Andrew Wilkinson's $20,000 to $260,000,000 story

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, what's going on? This is Sam. We've got an awesome episode today. We have Andrew Wilkinson on the pod. Andrew's one of our good buddies. Andrew owns this company called Tiny. Tiny basically started as like this agency that made a bunch of profit, and he took those profit, and he's bought like 18 or 20 different companies, and he took Tiny Public. I think today it's trading in the $600 million market cap. So he's got like a really good perspective on what's going on in life.
During this episode, I think it's the like with 20 minutes left in the episode, but he's actually said something that I'm sitting here taking notes, it's gonna change my business. It's about this thing he called the profit first mentality. And he goes in depth on how much money he leaves in each business and how the CEOs are able to operate them. And it's really insightful stuff that I haven't really heard him talk about before.
And then also Andrew is interesting to me because Andrew is my close friend, but he's very wealthy. And I get to ask him all types of questions, kind of like behind the scenes stuff on how he spends his money. He talks about how he's now a patient of Peter Attia, who's this famous doctor and how much he's spending on that and the outcome of that. I find it very interesting. He talks about shooting a shot with his hero. So he's done business with guys like Bill Ackman, who's worked 10 or $20 billion as a hedge fund guy. And he talks about how he met Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffett's partner. And so there's really interesting insights on A, how he lives his life, but how he got in doors that he did when he was still up and coming. Really fascinating.
So this is the episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Let me know what you guys think. You can hit me up on Twitter, the Sam Parr, and let me know if you enjoyed it.

**Shaan Puri** (1:36)
We got the man here, Andrew Wilkinson, fan favorite, guest of the pod.
Welcome, Andrew. How's it going?

**Andrew Wilkinson** (1:44)
Hey guys, I'm good.

**Sam Parr** (1:45)
So you gave us a list of ideas and things that you're kind of messing with, but you have this thing on here about sexy versus non-sexy things.
And you're like, the things that everyone loves in the outside, they're the hardest ways to make a living. And so you said here that I didn't know this. I, or maybe I did. I knew you owned a bakery. Is, you said you own a deli and a bakery. Is that two separate things or is it one thing?

**Andrew Wilkinson** (2:08)
No, that's combined. That's one.

**Sam Parr** (2:10)
And it's a pain in the butt.

**Andrew Wilkinson** (2:12)
Total pain in the ass. So yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I think when you talk to young entrepreneurs, they always want to do something sexy. And I was like that too. Like I was a product CEO, right? You think every CEO kind of has their thing. And for me, it was making great products. So when I was running software companies and stuff, I'd always be thinking, oh, when we released this new feature, that's when everything will take off or, you know, when we get this partnership or, you know, whatever big announcements, I think flashy. But one of the things I've realized after running a company for like 20 years is it's really not the sexy stuff that pays off.
You know, for example, like we have a bunch of companies and, you know, one increased prices 30% after not increasing prices for five years. They massively grew profits, right? That took 10 minutes, a little bit of planning, and that paid off big. You know, one significantly reduced shipping costs by sizing down packaging.
You know, another realized, hey, we've got insane SEO on certain keywords and now we can drive affiliate revenue.
You know, one had a bunch of customer gift card deposits and they were like, oh shit, we can invest these in T-bills and make 5%, makes 500 grand a year of just pure profit. I just love these boring things like that. And I've realized that it's kind of sad. Like, you know, I grew up being like, oh yeah, I want to be the next Steve Jobs or James Dyson or something. But the things I'm actually good at are these really, really boring, I call them like lever pulls. You get in, you pull a lever and revenue or earnings just grows, you know, by X percent.