Michael Sonnenfeldt: The Most Successful Real Estate Deal of All Time and Building a Community of Billionaires

**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.
What was the original fee and what was the requirements?

**Michael Sonnenfeldt** (1:07)
The original organization 20 years ago started with people who had created net worths of between 10 million and 100 million. And very quickly, the top end exploded with success.
So it grew to a billion dollars. A billion dollars and more recently, we've realized that our focus is on members between 20 million and a billion. And what I was gonna say is the main difference between Vistage and YPO and Tiger 21 is the average net worth of Vistage and YPO members is probably maybe a 10th of that or fifth of that of Tiger or.

**Sam Parr** (1:59)
How long ago did you start the company?

**Michael Sonnenfeldt** (2:02)
About 21 or 22 years ago at this point.

**Sam Parr** (2:06)
What was the original idea?

**Michael Sonnenfeldt** (2:09)
It's really a simple idea.
If you're an incredibly successful entrepreneur, could be building a business for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and then you sell the business, you think that it's the magic moment when you sell it.
But actually what happens is the day after you sell it, you have a lot of money, but you might be alone. You might have an assistant, but you don't have a thousand employees. You don't have anybody laughing at your jokes anymore. You might even have to get your own coffee. And everybody around you thinks that you're wealthy and successful, but you've lost the platform that allowed you to feel successful. And all of a sudden you're back at a new point and the number one challenge that you have is to be a wealth preserver so you don't lose what you've made except that you don't know anything about preserving wealth. What you are is a great entrepreneur or a great leader or a great manager and you're good at inspiring troops, but you don't have any troops anymore. So you have this dramatic shift and it turns out that what it takes to be a great entrepreneur might qualify you to be a mediocre investor. When you're an entrepreneur, you focus on a single opportunity. You're highly emotional about it.
You give it everything you can. When you're an investor, you have to be more dispassionate. You have to have a diversified portfolio and you have to be unemotional about it. So the sum of it all is that there's a little understood transition which a few very lucky, very successful people get to go through. And we wanted to study that, which is what we've done over the last 21 years to help people in that transition get through it and on to a better place.

**Sam Parr** (4:07)
When you originally started the business, what was the product? Was it like YPO where it was a monthly group meetup? What was it?

**Michael Sonnenfeldt** (4:16)
Sure, so you mentioned YPO, which is a fantastic organization. There's another similar organization called Vistage, and they both are for CEOs.
And if those are the great colleges, we're the one great graduate school. And so we have a lot of YPO members that graduate into Tiger 21 and a lot of Vistage members that graduate into Tiger 21 And just to give you an idea, the last time I looked, both Vistage and YPO have about 50,000 members globally. It might be 60 now.