So I lost a lot of money, a lot of money, a lot of money, and a lot of brain power when I got

in bed with a very bad partner. So I'm going to tell you what I did and what I did wrong.

So bad partners. Now I had partners before and they were good partners. We had bad partnerships.

This is bad partners. So I want to be really clear about the difference. All the partners I had before, ethical, find people, nothing wrong with it. We had a bad structure. And so you have the person and you also have the structure of the relationship that both have to be aligned. And as a side note, if you are dealing with somebody that you like, but you can't agree on a structure, it means don't do it. And the hard part is a lot of people get at that point where like, well, let's just make it work or you try and concede.

That will be a problem later. I promise you. And so like, if you're going to be making decisions together as co-owners of a business and you can't agree on the structure, that's a great sign. And the thing is, it's okay to not agree. The amount of deals that I've negotiated and got to the end of me like, oh, we just value things

differently. That's fine. You only want to get into bed with somebody who values your contribution the same way you do and you value their contribution the same way they do. Like you have to have alignment there. If you don't, you're going to be at the offset and misaligned and it's just going to be trouble. Now, this is bad partners. All right. And so bad partners I will define as people who have nefarious intentions who actually want to hurt you.

There's a difference to be trouble. Now, this is bad partners. All right. So bad partners,

I'll define as people who have nefarious intentions who actually want to hurt you. There's a difference there between somebody who wants to win and it's just about how much of the pie they want to get, which is completely self-serving and fine. Like there's nothing wrong with that. It's America, it's capitalism. Everybody wants to have more of the pie. Bad partners want to take your pie and do so in a way that's deceitful.

So some of you

have heard my story,

this was actually the, the pie. That partners want to take your pie and do so in a way that's deceitful. So some of you

have heard my story, this was actually the last partner that I took on. So this was punishing

enough that it was traumatizing. It permanently changed my behavior. All right. And so I had just

sold. So I had six locations at this time with my gyms. I had bought out some of my past partners, which cost me a lot of money. It cost me more money than it cost me to sell to have them buy in. So I had to pay that money to those guys over time so I could buy them out. And so I had six locations. Now, I shut down one because it was too new and I decided to switch gears because I wanted to start the licensing business. And then I sold five. Now, for a separate story, I sold each of the five different people. I sold to employees. I sold the customers. I sold to a competitor. And so I sold all these different locations, different people. And I did cash deals, seller finance deals. I did debt deals. So I actually got a ton of M&A experience really early on from selling to different types of buyers and doing different types of deal structures, which will be a conversation from another time. But now I had a big pile of money, big being relative. I had some money that I got from the years of me growing the gyms. And so at this point, this is now like basically my egg, what I have to show for it, for all this work and all the sacrifice they've done at this point, I've got this test egg. Now, I was doing gym launches at the time. So this is why I made the transition. I started

flying out to gyms, started making money, and I could do like $100,000 in sales in about three weeks.

And I would keep that cash for myself because I had almost no cost besides my airfare, my hotel,

and the ad spend, which usually for me was like one to three grand. So not a lot. Mind you, remember that like big crazy return on capital? Like I'd spend two grand and I make

100. Good returns. Now, I had this little system and it worked. I didn't have any employees.

It was a great life. I just fly out, make 100 grand, fly somewhere else. And I have to worry about

any fulfillment. I just sell all day long.

I would make calls and I'd sell. That was it. That was my entire life. 12 hours a day, 9 to 9, I'd sell.

And one gym owner was like, hey, you're leaving so much money on the table. Red flag number one,

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