Sam and Shaan investigate the economics of the public speaking industry — from Obama’s $1.2M fee to the speaker bureaus doing $150M in revenue — then pivot to the story of Sarah Moore, a 28-year-old who acquired eggcartons.com using 50 Craigslist interns, no collateral except her 2012 RAV4, and a faxed photo of herself smiling in an “I Want to Buy Your Business” sweatshirt.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Opening: Sam’s Mortifying Case of Mistaken Identity [00:00:00]
Shaan: You’ve been building this up for two days. What’s the story?
Sam: I was out to eat in New York with my friend Jason Janowitz. We’re sitting outside and I see this guy walk by — a comedian named Hassan who had been on the podcast. I go: “Jason, should I say hi?” Jason says yeah. The guy’s already halfway down the block, so I jog after him.
Sam: I chase him down, cross the street, grab him: “Hassan! What’s going on man, I didn’t want to bother you — it’s Sam Parr, you’re close with Shaan and you were on the podcast.” He looks at me and says: “Uh… what?” I say yeah, I’m Sam from My First Million. He goes: “Dude, I’ve never been on a podcast before.” I say: “What do you mean, you were just on it.” He goes: “Who do you think I am?”
Sam: It was not Hassan. It was not the comedian. I had the wrong person. Completely different man. I start explaining: “Well, it was for a podcast, and I only saw his upper torso on video, and—” and he’s looking at me like please stop talking. So I turn around and walk away.
Sam: Then he chases me down and says: “What podcast did you say?” I say My First Million. He goes: “Are you Sam Parr?” And he holds up his phone — he had MFM pulled up on Spotify. He knew exactly who I was the whole time. His girlfriend was losing it. It went from the most embarrassing interaction of my year to… okay, I survived this.
Shaan: So he waited through the whole thing, let you sweat, and then went: “Wait, are you the guy?”
Sam: He held the bit the entire time. I was watching my life crumble in real time. Ten seconds of cringe that I will feel for another ten years.
The Public Speaking Business Model [00:12:00]
Shaan: You get paid to speak sometimes, right?
Sam: Sometimes. I’ve said no most of the time, but I’ve done it a couple of times. And when you say the number — “it’ll be $10,000” — and they say “great,” you just think: I’m getting paid $10,000 to talk. It still feels insane.
Shaan: How much do you think Obama charges?
Sam: My guess: $250,000 to $350,000.
Shaan: Rumor is $1.2 million. Obama is not getting out of bed for less than a million. Oprah is reportedly around $1 million as well.
Sam: That tracks. No small boy stuff.
Shaan: I only had one paid speaker at HustleCon across a couple of years and hundreds of speakers: Casey Neistat. I paid him $25,000 plus a $6,000 private flight from LA to San Francisco, one way. That was at the height of his fame — that seemed cheap even then. Gary Vee’s asking price was $100,000 — or buy $100,000 of books to push him up the bestseller charts. Ashton Kutcher was around $150,000. And I spoke at an event recently for around $20,000 to $25,000 plus flights.
Sam: Here’s what made all this click for me: I met a guy who was writing a book, and he was kind of evasive about his goals until 20 minutes in, when he finally said: “The whole point is paid speaking gigs.” You write the book to become a “New York Times bestselling author” — which mostly means buying your way onto the list — and that credential bumps your speaking rate by $15,000. The book is the lead gen for the speaking career.
Sam: And when I heard that, I thought: oh. The thing I would do instead is a podcast. You record it at home, in batches, whenever you want. If a million people listen, you’ve jumped to where those guys are trying to get — without the book tour, without flying around constantly. The podcast is the better move.
Shaan: What’s the underlying goal for all these people?
Sam: Being professionally curious. They have a topic they’re obsessed with and they’re trying to figure out how to get paid to dig into it. Speaking is one path. The generous version of the influencer-guru thing is: I just want to spend 90% of my time being a nerd about this subject and the other 10% paying for it.
The Speaking Industry: Numbers [00:28:00]
Shaan: WSB — Washington Speaker Bureau. Guess their revenue.
Sam: Thirty million?
Shaan: They were acquired in 2000 doing $15 million. By 2017: $150 million in revenue. A speaker bureau doing nine figures. Who knew.
Sam: I went to Duke. Coach K — Coach Krzyszewski — was making $12.5 million a year to coach college basketball when he retired. He turned down a $10 million Lakers offer at one point. And his listed speaking fee on WSB: $70,000 plus. His speaking and endorsement income exceeded his coaching salary for most of his career.
Shaan: This is the business: aggregating access to these people. WSB and the Washington Speakers Bureau and places like them are doing enormous revenue just by being the middleman between demand and supply of attention.
Sam: And the opportunity no one’s done: a speaker bureau for podcasters, YouTubers, and Twitter guys. Sahil Bloom speaks. You speak. I speak. We’re already doing the behavior. We just haven’t gotten organized around it. Cameo tried to go upstream into corporate appearances but I don’t think they’ve cracked it.
Robert De Niro’s Movie Contract [00:36:00]
Shaan: Someone shared De Niro’s actual contract from the movie Savage Salvation (September 2020). Eight days of work. $11 million.
Sam: Okay.
Shaan: Plus: round-trip private air transportation on a Gulfstream. He gets to keep all costumes, wigs, and prosthetics from the film. An additional fee plus travel and hotel for his personal trainer. Eight days of production plus a seven-day all-expenses-paid vacation at the Ritz-Carlton followed by a trip to Puerto Rico — also at their expense, including private jet — plus one round-trip private flight between New York and LA any time within the next 12 months.
Sam: So for eight days of work he negotiated: an $11 million fee, a Gulfstream, free vacation to Puerto Rico, a Ritz-Carlton stay, his whole team transported, all his wardrobe, and a free LA trip for a year. That’s a hostage negotiation. “I need the briefcase with cash and a plane with the engines running.”
Shaan: The move I’m implementing from this: whenever someone asks what I want for a speaking gig, I now say: two first-class flights and a week of hotel for me and my wife so we can turn it into a trip somewhere interesting. I only say yes if it’s a cool place. That’s the De Niro strategy, scaled down.
Sarah Moore and Eggcartons.com [00:45:00]
Shaan: A while back I told you about eggcartons.com — an e-commerce business that sells egg cartons and specialty packaging, founded 2001, owned for 24 years by a guy whose LinkedIn photo is him at a desk with a corded phone. Very obviously the guy who started this in 2001. Then I noticed: new owner. Someone named Sarah Moore.
Shaan: She looks like a celebrity. Harvard graduate. I could not figure out what this person was doing buying eggcartons.com. I tried to reach out, no response. I told the story on the podcast anyway.
Shaan: Then, 20 days after I emailed her a Google Doc of five questions, she replied: “I couldn’t have paid someone to make me sound as cool as you and Sam did on the podcast last week. Thank you. I filled out your Google doc. I would have responded earlier if I didn’t think this was spam.”
Shaan: Here’s what she said, question by question.
Sam: I’m ready.
Shaan: Q: Did you buy it alone or with a PE firm?
Sarah (via email): “Alone-ish. I started a PE firm alone to buy a business, but it wasn’t your typical PE firm. My ‘office’ was a library at school. There was no fund. I had over 50 unpaid interns from Craigslist who sifted through over 400,000 private companies for a year and a half before I found this one.”
Sam: Four hundred thousand companies. With Craigslist interns. Out of a library.
Shaan: Q: Why eggcartons.com?
Sarah: “My goal was to buy a business using all debt so I could have 100% ownership — but I had no collateral except my 2012 RAV4. I needed something with historical cash flows so I could pitch a bank that the business itself was the collateral. This one fit: profitable since 2001, high barrier to entry given the domain name, and over 100 similar domains the founder had accumulated over the years — misspellings, variants — to protect the brand.”
Shaan: Q: How big is the business? I framed it as: “People in Silicon Valley are obsessed with crypto and AI — they’d probably underestimate eggcartons.com. Can you give us a sense of scale?”
Sam: Nice. You gave her a little prod.
Shaan: She said: “I’m in the middle of something that prevents me from sharing specific numbers publicly. All I can say is revenue is less than $50 million.”
Sam: She said less than $50 million, not less than $20 million. If it were under $20 million she would have said that. This thing is doing something real.
Shaan: Q: How did you negotiate the deal?
Sarah: “In summary: I harassed the owner until he replied. Then we hit it off and came up with a valuation together. I contacted over 100 banks — most of which told me to forget it. One agreed to an uncollateralized loan. Final deal: 75% bank debt, 25% seller’s note.” She bought it with no money down. The seller carried part of the note and the bank funded the rest with the business as collateral.
Shaan: Q: Any fun anecdotes?
Sarah: “While searching for the business I participated in research studies just to make money during the search period. I went legally blind from a deodorant study for a bit, and had to take a break until I could read again. My response rate was awful so I started doing borderline insane things to get replies. At one point I took a photo of myself wearing a sweatshirt that said ‘I Want to Buy Your Business’ with a massive grin and faxed it to thousands of businesses a day. To this day I run into owners who recognize me from those faxes. One of them is now my neighbor.”
Shaan: “The library we worked out of required a school ID to enter. Most of my interns didn’t go to the school, so we had to get fake IDs for all of them.”
Shaan: “Before COVID I used to fly to China and India to examine egg cartons. On my first trip to India, I was held by customs and interrogated for hours because they didn’t believe I was coming alone to investigate egg cartons. I almost got killed there — I rejected a shipment from an Indian vendor. His entire family lived there. He was furious and started chasing me. The hotel put me in security lockdown. My driver was luckily at the door I ran out of. Otherwise I’d probably still be buried there.”
Shaan: And then: “When I bought the business I considered it an egg company. Now I think of it as specialty packaging. 40% of our business comes from things entirely unrelated to eggs. Think Boeing, SpaceX, Disney, Madison Square Garden, Crayola. Anything that requires protection and separation is fair game.”
Sam: Sarah Moore is my hero. She’s 28. You can barely find anything about her online. She gave one interview where she said her mantra is “Don’t take counsel from your fears.” She bought a business with no money using Craigslist interns and a RAV4 as theoretical collateral, went blind from a deodorant study, faxed photos of herself to thousands of strangers, got fake IDs for her interns, and almost got buried in India over egg cartons.
Shaan: She’s so in the game she doesn’t have time to explain the game. That’s the tell.