Billionaire Lawyer spills his $250M side hustles (pick one)

i don't hunt dear i hunt money if you owe the the biggest if not the biggest law firm in the country we've seen your face on the billboards from morgan oregon and if you just wanna say morgan that'd be great too my big vision was this what if google was a law firm what would it looked like you just became a lawyer to fund your hernia ambitions that's pretty bad i built an attraction called out could alcatraz east and it just prints money i've got apartment complexes i've got shopping centers that prints money too he's basically half walt disney me half shark where my competition gets beat by me is ninety five percent of them are shit i'm not a hunt cockroaches i'm hunt big game i got goosebumps john i love that answer that was incredible so first of all welcome to the pod you know we're on and i i'm from the south from missouri and tennessee i live into the sea for while and i have been trying to convey to sean this idea that i call capital men and i was like sean i don't know how to explain it but they just kinda filed the process and they just do thing to thing to thing and they don't overthink stuff and they're just baller and you are a good example of that i'm hearing how you're talking and i'm like you exactly what i'm talking about these capital men these guys who just get into stuff and it's like a it's like an onion they just have layers of stuff that you don't even know about and so for this podcast maybe we can ask you about like the i think you have like ten or something different businesses we can like ask you about each one because everyone knows you as as the law firm guy but that might not be the most interesting thing about you well believe it or not i've tell this to my wife all the time the thing that i'm most proud of and all my businesses has been wonder works the upside down house back in the nineties my kids were little we'd go to the site center and it was just you know they were shit they were terrible and the kids were wanting to leave before they got there and i had a business where i put on fairs around america and in one of our one of our vendors had this huge tent and everything in it was interactive interactive touching feeling before before interactivity was a thing and i said you know if we built a sign center that was interactive that's what a assigned center should be where you're touching feeling do and that parents would enjoy as much as kids so i went out around america a matter of fact i went to the exploratory in san francisco and i found like four things in the exploratory i found in the exploratory in san francisco i found a bubble room where you make this bubbles and i'm like okay that's something i found another thing called recollection and so i went around the the country looking for interactive things from side but i felt like the building had to be great and this guy comes up to me who had been with rip lease and he had a rendering of a building turned upside down he goes this this is what you should do you should turn it upside down like well how do you do that he starts to tell me i go well hell if i could do that i would do that and so the so i built the first one orlando is called wonder works if you google wonder works it's this right here there it is and this is amazing i've never seen this is this your disney world one one of mine is my one the one in orlando is very close to disney world very close to universal so inside of the building upside down well you go in and you walk in and you walk in and you're standing on the ceiling yeah so you walk through the truss and now you're standing on the ceiling and the storyline is that once upon a time in the bermuda triangle the greatest scientist in the world we're working on the greatest experiments in the world to better mankind they were trying to build their own hurricane to get out of control it the the place was located in bermuda triangle lips lifted out of the air spins it and it crashes down in orlando pigeon forge branson missouri and so then you go in and now you're un so you look up and you know there's the stairs and now you gotta now how are you gonna visit it so you go through an inversion tunnel where we turn you upside down so that when you exit the inversion tunnel you will be defying gravity and walking upside down and then you go from gallery to gallery to gallery to gallery and that prints money too that that those thing i have zero debt and i'll do like thirty three million in eb this year oh that's amazing you dropped in a the kind of a a bit of goal that you just could've stepped over which was before that you had a a national fair well we put on fairs around america we we weren't we didn't own the rise we were the operator in other words b var county fair pennsylvania state fair long island fair nassau county fair where we just set it up we'd promote it and then the ride people would come in and we were just it it didn't make a lot of money but you know back in those days listen i remember the first time me and a guy took a piece of land and flipped it and made sixty grand we split sixty grand we went on a two week vendor celebrating our thirty thousand dollar profit you you know those first those first profits were like holy shit and it was like a side hustle i i was a lawyer but i just made an extra thirty get a piece of land re zone and flipping it to the developer so alright so john has tons of side hustle upside down buildings crime museums chocolate factories he's a machine but here's the thing every single one started with him spotting an opportunity others missed my old company the hustle built a database with hundreds of ideas like this some are weird like john's some are dead simple if you like liked what you just heard go check out the side hustle ideas database scan the qr code or click the link in the description now let's get back to the show san francisco inspired me i went there once with my wife we wanted to go see alta alcatraz we go to a alcatraz alcatraz is we get there thinking we're gonna walk right in and they go there's no tickets available i said we'll be here a couple more days when can we go there's no tickets it's sold out for the next two weeks i'm like the and so the way you the way you always saw that problem is you pull out two one hundred dollar bills to the ticket taker and you say are you sure you don't have two extra tickets back there the this is not for the tickets this is for you so i got to go through alcatraz and when i went through it i thought i had this epiphany you know have you have these epiphany and my epiphany is america is fascinated with crime and punishment like nothing else tv shows movies books at netflix all of it and i was in the attraction business anyway i said you know what about an attraction dedicated to the history of crime and punishment and so i built an attraction that's in pigeon forge tennessee called a alcatraz east and it's i built it it looks like a eighteen hundred prison and it's the history of crime and punishment and it just prints money how how big is that business it it makes five million bucks a year net net in in profits just kinda how much did it take cost to build it initially it's an interesting thing because you know i got a speech called failure can be your friend and what happened is i first built it in washington dc because i thought you know the his you know i called it the national museum of crime and punishment and it didn't didn't do very well and the reason it didn't do very well in my opinion there's there's a lot of free stuff in dc to begin with but more importantly they wouldn't let me do anything with the facade so i was just in a building you know across the national portrait gallery i was doing okay i was limp along but paying rent and paying just a little bit but the landlord came in and said you know you're not doing the numbers per the lease and we're gonna call the lease on him like but i'm paying my rent why would you do this say we're we're we're doing it so i moved everything and built the structure in pigeon forge moved a lot of this stuff so some of the stuff i'd had i bet the whole thing from what i had to build and what i took i think the whole thing probably cost thirteen million bucks fourteen million bucks but like the at the end of the attraction i have four things that are just you just can't believe it when you get there one ted bundy vw two bonnie clyde death car from the movie three okay o j bro and four john dill sedan and i just bought john bicycle and the murdoch golf cart and let me tell you america's fascination with crime is such that people are in this thing for three and a half four hours and it's an easy business to run because it's it's static you know it's not there's not a lot of interactive i'm looking at your website right now i've i've i've been here i believe i'm a huge crime fan and so would your waiting to name what you're gonna name i was like you're feeling forget no car this is awesome and you made a big bet because after you do the thing in dc i think the normal entrepreneur sort of starts to doubt the concept doubt the viability you you know you're you're you it didn't go well right away and yet you you doubled down in the face of that is it just blind faith conviction are you just a stubborn guy that's it not that i'm stubborn it's like you you know you hear everybody give these speeches speeches about failure is your friend failure can be the best thing that ever happened to you but yeah when we lose we never go near it again we say that you know it sounds good in a speech but what happened is i had had some investors from wonder works invested in this deal so i had investors i sent out my wife kept saying this is this is great it's great you just gotta build it in a place where there's people more people and so i sent a letter to all my investors saying look i'm gonna move it from here to there and you'll be part of it and everything was you know and not one person took me up on it not one person they all said you know you know we we're taking our loss and then i my wife i was what do you think she goes let's do it ourselves and you know and so the my new money was like eight million dollars new money and i got it back in a year and a half were you how big was the law firm or like what was your financial situation my financial situation was not bad but you know i mean my financial situation got the older i get the better it got you know because i've was one of these guys that always was pushing my profits into new things and it was good but but i i did have eight million bucks that's amazing so what's crazy about your story is you're this guy you own one of the biggest if not the the biggest law firm in the country right we've seen your face on the billboards from morgan and morgan before that you've done all these other things so you were talking about wonder work maybe your favorite business that you're you're most proud of which was a amusement business and maybe some of the inspiration from that came from you working at disney when you were younger yeah so like i guess where does the story start for you does it start when you're like a little kid does it start at disney where where does the entrepreneurial bug start i think the story started for me probably the same way the story started for you too except you're too young for this to happen there are people that are born with a entrepreneurial seed a seed it just happens now for my generation you can spot those people because they were paper boys or paper girls and a paper route was a dim effort because the paper route you're ten eleven years old but it's every single day it's rain sleep snow if you miss one you gotta go back you gotta collect your money and i'll bet you two guys if you went back to your ten or eleven years old i don't know if there were paper routes when you all were younger but you were probably doing something hustling and money you two were probably coding or you know prone stuff on ebay selling stuff on ebay whatever you know it at my school i always sold candy i always i used to wear army pants with all the pockets and i'd have watermelon sticks and bubble gum and not chocolate because that melted and i would sell candy at school and make like ten bucks a day by the way john you know the evidence for what you're saying buffett had a paper out plus you know sold magazines gum and coke jeff bezos had a paper out sam walton from walmart had a paper out walt disney peter dr there's like an an insane roster of people that did exactly what you're saying oprah had a paper out that's bad s and so the reason i know all these people because i've written a new book that's being edited right now called life is luck and the thesis of my book is we wake up we're born but we're born lucky you know we're born in america first of all warren buffett calls it you know winning the ovarian lottery just being born in america and then you make a thousand left turns at a thousand right turns at a thousand you turns and then you end up here and one different turn but part of my thesis is the paper boy the paper girl these people that were born with that genetic seed of entrepreneur and you it can't be taught it's just it's just in you and it's it's such an advantage in life because and it's really nothing we did we were born with it nobody wants rich people do never wanna be told that they were lucky they wanna tell us all i work my ass off i deserve every single penny i got and they are like one hundred aren't wrong about that because one different term i mean buffett buffett company is basically five stocks if you take it would charlie mu died i read to think about him yesterday the other day the wall you take five stocks away from berkshire it's not berkshire yeah it's like am coca cola apple and right exactly but but but but we see as his great investor and and his his greatness has really been his patience and his understanding of of of index funds instead of you know money managers and ton and and our of compounding interest i believe what you're saying i i believe luck to be true i think that most people and they get successful i actually think that they attribute a fair bit to luck because they realized like like for example when i saw my company the ceo gotten to a really bad accident like two weeks after the deal closed and i'm like i mean if that would happened two weeks prior that could change everything so there is a lot component but you have i i i have some research here and and i think you have like ten or twelve things that have worked out really well for you and so there is some like there's a lot of good decision making that that you have on your side were you always doing these little hustle like did morgan and morgan start as a hustle and turn into a real thing or were you trying to build something big from the gecko well i was not trying to build something big from the get go i mean look when i first got out of law school because somebody had told me they'd paid me a hundred grand and tied to cola i would have been you know jimmy me the pin i mean i wasn't even thinking like this you know i i got into this business because my brother got hurt when i was in college and it kind of you know he was became quad for from an accident and so i was in the middle of all that and our family was relatively poor and when you're poor you're helpless hopeless powerless and then you're watching your brother be you know pushed back by the the big companies and i became enraged about the way he was treated and and so when i went to law school i knew what i was gonna do when i went to law school i knew exactly what i was gonna do i was gonna come back and do this work i was i had a lot of job offers other places but this is all i wanted to do and this is all i've ever done but i didn't there's no way i could've have grabbed this because it it it's too big to drink it too it was too big to even dream this well it's interesting because i would say personal injury lawyers i think have a pretty bad perception in the public i think it's you know ambulance chaser is seen as sort of a s thing i think that would i think that's fair as like mass perception but the when you think about what you were actually saying and what you did right like you know your brother has this tragic accident on the job becomes a quad you didn't and and you know insurance companies and the and and large corporations they're you know they're not trying to pay out you know fair conversation or huge settlements to to to folks that that were that needed it and you're in in a way like you know you're basically helping somebody who needs the most help who tends to have the least power or resources to fight against those who have a lot of power resources in in many ways that's a very noble thing but it has the opposite perception is that is that how you see it or you know what what's going on yeah it's it's look it's it's like this when i got out of law school almost when i got out you weren't even allowed to advertise you know and personal injury lawyers were like you said ambulance chaser that was what they were called everybody wants to look down on somebody so lawyers who had a bad reputation themselves anyway you know kill all the lawyers all of a sudden they found somebody looked down on and that was the personal injury lawyer the am chaser i'm not an chaser and then all a sudden you have the advertising lawyers which is another group to look down on the pete the personal large i don't advertise i'm above that i'm down you know and so what happened was when i got out of law school i would've have been the last person you would have ever i was straight narrow i was the you know the president of everything at the university i had all these job offers but i didn't take them because i i did have a desire to do what i'm doing when i got out i started going around to people who did advertise who were kind of shady and they gave me their business and i took their bad cases i took their tough cases but i got inside the belly of the beast and i saw the future and you know a lot of times you get to see the future but you know bill gates and paul allen they saw the future but if they were born today that future wouldn't be there for them that was their luck when they were born because if they were born today microsoft is already something else and so i saw it and i said down with my wife and i said look this goes against everything i ever thought i'd be but this train is leaving the station and that train being advertising for your services yes advertising for my services and to get cases because when i was doing it when i started out other lawyers would refer you business and you were paying them a fifty percent referral fee so if your if your fee was a hundred dollars you had to give your referring lawyer fifty dollars oh that's hurts margins and and all of a sudden you're seeing a different way now it was still iffy when i did it because it hadn't really hadn't become mainstream at all so but it but it was something i was so embarrassed about it i didn't even do the commercials myself i had a friend who was very handsome and i said vance i want you to be in my face and he did it and then the bar came in and said well you can't have spokes you gotta do it yourself so i had to take my my fat face and go on tv there there i was look oh man look pretty good to me you it looks sharp but i didn't like the way i looked so so were people not advertising because they were literally just too proud for or was it was it a gray area legally of if you could or could it wasn't great legally but it was it was taboo it was just not done people who could who had wouldn't because they didn't wanna be shunned at the country club people that would didn't have the money to do it how i got to do it was i went to the bank and borrowed a hundred grand and went down did the commercials you know when i think back later you know and and by the way my credit was so good that this tv station would only run my ads if i paid in advance because you know that's how good that my credit was today's episode is brought you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com so you're saying the order of operations was you graduate as lawyer you know what you wanna do as a practice you saw that there were some kind of lawyers at the bottom of the of the social barrel there that were advertising you didn't advertise yourself at first you just went and took their cases to like they would catch the fish you would cook the fish you would go and actually do the case and you said you know you're you said you're in the belly of the beast and you saw oh this is the future these guys are getting a lot of cases this is how lawyers are gonna get business and you decided to do it what what was it that lets you kind of like go against that kinda can the country club mindset like you know i heard this quote from larry ellis and he said one time they were saying how successful he was and he goes yeah i had all of the necessary disadvantages he would need to be successful like kind of like i had this chip on my shoulder no i wasn't the best student no i wasn't the best at this i had everything i needed to be successful that's that's what i needed what was it that you needed to to kind of break out from the way that other lawyers are doing things well i've always been you know aggressive and i'm a network but i didn't wanna do it this way because but paying that fifty percent how i looked at it was this they were throwing me their trash i felt like i was up in a dumpster eating and a half eaten and who that had been thrown up in the dumpster but guess what it tasted okay you know the that i was i was living but i would rather have just had a fresh who right through the drive through windows instead of having to climb into the to the dumpster and that was my decision do i just keep because i knew it was gonna happen and i knew first to market was always an advantage and if i could get in there early enough you know and become k x instead of you know tissue i had a better chance and my wife was a securities lawyer she's very smart i'm not i i'm the part of the fifty percent of the law school class that enabled there to be a top fifty percent and without me there's no them my wife was in the top two percent the foundation call the foundation yes and so the thing that happened to tim it was one of these things where you know we're very close and he's in this terrible situation and disney is really treating him terrible and the more that we'd fight the more they were just crushing and when you're watching somebody you love that much get man handle that way you just there's a rage that that came inside of me and so i always knew what i was gonna do i mean i was offered a job was got more cole wanted me to come to his firm and i told him i said you know this is what i wanna do and he helped me get my first job out a law school and so the good thing about what i've done and the good thing for people and and that are listening to this is when you wake up and work is not work you're you're a lot better at it so i woke up every day going this you know i'm gonna take care of the ti of the world so it was never worked for me and i wanted to go and get my pound of flesh from these people who had bullied us when we were helpless hopeless and powerless and so as tom's gone on it's to me it's been very noble of what we do because the people we represent didn't do anything wrong but they had things taken from them they had their health taken they had their ability to wall taken and they had loss of incomes they had things taken and what we do is we get give them back as much as we can or compensate them as much as we can for what was taken from them and so you know i like the business i listen i liked robinhood hood when i was a kid i always i always liked the robinhood hood story you know and so the people i'm going against you know look the tobacco industry i've had many many trials against them what do they do for a living they are in the business of pre murder they know what they're doing they're gonna kill us they're gonna kill a bunch of us this year and they know it and the reason they know it in their internal documents they call it they call new smokers replacement smokers they laced the cigarettes with additives to to hook us they gave it to the kids they gave it to the service people they're in the business of pre murder and so i don't feel bad at all when that's my enemy i don't feel bad at all when i'm trying to get compensation for people who got hooked and addicted by a very evil company and by the way today those same companies now own our food companies yeah it's crazy and processed food is the new tobacco in terms of them so in a little bit we wanna ask about all your businesses because you've you've had so much stuff but just to add to to give us some context into the timeline when you start advertising do remember like the next ten years of business like how big your business grow it was it was gradual but the way always looked at it is i had a number of what i thought a case was worth and then i had the number of cases that that i was sign up and i would divide the the number the average fee into the cases and as long as that equaled out where i could break even i kept pouring more money into it so if a case was if i if a case was worth four thousand dollars and i was spending you know for four thousand dollars and i've i was spending eighty thousand dollars i had if i got twenty cases that was breakeven and if i got double that than that was profit so that's kinda how i did it in a very simplistic way and i felt like as long as i'm breaking even i'm building the brand and building the brand was very important too when you say building the brand like what's the john morgan school of brand if you were gonna school us and how you think about brand what what do you think about first of all i wanted to be something that's memorable i wanted so when i first did it when i first got into it i there weren't even computers i didn't have a computer i didn't have a url the first time i really understood what a url was i was at a yankee game with some lawyers in new york they all had these devices in their hands called blackberry and i'm like what are those you know it was like what what is this and they're all their own and they're just stomach through it the whole game and i'm like what are you doing there we're getting cases so i went back home and said i gotta get a blackberry and then i got the blackberry i said i gotta get a url and then so so the beginning of it the beginning of the brand was the url and so i wanted my url to be my mission statement and my branding statement the two things i came up with in my mind was just as for all and for the people those are the two urls and i ultimately went with four the people because i was worried that people couldn't spell justice all the time but i knew that we could all spell for the people and so when i built my brand it was i wanted my brand to be my mission statement and my url i wanted all to be one thing so i never had to say something twice i could just say it once so a lot of the ads in you know visit you know call morgan morgan for the people dot com alright so i can say it all just like that and so but building the brand was very very important who did you take inspiration from on building a like a iconic memorable brand who did you think was doing it well well the people that i admire in my life has walt disney i worked to i did magic at walt disney world and so every time i walk out of the magic store i see walt disney holding mickey hand on main street and they they had dream of doing it and so that was kind of in my mind it was pt bar disney those type of people so i like the promotion like when i was building wonder works i knew that the building itself you you've heard the slogan sell the sizzle not to stake well there's a lot to that so when i was building wonder works i was thinking sell the sizzle not to stay people will pay is to get behind the curtain like they did with pt barn them they'll get they'll pay to get behind the curtain just to see the human pin cushion how many active companies do have right now you know i got so many k ones that i've i've built i've got shopping centers that i'm built that i've built and i've got apartment complexes that i've built in are under construction so i i got that whole part of my life i've got the attraction businesses that i have i started building marriott hotels about twenty years ago i've had a had a billboard company that i sold to lamar for a lot of money i had an ad agency for lawyers called practice made perfect that i sold making did well the new thing i've got going right now is you know the the guy you know who guy eddie is he's a california guy yeah so dave and buster kinda have has it all to themselves and so we built our very first what we call downtown flavor pound in pigeon forge and it's basically dave buster meets guy and we built the we opened up the first one about a year or so ago and we're building the second one right now in pigeon forge oh in myrtle beach this fasting needs to be because so many people come on this podcast and their message is you just gotta focus you gotta you know don't get distracted don't chase the shiny objects you just gotta do one thing and let it compound for a long time but you kinda seem to have done both right your firm has compounded i think you guys do like two billion in revenue now this is like a huge firm but you've had all these other entrepreneurial side quests so i guess like kinda square that circle for me are you are you focused or are you un focus how do how do you think about that here's how i think about that those people that tell you to focus they're also doing a lot of this hunting fishing golfing all three off you know now nothing wrong with off but there's nothing about business except maybe a little golf if you can do a little bit there but hunting to me makes no sense you know you know killing an animal right up on an animal makes no sense venison i can i can taste the fur i don't wanna eat it so i don't hunt so i got that fishing i don't understand i don't understand catch and release let's go out and have a good time let's catch a fish let's rip its mouth open let's tear eye out and let's throw it back in the water i don't understand that and golf look it's a great hobby but i'd rather shoot pool you know for an hour than golf so all that focus that these people that these people are focusing on i don't have that distraction i don't hunt dear i hunt money and and i like it so instead of collecting stamps some people collect stamps as a hobby i collect artifacts for alpha alcatraz east i could i hunt you're you're a big fan of presidential note cards you know presidential flashcards cards you just like collecting those bills yes yes and clipping too bucks so i am very focused i'm just not hunting golfing or fishing if you take all that and listen i watch sports on tv but there's people that that are more interested in than you know in lane new job than they are their own job well i don't have those distractions to my focus can can i ask you about each one of these businesses that i researched and i wanna brag a little bit about you and also you can tell me if it's true or not okay so listen to this sean so tell me if this is okay so we have morgan morgan that's a huge successful thing you talked a lot about that but you also have a company called lit which i think you sold solidify is a tech company for lawyers and i believe you sold around sixty percent of the company you still own forty percent at a six hundred million dollar valuation is that true that's right do you do you have a method where like you do the vision and somewhat you hire our a ceo early on like what what makes the system work for that the a guy join me who is you know this guy was one of the smartest guys a young guy and he could do anything and it was like i could just tell him i i called it magic carpets i would say can you do this yeah i can do this can you do that can you do this can you do that yes when i first brought him in my vision and i've written a book called you can't i've written two books one called you can't teach hungry one called you can't teach vision my big vision for the law was this what if google was a law firm what would it look like that was a thing that just hit me and i just kept going over and over and over in my mind now the problem for a guy like me is you know terrible in math terrible in science you know the idea of coding you know i had you know no idea but i had that vision what if google was a law firm and then i decided that i was gonna build what i called the google law firm but i didn't have the so i've been close with obama's team and i was talking to the obama people the guys who ran the cave in chicago got teddy golf and there was another guy named yea cri and i'm talking to all of them about the google offer firm and when i would talk to they're they're just blank face like what what do you mean the google offer so i found this guy and he got it and the first thing i said to him was you know everything we're gonna do we're gonna ask what google do and here's what google would do if it was a law firm google would be everywhere for everybody and google wouldn't want some cases they'd want all the cases and if they didn't handle their cases in house they would refer them out they would partner with a firm like uber so so i i was inspired by google and uber so i wanted to build the google law firm i'd keep a lot of cases but i'd refer a whole bunch more out well so then so i say to the guy i he says what do you want the most i said i want transparency and automation now we had a software called client profiles it was was pretty good but he kept saying it's not enough it's not enough it's not enough we have to build our own software and and that's the last thing i wanted to do because it's just too big and i'm like that's not what we do but he finally convinced me we gotta build it and i had gained such trust him and i say well let's go ahead so we built lit for us internally and we put and we put it on salesforce we we we we layered it on salesforce nobody ever done that before so all of a sudden we got all these engineers we got this you know we got a staff of thousands of engineers salesforce was interested in us because they hadn't been in the legal space before and we can change things with with we can we can do whatever we want so so we started and part of the deal if you wanna be like like so i refer a but bunch of cases out to lawyers across america but like with the blue means if people wanna get my referrals they gotta be on solidified because that's how we talk to each other so a case comes in that i'm gonna refer out to des moines you know the case comes in i got a partner who's on i refer the case to him he's got you know twelve hours to accept it or decline it if he declines it comes back it goes to a second person comes back goes to a third person and then and then there's then it's so it started as something internal for us but it's but then it became you know so good that everybody wanted it so we started selling it what was how much did you invest in and what was the time to exit well p other people invested in it with his fortress put some money in i was on a bank board i was on the bank board called es esquire bank which was a because a bank for lawyers trades on nasdaq i said on the board tiger capital put in some money i would say from beginning to exits thick seven years and incredible i didn't really wanna exit but you know it was time because like you said the focus i needed to focus on the google law firm i already had this and i still have a lot of input with be and i sold it to somebody who i thought would be good i sold it to be and they're very good at this and so yeah about six or seven years okay that's amazing by the way it it seems like there's a flywheel between these businesses so you said we built kinda for ourselves and then you used your position and leverage in the market where hey if i'm referring you in the case you gotta be using our platform for this to work well to to get more customers the second business i think sam gonna bring up is like this ad agency you created the the ad agency was here's how the ad agency was i called it practice made perfect so what my idea was is i was gonna go out across americans say if you wanna do what i'm doing i'll write your ads i'll place your ads i'll i'll and and when big cases happen when mass towards happened you can put them in and then refer them to me so i've built this company called mass or practice made perfect at all these lawyers across america i was charging fifteen percent so i made money you know i was making i was probably making you know eight or nine million bucks a year just running that business but more importantly all those lawyers started referring me you know when vi would happen or when you know mass towards what happened they would send me their cases as well so i i built this i i thought of it like like global cross where i'm laying all this fiber optic across america but my fiber optic where these law firms across america that i would make money be the ad agency but i'd make the big money with the cases they would say wait so was that its own entity and you're saying it was doing eight million in income yes that's incredible what's where is it that now i sold it because here's why i had to sell it as i started to expand across america with all these lawyers they're all good friends of mine it by the end but i kept they they were like you know i had a guy in indiana and he's like john you know you you're you're infringing on my territory i'm like wow because my deal with these with my clients of this you don't have sign contract with me you can farm me anytime you want and i'll never compete with you i'll never compete with you and it was just a handshake well they were like call and saying well john you know i saw one of your billboards i'm like well where did you see it he's like well i was driving to louisville i were you in kentucky here indiana well i was in i was in kentucky but i was driving i was like hey man you're in indianapolis i i'm in louisville so i started getting i was infringing on my clients right and it just became un i i was at a cross i either had to not grow the google law firm or keep this other business so i sold practice made perfect i i don't know what's gonna happen to it i'm very worried about it because when they bought it from a the the person that came in to run it they called the person they put in their the the resident entrepreneur or something like that they have some name for the the guy who's gonna run on my you know just give me the money and go do what you want how much did you solve for like eighteen okay so that's eighteen million alright now listen is this sean is this true so do you still own this and and tell me a story about it you had a trade show called mass to made perfect and it's a twice a year trade show for for lawyers so you you're you basically owned like the networking of law firms is that right this called mass to made perfect and we put two times a year people have come to learn about the latest mass to it was a play on my practice made perfect i had practice made perfect for my clients and masked and towards made perfect for all the lawyers in america and i stay with that for a long time and at a certain point was me in two other firms it was when johnny cochran was alive he was part of it and i was helping johnny carr can map out his national strategy which also helped me learn about going national and then another law firm and but at a certain point back to your focus you you are right about focus i mean bill gates and warren buffett both say focus focus focus at a certain point mass torch made perfect was not helping me grow my business and so i sold i i'd i let them have mass torch made perfect i kept practice made perfect and we and then i went and spent way more time on the google law well how big was the trade show business it was big but it wasn't that profitable the what the the the the trade show itself made money but not a lot of money practice a practice made perfect the ad agency was really supplementing that but what we were really looking for were cases we were really looking for people to say hey you know we're gonna send you our cases so the trade show itself never made money it was the cases that we got where do you see opportunity today that you know a a younger more free job morgan would actually be able to go and pursue what would you go chase down if i was young i would probably because of ai because i'm not good at that stuff i would probably be looking towards the service industries for john morgan you know plumbing electrical air conditioning i think that that's where a person like me could thrive because i'm i'm good at scaling i'm good at building teams i'm i'm good at sharing the profits and so i think that that i think i might be in something like that but the business i really enjoy the most is the entertainment business and i don't it's just the great thing about the entertainment business whether it's the downtown flavor or wonder works or a alcatraz is you're not fighting can you can you okay so sean and i are i guess sorta of in the entertainment business because we have this podcast but you know i love the idea of owning an upside down museum that sounds amazing it sounds fun it sounds like it's good for the world like it it's like it's wholesome it sounds fantastic it seems cool to touch the things you're working on can you teach us how to get into that business and how to operate run about an opportunity or what a winning formula looks like well winning formula looks like you gotta go back to the basics always location location location look my orlando store does the best and then pigeon forge does the second best and then myrtle beach does pretty good and but branson does less than myrtle beach it's all about where your locations are if you don't have a great location for this for this type of business look six flags is having trouble in america right now because there's just not enough people to go to six flags i like these one offs where location based attractions where it's at the corner of remain in maine you got a lot of people coming with you know and when people come with money they're they're they're coming to spend money when the people come to orlando they're coming to spend money and so that's what i that's what i would focus on who should be would be you know the the cities itself and is the business model just thirty dollar tickets or fifty dollar tickets or they're not it's like twenty six dollar tickets yeah and and the value the reason i think i'm really doing well is the value incredible because there's probably four or five things inside of each attraction that if you just went out and paid for it on the street like i've got these virtual roller coasters in malls they go for twenty dollars a ride you know three minutes twenty bucks with me you can just keep going and go and going ropes course fifteen twenty bucks a ride with me go you laser tag fifteen twenty bucks there's probably five items inside of a wonder works that would cost a hundred bucks by each by themselves but here a family of four comes in for a hundred bucks and they leave you know with a huge g on themselves sweating from all the activities and the value is incredible the the thing i love about the business is there's really no fighting like in in my law business you know i'm competing to get the cases that i'm fight the insurance company that i'm fighting the defense lawyers and everything's is a fight the only thing a fight here is when somebody comes and say i didn't like it i want my money back and we basically look at the ticket and go how long words how long were they there if they were there for an hour or less here's your money back when they come and ask for their money back and they were there for three hours or like get the fuck out of here dude is there like a winning strategy like okay the story of an upside down house that i got tossed out the perimeter triangle that's kinda cool crime and punishment cool what other winning story formulas do you like well i have one that i'm gonna that i'm looking to build right now and it's called santa's chocolate factory so imagine this is santa's as childhood factory nice okay and the thing in the middle so envision here here's the that here's where this came from here's where this idea came from so i'm out at disney one day and i'm sitting at ji deli and ji deli is a ice cream shop the store right next door was a christmas store at at disney village i'm sitting there and then i go into the christmas store christmas is you know a year round business in certain places so then i thought what could i build that would be phenomenal so i thought well willy won you gotta pay ip for willy won but you don't have to pay ip for for santa claus so i said what about santa's chocolate factory santa's living there this is santa's house there's a big chocolate factory there's ice cream this the booze are made out of sleigh then you got all the merchandise you're gonna sell you got santa claus there and you know in his workshop you got pictures being taken you got elves work there and so my idea is to build this complex of santa's chocolate factory where santa is and and on the hour every hour at midnight every hour turns into midnight the clock turns dome dome dome down the lights go down and all of a sudden the store comes alive the train starts moving the bears are moving it's christmas time on the hour kind of a a bella moment where people come it's snowing outside and so that's the next thing that i'm gonna do i love have you seen en chant in chant christmas have you seen this business yeah but here think about this what i'm thinking about with this because the inside is gonna be so phenomenal i'm thinking about doing something that's never been done ever in the history of the world charging money to come into a retail store a dollar to come in now i don't know if it'll work if it doesn't work i'll quit charging in the dollar but i think i can build something inside so spectacular that people will wanna get in there to see the clock strike twelve the clock strikes twelve all of a sudden the everybody's up on the counters like johnny rockets they're all saying it's beginning to look a lot like christmas there's this five minute inter inter every hour and i think people will pay to come in and see it so that's my next thing that i'm working on right now sam isn't it crazy that he's basically like half walt disney shark half a lawyer shark you know better coleslaw saul meets jeff bezos it's like get one of the one of the wildest combinations it's pretty amazing it's i mean you been in the it's it's it's kinda a funny there's like a joke here of like you just became a lawyer to fund your carney ambitions and that's pretty bad to be honest because you know being a lawyer's is cool and i'm totally on board with helping the little guy but there's something special about particularly in a world of ai you know this is a common theme that sean and i have talked about it in a world of ai in more digital it's pretty cool to be out of the house and and screen free experiences and so i actually find your attraction business almost probably more interesting than your less lost i told you that i'm i'm you know my wife doesn't to understand it when i tell her i'm i'm more proud of my attraction business than the law business just because it's so unlikely and what do you think and so that business is third what do you think that do doing on the whole thing i'm almost i had some limited partners over time i bought a lot of them out but yeah so what's that worth eight x quarter a billion yeah hey quick message here because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works no friction well i've used mercury for years now and let me tell you it just works and that's why i use it for not one not two but eight of my companies from credit cards to invoices i have everything in one place there's no junky dashboard i've never told please please visit a local bank branch none of that tom fu and a few months ago i landed a big client the first thing i did i sent them a clean branded invoice boom deal close cash in the door that's the kind of banking experience i want and that's why i use mercury so if you're running a startup and you want making that feels like it's built in this century well go to mercury dot com and get started in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them man a and evolve bank and trust members fdic what are you doing with malls are you do something interesting with malls so what i do with malls is this everybody's tearing malls down because malls are no good so in myrtle beach i'm was gonna i'm gonna build this the i'm building this new downtown flavor with ga so there was a a there was a mall that was just on its last legs there's an out parcel that has a bass pro that kicks ass so that's that's golden but the mall what i really wanted out of the mall was i wanted the jc location it's the the locations fantastic the mall is just no goods i wanted the jc location to build downtown flavor but then i got stuck with them all but i bought them all i bought it all for an incredibly low price so now the question gonna be do you level them all or what do you do what i've decided to do is to do something that's never really been done like this for your viewers i'm gonna add you guys seem you'll know the answer to this are you all familiar with the concept of first principle thinking okay yeah e elon is popularized this this term and aristotle todd elon the term so but so you take these assumptions and you d them so right now the assumption is if you buy them mall you tear it down because there's nothing you can do with it so i've decided to do some first principal i do a lot of first principle thinking in my businesses so i've decided what about what have i take this older mall and with new technology and led and illusions that felt that what if i take this mall and i don't tear it down i just repurpose it but i make it a gallery i make the whole mall illusions that that you know like when you're in the venetian and you see those that the the the when you're on the water and and there's so many things to do with led so i'm gonna take this mall and i'm gonna repurpose it and i'm gonna call it the gallery and it's gonna be it's gonna be the mall is gonna be a museum you're gonna go to the mall just like you're gonna go to santa's chop the five you're gonna go just to see the inside of the mall you're gonna go to see all this and that i'm gonna have a zip line from one end to another i'll have my ropes courses in the middle i've got so many cool things so when you go to this mall most malls are now just tore down that's just that's what you do i'm gonna take elon first principal thinking and i'm not gonna turn them all down i'm gonna make the mall the attraction you're fascinating and your wife your children and some of your close coworkers what would they say it's like working with you well i think they would say that that i have strong feelings you know if if i feel like something is and you know it's i don't wanna say my or the highway because i i i i do a lot with consensus but once i form my consensus then i execute i mean i i'll spend a lot of time going around the horn but once i figure out what it's gonna be i execute of i would say you know procrastination may be what they would say i might put off a little bit but i don't see it that way because i'm i feel like i'm like even on this mall i'm still thinking of what i'm gonna put in it i mean over the weekend i was looking at these buildings where they painted illusions on these different buildings and so you pull up to a building and it looks like it's a you know it looks like it's something but it's not it's an illusion so like this week weekend i was looking at all these different things so it's not really procrastination in my mind it's thinking who's thinking playing in yeah yeah so when you it seems like you probably meet a lot or talk to a lot of entrepreneurs if i said to you man so many entrepreneurs just don't get it what is it that they don't get that you've that you get well first of all it's i have a game that i play when i drive down roads i'll see a new business coming in and i'll the game is this is it gonna make it or not well i'll see i'll see an old burger king being turned into some you know health food store and you look over your is that gonna make it or not and it's usually you know is they're repurpose an old burger king they're probably not gonna make it what i think they make the mistake they wanna do it so badly that they try to put a round peg and a square you know it just doesn't work they wanna do it so badly that they forget location location location location so would you summarized that into just planning in advance or just like or basically like if you nail one thing everything else is taken care of yeah and and and i i also believe bullish before bombs you gotta really test things a little bit a lot of people try to you know build two at once or three at once you gotta build that first one that first pilot and really get it down and and that's how i do the law firms before i really go big in a city i come in spend some money with ads are a few lawyers the bullets and then when i feel if catch it on then i bring the bombs and when other people try to compete with you with because you know if i drive i i was in vegas and in vegas every single billboard is a personal injury as i say i don't know why i don't know why that is in vegas but there was a lot of competition and when i think about what you did i guess my shortcut answer of like why did he win why did you become the largest law firm and then and everybody else is you know playing for second place my answer is you were early were first you know not maybe about the first mover which you were very early and then once you figured out the secret meaning like business is about exploiting secrets in a way you've you've figured something out before everybody else else's is before its consensus so you figured out hey we can advertise effectively and we can basically like poor money into ads and get get people get cases out of it that you were way more aggressive with that that even if other people were advertising they weren't as aggressive with the advertising meaning either putting money in effort into the creative or just reinvest capital to build the national brand and so that i guess that's what i would say is the the thing what am i is that right or am i missing something that was important and why you won and and everybody else didn't k you're miss yes you're missing a very big piece i one of you said i don't know if you'd heard me say but one of you told about fishing and and i've got a in my business i call it you know first of all you got a fish first and fish fast so there's two sides of my business there's catching and fish and to catch fish you got a fish first and fish fast and then there's cooking fish the value of the case where my competition gets beat by me is most of them ninety five percent of them are shit lawyers they're terrible at what they do they couldn't try case video if they wanted to so they have to take the last best offer you'll see people bragging hey we settle this case for a million dollars yeah well the case was worth ten million dollars but the problem for them is they couldn't do it they didn't know how to do it what i did when i was going through all this i started to really look at where does my money come twenty percent twenty percent of my cases are eighty percent of my money but here's where my money really comes it comes the friday before trial so they've said no no no no no no no no no no no now it's friday before trial the friday before trial a lot of times i say okay here it is the next time the money comes is during right after jury selection we pick a jury like we don't like that jury we pay us then the third time our money comes is during the trial they might say here's the money and then the fourth comes as a verdict i get gigantic verdict gigantic verdict where they're getting where they're talking about five hundred thousand i'm i'm i'm getting i got a verdict your city san francisco it gives google a couple of weeks ago for five hundred million dollars and so you you know i'm not a hunt cockroaches i'm hunt big game i'm not i'm not happy just to get a little bit of money i wanna get exactly what it's worth so where my margins where i have separated myself from all of them is results and reputation and then the other thing they don't do is there's a concept in my law called bad faith if there's a million dollars in coverage and they don't pay it they're in bad faith perhaps when they come to offer me the million it's too late now most lawyers because they need the money they take the million i say you i go get the verdict i go get the verdict for ten million you know i got one a representative state senator this year they were offering is nothing nothing they finally offered us a million the day of trial was a death case i said you know f you and we got a hundred million and so where the disconnect is they're not real lawyers so what have i done i've got a stable of race horses they get big verdict i got people who that's all they do they just go around the country they go from here to here to here to here to here to hear they don't even live in the cities they just parachute in and i call it the walter payton rule when walter payton played for the bears he got the ball fifty times a game when was fourth in goal he always got it so i've got my walter payton i got my walter payton who i parachute in and they get these big verdict so my differentiator between me and my competition is most of them are not real lawyers they're marketing people who take the last best offer their and their margins are terrible now on the more the cases i refer out the google offer my margins on those cases my margin in my business about thirty thirty five percent but my margins on my referrals is eighty five ninety percent and that business getting bigger and bigger and bigger as my national footprint gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger so i got two sides of the business i got the stuff i do internally but then i got the cases i refer out and when i refer them out to my uber drivers it's not a uber driver it's mario and dr that i'm referring these these my customers too i got goosebumps john i love that answer that was incredible that should be your next info commercial that was incredible johnson a cowboy i mean you got this cowboy energy which we love we love cal we we have a joke we call ourselves manifest cowboys because we like dream up this stuff and make happen because we're hoping other people start to call us that we we get to stop saying it ourselves that'd be great when new nick nickname yourself it's not as cool but i think you actually are the manifest customers law firms can't really be held by non lawyers right so do you own the i guess it's a partnership but do you own a huge chunk of this firm yourself know what there's no investors right no i yeah it's mainly me and my family but i do have a lot of partners at it because i believe that look when i look at this firm or all my business is always envisioned like i'm building a circus and i wanna build the greatest show on the earth when you see some of these circus in in shopping centers you know that they got an elephant with one tu in a drunk clown and a seal that's caught and it's a bullshit circus the circus i'm building is the greatest show on earth why do people go to the circus as they go there for two reasons one they wanna see the lives and the tigers eat the man they want that's why they want that's why they go they wanna see him and then they wanna see the great will lend fall to his death that's why they're at the circus that's why they go to nascar they're hoping that somebody is gonna die how do you not die well with the animals you feed them and you love i've got a lot of partners who make a lot of money because they got a piece of this deal the second way is you focus you're up there on that high wire and you gotta pay attention you gotta get from here to there so in building this firm i got three rules love them feed them focus and then you can build the greatest show on earth you're very successful you've you've won so many times in life has there ever been a point where the the businesses or the firm almost went under because you said that you're a pretty risk risk on person has have you almost had to pay the consequences because of that don't know about pay the consequences but i'd bit look i sent a guy to atlanta when i opened up atlanta i sent the wrong guy there by the time i got him out we were fourteen million dollars in the hole this it just kept you know and he was a disaster but you know now he's gone and my team i mean atlanta makes some you know prints money so that was atlanta was tough of had a couple of cities that didn't do as well as i hope like memphis so yeah i've had i've had some you know i've had some things not do well i had a built a small amusement park called magical midway that i ended up selling lost a million bucks but that doesn't bother me because nobody bets a thousand i mean if you bet if you bet three hundred you're in the hall of fame you all you have to do is get on base one out of three times and you're in the hall of fame like we talked about earlier warren buffett has five big stocks you take those stocks away he's not warren buffett anymore and he's the one he's the first person who tells you that that that's why i love him so much that's why i have so much berkshire hathaway to waste stock i mean he he's my guy you've been doing a lot of media i saw you on this j thing and i known of who you were before that and i was like what the hell why would you wanna do that you came off you came off pretty good you came up pretty good you done a really good job of j like a bunch of these like gotcha moments so that's been pretty what are you gonna do you try to rent for office one day i mean what's going on why are you why do you care about being why do care about being out there fish i want fish i wanna catch fish and you know i do these things called john in sixties but look in in i have had some success running for office look i don't know about that but but in florida when my brother the brother i told you about they got hurt he he he needed marijuana desperately to help his situation i ran a constitutional amendment twice in florida to legalize medical marijuana i spent tens of millions of dollars to to pass it and then later when you when you have when you make money i believe that we have an obligation a civic obligation a moral obligation to give back one of the things that is one of the things that i believe that where the country is headed in their wrong direction and you're starting to hear about it is affordability mh it's all because people aren't paid enough money that's that's the affordability problem the the the minimum wage in the america's is eight dollars an hour so what i did with my own money here in florida is i ran a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour and everybody told me again you know you're you're you're your nobody that's never gonna happen well it did happen and so i raised the minimum wage in florida to fifth from eight dollars to fifteen dollars an hour so because of those constitutional amendments i became almost like a politician in this state and everybody's like we want him to run for governor we want you to run for governor when i go to the when i would go to the white house they would take me to the side and show me pulling about my poll numbers so you you think about it but then you gotta think about the job itself i mean i i would have trouble with the job itself i live in maui you know five months out of the year which i love i love it out there and i'm sixty nine so i don't know but really what i'm doing is in this day and time it's just being out there and if somebody sees me and they're and they are favorably disposed by the j or i was just on this thing this weekend that printed called the business insider yeah that was a good interview i saw that so i just did that so my thought is it's kinda back to that you know why bother you know this you know some people are gonna see this and some people are not gonna like me but some people are and look you can become president with if fifty one percent of the people like you you can get rich as hell if you fifty one percent of the people use you so i look at these things as new age marketing where people get to see me you know with my ads i looked like i'm you know working at a funeral home you know with what i'm selling so by doing these things they're like you know that guy actually has a personality he's not a you know a grave digger but we wanna make sure there's enough people watching before i'm gonna gotta do it so like and subscribe leave a comment guess i well this has been awesome man i appreciate you coming on shout out your new book it's being edited right now is called life is lo the paper boy you you're the best that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking bag alright everyone if you're listening to m you probably want to make more money well i wanna tell you about a podcast you might wanna check out it's called the sales evangelist and it's hosted by donald kelly each week donald interviews the world's best sales who share their strategies to succeed in sales they share actionable insights and stories that will encourage challenge and motivate you to hustle your way to the top if you're someone looking to raise your income level check out the sales of evangelist you can find it wherever you get your podcasts