I made it through adolescence without killing myself in a car I flunked out of college I learned to play the guitar I lived on the beach lived in the French Quarter finally got laid and didn't go to Vietnam I got back into school started a band got a job on Bourbon Street graduated from college broke up
my band and went out on the road solo I signed a record deal got married moved to Nashville had my guitar stolen bought a Mercedes worked at billboard magazine put out my first album and went broke wrecked the Mercedes got divorced and moved to Key West I sang and worked on a
fishing boat went totally crazy did a lot of dope met the right girl made another record had a hit bought a boat and sailed away to the Caribbean I started another band worked the road had my second and last hit bought a house in Aspen started spending summers in New England got married broke my leg three
times in one year had a baby girl made more records bought a bigger boat and sailed away to St Barts I got separated from the girl sold the boat sold the house and Aspen moved back to Key West worked the road and made more records I rented an apartment in Paris went to
Brazil for Carnival learned to fly went into therapy quit doing dope bought my first SE plane flew all over the Caribbean almost got a second divorce moved to Malibu for more therapy and got back with the right girl I worked the road moved back to Nashville took off in
an F-14 from an aircraft carrier bought a summer home on L Island and had another baby girl I found the perfect sea plane and moved back to Florida my son joined me in the house of women I built a home on Long Island crashed the perfect sea plane in anet lived through it thanks to Navy training tried to slow
down a little woke up one morning and I was looking at 50 trying to figure out what comes next that was an excerpt from Jimmy Buffett's autobiography a pirate looks at 50 that is not the book that I'm going to talk to you about today although I did read it to prepare for
this podcast 99% of the stuff I'm going to talk to you about today actually comes from a biography of Jimmy Buffett called Jimmy Buffett a good life all away and that book was written by Ryan White and the subtitle a good life all the way is actually a quote from jimy Buffett when he was older describing his
life up until that point and so Jimmy passed away a few weeks ago and I think now is the perfect time to do an episode on his amazing life and career there's a great line later on in the book when they were talking about the fact you know Jimmy wasn't a mainstream artist didn't have a ton of like top you know
top 10 or top 100 hits and somebody said if you looked at his career compared to other people that had similar like a similar record he should be going on and performing at 300 p.m. in the middle of a state fair and yet that is not at all the outcome that he had Jimmy had a
50-year career he built a billion Fortune he made personally 30 to $70 million a year he was respected by his peers loved by his family and had millions of fans so the biography I'm holding in my hand tells the story of how that happened before I get into this book I want to read one more passage
from from his autobiography which I absolutely loved and he was asked what are you going to do with your life and this was his answer live a pretty interesting one I have been called a lot of things in these 50 years on Earth but the thing I believe I am the most is
lucky I have always looked at Life as a voyage mostly wonderful sometimes frightening in my family and friends I have discovered treasure more valuable than gold I have seen and done things that I read about as a kid I have dodged many storms and bounced across the
bottom on occasion but so far Lady Luck and the stars by which I steer have kept me off the Rocks I have paid attention when I had to and I've made more right decisions than wrong ones to end up at this moment with a thousand ports of call behind me and I hope a thousand more to see my Voyage was never a
well-conceived plan nor will it ever be I have made it up as I went along so I want to start with his father he has he's going to have a rather tumultuous relationship with his dad uh actually are strange for quite a while and I think Jimmy wasn't in it wasn't until Jimmy was in his 30s that he
actually reconciled with his father and I think you could trace Jimmy's desire to live an interesting life and to have treat life like an adventure to his grandfather because that's exactly what his grandfather did Jimmy Buffett wasn't the first Buffett to set out for adventure that would have been his
grandfather the former sea captain his grandfather ran oil and ammunition to Europe during World War I he had hustled oil to Japan for the Standard Oil company and he had been a seal hunter in the Indian Ocean his grandfather spent a lot of his life exploring the the World
by sea Jimmy would do some of that later in life as well and it said life would loosen up when his grandfather was gone and tidy up when he returned he was the moon controlling the tides to his grandkids he was the key to the universe everybody around Jimmy lived a conventional existence besides his
grandfather and his grandfather changes the course of his life not only by his example but in one of these conversations so it says on one day the captain pulled out a nautical chart and led his Grand son to the pier where are we he said Jimmy responded Jimmy's a little kid when this is happening we're
on the crab Pier look again the captain said pointing to the Chart slowly his point came into Focus they were at the beginning of everything from where they stood from that point the only thing standing between Jimmy and the world would be a lack of imagination or an
overabundance of caution at the bottom of the map Captain Buffett had written two words start here all he had to do was leap and the world would be his and this is such an important point to think about because the captain is giving the advice to his grandson the advice that he took himself
in his life he was born in Nova Scotia he came from a long line of coal miners he was expected to be a coal miner when he was younger instead he jumped out of a window ran away and chased after a life on the sea and so much later in life Jimmy had reconciled with his father his father father as Alzheimer's
and they go back to Nova Scotia shortly before he dies and they just want to see like where their whole family started and I think what Jimmy's father says here about his own father Jimmy's grandfather is very important to think about how the the decisions that you and I make today will can resonate through
the generations and so Jimmy's asking his dad what' you think of this day we went and saw where the captain had grown up where all his family is from and his dad said well I'm just glad that he jumped out that window or we would have all been goddamn coal miners and so when
I read that I thought of the powerful effect that the decisions of Captain Buffett had on not only his son but his grandson but I also thought it was interesting because now Jimmy's dad is a much older man he sees that his son is very successful the the source of conflict in their relationship in that
fatherson relationship was the fact that Jimmy's dad lived a conventional existence he wanted his son to do the same and Jimmy rebelled he's like no I don't I want a life full of Adventure so he runs away and decides hey I want to be a musician I am willing to take a
risk I will play on Street corners for tips which he does for a long time so I want to jump into the late 1960s Jimmy is in his early to mid 20s and what is fascinating is when you read a lot of these biographies you realize that there is some sort of innate talent that is usually revealed early so nobody knows
who Jimmy Buffett is now doesn't have a record deal is playing in you know bars and pizza joints and and on the street but he's starting to at this time the center of the music Universe especially for the the music that he thought he was going to play was in Nashville and so
he's going to these meetings and and people would notice the same thing they said the first thing I noticed when Jimmy walked in the room was that Persona the Jimmy Persona he wasn't yet the Caribbean Cowboy but he had a glow there was a presence to him remember that point for later because it's really
important to understanding the success that Jimmy has later in life you could think of him as a musician really what I think of him as a is a performer and an entrepreneur and I think that'll be obvious by the time we get to the end of the story but I think it's important to
stop and really think about the risk he was taking he said like once he discovered his guitar there's no way that he was going to have a conventional uh existence he actually talks about that multiple times like I had to go in an opposite direction I wanted to be a
Bohemian I wanted to be free I wanted to be unfettered in fact one of his Heroes is Mark Twain there's a lot of Mark Twain in Jimmy Buffett this was top of mine because I just did an episode on Mark Twain that was episode 312 if you haven't listened to it but the other person that young
Jimmy Buffett reminded me of is actually surprisingly uh Arnold schwarzeneger has this great line in his biography the one the biography that uh he wrote when he was in his 70s called Total Recall and in that book he says there was nothing normal about me my drive was not normal
my vision of where I wanted to go in life was not normal the whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me that line especially the whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me applies to Jimmy Buffett as well and so to try to make it as a musician Buffett
starts to give himself a different kind of education he's willing to perform anywhere that will take him he performs in pizza joints he performs on street corners he'll perform in bars and so it says New Orleans was school he studied the way musicians work the crowds he
would set up on street corners and work for tips and so this is a great description of what's Happening Buffett was smart enough to see a street corner and a Bourbon Street Bar as but another departure point with as much potential as the old crab Pier start there and so it's by taking every single job that's
offered to him that he actually gets a his first permanent gig he gets a permanent gig at a bar in the corner of a hotel that bar is called the Admiral's Corner this is very important because you can think about the life and career of Jimmy Buffett just like you could
think of the life and career of his good friend Warren Buffett their lives are illustrations in the power of compounding and so this is the first time in his career he able to stay in one spot and start developing a dedicated audience starts small every day gets a a little bigger and a little
bigger and a little bigger remember there's 50 years ahead of Buffett most of his success and most of his money is going to be made 30 35 years from now just like if you ever look at the the the net worth of Warren Buffett by age something like 99% of it or something
like that comes after the age of 50 and so while he's working at this permanent gig he's also going back and forth to Nashville to try to get a record deal try to make as much music as possible try to become known Nashville is the center of what he he believes at this time is the center of the music world
it's where he has to be if he's going to succeed he's going to accidentally realize that's not the case cuz he doesn't succeed at all in Nashville and he flees to Key West and that's where he finds his sound he really defines his own genre and becomes in turn completely
differentiated from anything else that was around we're not there yet he's in Nashville he has to get a real job at billboard magazine because he can't pay his bills the side effect of this job though is not just a paycheck it helps him build a lot of relationships inside the music industry and it helps him
School to the game at the exact same time so he says I had to get a real job billboard magazine said they needed a writer so Buffett starts covering the news like every day some there's a new artist that's being broken in Nashville he writes about them he will also write
music reviews of albums and shows and things like that but the most important thing this job did was that it opened a number of doors he winds up meeting people the music Executives he winds up people working at the studios he winds up work meeting people that work at publishing houses he winds up developing
friendships with people that work at billboard that actually teach teach him the music business one guy was Bill Williams Bill Williams was the editor of billboards Nashville headquarters and this is what he taught Buffett he knew the town and the business that turned its gears a hit song was nice but owning
the publishing on a hit song was even better so they would hang out they would drink at the end of the day and Bill is just sitting there schooling a young Jimmy Buffett to the game and so this is the first time in the book that this is mentioned but it's mentioned over and
over again it's the fact that artists are disposable commodity there's always another kid coming to town who can sing you've got to handle the business end of the music business you cannot think of yourself as just an artist as just a musician you will get taken advantage of
talks about you know yeah you you have a hit song but the guy that owned the publishing is making all the money and Buffett is going to take these lessons and put them to use maybe better than almost any other musician in history like there's been what hundreds maybe tens of thousands of musicians how many
of them are billionaires how many of them buildt businesses bigger than their music you're talking what 10 15 the number is less than 20 and Buffett is one of them and when I'm reading this part this part reminded me I did a episode on Jay-Z's autobiography which is absolutely excellent uh the book is
absolutely absolutely excellent It's episode 238 if you haven't listened to it but there's a time where Jay-Z's in his early 20s this is reminding me of the the the lesson that Buffett that Jimmy Buffett's getting his early 20s Jay-Z's in his early 20s when he reads this book called The Hitman and the
Hitman is essentially a history of the music industry about how artists get taken advantage of by Executives and the people that actually control and own all the valuable assets and so Jay-Z in his 20s is just like Jimmy Buffett in his 20s was like okay I'm going to learn
this and I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen to me and the interesting thing is if you fast forward 30 or 40 years into both of their careers they both apply these lessons to the point where they both built multiple billion dollar fortunes where their stories depart is Jay-Z's first album was a
success Reasonable Doubt is still considered a classic to this day Jimmy Buffett had you know a decade and a half two decades of struggle so he's in Nashville he gets his first record deal he's putting out songs he's putting out music nobody is knocking on the door
Nashville is not interested in Jimmy Buffett's sound and so you'll see a bunch of sentences spread out through the book describing this time in his life and I'll say something like the album didn't do anything nothing happened he was completely stiffed Jimmy Buffett got turned down by every single
label and the bad times were not just in his career he got married young it was a very hard time they were young it was very hard on them because they had no money and nothing was going well and so he winds up at the same time he's failing professionally right he winds up getting divorced and so it's just year
after year of struggle and rejection so he's like all right I got to get out of here he said he hated Nashville he's like I I need a change of place I think I need a change of place and so he goes where can I go he goes to the furthest place he can think of and he goes to Key
West and so there's two things that came to my mind when I was reading this part of the story the first thing that came to my mind was that excellent excellent quote by Steve Jobs he says you cannot connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards in
life so you have to trust TR that the dots will somehow connect in your future you have to trust in something and the thing that Jimmy is trusting in is himself his instincts his intuition he does not yet know this is going to be the most important decision he ever makes because he's the first person that
is able to actually package up and sell this Key West Lifestyle the second thing that came to mind is this Maxim that has been on my mind a lot and that is obvious in hindsight now that I've read 330 or however many books I'm on when it comes to the life of an entrepreneur
you're experience is likely to be very similar to Jimmy Buffett's experience up until this point where everybody's saying Jimmy we don't like what you're doing there's no market for that we're not going to sign you we're not going to help you in any way and so the maximum
is is that you should believe that your opinion on what you're working on right your opinion is greater than the opinion of everybody else around you Jimmy Buffett believed in himself and his music and I'm going to use the parallel that that keeps popping up my mind as
well Jay-Z did too everybody else would not sign Jay-Z he went to other record labels they wouldn't sign him you know what he did instead he started his own his first album is on a record label that he founded that is him telling you by his actions my opinion of what I'm doing is more important and is greater
than the opinions of every single other person that turned me down the decision that Jimmy makes here is not obvious it's it may be obvious in hindsight I'm going to describe what Key West was like in the 70s when he's there okay so it says Key West was and is for dreamers
schemers and contradictions it is hot and the heat breathes its own sweet lunacy so the kind of he's like in a a city or like a town of Misfits right there's writers there's artists there's outcasts everybody's doing drugs there's a bunch of people down there during this time and before and after Buffett goes
down there rents an apartment for $150 a month at this point in Key West now if you wanted something Ocean Front Key West you know you're paying millions of dollars he was paying $150 a month for $150 or $200 a month you could actually get an apartment on the ocean this is a
different Key West than than what it's like today and then what does he do he goes to the local bar and he's like hey can I just play for your customers and you could pay me in tips and alcohol and they say yes this book is full of stories these are wild men in a wild place during wild times so the bar he's
playing at it's like the the bar everybody goes to now this is the kind of place that Key West is think about the city that you live in right this is what the city that he's living at the time Key West was run out of that bar in those days the mayor was there the
police chief was there the fire chief the City attorney and the state attorney you could get arrested bonded tried and get a building permit all in the bar this is the beginning of this party lifestyle that Jimmy packages up and sells he sells like a more moderate version of this I mean there's insane
stories about this like this guy's walking around the bar he has an aspirin bottle he took out all the pills and filled it up with cocaine and put a straw in it there's a line later on describing all the citizens of Key West at the time they said they were dedicated to two Pursuits inebriation
and fornication there's a story in the book where somebody Spikes all the alcohol with LSD so everybody's drunk and then tripping on acid and so at the end of the night one of Jimmy Buffett's friends goes out to the sheriff's car and the sheriff hands the keys to Jimmy's friend and says hey you have to
drive he's like why am I we're both like drunk and and high on acid why am I driving he's like well because I can get you out of trouble but you can't get me out of trouble and at the end of the story there's a great line it says if you want to know what Key West was like
back then there you go and so Key West at this time is the opposite of Nashville it's isolated it's cut off it's the last place on Earth you're going to move to if you want to make it as a southern or maybe country musician but it's because of that decision and in part because of the isolation that makes
Jimmy so valuable Jimmy understood at a very young age that you should not try to be the best you should try to be the only Jimmy stood out in Key West in a way that he would not have in a big city had he left ntion for New York or Los Angeles he would have been just another
folk singer but Key West didn't have a Jimmy Buffett and Key West gave Buffett a canvas that no other songwriter had and so one of the main criticisms of Jimmy Buffett at the early stage of his career and really people didn't stop saying it for you know two decades into his career to then people realize oh my
God he's got this massive following is the fact that what are you you have no genre you don't s you're not a folk singer you're not doing rock and roll you're not doing country decades Before Peter tal said in 0 to1 that if you want to create and capture lasting value
don't build an undifferentiated commodity business Jimmy was doing that through his actions through his instincts to his intuition he was very self-aware and so what's happening now is he's building up this small but loyal following in Key West and he's still taking every single job he can get
anywhere in the country and so the note I left myself was as I'm going over this section it's like oh this guy's got infinite Runway so what do I mean by that in addition to reading two books to get ready for this podcast I watched a documentary took notes on the documentary read a ton of articles
trying to figure out cuz this guy's got a massive business they did $2.2 billion in sales in 2022 that doesn't include hundreds of other licensing agreements it doesn't include his $400 million alcohol business this guy built a money printing machine but it didn't start
like that he says like when he he started getting paid when he was back in New Orleans he was getting paid $150 a week as a headliner in a bar and he's like that's it there I'm at the top of Show Business there is nothing better than than this and so he's living in a
100 now he's in Key West he's living in $150 a month apartment doesn't have to spend a lot of money and because his costs are so low and he's happy he's just like listen I just don't want a conventional existence I just want to play music and I want to entertain people he's now got infinite Runway and
so his costs are low he's got infinite Runway and now he could just all he's dedicated to is practice practice practice that's another main uh theme of this book Buffett Jimmy Buffett wanted reps reps reps reps he understood that's how you get good at anything and so when
he's not in Key West he's in Atlanta he's in Chicago he's in New Orleans he's in buuy he's playing colleges he's playing bars he's traveling All Over Texas he's playing Dallas Houston Austin to get to these gigs he was willing to drive take a train or fly and here's a great line in there he needed to play
Live he needed to hit the road he needed to perform there's no substitute for experience and there's only one way to get it and he's running his entire business out of the bar in Key West he doesn't have a phone so this guy that's booking him said this is the time before fax machines this is before email
Buffett didn't even have a phone of his own so the guy that's booking him would call the chart room which is the bar that he's working on and he says that's where we did business I'd leave word for Buffett to call me back from there Jimmy had a fierce work ethic he had a fierce
work ethic when he was in his 20s he had a fierce work ethic when he was in his 60s and his 70s he talked about the documentary he was interviewed with the documentary is watching he yeah I'm definitely a workolic and so one thing that he's working on at this time the
way to get successful there was a path right in the music business to get successful that path was through radio radio refuses to play Jimmy's trying to get on the radio over and over again they refuse to play him and radio is what's influencing record Executives they influence not only what people
listen to so the consumers but also the executives in the music industry this is really important it says radio was what record Executives knew to establish an artist to build a fan base and sell records you had to get AirPlay different was a risk risk was a hard sell Buffett
wasn't like any other artist at the time and so along the way there's a bunch of people that meet Jimmy and have a fear there would be individuals multiple individuals that had a deep belief that he was going to be successful this one guy that's trying to help him at this point is this guy named Don light and
he's describing what's taking place and why Jimmy even though he's can he's starting to build a following on the road why can't he get any radio Play Why can't record Executives like why don't they want to sign them why don't they want to put resources behind them and so
he says record uh labels look to the past and what had worked light was pretty sure that he was watching the future take shape kids were sitting in front of Buffett meaning the crowd in increasing numbers the receipts from these concerts were adding up and so light's point was if you were a record
executive right he says they weren't off base on that that Jimmy was different Jimmy was new and that that new and different is a risk and a hard sale sale they weren't off base but they were wrong just the same this is such an important part of the story in that documentary Jimmy was talking about this
time in his life he goes it is ironic that it was never categorizable that's what they would tell him it is ironic that it was never categor iable and now I'm a category I wasn't categorizable now I'm a category the idea behind that statement is why he was able to build
such a valuable business and so when I got to this part of the story it made me think of Bob Dylan's autobiography that I did all the way back on episode 259 cuz Bob was talking about this and he was talking about the people were asking him because his sound was just so
different and so odd and so it says hey he was asked like who do you see yourself like in today's music scene and this is what Bob Dylan said before he was famous before he was successful I told him nobody I really didn't see myself like anybody what really set me apart in those days was my repertoire it
was more formidable than the rest of the players there were a lot of better musicians around but there wasn't anybody close in nature to what I was doing don't try to be the best try to be the only in that documentary Jimmy's very self-aware he says listen I'm an adequate musician and I'm a fair singer
but he's a great performer and a world class entrepreneur and those kind of people cannot work with in a system they have to create their own here's a great line on why Nashville was not right for Jimmy Buffett and why every time he went there he got rejected no one's ever
eager to fix a cash machine that isn't broken go back to episode 300 James Dyson still my favorite book against the odds and autobiography by James Dyson is still my favorite book out of every single book that I've ever read for this podcast what was James's mistake oh
great James you invented the world's first cyclonic vacuum who did you try to sell it to you tried to sell it to a company that made $500 million a year selling vacuum bags you eliminated the bags of course they're not going to buy it because no one's ever eager to fix a cast machine
that isn't broken and so James just like Jimmy had to find their own way in and the F the way you find your own way in is you do it yourself this metaphor I'm about to read to you this metaphor is a is the way to think about Jimmy and his approach to his career it is written about a poet
and a painter named Kenneth paten I am going to read it to you taking out Kenneth's words or Kenneth's name and putting in Jimmy's and it's perfect it fits perfectly so this is my version of the story that I think will illustrate the point I'm trying to make to you Buffett was accomplished if not exactly
appreciated many critics found Buffett naive and romantic even the most generous praise was usually grudgingly as if Buffett had somehow won his place through sheer wrongheaded persistence sure of who he was and what he was doing he kept at the job of being Jimmy Buffett until people came around or
didn't he didn't worry about it and so what is Jimm's response to being told no by the industry being told no you're not categorizable we're not putting any marketing dollars behind you we're not putting on the radio well his response to this sounds a lot like if you listen
to the episode 314 Paul Graham how to do great work I love this Paul Graham says something that grows exponentially be can become so valuable that it is worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started the Jimmy Buffett version of that idea sounds like this he made up his songs when nobody was looking and
played them from anyone who would listen in coffee shops student unions and listening rooms and so even when he was a young man he had this Relentless self-belief in himself and his work and he was trying to make a product that only Jimmy Buffett could make and so he releases
this album and so he has a song on there called why don't we get drunk this is his first what we would call like a hit like a middling hit but at this time it was the biggest song that they ever had and what was fascinating is people around him were trying to change the
lyrics of the song because why don't we get drunk if you leave it there that's GNA that'll play on country radio Nashville will play that but he adds in the lyrics it's why don't we get drunk and screw remember Jim jmy is living in Key West they are dedicated to the twin gods of inebriation and fornication and
so he's writing his lyrics about how he's living his life at this time and so people around him would say hey you got to take those words out of there this could destroy your career and Buffett said why I don't even have a career yet how could it destroy it this could make it and so the entire album It's called a
white sport coat and a pink crustation is like that and this is what it says this album was the first Jimmy Buffett record that only Jimmy Buffett could make it wasn't FK or country or rock and it wasn't trying to satisfy anyone but Jimmy Buffett and so Jimmy is working with Don
light they share the same philosophy and the philosophy is that anything that rises above the Meer is a success anything that draws attention to itself and continues on without some sort of great Preposterous hype cycle involved is a success and that's what Jimmy's
music started doing there was no Niche there was no genre that you could put him in in fact he created his own genre it's called trop Rock tropical Rock and so Jimmy just keeps on doing what he was doing he tries to get as many reps as possible he winds up making like eight or nine albums like in the
first like 10 years of his career I think he winds up publishing over like 30 albums in his lifetime so he grabs his guitar and he goes back on the road and will play literally any any place that will have him and then he starts doing something that is very fascinating and they talk about this in
documentaries you can see it on YouTube as well he doesn't just play songs he will play a song and then he'll just talk directly to the audience sometimes he'll talk for 12 minutes and then play another song then he'll play a few songs then he might talk for 20 or 30 minutes
this guy's like a again think of him more as a performer not a musician and what you realize is like wait a minute these people aren't there just for the music they're there for him and this idea that Jimmy was just communicating directly to his audience is really
important because it's repeated over and over again says stuff like hey this guy could talk and people loved him for it he was quick another description on stage Buffett was part bar stool philosopher and everybody's stoned best friend he was a run-on sentence punctuated by an occasional song and he
was busy he would find himself far away from Key West for longer periods of time Buffett had onstage wanderings and extended monologues people like those they paid to hear him talk as much as sing again they're not just buying music they're there for him and anything that
he does he had no idea it's going to take like 15 years maybe 10 or 15 years from where we're in the story so he actually turns that into a business and that's what allows him the business supports the music if he just did music he would have never been able to survive he just doesn't know that yet now this
is hilarious so that song that first hit right why don't we get drunk it winds up being a massive hit inside of bars so a huge Revenue stream of bars at this time were Juke boxes right you go up you pay 50 cents a dollar you get to choose what everybody else in the bar is listening
to so he winds up and I didn't even know this was an entire industry and they actually tracked how many sales so in 1973 he sold on Juke boxes 50,000 copies of that song why don't we get drunk and so he's like oh my God I'm going to be rich I'm going to take this money from the song and I'm going to buy a boat and
the reason that didn't happen is because at this time the mafia controlled the Juke boxes and they would never pay out a dime a young Jimmy Buffett gets stiffed by the mafia this is also a lesson he learns later on okay I need to control my own distribution and so what is Jimmy's response to the fact that
he's got a song that a lot of people are requesting a lot of are playing well it says there be no slowing down Jimmy Buffett played a concert at noon on a Monday in a student union Center on the campus of Purdue the admission was free that is not a gig you play for fame you
play because it's your job he would play any gig anywhere that would have him and so at this point that is repeated over and over again this is the note I left myself on this page describing Jimmy Blue Collar work ethic learning machine loves it won't quit again people that
have a blue color work ethic learning machines love what they do and won't quit are so hard to beat and so now that he's been at it for almost a decade we start to see the very beginning of this compounding of his customer base and it's spread through word of mouth again he's not going to
sell music he's going to sell live music and that is a much more durable business so it says the audience was singing words to every song and they didn't hear those songs on the radio they knew those songs because maybe they bought a record or a friend had bought a record and then
it played it for him they knew those songs because they caught a show then caught Buffett again the next time he was to town and brought more friends this will be the key to everything else that comes after okay so years ago I used to read this blog all the time called priceonomics and I like they
would repackage their blog posts into books and I remember one thing I didn't know I had never heard of this this group called The Fish and I was shocked that how much money they were making and so I went and read from this blog post called The Business of fish and so fish is mentioned in the book there's
actually a similarities in between the way they built their business and the way Jimmy built his business and so this article is several years old but it says over the past four years the rock band fish has generated over $120 million in ticket sales they are one of the most
lucrative touring acts in America and have generated well over a quar billion dollars yet by other measures the band isn't popular at all only one of their original albums has ever made the Billboard Top 10 rankings none of their 883 songs has ever become a popular hit
on the radio are you starting to see the parallel if the traditional band business model is to generate hype through media and radio AirPlay and then monetize that hype through album sales and tours fish doesn't fit that model at all their album sales are minuscule and their radio AirPlay is nonexistent that
is exactly the same for Jimmy Buffett fish doesn't make money by selling music they make money by selling live music and that it turns out is a much more durable business model this wasn't some brilliant pre-calculated strategy by the band or its managers it's the business model
that sprung forth from the kind of music the band makes the band developed the kernel of this musical style during their first five years when they played almost exclusively in bars slowly and organically they grew Their audience the same for Buffett another thing that's the same as Buffett
is this sentence during this period they maniacally focus on improving the quality of their music through intense practice and frequent gigs at first these gigs were relatively unsuccessful over time Their audience grew they were profitable before anyone in the music industry knew who the hell
they were we haven't even got to that part of the story but that's exactly what's going to happen to Buffett's career too and with profitability came the freedom to make music on their terms Jimmy made music on his terms he lived life on his terms and he built businesses on his
terms and so let's go back to his Fierce work ethic one of my favorite lines from the essay I mentioned earlier by Paul Graham on to do great work is being prolific is underrated Jimmy Buffett was definitely prolific in a little more than a year and a half Jimmy Buffett had
recorded I'm just going to count them one two three three full albums and then a soundtrack for a movie he played every Coffee House beer joint and student assembly room from Boston to the keys to San Francisco and back he continued to work Nashville whether Nashville liked it or not he could make a living in
Texas he had a beat up truck a nice little boat and a min minor hit he grown his onean band into two he had his wit and his charm and went right back to work and so in addition to being a workoholic at this point in his career he's also a control freak Jimmy did everything Buffett didn't think that the
art Department could present his music better than he could he didn't think that someone else should write the line notes on his album he had a case File full of evidence that record companies didn't get him and couldn't figure him out listen to what he says so he's
reflecting on this time of his life he's saying this 2015 he says at that point in his life and his career there was nobody out there but you and so multiple decades later he's defending himself he says against charges of narcissism yes I'm a confirmed narcissist because there
was nobody back there who gave a [ __ ] at the time you were on your own and you better be good he was the most take control artist that have ever been around and so when I got to this section I've said this before but if I had to distill every single thing down to one sentence right what have I learned so
far in the years 300 something books all these episodes about the kind of mentality that these Founders had and I would say you need to combine the work ethic of Kobe Bryant with the self-belief of Kanye West Jimmy Buffett had an intense work ethic but just as important was his Relentless self-belief
and I think this point is so important to internalize this self-belief acts as fuel everybody around him at this point is saying Jimmy don't do what you're trying to do Jimmy don't chase your dream what's wrong with you no we won't sign you know we won't play you on the
radio and Jimmy saying that belief was my fuel what you call narcissism I needed because there was nobody back then who gave a [ __ ] at the time you were on your own and you had better be good and so the reason I point this out is because this is happening to Jimmy in the 60s and 70s it it happened way
before that it happened to Henry Ford in the 1919s it will happen to people today one of my favorite lines or one of my favorite songs about this is actually by Kanye this is why he popped in my mind and on his first album he has a song called last call it's 12 minutes long
and it tells the story of him trying to achieve the dream that he had just successfully achieved with the completion of his first album The parallels between Kanye's own story and Jimmy is spooky listen to what he says some say he's arrogant he's talking about himself okay some say he's
arrogant can y'all blame him it was straight embarrassing how y'all played him last year shoing my demo I was trying to shine every [ __ ] told me that I couldn't rhyme I want to pause there some say he's they're saying the exact same thing about Jimmy right it was embarrassing how you guys treated me
Jimmy was embarrassed over and over again by record Executives By Radio people by everybody in Nashville Kanye was shopping his demo meaning his demo tape Jimmy was trying to play his songs they were both after the same thing and everybody around them they use different
language obviously but everybody around them saying nope you're not good enough but here is the difference and this is what Jimmy Buffett Kanye West and all these entrepreneurs that you and I talk about have in common they have this Relentless self-belief belief comes before ability now I could let these
dream Killers kill my self-esteem or use my arrogance as the steam to power my dreams I use it as my gas so they say that I'm Gast but without it I'd be last so I ought to laugh he continues I don't listen to the suits behind the desk no more that's Kanye what is Jimmy saying
I'm not listening to you you don't get to Define what I work on you don't get to Define if I succeed or not and you could tell Jimmy believe that through his because everybody's telling him no and what he do the guy refuses to stop oh you want me cool I'll go play this free gig in a student union at Purdue at
12 o'clock on a Monday and the similarities between Kanye and Jimmy Buffett continue so listen I don't I don't listen to the people to the suits behind the desk anymore right you can't say [ __ ] to me anymore because I just rocked 20,000 people I was just on tour what is happening in Kanye's career
right he didn't even have a record deal at this point he's going on tour with Tab quali and all these other rappers and he's playing shows for 20,000 people at the same time nobody wants to give him a record deal and so Jimmy's agent and manager is seeing the same thing
he's like I go to the Jimmy shows all these people they're growing the receipts uh the ticket receipts are are increasing and yet I go to the same record Executives and the same industry veterans in Nashville and they say nope nope nope what are you going to believe and you and I know the answer that
question you always believe the customers there is demand for what Jimmy Buffett is making and the executive are too slow and by the time they realize it it's too late and so slowly but surely Jimmy is finding a new way to make it in the music business another thing that I
haven't talked about yet but he was obsessed with cost efficiency I referenced this as an infinite Runway earlier but he talked about this he's talking about it now we're still in like let's say the late 70s early 80s at this point and he talked about it when he was a much older man when he was like 5060
years old and at that point he had been traveling they called it a uh they said Jimmy Buff had been moving his traveling Carnival show Across America for more than 30 years and he takes pride in doing it economically and efficiently he was doing that day one and he was still
doing that same approach 30 years later he watched his costs and so they're coming to understand that chart performance and radio play alone will not Define his success and because that his costs remain manageable and he didn't have to sell that many records to
make money and his record label was not spending much money and promoting him that he was actually turning a profit in other words he was building a successful business music was just happened to be the first product the first of maybe hundreds we talk get to I I've tried to collect all the different
things that he produced under the margarita brand and all the licenses Margaritaville brand and the licenses he had like I can't even you can't even find them all in one place it's incredible but music more specifically live music was the first product and when you hear this description of this
live show right his first product I think they said he made over his career I think the number I pulled from like 2021 he had made over $800 million from his tour this is the beginning of it says he pretty much stayed on the road jamming more hours and miles into each day than the laws of
time and space would seem to allow he had proven himself capable of writing and recording uh music putting together a band and keeping that band on the road and getting it on stage each night no matter what everybody working for him and everybody around him calls him the
benevolent dictator that is the name that he gave himself and that's how he approached his business he liked being in charge and he liked being detail oriented he is a benevolent dictator that's what he calls himself and you can tell right from the jump that he's smart he keeps the main thing the main thing
this is so smart the ground rules as he explained to everybody around him was simple I don't give a [ __ ] what happens 22 and 1/2 hours of the day the only thing that matters is the 90 minutes that we're on stage if you had a shitty day or if you're just dragging ass I
don't want to hear about it don't complain what matters is the 90 0 minutes on stage the main kept the main thing the main thing if we take care of this 90 minutes every night that we're on stage and we do that for a long time we'll get every single other thing that we want out of life the 90 minutes on
stage every night is what made Jimmy Buffett tick and so it's because he stumbled onto this business model it's because he watched his cost it's because he was maniacal about practicing and making his live show better and making a profit even though it was a small Prophet right
but that profet gave him an infinite Runway and it what that achieved is another maximum from the history of Entrepreneurship stay in the game long enough to get lucky he is about to do that this is the creation of Margaritaville the song what will become the Cornerstone of his Billion Dollar
Empire in his notebook was a song Buffett began writing in Austin after drinking away an afternoon in a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall he was with his friend and they had a few hours to kill before a flight and so they had some margar I started it and then I get off the
plane in Miami and I drive on the oversea highway to Key West and on the 7mile bridge there was a traffic accident and I sat there for an hour and a half and I finished the song he decided to call that song Margaritaville and so he takes the song and performs it for his producer this is
why I go back to that maximum that you should believe that your opinion is more important than the opinion of anybody else around you his producer tries to get him to change the title luckily Jimmy did not listen to him so they released the song right and then he's on he's in the Caribbean he's you know when
he's not on tour he's fishing he's drinking he's writing music he's he's practicing his guitar and so unbeknownst to him and it was completely unpredictable to him the radio starts playing margari Ville like that's kind of weird and then it automatically starts getting Steam and it starts
looking like a hit and he's in the Bahamas he's like oh [ __ ] we have to capitalize on this so he says change of plans go get your back go get your ass back on the bus and so he leaves the Bahamas to go back to United States States right to start this tour this is
an an excellent line it was time to tour and he couldn't possibly have imagined as he lifted off from the Bahamas that this tour would never really end and so I mentioned at the beginning the fact that one of the things you have to admire about him is in addition to you know making millions of people happy
with his work building this this great business building weare's family is the fact that he was respected by his peers there all these kind of great stories in the book like this guy's flying over Jamaica he was a pilot too uh he owned a bunch of planes he's like whole like
private Air Force and he's flying the plane himself over Jamaica and uh they mistake he's got Bon Bono from You2 in the plane and they get mistaken for like a drug Smuggler and so the Jamaican government tries to shoot down the plane not knowing that Bono and Jimmy Buffett are the ones on the plane but anyways
something that happens after this hit is the fact that he becomes friends with a lot of people in his industry and so he develops a true friendship with one of the biggest bands in the world at the time which is the Eagles and so they let Jimmy start opening up for him and so
now he goes from playing like you know the student and bars and and these small joints to literally playing stadiums and that's just another form of distribution because it gets them into in front of some of the biggest audiences in the world and so because of his friendship with the Eagles he meets Irving asof he
decides hey I'm going to put my career in this guy's hands this guy may be the best manager or agent that you could possibly have at this point in history they called him this is the description of how they other people would describe Irving asof they said he is the American
dream taken by the balls and so I want to go back to this idea that Jimmy Buffett one of Jimmy Buffett's Heroes is Mark Twain in fact in his autobiography he lists these 12 books like if I'm stranding on a desert island I'm never going to come back these are the 12 books I would take and in there is of
course work by Mark Twain but there's also similarity in the sense that you can think about what's happening in Jimmy Buffett's life right now and his career this is an inflection point there was an inflection point in Mark Twain's world as well where he's in Hawaii he' already written like one viral hit and
there's this Diplomat called Ambassador Berling game and he gave Mark Twain he's much older than Mar Twain Mark Twain's a young man at this point and he gave him some advice that Mark Twain would use for the rest of his life he had 44 years left to live and he would use this
advice that he got from Ambassador Berling game and this was the advice what you need now is refinement of Association seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character refine yourself and your work never affiliate with inferiors always climb Jimmy is doing that Jimmy is climbing he
releases the next album after Margaritaville there's another parallel with Mark Twain They say it specifically so he releases this album it's really about his grandfather right son of a son of a sailor that's describing his grandfather his dad and Jimmy this album
sold big with limited radio play and no hit single and Buffett was selling out shows across the country he's become the marked Twain of southern music and so he's constantly refining who's around him it says Buffett had developed a disinclination to hang around with [ __ ] up people everyone wanted to show
Jimmy what a wild partyer they were because he was so famous for being a partyer and he just hated that Buffett liked a party but he had his stuff together and he wanted to be around other people who did too and so remember when Buffett said yeah I may be a narcissist he also understood something
about himself which I don't actually think is a negative he realized oh I'm addicted to Applause he would go out and and you know go to the Caribbean like take a vacation whatever the case is but then he' immediately's like there was like a yinyang to his life he's like I
have to take a break from the road and then I have to get back to the road because I miss it and he says explicitly listen I have a thing for Applause I'm addicted to Applause Now using the word addicted I am addicted to Applause if your main business is a live traveling show that you're going to do for three
or four decades and you do 30 to 35 shows a year year in and year out not missing any show that addiction is a good thing for his business because that addiction is what keeps him on the road for decades this may that addiction may be the Cornerstone of this Margaritaville Empire and what's
fascinating is all this is happening to him like yeah he's going to have Margarita but Margaritaville is a hit but I think he goes a 37 years something like 37 or 35 years something like that between his next hit which is going to be the song written in 2003 by Allan
Jackson called It's 5 o' somewhere and so what's happening at this stage in his career he's like oh okay my career is not going to be driven by hits at the top of the charts and I'm not going to be driven by Mass Appeal so I have to find another way in and the way he found
in wind up being much more lucrative than if he had pursued what he thought he wanted initially and so now he's in his 30s and he says listen he'd released seven albums in six years and had produced One top 10 Single not one of those albums had gone past number 10 on the album chart radio hadn't been able
to deny Margaritaville but after that it was like radio found the hole in the fence that Buffett crawled through and patched it up fine you put up a fence we'll crawl our way through we'll jump over it we'll dig underneath it we are going to find another way and that other
way is to r preneurship that other way is realizing hey these are not fans this is a brand I am fulfilling a need that I didn't even know existed because I was just filling that need for myself it says the need for a Caribbean poet spinning palm trees and stiff drinks into middle class fantasy was an
accidental Discovery and why did I say that's more lucrative because fashion changes musical taste changes but if you love the person that doesn't I'm going to get there in a minute what this is what I mentioned earlier that Buffett is an entrepreneur for sure his product his
first product just happen to be live music but he's got all these people around him that had experience in the music industry and they keep warning him and other people around him like listen man people that want to be musicians are Diamond D the people that last are the ones that transition from artists to
businessmen they understand they think like a businessman you hear Buffett talk he's clearly talks like an entrepreneur and so he talks about there's this one guy that had like a he was a talent agent he just knew everybody in the business he was very famous in the uh 50
60s '70s and this is his warning he says there there's a couple things that I'm going to pass on to you from my experience you're going to meet a lot of talented young people and a lot of them are going to be one hit wonders and you know why they simply don't have the intellect to deal with becoming a
businessman and so that continues to push Jimmy Buffett down the path that he's already started he's like my business is not hit driven it's not radio it is I'm in a live music business and then he's going to accidentally discover a way to turn the love of that
show that he has into this business Empire which again this is not a fat get-rich quick thing you know this is like he says something I think I mentioned this earlier like he was an over in terms of business he was an overnight success 30 years in the making and so now we're in the 80s and they're
talking about the overall Trends this is so fascinating because mainstream tastes for music genres are going to change right they're going to change by the decade maybe by the year now maybe by the half decade buffet was immune to this because it's not about the music it's not it's about him and so they talk
about you know they went from the age of singer songwriters then they went there was disco and then there was Punk and then there was this thing called Outlaw country and so all these people these oneit wonders are coming and going and Jimmy Buffett is sustaining it says he
built an audience and that audience couldn't have been genre dependent because he didn't have a genre why would a new decade of changing taste change that and a way to think about that is Buffett was the genre make no mistake about it and it is said explicitly in this documentary
watch he is a cult leader you could could mistake him for the leader of some strange tropical cult it is a cult of personality it is built around him not of any not built around any genre of music not built around any changing fad there's very few people very few artists that understood their fans or their
customers as well as Jimmy Buffett does you look at any great business they understand their customer very very well Jimmie just applied that to fans and the audience and so there's many examples where this these fans in this market is pulling the product out of him five
years have passed right so in the last five years since he released margar raville he made five more albums being prolific is underrated five years and as many albums since margar raville Jimmy Buffett was still the man from Margaritaville he signed a deal with Miller beer and recorded a jingle he
records a commercial for Miller beer at the shows the commercial was so popular that they request him to performed the commercial like it's one of his hits how crazy is that and then this is what he says this is what I mean is like there are very few artists who understood
their fans as well as Jimmy Buffett did responding to a requests to sing the commercial Buffett said yeah we'll do the commercial yeah that was the closest thing I've had to a [ __ ] hit in 5 years here you go you ask for it you get it if you listen to your customer base they will pull the next product out of
you he talked about this uh he meets this guy they talk about this in documentary he comes he goes to the same cities over and over again which again that is so important because if you went to the Atlanta show last year you'll go to Atlanta show next year and then as he
ages you went to Atlanta show for 10 years now you're not you know now you're not in your 20s to 30s now now you have a kid now your kid is going with you it is literally generational that's how crazy it is so he'll go through these towns and he goes in the store one day and the guy that owns the store just
happens to say oh you're Jimmy Buffett Come here like I got to give you a big kiss I love you and the guy's like why he goes because every time you come to town you see these Hawaiian shirts that I'm selling he goes I can't keep them in stock they buy every single one and
Jimmy's like oh I guess I should make my own Hawaiian shirts and he starts making uh like Buffett he starts out with Jimmy Buffett merch and he got that idea because he'd go to these towns and people would make like bootleg Jimmy Buffett merch and he's like they're not even spelling my last name correctly
surely I could do better job than that and even though his name was misspelled they couldn't keep the t-shirts in stock the market is pulling the product out of him so the early 80s from let's say 1982 1984 4 1985 almost 15 remember we're almost 15 years into his career Jimmy is now 38 to
40 years old this is when he starts oh wait we can like we're going to do shirts we're going to do a book he had an idea for a movie he's getting paid to promote alcohol realizes well why don't I just do a deal directly with Ane of bush he licenses out the name to this
bar called JB Margaritas Ville or JB's Margaritaville in Alabama they wind up what happens well if you go there what do you think they sell a lot of did they sell a lot of Margaritas yeah of course they do do they sell a lot of t-shirts yeah of course they do that business
actually goes out of business because a bunch of hurricanes hit the GF coast and so then he's like oh wait this this is fascinating like maybe we can run this Playbook the next year so he's talking he's back in Key West this is 1985 and one of his friends who goes by the nickname of sunshine Smith was getting
foreclosed on her house and so Jimmy goes up to her says hey why don't we just put up a t-shirt store put my name on the roof and if it makes money fine and if it doesn't make money fine this is the humble and simple launch of Margarita the business the actual brand right he's
going to wind up working on this for the rest of his life he's got 38 year 38 more years to live uh at this point and so they open a 500q foot t-shirt store and it evolved from there then he goes back to this idea hey I need to have control my own distribution right I got stiff by the mafia and the Juke boxes so
he starts this newsletter this is what time when newsletters were actual physical things that you mail to people but what happens you're mailing this to people now you have their names and their addresses you know where they live that newsletter first published in 1985 it's called the Coconut Telegraph and so
everything he does feeds on everything else the more he tours the more t-shirts he sells the more licensing agreements he has the more people that want him to promote his products and he's going to have his own products and because he's hitting these same cities year after
year after year what is it that allowing to happen compounding to take place the math suggested remember he is now probably 10 years since he's at a hit this doesn't make any sense how is this guy not having any hits and his business is more valuable every year the math
suggested that Buffett's career should be waning instead the crowds were younger they were more enthusiastic and they were bigger this is the point I was making earlier they're there for him not the music Jimmy is Margaritaville Margaritaville is Jimmy the parote heads which is the name of his fans would
stick with Buffett regardless of musical fashion Jimmy Buffett was Margaritaville this is what the talent agent and the manager said azof said only twice in his career had he been involved with what he called World building Margaritaville was World building and so now almost two decades into his
career he's 40 he's like I'm not compromising anymore he made one more run he tried to make like a country like a traditional country album so Nashville playing on the radio a few years ago he's like I don't need to do this no more compromise I never really was a country act when they pitched the whole
thing to me I said I'll give it one last shot at thinking radio means that much and it didn't work anyways so I went back to doing what I wanted to do you know I really didn't think I'd live to be 40 now that I'm here I've decided that they can't tell me to do anything Buffett wouldn't worry about genre he
would f focus on audience and focus on that he did for decades this is crazy 22 years these are exciting times for me I've been doing this for 22 years I'm just a saloon singer who's grown up and I think audiences can relate to this this is about the idea that the audience
aged with him so they were asking him like what's a typical day I write play guitar eat read sing and fish I've noticed hangovers are starting to feel like recovering from surgery and so this is what he mentioned earlier that he drank a lot less and he stopped doing
drugs completely and so he says he hit this one time where he talks about really anybody that's dedicated to their crafts there's something I heard Kobe Bryant say that one time where he was asked by aad Rashad he's like don't you ever aren't you ever worried about letting down the fans and he hit Ahad
Rashad with like the Stanky face he's like and he's like and what he said was fantastic he goes no their expectations will never be higher than my own I love that idea that nobody should have higher expectations than you do for yourself we seen example of this here uh he played
backtack nights at Red Rocks in Colorado and they got so drunk the night before it says he still hadn't recovered by the time they hit the stage I made it through the show he said but I was mad at myself for not giving the crowd its money's worth nobody in the crowd knew but I sure did and so again that's
another form of discipline you know the fact that he might like to party he might like to drink obviously like doing drugs he's like well if this is getting in the way of the quality of my work then that has to be eliminated so by the late 1980s is when they Branch out into
restaurants this is crazy I had no idea they did the revenue that they do for a few years the restaurant in Las the Margaritaville in Las Vegas was the highest grossing restaurant in the United States the Margaritaville outside of Universal Studios in Orlando is one of the highest grossing I think it's the
highest grossing restaurant in Orlando which is obviously I think the has the most visitors the most tourist visitors every year but again it just starts with one it always starts with one now they have ton of restaurants they have hotels they have Resorts they're real estate
developers they have their own cruises they have retirement home communities they have hundreds of uh licenses and uh this is how he's making you know 30 40 depending on the year personal income like his the equity value in the companies is over billion made him a billionaire but the actual income the
cash flow he was getting was crazy 30 million something years 50 million $70 million a year and so he Partners up with this guy Kevin buer who I think is still running Margaritaville now they realize like okay who are we going for he says they aim for a middle class crowd not too exclusive but not too
cheap they wouldn't price anyone out but they would not invite sloppy drunks and so open this first restaurant in 1988 and the very first year that restaurant does over a million dollars in sales and so he picks his Partners very carefully he picks what he's going to do very
carefully and he says I remember supply and demand as the one and only Jimmy Buffett he understood what his fans wanted and controlled the supply and based on his own experience he knew that true success took time that's what's wrong with the world these days nobody wants to put in the time it takes to be
legendary mythology is not fast food and so when Jimmy and his partner looked out at the crowds the millions and millions of people that come to his shows every year they realized oh this isn't just a crowd these aren't just fans this is a brand these are people that already
believe in the Margaritaville ethos they're interested in travel and Leisure and so they start building this restaurant and Hospitality Empire and then other people who are actually fans of Buffett actually help him along the way so Edgar Bruner JR this is the son I
did a podcast on his dad who founded the bramman family Dynasty they they the family owns serums and they branched out into a bunch of different media properties but now this is uh his son many years later actually gets in touch with them and he's like hey can we license Margaritaville and build a
restaurant outside of the Universal Studios park in Orlando and that's where they're like oh my god there could be a very big business in these big box restaurants and so then the casino Mogul in Vegas Steve wi Steve wi happened to be a big Jimmy Buffett fan and so he's
like if you open a Margaritaville in Las Vegas I'll do that deal tomorrow and the size of some of these businesses may surprise you like the first year that restaurant in Orlando did $18 million in sales and so I found an interview that the CEO and Jimmy's long-term partner this guy named John colon gave a few
years ago that describes this so this is this is uh I think this dat is like two years old but they had 33 hotels Resorts and other lodging Concepts 150 restaurants bars and cafes they take an asset light but Hands-On approach so what does that mean Margaritaville Holdings intuitively adopted an asset
like model where it licenses its intellectual property to owners and operators via franchise agreements unlike most other franchisers Margaritaville is Hands-On about things like hiring the design firm that you have to use and even such details as which pillows go on the guest
beds and so on his own slowly and organically he's growing this audience he's growing this business and again we always talk about staying in the game long enough to get lucky because you have no idea like you have future opportunities if you can stay in the game long enough to get lucky there's
going to be future opportunities that are unlocked that you can't possibly predict and one of them is the fact that Alan Jackson this huge country star in the early 2000s really like Jimmy Buffett and so he does this song called It's 5 o'cl somewhere and he invites
Jimmy Buffett to get on the song I think Jimmy's only on the song for like 30 seconds or 40 seconds and this song goes crazy it spends eight weeks in the summer of 2003 at number one it wins a Grammy it wins a country music association award it wins an award of the the academy for Country Music Award
for single of the year and video of the Year this line is hilarious it says three decades After Jimmy Buffett arrived in Nashville from Mobile Alabama he was an overnight country music sensation why is that important because millions and millions and millions of people different new people people that
may not have known who Jimmy Buffett was hear the song There is a Margaritaville ad at the end of the song it talks about hey it's always 5:00 in Margaritaville Buffett said I've been to Margaritaville a few times replied they have a Fong conversation at the end of the song
about Jimmy's business you couldn't pay for advertising like that and so now he has this huge swell of new fans that didn't know him and so what's the difference he what what difference does this make he releases a new album remember he started in 19 end in 1960s this is 2004 he drops this album called
licens to chill and it's his first number one album on Billboard's album chart think about this Buffett's first number one album took him 30 years years to do that explodes his popularity it also explodes his business now the deals are bigger like you're doing a a restaurant that may be doing 20 million
a year in sales for one restaurant you know they have 150 of Motas but now they start building these massive Resorts they build a resort called the margarita Beach Resort it's actually in South Florida it costs 200 million to make 200 million and that's just one property
this explodes his tour business as well between 200 2009 he was the 10th highest grossing act in the country the other people on the list are people like Bruce springing the Rolling Stones You2 and Elton John they start a line of cruises they start selling their licensed
product on the Home Shopping Network they build a hotel and Casino in Oklahoma they have their own line of margarita machines they sell tequila he starts land shark beer he sells bicycles hammocks bedding luggage candles online games dozens of other products and More Than 3 million cases of land shark beer
a year over 50 15 million people a year visit his restaurants his hotels his casinos and his Resorts incredible this is where we'll end he's been doing this all of his life from the earliest days of his career four decades on there's still nobody who understands who Jimmy Buffett is and
what Jimmy Buffett does better than Jimmy Buffett it was the little details about dealing with vendors dealing with promoters dealing with different concert Halls dealing with sound systems and when he got somebody who was good he hung on to them and if they started to
screw up which happened when they were partying too much and they took it for granted he knew he was very detail oriented he just paid attention to [ __ ] by any reliable measure of Pop stardom Buffett shouldn't have had the career he's had Margaritaville was the 14th biggest hit of
1977 he should be going out and playing at 300 p.m. in the middle of a state fair if I ever had to defend myself for my career Buffett said I would only say that the most bitter artist I know are those who had the chance to jump through the hoop and chose not to take it they
stayed on as a coffee house singer but I jumped through not knowing what was on the other side and when I got there I had to deal with it it wasn't happily ever after I was just getting started what an incredible story if you think about where he started and where he ended up that is where I'll leave it
for the full story highly recommend buying the book if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player or available at founders podcast.com you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time that is 323 books down 1,000 too and I'll talk to you again soon