Ep798: Fabrizio Poli – When Passion Meets Poor Partnership

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Hello fellow risk takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever. Stories of loss. To keep you winning in our community, we know that to win an investing you must take risk, but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives, and I want to thank you for joining this mission today. Now, ladies and gentlemen, fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Fabrizio, Poli Fauci, are you ready to join the mission? I'm ready. Yeah, your energy comes across right from the beginning. And I love that. So let me introduce you to the audience. Fabrizio has always wanted to fly jets, and if you ever remember the scene from Officer and a Gentleman and Louis Gossett Jr has Richard Gere down on the ground on a weekend when he's holding him back and trying to break him, and he says, why are you even here, mayo? And he says, I always wanted to fly jets. My mother wants to fly jets, and he was just harassing him. So it made me think about that so and he's had Fauci has had a career flying both private jets and for various airlines around the world, he shared the cockpit with pilots from over 65 different nationalities, and this has given him a broader perspective on people and life. For over the past 14 years, Fabrizio has been buying, selling, leasing and chartering private jets for the ultra wealthy. He's also the author of the quantum economy and other books, and often shares his expertise in aviation. In the media being featured in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Social Media Examiner and Chicago Tribune, just to name a few. So Fauci, take a minute and tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world.

Fabrizio Poli 02:00
Well, you know, a lot of people have to travel and with social media today, connecting with people across the world is a lot easier, but you get to a point where you can do so many zoom meetings, and then you have to physically meet in person. Now we know that the growing economy is happening mostly in the third world. And if you have to go to third world country, you don't really want to be flying on their airlines. You want to be going in and out of a private jet. So private jet travel is on the increase, but there are a lot of problems with private jet travel. And one thing I talk about in my book The Quantum economy is the safety record. And this is an interesting thing, because I'm the only one that talks about this, is safety record of private aviation compared to commercial aviation is 9.2 times worse. Now it costs you 15 times more money to fly on a private jet than to fly first class, and you're risking your life 10 times more. That's the reality. So now the next question is, well, why is this happening? How come this is happening? The problem is, a lot of is to do with pilot selection and training, and they're not being selected and trained in the right way, and so consequently, the accidents are happening. Now. The good thing is, 2024 compared to 2023 the accident rate has decreased by 35% so it looks like we are heading in the right direction. A lot of that is technology in the new airplanes, which is helping. It takes the workload off pilots, but still, we still have a reoccurring problem. So when I what my value add is when I sit down at the table with one of these people that wants to buy an airplane. And a lot of people these days are not necessarily flying for business. They also fly their families around on the private jet. And I always tell people, don't get too focused on the jet, because the pilot is more important than the jet. So we need to find the right people to fly the jet. We need to make sure that technically, they know what they're doing. We need to qualify them on the airplane, but we need to make sure that they will fit in with you and your way of operating. These people need to be paid very well. They need to receive more training than the minimum requirement. It's like, you know, you're recruiting a guy for your new basketball team, and you want the best of the best. You hire LeBron, and then you don't give him the right training you want. LeBron performer is best, so he needs to have the best trainers and that so you need to spend money on your pilots before you spend money on the plane, because the pilots will look after the plane, and consequently, look after you too, and they'll keep their mouth shut, because on the private jet, things are private, and things need to stay private. And so these are things that 90% of people that buy a private jet, they don't think about. And when you tell them about it, they're kind of too focused on the plane because they want to show their friends their shiny object. But in reality, you know, it's the pilots, it's the pilots that will keep you safe, it's the pilots that can kill you. So you know, and because the safety record is so bad, you really need to hone in on the pilots. And this is where I come into it. Having Flown with 65 different nationalities and many pilots all over the world, I know what the standards are like, and they are very different, believe me. And so through her. I

Andrew Stotz 05:00
just out of curiosity, like, where are the best standards? Where have you seen the worst situations? Or, I mean, how does it look across the world?

Fabrizio Poli 05:08
Let's put it this way, the best pilots I have flown with have been the Scandinavians, not the British, not the Italians. And I'm half British, half Italian, not the Americans, not the Canadians, the Scandinavians, and is

Andrew Stotz 05:22
there something about character that, or the way they think, the way they operate, or is it just about they have to have so much more training?

Fabrizio Poli 05:29
No, I'd say they're just very laid back and cool about things. Their ego doesn't get in the way, and they get on with it, and they let you get on with it, and they're good team players, and they don't rabbit on about this that the other they stick focus on the task and the nice people to work with. And that's another key element, you know, it's not just the skill, it's the personality as well. If you're flying for 10 hours with somebody, you're not just going to be talking about the flight and you'll be spending maybe a week with this person. You know, you know, you want to make sure you get on with them and that, and that is an important element,

Andrew Stotz 06:04
too. And when you know, I'm not asking the name or shame, and I know that there's great people coming out of many different countries, yeah, but you know that are great pilots because of their personal, you know, dedication to it. But you know, when we look across the world, there's just training regimens or other, you know, lacks requirements. Is it the emerging world that's doing that? Is it the developed world that's doing that, or where, what? What's happening in

Fabrizio Poli 06:29
that space? Well, because we don't want to, as you said, we don't want to shame anybody. But I'll, I'll answer your question in this way. I like to, well, I see a lot of similarity between Formula One, driving and, flying planes. So if you think of certain countries in the world, you would have never seen people from that country win a Formula One race. They are not good pilots. And it's a bit cultural, it's a bit environmental. It's a number of factors. It's a bit their basic education is not as good. There are a number of factors applying to also in certain countries, when you become a pilot, it's a big ego thing, and they're focused more on the uniform than on the actual flying and learning the airplane and doing their stuff. And also from a matter of skill, they're not very good at driving cars, so very good at translating that into the air. Kind of thing

Andrew Stotz 07:28
I was thinking about when, when? When you watch videos like on YouTube where you see a pilot bring a plane down on the runway in really adverse conditions, you're like, holy crap, you're exactly right. It is about the pilot. And then if you go back 50 years, 75 years, a plane was a rickety bag of bolts, you know, like in the in World War Two or whatever, like, you know, you just think it definitely was the pilot in those days that had to, you know, really physically work that plane to get it to where they wanted. So it made me think about those past situations, and then, yeah, the pilot is probably ever Andrew.

Fabrizio Poli 08:07
It's not just, you know, when you have a private jet, your pilot basically will be interacting with your guests as well on your plane. So it's not like the airline. As you get on the airplane, there's 300 passengers, the pilot never sees you. When I was flying for the airlines, I was sitting in my cockpit. Door was shut. Never even saw the passengers before. We come to the front, now and again say, Oh, this guy's arguing with his wife in the back. We've had people arrested. All sorts of stories I could tell you about what happened during my airline years. But you know when it's a private jet often enough to catch in or First off, I saw the CO Captain get up. Well, first of all, they'll greet you when you arrive with your car and introduce themselves. Then during the flight, they maybe come back for five or 10 minutes to say hello. And so you know, they have to have a type of personality that's going to make you look good with your guests. And that's another element. And then when things go wrong, or the weather's bad or whatever, and think decisions need to be made. You know, these people need to be able to make certain decisions and communicate that decision in a certain way to you or your guests, or both.

Andrew Stotz 09:08
Yeah. And one other thing you talked about, the safety record. And, you know, when I think about commercial airlines, you know, I think about, okay, Malaysian flight that was shot down over Ukraine, or whatever. And think about the Malaysian flight that disappeared. I think about the Air Asia flight that went down in Indonesia. That kind of was the beginning of the problem. About the Boeing, you know, software, and then that Kenya flight went down. It's like, it's very well known, but you talked about 10 times more risky in a private jet. Are there private jet accidents happening, you know, every year that we just don't see or know, unless it's okay, celebrity like Kobe Bryant went down in a helicopter, I believe. Yeah, you know, can you just explain a little bit more about what's happening with these crashes with private jet or, you know, safety record?

Fabrizio Poli 09:54
Well, you obviously mainstream news. I mean, you wouldn't see a lot. Of the private accidents covered on the BBC or CNN or news, because, you know, it crashes, two people die. It's not big news. When an airliner crashes and 300 people die, then it's big news. But, you know, the crashes are happening, unfortunately. Now, one of the trends we're noticing is that there's a suit type of pilot which is also an entrepreneur. So you're Mr. Entrepreneur, you've made a bit of money. You like the idea of flying yourself. So you go to flight school, you work up, you buy yourself an airplane, you decide to fight yourself. And a lot of these guys end up crashing and killing themselves, and this is one of the factors. And why does this happen? Well, first of all, you're wearing two hats. You're the business guy and you're the pilot, and sometimes it's difficult for them to separate the two. So I'll give you an example, one gentleman that I'd met, like, 27 years ago, and then he crashed his airplane last year. Um, it was early morning, I think it was second or third of January. Went to the airport with his wife, a friend and his wife, they were going to go to a ball game from Provo Utah to Seattle, and it was early morning. It been snowing, but the airplane had been kept in a heated hangar. So he pulls the airplane out the hanger, and he figures, well, it's been in the heated hanger all night. We put some fuel in it, which is heated, off we go. He didn't think to the ice the airplane. So he gets on the wrong way, starts going down the wrong way, pulls the aircraft off the runway, and the airplane flips over like that, crashes on the wrong way. Miraculously, three survived. He died. Air Traffic Controller was shot at. Three people managed to walk away. Now what had happened is ice had formed on one of the wings, which is why it went like that. Bit like on your car in the morning, you walk outside and it's frost on one side and no frost on the other. But some ice you can't see with the naked eye, so when you're looking at the weather conditions, which he should have done. And he was a bit in a hurry, because he wanted to get to this ball game. And it was going to take 45 minutes to, you know, order the de icing truck, get the ice done, and about $5,000 to do that. And so he was thinking of, can't be bothered, or maybe he didn't even think about it. So this is the kind of thing that's happening with these pilot owners. They don't really have the time to do the training. What they should be doing is what John Travolta does. John Travolta has a bunch of planes. He has a whole flight department, so he basically pitches up to the airplane, and his pilots have been there already for an hour, and they've got all everything organized. They get on the airplane, shut the door, so, yeah, the icing truck's coming now. They've already ordered it. He doesn't say anything, because he lets his guys make the decision. You know, they're 24/7 pilots. John Travolta got a pilot 24/7 he's an actress and producer. You know, he does many things, but you know, he understands his limitations. He enjoys the flying. He's good at it, but he also understands that, you know, it's not just the flying. There's also everything around the airplane that needs to be looked after. The airplane needs to be looked after. Well, uh, fueled appropriately. I had another guy interviewed recently on my channel, biz jet TV on YouTube, and he owns a Honda jet, and he has an insurance company. Was flying from Miami to Houston, and he just took off with his family, and he worked out that he was going to land on a certain runway in Houston. He gets near Houston, and that runway is not in use. They're using a different runway. So he starts arguing with the air traffic controller for about 10 minutes. Eventually, a traffic controller says, Look, you're doing it my way, full stop. So he vectors him in all the way around. Comes in the plane in front of him had to go around. For some reason he was asked to go around. Now, not only didn't he carry enough fuel to land on this different runway, now he's had to go back up again all the way around. By the time he comes in for his landing, he's starting to be low on fuel. He's got his family sitting in the back. His stress level is through the roof. He's still mad at the air traffic controller. He lands, goes off the end of the runway. Fortunately, he lands in the grass, gets out. Airplane intact. Everybody intact. Everybody gets out with not even one scratch. They walk away. And then when they eventually had to extract the airplane out of the grass, it got damaged, and they had to throw it out, and the insurance company gave him a new airplane. But he was very, very lucky that he got away with it. Very, very lucky. What he didn't understand is he needed to have plan for more fuel. But again, we're in this situation where these guys and some of the aircraft manufacturers are a bit naughty in the sense that they want to sell airplanes to these guys, so they just kind of sign them off and tell them good. And tell them, you know, this is okay, and they kind of cut corners just to make millions. Why they don't sit down and say, Look, you really should have a professional guy hired by you that flies with you all the time. Interestingly enough, the insurance companies are now clamping down on a lot of these guys and saying, We will only insure you if you fly with somebody else all the time.

Andrew Stotz 14:38
Right, right. Interesting. I have a story about this owner versus operator. And I had a Harley Davidson Road King, which was a prized possession, you know, it cost a lot of money. I had it here in Thailand, and I went out, and I'm a pretty experienced rider, and I went out with a group of guys that weren't necessarily that. Experience. They were just rich guys who had Harley Davidsons in Thailand and but we got onto a mountain road that was, you know, swerving. It was going down, not, not super steep, but it was a winding road. And I, for some reason, violated rule number one, which is, you never ride side by side because you don't have an out. And so I was riding side by side, and I kind of all of a sudden found myself where I got kind of pushed off the road as I was churning one of these corners. And there was a ditch, you know, on the side of the road, which was a water for, you know, in case the water was flooding off of the mountain, and so I just basically rode that motorcycle into the ditch, up the one side of the ditch, then down the other side. But I didn't have enough momentum to get back up on the road, so I'd had to go back into the ditch and then back up. And then I got enough momentum to get back on the road. Luckily, there was no motorcycle in my way. And then I got back, and we sat down, and they were like, how the hell did you do that? And I said, I am not going to crash this bike. You know, how valuable it is to me. And so there I was taking, you know, huge risk, you know, whether I did the right thing or not, but I was definitely thinking about the cost of crashing this thing. So that was kind of a simple situation that shows the owner versus versus versus an operator. Let me ask you another question about the data. If we look at the data on private jets, if we were to tease out the private jets that are really just owner operated by these guys that are, you know, buying and running these jets, you know, and flying them for their own, you know, fun and whatever, versus private jets that are owned by people that aren't, never, never flying them. Would we find that those statistics are very different, like in as much of that 10x happening in owner operator planes?

Fabrizio Poli 16:57
No, no, they are still happening. Unfortunately, numbers are obviously a little bit better, but even you know airplanes that accrued to professional pilots, and I'll give you an example, two examples. Two friends of mine are airline they've flown for the airlines. They've flown private jets, and they both teach in the simulator. One teaches the goal stream simulator, and another teaches on a thing called the Falcon 8x and they told me, they said, it's an absolute disaster. What we see in the simulator, these are professional guys. Now, when you're in a private when you're in an airplane and you're going down the runway, there's a speed called v1 which is called the decision speed. If you have a failure before v1 you can stop on the runway. If you have a failure after v1 you don't have enough runway to stop the airplane. So you do what's called, you take the problem into you take the airplane into the air. But as my Boeing instructor said to me many years ago, he said, Remember, Fabrizio airplanes are designed to spend time in the air and not on the ground. Therefore, you take the airplane in the air, it will behave a lot better than on the ground. They're not built to drive. They're built to fly. So if you get an engine failure, engine fire, whatever at the v1 you rotate. You take the plane into the air, you put the fire out. You go into the hold, you take your time. You burn as much fuel as you can, so you reduce the weight, which means you have more runway to land on. You tell the tower what you're doing, so they can prepare the runway and the fire brigade and everybody there for you to come in, and then you come in, and you've planned it, you've taken your time, and you come in. But a lot of these guys in the simulator don't do that, and what they're going to do in the airplane, exactly the same thing. And we look at some of the accidents that are happening. These are professional guys. These are guys that make, you know, make money flying planes. That's what they do. They make two or 300,000 a year. Some make 400,000 a year, and you would expect them to fly the airplane in a certain way, but some of them don't. A lot of them don't. And this is a big problem. And this is what I tell people. I said, you know, you'd be surprised of how many close calls there are. I mean, I had a close call early on in March, and I'll tell you the story. I was young. I was 22 I had about 700 hours total time, but most of it done in jets. I was lucky to fly jets very early, and I was with a captain who had been a captain three days. So we fly from Milan. We're going to Milan up to samaritz, which is in the Swiss Alps. It's the highest elevation airport. It's 5800 feet in the mountains. But there's no instrument landing system, so you have to be able to see the runway to land. So we get to the airport, and we're picking up this gentleman, taking him up to summer. It's to pick up his children and then fly them all down to Zante, which is one of the Greek islands. So we get to the airport at the time, you would phone the control tower in Switzerland, say, hey, what's the weather like? They will tell you, look out the window and they tell you what the wind was like, and the cloud cover version and everything and that. And then you'd make a decision if to go or not go. Now, based on what the tower told us, it wasn't a good idea to go. This guy comes along and he says, I just spoke to a friend of mine. He landed with his airplane an hour ago. Let's give. I said, Look, if we get close to the airport and the weather's not good enough, we have to come all the way back here. You have to pay for the flight and then get your kids to come down by car. We'll fly out to Zander tomorrow. So I suggest you do that right away. Let's not do the flight. No, no. Show you sister. Okay, fine. So let's go. So if we get in the plane, off we go. We were approaching the valley, and he comes right to the front, and we see a space in the clouds. So down we go. We land. My colleague gets off to go and pay the landing fees. I get the fuel on and the bags, and it was a small Cessna Citation one, so it's not very big, yeah. So we get three kids on board, the nanny and this guy and all their bags. And rush, rush, rush, rush, because the storm was approaching. We get in the plane, get on the runway, come down the runway. We hit this v1 speed, rotate. My colleague was flying. So he pulls back on the yoke, and the plane doesn't lift up. He says, for it, so help me. Help me. So we're both pulling back. We barely get off the end of the runway, into the air, hit right into the storm. Airplanes going all over the place, uh, passengers screaming and hollering in the back. We eventually, after 1015, minutes, get above cloud and storm and underwear all on our way down to Zandi. The guy comes to the front. Sorry, I pushed you. Yeah, you did push us to do something we shouldn't have been doing here. And then I, I sort of thought to myself, well, why were we struggling to get off the ground? Well, we're actually overweight because we were such in a hurry, we didn't have to work out the weight and balance. We were about 150 pounds overweight, but we still got off the end of the runway. But we were lucky. We were lucky. We survived that one. But that happened because I allowed, as a crew, the passenger to push us. And that is dangerous. And I have a good friend of mine that had that happen to him, and he was flying a helicopter, and this was on all over the news all over the world. A few years ago, Leicester City Football Club, Premier League club won the Premier League a few years ago, helicopter taken off out of the stadium with the owner on board, and then it crashed. My friend was flying the helicopter to his girlfriend, and they crashed. Everyone died on board. And what happened there is, when a helicopter takes off out of the stadium, it goes straight up like this, okay, so the problem is, if suddenly they have an engine failure, they don't have any forward movement, right? And so it'd be difficult to control the helicopter. And that's what happened. A screw which connected the two rotors came loose, and the helicopter started doing that, but Eric managed to maneuver the helicopter away from the car park area where there were a lot of people, and he regained control of the helicopter a few feet from the ground, and then lost control again, and then it came down like that. As far as it came down like that, hit the ground, was full of fuel, exploded, and everybody died. But that was a situation where he told his boss a number of times I'm not comfortable with this. Let's just pick you up outside the stadium and not do this stadium take off. The boss said to him, I'm paying you a lot of money. I paid other guys a lot of money as well. They had no problem flying in and out of here. If you're not happy with it, you can leave. So he continued until he died. And this happens a lot as well. Where you get these people that have a lot of money and they think they can buy everything, and as I said to my passenger, samaritz, I said, you're obviously a select successful man, or you wouldn't be able to charge for a private jet. And you can buy many things with money, but you can't buy the weather because the weather's controlled by God, and you can't buy him, yeah? And he said, Yeah,

Andrew Stotz 23:19
that was a team that was owned by a Thai tycoon. Yes, right? Yeah, I remember that I want to draw a parallel before we're going to get into your story of your worst investment ever. But you know, I really enjoyed our discussion learning a lot, and there's just two things that I wanted to highlight. The one is that I have a friend of mine that has a tour business in Asia that really only caters to the highest level guys, men and women in the world that are all, you know, private jets and the like. And his business is booming, you know. And I help him to, you know, how he's running his business and all that. But I wanted to mention, so I can see it on the ground here in Asia that there's, you know, there's, there's that happening on the pleasure side. But they're not just coming for pleasure. They're also coming to learn things, and, you know, all of that. But the other thing I wanted to draw a parallel with is, if you know, I'm in the world of finance and as a CFO, in some cases of companies, or as an advisor. You know, one of the things is that you get pressure. And as a CFO, you can get pressure from the CEO. And recently, I did see a case where a CFO just didn't stand up. And then, you know, in the end, what happens is it all falls in, and then the CEO is like, why didn't you stand up and tell me what was the right thing to do? Well, you put so much pressure on me that I said, Well, that's a bullshit excuse. If you're a CFO, you need to stand up to the CEO and stand by what you know is the right thing. If you let yourself get pushed around and don't stand up for what's right, it's just going to be a bad. Ending, and in the end, the CEO is not going to be served in the long term. Now you may find out that you're going to be fired by some idiot CEO who says, " I want to work with someone that tells me what I want to hear. Fine, but you will be valued as an important person in the decision making process if you are an independent voice and not swayed by, you know, the people around you, and I guess that's what I'm hearing partially about what makes a great pilot.

Fabrizio Poli 25:27
Yeah. I mean, when you hire a pilot, he's hired to say no. And you need to understand that when you step on that airplane, that door shuts, he is now in charge, or she is in charge, not yet. Yep, yep. And that's why you paid it 400,000 a year to say, sorry, Andrew, we can't land today at this airport. We need to go to an alternate airport. You've got two choices, A or B. What would you like? Either one is, but we can't land the original destination. Yeah. Which

Andrew Stotz 25:53
also reminds me of a client I had that used to always yell at me about, you know, when I bring him an idea or something, and we'd talk about and then I watched him. He yells at everybody that does that, but I told him, you know, you got to understand that if I bring you ideas that you already have and therefore agree with, or I bring you ideas that you agree with, what value am I bringing you? Yeah. And so yeah, well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment, thinking it will be, tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it, then tell us your story.

Fabrizio Poli 26:27
Well, as you know, I'm in the private jet business, and a few years ago, I decided to adventure into the car business, because I figured, well, people that buy private jets also collect cars. So you know, it's the same customer, so a friend of mine in Italy, we teamed up and we bought a bunch of cars. We opened a showroom and but I was in England, and he was in Italy, and I was assuming that he was doing things properly, I sent over our web designer to help out for the day to tweak the website. And the idea was to buy alpha males Ferraris Vespers as well in Italy and sell them on the international market. So he opens a showroom, which I incidentally, and I found out this later was on the road where the very first Ferrari had driven. So it's kind of his. I only found this out after that we shut the business down. But anyway, so he was on this main road, and with these flashy cars parked outside, lots of people were stopping and going into the showroom. So I send Lance over to do the website and explain to the guy what he needed to do with the website. And these people keep coming in every five minutes. And so I turn around to my business partner, I said, you need to keep the door shut and locked, and you put a sign on the door that says, By Appointment Only, because otherwise you spend 90% of your day talking to people that you know. They're not there to buy a car. They're there to look at the car. They probably don't even have the money to buy it. So and then you need to spend your time online. I've got people lined up in Hong Kong, people lined up in New lined up in New York to do these online auctions. That's what I wanted to do, you know, get 10 people on, on on, on a call, video call. And this was like 1212, years ago. So the internet wasn't as big as it is today. And I was taking the inspiration from Gary V who everybody knows he did this with his wine, with his dad's wine store. I said, we need to do this, but with cars. But unfortunately, I'd invested in the right business, but the wrong person, and I lost all my money. So that was my fault, and this was a very good friend of mine, and he had been in a bad space, but new cars, and I kind of saw the opportunity to do a business and help somebody at the same time, which was a bad thing to do. Business decisions need to be made to make money, and then if that making money helps people as well, great. But trying to mix charity with business, very bad idea. And it also affected my aviation business, and that was not good, yeah. And so ultimately, that was a hard lesson, but, you know, an important lesson, the people are more important than the product.

Andrew Stotz 29:12
And can you remember? Can you remember the moment when you realized I got to shut this down? What was that moment when you realized that, you know this isn't going to work?

Fabrizio Poli 29:25
Well, the moment was because he kept calling me for money. And I'm like, what happened to those three alpha males you bought the other month where they're gone? And I said, you know, we keep sending money, but you told me money was coming back, and I keep seeing it flowing one way, and also, you know, we need a and I took him with me to New York. And we went to a place in New York, and we told him, because we had a guy who was really good at buying old Vespers, and he would refurbish them in two weeks, and it they look like brand new. So we found this guy in New York that wanted to buy 20 a month. And. But my business partner didn't get the deal moving the way it needed to go up just those 1212, Vespers a month would have opened a number of doors. So I just turned around to him one day and I said, Look, I have to cut now, cut this, because this is just draining Money, money, money, and you're not listening. I said, You're not listening. We need to get you on video showing the cars, and create a YouTube channel, you know, and do what Gary V is doing for wine. Do it for cars. Oh, but I don't speak English well enough. Your English is good enough, and it's not too good. It needs to be good enough, because with the Italian accent, yeah, Italian style, with the Alpha Romeo and the Ferraris, that's what we need. We need the character. He didn't get it. He didn't get it. He didn't get it. Unfortunately, sad, because, you know, he was a good guy, and he would have done really well on camera if he'd listen. He just didn't listen. And that's my fault. I put it, I put it down to me because, you know, again, I try to mix charity with business, and that's a very, very bad combination.

Andrew Stotz 30:57
You know, it reminds me of my worst investment ever, which was very similar, investing in a business with a friend. I think the business idea was a good idea. I think he's a good guy, and I still think he is a good guy, but I just at some point realized he wasn't going to be able to take it to the next level. And the next level was really commercializing it and really making it big. And at that point, I was faced with the decision of, you know, do I put more money into this, or do I pull the plug, knowing that pulling the plug means all is lost?

Fabrizio Poli 31:27
Yeah, well, not really, because, I mean, if I, if I keep sending, you know, 80,000 euros a month to the business, and I suddenly pull the plug next month, I'm not sending 80,000 euros, I'm keeping the 80,000 euros.

Andrew Stotz 31:38
Yeah, in my case, there was just nothing to recover. There were no physical assets or anything. So I knew, yes, I would not have the monthly outflows, but I also knew that there wasn't really anything to recover. So that was, you know, a challenge. So let's, let's go back in time, and let's think about when you went into this decision. And let's think about a young man or woman listening or watching this who is just about to do this exact same thing that both you and I did? Yeah, so based on what you learned from this story and what you've continued to learn throughout your life, what would be one action that you would recommend that they take before doing it? You know, here's what you need to do next so that they don't suffer the same fate.

Fabrizio Poli 32:20
Okay? Well, what I would do if, if I could go back in time, is have some team members look at the business case, interview the guy independently, and then turn around to me and say, it's a great business, but this is your wrong guy, and then turn around to my friend and say, I'm sorry. My team have advised me against doing this, and I have to listen to them. That's why I pay them. Yeah, so I'm the good guy. Have somebody play the bad guy. But look at because obviously, if you were going to invest with your friend, you are emotionally engaged, and that's dangerous. So sometimes taking the emotion out is difficult, so bringing somebody else to play the bad guy, and when I say the bad guy, I'm not mean being bad. I mean you look at it without emotion, yeah, objectively. Because, like in every business, there's three things. You've got the product, you've got the process, which is like the business, but you've got the people, and the thing is, the product and the process can be great, but you put the wrong people in there, they'll screw the whole thing up. But also vice versa, you can have a bad product and a bad process. If you've got the right people, they'll straighten out the product and the process, and you'll get it right, and you'll make a ton of money. So the people bit is the most important bit. I mean, I'm over here in the US right now. We're looking to open a new business, and so we're between Scottsdale and Park City and back and forth, and looking at what we know, what we're going to do, but chosen a particular location, because we know in that area we can recruit good people that also can speak languages, and that is going to be important compared to other places. And also, there's a tech industry growing, and there's, there's a number of facts. But anyway, we're thinking of the people element, which is going to be the key factor, which is going to make this a success or not. And so put yourself in a place where there are enough good people should have to bring them in from elsewhere. Because even if you bring them in from elsewhere and you pay them well, they may not acclimatize. Well, yeah, maybe the manager comes in his wife doesn't settle, or the kids don't, you know. And you don't want that happening. You want your people to come to work every day and being able to focus and not be concerned of problems at home, the argument with the wife or the daughter that's not happy in high school or whatever. So you know that that element is really, really important. So when you think of people, don't just think of the actual person working for you think of their environment around them. I mean, I like to hire people, particular, if I'm hiring men, men that are married and stable in their relationship with their families, not going to start looking. Around and messing around, and they're going to stay focused. And that, for me, is important. So I always look at that, and I ask people some questions that may be considered prior. I like to get to know them, be able to trust them, because if I can trust that, you know, they're behaving in their relationship and with their family, they'll probably behave in the business as well, and that's something that I look for. So I'd say, you know, just going back to your question, have somebody else evaluate the business and the person, and if your team, or your if it could be one person or a team of two or three, come back and recommend against it, then don't do it. But then when you go to your friend and say, I can't do this. You're not being the bad guy. It's your team that have advised against it.

Andrew Stotz 35:45
Uh, lots of great stuff. I mean, one of the things that I take from that is, you know, I always say, find a independent, objective, knowledgeable, third party to get involved, right? And I also have something that I've learned from all these interviews that I also teach about, which is separate the decision between risk and return. When you have a business opportunity that comes, have your first big meeting on it, all about the return, what's the potential? Tell me about what the market is all this, and then wait for a week and then say, now I need you to present all of the risk factors. And the separation of the risk and return just does wonders to change your thinking, and it's helped me so much. But here I also thought about an idea of separating the business idea, from the person, from the person who's going to operate that idea. So we may say bad idea, good person, bad, good idea, bad person. Or, you know, maybe it's great idea, great person. But separating those two could also help us to not make some kind of mistake like that. So that's what I learned from what you've just talked about.

Fabrizio Poli 37:10
But also talking about bad investment. A private jet can be about investment too

Andrew Stotz 37:15
impossible and

Fabrizio Poli 37:17
no, because you know what happens in the private jet world. You're going to buy the airplane, and then you want to give it to a management company, or the management company, you know, somebody as a private jet management company, and they talk you into buying an airplane, because, guess what, when you're not using the plane, it's going to charter so much, it's going to pay for all your flights. That is not true. Yeah. And so I know so many people have been roped into this, and they think they're making an investment, as in the plane. And I'm saying the plane's not going to make you any money. Chartering a plane is not going to make you money. It's going to make the management company guy money, because your pay for everything, pay for maintenance, the pilots, the insurance, the whole thing. And he's making 15% on every flight, yeah. So he's just pure profit all the way more airplanes he has in his fleet more profit he's going to make. And then, guess what, when your plane breaks down, which it will, if it flies more, it'll break down more often. He's got a maintenance shop next door that he owns, and he's making 30% on parts. And this that the other every time. So you know, it's, he's having a field day with your airplane. And you know, you think it's a good idea on paper, but, you know, one two years down the line. And then the other thing which will happen is you'll ring up and say, Okay, I need a flight tomorrow morning. Oh, no, your airplane is in Houston. And this happened to a friend of mine. He's with his boss. They're in Milan, and the airplane was in Houston, and then you go to Japan, and he had to charge someone else's airplane. What's the point? He's spending $50 million on a private jet? And then when you need it. It's not there. It's on a charter.

Andrew Stotz 38:43
I hate it when that happens.

Fabrizio Poli 38:46
So, so, you know, the private jet can be a really bad and then, as we discussed before, you know, you buy the playing, and then you hire the wrong pilots, or you, you know, you bully your pilot into doing whatever, and they're not keeping you safe. You end up crashing or having, you know, a scary event or whatnot, or it scares one of your guests, where you got a potential business deal and you sent the plane to pick them up, and they the the pilot flies through a thunderstorm, like one guy sold an airplane to in November last year. He was telling me a horror story of a friend of his with their airplane. She said, Oh, she told me not to buy a plane. I said, why not? Oh, because her pilots through flew through a thunderstorm, and it ruined all the paint on the airplane. So I turned around and said to him, I said, You know what, your friend doesn't have a plane problem. She has a pilot problem. There's a pilot that's well trained doesn't fly through a storm,

Andrew Stotz 39:33
yeah, yeah. So in, in wrapping up, I mean, you got so much different stuff that you are doing, and you know your marketing skills are excellent and all that. But I am just curious, like, what's a research, a resource, one or two resources of your own, personally, or anything else that has really helped you to be successful? Feel free to share that with our audience. Well, I

Fabrizio Poli 39:57
mean, for me, I won't mention. National School of Milan for a number of years, and I had a teacher there, Miss Elizabeth Skinner, and she taught me the importance of reading. And so I've always read a lot. I read about, I read now even about, even now about four books a month, and then I'm listening to podcasts. So I'm continuously educating myself. And when I say educating myself, I read all sorts of stuff. And I don't only read non fiction. I also read fiction. I think fiction opens up your mind to new possibilities. I'm a fan of science fiction. I like watching science fiction shows. I'm a big Star Trek fan Stargate. You know, I love those two shows. But I also read science fiction, and it because it makes you think about the future and the possibilities of the future with technology and space travel, and, you know, airplanes flown by machines, or AI and all this kind of thing. And so that, I think really, really does help. And then listen to all the other business leaders you can learn from a lot of other business people. Podcasts are great, like your podcast, sit on and listen to Andrew and his guests, and listen to the different people that have made some bad investments and what happened and why they've made that mistake and what they would do different. You can save yourself a lot of hassle by learning from other people's experience. And so that's where I think education needs to stay for business people today, and it's not just studying business understand geopolitically what's happening, because politics does influence. So geopolitics, technology, the media. Today, we have a new phenomenon called citizen journalist, and very often, the citizen journalist gets it, gets it right, whilst the BBC get it wrong. So, you know, listen to different people, connect the dots. Don't just believe something because it was on BBC. BBC often are very devious, and I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here, but you know this, tune in to certain and we've got a lot of professional journalists now that have left mainstream media, like Tucker Carlson, for example, and many others that doing their Glen. Glen Beck is another one. These guys are doing their own Glenn greenmon, yeah, yeah, and the others. So tune into these guys. Tune into the mainstream media, you know, and connect the dots. Think about what you're hearing and what you're listening and, you know, and reason about it, and then dive into some fiction as well. It's cool. It's fun, and it opens your mind.

Andrew Stotz 42:22
Great advice. I've read between 3005 1000 books in my life, and I've got library full of books, and I'm constantly reading, speaking of books, maybe just give us a little snippet of what we would get if we read the quantum economy, how to exponentially dominate and disrupt by increasing your speed to success or to succeed. Here it is. Look at it. Now

Fabrizio Poli 42:41
the book. Now, obviously, in the book, I talk about private jets. I tell the story of a number of people, including that of Sam Walton found at Walmart. He is used airplanes from the very beginning to build his empire, and I tell the story of how he did that. Today, Walmart have a fleet of 30 airplanes, incidentally. But in the book, I talk about the economies of the future. I talk about Bitcoin, I talk about the emerging economies, how cryptocurrency is going to change the way we do business. It's something that, if you're watching this and you think it's a scam, do some research. Connect the dots. President Trump, who's now the new US, President, has said he wants to make the United States the crypto capital of the world up until now, the US government have been a bit anti crypto. Now they're starting to tune in. So now all the Western world will start to open up, and there will be more usage of crypto. How is this going to change the world? And then the emerging economies and the flight safety record in these different economies, and if you are going to expand internationally, you know, get yourself a private jet. You may want to start by just chartering, and then you maybe lease an airplane, and then you buy an airplane, and I can help you with all those things. You can reach out to me. You can look at my YouTube channel. If you go at biz jet TV, B, I, Z, j, e, t, v, we've got over 1000 videos on biz jet TV. I talk about private aviation, the different airplanes. I interview aircraft owners, and they tell their story. But you know, you can reach out to me. We can get on a one to one call and figure out what your real needs are, and give you the right advice, because flying by private jet will get you in and out a lot safer if you do it the way I said, you need to do it, get the pilot right first, then the airplane, and you can get a lot more business done. And guess what? You can use it to fly your family around as well. Yeah. I mean, what's the beauty of driving your SUV up to the airplane, getting out with your four kids and your bicycles and dog and cat, getting on the airplane, flying two hours landing, and then getting into another SUV and go straight to the house in Colorado, instead of going through the hassle of going through, you know, the terminals. I mean, we were arrived in LA the other day from the UK, and one of my sons had his bag lost, and we drove here to Scottsdale, and my son's case arrived three days later, been flying on a private jet. You know, that wouldn't have

Andrew Stotz 44:52
happened. Yeah, painful. So last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Fabrizio Poli 44:57
Well, as I said, we're starting this new business. Yes, and we're aiming to launch it in September. I can't really say much now, and so we're working towards this goal. It's going to revolutionize a bit the way things are done in the private jet world. And I'll be moving over here to that and get that going. And so that's that's the goal in the next 12 months. And then I've got a new book coming out in a few months time, but I'll tell you about that on, on, off camera.

Andrew Stotz 45:22
We'll talk about that next time. Yeah, fantastic. Well, I enjoyed it. And listeners, there you have it, another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And today we've talked about not only the risk of financial loss, but also the risk related to keeping yourself set safe in a private jet. And as we conclude Fauci I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Fabrizio Poli 45:59
Lie. Hi, think. High.

Andrew Stotz 46:02
Beautiful, beautiful. Fly high. Think high. Well, that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our wealth. Fellow risk takers, let's celebrate that. Today, we added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz, saying, I'll see you on the upside in the sky. You.