Recently named among the nation’s top 100 entrepreneurs, Co-founder of Scambook.com. Entrepreneur and Angel Investor. Avid philanthropist, and networker - Andrew Bachman

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This is packed with info on creating your startup so an angel investor will invest.

Tips on:

•         Traits you need (it’s not a skill!)
•         Why He doesn’t care about Business Models, but he does      care about THIS
•         Do you need to partner?
•        Why he would rather invest in the cleaning lady than most startups!
•         If you close a round of capital what you have to be ready for… (which is SO important even if you aren’t raising capital!)

And tons more. Andrew rocks!

Check out AndrewBachman.tv for free videos, expert interviews and articles from Andrew!

Thanks so much for listening!

(Lighting sucks on this one, late night in Boston with no professional lights! Too bad )

Transcript:

Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Andrew Bachman on the show. Now he's here. We're actually in person, which is totally awesome. This is one of the first interviews that we've done in person. He is an angel investor, has run ScamBook.com, sold a $100 million company, something crazy like that; really excited to talk to him today. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Thanks for driving down from Maine to see me.

JAIME TARDY: It was just for you. I'm really excited to actually meet someone in person. Tell me a little bit about how you got started. I know you started when you were in college. Tell me about that.

ANDREW BACHMAN: I grew up outside of Boston and my parents are physicians. Around my dinner table growing up business was not really a topic of conversation. I was really small in high school. I was a wrestler. I wrestled 103 pounds so I was always really scrawny. Everyone around me grew faster than me. I always wanted to be great at something. I always said that my burning desire was that. A lot of people in my family are doctors. I have sisters who are doctors. Both my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, whatever, and I was shit at biology.

I was in my high school locker room one day after wrestling practice and a kid who was a year old than me was talking about this place Babson College and he was talking about all these distinguished entrepreneurs – Arthur Blank founded The Home Depot – and all these billionaires that went there who started from nothing and built these companies. All these recent kids, my friend Kevin, from Facebook and these guys all went to a school called Babson. At that moment, I decided that's what I am going to do. I am going to make money; I'm going to go to business school.

I showed up to Babson in 2002 thinking Ford Explorer and Abercrombie & Fitch was as bling bling as it got and there were all these kids there from family businesses running around spending all this money in pubs and this and that and it just really fired me up and I became a serial entrepreneur. I started probably five or six businesses that have got this far off the ground and then just never made it because I was a great seller but I wasn't that great at building the companies. Eventually in school I met a business partner who was your typical tech nerd type of guy and together our paired talents created something really big and we pioneered the premium SMS industry and actually sold out for eight figures. It was good.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me about some of the times that sucked because we can hear about then it went well and really, really awesome but tell me about some of those that sort of went like this.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Totally and I think that's important because if you're watching this, times might suck. You're looking for something that might help you out.

JAIME TARDY: That's what we have. Like come on tell me when it sucked for you.

ANDREW BACHMAN: For sure. I remember getting out of college not wanting to get a job because I didn't want go be part of someone else's dream and couldn't get inspired by that. I was anxious. My parents were up my ass. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and my heart is pounding. It's like all right here I am in the real world, now how am I going to make a buck. I think that something I've realized is a lot of my peers and a lot of people heard this before, a lot of people say college is the greatest time of your life. I think that people find that to be true because in college you're given a goal. You have one overlying goal the whole time. What is it? Graduate. Don't screw up. Don't piss your parents of, graduate.

Go out, get drunk, do stupid things, whatever, as long as you're waking up every day, you know, skating by, going to a few classes and you graduate, you're okay. What happens is you get out of college and all of a sudden you're in this abyss and you say, "Does real estate define me? Does being a reporter define me? Does being a dentist define me?" People struggle with that. What am I going to do with the rest of my life? That's a scary concept.

For me, it was always important that I did something that defined what success meant to me. Seeing all these kids around me with money really gave me a lot of inspiration to make that definition of success something very lofty. I wanted to build a business; I wanted to sell a business. I'm a nobody from nowhere, you know what I mean?

JAIME TARDY: Where are you from originally?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I'm from a town called Wayland, Massachusetts. It was important for me to build this image of myself. But I had to find success so I could wake up every day and drive toward that. I could constantly ask myself should I go party with my friends or should I go have this meeting or go to this trade show or something? What's the return on my time of each?

JAIME TARDY: So you didn't party very much I'm assuming.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Business is my life. That's who I am. I am driven by anxiety so like if there's something I really want to do that I think it is fun or I've got to fly to Seattle on Alaska Air coach middle seat to put out a fire with a vendor, a supplier, a business partner, whatever, that needs to be done for my business, there's no choice. I have no choice, I'm on that flight. That's where I am at least in the last five years. Maybe I'll chill out a little bit and realize I don't have to grind it out so hard.

JAIME TARDY: Did those times that sucked, tell me about a specific example, especially something, because there's a lot of people that are listening that are newer entrepreneurs or in this time that kind of sucks where they are not at the tipping point yet and they are just sort of really chugging along. Tell me about one of those times.

ANDREW BACHMAN: I'll say this, in terms of advice, I see so many people out there with like oh and this is my crazy idea. You can bring your crazy idea to a guy like me and can't figure out how that idea makes a buck, you've already lost me. If you want to be in business and you want to be a success, what are you trying to do? You are trying to make a buck. You buy something for 1, you sell it for 3 and keep 2. That's how it works. That's business.

If it sucks for you right now, odds are you are overcomplicating things. Figure out how to make one dollar and also be brutally honest with yourself. I was. I always thought of myself as the CEO. I'm more of a sales guy. I am more of product guy. I am more of a promoter, you know. I needed to pair myself with someone who is a real finance guy, a grinder could build that type of stuff.

JAIME TARDY: You're a popular guy.

ANDREW BACHMAN: I am, I got to shut my phone off.

JAIME TARDY: What I love is that you are an angel investor and I saw on your site and you're like people can pitch me ideas. You must get pitched a huge range of ones that probably suck really bad and some that probably really have a lot of potential hopefully. That's the plan, right? Tell me about why the ones that suck, why do they suck? One reason of course is because they apparently have a business model and that's why that doesn't work well for you. But other reasons…

ANDREW BACHMAN: Wait, hold on, revenue model, not business model. But anyway.

JAIME TARDY: I like that. Why did you correct me?

ANDREW BACHMAN: Well you said business model. Everyone kind of has a business model but some of these business models don't have revenue models. How does this application of yours that does this, that and the other thing make money? Oh in seven different ways. No, I already don't get it. If you're coming to me as an investor, here's what I need to know. You're going to take X amount of dollars from me and do what with it, XYZ to make my money now worth more money? When are you going to return it and how much are you going to return?

If you start talking to me like that, I'm like oh man you speak my language. But people don't do that. They come in and go here's my power point. As you can see, the nutritional market is a $16 billion industry. It's like ugh.

JAIME TARDY: Haven't they watched enough Shark Tank? They're not supposed to do that. Give me the facts. Tell me though, when you get into this, tell me about some of the ones that you really like. What do they have? It sounds like what you were saying before is if someone is not confident in their idea and they are all kind of crazy, that sounds like that's a turnoff too. What are some of the good things that people can do to try and pitch?

ANDREW BACHMAN: They can be survivors. They can really be determined people and I'll tell you, let's say 90 percent of the ideas that I see suck; 10 percent have an actual revenue model or have people who are talking to me in a simple way that I understand, the revenue model. Look, I would rather invest in the lady that cleans my apartment who will say to me give me $50,000, we are going to go buy four vans and scale my business up and just clean more homes. That to me I get. Okay, fine. There's money there.

JAIME TARDY: You already started making money and it will be easier for me to see.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Yes, bus some crazy idea that is going to be the next Twitter that someone is like describing to me and I can't even understand. If I can't understand, I can't be excited about it. My point was 90 percent of the things I see suck. Of those 10 percent, maybe 2 percent will make it because of the team. It takes really special hardcore people like just aren't going to fail and they are going to persevere because that's what business is all about. I mean everyone wants the dollar. If there was $10,000 sitting in front of us that didn't belong to anyone, I'm dipping my hand down, aren't you?

JAIME TARDY: Yes, I'll fight for it.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Exactly. When you said you are going to get there but I know I am going to get there.

JAIME TARDY: I don't know, we'll see.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Exactly. Everyone wants it. You made my point. It's hard. People are like oh we have this great idea and then they take it live and they are like why isn't anyone coming? Why isn't anyone buying? You've got to constantly be optimizing and dealing with that.

JAIME TARDY: Do they already need to know, like say it's an online company, do they already need to have online marketing, a whole bunch of stuff, as their asset, before they bring it to you or can they just come with an idea? How do you, do you have requirements?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I'll look at anything but if you're going to close around capital, you've got to be ready to take someone's capital. You know what I mean?

JAIME TARDY: And know what to do with it.

ANDREW BACHMAN: It's a big deal, you're going to take someone's money and you're not prepared to give them a solid return. You're dumb if you do that because you fail me once you're not coming back to the tank.

JAIME TARDY: Tank, I like that, like Shark Tank. You said the team. Do you invest in people that are just one person or do you pretty much always look for at least two people?

ANDREW BACHMAN: It doesn't matter. If it's just one person that comes see me, then they're probably pretty aggressive like crazy person well rounded. I mean I've been in the tech space for probably going on ten years now, a little bit longer even, a dozen years and I've seen programmers, single programmers that are just as good as 50 and I've seen hundreds of programmers that are just useless. They show up and they just like grind it out. Then you have that one special guy that gets it. You don't have to explain things. They do the research. They understand how things make money so they build things a certain way. It doesn't need to be a team. Like I said, if the revenue model is there, I don't care if it's 1 person or 50, whatever it takes. As long as you know what it takes.

JAIME TARDY: Do you get involved with any of it or do you stay hands off?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I end up getting involved more than I'd like.

JAIME TARDY: Well it's your money. I'd be like okay, you got to be doing something good with it, right?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I mean I won't be in a position to be an investor. I don't have to sit there and teach you how to run your business. That's a crappy investment. If I've been lucky enough to make my money and someone is going to want to make a deal with me, I want them to go out and run a business. My capital should be a resource for XYZ you're going to do these things and you're going to go out and build a business that's going to be profitable and you're going to pay me back. But often times what happens is people are unprepared and they get into these businesses and they call you up and say, "Here we are, can you help?" I'm golfing, leave me alone.

JAIME TARDY: That sucks. That's not why you got into what you're doing.

ANDREW BACHMAN: That's why lending money in real estate is good.

JAIME TARDY: Really? Because it's just more hands off?

ANDREW BACHMAN: Yes. Because the banks aren't lending right now, you can do something called hard money lending, so there's a lot of people out there who are mid construction that need to take a loan and you can loan them the money for like 20 percent for a year and if they default you own the real estate. But what happens is you only lend them up to 50 percent of the value on the real estate. So if they do default, you own the real estate for half the cost of what you agreed.

JAIME TARDY: So you get it either way.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Yes. Now we're talking about a business model that's not really crazy innovative entrepreneurship but the dollars and cents make sense.

JAIME TARDY: There it is. Let's move money in there.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Get it? Did I not just make that super clear in five seconds?

JAIME TARDY: Oh yeah, and you know it works. It has worked many, many times before. Should somebody, that's the thing though, we're talking about business. There's so many other things that people can be doing. A lot of people that are business owners go I want to do real estate, I want to do investing, I want to do business and it sort of gets confusing because there's so many options. Would you suggest someone start in business or should they start in real estate or where do you think is the best avenue right now to sort of get started to try and build your wealth?

ANDREW BACHMAN: Look I mean you've got to try and fail probably before you make it. For me, I would have rather have been broke for ten years while I was out there trying to figure out, rather than making 50, 60 grand in someone else's dream. Think about all those hours you wake up, all the personal stuff you sacrifice working a 9 to 5 job. You sacrifice a lot. It's a lot of time and you get paid like crap. Rather than if you spent that time trying to build your own thing, when you hit it, the payoff is going to be way greater and the return on your time is going to be way higher.

JAIME TARDY: Like you were saying too, the failure probably is a good thing.

ANDREW BACHMAN: However, with that being said, if you're wet behind the ears and you go and take a job in an industry that you knew nothing about, you can often times get inspired and see inefficiencies that you can solve and break off and start something. I mean something I encourage people to think about, I mean I know some really wealthy people who aren't the brightest people.

JAIME TARDY: Good, that's what everyone wants to hear.

ANDREW BACHMAN: But they've been in the right industry. Some people who think about dollars and cents as $1, $2, $3, there's people out there in the financial world that think about dollars and cents as 2 percent of a billion dollars, which is what $20 million?

JAIME TARDY: Makes a big difference.

ANDREW BACHMAN: They just fall into an industry where there's just a lot more cash to be thrown around, that goes around.

JAIME TARDY: How do we find those? That's what everyone is wanting to know. Tell me what industries are good right now, especially if you're doing angel investing and stuff. Do you know?

ANDREW BACHMAN: You've got to look at rising markets. That's why if you note a lot of people in tech, over the last ten years, odds are they've got more money than people who are in I don't know, grocery store development or whatever.

JAIME TARDY: That's a good one. That makes sense. Do you think that trend is going especially because you are in tech. Looking through tech, we've had ups and downs and craziness going on with tech for awhile, especially 2000s and the bubbles and all that. Do you see it going well still for everyone?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I think the space is for everyone. In 2006 Facebook came out. That was only six years ago, seven years ago and so that was a new form of media and because of the social component like young kids were are like really smart and geeky, were able to build this infrastructure and understand this thing before everyone else caught on. I feel like the older generation is kind of catching on a little bit more. It's not like just a young guy's game.

Everyone looks at their advertising and online plan now whereas before it was like oh man you're making all this money on the internet. How do you make money on the internet. Any Joe Schmoe off the street who has got any sort of business knows what Google Ad Words is. They're paying Google Ad Words monthly. They're trying to optimize their keywords. I mean beforehand, a couple years ago, you'd meet guys like Neil Patel, I mean they were just charging you whatever they wanted because they understood it and no one else did.

JAIME TARDY: I know. We're lucky that it's starting to become a little more mainstream but I think that technology is evolving so fast that it's just going to keep changing. How can we stay ahead of that trend?

ANDREW BACHMAN: You've always got to look for the rising tide in that growing industry. What's next? There's a good quote, "Rising tides float all ships." I was part of something that got really hot.

JAIME TARDY: Do you think that that was luck? Do you think that was you're like I saw that trend and I went after it? What do you think was that? What made you so special?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I'm good at picking winners and the kids I chose to partner with I just knew they were making money. In my gut, I knew they were making money and I figured out whatever I could to get in and down with that early. I didn't left life, the cool jocks, like why are you hanging out with these kids, I didn't give a shit. Shut up.

JAIME TARDY: I'll see you in ten years.

ANDREW BACHMAN: I knew these kids were going places and I figured out how to do what I did best which was as simple as even teaching them how to be social. I took these kids on their 21st birthday and got them into a place for the first time and have a drink and introduce them to girls. That's what it took but that was my gift to the relationship. Anyone could do that, if they're like me.

JAIME TARDY: How did you know? These guys seemed cool. Smart cool guys.

ANDREW BACHMAN: They weren't cool at all.

JAIME TARDY: I'm a geek. I have a degree in IT so maybe they were cooler to me than they were to you. How did you know innately?

ANDREW BACHMAN: No, it wasn't even that. They just weren't cool. They are not like pleasant to be around.

JAIME TARDY: Oh that's why you helped their socialization. Sounds like a dog, that's horrible. So you knew that they had something. Is that innate? Have you always just sort of had that gut feeling about people or is it something that you had to cultivate?

ANDREW BACHMAN: No. I think maybe that's just a natural thing but you know when someone is going places because they are not, you feel the buzz, you feel the energy. It's like if you walk up to a bar and some guy is just sitting at the bar like this, drinking his drink, do you want to run over and chat with that guy? You want to be around that guy or is that guy kind of a nuisance? But if there's a guy in the corner like ahh, spins you around on the dance floor, like hello.

I guess it was just seeing that these kids kind of knew they were on to something, how focused and passionate they were and they were talking about something new. I don't know. They were just really kids that I could rely on to build a business. I knew that they were incentivized to wake up every morning and make this thing right so I could go out and sell it.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, because you were the sales guy. Tell me about the very beginning of that, because that's really interesting. You were in business school. Hopefully everybody knew a little bit about business.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Undergrad business school. It was not MBA. It was called Babson College. It's a school that has a business focus. The kids I was teamed up with were there because they wanted to be in business too.

JAIME TARDY: So everybody sort of knew. They did a lot of the infrastructure and stuff like that and you went and sold it. How did you sell it? Why don't you tell people what it kind of is so that way they have a good idea.

ANDREW BACHMAN: The first company I sold was a text messaging based premium SMS and display ad network. Early on we were buying a lot of different media on websites, meaning like banner space and then we would just resell that to people and optimize the banners and the ones that were performing and getting clicked on the most would get shown the most. You could buy these, with big volume relationships, you could go out and buy inventory for say $0.10 per 1000 page views and turn around and sell it for a buck.

JAIME TARDY: Now what year was this?

ANDREW BACHMAN: This is about '04/'05.

JAIME TARDY: You are younger than I am? How old are you?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I'm 29.

JAIME TARDY: Damn, I'm 30! Anyway, let's keep going. Let's forget about that. You went ahead and how did you, some college kid, go out and sell massive quantities of that stuff?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I was always good at finding decision makers and getting close with them, getting them to green light me for things and that's important too. The bottom up approach never really works. If you're trying to work with a company and you go on their webpage and you just submit the contact, rather than just being really a bit of a hardcore stalker about it.

JAIME TARDY: Hustler.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Find them on LinkedIn, find out where they live, find them somehow. Find out what trade show they are going to be at next and go speak to them in person. That's a big difference.

JAIME TARDY: Give me some advice for meeting someone like that. Like trying to sell to somebody, especially somebody that's high level, for someone, like when you are a college student, introducing yourself and going hey I'm 20, nice to meet you.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Find them in person. Make them have a drink with you. Look at a guy like Gary Vanderchuck. The guy probably gets thousands of emails a day and you're trying to reach this guy and you're like oh Gary, I need to talk to you, I need to meet with you. Show up to somewhere he is going to be, some conference, walk up to him and say, "Gary, I know you like wine, come split a bottle with me, I have something to ask you."

JAIME TARDY: That totally changes things.

ANDREW BACHMAN: All of a sudden, now you know him. Now you got his attention. Now you know him.

JAIME TARDY: How important are relationships to you?

ANDREW BACHMAN: Everything, it's everything. Network is everything.

JAIME TARDY: So you built that company and then you started another company.

ANDREW BACHMAN: I partnered with a law firm that was representing a company I worked with and I just met these guys randomly and I was in Chicago. I went up to the office to hang out and these guys were in their early 30s and they've got a big office, top floor in Chicago, 70 lawyers working for them and I said to the guy, "How do you guys get leads for these class action lawsuits? It looks like you're doing really well." It was something as archaic as oh we've got one guy on Google all day long looking for a related scam, then we find someone who has been scammed and we go out and sue the scammer.

I was like hmmm let me build you a website. We built ScamBook.com and the message to the consumer was make a complaint, get your money back. On the back end, this law firm could log it in to users complaining about tech spam credit card fraud, privacy breach and turn all that data into money.

JAIME TARDY: That was genius idea. Did you come up with that when you were talking with them?

ANDREW BACHMAN: Yes, we literally just ping ponged in a room, over a ping pong table.

JAIME TARDY: Was it really? That's hilarious.

ANDREW BACHMAN: In a brainstorm session, I just came up with the idea.

JAIME TARDY: But they had already had their business. You were like I am going to run with this? You didn't partner with them or anything like that?

ANDREW BACHMAN: At first they were partners. We started to get a lot of attention and I think their core business was legal so they exited and then my business partner who is really more of a technical guy was really into the company and moved his family out to the west coast. We had a financial agreement and that was that.

JAIME TARDY: How did you find that partner?

ANDREW BACHMAN: My same partner from my first company.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, cool. It went well, so well last time that you were like okay I am going to take this guy along with me because it went really well?

ANDREW BACHMAN: That was the beauty of when you pair your talents with someone and it makes sense. It's like great football teams that have great offenses and crappy defenses. Who is the classy example? Drew Brees won a Superbowl but teams like that, Drew Brees this year who is just a crazy offensive guy but he has not defense versus the teams that are well rounded. You've got to be strong in every area, not just one.

JAIME TARDY: But you hear so much about partners and horrible partners, like we've done a lot of interviews and we've heard of horrible partnerships gone wrong. Tell me some advice on (A) finding a partner and (B) not having things go horribly wrong.

ANDREW BACHMAN: That's tough. People are inherently greedy. It can just be tough to work with people sometimes. Work with people you like. Work with people you respect. Work with people that you wouldn't mind seeing make money. I think a lot of times I see guys get greedy and once they are actually successful and then their partnership ruins it all because they can't stand that one of them is making more money or this or that. You got to keep it cool.

I guess my advice of that is if you're going to call yourself an entrepreneur, you want to be a millionaire, you want to be in business, you've got to realize that through your career it's not about the deal you're living today. We're all thinking about the deal we're working on right now, the business we are working on right now. But in reality, there's going to be 30, 40, 50 of those through our lives and they're all going to be stepping stones. So never burn a bridge and always try to be moving up the ladder.

JAIME TARDY: We forget that all the time. We always assume we have to do it now and no offense to entrepreneurs in general, but we're sort of like let's do this. Let's spit this out as fast as we can, as quick as we can. That's awesome advice but how do we implement that? How do we not go crazy on this deal?

ANDREW BACHMAN: You've got to be happy. You have to be happy enough to enjoy every day because things take a lot of time, especially in business, you have to rely on other people. Say you're a product person, once you design the thing, it takes awhile to get it back in your hands. Once you make the order or whatever, things like that just takes a long time. We're all human beings. We all live and we all die and we have to remember that. You just got to enjoy these moments. It's going to be great.

For me, I think a big part of what I do now is realize that I'm so anxious, always financially anxious. I need to make more money, I need to do this. It really makes me anxious but, at the end of the day, I know I am going to be old and rich someday and all I'm going to want to be is young and healthy like I am right now. You got to remember that.

JAIME TARDY: Number one, that's really good for everybody to hear, right, because we're interviewing you, you're successful, you're awesome and you're still anxious and wanting to make more. I think, in general, that type of people that are humans, we like more of just in general. But we assume that once we hit a level of success it's like yeah I'm satisfied, but that didn't happen with you; you still want more.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Yes. You have got to be happy with yourself today no matter where you are in life because the truth is you don't really ever change that much. I'm still that same exact person who I was at my parents' house when I was anxious right after college, like with my heart pounding. I made all this money but I don't really think about it. Once you get over the hump of you've got a couple Rolexes, you've got a Ferrari, a nice apartment, once you get that out of the way and it has been awhile, like monetary stuff goes away, you're all the same person. It's just fun; it's cool to get money when you've never had it and splurge a little and buy shit.

JAIME TARDY: Let's talk about some fun stuff. Let's talk about some really cool stuff that you were able to purchase. I know people are like well I kind of want the Ferrari. I don't want to feel bad about buying a Ferrari later.

ANDREW BACHMAN: I don't feel bad about that.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me about the fun stuff! What do you have a chance to do that these people would love to have a chance to do?

ANDREW BACHMAN: It's cool but the thing like the Ferrari is I'm 29; I got my Ferrari when I was, let's say I've had it for like 3.5/4 years. I'm like 25/26, like pulling up to restaurants and places in Boston and all of a sudden everyone is like who the hell is this kid? Everyone in the restaurant wants to come out and be like who is this guy?

JAIME TARDY: He must be so important.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Right and then you foster those relationships and monetize those. Exactly, right. That's something that's like kind of cool.

JAIME TARDY: It's a business asset.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Everyone is like how fast does it go? I don't know, I don't really drive it that fast. I just drive it so people notice me, you know what I mean.

JAIME TARDY: Everyone is going to write down on their list they want a Ferrari. It will help me build my business, it's fun. That's great. Going back you've been an entrepreneur for ten plus years, you've helped other angel investors. You are really in this space a thousand times over. There's people that are wet behind the ears that don't necessarily know what you know. What are their first, like if you were to say first, second, third, fourth step, what are their first couple steps on starting a business?

ANDREW BACHMAN: Ready one, two, three:

(1) Define what success means to you because success means something different to all sorts of people just based on what you grew up, what you think success is, who you think a successful person is versus who I might thing is a successful person is. So define what success means to you and don't be shortsighted by society because we are all really institutionalized. A lot of us grew up and went to middle school and high school and then college and then you are supposed to graduate and get a job. That's what society says, right. You look at guys like Gates and Zuckerberg, they just put the blinders on that. Mom and dad I can't hear you; college what the hell is that? I don't give a shit, I'm leaving. Had the vision and just nothing got them off that path. Every day they woke up they were driving toward what they saw and they made it happen. So number one, define what success means to you and make a goal for yourself.

(2) Constantly ask yourself what's the return on my time. Like Zuckerberg and Gates, do I stay in college or do I just leave and start this business? What's the reward of my time for doing this? What's the reward on my time by doing that? Think like that. Ask yourself that. When I am sitting on my couch just like reviving, watching TV for an hour, that's okay. If someone calls me up, hey Andy do you want to come have a drink with me, I often say to myself it's really to reward my time. If it's someone I can clearly like say okay maybe he'll be an investor in my hedge fund, I go in that meeting and say all right I am going to close this guy and make him invest in my hedge fund. So it's going to be positive and worth my time. Otherwise, unless I am looking just to do something mindless, I probably will decline. What's the return on your time for the decisions you make?

(3) Win. Be brutally honest with yourself and say I can do this. Set yourself up for success. I can do this and I'm good at this but I'm shit at this and I need to pair my talents with someone who can help make me a more well rounded team.

So there is your one, two and three; define what success means to you, ask yourself constantly what's the reward on my time for the things I'm doing in my day-to-day life and optimize that. Earn, don't burn your time. And three would be honest with yourself.

JAIME TARDY: That's huge. That's the thing that a lot of people don't talk about. They don't look at what they're good at and what they're not good at. They just feel pretty good about going no I'm pretty good at everything. We're good.

ANDREW BACHMAN: You got to set yourself up for success. Some people can handle sitting in an office and are good at grinding things out and working. If you're that type of person then you're like okay then build a business where that's going to be your role and that's cool and that's fine and you can sustain that. I can't do that. You know what I am worth in an office? Nothing, maybe like $5,000 a year I could bang out. If you put me on my plane and I'm meeting investors and doing this and doing that, maybe I'm worth $50 million a year. Then I need someone in the office doing all the admin stuff.

JAIME TARDY: How do we find that out? For people that may be at a job that they hate.

ANDREW BACHMAN: They just know it. If you hate it, you hate.

JAIME TARDY: But how do we find out what we are really good at, if we don't already know? How would you? It's funny because you know and that's what I think is really interesting because you're like no I am hardcore, I understand this without having to ask myself. But I talk to a lot of people that don't know and it's hard, you know what I mean, because if it's not innate and that they know that they're good at this stuff, where do they start? Maybe you don't have an answer.

ANDREW BACHMAN: First of all, you have to have that platform that allows you to be successful. For instance, could I go out and raise a couple hundred grand and do another startup? Easily but that's kind of selling myself short at this point because there's a lot of people that invested in me and made money behind me on my last couple of deals that I should be out monetizing that. How do I do that? I do something called wealth preservation. I started a hedge fund. I take a geeky friend of mine off Wall Street, who I met in college, make him manage my money and then invite investors to come along and sell them that he's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

In terms of money management, he is going to outperform the market by 10, 20 points a year. So how do we make money on that? You take a management fee of 2 percent, we take 20 percent of the profits. So now I can go out and say to people oh this is Andy Bachman, he sold a company, now I have a track record. Do you want to put some money in, start small and see how we do in six months and then I go back to the well and we do something bigger.

JAIME TARDY: How do you know that he's going to do a really good job?

ANDREW BACHMAN: I just do, because I am good at picking winners, remember?

JAIME TARDY: Damn, how can we bottle that from you and just sell that? That would be great.

ANDREW BACHMAN: You know how I know he is going to do a good job, because the kid has made $250 million for his bank on Wall Street over the last six years. He's one of the youngest VP's on Wall Street.

JAIME TARDY: So you kind of knew.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Yes, so if that asset is good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

JAIME TARDY: That's awesome. I know we have to start wrapping up. I ask the exact same question every single time.

ANDREW BACHMAN: This is your signature thing?

JAIME TARDY: This is my signature question and I totally usually tell the people in advance what the question is but I totally didn't for you so let's see how well you do. The question is what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

ANDREW BACHMAN: Define what success means to you. We touched it; literally define what success means to you. What does success mean to you? What's your goal for your site?

JAIME TARDY: Everybody knows, right? I want a net worth of at least a million.

ANDREW BACHMAN: By when?

JAIME TARDY: By 2015 is what my date is, which I don't know if anyone knows that.

ANDREW BACHMAN: That's important. But you could wake up every day and ask yourself is this meeting I'm taking driving me toward that goal of that net worth towards a million or is it not and eventually what you are going to figure out is a lot of the times, we all optimize. You have to optimize because there's going to be a lot of meetings and things that you have done and do that you think were going to result in monetary value for you that really didn't. And then there are going to be other ones that you look back on and you're like that one thing made my entire year. That one thing was like 95 percent of the money I made this year. You are going to say why not just do everything like that one thing.

JAIME TARDY: I totally have to ask another question. How do we know though, because relationships are everything and like you said, you drove in a Ferrari, met some guy, you never know if that's going to necessarily turn into something. How can we really know what our opportunities?

ANDREW BACHMAN: You do though because remember what I said about building a platform. If you don't have a plan going in, you know when you hear people say like oh I worked so hard, when is something going to happen for me this and that? It's not because you need to, even the people I know who were bottle waitresses at nightclubs that took a casting call and got on a TV show and now are popular and can get paid by places for $5,000 to show up and do signings or this and that, at least they took that casting call and they said what's my return on my time?

Should I sleep in today or should I go to this casting call which will lead to me getting on TV which will lead to people wanting to meet me and know about me and they'll actually be willing to pay for that. Okay, get it. I mean just like meeting people and they're like well I'm trying to do this, blah-blah. What the hell does that mean? You got to be confidant. You've got to build yourself a platform and define what success means to you and then you can monetize it.

JAIME TARDY: I love it. Thank you so much for letting me come to your home and actually interview you. I really appreciate it. We're in Boston, Massachusetts right now. Check out Andrew Bachman, well actually give us your website and all that fun stuff.

ANDREW BACHMAN: I have a blog that I don't really monetize. I just like to hear myself talk and sometimes I post cool videos at AndrewBachman.TV. It has been awhile.

JAIME TARDY: You have really cool videos.

ANDREW BACHMAN: My hedge fund, for any of the other millionaires out there listening…

JAIME TARDY: There's a lot of those.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Is greenbloodcapital.com. We're a long/short hedge fund strategy and I've got some other stuff I'm in the works on that that I don't need to plug yet but we will chat over time.

JAIME TARDY: So I'll have you back on the show and you can tell us all about it. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

ANDREW BACHMAN: Thank you.

Just to note, you can download the top ten tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

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