Brandon Dawson has built and sold companies for valuations that most entrepreneurs can’t even begin to imagine, including one eye-watering exit at US$151 million – 77 times EBITDA, among the highest multiples ever paid for a private company.
The now Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Cardone Ventures has scaled multiple ventures from scratch to more than US$100 million in revenue without outside capital or debt. And in partnership with his wife Natalie Dawson and real estate mogul Grant Cardone, they’re on their way to building billion-dollar companies.
Yet Dawson insists his real mission isn’t about the numbers. It’s about showing business owners the path from Founder to CEO – and why so few ever make the leap.
“Most entrepreneurs never make it to CEO status. They might give themselves a CEO title, but they don’t really know what a CEO is,” he tells The CEO Magazine. “A CEO doesn’t figure out how to start something. A CEO takes it and makes it bigger and better.”
Defining the CEO mindset
Dawson draws sharp lines between a Founder, an entrepreneur and a CEO. Founders start businesses and entrepreneurs grow them, but CEOs, he says, bring discipline, accountability, strategic planning and a deep focus on value creation.
Until a business reaches about US$25 million in revenue, Dawson sees it as a “Founder-run business, sloughing around trying to make it work”. The transformation, he stresses, is both technical and mental. It’s a shift from doing everything yourself to building a structure that drives sustainable growth through others.
“The CEO will identify, find, attract, align, develop and retain talent – and remove those who don’t perform,” he says. “That’s how they protect the body of the business.”
Dawson’s education in CEO-level thinking started unusually early. At 26, he acquired half of a US$3 million hearing-care business for no money down, guided by a seller in Canada’s financial space who taught him how to run a public company.
“My first company was a micro-public company, but it had to live with the same rules as a macro-public company,” he explains. “This experience taught me discipline and accountability and gave me experience with quarterly meetings, board meetings, investor presentations and certificates of financials.
“You can go to jail if you don’t do it right – it’s scary stuff. But it pushed me very quickly into what a CEO has to be.”
By 29, Dawson was the youngest CEO to ring the opening bell of the American Stock Exchange. That trial by fire gave him a blueprint he would apply and refine across multiple ventures.
Proving the science
After selling his business in 2016 for that record-setting 77 times EBITDA, Dawson, also the best-selling author of Nine Figure Mindset and host of podcast Building Billions, could’ve stopped. But instead, in 2019, he and Cardone co-founded Cardone Ventures, a business education and management company. He was determined to prove that his methods worked in any sector.
The numbers don’t lie.
“We took Cardone Ventures from zero to US$120 million last year bootstrapped with 230 employees,” he says.
To further make his point, Dawson shares that he bought a US$1.8 million healthcare company, renamed it 10X Health and scaled it to a projected US$122 million in just four years – again with no debt and no outside investors.
“We’ve engineered over US$9 billion of business in the last 60 months,” he says. “We get all these business owners and entrepreneurs coming through, wanting to emulate, copy, model, mimic and master what we proved works.”
The macro numbers are stark – of 34.5 million small-to-midsize American businesses, 97 percent fail within 10 years. Most never even break the US$1 million mark. In fact, just 1.8 percent surpass US$3 million. And the percentage that exceeds US$25 million – where Dawson says the real CEO work begins – is a fraction of a fraction.
He’s quick to point out that the jump from US$15 million to US$25 million requires “we leadership” – a tight team of leaders pulling the rest of the company uphill. From US$45 million to US$75 million, culture solidifies and “us leadership” takes hold, with a large portion of the workforce aligned to the mission.
“The beautiful thing in business that we identified is once you’re ascending to US$75 million, your culture kicks in,” Dawson says.
“They know where they’re going. And they understand with absolute clarity, dedication and commitment because they’ve sworn their oath to that.”
Beyond the exit
Many Founders believe the exit is the finish line. After all, it’s the moment years of risk, grit and vision finally pay off. Even Dawson admits there was a time when he believed that too. But after his 2016 sale, he hit an unexpected low.
“About eight out of every 10 [entrepreneurs] go through a state of depression,” he shares. “I went through it and never thought I would. You have this dream – you’re getting pulverized for years but you still have enthusiasm and excitement.
“Then you ring that bell. You do it – everything you dreamed of, you did. You celebrate for about 90 days and then realize, I’m not around all the people who helped me do it. I’m on an island now, my own ship, but I have no crew. I’m all by myself.”
He pinpoints exactly what leads to that headspace.
“For every founder who’s ever sold a business and dropped into a state of depression – you lost your purpose,” Dawson says.
For him, the fix was to get back to building. And not just for himself, but for others.
“Stop making it about you and start going and helping people who don’t have what you have,” he insists.
“You’ll find that appreciation again for how hard it is, and you’ll start celebrating yourself. Most importantly, you’ll surround yourself with people who will celebrate you. And if they’re winning because you’re helping them – you’re going to feel like a gazillion dollars.”
The opportunity of a lifetime
Looking ahead, Dawson sees a generational shift, creating a once-in-a-lifetime opening.
“There’s US$5 trillion of wealth transfer happening over the next eight years of businesses owned by people who have never run them to make any money,” he says.
“If you have the skill set bridging those broken businesses … it will give you the greatest rewards in life.”
And if there’s a single principle Dawson wants leaders to take away, it’s this: Keep your purpose tied to people.
“When you no longer love your people and you no longer love your ability to create impact, you’re going to fail,” he says.
“Shift your point of focus from the problems to the people you get to work with to change their lives, help solve those problems and inspire them to go attack it – and everything will get fixed.”
