Brandon Dawson

very well.

Why don't I start a platform company and go to owners who are struggling and say, I'll build marketing, sales, leadership, operations, finance, technology.

You can offload all that to me.

And instead of me buying your company, I'll give you equity in my company and with the right to swap

to buy into your company at a predetermined valuation.

And I was told it wouldn't work.

The SEC said I couldn't do it.

All this taxation issues, franchise laws, I bumped up against all that, but I was able to create a workable model that I launched in 2006 with the idea that if I could build a prototype to consolidate a vertical, I could do it across hundreds of verticals.

I launched that business, bootstrapped, built the rules and requirements of how I wanted to build a business without needing anybody else's capital.

And read a lot of books to really become an expert in the things I was not good at the first time around.

And then all of a sudden by eight, nine, 10, I was Inc.

500, Inc.

5,000, fastest growing this, fastest growing that, entrepreneur of the year.

And so I hired a research firm when the market went to shit in 2009 because of the real estate space.

And I was able to hire FTI, a billion-dollar research firm, and I looked at 10,000 verticals.

I hired eight people inside from Wharton and Stanford.

And I wanted to understand what makes businesses work, what causes them to fail, what are the things that we could create from an infrastructure.

And I built what I call now the transformational growth platform, which is taking belief, operational effectiveness, and leadership.

And in the center of all that

scaling it from zero to a billion.