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Everyone thinks money is the only way to get ahead. But what if your greatest assets aren’t sitting in your bank account? Discover the five trades you can use to create opportunities, build wealth, and unlock unlimited upside. In this episode, Sharran explains why money is only one of the many assets people can use to create opportunities and reveals five powerful trades that can be exchanged in the marketplace. Through personal stories, including his experiences with investing in mentors, relationships, and real estate opportunities, Sharran shows that wealth is not just about how much money you have but also about understanding and leveraging all the assets available to you.
“When you see money as this one-dimensional thing, and it’s the only way you can win, it is very debilitating… But when you start to see that you have multiple assets, that’s when it really starts to work.”
~Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
01:25 – The money trade: Using capital to create significantly larger returns
05:14 – The relationship trade: How connections create wealth opportunities
07:47 – The time trade: Turning time into money and equity
09:54 – The skill trade: Developing valuable skills that increase income
12:17 – The brand trade: Building an asset you can monetize
13:43 – How to combine multiple assets to create bigger opportunities
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Acquisition.com
– ACQ Real Estate
– Board Member: ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Board Member: The Real Brokerage
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
– Threads
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Has anyone ever told you that money can’t buy you happiness? Well, it can only buy you, uh, comforts or maybe a fancy car, uh, a nice house, get your children to school, uh, vacations, maybe a plane, maybe transport, maybe medical care. It can do all of that. Well, money solves the problems of money problems, right?
It can make you money, but is that the be-all end-all of everything? Now, I will tell you that there is a way to make money, but in– today, I wanna talk about how you can make more money without making more money, and that is, they actually believe that there are five trades that you can trade with the marketplace that can be significantly more valuable than money.
Hey, uh, if you don’t know me, my name is Sharran Srivatsaa. I have h- got a chance to build two billion-dollar companies, one in the private markets, one publicly traded on the Nasdaq. Uh, I’ve invested in 100-plus companies. I was investment banker at Goldman Sachs and at Credit Suisse, and, uh- I’m a big Anaheim Ducks fan.
But most importantly, today I am the CEO of acquisition.com, where I partner with [00:01:00] my friends and my business partners, Alex and Leila Hormozi. And the thing that I wanna tell you about is a lot of which got me to today was just realizing that it was not about the money. And at the end of the day, you can use four other ways to make more money, and the first is to realize that there are five trades, and these five trades are actually five assets that you can deploy in your life and in your business.
And here’s trade number one, which is the money trade. This makes perfect sense. You use money to get different things. You use money to buy time. You use money to buy services. You use money to buy things. You use money to, uh, move your business forward. Uh, but everybody thinks that money is the final trade.
But the question here is this. I wanna give you a quote that I heard, which was, “When you can write a check to solve a problem, you don’t have a problem.” Right? When you can write a check to solve a problem, you don’t have a problem. And what is the big reason that I’m sharing this with you? And that is that people sometimes undervalue what money can do.
[00:02:00] And if you just start to realize that it can be a massive tool for you, you can really use it to unlock a lot of different things. And I will tell you the number one thing that I’ve used to unlock money for, and I call this the asymmetric money trade. What can I write a check for today that will give me unlimited ROI for the future?
And that is the question to ask. Now, if I write a check to buy this, you know, Model S Plaid Tesla, that’s cool. I get a one-to-one money trade. I write a check, and I get something that is worth the thing. But where can I write a check to get something that is worth something completely different? And I’ve realized that that is in education.
Now, I wanna tell you a story, and the story is that when I was a child, my, uh, my mom and dad were entrepreneurs, and so I would… I was relentless as a kid. My mom would take me everywhere she went, to every store that she went to, and like every other child, I would ask for everything. I would ask, uh, for books and toys, and if we went to the grocery store, I would ask for a banana or ask for a pumpkin.
If we went to the, uh, hardware store, I would just… [00:03:00] I would ask for a pipe or a bolt. I would literally would ask for everything, right? And the key part that I wanna share with you is that my mom would not say yes to anything. She would say no to everything. And I finally realized how I could get her to say yes, and that was if I bought a book, if I asked for a book.
And so I knew I had the massive hack. At the end of the day, I would start at the most expensive thing, maybe a toy or a game or a piece of candy or what have you, and then finally I’d ask for a book, and she would always say yes to a book. And the reason I’m sharing this with you is when we had children, my mom then told me that I should create an unlimited learning budget for my children.
And I think this is the money asymmetric trade, where if we could deploy the learning in ourselves, the very fact that you’re spending time watching this, e- even though it feels like free, you’re investing your time doing this, it’s a good thing because you can’t really manage or, or, or get the math around the ROI.
But you do know [00:04:00] that you are a better person because of it, and because you’re a better person, you will do better things. You will create a better life. So I deployed so much money into just straight education. I bought… I hired Tony Robbins’ speaking coach for $50,000 for three hours. I currently have seven active coaches right now, and I just call them sniper mentors.
Whenever I wanna learn something, I go pay somebody to have them teach me something because once they teach me something, I know it forever. And the question I would ask you is this If you want to go become the person you wanna be, there’s probably a skill delta there. Maybe you need to get better at sales.
Maybe you need to get better at marketing. Maybe you need to get better at AI. Maybe you need to become a better leader. What is it? And that skill, someone else has probably already done. Someone else probably already knows. And for you, that skill may be worth hundreds, thousands, millions, tens of millions of dollars, but you could pay somebody $5,000, $10,000, a $50,000 coaching to teach you how to do that.
Now, you may say, “Well, Sharan, I don’t have that right now.” Well, you’re doing the second-best thing, which is consuming everything that you [00:05:00] can because you’re investing in yourself. The money trade, the most asymmetric money trade that you can make is to, to deploy the dollars in yourself because, uh, the learning in yourself is the, the greatest investment that you can make.
So deploy the dollars in yourself when it comes to a money trade. So number two, relationships. Well, what does relationships mean from a trade perspective? So I wanna tell you a crazy story. I recently mapped, looked back at my life, and I realized that 95% of my net worth was created by seven relationships, just seven.
Now, the crazy part about that is you have no idea which seven when you start. And so I… When I realized that, I said, “All right. There’s got to be a framework that I can use in my life to harness the value of these relationships.” And you… The more valuable you become to people, the better it is, but there has to be a framework.
And people always say, “Well, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, uh, who you know. It’s who knows you,” or, “It’s, uh, who, not how.” Well, when someone says things like that to me, I don’t know what it [00:06:00] means. When someone says it’s who, not how, like, what am I supposed to go do with it? I have no idea, which is why I came up with this framework called the 10/10 forever rule.
10 relationships that I can invest in for the next 10 years that will pay me forever. And you may wonder, well, what are these 10 relationships? Well, the, the crazy part is that you’re not gonna be able to invest in 100 relationships for the next 10 years. I… That’s why I picked just 10. So if I was investing in 10 companies and I was gonna help them for the next 10 years, what would I do?
And I took the same approach as an investor to investing in relationships. And it’s like if I, if I… If here was a relationship, and my relationship was Alex, and I wanted to invest in him, and I would do everything to make him successful. I would, um, support him. I would answer his calls. I would give him money if he was ever raising money.
I would invest in his company. I would buy his products. I would speak on his stages if he wanted me to. I would introduce him to other people. I, I would treat him just like I was investing in a business. I would do whatever it takes. The answer was always yes. Now, what was the question? I would invest in these 10 people [00:07:00] for the next 10 years so they, they knew that no matter what, I was their biggest supporter This 10/10 forever rule, by the way, is really hard to do, ’cause if I told you, “Come up with 10 people that you’re gonna invest in for the next 10 years,” I guarantee you, you may probably not be able to come up with more than one or two.
And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Over the last 15 years, I only have seven names on the list, and I’m always looking for my next. The, but the crazy part is you don’t know who the next person is, so you have to start doing the 10/10 forever with people. You have to start actually investing in them with no scorecard.
You can’t say, “Well, I made this investment and I didn’t get anything back.” No, the anything back comes later. The anything back, you realize that the relationships can be traded, and because they will start doing things for you that you’ll never imagine. So the, the second biggest trade in, in all of this are the asset is relationships.
So money, relationships. The third is time. When you’re just starting out, you just have time. You have more time than you have money. And so, on, on a lot of people, like for example, for me right now, I would pay to get the time back because I could take a little bit of time and [00:08:00] make a lot of money with it.
I could take a little bit of time and make a lot of cr- uh, create a lot of value with it. But when you have time, you have the ability to trade that for something else. I’ll, I’ll give you a crazy story. Uh, my mentor, who was a real estate entrepreneur, he, um… You would never know him. You would never know when he was walking around how wealthy he was.
And I kept asking him questions when I saw his portfolio. I was like, “Man, this is insane. How did he build all of this? I… How am I ever going to get my first real estate property? I don’t ever know if I can ever do that.” And one day I asked him, I said, you know, “Hey, h- how, how am I ever gonna break into this game?”
And he said something like, you know, “If you want to, you know, uh, y- y- you, you should, uh, if you… You should host the meal.” I was like, “What do you mean I should host the meal? If y- Just host the meal? I don’t… Does that mean that I need to, um, host a dinner?” I didn’t know what that meant. And So I wrote him a, a text message and I said, “Hey, I know you’re making a lot of these investments.
I know they’re– it’s really annoying and boring to you. I know you’re busy and you don’t have time. How about this? [00:09:00] On your next investment, real estate investment flip that you’re making, what if I did all the work, A to Z? You are not involved at all. I did all the work from A to Z. Would you be open to sharing 10% with me of the deal?”
And as an attorney, all he said, responded to the text message and he said, “Write it up.” And that was the beginning of me getting my first access to it because I used my time and traded it for money. And you may say, “Well, Sharran, 10% is nothing. It doesn’t change my life in any way.” Well, 10% in California when he was doing 18 to 24 deals in every one to two years is a lot.
Over a two-year period, he did $16 million worth of deals. I got $1.6 million worth of equity in these businesses, and then I still own a couple of those properties 15 years later. I would have never had a chance because I got a chance to trade my time for the equity, for the asset, for the money. So, so money, relationships, time.
The fourth is skill. And people don’t realize that how valuable skill is in a marketplace, right? [00:10:00] So, uh, a lot of times my friend will tell me, “Hey, uh, you know– Hey, Sharran, I wanna, I wanna make more money. What do you think I should do? Like, should I get a different job?” And I’m like, “Well, the reason you’re not making more money is not that you don’t have to get a different job.
The reason you’re not making more money is because you don’t have the right skills, because the higher the skills, the good value in the marketplace.” I– So I asked him, “How much money do you wanna make?” And he said, “Well, I wanna make a million dollars.” And I said, “Well, do you know anybody that makes a million dollars?”
And he said, “Yes, my neighbor makes a million dollars.” And I said, “Great. What does he do?” He’s like, “Well, he’s a top salesman at this company.” I go, “Awesome. What skill does he have that you don’t have?” And he’s like, “Well, he is, um, charismatic.” I was like, “Well, what does that mean?” “Well, he knows how to read the room and influence people.”
I’m like, “Okay, that’s sales.” “He has the amazing gift of the gab.” I’m like, “Okay, what does that mean?” “He has the ability to articulate his thoughts and package his ideas. He knows how to influence people.” “All right, great. He knows how to market and sell. Right? Awesome.” I’m like, “Do you know how to do that?” “No.” I go, “So now you know the real difference between your skill and his skill.
You just have not been trained to be able to do that. [00:11:00] That’s it.” Right? Because he then learned the skill, he mastered the skill, and he’s trading the skill with the marketplace, which is really powerful, right? And so because of that, my friend had this ma-mass- massive shift where he started to realize that he needed a new skill to actually make the money And so now he was like, “If I got that skill, I can trade that skill into the marketplace.”
The question I would ask you is, if you feel like you’re not hitting your income targets right now, the, the, the question to ask is not how I get another job, not how I make more money. The question is, what skill do I need that will naturally make it unreasonable for me to n- make more money? If you had, if you had a skill that was, that you knew would fetch you more money, why would you not make more money?
And maybe that is learning sales. Maybe that’s learning marketing. Maybe that’s learning AI. Maybe that’s, um, I, I don’t know, maybe that’s l- becoming a phlebotomist. Maybe that’s, uh, well, becoming a, uh, working in the healthcare industry. Maybe that’s learning in, in, maybe learning a specific [00:12:00] industry. It can be anything.
But the question I would just flip and stop asking, how do I make more money, and start asking, what skill do I need that will guarantee, that will almost make it unreasonable that I don’t make more money? So that is the fourth one, which is skill. And the last one is brand. Well, well, brand. What does brand mean?
I- in a lot of ways, brand is just association. And when you get deep association, you have the ability to redirect that association. And we know that that is an asset that you can monetize at some point. So what do… So if I were you, and you wanted to… You were like, “Hey, my life is good right now. I just wanna create some optionality for myself for the future,” what would you do?
Well, you would start building brand right now. The world has proven that you can monetize brands. Kylie Jenner took Kylie Cosmetics just because she had a brand and built a billion-dollar business. Uh, Ryan Reynolds, if you know, he bought a struggling Welsh team called Wrexham for $2.5 million. I think it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars right now, [00:13:00] and he just put his brand and marketing chops behind it.
You take The Rock. He was just making movies. He was ripped doing UFC or whatever else he was doing, right? But then he took his brand, and he put it behind Teremana. And you, you, you can, you can start to see how people are able to take simple little things and put their brand behind it. The crazy part is we have micro-influencers right now who are putting their brand behind things and creating insane amounts of money.
So brand is a very monetizable asset, but it takes a minute to build the trust. So but it’s, it’s got nothing to do with money. You can’t write a check to build brand. Sure, you can maybe get some fame, but you can’t write a check to build brand. It takes a minute, especially in today’s environment. So those are the five assets, money, relationships, time, skill, and brand.
And so whenever you’re faced with a tough situation, I want you to think about, “Well, what can I trade to get me the thing that I want?” Sometimes you have to write a check. You write a check to get the money. Sometimes you write the money. You know, sometimes you trade the relationship to get the brand.
Sometimes you trade the brand to get time. [00:14:00] Sometimes you trade time to get money. And when you just see money as this one-dimensional thing, and it’s the only way you can win, it makes it very debilitating. It’s very hard to actually win. But when you start to see that you have multiple assets, that’s when it really starts to work.
By the end of the day, I actually believe that you have more assets than you think, and you can get compensated not just for your effort, but for your time, skill, relationships, and brand as well, which is extremely powerful. So if you have one asset, which is money, you win. But if you start developing more assets, you win big time.
So the next time you’re faced with a situation where you really want something, ask yourself, “Can I only write a check, or can I actually use money or relationships or time or skill or brand to get exactly what I want?”