Heroes in Business - Grant Cardone, Founder of $4B Cardone Enterprises, Author of The 10X Rule grantcardone.com

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Grant Cardone, founder of $4B Cardone Enterprises, author of The 10X Rule, and creator of top-selling business programs, joins David Cogan, renowned host and founder of Eliances, for an exclusive interview at the Eliances Heroes Show. grantcardone.com

Up in the sky, look, it's captivating. It's energizing. It's Eliance's Heroes. Eliance's is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities, and startups. Where our heroes in business aligned. Now here's your host flying in, David Cogan, founder of E-Lionces. That's right and I'm so excited we've got a full day planned today. Make sure you stick around too because later on we have the co-founder of Netflix

coming on and check out past episodes when I had the founder of E Entertainment. So make sure that you go to elliances.com that's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com because it is the only place where entrepreneurs align. Well I've got just his name to say and you'll probably recognize him. He is all I've seen him on the news. I mean, just everything. You will be completely amazed because we have with us today, the Grant Cardone, Cardone, CEO of Cardone Enterprises, Cardone Capital, international speaker, entrepreneur, author, the 10X rule,

creator of 21 bestselling business programs, owns and operates seven privately held companies valued at $5.2 billion and just the list just goes on. That's just for this morning of what he's done and you could reach him by going to GrantCardone.com. Grant, welcome to the show. David, thank you, man. You're so entertaining, dude. I love the opening here. I appreciate it. We're gonna have to share the stage sometime here

because Grant, you know, you have phenomenal amount of energy. I've seen you on TV. I've seen the way that you speak and communicate. Where does that come from? And how do you draw in everybody? It comes from failure, man. Shit, you know, so I was, you know, I'm in Scottsdale today.

I did not know you guys were here in town. I'm actually in this, my partner let me use this place and they haven't even finished it. But I used to come to this town 25 years ago. I was cold calling business owners here in town, tens of thousands of cold calls, knocking on the door, walking in saying, hey, I got this great idea. I was basically a salesman, but I was selling something that was intangible, which is I could improve their business. I didn't have an actual, I didn't have pots and pans, right? So, but I had a concept and idea about how to change a business. So what has made me, you know, the energy, the tenacious is just the drive to be

successful. You know, I wanted to make something of myself and I had an idea that I could do something. I thought I was somebody. Nobody else thought I was somebody. But, you know, I just like so many entrepreneurs on the come up, you have an idea, some belief that is backed by nothing. And I didn't give up on it. I've been running this game for 35 years now since I was 28 years old. And figured out how to crack through man. Now, you know, I remember when I couldn't get six people to show up for an event.

Now we have events where there's 30,000 people at them. They come from all over to see you, but you do such a phenomenal job, Grant, of being able to engage the audience, whether they're in the last row or whether they're in the front row. What's the secret, the magic of that? So for me, I've never forgot where I came from.

I've always been the little guy, the outsider. I've never felt like anybody treated me like the person I knew I could be. And I just promised that if I ever made it, I promised myself that if I ever made it, I would treat other people the way I would want to be treated. And I know that sounds kind of foo foo, but I have a belief that everybody should be treated like a millionaire. Everybody should be treated like a whale. All whales start as minnows or something. They start small. And, you know, every billionaire I ever met started off

as a non-accredited investor that probably had trouble in school, that had to grow up just like the rest of us. Even if you're born to a rich family, you still don't have anything. I told my two kids the other day, they said, pop, are we rich? I said, no, I'm rich. You have nothing. OK? OK, you got to go get yours. So I grew up in a middle class family,

and I've never forgotten where I came from and how hard it is to hang on and just get by. And so whether you're in the back seats, whether you're on YouTube following me and paying nothing, it doesn't matter to me whether you're paying me nothing or you're paying me a lot of money. To me, you're a human being and you could, and I truly believe that anybody can be a star.

Excellent. All right, so you've got this 10X, you're the 10X master in that. Why not 5X? Why not 15X? Where does the 10x come from? Well, the 10 is a multiplier, right? So it's in 2008 when the economy, the global economy, collapsed, I looked at, hey, what could I have done different? And that was the, that was literally

the creation of the 10x rule. And basically, I looked at what I would have had to do different back in 2008, nine and 10 to prosper because of the collapse rather than be punished by it. And had I been 10 times bigger at that time, I would not have been punished in the same way. That means 10 times more customers, 10 times the verticals, 10 times the audience, 10 times the reach. I would have needed 10 times the employees, 10 times the effort to counter

this devastating moment. And here it is 12 years later to happen again with COVID. We're probably going to go into a major recession here in the next 12 to 15 months, David. And you'll find out whether you've been investing enough energy and resources to build your business or not. Small no longer works. The small get punished, unfortunately. So Grant, how do we make money now? What can we do?

Where do you even invest? What do you look at? Where do you start? What's the best thing to go into. What can we do? It's on sale. All of America is still on sale. You guys think it's gone up because it went up 30%. We printed 40% of all the dollars in circulation have been printed in the last 36 months. I'm sorry, in the last maybe, maybe what, two years, yeah, maybe the last five years. Things would have to, things would have to, real estate would have to things would have to real estate would have to inflate a great deal higher because the amount of money that's

available today will continue to push real assets up. So I would tell people number one get your money out of the banks, quit saving money, stop the IRAs, stop the 401ks, stop worrying about paying down your debt. I know this is contrary, okay? Cash is trash. It is complete garbage. Convert your cash into real assets that produce income. And by the way, I'm not talking about where you live. I'm talking about investing money in properties that you can rent out to others that provides cashflow, appreciation, and tax write-offs. Absolutely, absolutely amazing, amazing. All right, so we've had some of our listeners

and viewers submit questions prior to the interview. All right, one of them wants to know, so which political office are you gonna run for? Huh, I haven't said whether I would run or not, but the question is if I did, which party would I run with? Because it's not clear. I had Donald Trump on my stage recently. He's like, you know, I think I would endorse you. He's like, and I don't even know whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. He never got an answer to that question. But,

you know, I do know that something needs to change there. Our education system is failing families. Something needs to change. And I typically am not a person that complains about something before I finally jump in and try to do something about it. All right, all right, all right. Again, and you're watching, listening to me, David Kogan,

host of the Alliances Hero Show. Make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com, because we have with us Grant Cardone, CEO of Cardone Enterprises, Cardone Capital, international speaker, entrepreneur, author of the 10X Rule, creator of the 21 best-selling business programs and owns and operates portfolio worth over $5.2 billion. Grant, how in the world do you have all that time to even be able to create all this stuff and manage it? I mean, it just seems like it would take an entire army to do that. People I have, exactly it's an army. I have great people. We have 800 employees in Miami. We just expanded our offices to Scottsdale. We expect to have as 800 employees in Miami. We're we're just expanded our offices to

Scottsdale. We expect to have as many employees in Arizona as we have in Miami in our real estate arm. Um, so we're in a lot of different ventures. I think you know, the bio you have is eight companies. There's 15 companies now. A lot of partnerships. We look for great people. We're collaborating with a lot of other people to do to do great things and People man, you said it's an army You got to go big folks if you if you try to stay small in the 21st century Particularly with what's coming up you will cease to survive small is not a strategy. It is a retraction And it is a it is an idea that you're gonna stay small and you're gonna be fine and

you're gonna keep all the profits. The truth is you're gonna get killed. The middle class is getting crushed right now. This will continue by the way. Wealthy people, people that wanna create wealth and financial freedom for themselves don't stay small. And they don't do many of the things that the middle class does. They don't save their money. They invest their

money. They don't buy homes. They invest in homes. They they buy. They buy properties. They live off their passive income, not their earned income. They do so many things different. So uh how do I do it all man? Because I because uh you know, I'm interested in doing it all. Do you I don't want to get squashed anymore. I'm tired of getting beat up by the big guys. Do you sleep?

Oh yeah, I sleep. I get at least eight hours of sleep a day. Excellent, excellent. All right, so what do you do? I wake up at 16 hours. That's right. Oh, I know you've got things planned to a T. What about, what's your view of stock market?

Stocks, bonds, all that? I hate it. I hate the stock market. Hate it. I despise it. It feels like a dirty ass casino to me. Interesting. Interesting. All right. Okay. All right. So, um, again, Grant, you just continue to do so much. Uh, I know you've got two daughters in that. We and me and our listeners and viewers wanna know the secrets that you're sharing with your daughters now of how to one, leave a legacy and an imprint

like you've done and how to be successful and leave their mark in the world. Look how many people Grant you have touched, right? How do you, what kind of things do you share with your daughters about that? So, you know, they're with us, we homeschool our kids. We took them out of the education system, something I briefly touched on earlier

about how we're letting our kids down. And so we homeschool our kids. They travel with us everywhere we go. So they get to see the world. They get to be part of my meetings. They get to be part of our conferences. They get to meet very important people, which I think is really important to put kids in places

where they can meet outside their comfort zone. We spend a lot of time with them encouraging them meet outside their comfort zone. We spend a lot of time with them, encouraging them to do what they wanna do and also encouraging them to be part of our team. So our kids are given nothing without exchange. They have a crazy great lifestyle that we don't just give them, okay? They earn it. They're in exchange with us and we're in exchange with them. So I have a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old, Scarlett

and Sabrina. They've been on stages. They work for the company. They get a paycheck. Their paycheck gets invested in real estate. They live off the dividends from the real estate. I don't just give them stuff. So everything they get, every dress they buy for themselves, all the tennis shoes, they've earned all that. How do you find the deals in real estate? Where does someone go? How do you, I mean, cause it's-

Well, I do deals, number one, do deals, okay? So like, I've been trying to buy real estate in Phoenix for three years now missed it, but I bought in the last we're $5.2 billion worth of real estate apartments, apartments, some office, we're looking at office in Scottsdale right now to expand our office portfolio. And we're looking for apartments here. But you got to be looking every day, you got to be making contacts with brokers. This apartment thing is not over. We're not in a bubble.

Folks, you need to be shopping real estate. Multi-family real estate is the golden goose. It will continue to work for the next 20 years. We will become a renter nation in America. People will not own homes the way they did in the 50s and 60s. They provide income. Be willing to get 3 or 4% on your money to wait for the appreciation of a double or a triple. This is what these properties have done for the last, since 1945. This is not a new thing, by the way. Since 1945, rental prices in America have gone up every single year since World War II ended, and that will continue. Wow. Now, Grant, I know you've done a gazillion interviews. What question haven't you been asked that you would have liked to have others? You gotta win, man. You gotta win. You can't stay motivated if you're losing. So, you know, the thing I did, look, I lost for 10 years of my life from the age of 15 to 25. I was losing every day. And then from about 30, 35, 36 till about 42, I was losing again. And so one thing I would tell people is you have to figure out how you can win. Now once you start winning at one thing, you got to figure out how to win at something else because that's going to get old.

You're not going to be motivated winning at the same game over and over and over again. It's just, if you win at every game you play, you're going to quit playing those games, you need a new game. So I would just tell people that the number one thing I've done that's helped me stay motivated is once I get to a certain place, then I move. I literally move myself physically. I've moved seven or eight times in my career.

I've moved my family. When I get too comfortable, I move myself physically. Now that might mean I moved my home, I've moved my family. When I get too comfortable, I move myself physically. Now that might mean I moved my home, but typically what it really means is I move into another audience. I start asking to get in other rooms with other people. And when you get around people that are doing more than you, people that are doing more than you will never hate on you.

It's the people that are equal or below you, I'm talking about production-wise, that will pull you down. The people above you will not hate on you. They don't even talk about you because they're too busy doing stuff. Right, right, yeah, no, exactly, exactly. You talked about too, people,

as far as that you've got good people, you surround yourself with good people, help manage your, you know, huge portfolio. And I mean, just to even review all that would take forever. How do you find those? How do you find who, and Grant, how do you find though who to trust? Cause you're putting, they're holding your money, right?

I mean, how do you find them? Well, nobody holds my money, but I don't give it to financial planners, Schwab, Fidelity. I don't give it to Goldman. I don't give it to anybody. Like, I want to become those people. I don't want to give them that. I'm trying to duplicate and emulate what these guys have done. And so how do I find those people? You got to be in a bigger game. You just got to keep, I have to keep leveling up my game. Remember David, when I was 25 years old, I was broke.

I was in debt. I just came out of a treatment center to recover from a terrible drug addiction. My first deal, my first deal was a $3,000 investment in a piece of real estate. I parlayed that, no connections, no debt, I had no banks, no connections. That's why when Discovery Channel, I don't know if you know if I did this show called Undercover Billionaire, where Discovery Channel said, this was two years ago, a year and a half ago.

Hey, if we drop you off in a city with no money, you can't use your name and you can't use your credit card, you can't call your friends, how long would it take you to build a million dollar business? I said, oh, I don't know, about 90 days, maybe less. And they said, you think you could do that? We wanna make a TV show of that. I said, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll build a $10 million business in 90 days.

Jeez. With no money, don't give me a place to live, no food or no water, and you just follow me for about 60 or 90 days and let's see what happens. I built a $5.5 million business with no money, no food, no shelter, built it in about 68 days during COVID,

and bought a $1.7 million piece of real estate with no money. And that happened during COVID. That's a recent time, right? That's like in present time. So you got to have a strategy, right? But you got to meet the right people. For me, everything's about the people I meet. Who can I partner with? It's easy. Once you know what to look for in the right people, if you, if you know what to look for, that would make them the wrong people, then you'll know how to find the right people. Same thing with success. If you know what not to do, you're left with what to do. How do you organize your day? Well, first I get my eight hours of sleep in every day. Okay. I find that

I used to try to run on four hours. It was terrible for me. I was agitated. I was angry. I was like, you know, it wasn't good for me. And I tried that for many years. So first thing I do is I prioritize my rest. And then now it's okay,

how am I gonna use my 16 hours, right? Wake up in the morning, get a workout in. I try to get a workout in every day. And then I have a schedule laid out where I'm like, hey, 1130, you got to be with David, man. So you guys send me the notes of the show. I don't read them. I show up.

We do this. I'm like, why am I going to read what they're going to try to do when I know we're going to end up going some other place anyway? That's right, that's awesome, that's awesome. Grant, you do so much for so many, you inspire so many. I mean, you really, you know, the impression that you leave on others,

do you just ever just sit back and just take it in and go from where you were, you never just sit meeting me now that you you didn't see like my wife, I've been married 18 years. She didn't see the first 17. She didn't really even know what I went through. She knows what we've been through. Right. So yeah, look, all I can tell you and whoever's listening right now is every time I see a successful person, the first thing I think about doing is going up to them and saying,

thank you for being successful. Because I don't care if it's handed to you, even if somebody gives it to you, then you got to keep it. And most people can't even keep it, much less get it. You got to get it, you got to keep it, then you got to multiply it. Because if you don't multiply it, you're not't even keep it, much less get it. You gotta get it, you gotta keep it, then you gotta multiply it. Cause if you don't multiply it, you're not gonna keep it. You cannot keep anything that you don't expand.

If you don't expand it, we'll leave you. Flat lines always fall, right? Nothing stays the same. There's always gonna be change. That's right. We'll expand. Just like the Alliance's Hero Show is expanding with Grant Cardone, who you inspire millions to go after their dreams and make the reality the life they

want to live. That's a hero, the 10X Master, Grant Cardone CEO of Cardone Enterprises, Cardone Capital. Make sure that you go to grantcardone.com. This has been David Kogu with the Alliance's Hero Show.