Michael Girdley: Why Fireworks Are A Cash Cow and How to Operate a Holdco Worth $100 Million

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
You own a hold co, I think Girdley Enterprises, the name of it.
Within it, you have a bunch of different things. So you will own stuff as funky as like a fireworks company called Alamo Fireworks.
You own like a software roll up called Dura Software. You have like a coffee chain, I think. Is that right? You have like your drive-through coffee chain that's got like three or four locations or something like that. And then you incubate a couple of projects, one of which I used actually recently.

**Sam Parr** (1:37)
Michael, what up, dog? Shaan, where are you? You're in Tahoe?

**Shaan Puri** (1:41)
I'm in Lake Tahoe, yeah.

**Sam Parr** (1:43)
How is it?

**Shaan Puri** (1:44)
It's amazing, yeah, this place is great.

**Sam Parr** (1:47)
Is it just a getaway from Crypto?

**Shaan Puri** (1:49)
No, it was a father's day trip. So, you know, came out here with my wife's family, and yeah, it's been cool. Just been like at the lake, in the pool, all that good stuff.

**Sam Parr** (2:01)
That's awesome. So, you, Shaan, you want to introduce this guy?

**Shaan Puri** (2:04)
Yeah, okay, great. So, we got Michael Girdley, is that the way you say it?

**Sam Parr** (2:08)
Yep.

**Shaan Puri** (2:09)
Yeah, Michael's here. I've been following you on Twitter for a while, and I think you almost bought our NFT for the five minutes of fame, but you got outbid at the last minute, is that right?

**Michael Girdley** (2:23)
Yes, yeah. I had a whole plan about it. I was actually gonna shard it, and then try to make profit from it and sell it in 15 second increments, but some really rich crypto person came in and swooped it out from under me, so.

**Shaan Puri** (2:36)
Sam loves sharding.

**Michael Girdley** (2:37)
I had a huge plan. I had a huge plan.

**Shaan Puri** (2:41)
And, but it worked anyways. You got on the pod anyways without it, because you're a pretty interesting dude. I've been following you on Twitter, mostly because you tweet about Chili's a lot, and I'm a big Chili's guy, huge Chili's fan, but you also, you kind of fit into this sort of like Andrew Wilkins-y bucket, which is like you run a hold co, and you run like a pretty big hold co, and so let's just give people kind of like your rundown. Here's what I know about you.
You own a hold co, I think Girdley Enterprises is the name of it. Within it, you have a bunch of different things. So you own stuff as funky as like a fireworks company called Alamo Fireworks. You own like a software roll-up called Dura Software.
You have like a coffee chain, I think. Is that right? You have like a drive-through coffee chain that's got like three or four locations or something like that. And then you incubate a couple of projects, one of which I used actually recently called Neer, which is like a easy way to hire people in Latin America. And I found this awesome dude, not a plug for Neer necessarily, but it did work exactly as intended. I found this awesome operations guy for my e-commerce business there, Nico.
So yeah, so that's what you do. And I don't know, Sam, where do you wanna start? We can go into kind of high level or we could dive into any of the details. Where do you wanna start?