Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Elliot Kallen, President of Prosperity Financial Group

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Elliot H. Kallen is a leader who brings over 30 years of passion and robust entrepreneurial business ownership experience to his elite Financial Planning & Advising practice. He has built international organizations, been the CEO of two other companies before forming Prosperity Financial Group, Inc., and is a frequent keynote speaker to charities, podcasts, and radio shows on motivation, leadership, charitable work, marketing, and various financial subjects.Elliot holds a BA degree in both Accounting and Economics from Rutgers University in New Jersey and has served on various Boards, as an active member and/or President, including The Boys and Girls Clubs of the Diablo Valley, the American Cancer Society of Contra Costa County & Congregation B’nai Shalom, where he has been actively involved in raising millions of dollars for these organizations. As President of Prosperity Financial Group, he has led his organization to be actively involved with many charities as this has been a lifelong theme.Elliot is also President of A Brighter Day Charity, the 501c(3) he began following the suicide of his youngest son, Jake, in 2015. This charity unites stress and depression resources with teens and their parents with the goal of stopping teen suicide. The resources of A Brighter Day have touched thousands of families and are having a major impact on the lives of our teens.Learn more:https://prosperityfinancialgroup.com/ and https://abrighterday.info/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-elliot-kallen-president-of-prosperity-financial-group

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us, Elliot Callan, who's the president of Prosperity Financial Group. Elliot, welcome to the program. Thank you, Michael. Great to be here.

Yes, I'm looking forward to talking with you because I see that you have a lot going on and I want to learn about how you are serving your community and your clients, but get us started with your story. What's your background? So I've started and thank again for having me. Thanks again for having me on. I've been doing this business, which is financial services for 30 years, but I come from an entrepreneurial background. I'm one of those people whose father was an entrepreneur and learned early on in the game that I'm not the most employable person out there. entrepreneurs. They're not necessarily rough around the edges, is that they kind of have a vision, and then it's hard to get them off that vision, and that was me. I started as an accountant, boring world. That's so not me. When turned into a packaging business, sold that, created an environmental cleanup company, sold that as well. Very exciting on that. And then my wife got pregnant with twins from California, came out here and realized I wanted to start a financial services business.

And I put a vision together that kind of combined the price warehouse world, which is what my background was, with current financial services, it came up with a vision. It looks very different today in my original vision, but it was finding business owners that you can help reach their financial goals. That's been the vision of our company from the very beginning, whether it be a retirement goal, a personal goal, a family transition goal. a next generation goal, an exit strategy goal, create wealth for our clients. That's what we do every day. You know, what I like about that is that creates a vision for your clients to be drawn toward.

You don't ever want to be told you must do this and put your money here and invested this. You want to go, wouldn't it be nice to have this as your retirement goal? What does retirement look like? What does that transformation that you, envision for your retirement and then you guys come alongside them and help them achieve that. It's not my retirement. It's their retirement. And I'll tell Michael, most people, most entrepreneurs are so busy being in the game of their business or the game of their startup that they cannot see what it looks like to exit. And then there are some people who create, who start their business with the exit in mind, but that's a handful and a small percentage of people.

in classes they'll tell you always begin with the end in mind, but sometimes you're so busy doing everything in the business, you can't think. You're working six and a half days a week, including empty in the garbage cans, including doing marketing, and then you're firing people, and you're hiring people,

and you have cash flow issues, and you have employment issues, and you have human resources, and we live in California, where every employee is super thinskins. You can fend everybody for every reason out here, which requires an attorney sometimes, and then you're spending money in front of your attorney,

you can't imagine that there's an exit strategy. And sometimes you've got children, sometimes you've got no children, sometimes your children only want your results, but they don't want your effort. That's what we do is help them coalesce that, put it in a concise format with a financial goal, and define what that means. And that's a really hard thing because for you, Michael, maybe your goal in retirement is, you know, I really would love to travel. I wanted to go to Europe. I want to go to Antarctica. How do I do that? And for somebody else, it's, I don't like travel.

I just want to visit the grandchildren. And that's fine. And so they're very, very different goals. And then for other people, they have like, I love being local. I love going to wine country. I love going to national parks. Maybe I want to be the grandparent that takes my grandchildren to national parks and has a huge impact on them with my RV.

Great goals, all very different. You know, it sounds like you. have become a life coach of sorts. And it's just that one of the deliverables you provide your clients after they've articulated their life goal is some financial guidance. Well, you could be an accountant and be delivering money guidance that way. Or you could be a fitness coach. But the point is the foundation is, where do you see yourself?

Articulate retirement and your dreams because these days I am seeing reports that people are taking better care of themselves. They've got better health care, better doctors, and they're exercising more, they're eating better, and they're living a little bit longer. So whatever that age of retirement is, that typically people would say, I am going to retire at this age, and then they're going to live this long. Typically now, it's like a broader, longer time frame, so you need to have your money last longer. Well, if you don't know what that retirement time span looks like for you, then you don't know how you're going to hit that target and work through that. It's a difficult target, even though mentally we see the generation before us or two

before us with a pension and a pocket watch show to speak and they just enjoy their life. It's very different today. Here's a good story though, Michael. I talked to, I was sat down with my wife about a decade ago and I said, you know, I advise people every day on what they want to do in their retirement. So let me ask you, because, you know, sometimes the cobbler's children have no shoes. Yep. Let me ask you. my wife, what would you like? What does your retirement look like? And she said, well, I like to travel with you. We enjoy each other's travel time. You lived in Europe once, so you like to, you know, travel globally. You love great, you love to cook. A little bit of an amateur chef, so I like to eat

great food. I like to make great food. I have a thousand bottles of incredible cabernet at home from California mostly with a little bit of Zinn and Merlot. You like to collect great wine. You like to drink great wine. So I looked at her and I thought about for a moment. I said, so why do we need to wait to retirement to enjoy these things? Yeah. Why can't we enjoy them now? While our legs to work, we're still upright. I still have my health. And we took what was going to be happening in our retirement and we made it a lifestyle for today. And that as an entrepreneur is an incredible thing to do to say you don't have to wait till you're 65 or 70 to start enjoying life. You can do it now.

That's a huge light bulb moment. Aha. And have you ever read the book, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss? I have not, but it's now on my list. Well, it's kind of like a classic of sorts. I think it was written probably 15, 20 years ago or so. And obviously the title is like, come on, four hour work week. but one of the points he brings up is what you just said,

which is here's what your retirement looks like. Why wait till then? Because you never know what it's going to bring. Are you going to have the stamina, health? So what he recommends is to structure your life personally and professionally so that you can take these many sabbaticals, many retirements, and take that to, you know, could you leave your business? If you're an entrepreneur, could you leave your business for two months

and check out and come back and have it still running and move and long. If you can structure that and now all of a sudden, every year you take two months off in a row and you feel like I'm kind of living my retirement, those too much, you come back and you get back to work. So that's a massive mindset shift, which takes a lot of planning to be able to do that. It sounds like on a surface like a great idea. Even in my mind, I'm thinking, could I do that? Could I do that? I'm not sure. But then again, in the world of Zoom today, in the world of the electronic ability to talk to people. You know, right now I could be at Buenos Aires

and we could be having this conversation. And that is one of the changes. Now, not every industry has that ability. There's some things, you have to go face to face with. But it's a great concept. And I could tell you that I told my wife, the beginning of for next year,

I said, she just asked me, where would you like to go on vacation next year? And I said, you know, in a world of VRBO or Airbnb, you'd have to tout either one of those organizations, how would you like to live in Amalfi Coast for a month, you know, in next summer? And she said, she thought about that. She said, well, that's a fantastic idea.

I said, let's look into that. And that's the things better. Now with our fingertips, thanks to COVID and electronics and Zoom, that five and 10 years were not even around. You're exactly right. And probably behind the scenes there, Elliot will need to go, okay, team, let's start having a pre-planning sessions here. a week leading up to when I leave to do that because no, I'm not going to be checked out of the business. I'm going to be available by Zoom, by electronics, but I'm going to be working maybe two hours a day and only Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday during that time frame. So here's what

you guys need to be prepared to do. So I think that, again, comes back to some key tips on entrepreneurship. Here's how you could be structuring your business. How about leadership? you know, let's lead my organization so that if I take care of myself, I'm a better leader when I do come back and to make sure that things are being done while I'm, you know, kind of remote a little bit. And then just the tenacity. And I think that's such a huge word. So I would just say, what does tenacity mean to Elliot Callan? So tenacity, it's a great word. And I'll give you a story around that one, too. Do you remember the movie, one of the Rocky movies? He was talking about the Rocky characters.

Esther Stallone was talking to, I think his son, and he said, it's not how many times you get knocked down. It's how many times you get back up. That's tenacity. So sometimes I feel like I've just got a bloody nose from my day. Every entrepreneur gets that bloody nose. It went well. It didn't go well. Whatever. It's getting back in the game and realizing I'm here to fight another day tomorrow. We're going to do this again, and we're going to make this work. That's tenacity. It means that not giving up the matter what. Sometimes it means moving on, but that's not the same thing as giving up. And that's really important for a lot of people. I went to a seminar. I went to a walk on fire seminar with Anthony Robbins years and years ago. And there may be a thousand people in this room

that were going to walk on 40 feet of hot coals. Very cool experience. It was all, and the majority of people in there, probably well over 90% of people in there, were small business entrepreneurs that were looking to get reinvigorated, reprogram their brains to do it. And that fire, that 40 feet of hot coal was going to represent the change that they needed

to rewire the brains to get back in there and pick up the bat and start swinging again. Every entrepreneur he's at. Everybody does. Pick up the bat and start swinging. You're going to hit a single. You're getting ground out. But tenacity is I'm not putting

the bat down until I absolutely have to. Love it. That's awesome. Hey, I know that you are passionate about causes. Tell us about your charity, a brighter day. Yeah, I'm a big thank you, Michael. I'm a big fan of giving back.

I think that it's not just about taking. It's giving. And I mean, I give to people their retirement and successful retirement, but making a difference. And so sadly, eight years ago, my youngest son took his own life while a sophomore at University of Montana. He committed suicide. And in his note to us, suicide note, which was delivered via Federal Express before we even knew he was dead, it said mom and dad, there's six pages long, but it said mom and dad, I've been thinking about this for a long time. I never would have told you

how I felt. I never would have asked for your help, and I never would have taken your help. And on the way back with his body under the plane, I knew that we had to make a difference to keep other families from feeling the destruction and devastation that we were about to go through, which we did and have still today. It doesn't really go away. And we started the charity called a brighter day. It's at a brighter day. info. And what we do is we create resources, original content, a whole team of people that work for us, content that gets emailed out twice a month with a bi-weekly newsletter. We have a 24-7, all 50 state text crisis flying at any teen, any time of the day, can reach out for up to 40 minutes a day and say,

help me. And most of them ask the same question. Am I the only one feeling this way? So that's thousands of teens around the country. And if that doesn't work, it takes six to ten weeks, almost everywhere in the United States, to make an appointment for your teen who's in crisis. Our program is seven days. We'll get your team in an appointment in seven days in all 50 states.

It's amazing. And so when we first started, we were touching about 500 families per year. Last month, we touched over 10,000. Wow. And I'm sure you have gotten feedback and responses saying, if it were not for you, I don't know where we would have been. Oh, it's amazing what people are saying to us. But literally, I run into people who say, thank you for saving my teen's life. Thank you.

And I've got letters, three letters on. my desk, two from parents, one from a teen that said the same thing, that you're making a difference in the world. I don't do it from a religious point of view. I don't judge. We don't judge any reason why you're depressed as a teen or you're anxious or you're stressed. We put no judgment on that. We just want to help you. Yeah. Wow. Well, if it's life vision coaching help with the financial side of things or the brighter day side of things the help you provide there. I just applaud your work. Thank you so much for what you're doing and why you're doing it. And Elliot, I guess at this point, I would say if people are

interested in either one of your missions and crusades and causes, what's the best way that they can reach out and connect with you? Great. My cell number, Michael, and I urge people call me on my cell. I get those day and night. 510, 206, 1103. I am in California, Pacific time. So, Try not to call me at three to morning. And then Elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T, 2-L-1-T at Prosperity Financial Group.com. Well, Elliot, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you, Michael, for having me.

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