Double Win Investments – Episode 082

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, got Kim Butler, our bestselling financial author and my co-host here with us. Welcome, Kim. Hello, Todd. Happy to be here. Welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about, I guess we need to give proper credit, we’re going to be talking about some concepts that we think are pretty cool. One of them is a guy by the name of Peter Diamandis and he refers to it as double

[00:48] line investing. Peter has which book out again? His newest is bold. The previous one is called Abundance. And I have to admit I almost like Abundance better, but he’s got a third one coming and he actually calls it double bottom line investing. What did I call it? Sorry. Double, but I don’t remember. Okay. Double bottom line investing. Yes, that’s correct. Apologize. And then the second author is Garrett Gunderson who wrote a book by the name of Killing Sacred Cows and he discusses the triple win. So Kim, I’m going to let you just kind of start us off there. Well, I love both of these concepts because the investments that we work with as well as the place to store cash are truly double bottom line opportunities and triple wins.

[01:38] So Peter Diamandis’ thought is that if you’re going to invest in something, it should help you and it should help the other person and it should also be a benefit regardless. In other words, it shouldn’t be connected to who’s in the presidency or what’s going on in the stock market or where oil prices are. That when you invest, you should get some good and the other person should too, whoever that other person is. Maybe it is the owner of a business. Maybe it’s not somebody that you know personally. Maybe it’s the owner of some real estate, but you don’t know them personally or maybe you do know them personally. The double bottom line investing says that you get a good deal and so does the other

[02:23] side. That when money is put on the table, it’s a win-win for both parties. And when we look for business opportunities that way, we solve more problems. When we look for investments that do that, we create more opportunity. And opportunity is all that we’re all looking for. That’s what investing is. It’s the creation of an opportunity. Does that explain that one well enough? Super. And I believe triple win is right there in the same category. And that’s that the buyer wins, the seller wins, and the marketplace in general or the world or whatever you want to refer to it as is enhanced by the transaction. And I think one of the great ways to look at that is to look at an actual investment. And let’s take a bridge loan, for example.

[03:11] In my particular neighborhood in Salt Lake City, back in 2008, there was a partially finished apartment complex. And this was probably 500 units that they were trying to build a large chunk of these at once. They ran out of money in 2008. And this literally sat just dilapidated for about five years. And finally a developer came in. And of course, they went to the bank with this piece of property that had, you know, 150 half falling down units and approved for another 350 or whatever. And the bank’s not going to touch that. I mean, it’s an eyesore. The kids are playing in there. It’s dangerous. So again, a bridge loan was brought in. The bank said, wow, you ever figure out a way to make these 150 look nice and we

[04:03] want to do business with you. So a bridge loan was used in that situation to provide the money to finish those 150 units. Now, the roads are in, the pavements in, the playgrounds are in, and there’s 150 apartments that are now being rented. It’s providing housing. It’s generating cash flow, finishing those 150 units. I can’t imagine how many hundreds of people went to work because of that. And our whole neighborhood was enhanced. So if we look at just the transaction of the bridge loan, which is probably providing financing for 12 months to provide that band-aid to get that eyesore back up to bank standards, Kim, what’s your opinion of that? Well, I just love the whole win-win approach. And it is necessary for our society as a whole to look at problems this way.

[04:59] And you’ve got these companies out there that are making a profit, doing good. And that is a perfectly acceptable transaction. And doing a good should generate them a profit. And investors can fund those opportunities. So that scenario that you just described is a great example of what we’re talking about with double bottom line investing or triple win, however you want to term it. And it’s something that you can look for in your own area. When you’re driving around, when you’re seeing businesses, when you’re seeing pieces of real estate that need improvement or what have you, with the creation of the new crowdfunding environment, there will be opportunities to fund businesses that are doing well.

[05:45] And that will be something that people can do locally with boots on the ground, so to speak, just like you were talking about when you saw your area of Salt Lake City and the work that could be done there. It’s good, good investing. That’s what we should be focused on. And hold and hope. Another example I just happened to think about was, this is kind of silly, but when you go on a cruise, one of the fun things to do is to whack golf balls off the back of the boat or shoot skeet off the back of the boat. And fish and waterfowl and whatever do tend to eat the golf balls. And they do tend to eat the skeet shells and it is not healthy. So a company decided they were going to create golf balls out of fish food and

[06:31] skeet shells out of fish food. I love it. Another thing. I mean, the investors in the company made money. The person who came up with the idea made money. And there’s a lot of fat fish that we probably ate. That’s fabulous. Yep. That is taking a problem, turning it into an opportunity and having it be a win-win-win. Super. I think we’ve kind of talked about the triple win. I don’t know if we’ve quite clarified the double bottom line enough. Maybe we could go just a little bit deeper into that. Well, sure. And it’s evidenced by Peter’s work out in the marketplace, which by now, depending on when this podcast goes live, I hope everybody got a chance to view the Visionnaire movie that we were able to send a link to people

[07:19] to get for free. It’s an hour worth of talking about what Peter Diamandis is doing with the creation of teams. So he will create an idea and Richard Branson is another example of somebody that does this. He’ll create an idea. He’ll see a problem and he’ll go about solving it in a for-profit way. We’ve talked on our show in the past about the value of the for-profit way to solve problems as opposed to the non-profit way. And so Peter will get out there. He’ll create a team of people and he’ll enable the investors to really be involved in the business. Maybe they know some of the team members. Maybe they can create contacts. Maybe they can actually physically help in a particular area. Maybe they have more investors that are available, you name it,

[08:13] so that it truly is a double bottom line deal for everybody in that the investor gets a good return on the money, gets to be involved in the business. So that’s more exciting for them than if they were just handing money over and getting money handed back. And then additionally, the people actually running the business, which is usually not Peter. He’s a great starter and then moves on to the next project. Not always, but oftentimes. Then his vision gets to continue on with people that are really good at managing the company, creating the products, doing the service, whatever it is. And he gets to go find new problems to solve. One of the things that he talks about is a GGC, and it stands for Grand Global Challenge.

[09:01] And I just love that. And all entrepreneurs are essentially solving grand challenges. They may not be global, but more and more today, activities are going to be global. I got an email just the other day from somebody that wants to convert or translate, I think is the word I’m looking for, the Live Your Life Insurance book into Iranian. So yeah, global. Now, I don’t even know if Iran has life insurance companies, but if you step back and you just look at the principles that are there in that book, surely they have something similar in terms of a product. And that’s available today for anybody. My sister Tammy just told me that she put a course out on Udemy, and she already has people from across

[09:54] the globe that are interested in her course. So everybody today, even if you own what appears to be a very, very local business, we need to be getting our chins up and really looking out there to see what is available on a global scale. One of the other things Peter says that I think is so great is if you want to make a billion dollars, then find a billion people to help. Awesome, I think that whether you want to credit it to the downside of the economy, or maybe we’re evolving as people, I find more and more people are doing what they are passionately called to do, to earn their money, and slowly they’re starting to turn that passion on to when they tear open that 401k statement, and there’s no passion

[10:47] or excitement there because you don’t know what you’re doing. I mean, you could be backing ammunition for killing children for all you know. You just see the positives and the negatives. And this being able to feel that with every dollar you invest and every time you see your money grow, you are helping the world, and I just think that would create so much more excitement and make it that much easier to postpone that satisfaction on that money, because otherwise, it just seems like why don’t I just spend it? Well, and as we know, since retirement is a term and a concept that needs to be retired, it’s so important that people love what they do because they need to be doing it for a long, long time.

[11:33] Yes, take vacations. Yes, take long weekends. Maybe even take a sabbatical, but good heavens keep working, and that’s a piece of cake to do when work is part of your love. Super. Well, Kim, anything you want to add before we wrap up? Just super grateful for everybody, the work that they’re doing with their own finances. It’s not easy to, as you were saying, delay gratification, to save money consistently. Those are tough, tackled things because our society is so much about today, today, today, and so much about having a whole bunch of material items. And I believe very much that we can do both. We can save money and have the material items that we want. But the idea of thinking long-term, getting our heads up,

[12:19] viewing the things that we look at that are important to us from a very big-picture perspective, that’s what our listeners are about, and I’m grateful for each and every one of them. Super. Well, this is No BS Money Guy Todd Strobel for the Prosperity Podcast. Again, special thanks to Kim Butler and take care, everybody. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.