You’re Missing Opportunities You Don’t Even Know Exist
Listen To The Podcast:
You’re Not Missing Opportunities. You’re Missing Entire Categories Of Them.
So I remember the first time I heard the idea of buying an existing business instead of starting one from scratch came from Cody Sanchez who’s built an entire platform around exactly that, buying what she calls boring, unsexy businesses and starting in instead of starting new ones from scratch. And what got me wasn’t the idea itself. It was that I’d never even considered that as an option. I understood numbers. I understood operations. I understood what made a place run or fall apart. So somehow in my head though businesses were things that people started or something they inherited. Buying one belonged in a completely different category. A category I didn’t even know I had until I noticed that I did have it. And then I started spending time around people who talked about acquisitions like they were no big deal and I started hearing every conversation after that differently.
So I had this whole realization again a couple weeks ago I got to talk with my friend Christine Cloum who was recently on the podcast. We met in person. But she spent over 20 years building a marketing agency before she sold it. Talking to her, she mentioned that she had interviewed someone for Inc. magazine about how they were acquiring their talent by acquiring other companies and that she had never looked at it that way either. So I just want to keep coming back to this. You can’t read the label from inside the jar. And when you get around things that are new and you think, wait, I never saw it that way, but now I do.
Welcome back to Expand Your Empire. I’m getting somewhere with this. I promise.
The Idea That Changes Everything
The idea that I want to hand you today, and I think it’s going to change how you listen to every conversation you have from here on out, is this. You are not missing opportunities because there aren’t enough of them. You’re missing entire categories of them. Whole sections in the financial world just don’t register for you as options. So you never even get to the part where you can decide yes or no.
We’ve talked on here about proximity before. Like it’s motivational. Get around people doing bigger things and you’ll start believing bigger things are possible for you too. Yeah, I’ve said it on the show before. The top five people you hang out with. It is still all true. But I think we’ve been missing a more important part.
Proximity trains pattern recognition.
And that’s the whole episode. If you want to leave right now with just that one sentence, fine. But being around people who do this regularly, it doesn’t just inspire you. It rewires what your brain flags as relevant. And today I want to talk through exactly how that happens because once you see the mechanism, you can’t unsee it.
What Overfunctioning Actually Costs You
This all connects to something we talk about on this show constantly. A lot of us are so busy being the person who handles everything, who does the work, who is reliable, that you’ve never really had the bandwidth to just look up and notice what’s happening around you. Overfunctioning doesn’t just cost you your time. It costs you your peripheral vision.
Before we get into how this actually shows up, I want to name something underneath it because if we skip this part, everything else I say today will just bounce right off of you. A lot of women I work with, they don’t identify as someone who gets offered deals. It doesn’t matter if she owns a successful company, if she’s smart enough to understand the economics in four seconds flat. Somewhere in her head, that category, deals, acquisitions, opportunities, whatever you want to call it, it still means something else.
Same Sentence. Two Completely Different Reactions.
So what this actually looks like in a real conversation, because I think it’s subtler than you think.
Someone says, my dad is finally closing his company. Most of us think, oh, that’s too bad. But a brain that’s been trained to notice thinks, who’s buying the customer list?
Someone says, I’m so sick of managing this rental property. Most of us will agree and say, being a landlord sucks. But a trained brain thinks, would she carry the financing if the right buyer came along?
If somebody says, we can’t find anyone to take over the practice or the business when he retires, a lot of us think, that’s happening everywhere these days. But a trained brain thinks, what happens to all those existing clients?
Same sentence. Two different reactions. Very subtle. And the gap between them is not intelligence. It’s whether the category was ever open in your head to begin with.
So among being in those conversations and hearing all the opportunities, you never get to say no to any of those. You never get the chance to say yes or even maybe because your own brain automatically files it under not relevant to me before you even get a conscious thought that there is a decision to be made.
Familiar And Safe Are Not The Same Thing
Here is a second thing that quietly filters opportunities out before you ever evaluate them. We treat how comfortable something makes us feel as if it’s the same thing as how risky it actually is. But it isn’t. Something can be completely familiar and still carry risk. And something can be totally unfamiliar, unknown to you, and be a genuinely good opportunity. Familiarity doesn’t tell you which one you’re looking at. It just tells you how much you already know about it.
Think about it this way. You’ve heard the phrase index fund for 20 years or more. So it feels responsible and safe and like something that adults do. And in a lot of ways it is a smart, well-diversified choice. That part is true. But the comfort you feel isn’t coming from an actual risk calculation that you ran in your head. It’s coming from repetition. You’ve simply heard the phrase enough times from enough people.
Now put a completely unfamiliar opportunity in front of the same person, something they’ve never seen structured before, and their gut reaction is no freaking way. That’s too risky. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s not risky at all. It’s just unfamiliar. And their gut can’t tell the difference between those two things.
Your comfort level was never measuring the opportunity. It was measuring your exposure to it. And those aren’t the same thing.
The Menu You Think You’re Choosing From Isn’t The Whole Menu
Separate from the identity and separate from risk entirely, most of us assume that the opportunities we get shown are roughly the opportunities that exist. Like this is the buffet and this is what’s available. I’m choosing from the menu. But that’s not true. Not even a little. You cannot choose an investment you’ve never learned exists. What you’re actually seeing is whatever happens to flow through the people that you spend your time with.
If everyone in your life works a regular W2 job and banks at the same big bank you do, you’re going to hear about regular jobs and big bank products and that is your entire menu as far as you know. But if you are friends with someone who flips houses or your cousin’s husband buys small businesses for a living or your hairdresser mentions that her landlord is trying to unload a building, an entirely different category opens up. And nobody’s keeping you out on purpose. There’s no gatekeeper standing at this velvet rope. Your data set is just incomplete and you’ve had no way of knowing that because you can’t miss what you never saw in the first place.
I was at a conference a while ago in Boston. I was talking to this woman who’s in the M&A world, mergers and acquisitions. She’s buying and selling businesses, getting them ready to sell. Super smart, successful woman. And I started talking about real estate. She’s like, oh no, no, no. I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know anything about that. And I’m like, wait a minute. You’re doing the exact same things. You’re taking underperforming companies, you’re making them stronger and selling them for more money. That’s what you do with a rental property. And she could not get those wires to cross and understand one over the other.
You’ve got now three things stacking on top of each other. An identity that quietly rules certain categories out before they get to say yes or no. A risk reaction that can’t tell familiar apart from safe. And then an environment that’s only ever shown you a slice of what’s actually out there.
How Proximity Actually Fixes All Three
Here’s why proximity fixes all three of these at once and it’s not the reason that you think I’m going to give you. Yes, get around people doing bigger financial things and then you start believing bigger things are possible. That is real. But that’s the shallow version of what’s happening.
The deeper version is that proximity trains that pattern recognition. You hear enough conversations about someone selling a company and you eventually understand what happens in that process. You watch enough deals get picked apart at a dinner table and you start noticing the variables yourself without anyone pointing them out to you. If you spend time around people who structure these things regularly, your own brain slowly starts asking different questions than it used to. That’s the whole mechanism. That’s how I got here. That’s how something invisible becomes visible. Not because someone convinced you to believe bigger, which I do want to do, but because your pattern recognition actually changed.
And here’s the part that removes your biggest excuse. You don’t have to be the one who buys anything. There are at least three ways to be part of an opportunity. You can own it. You can help finance it. Or you can just connect it. You can know the person who’s selling and the person who’s buying and you can put them in touch with each other. And that third one costs you nothing, requires no capital at all. Half the time the entire opportunity is just being the person who introduced two people who needed each other.
What To Do After This Episode
Here’s what I actually want you to do with this. Not just nod and acknowledge. Build what I’m going to call your opportunity list for the next seven days until we meet again. Every single time you hear something that makes even a small voice in your head go, wait, what? Write down three things.
Signal. What did you actually hear or notice?
Possibility. Where might there be real value hiding in that?
Connection. Who would know more about this, need this, want this, buy this, or be able to fund this?
Let me give you an example so you can hear exactly what this sounds like. Your neighbor mentions her father wants to retire from his HVAC company. That’s the signal. The possibility is that a business like that, especially now, might need a buyer or a succession plan. The connection is you happen to know someone who’s been looking to buy service businesses. Done. Three lines. No spreadsheets, no underwriting, no investing required. You’re not committing to anything by writing it down. You’re just building proof for yourself that these things are actually around you constantly. Most of us have just never been trained to log them.
Collect 10 of those over the next week. And I promise you, by the fifth or sixth one, something starts to shift. You stop feeling like opportunities are rare or crazy or weird, and you start walking past them in everyday life.
What Noticing Is Not
Here’s what I want you to be honest with yourself about. Noticing something is not the same as knowing what to do with it. You don’t currently know how to evaluate whether a business is actually worth buying. Maybe you don’t know how to think about risk correctly. We just spent this whole episode proving that your gut can’t be trusted on that alone. Maybe you don’t know the questions to ask a seller, how to structure an offer, or when to walk away.
That’s not a knock on you. Nobody ever taught us that. It’s just not a skill that you have yet. And pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody.
So that is exactly what Investing 101 gives you. Not theory, not a stock-picking class. It is the actual framework for evaluating any opportunity once you’ve spotted one. Understanding what they are so that noticing it stops being the end of the story and starts being the beginning of one.
All right, the link is in the show notes. Go build that list. Start collecting them this week. When someone tells you they’re retiring, you wait. When someone tells you they’re selling, you wait. Someone tells you their landlord wants out. Wait and think.
If this episode changes that reflex even a little, that is the whole win. That’s what this show is actually for. I want you seeing a different financial world than the one you saw 30 minutes ago.
Until next time, keep building.
Watch The Podcast:
So I remember the first time I heard the idea of buying an existing business instead of starting one from scratch came from Cody Sanchez who’s built an entire platform around exactly that, buying what she calls boring, unsexy businesses and starting in instead of starting new ones from scratch. And what got me wasn’t the idea itself. It was that I’d never even considered that as an option. I understood numbers. I understood operations. I understood what made a place run or fall apart. So somehow in my head though businesses were things that people started or something they inherited. Buying one belonged in a completely different category. A category I didn’t even know I had until I noticed that I did have it. And then I started spending time around people who talked about acquisitions like they were no big deal and I started hearing every conversation after that differently.
So I had this whole realization again a couple weeks ago I got to talk with my friend Christine Cloum who was recently on the podcast. We met in person. But she spent over 20 years building a marketing agency before she sold it. Talking to her, she mentioned that she had interviewed someone for Inc. magazine about how they were acquiring their talent by acquiring other companies and that she had never looked at it that way either. So I just want to keep coming back to this. You can’t read the label from inside the jar. And when you get around things that are new and you think, wait, I never saw it that way, but now I do.
Welcome back to Expand Your Empire. I’m getting somewhere with this. I promise.
The Idea That Changes Everything
The idea that I want to hand you today, and I think it’s going to change how you listen to every conversation you have from here on out, is this. You are not missing opportunities because there aren’t enough of them. You’re missing entire categories of them. Whole sections in the financial world just don’t register for you as options. So you never even get to the part where you can decide yes or no.
We’ve talked on here about proximity before. Like it’s motivational. Get around people doing bigger things and you’ll start believing bigger things are possible for you too. Yeah, I’ve said it on the show before. The top five people you hang out with. It is still all true. But I think we’ve been missing a more important part.
Proximity trains pattern recognition.
And that’s the whole episode. If you want to leave right now with just that one sentence, fine. But being around people who do this regularly, it doesn’t just inspire you. It rewires what your brain flags as relevant. And today I want to talk through exactly how that happens because once you see the mechanism, you can’t unsee it.
What Overfunctioning Actually Costs You
This all connects to something we talk about on this show constantly. A lot of us are so busy being the person who handles everything, who does the work, who is reliable, that you’ve never really had the bandwidth to just look up and notice what’s happening around you. Overfunctioning doesn’t just cost you your time. It costs you your peripheral vision.
Before we get into how this actually shows up, I want to name something underneath it because if we skip this part, everything else I say today will just bounce right off of you. A lot of women I work with, they don’t identify as someone who gets offered deals. It doesn’t matter if she owns a successful company, if she’s smart enough to understand the economics in four seconds flat. Somewhere in her head, that category, deals, acquisitions, opportunities, whatever you want to call it, it still means something else.
Same Sentence. Two Completely Different Reactions.
So what this actually looks like in a real conversation, because I think it’s subtler than you think.
Someone says, my dad is finally closing his company. Most of us think, oh, that’s too bad. But a brain that’s been trained to notice thinks, who’s buying the customer list?
Someone says, I’m so sick of managing this rental property. Most of us will agree and say, being a landlord sucks. But a trained brain thinks, would she carry the financing if the right buyer came along?
If somebody says, we can’t find anyone to take over the practice or the business when he retires, a lot of us think, that’s happening everywhere these days. But a trained brain thinks, what happens to all those existing clients?
Same sentence. Two different reactions. Very subtle. And the gap between them is not intelligence. It’s whether the category was ever open in your head to begin with.
So among being in those conversations and hearing all the opportunities, you never get to say no to any of those. You never get the chance to say yes or even maybe because your own brain automatically files it under not relevant to me before you even get a conscious thought that there is a decision to be made.
Familiar And Safe Are Not The Same Thing
Here is a second thing that quietly filters opportunities out before you ever evaluate them. We treat how comfortable something makes us feel as if it’s the same thing as how risky it actually is. But it isn’t. Something can be completely familiar and still carry risk. And something can be totally unfamiliar, unknown to you, and be a genuinely good opportunity. Familiarity doesn’t tell you which one you’re looking at. It just tells you how much you already know about it.
Think about it this way. You’ve heard the phrase index fund for 20 years or more. So it feels responsible and safe and like something that adults do. And in a lot of ways it is a smart, well-diversified choice. That part is true. But the comfort you feel isn’t coming from an actual risk calculation that you ran in your head. It’s coming from repetition. You’ve simply heard the phrase enough times from enough people.
Now put a completely unfamiliar opportunity in front of the same person, something they’ve never seen structured before, and their gut reaction is no freaking way. That’s too risky. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s not risky at all. It’s just unfamiliar. And their gut can’t tell the difference between those two things.
Your comfort level was never measuring the opportunity. It was measuring your exposure to it. And those aren’t the same thing.
The Menu You Think You’re Choosing From Isn’t The Whole Menu
Separate from the identity and separate from risk entirely, most of us assume that the opportunities we get shown are roughly the opportunities that exist. Like this is the buffet and this is what’s available. I’m choosing from the menu. But that’s not true. Not even a little. You cannot choose an investment you’ve never learned exists. What you’re actually seeing is whatever happens to flow through the people that you spend your time with.
If everyone in your life works a regular W2 job and banks at the same big bank you do, you’re going to hear about regular jobs and big bank products and that is your entire menu as far as you know. But if you are friends with someone who flips houses or your cousin’s husband buys small businesses for a living or your hairdresser mentions that her landlord is trying to unload a building, an entirely different category opens up. And nobody’s keeping you out on purpose. There’s no gatekeeper standing at this velvet rope. Your data set is just incomplete and you’ve had no way of knowing that because you can’t miss what you never saw in the first place.
I was at a conference a while ago in Boston. I was talking to this woman who’s in the M&A world, mergers and acquisitions. She’s buying and selling businesses, getting them ready to sell. Super smart, successful woman. And I started talking about real estate. She’s like, oh no, no, no. I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know anything about that. And I’m like, wait a minute. You’re doing the exact same things. You’re taking underperforming companies, you’re making them stronger and selling them for more money. That’s what you do with a rental property. And she could not get those wires to cross and understand one over the other.
You’ve got now three things stacking on top of each other. An identity that quietly rules certain categories out before they get to say yes or no. A risk reaction that can’t tell familiar apart from safe. And then an environment that’s only ever shown you a slice of what’s actually out there.
How Proximity Actually Fixes All Three
Here’s why proximity fixes all three of these at once and it’s not the reason that you think I’m going to give you. Yes, get around people doing bigger financial things and then you start believing bigger things are possible. That is real. But that’s the shallow version of what’s happening.
The deeper version is that proximity trains that pattern recognition. You hear enough conversations about someone selling a company and you eventually understand what happens in that process. You watch enough deals get picked apart at a dinner table and you start noticing the variables yourself without anyone pointing them out to you. If you spend time around people who structure these things regularly, your own brain slowly starts asking different questions than it used to. That’s the whole mechanism. That’s how I got here. That’s how something invisible becomes visible. Not because someone convinced you to believe bigger, which I do want to do, but because your pattern recognition actually changed.
And here’s the part that removes your biggest excuse. You don’t have to be the one who buys anything. There are at least three ways to be part of an opportunity. You can own it. You can help finance it. Or you can just connect it. You can know the person who’s selling and the person who’s buying and you can put them in touch with each other. And that third one costs you nothing, requires no capital at all. Half the time the entire opportunity is just being the person who introduced two people who needed each other.
What To Do After This Episode
Here’s what I actually want you to do with this. Not just nod and acknowledge. Build what I’m going to call your opportunity list for the next seven days until we meet again. Every single time you hear something that makes even a small voice in your head go, wait, what? Write down three things.
Signal. What did you actually hear or notice?
Possibility. Where might there be real value hiding in that?
Connection. Who would know more about this, need this, want this, buy this, or be able to fund this?
Let me give you an example so you can hear exactly what this sounds like. Your neighbor mentions her father wants to retire from his HVAC company. That’s the signal. The possibility is that a business like that, especially now, might need a buyer or a succession plan. The connection is you happen to know someone who’s been looking to buy service businesses. Done. Three lines. No spreadsheets, no underwriting, no investing required. You’re not committing to anything by writing it down. You’re just building proof for yourself that these things are actually around you constantly. Most of us have just never been trained to log them.
Collect 10 of those over the next week. And I promise you, by the fifth or sixth one, something starts to shift. You stop feeling like opportunities are rare or crazy or weird, and you start walking past them in everyday life.
What Noticing Is Not
Here’s what I want you to be honest with yourself about. Noticing something is not the same as knowing what to do with it. You don’t currently know how to evaluate whether a business is actually worth buying. Maybe you don’t know how to think about risk correctly. We just spent this whole episode proving that your gut can’t be trusted on that alone. Maybe you don’t know the questions to ask a seller, how to structure an offer, or when to walk away.
That’s not a knock on you. Nobody ever taught us that. It’s just not a skill that you have yet. And pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody.
So that is exactly what Investing 101 gives you. Not theory, not a stock-picking class. It is the actual framework for evaluating any opportunity once you’ve spotted one. Understanding what they are so that noticing it stops being the end of the story and starts being the beginning of one.
All right, the link is in the show notes. Go build that list. Start collecting them this week. When someone tells you they’re retiring, you wait. When someone tells you they’re selling, you wait. Someone tells you their landlord wants out, wait and think.
If this episode changes that reflex even a little, that is the whole win. That’s what this show is actually for. I want you seeing a different financial world than the one you saw 30 minutes ago.
Until next time, keep building.