The Billionaire Nobody Knows About

Hey, this is Shorang Srivats, welcome back to the Business School podcast. And today I want to tell you about a guy named Don Brand. He's worth about $17 billion and most people have never heard of him. And what really caught my attention wasn't really the money. 17 billion is a lot, but how he got it. Because if you look to the story from the outside, it would all, that seemed exciting at all. But this wasn't one big deal. This wasn't one big moment. This wasn't him going public. There wasn't one year where everything changed. It was something much slower, something that you and I can both do. And once I really kind of understood what he was doing, I started seeing the same idea and a lot of other places. I'm going to break this all down step by step so you can use this exact method starting right now. One thing is for certain just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology and the exact how to how to grow your business. How to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharon Trevata and welcome to business school. Okay, before I tell you the story, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever thought about buying a business, not starting one, but actually buying one and probably not many of us think that and I think I know why. Because most of us grew up learning how to get a job, how to get a degree, get a job and find a career. We learn maybe we learn maybe how to buy a car. Maybe we learn how to buy a house, but that doesn't really happen. We actually buy a house and then screwed up and then learn to do it better the next time. Nobody actually sits down and says, Hey, here's how a business gets bought and sold. And so we end up with this picture in our heads that buying a business might be something that only rich people do or private equity firms do or hack billionaires do. But it's not just for the people with more money than us. And I will tell you that sure, maybe it's true for some deals, but the one thing that I've learned, especially being a banker at Goldman Sachs is that every year, thousands and thousands of businesses change hands. I personally, you you're actually listening to a person that you know has done 100 plus deals. And I'm not that old, by the way, 100 plus deals and sold five different companies, right? But most of these are not billion dollar companies. They are local businesses, service businesses, family businesses. I would tell you companies, you probably driven past hundreds of times without even thinking about them. And you may think that that business doesn't make that much money. They are probably making significantly more than many of us are. And the reason this matters for you and me is that starting a business is really hard. You have to figure out a lot from scratch. You need customers, you need employees, you need systems, you need the actual paperwork. You need enough cash to survive all the business, all the mistakes that you make early on that you don't even know about. But buying a business is a little different because you already have existing customers. Maybe the employees are kind of already there. The business is already working. It already has a brand. It already has like registrations and all the legal stuff. Now I will tell you that does not mean it's easy, but it's a different challenge. But it dramatically reduces the risk because if a business already is past the three to five year range, maybe just maybe you have beat the risk of it going under. And once I started thinking about that, I will tell you right now I would much rather buy a business than start a business. And I totally became fascinated by how great businesses actually get acquired. Somebody buys these things, right? If recently I'm on the board of a publicly traded company called real and real is is one of the top five real estate brokerages in North America. Well, real just made a bid to acquire remax, which is one of the, you know, oldest and most trusted names in real estate in the world. And that will combine make the second largest real estate business in the world. Now this is like a story of a minnow eating a fish and there's no way real would have been able to do that. And the reason I say that I was part of this transaction is because I serve as president of real. We grew the business, you know, to a billion dollar valuation from 6800 agents to 28,000 agents in under three years. So I was part of I literally probably know every single person in that in the business. And now going from call it 28 to 30,000 agents to 120,000 agents. There's no way that could have happened without buying the business. And the reason I'm sharing all this with you as a preamble is I live in Orange County, California. If you live in Orange County and you know about the wealthy and the elite, there's this one guy that everybody knows about his name is Donald Brent. So Don Brent, when I first heard the story was like this big dramatic moment. I was like, who is this guy? But Don Brent bought his way into the most massive amount of wealth possible without a bidding war without any kind of giant deal announcement without any kind of hostile take over. It's crazy because he's the most underrated billionaire I know. And he spent close to 20 years doing something that is extremely boring. But you and I can learn from that at all. And it made him one of I would tell you the richest real estate owners in America. So backstory. Here's what happened back in 1977. Don Brent decided that he wanted to own this company called the Irvine company. Now you probably have never heard of the Irvine company. If you don't live in Irvine, California or Orange County, California, I hadn't really thought about much either. I had no idea who it was until I got here. But it brand is one of the most valuable landowners in the country. So today a huge part of Orange County actually sits on and is connected to the Irvine company. But Brent didn't have that much money and he didn't buy the company that, you know, kind of most people would think where he talked to bankers or went to an auction or there's a room full of buyer. He started buying share. What he did was he started buying shares from individual owners. Imagine this one person owned a piece, then another person owned a piece and someone inherited a piece and someone else inherited this piece and someone who's gifted this piece. And every now and then one of those people want to cash. And maybe there was a family issue or maybe there was an estate being settled or maybe they just wanted the money. But whatever the reason Brent would buy their shares and then he'd find somebody else and then buy theirs and then he would do it again and then he would buy theirs and he kept doing that for 20 years. By the way, I don't know why you, but that's the pass that I cannot get over. Some people stick with the same diet for like, I don't know, 20 days, but this dude focused on the same opportunity for 20 years. And he did it one owner time, one conversation at a time. He bought this whatever one share at a time and eventually he owned the whole darn thing. Now when I heard that my first time was due to why? Why would you spend 19, 20 years doing something like this? What was so special about this company? So I started learning more about it because I live near Irvine, California. And the answer that I found out ended up being more interesting than I even thought. The story actually starts along before this guy Don Brent. Back in the 1800s, there was this Irish immigrant named James Irvine. He is the mastermind behind all this. He put together close to 100,000 acres of land in Southern California. At that time, it was mostly ranch land. And of course, no headlines and no one really knew who Jones Irvine was. And the family held on to that land for decades. Then Cal, of course, California grew. People moved in. You had businesses showing up in cities and then expanding and like, you know what California is today. But eventually the Irvine company that owned this 100,000ish acres of land was sitting on an enormous amount of land. A right in the middle of one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Imagine like I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll can this to you. Imagine you bought Central Park in New York City, right? Imagine Manhattan. Imagine you bought Central Park and you just didn't do anything to it for 30 years. And then suddenly you wake up one morning and you're like, Hey, here's Manhattan. Maybe I should do something with Central Park, right? And you just didn't leave it Central Park. You actually did something with it. Imagine that's what actually happened. And then of course, what these guys did, they made a decision that totally, you know, did something amazing for Irvine instead of selling pieces of whenever someone was born to buy them. They started planning an entire city. As you know, the city of Irvine, California, that's where the modern Irvine actually came from. And so I was reading about this. I realized, wait a minute. They decided just like Central Park that one third of the land would never be developed ever. Now that's cool. Maybe that's a conservation easement and you get a tax benefit for that. They probably did. But think about this. Maybe it's like, Oh, maybe they want parks and protected pace and for the kids. Sure. Maybe it's both though. I asked myself another question. What happens to the rest of the land when a third of it is permanently off limits? Right? I will tell you that just as soon as they put Central Park into New York City into, into into Manhattan, the rest of the value of Manhattan went up. Why? Because it's a straight demand supply. There was just not enough of the thing, right? Because when there's less of something, it tends to become more valuable of everything else. And more I thought about it, the smarter I realized it because they were not just reacting to the growth of what was happening around them. They just decided that, Hey, what if we could artificially shape this growth? And that's when I thought, wait a minute, this is what this is why what Bren was doing was so interesting because it was not just buying of the land. I think it was something significantly bigger. He had this vision. And sometimes I feel like, man, I should have thought about this. I think that most people look at a company and focus on the company. I think what Don branded was focused on the people. And I'll tell you what the people means here. A company that a company, what does the company do? A company follows a process, right? What do people do? People follow their own lives. A company hires bankers. What do people do? People go through divorces. People go through estates. People go through, I don't know, money for different reasons. People go through their life in some way. And Bren understood that. So instead of waiting for the entire company to be sold, he just talked to the individual owners. He just talked to the the people one by one. Honestly year after year, he just probably just waited. And because of that, he wasn't competing with anyone else. This business was not for sale. James Irvine did not want to sell the Irvine company. Bren just bought it piece by piece, share by share owner by owner. Like that is freaking insane. And most of the time, the reason is most of the times he was having conversations that no one else was having, right? He was talking to people about buying their share when that nobody else wanted to have that conversation. And everybody else was waiting for this company to go for sale saying, Oh yeah, one this, the Irvine company goes up for sale. We'll have private equity. We'll have an investment bank or some Goldman Sachs. We'll figure it out. But this guy, Don Brent, was not waiting for any money. He just, he probably had a CRM or a roll of X or some bunch of listed names somewhere. And he just realized, Hey, if I bought one share, then I bought the other and all those small decisions would add up at some point. I think in 120 years, he owned the whole company. Now here's the other crazy part. Once he owned everything, he didn't rush to sell pieces of it. And anyway, he kept operating with the same like thought process or the patience he had used to acquire because as the city kept growing, the rent, what happens to the land? The land becomes more valuable. And as the land becomes more valuable, the original plan of getting it piece by piece keeps working. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized the story wasn't really, I don't know, helping me understand real estate. It was teaching me how opportunities or strategy or a long time actually work. So I think there's three things. And you may say, well, Sean, why are you telling me all of this? I think there's three things kind of worth what thinking about here. The first one is that I've realized that the biggest opportunities don't always look like opportunities at first. Sometimes they're just hidden opportunities. They're like, you got to have a bigger vision for these. Sometimes they're hidden in situations that no one else is paying attention to because they're hard because they're not scalable because it's not neatly packaged for us to actually go by a thing. That's number one, which is the biggest opportunities don't always look like opportunities at first. The second is that most people compete in shark-infested waters, right? Most like when you buy a house, what do you do? The worst way to buy a house, you may think everyone thinks that the only way to buy a house is when there's a sign in the art. Well, when there's a sign in the art, everyone's competing on the same house. Well, what if you could actually buy a house and you were patient and you wanted a house down the street from you and you kept talking to the neighbor over and over and over and over and over again that whenever that neighbor was ready to sell, they called you first. If that was the case, you would get the call first and no one will ever know when there's a sign in the art. So I think the second most important thing is that people compete where everyone else is competing. People compete in shark-infested waters. And because it's just easy, it's packaged well. It's where, quote, listings are. It's where, like, there's an auction. That's what it happens. But because of that, when everybody bids on something, you know that something is valuable. It ascertains some kind of value. But when you're not competing, that's pretty amazing, right? I don't think in this case, Donbren, who is a billionaire on the Forbes list, he bought the Irvine company without competing with anyone. Like, that is insane to me. The third thing is that sometimes I just don't understand, like, time can do incredible things if you just give time a chance to work, right? Wealth is a function of time. You know, there's nothing more valuable. I read this crazy study that said, if you had invested one dollar when when Jesus was born, right? Essentially the turn of the century, the turn of like, yeah, in what AD 00, right? And it compounded it and it grew up 5% a year. It would be worth like 100 to 200,000 times ordered as magnitude today than any other time. One dollar at that time, right? Just from a compounding perspective, which I think is crazy. Like, we don't think about time. And a lot of it is why, like, I stress out about not what financial planning and strategies and investing can do for me. I'm literally all of my stuff right now is in the name of my children and they own everything. And now, sure, there's some protection mechanisms associated with that, just so my son doesn't go rogue or whatever, but they have what 30 plus years on me, right? And no matter what, even if AI prolongs our life for another 100 years, sure, I will win, but they will always win more than I did. So I, the thing that my biggest learning here is I'm not saying it's too late for me. I'm saying I've been fortunate to make what I've made and one what I have won and I'm good for the rest of my life. However, my children can have an extraordinary outcome because time is insane, right? So it's amazing what time can do if you give it a little chance, if you have little, little patience, 90 to 20 years, sounds crazy. But if you see what 19 to 20 years produced, that is insane. Like that 20 years to become a billionaire without anybody, without obeying on the Forbes for 100 without anybody even knowing about it is unbeatable is insane. So I think that sometimes we ignore what's not exciting enough. Sometimes we ignore something because it feels too small. Sometimes we say, Hey, you know, you were stuck in our own head. Sometimes we ignore something because it's not for sale. But I really think that we had a great lesson here, which is to do the unscalable. I think what Don Brand did, spending what 90 to 20 years chasing chasing this, the single opportunity that most people didn't even know existed was the special sauce in all of this was the winning formula in all of this. This guy, who's I don't know, 85, 90 years old right now has 17 billion dollars worth of worth of net worth. He's on the Forbes for 100 less. No one even knows who he is. But if you live in Orange County, California, you know that he doesn't even have the last name or vine, but he owns the Irvine company and he did this, what one conversation at a time, buying one share at a time from one owner time. Pretty freaking amazing. So owner tell you that as a great story, I thought I'd share with you because if we learn things like this, we can change the financial build lines of our family forever. Hey, by the way, if this is interesting to you, hopefully listen to it on to Xpeed and you got a great story out of this. Now you know how Irvine, California was started. Now you know how James Irvine from the Irish immigrant actually built this all this and how Don Brand, the one crazy dude who bought this one share at a time for 20 years and now is a billionaire that nobody even knows who he is. Pretty amazing. Remember how many sites of greatness is a choice and I hope you choose to like take this lesson away. By the way, if you like this and you want to make one made to make more like this, just screenshot this episode and tag me when I can make more like this for you. If you live in Orange County, California, definitely screenshot this and tag me because I think everyone else in Orange County share here at the story because everybody knows about the Irvine story. So do me a favor, screenshot this, tag me and I can make more like this for you. Hey, this is Sean. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build two billion dollar companies a hard way. So if you like this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as they go for a three-peat and build the next billion. So everything's free at MyNextBillion.com. Please check it out MyNextBillion.com.