simple shortcuts.

Larry’s advice is to:

• Ignore the noise. Calendars don’t drive returns.
• Stay invested. Missing just 10 best days in 30 years slashes returns by 50%.
• Focus on what matters: Diversification, low costs, and tax efficiency.

Bottom line: The “Sell in May” strategy is a form of financial astrology. It confuses seasonal patterns with strategy. The market’s not a magic 8-ball. Stop gambling on folklore—and start compounding.

In chapter 38, Larry explains why chasing spectacular performance is not a prudent investment strategy.

He starts the article by highlighting that 2020 was a phenomenal year for hot funds. During that year, 18 US stock funds posted gains of over 100%, attracting $19 billion in investor dollars in pursuit of recent performance. Their prior records seemed unstoppable—17 of 18 had reigned supreme over markets for three straight years.

A landmark Morningstar study by Jeffrey Ptak looked into equity funds that gained more than 100% in a calendar year. He found that of the 123 stock funds that gained at least 100% between 1990 and 2016, just 24 made money in the three years following their phenomenal return.

More adversely, the average fund subsequently lost around 17% each year. Ptak also found that funds that failed in the years before their big gain were far more likely to earn more money during the years after that big year, compared to money that had been profitable during the period preceding their big gain.

There are a few reasons why hot funds could implode. One is overvalued bets. For instance, the 2020 superstars held stocks trading at 3x the valuation of the Nasdaq 100. Another reason is the reversion to the mean. Extreme returns are statistical outliers, not a result of skill. Lastly, the crowd effect. Inflows surge after gains, forcing managers to buy at high prices.

Larry observes that while speculators chased fireworks, Fidelity’s Total Market Index (FSKAX) returned 20.8% in 2020, beating 80% of active funds in its category. It did this with a 0.01% fee, 1/100th the cost of typical active funds.

In conclusion, Larry reminds investors that the race to spectacular returns is a marathon, not a sprint. Winners ignore the fireworks.

1. Jeffrey Ptak, “What Happens After Fund Managers Crush It?” The Evidence Based Investor, January 18, 2001.

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of...

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 36: Fashions and Investment Folly.

LEARNING: Do not be swayed by herd mentality.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 36: Fashions and Investment Folly.

In this chapter, Larry explains why investors allow themselves to be influenced by the herd mentality or the madness of crowds.

When it comes to investing, otherwise perfectly rational people can be influenced by a herd mentality. The potential for significant financial rewards plays on the human emotions of greed and envy. In investing, as in fashion, fluctuations in attitudes often spread widely without any apparent logic.

Larry notes that one of the most remarkable statistics about the world of investing is that there are many more mutual funds than stocks, and there are also more hedge fund managers than stocks. There are also thousands of separate account managers. The question is: Why are there so many managers and so many funds?

According to Larry, there are several explanations for the high number of managers and funds. The first is the all-too-human tendency to fall subject to “recency.” This is the tendency to give too much weight to recent experience while ignoring the lessons of long-term historical evidence. Larry says that investors subject to recency bias make the mistake of extrapolating the most recent past into the future, almost as if it is preordained that the recent trend will continue.

The result is that whenever a hot sector emerges, investors rush to jump on the bandwagon, and money flows into that sector. Inevitably, the fad (fashion) passes and ends badly. The bubble inevitably bursts.

Another reason, Larry notes, is that the advertising machines of Wall Street’s investment firms are great at developing products to meet demand. The record indicates they are even great at creating demand where none should exist.

The internet became the greatest craze of all, and internet funds were designed to exploit the demand. Investors lost more fortunes in the craze. The latest fashions include cloud computing, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence.

However, this trend, at least for mutual funds, has changed, and there are now fewer funds than there were at the height of the internet frenzy. This is a result of many poor performers being either merged out of existence (to erase their track record) or closed due to a lack of sufficient funds to keep them operational.

Another reason for the proliferation of funds is that Wall Street machines recognize active managers’ track records as inconsistent (and often poor) performance. Thus, a family of funds may create several funds in the same category, hoping that at least one will be randomly hot at any given time.

To overcome herd mentality, Larry advises investors to craft a comprehensive investment plan that factors in their risk tolerance. By building a globally diversified portfolio and sticking to this plan, investors can navigate the market’s noise and emotional triggers, such as greed and envy during bull markets and fear and panic during bear markets.

He also adds that investors will benefit more from using passively managed funds to implement the plan; this is the only way to ensure they do not underperform the market. Minimizing this risk gives them the best chance to achieve their goals. If investors adopt the winner’s game of passive investing, they will no longer have to spend time searching for that hot fund. They can spend time on far more critical issues.

1. Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness
2. Quoted in Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play
• Enrich Your Future 13: Past Performance Is Not a Predictor of Future Performance
• Enrich Your Future 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the Horizon
• Enrich Your Future 15: Individual Stocks Are Riskier Than You Believe

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 35: Mad Money.

LEARNING: Investors are naive, and Cramer is an entertainer, not a financial advisor who adds value.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 35: Mad Money.

In this chapter, Larry explains why investment advice from so-called market experts is often worthless.

Jim Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, has become one of the most recognizable faces in the investment world. He dispenses rapid-fire investment advice on the show “Mad Money.” Since it premiered in March 2005, it has been one of CNBC’s most-watched shows. But has his advice been as successful for the investors who follow it? Larry shares a couple of research studies that answer this question.

Cramer manages a portfolio that invests in many of the stock recommendations he makes on TV. Established in August 2001 with approximately $3 million, the Action Alerts PLUS (AAP) portfolio has been the centerpiece of Cramer’s media company, TheStreet, which sells his financial advice, giving subscribers in the millions access to each trade the portfolio makes ahead of time. Jonathan Hartley and Matthew Olson, authors of the 2018 study “Jim Cramer’s Mad Money Charitable Trust Performance and Factor Attribution,” examined the AAP portfolio’s historical performance. Their study covered the period from August 1, 2001, the AAP portfolio’s inception, through December 31, 2017. The study found that the fund returned a total of 97%. During that same period, an investment in the S&P would have returned 204%.

In another study, “How Mad Is Mad Money?”, Paul Bolster, Emery Trahan, and Anand Venkateswaran examined Cramer’s buy and sell recommendations for the period from July 28, 2005, through December 31, 2008. They also constructed a portfolio of his recommendations and compared it to a market index. The researchers came to three key conclusions:

• Investors were paying attention, as the stocks he recommended had abnormal returns of almost 2% on the day following his recommendations.
• The returns for the recommended stocks were both positive and significant for the day of the show and the 30 days preceding the show. So, it seems he was recommending stocks with short-term momentum.
• The returns were negative and significant, at -0.33% and -2.1%, for days 2 through 5 and days 2 through 30 following the recommendation. After 30 days, the results are insignificant.

There is no evidence of any stock-picking skill—Cramer’s picks are neither good nor bad. In the end, it’s just entertainment.

A third study, “Is the Market Mad? Evidence from Mad Money,” conducted in 2005, found the same result as the second study: prices rise overnight, and they are quickly corrected. This means that Cramer added negative value for the people who tried to implement his advice because they drove the price up in their buying frenzy. Then the smart money comes in, and the price reverts to basically where it was before he made the recommendation.

In a fourth study, CXO Advisory Group set out to determine if stock market experts, whether self-proclaimed or endorsed by others (such as in the financial media), reliably provide stock market timing guidance.

To find the answer, from 2005 through 2012, they collected and investigated 6,584 forecasts for the US stock market offered publicly by 68 experts (including Cramer), employing technical, fundamental, and sentiment indicators. Their collection included forecasts, all of which were publicly available on the internet, dating back to the end of 1998. They selected experts, both bulls and bears, based on web searches for public archives that contained enough forecasts spanning various market conditions to gauge their accuracy. Basically, they found there are no real experts.

The distribution of their accuracy looks virtually identical to a bell curve but slightly to the left, meaning, on average, they do worse. The average accuracy was 47%, which happened to be the same score as Cramer’s. So, of all the non-expert experts, Cramer was average at being non-expert.

According to Larry, all these studies indicate that investors are naive, Cramer is an entertainer, not a financial advisor, who adds value, and that the market is highly efficient, making it very hard to beat it.

They also show that being highly intelligent (and entertaining, in Cramer’s case) is not a sufficient condition to outperform the market. The reason is simple. There are many other highly intelligent money managers whose price discovery actions work to keep the market highly efficient (meaning market prices are the best estimate we have of the right price). That makes it unlikely any active money manager will outperform on a risk-adjusted basis.

The research shows that gurus’ only value is to make weathermen look good, whether it involves predicting economic growth, interest rates, currencies, or the stock market, or even picking individual stocks.

Larry concludes that while Cramer might provide entertainment, those following his recommendations are like lambs being led to slaughter by more sophisticated institutional investors. He urges investors to keep this in mind the next time they find themselves paying attention to some guru’s latest forecast. You’re best served by ignoring it, he says.

The prudent strategy, Larry adds, is to develop a well-thought-out plan and to have the discipline to adhere to it, ignoring the market noise, whether it comes from Jim Cramer or any other prognosticator.

1. Michael Learmonth, “Ratings Flood for Fox, CNN,” Variety, September 27, 2005.
2. Jonathan Hartley and Matthew Olson, “Jim Cramer’s Mad Money Charitable Trust Performance and Factor Attribution,” The Journal of Retirement (Summer 2018).
3. Paul Bolster, Emery Trahan and Anand Venkateswaran, “How Mad Is Mad Money?”The Journal of Investing (Summer 2012).
4. Joseph Engelberg, Caroline Sasseville and Jared Williams, “Is the Market Mad? Evidence from Mad Money,” March 22, 2006.
5. Bill Alpert, “Shorting Cramer,” Barron’s (August 20, 2007).
6. Jim Cramer, “Cramer vs. Cramer,” New York, May 25, 2007.
7. CXO Advisory Group, “Guru Grades,” www.cxoadvisory.com/gurus.

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment

BIO: Mike Koenigs is a serial entrepreneur with five successful exits, a 19-time bestselling author, and a top strategist for founders post-exit.

STORY: Mike invested big in a SaaS startup set up for success, but infighting brought it to its knees.

LEARNING: Character is bigger than charisma.

Mike Koenigs is a serial entrepreneur with five successful exits, a 19-time bestselling author, and a top strategist for founders post-exit. He helps build powerful personal brands in just one week and pioneers Generative AI for executives, speaking at elite events like Abundance 360, MIT, and Tony Robbins’ gatherings.

Mike learned about a SaaS startup from a client with whom he had spent time and had gotten to know, like, and trust him. So, when the client introduced Mike to this deal, he got interested.

The startup looked great, so he invested a substantial amount of money and then doubled down because it got even better.

The basic premise was that it was a pool. The founders would find SaaS companies with customers, momentum, technology, and a bit of a moat. They had much experience and success, such as a 10x dividend to investors in three years.

Unfortunately, the two founders started fighting. One of them locked the other one out of everything. They had the majority and equal shareholding, making infighting even worse. The remaining partner started emptying the coffers.

Someone doing the books became a whistleblower and revealed the shenanigans going on. The partner was siphoning off money, building a house, going on big trips, using private jets everywhere, etc. It got uglier and uglier, causing the shareholders to file lawsuits, and the FTC got involved. Years have gone by, and things are still shut down.

• Time kills deals.
• Character is bigger than charisma. Crooked founders will gut you faster than any market downturn.
• Put all that money into index funds and let it compound.

• The only way to invest as an angel investor is to invest in 10 startups. Don’t do it if you are not prepared with the money and time to do that.

Unless you’re a full-time VC with deal flow, customer channels, or an exit mapped out, keep your money in things you can control. If you’re a shareholder, your best exit is for a big company to come and buy what they believe is money at a discount.

Mike recommends learning to build a brand that will elevate everything you touch for the rest of your life. He suggests reading his book, Your Next Act: The Six Growth Accelerators for Creating a Business You’ll Love for the Rest of Your Life, to help you build your brand. He also recommends immersing yourself in AI and learning how to use it effectively.

Mike’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to become an international citizen. He wants to continue living his beautiful life in multiple locations and working with more entrepreneurs worldwide.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Podcast
• Website
• Books

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 34: Bear Markets: A Necessary Evil.

LEARNING: Investors must view bear markets as necessary evils.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 34: Bear Markets: A Necessary Evil.

In this chapter, Larry explains why investors must view bear markets as necessary evils. He says that if stocks didn’t experience the kind of bear markets that we have, investors would be very unhappy.

Larry further explains that the most basic finance principle is the relationship between risk and expected, but not guaranteed, return. So, the higher the risk, the higher the expected return, which means that if the risk is high, investors will apply a bigger risk premium, which will lead to the denominator in the formula of the Net Present Value. The numerator is the expected earnings. The denominator is the risk-free rate plus the risk premium.

Larry highlights historical bear markets, noting the U.S. has experienced losses exceeding 34% during the COVID crisis and 51% from 2007 to 2009. He argues that these losses are essential for investors to demand higher risk premiums. The very fact that investors have experienced such significant losses leads them to price stocks with a large risk premium.

From 1926 through 2022, the S&P provided an annual risk premium over one-month Treasury bills of 8.2% and an annualized premium of 6.9%. If the losses that investors experienced had been smaller, the risk premium would also have been smaller. And the smaller the losses experienced, the smaller the premium would have been.

In other words, the less risk investors perceive, the higher the price they are willing to pay for stocks. And the higher the market’s price-to-earnings ratio, the lower the future returns.

The bottom line, Larry says, is that bear markets are necessary for the creation of the large equity risk premium we have experienced. Thus, if investors want stocks to provide high expected returns, bear markets (while painful to endure) should be considered a necessary evil.

However, Larry notes that it is during the periods of underperformance that investor discipline is tested. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that most investors significantly underperform the stock market and the mutual funds they invest in. The underperformance is because investors act like generals fighting the last war.

Subject to recency bias (the tendency to overweight recent events/trends and ignore long-term evidence), they observe yesterday’s winners and jump on the bandwagon—buying high—and they observe yesterday’s losers and abandon ship—selling low. It is almost as if investors believe they can buy yesterday’s returns when they can only buy tomorrow’s.

Larry shares three keys to successful investing to ensure you get the most from your investments even during bear markets.

The first key is to have a well-thought-out plan that includes understanding the nature of the risks of investing. That means accepting that bear markets are inevitable and must be built into the plan.

This understanding will help you feel prepared and less anxious when bear markets occur. It also means having the discipline to stay the course when it is most difficult (partly because the media will be filled with stories of economic doom and gloom).

What is particularly difficult is that staying the course does not just mean buying and holding. Adhering to a plan requires that investors rebalance their portfolio, maintaining their desired asset allocation. That means that investors must buy stocks during bear markets and sell them in bull markets.

The second key to successful investing, Larry suggests, is to avoid taking more risk than you have the ability, willingness, and need to take. By steering clear of excessive risk, investors are more likely to stay the course and avoid the common buy high/sell low pattern that most investors fall into.

The last key is to understand that trying to time the market is a loser’s game—one that is possible to win but not prudent to try because the odds of doing so are so poor.

1. 1996 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway.
2. 1992 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway.
3. 1991 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway.
4. 2006 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway.
5. 2004 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway.

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play

BIO: Jeff Sarti, CEO of Morton Wealth, leads a firm managing over $3 billion in assets. With a mission to empower better investors, Jeff helps clients achieve their financial goals while supporting employees in their career growth.

STORY: Jeff bought a few dot-com companies, thinking it was smart and safe because he bought the big brands. All of the companies dropped 90%+.

LEARNING: Don’t let greed, FOMO, and a lack of imagination drive you to a bad investment.

Jeff Sarti, CEO of Morton Wealth, leads a firm managing over $3 billion in assets. With a mission to empower better investors, Jeff helps clients achieve their financial goals while supporting employees in their career growth. A CFA charterholder, Jeff shares his insights through his Perspective newsletter. His expertise emphasizes challenging the status quo and fostering long-term, resilient investment strategies.

In the late 90s, during the dot-com boom, Jeff had just started making a bit of money. He bought a few dot-com companies, thinking it was smart and safe because he bought the big brands. All of the companies dropped 90%+ after a while.

• Don’t let greed, FOMO, and a lack of imagination drive you to a bad investment.
• Always do your research.

• When prices get untethered from earnings growth, our expectation of the future is what matters.

The only way you can learn is by doing and making mistakes. But before you start doing, do the research, understand the underlying risk factors of your investments, and don’t take shortcuts.

If you do, at least know you’re speculating and not investing. Keep that speculative piece of your portfolio small. It’s always a good idea to balance speculative investments with more traditional, long-term investment strategies for a more secure financial future.

Jeff recommends checking out resources on his website, such as his investment guides and market analysis, and signing up for his quarterly newsletter if you want financial education.

He also recommends reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and books by Morgan Housel to understand how emotions drive investment decisions.

Jeff’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to continue traveling the country with his investment team, uncovering some new niche opportunities.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Blog

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 33: An Investor’s Worst Enemy.

LEARNING: You are your own worst enemy when it comes to investing.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 33: An Investor’s Worst Enemy.

In this chapter, Larry demonstrates why investors are their own worst enemies. He observes that many people think the key to investing is identifying the stocks that will outperform the market and avoiding the ones that will underperform.

Yet the vast body of evidence says that’s playing the losers’ game. He adds that most professionals with advanced degrees in finance and mathematics, with access to the best databases and huge advantages over individuals, often think they’re smart enough to beat the market.

They do so by attempting to uncover individual securities they believe the rest of the market has somehow mispriced (the price is too high or too low). They also try to time their investment decisions to buy when the market is “undervalued” and sell when it is “overvalued.”

However, evidence shows that 98% of them fail to outperform in any statistically significant way on a risk-adjusted basis, even before taxes. As historian and author Peter Bernstein puts it: “The essence of investment theory is that being smart is not a sufficient condition for being rich.”

In the face of such overwhelming evidence, the puzzling question is why people keep trying to play a game they are likely to lose. From Larry’s perspective, there are four explanations:

1. Because our education system has failed investors and Wall Street, and most financial media want to conceal the evidence, people are unaware of it.
2. While the evidence suggests that playing the game of active management is the triumph of hope over wisdom and experience, hope does spring eternal—after all, a small minority succeed.
3. Active management is exciting, while passive management is boring.
4. Investors are overconfident—a normal human condition, not limited to investing. While each investor might admit that it’s hard to beat the market, each believes he will be one of the few who succeed.

In light of the evidence presented, Larry’s advice is clear: avoid the losers’ game. Instead of trying to pick individual stocks or time the market, he advocates for a disciplined approach to investing. Investors can win by staying the course through bear markets by simply getting the market’s returns. This, he argues, is the right strategy for successful investing.

Suppose you choose to play the game of active investing. In that case, Larry warns, the only ones likely to benefit are your financial advisor, broker-dealer, the manager of the actively managed fund, and the publisher of the newsletter or ratings service you subscribe to. The odds are overwhelmingly against individual investors in this game, making it a futile endeavor.

1. Jonathan Fuerbringer, “Investing It,” New York Times, March 30, 1997.
2. Robert McGough, “The Secret (Active) Dreams of an Indexer,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1997.
3. Peter Bernstein, The Portable MBA in Investment (Wiley, 1995).
4. Jonathan Clements, 25 Myths You’ve Got to Avoid (Simon & Schuster, 1998).
5. James H. Smalhout, “Too Close to Your Money?” Bloomberg Personal (November 1997).
6. Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
7. Peter L. Bernstein and Aswath Damodaran (editors), Investment Management (Wiley, 1998).
8. Ron Ross, The Unbeatable Market (Optimum Press, 2002).

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play
• Enrich Your Future 13: Past Performance Is Not a Predictor of Future Performance
• Enrich Your Future 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the Horizon
• Enrich Your Future 15: Individual Stocks Are Riskier Than You Believe
• Enrich Your Future 16: The Estimated Return

A retailer in Bangkok was staring down a cash crunch after COVID. He was ready to sign for a loan, convinced it was his only option.

Instead, we dug into his numbers and found $30,000 in unsold inventory gathering dust and $8,000 in overpayments to suppliers. That cash was enough to stabilize his business; no debt was needed. The money was there; he just couldn’t see it.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

When cash flow gets tight, panic sets in. Your mind races, layoffs, loans, maybe even shutting down. But fear isn’t a strategy. The truth is, your business is probably sitting on hidden profit, even in tough times. You just need to find it.

Start with a zero-based budget. That means you begin each budget line at zero, not last year’s number, and build it up based on what’s actually needed. Each team member justifies every expense from scratch. No assumptions. No carryovers. Just what drives results. Look at your expenses, inventory, and contracts. What’s wasting money?

Maybe it’s unused subscriptions, overstocked supplies, or a vendor charging too much. One client found $500 a month in duplicate software licenses. Canceling them took one email and saved $6,000 a year.

Don’t just cut costs mindlessly; focus on waste, not muscle. Keep what drives value, like your best staff or marketing, that works. I’ve seen owners slash their top salespeople in a panic, only to tank revenue. Instead, realign spending to what moves profit.

For example, shift the budget from low-margin products to high-margin ones. One business I worked with dropped a product line that was barely breaking even. That freed up $20,000 for ads, bringing in $100,000 in new sales.

Small wins create momentum. Even saving $1,000 can shift your mindset from panic to possibility. Try this: call your top five vendors this week. Ask for a 10% discount or better payment terms. Most will say no, but some will say yes to keep your business.

A client of mine negotiated $5,000 off his annual shipping costs in one 15-minute call. That’s cash you can use to grow, not just survive.

Discipline beats loans every time. Borrowing might feel like a lifeline, but it’s a weight around your neck if you don’t fix the root problems. A logistics firm I worked with was desperate for a loan. Instead, we audited their spending and found $8,600 in waste, unused equipment leases, and overpaid utilities. That cash funded a marketing push that brought in new clients without debt. They weren’t out of options; they just needed clarity.

Here’s one last story. That same logistics firm thought they were done. But that $8,600 audit changed everything. They used the savings to relaunch ads, landing three new contracts monthly. The owner told me, “I thought we were stuck. Turns out, we just needed to look closer.” What’s hiding in your business?

You’ve now faced the five hard truths holding your business back. You know no one’s coming to save you, that delay kills profit, that family dynamics can trap you, that leadership drives results, and that you have options even in a cash crunch. Now, it’s time to act. Pick one step this week, cut an expense, fix a meeting, check your P&L, and do it. Your business depends on you.

• Cut one cost: Block 30 minutes, review P&L, and cut one expense. Just one. Lead by example.
• Find one drain: Review finances weekly, searching for one hidden loss. Act now.
• Align the family: Hold a monthly, one-hour family meeting. Ask: “What will drive next month’s profit?” Prioritize profit over family tension.
• Lead the team: Run focused weekly meetings with a clear agenda and one action item. Drive results.

• Zero-based budgeting: Justify all expenses to free cash for growth.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Oeystein Kalleklev is the outgoing CEO of Flex LNG and Avance Gas. He has prior experience as CFO of Knutsen NYK Offshore Tankers and Umoe Group and Chairman General Partner of MLP KNOT Offshore Partners.

STORY: Oeystein has been part of some terrible investments made by his employers. One invested $150 million to become the biggest shareholder of a mine in Guinea, which was lost due to a bad regime. During the great financial crisis, another invested $300 million into a bioethanol plant in Brazil.

LEARNING: In a dynamic industry like shipping, you must think more about adapting and being tactical rather than strategic.

Oeystein Kalleklev is the outgoing CEO of Flex LNG (NYSE/OSE: FLNG) and Avance Gas (OSE: AGAS). He has prior experience as CFO of Knutsen NYK Offshore Tankers and Umoe Group, as well as Chairman General Partner of MLP KNOT Offshore Partners (NYSE: KNOP).

Oeystein has been part of some terrible investments. In one case, a family Oeystein worked for had invested about $150 million to become the biggest shareholder of a mine in Guinea. The country was under an unstable regime, and the leader was assassinated. There were also so many operational hiccups operationally. That $150 million turned out to be like $3 million when they sold their last share.

He has also been involved in bioethanol production in Brazil, where a company he worked for invested about $300 million into a bioethanol plant in Brazil during the great financial crisis. The bosses had to restructure the whole company, and Oeystein had to go to the US to talk to bondholders, trying to get them to choose whether to become shareholders or take a big hit on the bond loans.

In another case, Oeystein was involved in a nickel mine in the Philippines where the company he was working for was building a floating production ship for oil. The budget was $280 million, but the company spent $500 million on that building project, and it also took one and a half extra years to complete.

• When you have such a dynamic industry as shipping, you must think more about adapting and being tactical rather than strategic.
• Focus on running your ships efficiently—it’s a critical success factor.
• Shipping is a lot about market timing. Read the market, know where it is going, when you should exit, and when you should invest.
• You have to be knowledgeable about technology because technology changes quite often in shipping.
• Be smart about running a shipping company. Do it lean and follow the technology.

• It’s hard to set a long-term strategy in an industry such as shipping because you’ve got to adapt to what’s happening in the market.
• You have to run ships efficiently, or else you will miss the core aspect of your business.

If you want to venture into the shipping industry, you must properly understand shipping because it’s not as straightforward as people think. It’s not just about moving goods from A to B.

Oeystein’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to read more books to be on top of contemporary issues and be a successful shipping investor.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• X

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

I once sat down with a furious business owner. “My team’s useless,” he said. “They never deliver.” I asked him two simple questions: “Who hired them? Who sets their goals?”

He went quiet. He admitted he hadn’t run a proper meeting in months, and his priorities changed weekly. His team wasn’t failing; they were confused.

Once he got clear and consistent, everything shifted. Execution improved, morale spiked, and profit followed. The problem wasn’t his team; it was his leadership.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

When the same issues keep popping up: missed deadlines, low margins, and sloppy execution, it’s easy to blame your team or the market. But nine times out of ten, those problems point to your systems, not your people. If your business feels stuck in a loop, you haven’t built the structure to break free. Leadership isn’t about charisma or barking orders. It’s about clarity and follow-through.

Start by auditing yourself. Are your priorities clear to your team? Do you track progress, or just hope things get done?

I’ve seen owners delegate tasks and then forget about them, leaving their teams guessing. That’s not leadership. That’s abdication. One client delegated a pricing review but never checked in. Six months later, nothing had changed, and they’d lost $50,000 in potential profit. Set clear goals, assign owners, and follow up. It’s not sexy, but it works.

Here’s a game-changer: fix your meetings. Most business meetings are a mess, with endless venting or no focus. Better meetings lead to better profit. Try this: run one weekly meeting with a tight agenda. Pick one metric, like cash flow, gross margin, or overdue invoices, and identify three actions to move them.

One client’s meetings were just complaint sessions. We set a new rule: every meeting ends with three clear next steps. Four weeks later, the execution was sharper, and he told me, “We didn’t need more staff, just a real plan.” Focused action works.

You don’t need a new team, just better habits. Your people are probably capable, but they need direction. A weekly rhythm, like Monday priorities, Wednesday short check-ins, and Friday results, builds momentum fast. It’s not about working harder; it’s about working smarter. And start writing down what works. That’s your playbook for scaling.

One owner I know documented his best sales process. It took an hour, but it cut training time for new hires and boosted close rates by 10%. That’s leadership in action.

You’re leading with clarity now, but what if cash is still tight? In our final episode, we’ll tackle how to turn things around when money’s low and pressure’s high. Don’t miss it.

• Cut one cost: Block 30 minutes, review P&L, and cut one expense. Just one. Lead by example.
• Find one drain: Review finances weekly, searching for one hidden loss. Act now.
• Align the family: Hold a monthly, one-hour family meeting. Ask: “What will drive next month’s profit?” Prioritize profit over family tension.

• Lead the team: Run focused weekly meetings with a clear agenda and one action item. Drive results.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 32: The Twenty-Dollar Bill.

LEARNING: Trade as if the markets are efficient, even though they are not.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 32: The Twenty-Dollar Bill.

In this chapter, Larry explains the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) and why successful trading strategies often self-destruct due to their inherent limitations.

According to Larry, one of the fundamental tenets of the EMH is that in a competitive financial environment, successful trading strategies self-destruct because they are self-limiting—when they are discovered, they are eliminated by exploiting the strategy.

He shares the example of Andrew Lo’s adaptive markets hypothesis, which acknowledges that while the EMH may not necessarily hold in the short term, it does predict that inefficiencies will self-correct over time as arbitrageurs exploit them after publication. This understanding leads us to the inevitable conclusion that financial markets trend toward efficiency in the long run.

To demonstrate how the efficiency of markets rapidly eliminates opportunities for abnormal profits, Larry shares the following example:

Imagine that an investor discovers that small-cap stocks have historically outperformed the market in January. To take advantage of this anomaly, that investor would have to buy small-cap stocks at the end of December, before the period of outperformance. After achieving some success with this strategy, other investors would take note—with the large dollars at stake, Wall Street is quick to copy successful strategies. An academic paper might even be published. Since the effect is now known to more than just the original discoverer of the anomaly, one would have to buy before others do to generate abnormal profits. Now, prices start to rise in November. But the next group of investors, recognizing this was going to happen, would have to buy even earlier.

As you can see, the very act of exploiting an anomaly has the effect of making it disappear, making the market more efficient. This underscores the significant role investors play in shaping market efficiency.

Larry surmises that while equity markets may not be perfectly efficient, the winning investment strategy is to behave as if they were. This reaffirms the importance of the EMH in guiding investment strategy, providing investors with a sound approach to market participation.

In conclusion, Larry advises investors to consider carefully these words from Richard Roll, financial economist and principal of the portfolio management firm Roll and Ross Asset Management:

1. Andrew Lo, “The Adoptive Markets Hypothesis,” The Journal of Portfolio Management (30th Anniversary Edition, 2004).
2. Dwight Lee and James Verbrugge, “The Efficient Market Theory Thrives on Criticism,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance (Spring 1996).
3. Burton G. Malkiel, “Are Markets Efficient? Yes, Even If They Make Errors,” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2000.

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play
• Enrich Your Future 13: Past Performance Is Not a Predictor of Future Performance
• Enrich Your Future 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the Horizon
• Enrich Your Future 15: Individual Stocks Are Riskier Than You Believe

I once worked with a family business run by two brothers and a sister. The sister was a dreamer, pushing niche markets and creative ideas. Her CEO brother was all about landing big accounts to keep cash flowing. Every strategy meeting turned into a shouting match. Nothing got decided, and the business was stuck.

I pulled the creative sister aside and asked, “Do you want to be CEO?” She laughed, “No way.” That honesty was a game-changer. They finally aligned behind one leader, and the chaos started to fade. Is your family business stuck because no one’s steering the ship?

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

Family businesses are special, but they come with unique traps. The daily grind, orders, payroll, and customer complaints can bury any chance of big-picture thinking. You’re so busy keeping the lights on that you forget to ask: where’s this business going? That’s survival mode, and it’s a profit killer. Strategy takes a backseat when you’re just trying to get through the week.

Then there’s the family dynamic. Loyalty and emotions can cloud tough calls. Maybe your cousin’s great at sales but terrible at managing people, yet no one says anything because he’s family. Or your parents are still on the payroll, even though they retired years ago. These are human issues, but they hurt your bottom line.

The fix? Write down everyone’s roles, even if it’s awkward. Be clear: who’s in charge of what? I’ve seen families transform their businesses just by putting this on paper. It’s not about cutting people out but giving everyone a lane so the company can move forward. Always return to the core principle that increasing profit increases value for all family members.

If every week feels like a scramble, you’re missing structure. Without a precise rhythm, you’re starting from zero every Monday. That’s exhausting, and it keeps you stuck. Try this: start one monthly owner profit check-in, 60 minutes max.

Focus on one question: what’s driving profit next month? It could be following up on late invoices, cutting a small cost, or pushing a high-margin product. Get your team thinking about profit, not just staying busy. Structure turns chaos into progress.

Family businesses also risk getting too comfortable. You might have a warm and loyal culture, but is it driving growth? Or is it just keeping the peace? Ask yourself: does our setup push us toward profit, or are we coasting on familiarity?

One family business I know kept a low-margin product line because it was “part of our history.” Dropping it felt like betraying the past, but it freed up cash for marketing that doubled their revenue. Logic has to win.

Here’s a quick story. I had a client who groaned, “Mondays are a mess.” Projects stalled, and he was micromanaging everything. We set a simple rhythm: Monday to set goals, Wednesday for updates, Friday to review wins. In just a few weeks, his team started owning their tasks. He wasn’t carrying the whole business anymore; he had breathing room. Structure doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s a game-changer.

Now you see the real traps keeping your family business stuck. But what if the real problem isn’t your family, it’s you? In our next episode, we’ll face the hard truth about leadership and profit. Don’t miss it.

• Cut one cost: Block 30 minutes, review P&L, and cut one expense. Just one. Lead by example.
• Find one drain: Review finances weekly, searching for one hidden loss. Act now.

• Align the family: Hold a monthly, one-hour family meeting. Ask: “What will drive next month’s profit?” Prioritize profit over family tension.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Jeff Holman, founder of Intellectual Strategies, is revolutionizing legal support for startups and scaling businesses. His Fractional Legal Team model provides expert legal guidance without the cost of a full-time team.

STORY: Jeff started a cold plunge and sauna business during the pandemic. The company looked great, but he had employee issues, which affected its success. Soon, tens of other studios, brands, and franchises were all popping up within a mile of Jeff’s studio.

LEARNING: Create strategic alignment incrementally and iteratively.

Jeff Holman, founder of Intellectual Strategies, is revolutionizing legal support for startups and scaling businesses. His Fractional Legal Team model provides expert legal guidance without the cost of a full-time team. With expertise in engineering, law, and business, Jeff helps companies navigate complex challenges, enabling them to grow with confidence.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeff decided to find ways to spend his time and invest some of his money. He settled on a cold plunge and sauna business. The spreadsheet looked great, and the numbers were fantastic. The business model followed another business that Jeff had previously done, which had achieved considerable success.

Jeff found a local company in Utah that was manufacturing cold plunges at the time and secured a couple of investor friends to invest in the business. He rented an office space and converted one of the suites into a cold plunge and sauna studio.

The biggest mistake that cost Jeff this business was hiring employees and trying to get them more involved in marketing. He would help train and incentivize employees, ensure tasks were completed, have people submit reports, follow up for accountability, and more. It felt like he was babysitting his employees. This eventually brought his business down. However, the final nail in the coffin was a proliferation of other studios, brands, and franchises, all popping up within a mile of Jeff’s studio.

• If you’re part of a franchise, consider visiting other franchise businesses that may not be competing with yours or those a little further away from your customer base to observe how they operate.
• If you’re pivoting your business, create strategic alignment incrementally and iteratively because the business you’re operating today might not be the one you pivot to tomorrow.

Find a business that does what you want to do in another state and go work with them for a while.

Validate the business idea you want to invest in well beyond the spreadsheet. Research regulations, test your MVP, identify channels that you’ll use to drive revenue, and much more.

Jeff’s journey has taught him the value of seeking expert advice. He recommends holding a strategy call with him if you need legal expertise to scale your business confidently. He also suggests reading Rocket Fuel and Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman to learn how to align intellectual property, assets, patents, trademarks, and copyrights with your business objectives and strategy. This advice can provide reassurance and confidence as you navigate the complexities of business.

Jeff’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to expand his law firm and also evangelize the fractional legal team model.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Youtube
• Website

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

I met a family business owner in the Philippines who was proud of his “stable” company. Two percent net profit, year after year. Sounds okay, right? Until I showed him the math: because his margin was deeply below average, he’d missed out on $1.2 million in potential profit over three years.

That “stability” was a slow bleed, draining his business while he didn’t even notice. Are you losing money you can’t see? That’s what this episode is all about: how profit problems silently grow while you’re looking the other way.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

Profit problems don’t usually hit you like a freight train. They creep in quietly; a slight inefficiency here, a missed opportunity there. Maybe it’s a subscription you forgot to cancel or pricing that hasn’t budged in years. These leaks add up, and the longer you wait, the harder they are to fix. Think of it like a leaky pipe: today’s drip becomes a flood tomorrow.

The longer you delay, the more risk and complexity you’re piling on. Your margins shrink, your stress grows, and suddenly, you’re vulnerable to a bad month or a competitor’s move. I experienced this in my own business leading up to the government COVID lockdowns.

The good news? You don’t need a massive overhaul to start. Just find one recurring cost that’s dragging you down. It could be an overpriced vendor, software you barely use, or a process that wastes your team’s time.

One client I worked with found $1,500 monthly in unused cloud storage. Cutting it took 10 minutes and saved him $18,000 a year. That’s the kind of win you can grab right now. Small tweaks today prevent painful losses tomorrow.

Here’s a simple way to start: schedule a 30-minute profit review this month. Pull your profit and loss statement and look for one leak. Don’t overcomplicate it. Just ask: where’s money slipping away?

If you don’t know your P&L, ask your accountant to walk you through it. You may need a new accountant if your accountant can’t do that. This isn’t about being a finance wizard but knowing your business. One owner I know avoided his financials for years, trusting his bookkeeper. When we finally looked, we found $40,000 lost to outdated pricing. A 30-minute review fixed it. That’s the power of paying attention.

Don’t wait until you’re desperate. I’ve seen too many owners hold off until they’re scraping by, thinking they’ll fix profit when things “calm down.” Spoiler: things don’t calm down. The time to act is now when you still have options. If you wait until you’re broke, your choices shrink fast. You might have to cut staff, take a loan, or close up shop. Acting early keeps you in control.

Here’s a question to spark clarity: if a third party bought your business today, what’s the first thing they would fix?

Maybe it’s a product line barely breaking even or a client who pays late but demands your time. Write down one fix and tackle it this week. That mindset, seeing your business with fresh eyes, uncovers profit you didn’t know you had. Don’t wait for the third party to arrive. Fix your business now.

Let’s pause for a story. I worked with a client who never tracked profit by product. His team was convinced their manufactured products were the cash cow, way better than their imported products. We dug into the numbers, and guess what?

The imported products they sold were nearly twice as profitable. He immediately shifted strategy, focused on imports, raised prices on the manufactured stuff, and boosted gross profit by 17% in three months. That money was sitting there, waiting to be found. What’s hiding in your business?

You now see how delay kills profit, but why is breaking free from survival mode so hard? In our next episode, we’ll dig into why family businesses stay stuck and how to finally escape. Don’t miss it.

• Cut one cost: Block 30 minutes, review P&L, and cut one expense. Just one. Lead by example.

• Find one drain: Review finances weekly, searching for one hidden loss. Act now.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 31: The Uncertainty of Investing.

LEARNING: Equity investing is always about uncertainty.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 31: The Uncertainty of Investing.

In this chapter, Larry explains the difference between risk and uncertainty. He highlights that one of the most important concepts to grasp is that investing is about dealing with both risk and uncertainty.

University of Chicago professor Frank Knight defined risk and uncertainty as follows: Risk is present when future events occur with measurable probability. Uncertainty is present when the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable. Larry further explains that risk involves known probabilities, like casino odds or life insurance estimates, while uncertainty involves unknown outcomes, such as major events like the Great Depression or COVID-19.

Larry explains that we sometimes know the odds of an event occurring with certainty. For example, because of demographic data, we can reasonably estimate the odds that a 65-year-old couple will have at least one spouse live beyond 90. However, we cannot know the exact odds because future advances in medical science may extend life expectancy. Conversely, new diseases may arise that shorten life expectancy.

Larry insists that it is crucial to understand the difference between risk and uncertainty. This understanding is key, as many investors mistakenly view equities as closer to risk, where the odds can be precisely calculated. This misconception often arises when economic conditions are favorable. The ability to estimate the odds gives investors a false sense of confidence, leading them to make decisions that exceed their ability, willingness, and need to take risks.

However, Larry adds that the perception of equity investing shifts from risk to uncertainty during crises. Since investors prefer risky bets (where they can calculate the odds, like investing in a stable company with a proven track record) to uncertain bets (where the odds cannot be calculated, like investing in a startup with an unpredictable future) when the markets begin to appear to investors to become uncertain, the risk premium demanded rises, and that is what causes severe bear markets.

Further, dramatic falls in prices lead to panicked selling. Larry says that investors tend to sell well after market declines have already occurred and buy well after rallies have long begun. The result is that they dramatically underperform the mutual funds they invest in.

Larry emphasizes that one key to success is understanding that equity investing is always about uncertainty. Another crucial aspect is understanding the importance of choosing an equity allocation that doesn’t exceed your risk tolerance.

To further mitigate these uncertainties, Larry strongly recommends diversifying your portfolios. This strategy can provide a sense of security and preparedness in the face of market volatility. Additionally, he suggests using Monte Carlo simulations to account for various potential outcomes.

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play
• Enrich Your Future 13: Past Performance Is Not a Predictor of Future Performance
• Enrich Your Future 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the Horizon
• Enrich Your Future 15: Individual Stocks Are Riskier Than You Believe
• Enrich Your Future 16: The Estimated Return Is Not Inevitable
• Enrich Your Future 17: Take a Portfolio Approach to Your Investments
• Enrich Your Future 18: Build a Portfolio That Can Withstand the Black Swans
• Enrich Your Future 19: The Gold Illusion: Why Investing in Gold May Not Be Safe
• Enrich Your Future 20: Passive Investing Is the Key to Prudent Wealth Management

I want to tell you about a midsize business owner drowning in consultants. He kept hiring them, one after another, each promising to turn things around. They’d show up, drop off a fancy report, and disappear. Meanwhile, his profit stayed flat, his team was overwhelmed, and he barely slept.

One night, he was alone in his office, staring at a payroll he wasn’t sure he could cover. That’s when it hit him. He told me, “I realized it’s on me. No one’s coming to save my business.” That moment was his turning point. So, what’s yours?

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

Let’s be real: hoping someone else will fix your problems is tempting. A consultant, a new hire, maybe even some magic software. But here’s the truth: no one will care about your business as much as you do. Consultants can advise, pinpoint blind spots, and maybe even hand you a plan. But if you don’t act, nothing changes.

I’ve seen owners spend thousands on experts only to shelve their advice because it felt too hard or the timing wasn’t “perfect.” Waiting for the right moment is a trap. Your business doesn’t have time for that. The problems are piling up: low margins, stressed teams, endless emergencies, they’re not going away on their own. You have to step up.

I know what you’re thinking: “I’m already doing everything I can!” But are you? Pull up your calendar right now. What does it say? If it’s packed with meetings, emails, and putting out fires, you’re probably not leading; you’re reacting.

Your calendar tells the truth about your priorities. If there’s no time blocked for profit-focused work, like reviewing your P&L or cutting a bloated expense, you’re not owning the future of your business.

One client I worked with swore he had no time for strategy. His calendar showed 12 hours a week chasing emergencies, zero on profit. We carved out just 90 minutes a week to review his financials. Within months, his managers solved problems without him, and the whole business felt calmer and more focused. That’s the power of taking charge.

Here’s the thing: you can’t pay someone to care as much as you do. You can hire the best accountant and the sharpest operations manager, but responsibility for your business’s success rests with you.

It’s not about working harder; it’s about working smarter. Start small. Pick one profit-related task this week. Maybe it’s canceling an unused subscription, renegotiating a vendor contract, or reviewing your pricing. Do it by Friday. One task, done well, can shift your momentum.

A client thought he needed a complete overhaul to boost profit. Instead, we started with one thing: he cut a $900 monthly software he barely used. That small win gave him the confidence to tackle bigger issues.

Your team is watching you, too. They feed off your clarity and energy. If you’re scattered, putting out fires, they’ll be scattered too. But they’ll follow if you show up focused with a clear plan. That client I mentioned. Whose calendar was filled with firefighting?

Once he started those weekly financial reviews, his team noticed. They started coming to meetings prepared, pitching ideas to save money. Your leadership sets the tone. When you own your business’s future, you also allow your team to step up.

Owning your business isn’t just about responsibility; it’s your biggest advantage. No one knows your customers, team, or vision like you do. That’s your edge. But you have to use it. Stop waiting for a savior. Stop hoping the market will turn or a new hire will fix everything. The power to change your business is in your hands right now.

So, here’s your action step for this week: open your calendar and block 30 minutes to tackle one profit task. Review your P&L and look for one cost to cut. Maybe it’s calling a vendor to negotiate a better rate. Just do it. That’s how you start owning your business again.

You’re ready to step up, but here’s the catch: what if your business is already leaking cash? In our next episode, we’ll uncover the hidden ways your company is losing money and why waiting even one more month could cost you everything. Don’t miss it.

• Cut one cost: Block 30 minutes, review P&L, and cut one expense. Just one. Lead by example.

Download The Profit Gap for free at TheProfitBootCamp.com to see 5 hidden reasons family businesses work hard but still fall short of profit.

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 30: The Economically Irrational Investor Preference for Dividend-Paying Stocks.

LEARNING: The dividend policy is irrelevant to stock returns.

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 30: The Economically Irrational Investor Preference for Dividend-Paying Stocks.

In this chapter, Larry discusses why many investors prefer cash dividends, especially those using a cash flow approach to spending.

Larry explains that experts have established that dividend policy should be irrelevant to stock returns, which is supported by historical evidence. Stocks with the same exposure to common factors (such as size, value, momentum, and profitability/quality) have had the same returns, whether they pay dividends or not. Despite theory and evidence, many investors express a preference for dividend-paying stocks.

As Larry explains, investors tend to assume that dividends offer a safe hedge against the large price fluctuations that stocks experience. However, this assumption ignores that the dividend is offset by the fall in the stock price—the fallacy of the free dividend is a common misconception in the investment world.

Larry adds that stocks with the same “loading,” or exposure, to the four factors (size, value, momentum, and profitability/quality) have the same expected return regardless of their dividend policy. This has important implications because about 60% of US and 40% of international stocks do not pay dividends.

Thus, any screen that includes dividends results in far less diversified portfolios than they could be if they had not included dividends in the portfolio design. Less diversified portfolios are less efficient because they have a higher potential dispersion of returns without any compensation in the form of higher expected returns.

Larry notes that what is particularly puzzling about the preference for dividends is that taxable investors should favor the self-dividend (by selling shares) if cash flow is required. Taxes play a crucial role in investment decisions, and understanding their implications is essential for making informed choices.

Even in tax-advantaged accounts, investors who diversify globally (the prudent strategy) should prefer capital gains because the foreign tax credits associated with dividends have no value in tax-advantaged accounts.

Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman, two leaders in behavioral finance, attempted to explain the behavioral anomaly of a preference for cash dividends. The first explanation is that, in terms of their ability to control spending, investors may recognize that they have problems with the inability to delay gratification.

To address this problem, they adopt a cash flow approach to spending—they limit their spending to only the interest and dividends from their investment portfolio. In other words, the investor desires to defer spending but knows he doesn’t have the will, so he creates a situation that limits his opportunities and, thus, reduces the temptations.

The second explanation of why investors prefer dividends is based on “prospect theory.” Prospect theory states that people value gains and losses differently. As such, they will base decisions on perceived gains rather than losses.

Thus, if a person was given two equal choices, one expressed in terms of possible gains and the other in potential losses, they would choose the former. Because taking dividends doesn’t involve selling stock, it’s preferred to a total return approach, which may require self-created dividends through sales. The reason is that sales might affect the realization of losses, which are too painful for people to accept (they exhibit loss aversion).

1. Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani, “Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares,” Journal of Business (October 1961).
2. Hersh Shefrin and Meir Statman, “Explaining Investor Preference for Cash Dividends,” Journal of Financial Economics (June 1984).

• Enrich Your Future 01: The Determinants of the Risk and Return of Stocks and Bonds
• Enrich Your Future 02: How Markets Set Prices
• Enrich Your Future 03: Persistence of Performance: Athletes Versus Investment Managers
• Enrich Your Future 04: Why Is Persistent Outperformance So Hard to Find?
• Enrich Your Future 05: Great Companies Do Not Make High-Return Investments
• Enrich Your Future 06: Market Efficiency and the Case of Pete Rose
• Enrich Your Future 07: The Value of Security Analysis
• Enrich Your Future 08: High Economic Growth Doesn’t Always Mean High Stock Market Return
• Enrich Your Future 09: The Fed Model and the Money Illusion

• Enrich Your Future 10: You Won’t Beat the Market Even the Best Funds Don’t
• Enrich Your Future 11: Long-Term Outperformance Is Not Always Evidence of Skill
• Enrich Your Future 12: When Confronted With a Loser’s Game Do Not Play
• Enrich Your Future 13: Past Performance Is Not a Predictor of Future Performance
• Enrich Your Future 14: Stocks Are Risky No Matter How Long the Horizon

I am the cup of coffee warming your hands right now. A simple drink with a story no government could brew. My journey from a cherry on a tree to your morning ritual is a testament to freedom, ambition, and human ingenuity.

I exist not because of a single plan by a government or business but because of countless decisions, risks, and exchanges made by individuals and companies.

I am the child of voluntary trade, fierce competition, and the pursuit of profit, all working without a master plan. These forces grow me, move me, roast me, and deliver me to you.

No single person could make me from start to finish, yet billions of cups like me are made every day.

I began as a cherry on a small farm in Costa Rica, grown by Manuel. Because he owns the land, he has reason to think long-term, studying prices, testing new methods, and planting varieties that take years to bear fruit. He’s not just farming for today; he’s betting on tomorrow. That’s what capitalism rewards: patience, planning, and the courage to take risks.

Manuel’s commitment to tomorrow propels his green coffee bean across borders, where profit and competition transform local harvests into global goods.

Once picked, my journey begins from fruit to finished drink. I pass through the hands of workers and businesses, each driven by their own needs. No one is in it for love. They’re in it for a paycheck. And that’s precisely the point. The drive to earn a living keeps the whole system in motion.

Profit isn’t greed; it’s survival. Prices tell people what is scarce and wanted; markets change direction overnight. To survive, you adapt. To win, you innovate. That’s how competition works; it’s the quiet engine pushing new ideas forward. In capitalism, you don’t get to stand still. Evolve, and you’ll thrive. Stay stuck, and you’ll disappear.

As I leave the processing facility, my journey goes global. I cross oceans and borders. The people along the way live in different countries, speak different languages, follow different beliefs, and may even hate each other, yet they still cooperate. Peace is the quiet miracle of capitalism. The market’s invisible hand turns individual pursuits into shared progress.

Each region plays to its strengths. Manuel grows coffee in Costa Rica. Luigi builds espresso machines in Italy. They’ve never met, but through trade, they both win. By trading rather than trying to do everything alone, both end up better off.

At the roasting factory, experts dial in flavor. The process begins with precise heat control, powered by machines and fuels from distant places. Roasters adjust their methods to meet customer expectations because you, the consumer, decide who wins.

I don’t exist by chance. Every choice, a dark roast or a decaf, oat milk or cream, sends a signal. You’re the boss here. I’m shaped by what you sip. That’s why quality matters. Even minor errors lead to waste, lost sales, and the risk of being replaced by someone who gets it right.

Each role, from warehouse staff to maintenance teams, shapes the outcome. The technician who calibrates the roaster’s heat, the quality inspector who catches defects, and the logistics coordinator who ensures delivery affect how I taste in the end.

In this system, no task is too small. A green coffee warehouse worker in Indonesia who rotates inventory properly helps ensure I arrive fresh in Denver. One mistake and a competitor gets the next order.

At the café, baristas add their expertise, turning a roasted bean into your favorite cup: a bold black coffee, a tangy espresso, or a smooth latte. They steam, clean, pour, and seal. And they know: just one overheated shot or cracked lid, and everything I’ve been through goes to waste.

That’s the harsh reality of capitalism. Each choice leads towards profit or loss. Accountability isn’t imposed; it’s automatic.

Some argue that markets need heavy rules, but I’ve seen competition shape behavior better than any bureaucracy. The people who move me act responsibly not because they’re forced to, but because trust pays off. Break that trust, and the market makes you pay.

Even sustainability depends on you. When you choose shade-grown beans or Rainforest Alliance-certified coffee, farms change. Your fair-trade purchases raise wages. Your demand for carbon-neutral shipping pushes the whole system forward. I’m not made greener by policy memos; I’m made greener by you. That’s capitalism.

So here I am, your coffee, warming your hands just as I began this story. I started as a simple cherry on a tree, and through countless individual decisions, I’ve become your morning ritual. No one commanded my journey from Costa Rica to your cup, yet I arrived through millions of voluntary exchanges.

I’m not just a drink but living proof that capitalism, at its best, transforms strangers into partners and simple beans into something extraordinary.

As you sip me slowly, remember: every drop represents a quiet miracle of human cooperation, brewed not by force but by freedom, the same freedom that will bring your cup tomorrow and every morning after.

Essay by Andrew Stotz, loosely adapted from Leonard E. Read’s “I, Pencil”

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast

BIO: Collin Plume, a precious metals expert and serial entrepreneur, helps investors maximize returns with minimal risk.

STORY: Collin inherited some money from his grandmother at 18. When two of his college friends came to him with the idea of creating a TV show, but on the internet, he cut them a check that was way too much than what he should have. The business didn’t work.

LEARNING: If you’re going to make a mistake in something, make it yourself and learn from it.

Collin Plume, a precious metals expert and serial entrepreneur, helps investors maximize returns with minimal risk. Founder of Noble Gold Investments and My Digital Money, he champions alternative assets like metals, real estate, and crypto. He is a dedicated family man who prioritizes integrity and client success in navigating complex financial markets.

Collin inherited some money from his grandmother at 18. He did some traveling and a few other things with the money. Two of Collin’s college friends came to him with the idea of creating a TV show but on the internet. In theory, it made a lot of sense. They raised money, and Collin cut them a check that was way too much than what he should have.

Unfortunately, Collin didn’t fully engage with the idea beyond writing the check. He didn’t foresee the potential pitfalls. The business, however, didn’t pan out. Collin’s deepest regret in this investment was not actively participating in the business and learning from it. He lost money and the opportunity to grow as an entrepreneur.

• If you’re going to make a mistake in something, make it yourself. Don’t give money to someone else to make a mistake on your behalf—they will learn from it, you won’t.
• Teach your kids how to make money from an early age.

• Families should take it upon themselves to protect the next generation.

If you get that opportunity, take it and learn from it, but know that if you invest, you’ll probably never see $1 come back to you. Also, you could jump on the bandwagon of a totally new and exciting idea, but there are some successful businesses out there that you can invest in.

Collin advises seeking out new mentors in different areas every year. Continuous learning and growth through mentorship is a powerful tool for personal development, and Collin himself has found it invaluable in his journey as an entrepreneur.

Collin’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to train some people to take over more of the day-to-day operations in two of his businesses. On a personal level, he wants to go on one of the big hiking trips he’s never been able to do.

[spp-transcript]

• LinkedIn
• Instagram 
• X
• YouTube
• Book 
• Website

• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• My Worst Investment Ever
• 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points

• Valuation Master Class
• The Become a Better Investor Community
• How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
• Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
• FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
• Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
• Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Achieve Your Goals

• astotz.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Threads
• X
• YouTube
• My Worst Investment Ever Podcast