- The other day, I had an entrepreneur come to
my house with $2,000 in cash to give me.
The reason why is, a few months earlier I was at an event
and every time I go to an event,
I always try to do this.
I try to collect four or five entrepreneurs that I met.
Either they asked me questions after I gave a talk
or they came up to me in the alleyway
or in the conference in the hallway
and wanted to ask me a question.
And if I feel like they have good energy
and they're just good people in general,
I always invite them to lunch.
And I was having lunch with five entrepreneurs.
We were talking about different parts of their business,
what they are passionate about
and how they were doing in general.
And this one entrepreneur, David,
was telling me about his business.
He had an online toothbrush subscription company.
Now, I had invested in a company called Manpacks,
so he was all interested in, you know,
Manpacks is this company
where you can auto-order your underwear,
your shaving gear, everything.
I mean, it's a really cool, check it out, Manpacks.com.
Obviously, that's a plug.
I'm an investor, whatever.
Anyways, David's asking me about it because
he had a business that was similar for
toothbrushes and, you know,
he's telling me about the challenges
and asking me of my feedback and I said,
You know, David, there's probably one reason
you haven't achieved this yet.
And he's like, Oh?
And he's all ears and he's listening.
I said, The number one is you haven't decided.
You haven't decided what your goal is for
this month, this quarter, this year.
And from that point of view is you work backwards.
You haven't decided.
And he's like, Oh, yeah, well I do have goals.
I'm like, You might have a yearly goal,
but you don't have a monthly goal and you haven't broken
that monthly goal down into weekly goals, right?
And I don't mean to say that to be confrontational,
but that would change it all.
And I said, Why don't we do this thing?
You know, for years, I've been doing
this thing called the Martell bet.
If you haven't heard it, I wrote about it on my blog,
but the Martell bet is where,
when I meet entrepreneurs at an event or a conference
and they're excited about their business
and they're telling me about what they're gonna achieve,
et cetera, and I just feel like
they just need a little bit more guidance,
I'll make a bet with them.
And every time I bet, I hope to lose.
So don't get my wrong.
I made a bet with David.
I said, Hey, let's pick a number in three months.
What do you think you could achieve from a monthly,
his business was a SaaS business, subscription.
So what could you achieve?
How many subscribers do you think you could achieve?
And he gave me a number.
I said, Perfect.
How much do you wanna bet?
You know, do you wanna bet 100 bucks, 500 bucks, whatever.
He's like, $5000.
I was like, Whoa, dude.
I mean, you're not making any money.
I don't even know, you're 19, 20 years old.
I don't wanna take your money.
I was like, OK, how about $1000?
Are you cool with it?
He's like, Yes, $1000.
I'm like, Alright, 'cause if you lose that means,
you know, that's a lot of money.
He's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, $1000.
I said, You can't put it on your line of credit.
Yes, yes, no problem, $1000.
Perfect.
So I open up my calendar, I set the terms of
the deal there, I invite him to the calendar
and then I, expecting to lose,
actually transfer via PayPal my $1000 loss.
I said, Look, I'm going to give you the money now.
Do what you want with it.
You can put it in your bank and hold onto it.
You can spend it, whatever,
but I want you to know that I hope to lose this bet.
So here's my money, hope to lose the bet
and in three months we're going to get a reminder
and I expect to get an email from you.
And if they lose, here's the deal.
They have to pay me.
I always take the money.
Two, I get to write a blog post about it or a video
and tell the whole world about it.
And then three, I always say, Look.
If you lose, I'm going to be helpful, whatever it is.
And I do these things, I do these bets for
three main reasons.
One, I feel like it holds people accountable.
You know, if you think about in your business,
you know, people joke that you have your customers that
hold you accountable, you have your,
you know, your team or whatever.
But the truth is you don't.
There's nobody that's saying,
OK what are your goals for the week,
the quarter, the month, et cetera.
That doesn't usually happen.
And I do these things to just get people excited.
Sometimes people want or are just excited to
have me involved in their business.
So we set a goal to hold them accountable.
The second thing, it actually teaches them how to set goals.
It still blows my mind in 2014 that
people in business still haven't set,
OK what is a goal?
It's not about having more subscribers.
It's saying, I'm gonna have X amount of subscribers.
And it's more than that.
It's saying, by this date.
And then even further than that it's with
these profit margins because if you have to spend $10 to
get a dollar, you're not building a business.
Helping people define what's called SMART goals is another
thing that they achieve.
They hold the accountability, they've got the SMART goals.
And the third thing is I feel like it gives them a sense of
stretching themselves, of learning how to decide to
do things that are exciting,
that are kind of crazy.
I don't know if I can accomplish it,
but if I did, wow, that would be amazing, right?
So it's not a lay up.
It's not just like a knock it out of the park goal.
It's kind of a stretch goal and I feel like people don't
kind of ask themselves, Is there more I could be doing?
Could I grow further?
Could I push further?
Could my goals be, you know, Apple's known for this,
where they set their goals and then they have stretch goals.
And the stretch goals is where, I believe,
their managers get compensated on it.
So I made this bet with Dave.
And unfortunately three months later,
he shows up to my door with $2000 in cold hard cash.
Cash, dollar bills, money.
And I invited him over to my house for lunch because
obviously I was a little disappointed that I won the bet.
Which sounds nuts, but I wanted to
make sure I was helpful as I committed to him earlier.
And here's what the neat part was.
You know, he wanted to come and give me the money.
Even though he lived three hours away from where I lived.
He wanted to drive, have lunch with me,
give me the money in person because,
it turns out that in going through this process
and really working hard to hit this goal,
he realized that his business wasn't that exciting.
That the numbers would never really
work the way he envisioned it.
And a lot of other challenges with the business.
Not that it was a bad business,
it just was challenging.
And it wasn't really something he wanted to do but in
going through that process in the previous three months
he ended up finding an acquirer in Silicon Valley
and that company ended up buying his company
and he's now moved from eastern Canada to
Silicon Valley to join his start up.
And he was excited, elated.
It was just the most amazing thing that
he was excited to come in person to tell me that story.
You know, I can't tell you the amount of people,
I've made probably 20 of these bets over the years.
Guys have either knocked it out of the park
and told me it was the best thing they'd ever done.
Another friend of mine, Sam, he ended up
shutting down the business.
It didn't work, but he quickly moved onto his next one.
It's called MakeSpace, it is an amazing idea.
Sam, you, dude, are an amazing entrepreneur
and I hate winning but I'm so pumped to
see what you're working on now.
That and many other stories are the outputs of
why I bet on entrepreneurs and I hope to lose.
It's just an idea.
Maybe when you're meeting with somebody in
the future, you can decide to make a bet with them.
And it's just saying, Hey do you wanna make a bet?
It's not about (deepens voice) I think you're
overinflating your ideas (normalizes voice) or whatever.
I don't know, I thought it was a neat idea
and I'll continue to do it.
Usually do one per event that I'm speaking at.
And I just thought it was a neat idea.
I'm obviously super passionate in other people's success
as a business and I want to challenge you to really stack up
your game for your business growth
and think about how can you set goals that stretch
and really move things forward.
So with that, I hope you have an amazing day
and you live an extraordinary life.
All the best.