(dramatic slow piano music)
(laughing) - Hardcore.
Hardcore is for somebody that's gone through the seminar.
That's the first thing. - The basic castle.
- The basics, just like you have,
and wants to know definitively
how the thought process, the strategy
behind the motivated seller
and the acquisition model.
And we get into divestitures,
we also get into other more sophisticated M&A strategies,
but we've got guys worth 100 million dollars
that don't know but one strategy.
Motivated seller, free cashflow
covering debt service, period, full stop.
But I mean, you don't grow a billion dollar organization
without getting more sophisticated than that.
And we obviously have them,
but that's what the Hardcore is for,
and it's over Christmas.
Our Hardcore is by accident.
Two Easters ago, I'm standing in front of a regular seminar
and one of the kids said,
"Mr. Peña, do you realize today is Easter Sunday?"
I look around the room, I go, "Really?"
And I said, "You mean good Friday was the day before,
"two days ago?
"Fuck, we missed Good Friday, okay."
And then during, I said,
"I wonder if I gave a seminar over Christmas,
"would you have any interest whatsoever?"
Within 48 hours, I had a couple hundred requests
to sign up for a seminar that hadn't been formed yet.
Because contrary to what you might think,
a lot of people don't like Christmas.
They think it's down time,
and a lot of people don't like opening presents
with their little shit-head kids,
contrary to what you might think.
And that's probably some of your problem
is your dad didn't like opening up presents with you either,
and it was pretty fucking obvious.
And so the Hardcore was born.
So then I had to develop a seminar
and what we do is we do between 32 and 40 case studies.
We do seven or eight case studies from Harvard,
Yale, Oxford Graduate School.
The classic like a AOL/Time Warner merger, okay?
And then everybody that comes to the Hardcore
brings at least two cases.
Either two cases they had failed on,
two cases they were successful on,
how could I have done this case more,
more better is not good English, but better.
So we go between 32 and 40 cases,
and when you go to Harvard or you go to the B schools
like our youngest son Derek has,
you cover about 30-35 cases in two years.
We do it in nine or 10 days.
- [Announcer] The most epic event
of this century, (dramatic strings music)
the Oscar for high ticket closers.
Closers in Black 2019.
The 50 billion dollar man, Dan Peña.
The king of high ticket sales, Dan Lok.
Get your ticket today. (dramatic strings music)
- Don't you also have breakout rooms?
- Oh yeah, we divide the 20 kids
into four breakout rooms, five,
so they are in four different places around the castle,
and in the morning I pontificate, we answer questions,
then we break out.
Then I go from breakout room to breakout room
and I sit and listen to them and I make corrections.
Did you think of this?
Did you think of that?
And then, after lunch we get back together again
and then at night, before they go to their evening meal,
for two hours they start presenting the cases.
'Cause we only give them a few hours,
we don't give them two years.
So we go through that for nine or 10 days
and they go through the cases.
This last time, we had guys that had
run successful billion-dollar conglomerates,
we had a few MBAs, we had a couple of...
We had one plumber
that got a 5th grade education.
By the way, our Hall of Fame
has an 80 IQ guy who did a 400 million dollar deal.
We have 180 IQ guy that did a 40 million dollar deal.
80 IQ, 180 IQ.
400 million versus 40 million.
Has nothing to do with IQ.
Has nothing to do with degrees.
What it has to do is the 80 IQ guy
had a heart as big as this room and worked like a dog.
Like a dog.
The last Hardcore seminar,
not the one that just ended a couple weeks ago,
but the one before that.
Then they go through a mentor program,
they go through Zoom calls.
We also have Zoom calls once a month.
You missed the Zoom calls.
- Shit.
- Yeah, yeah, and they say you were the lucky one.
See, that's what they say. - Oh, fuck.
- I hear that all the time.
- I want the Zoom call, Dan. (laughs)
- And from the time that they left the Hardcore
to their last Zoom call which was November of last year,
they'd done 19 deals.
One guy had bought five hospitals,
he is following what is called the Rick Scott derivative
- Correct. - Of QLA,
because Rick Scott is a mentee.
He is currently the senator in the great state of Florida
and he built the largest healthcare company
in the world, Columbia Healthcare,
over a seven year period amounting to about 30 billion.
So there is a Rick Scott sliver off of,
you know there's protestants and then there's Lutherans,
well, they are following the Lutheran model
which is specifically just geared to hospitals.
And with no money, none of his own money.
The thing that they all have in common,
no matter what they chase, no money do they have.
Zero, which is, of your following, is closer.
Your following is closer to that end of the continuum
than your end of the continuum, the no-money,
and it's just out there.