The Flat Bill Investor

The Flat Bill Investor is where entrepreneurs learn to stop networking and start building real relationships that compound into wealth. Every episode is raw, specific, and built for people who are done talking and ready to move. Hosted by Josh Zieglowsky and Zach Spencer.

The Flat Bill Investor is a business podcast hosted by Josh Zieglowsky and Zach Spencer, with 41 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Josh Zieglowsky and Zach Spencer hosts The Flat Bill Investor, a business show with 41 episodes published.

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  Episode #43

  TFBIP | Ep 43 - Ben Peterson: Building Knafs From Nothing

  Sep 25, 202623 minS1

  Ben Peterson was at a family Christmas party, newly married, knowing nobody. So he turned to the guy next to him and asked what he did for a living. That conversation put him in the pocket knife business. He was studying broadcast and film at the time and couldn't see where the degree was going. Video was just starting to move onto the internet — this is back when Zappos was putting shoe videos on product pages — so he asked the guy whether his knife site had any video on it. It didn't. Ben started making YouTube videos about knives instead. What happened next is what he calls two degrees of learning. You learn YouTube, then realize YouTube is a piece of marketing, so you learn marketing. Then you wonder what's beyond that. Own the marketing department, then finance and accounting, then ops — and eventually you're looking at a business you own outright. He and his wife started Knafs in 2018 as a side hustle, ran it that way for four years while having kids, and took it full time in 2022. Today it's ten employees, roughly half direct-to-consumer, most product launches happening on Kickstarter, and seventy dealers worldwide with the biggest in the Netherlands. He's not a knife maker, and he'll correct you if you call him one. He's a marketing guy and a storyteller who happens to own a CNC shop with three mills. The name came from a hashtag nobody had claimed — "knifes" the way it sounds in the American South. Five letters, twelve dollars, 2018. That doesn't happen anymore. Ben's answer for what he credits his success to is two words: failures and networking. His superpower, by his own account, is connecting ideas — knowing a guy in Boise who knows how to do one thing and a guy with the right machine, and seeing how they fit together. It's the same skill that builds a newscast rundown, which is what he studied. Also in this one: why there's a glut of pocket knives and what actually makes one matter, five guys from North Carolina who called ahead for a short tour and stayed two hours, live-selling on Whatnot where he signs knives on camera, the roll of toilet paper that sold for a hundred and eight dollars, why he puts space cats on his products when the rest of the industry goes tactical, and the rising-tide mentality he brings to introductions: invite me to your pool when you're all billionaires.

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  Episode #42

  TFBIP | EP 42 - Carpe Victoriam: Kevin Ward's Life Framework

  Sep 18, 202630 minS1

  Kevin Ward was voted Realtor of the Year for the number one Century 21 office in the world. He was having an affair at the time. Within a year he was sleeping in that office. He spent fifteen years as a Christian pastor in small-town Texas before moving to Dallas Fort Worth — a town of twelve thousand to a metro of five million, knowing nobody. He learned real estate the hard way, did 108 transactions in a single year before mega teams existed, and buried himself in the work to avoid a marriage he'd never admitted was broken. Then it burned down. And he did it again. And again. Three divorces. After the third, he journaled over two thousand pages in about fifteen months and arrived somewhere most people never get to: it's gotta be me. There's a commonality, and the commonality is him. That admission is what everything he teaches now is built on. Out of it came the seven domains — faith, feelings, focus, fitness, fun, finances, family — and his argument that feelings is the most powerful one and the one nobody talks about, because your emotions drive more of your behavior and decisions than anything else does. It only takes one domain in trouble to take the rest down with it. His analogy: you can't win at pickleball with a great serve alone. Also in this one: Vortex Kings, his men's mastermind, and why he believes you're the king of your own life. The daily guided journaling practice that isn't about writing down feelings at all. The book that reframed how he understood being a husband. Two bestselling books for real estate agents built on getting yes without the BS. And the superpower he'll tell you plainly: he gives a shit, and he'd rather have his heart broken and let it heal than stop caring. Carpe victoriam. Seize the victory. It's the phrase on his hat and the battle cry of his coaching, and it exists because championships are planned events. Nobody hands them to you.

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  Episode #41

  TFBIP | Ep 41 - Mike Brenny on Perseverance, Valuation & Real Estate Development

  Aug 28, 202632 minS1

  In 2007, Mike Brenny's tax return said $530,000. In 2008 it said $17,000. He spent the next two years mowing lawns and reselling Air Force base auction finds on eBay, trying to keep his family in their house. He didn't stay because he was made of something rare. He stayed because nobody offered him a way out — and he says so plainly. If someone had put an insurance job in front of him in 2008, he'd have taken it. Mike is a Minnesota kid who moved to Hawaii after college, met a girl from Sandy on the beach, and followed her to Utah twenty-five years and four daughters ago. At 22 he bought a condo two blocks from the water, then bought a trashed one nearby for reasons he still can't explain, and spent his evenings fixing it up with paint from Home Depot. When he sold it he made a year's salary in one go. This was 1999, before house flipping was a thing anyone had named. Utah in the early 2000s had no tech industry and no job he wanted, so he opened a Curves franchise in Sugar House, was projected a hundred members in week one, signed eleven, and had to go get a job to pay for the business he'd just started. That job was mortgages — an industry he knew nothing about and was setting company records in within six months. Spec houses followed. Things got bigger. He decided he was a genius. Then 2007 arrived. What came after the crash is the shape of the whole conversation. Two months of his parents covering his mortgage, then a month of his mother-in-law covering it, which he describes without any softening. Years later, a short sale finally cleared and he pulled the repayment out of the bank in cash, because he knew his father wouldn't accept it any other way. Then a $200,000 raise turned into a $2 million line of credit, and for five straight years he was at the courthouse auction every single day — roughly 300 houses. He's equally direct about what happened next: a million dollars lost on his first big Park City deal, another million on his first development. Today he's building ski-in ski-out at Powder Mountain and has just taken on High Star Ranch, and he's honest that the reason he can do it is a single narrow skill. He values real estate better than the people bidding against him. That's the whole superpower, and he can point to exactly what it's been worth. Running underneath all of it is a question he keeps circling: how much of this was him, and how much was timing. He'll tell you the only common denominator across successful people isn't intelligence or hustle — it's the ones who don't quit — and then immediately admit he was one phone call from being someone who did. It's also a conversation about four daughters. A farmer, a nurse, a self-declared golf mom, and a fifteen-year-old just signed by an LA agency. About a wife who told him at nineteen exactly what she wanted to do with her life. And about the low-grade dread every parent of grown kids carries — that one day someone new walks in and the thing you built at home changes shape.

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  Episode #40

  TFBIP | Ep 40 - Brick by Brick: Brett Chell on Building, Losing, and Rebuilding

  Aug 21, 202636 minS1

  At 8:30 one morning Brett Chell was the CEO of a company he'd spent thirteen years and $53 million building. By 9 he'd been told not to go back to his house, not to speak to a single employee, phone off, computer off. They towed his Escalade. His visa was attached to the job. He walked out of downtown Houston with a backpack. Brett dropped out of high school and spent eight years on oil rigs. What he also saw was a problem nobody was solving: operators running hundred-million-dollar sites from headquarters half a country away, getting their data emailed to them piecemeal by a dozen service companies who had no interest in talking to each other. He figured software couldn't be that hard. Thirteen years and $53 million later, he had his answer. The company he built is still running, doing $50–60 million a year with 250 employees. He was removed from it right as it hit escape velocity. What followed was sixty days of Domino's and Netflix with his phone off, then a year of trying to work out who he was without a company name to lead with. His lawyer told him he'd win the fight for his equity — two years, half a million in fees, roughly $20 million in warrants on the table. He let all of it go, because taking it wasn't who he wanted to be on the other side. Then he sat at a kitchen table and wrote down what he actually loved. Supercars. Art. Being around his friends. Marketing. He flew to Salt Lake, drove the city in a grid for two weeks writing down addresses of interesting buildings, walked into the first one, and met the man redeveloping the entire neighborhood. The warehouse he ended up with had gravel floors, smashed windows, rain coming through the roof, and people living inside it. He took it because it was the only one he could afford. That's Bricks: a business club, a car club, and a media house in one building, built on the observation that most coworking spaces sell community and deliver a room full of strangers who never speak. His fix is curation plus actual services — pooled media production, distribution, and a network members can use. This is a conversation about what happens when the thing you built stops being yours, and what you're left with. Brett is unusually honest about the role ego played in staying too long, about how much of his earlier success he now attributes to timing rather than talent, and about the difference between the CEO a small company needs and the one a large company needs — a distinction he understood about himself and ignored. His line for anyone whose identity has quietly merged with their work: "I ask people, who are you? Not what you do."

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  Episode #39

  TFBIP | Ep 39 - Two-Time World Record Mountaineer Jenn Drummond on Failure, Pivots & the "Somedays"

  Aug 14, 202631 minS1

  One day from the summit of K2 — three weeks on the mountain, a teammate just killed in an avalanche — Jenn Drummond turned around and walked down. "I don't want to teach my kids peaks over people." That decision cost her the entire climb: the money, the training, the window, all of it back to zero, on a mountain she says kills a quarter of the people who attempt it. She went back and finished it. Jenn Drummond holds two world records and had never slept in a tent before any of this started. She's a mom of seven who moved to Utah at 35 with seven kids under the age of eight and two thousand miles between her and everyone she knew. What set the whole thing in motion was a car accident she says she shouldn't have survived — and the realization that came with it, that she'd been building a life on external validation instead of internal. In this episode she and the guys get into what she's learned from mountains that transfers directly to building a business: why you climb a big peak multiple times before you ever summit it, why every step back down feels like failure and isn't, and why winning means coming home alive — which is also the question to ask before you launch anything. She explains the "grump dump," a journal where she writes down every failure and leaves blank lines underneath, then goes back months later to ask whether it was a failure or a pivot. Plus: landing on a Denali glacier with five people, 650 pounds of gear, and no porters allowed. Getting stranded in Russia when a missile closed the airfield and no American card would work. And the "somedays" list she's building a company around — because her grandma died, her dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and a friend got cancer with a mountain still on his list.

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