#226 – Tom Dunkel: Wealth Builder's Playbook
Enter the Lionheart
Lawrence Dunning
4.9 • 67 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tom Dunkel is a battle-tested entrepreneur with nearly 30 years of experience building, scaling—and failing in—business. He's built two 8-figure companies, crashed six, and raised over $50M across multiple asset classes. Tom has spent the last 30 years in finance, investing & real estate
Get Tom's Free Book Here: https://funnel.eaglecapitalinvestments.com/opt-in-ebook-page
0.00: Tom's background and becoming a deal maker
6.00: Importance of a niche business
12.00: Wisdom learned from "failure's"
17.00: Utilizing the "Empire of One"
24.00: Freedom from living below your means
28.00: How do you get rich?
34.00: Conversation with your kids about their careers
41.00: Importance to nurture relationships for men
44.00: Where Tom sees opportunity for investment (and true diversification)
48.00: Private lending and due diligence before investing
53.00: Partnerships
Until next time, love and good vibes.
Podcast Website: https://enterthelionheart.com/
Check out the latest episode here:
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/enter-the-lionheart/id1554904704
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4tD7VvMUvnOgChoNYShbcI
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | how do you tell an eight-year-old, how do you tell an eight-year-old, like, how do you get rich? |
| 0:04.7 | And, of course, you know, she's a little too young to go into the whole rich versus wealthy, |
| 0:09.4 | you know, kind of philosophical discussion. |
| 0:11.3 | So that's pretty much, I simply said to her, I said, well, just spend less money than you earn. |
| 0:18.5 | And eventually, you'll be rich. |
| 0:34.1 | A single theme is too narrow for great minds and daring hearts. |
| 0:38.1 | Get ready to enter the Lionheart with your host, Lawrence Dunning. |
| 0:42.7 | Tom, so great to get connected with you. |
| 0:45.0 | I love the fact that your bio has you as being in finance, rural estate, and investing for 30 years. |
| 0:51.2 | And like we were just saying, I'm in the same fields for 25 years. So I'm a little bit behind you, but I'm so excited to pick the train on all those things. Yeah, thanks, Lawrence. It's great to be with you and all the listeners today. Looking forward to our chat. Yeah, so maybe we could start with a little bit of your background, you know, how you got into the field you're in, and then we can start talking specifics. |
| 1:12.2 | Sure, yeah, yeah. |
| 1:13.2 | Well, as you mentioned, in 30 years, it's like, wow, where'd all that time go? |
| 1:16.5 | But, yeah, I got out of business school in the mid-90s and got into mergers and acquisitions |
| 1:25.1 | in the aerospace industry. |
| 1:27.0 | So it was a great place to get started. |
| 1:29.3 | I was surrounded by some amazing people, you know, ex-fighter pilots. And we even had a |
| 1:36.0 | couple astronauts on our board of directors. They're all kinds of like retired, you know, |
| 1:41.2 | Air Force colonels and things like that. And on top of that, there were |
| 1:45.3 | Harvard MBAs, Wharton MBAs, Chicago MBAs. So I was surrounded by all these amazing people, |
| 1:50.7 | and we were putting these deals together. So from a very early stage of my career, I was putting |
| 1:57.5 | deals together. I was the spreadsheet jockey, you know, the Excel nerd, you know, |
| 2:03.0 | running the models and putting the projections together so that we could go out to the banks |
... |
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