The Entrepreneur DNA - Beyond the Grind: Record-Breaking Founder to a Philanthropic Visionary | Dan Fleyshman | EP 5

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Delve into the journey of Dan Fleyshman, the youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history turned angel investor in 43 ventures. Through captivating dialogue, Fleyshman reveals the relentless drive and personal sacrifices demanded by entrepreneurship. From forsaking personal milestones for business milestones to the exhilarating highs of scaling ventures and launching chart-topping podcasts, the narrative oscillates between the allure and challenges of building empires. Fleyshman’s insights on branding, marketing, and the transformative power of personal branding illuminate the path for aspiring entrepreneurs. Beyond wealth accumulation, Fleyshman’s vision extends to philanthropy, aiming to tackle homelessness and basic human needs. Amidst discussions on financial strategy and investment, Fleyshman’s wisdom underscores the significance of perseverance and strategic vision in navigating the tumultuous landscape of business and life.

All right, everybody, welcome back to the Entrepreneur DNA. I have a good friend of mine, Dan Fleischman is in the house. What's up, brother? That's a really good name for a podcast, by the way. Entrepreneur DNA? Because it's in your DNA. That's it. So I appreciate that.

Well, listen, your resume is so expansive. I want to cut to the chase. I want everyone to know who you are, but I want you to give them your top two items that you think you'd want to share from your resume, what you've accomplished in all these years. Youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history and angel investor in 43 companies. Let's go. What does it take to get there? How do you get those two resume bullet points?

Obscene obsession. Okay. You have to be obsessed with work. You have to be hyper-focused and you have to be relentless. You can't worry about people saying no because a lot of people are gonna say no you can't worry about people like trying to stop you because a lot of people are gonna try to stop you oh yeah can't get sad or mad when bad things happen because every day bad things happen that's right you're an entrepreneur you just have to be a firefighter and so it's just you know you have to know that going in

bad things happen you got to fix it people are gonna doubt, you have to know that going in, bad things happen. You got to fix it. People are going to doubt you. You got to keep going. Like, as long as you know, going into the fire, into the jungle, that's what you the level as you've been able to reach. And this is why I have you here. I'm so honored to, by the way, for all my listeners, this man literally last night is texting me. I'll fly into Miami to do a podcast with you. Then I will fly out the very next morning. So he is sacrificing, but that is part of the obsession. He he's doing it because he's a friend of mine, but also this is his DNA. This is the entrepreneur DNA he has. He has meetings all day tomorrow in Jacksonville. So thank you again for coming and making the sacrifice. But the obsession part, I want to, I want to hone in on that because there's a lot of sacrifices we make that I think a lot of people, they either don't value the sacrifice we make. I guess the best way I could say is don't value, but let's talk about some of the things that you maybe sacrificed, just tv but like yeah did you maybe not have a you know young

20 absolutely party phase did you sacrifice these so i went public when i was 23 years old right right so all of a sudden i'm rich and my like i got all this stuff going on i'm traveling from 23 to 27 i got the product the energy drink into 55 000 retail stores i do not remember a birthday a date or anything there so nothing like literally nothing i only remember selling drinks for four years now that's not a good thing from like personal life and like for sure like oh family like i literally don't remember it but i don't regret it because that's part of the obsession and also you don't know until you get into it, how much physical time you're going to be away from family, friends, old friends, and everybody in between. Cause you are focused on

work. You are focused on the goal. And by doing your work and the goal, everyone around you wins and all the people in your friends and family win. That's hard for everyone to understand. Yeah. So let's talk about the company. Can you mention the company that you took public? Yeah. So I trademarked the catchphrase, who's your daddy? Yeah. So I had over 300 products, clothing, barbecue sets, but the energy drinks was the main thing once I went public. Before that, I did tens of millions of dollars in sales of apparel. And then the energy drink was my focus. It was the very first zero sugar, zero carb, zero calorie energy drink. And the first one was like bright colored cans. We had the cranberry pineapple. We had the first green tea.

Like we were doing innovative things back then. And so I was obsessed with it. By the way, one more thing about obsession. The reason you have to be obsessed to be an entrepreneur is in those hours when it's 11 PM and it's 1 AM and it's 2 AM or it's 6 AM and you got to get up early. You have to be obsessed to want to do that. That's it. When your dog wants to cuddle or your girlfriend or husband wants to cuddle, you have to be obsessed to want to pick up and go to work and do your thing. And you have to push all these other things aside, which sounds mean. You have to do that. You have to be obsessed to actually become an entrepreneur. Yeah. And listen, I'm a big fan of, like I talked to a lot of people, I'm going to be a billionaire. My vertical is

going to be through real estate. That is my specialty. But I own seven companies at this point. One of them has my intrigue. It's in technology. By the way, I know nothing about technology. But what would you advise someone who's going to go hard in the paint? What level of obsession would you say is safe, right?

Where you're not sacrificing your physical health? It is not safe to be an entrepreneur. Okay. And it's not okay that people make it cool to be an entrepreneur. Yeah. It is really hard. Yeah. No matter what level you're at, every step of the game is super, super hard.

When you first try to raise money, when you first have an idea, when you first try to get going, then you finally get some sales and you want to go to the next level. Then you need more capital because you actually got sales. And then all of a sudden you got more capital and you got all these people to answer to. And there's a board of advisors. Now you got a bunch of sales and everything's going great. But then all your employees start to leave and you got fired. There's competition and then you got, and there's lawsuits because now you've got money. Every step of the game is hard. There is point ever that's not hard even trying to sell your company takes a year or two and you go through five different backstab offers like

every single step of an entrepreneurship is hard and we don't talk about it enough because everyone just thinks it's cool yeah an entrepreneur this could be my favorite podcast episode already because it's so damn real i mean it is not, the amount of sacrifice. And for those that are married and have loved ones that have kids, I mean, it is on another level, like the love for kids and missing those things. That is incredibly difficult. So let's take it where you are now. You've done a lot in the last 12 months, 18 months. I've been watching this journey. Tell me about what you're most excited about right now. So the reason I'm going to hyperdrive is I feel like I'm in the matrix. I can see when I want to launch something, I can scale it. Gary V named cards and coffee, my sports card store chain. It was a fun idea,

fun hobby. Eight weeks in 1 million sales. I self-funded with 1.6 million, eight months in 10 million sales. Nobody else in the sports car space is doing that. I can, I feel like I could just see it because I had all the puzzle pieces. Ever Bowl, we went from 17 locations to 30 locations. Now 81 locations. One new one every six days. I feel like I'm in the matrix, right? I'm going to start a podcast finally for four years. I'm like, I'm not going to do a podcast.

I launched it exactly a year ago. We were number one entrepreneur category for 41 weeks out of the year. By the way, everyone needs to go listen to that right now. If you're watching this, listening to this, if you're on my YouTube, wherever you're at, go to The Money Mondays. And so I just feel like I can see it now. And that's why I'm going to hyperdrive. Then last summer, I bought into the parent company of Aspire Tour. We have 19 companies within it,

but Aspire Tour is the one that people can see because it's a nationwide tour. Double the size of the business. All of a sudden, it's the largest business tour where I have Kevin Hart and 2 Chainz and Rick Ross and T-Pain and Mark Cuban. I just feel like I can see it right now. I can see how to scale things in each vertical, in each category. I'm going to throw the world's largest toy drive and I'm going to break my own record and I'm going to break my own record again. I feel like I'm in it. You know what I'm saying? So that's why you see like the last 18 months in particular, I'm going to hyperdrive in charity, podcasts, books, speaking, every category. Yeah. I just feel like I'm in it and I can see this is what we need.

This is who we need. This is how we can do it. Do you believe in seasons? Absolutely. Do you believe like Dan Fleischman has his season right now? I'm in until the season's up. I'm in it. I mean, the way I kind of bring it up is a season or like a wave.

Like this wave runs, but at some point the wave crashes. Of course. So you ride the damn wave as long as you can. And right now you're in the middle of the tube almost, I guess would be a great analogy. You see it happen in basketball games all the time. Momentum. The team's down 26 in the fourth quarter. Like, ah, I would bet my kidney that it's over.

And then they win by four. You're like, how'd that happen? Oh, they're down by 32 at halftime. Ah, this is boring. Change the channel. You come back, they're up by 12. Like momentum happens in business. Momentum happens in family, in charity, in life, in friendship and everything between momentum happens. And during that time, it's up to you to keep up the momentum or not. I think people give up before they catch it. The challenge is not people getting excited about owning a business, being an entrepreneur. The challenge is they'll give up before they even have a chance to sniff momentum. Well, that's again because we're in an ADD society that's like,

they could be two months in or six months in or one year in. They're like, I'm not a bazillionaire yet. How? Right. Even if you crush, let me give you a quick example. Let's say you and I start greenshirts.com together and Justin goes and gets $4 million in sales of green shirts. I put in 500K to start the company. Guess how much Justin's going to make in that year? It rhymes with zero.

Because if he goes and does $4 million in sales off the 500K I gave him, $2 million of that was hard costs. The manufacturer of the green shirts, he spent $600,000 in paid ads and paid media. He got an office that cost $200,000 a year. He hired seven staff that cost $400,000 a year. What money is left over for Justin? None. So people think that, oh, I did $4 million in sales. That means you made zero.

Your staff made money. Justin, the CEO, made zero. You're always last to get paid. Let's talk about that. That is a very under-talked-about subject. People want to start a business. They, the CEO, made zero. You're always last to get paid. Let's talk about that. That is a very under-talked-about subject. People want to start a business. They want to start a new thing. They want to start a new vertical.

They want to start a new something. Even the experienced entrepreneurs, even me, like I just said, I'm going into tech. I am not taking any income. Everyone is making money except me. The sales guys are already selling, crushing it, making multiple six figures. Daddy's bringing home zero. Actual zero. And by the way, when rent's due, when the credit card bills are due, when everything is due, every invoice that comes in, guess who's going to pay it if there's no money in the car?

Yeah. Just me. Every time. Absolutely. Nobody else. That sales rep that made $200,000 this year, he's pitching in $0.00 and he'll look at you sideways if you ask them to put up 10 grand for one of those invoices. 100. But the second that he makes a sale, he makes sure I know how much commission he's going to make to make sure it's paid out.

Absolutely. As he should, by the way. Oh, and I love it. And I encourage it because I know my role. I've done this a long enough time. So how long have you been an entrepreneur? How old are you now? I'm 42 now.

I started my company when I was 17 and a half. I like to say that. Bro, I had an entrepreneur spirit, right? So I was like hustling sports cards. By the way, kudos to you. And you got me back into sports cards. Listen to Cop List. Legit. Dude, I was breaking packages. I didn't know I was watching you. I'm like, I'm breaking, right? So super happy I did. I definitely need one of those rookie cards from that new rookie. Oh yeah. I can't even pronounce his name. Yeah, his name is Funky, but like, I'm breaking. Right. So super happy. I did. I definitely need one of those rookie cards from that new rookie. I can't even pronounce his name. His name is funky, but yeah, he's amazing. Um, and then I'm a Niner fan. Brock Purdy rookie cards right now, like eight,

nine grand. Come on. I missed the boat already. Anyways, I had like the hustle where I'd open a box of baseball cards in the, the card store. Yeah. Sell them the best cards back at wholesale price. Essentially double my money. So at the time it was 20 bucks. I would make 40. Give my mom the 20 bucks back. I would take my other 20 bucks. Everybody wins.

But you legit were starting businesses at 17 years old. I trademarked the catchphrase when I was 17 and a half. My older brother had to help us do it because you have to be 18 to do all the work. 18, we went to the clothing convention in Vegas called Magic. We 18 to, you know, do all the work. 18,

we went to the clothing convention in Vegas called Magic. We wrote $1 million in orders. It was in 1999. Were they the big white shirts or whatever? It says, who's your daddy? That's all it was.

Dude. We were in Mervin's, Miller's Outpost, Anchor Blue, like the stores, these are old school stores that don't even exist. Some of them don't even exist anymore.

Anchor Blue, I love that. The booth next to me was FUBU and he had like a million damon damon had a million dollar booth the brand new clothing line by some guy named puff daddy oh called sean john was like literally a castle right next to me i had 20 feet yeah that was my booth yeah i had two high school girls in the freaking clothing rack we were at a million dollars in orders the next year we did a deal for 9.5 million dollars with starter apparel in the

uk that changed everything. Because now we got 8% of gross sales as royalty money, 3% for marketing money. They did all the manufacturing. That set us up into the clothing space to go through. How long do you stay in the game to catch that momentum? Back to kind of this point of momentum. How long do you tell people, like, obviously you got to be in the right vertical. You got to understand that there's something there that there's, but like, how long would you encourage people? Like, even if you don't feel like you're winning right now, even if you got to keep pushing, what's your thoughts on all that? You're going to know in the first year, if you are onto something, you're going to know in the

second year, if you can actually do it after that there's decisions. Cause it's based on category and vertical of what you're doing or what you're up to. The first year is set up shop and research. Like if you want to do real estate or tech or anything between like immerse yourself, go to every convention, go to every event, be on Google all night, be on social media, like immerse yourself to learn everything. You might realize I don't like tech or I love tech by immersing yourself in the space. The second year you realize, okay, now I know how to raise capital. Now I know how to get sales. Now I met a bunch of people. Now I have connections, relationships. Now, if you can actually go get sales, then go for it. If you're not doing it by year or two, you might want to go look at working somewhere else. Absolutely. So let's

talk about social media. You started a pretty powerful branding company. How much have you spent on ads? Over $60 million with influencers for brands, products, and mobile apps. That's insane. So let's talk about branding. I just interviewed our mutual friend Grant Cardone and asked him about branding. I don't know mutual friend Grant Cardone and asked him about branding. I don't know what he heard or didn't heard when I asked him the importance about branding, but he said his bullshit. He said, Grant, you are the guy who branded yourself.

He spends more money than anybody in the category. And so I love him. Grant, if you're watching this, talk to me about branding, the power of branding, power of personal brand, the power of everyone knowing Dan Fleischman with all the companies. But it's got to be Dan Fleischman. Let's talk about branding. I mean, Grant even spent six years with me to do branding.

So he likes branding. Yeah, yeah. To be clear. You might not have heard the question. He is one of the true icons of the branding. Whether you love him or hate him or whatever it is about him, they're relevant. You think about them when you talk about them. A hundred percent.

Absolutely. And so he spends more on personal brands than literally who else besides like Tai Lopez back in the days, like who spends more than Grant? Not Gary Vee. Gary Vee doesn't spend it. He does it through organic. Grant does organic also. Anyways, it is mission critical. Yeah. You have a personal brand, whether you like it or not. It's up to you to decide if you want to tell the story or let other people gossip about you. Right. Your choice also is if you know that your personal brand leads to sales or investors or partnerships or deals or whatever, then more. Like if you know

I'm a real estate agent, if I had more clients and I had more people see me, I would make more money. Okay. Go get more famous. That's right. Even if just in your niche or your category, when I say famous, I don't mean TMZ. I mean in your niche or in your category, you know? And too many people don't do it or they think they can only do organic or should only do organic, which is insane. You need to build your personal brand

if it relates to your business, sales, charity, you have a book, you have an event, something in your world, you have to get more famous. You're hearing this from someone who spent over $60 million on influencers for brands. The man knows what he's talking about. So you've heard it from me enough. Start branding yourself. Now, with that said, I'm watching you and hitting you up periodically, but what is the movement for right now? What is this momentum? Where are you going? What are you

trying to achieve with all that you've already achieved? You're 42, you're the same age as I am. With everything that's on your resume, what are you going for with the Aspire Tour, which is front-facing, all the other things behind it? So my ultimate goal is to save the world. There's only three main categories that humans need to survive. Food, water, shelter. Obviously, they need love and other things and things that would matter to people, but to actual hardcore survival, especially in third world countries, they need food, water, shelter. Charity water does a great job in what they're doing for water. And I don't want to replicate or compete with them. Either way, I wouldn't mind competing because it helps the world, but meaning that they just do such a

great job. I'd rather support them. Sure. On the food side, it's so clear when you've got tens of thousands of major food companies, hundreds of thousands of food companies, but tens of thousands of major ones that have so much excess supply or product that's very affordable that we can be buying at a cheap wholesale

or they could be donating, we could be giving it out. I want to create a very efficient model to give out food to homeless, to third world countries. And by the way, there's a huge amount of people that are not homeless, but they are not getting by. And that number is going to get worse because our inflation being at 9% a year, the lower income is not going to become homeless technically, but man, they have to choose between

their insurance bill and food or their rent and food. It's going to get tough. Or milk and bread because it's too expensive. It's going to get tough. So delivering food at an affordable price and then buying it at wholesale or getting it for free, then distributing it around the planet. That's one part. And then the homeless side, that part is completely clear to me. I have a very clear vision of how to basically build small cities for the homeless next to major cities to provide an environment for them to rehab, get better. And some people will never get better. Some people won't rehab because they want to be, I know it sounds weird. They want to be homeless. They did a study in San Diego.

They built a 114 unit, put in 114 homeless people in it. Within one week, there was less than 20 of them living there. Wow, dude. Wow. And it was nice. It wasn't wasn't like you know they just want to be homeless and so it's part of their lifestyle and so that part is hard because that's not fixable yeah um unless without extreme therapy psychology uh rehab etc so anyways the point is uh my goal in all this of why i'm trying to get personal brand wealthy build a lot of friendships and make a lot of other people, the masses money and teach them about money. Whether it's podcasts, speaking, et cetera. I need the masses and my friends to get really rich so that I don't ask them for anything. But one day I'm like, Hey, I can solve food or I can solve homelessness in this area.

I need money. I don't want a dollar from it. I don't want to take like when I run this charity, as you guys have seen for 12 years, I'm also publicly showing all my charity stuff and I pay for all of it. And I don't want you to donate if you don't have to. Go do it yourself. I'm showing in public how I do charity, how I can throw the world's largest toy drive, Thanksgiving food drives, 6 million items to the homeless, et cetera, so that people can see that one day Dan's going to ask and say, hey, let's do this together.

That's right. That's right. So let's talk about money real quick. I enjoy your podcast a lot. I enjoy your guests. Obviously, I'm listening to the advice you give. A lot of people don't, they say they don't care about money. So I don't agree with it, right?

I'm hell-bent on money. I'm hell-bent on making as much damn money as I possibly can not to sacrifice my love for my family in any of that but I think it is the most important thing barring the essentials because it really provides the the the answer to a lot of the pain hurt issues that we have normal people have every single day right um you have a different mission it sounds like for money right you're really out there to make as much as you can not for dan although dan i don't buy anything yeah but because you have a bigger mission and in this talk just i know we just talked about that but like let's talk about the money factor and how it plays into all this.

So society, we just grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. And that put us at a huge deficit because we couldn't have discussions about salary and rent and loans and all the situations that come up. What really at the core of it, if you think about it, money is not the root of all evil. It's the root of all your solutions. If your mom gets sick, you need money and you would do anything to pay for her to have an extra one month, one year, two years, five years. If your dog gets hurt, what would you do? If you had to spend $5,000 or $10,000 to fix the dog for another year or two, would you do it? That decision changes if you only have two grand in the bank. That's right. You don't have the option. When you have 20 grand, you have a different decision. 50 grand, 100 grand, 200 grand. People think it's rude for

me to say that. It is not rude. No. You're making a decision for your mom or your dog or your child or yourself, et cetera. You want to live somewhere. The difference between a two bedroom, a three bedroom, a four bedroom, a five bedroom is about 20, 30, 40% each time. That is part of money. You want to go to restaurants because you enjoy it or you want your kids to play sports or it's expensive. You want them to go to private school, private school is expensive. You want to fly however you want to fly, business class, regular. All these things cost money and they're part of your daily life. I didn't say anything that's, I don't say you got to buy private jets and fancy watches. I'm talking about real life, food, travel, sports for your kids, health for your family

and your dog. There's real life stuff that happens. You need to repair something. It costs money. And so we need people to make more money. We need them to invest. I need people to understand it is not cool to not invest it is not cool to not save money you have to save money because life's going to get really expensive and your kids are

going to live to over 100 years old yeah our parents pass away 73 to 77 years old yeah we are going to pass away technically around 83 years old but your kids are going to live to 100 yeah because they grew up where they could be a vegan or they could work out or they can have mental health or they could research things. There's a gym on every corner. There's a Whole Foods in every corner. You and I, there was no Whole Foods. There wasn't a gym on every corner. And so because of that, if you're going to live to a hundred years old, if you retire at 65, you need 35 years of money. How the hell are you going to do that? If you're going to get by on 60 grand a year times up by 35, that's still $2 million. What if you want 100 grand a year lifestyle for 35 years?

You need to have $3.5 million saved up if you never have a medical expense or do anything different. That's right. You have to make more money. How many, you talk about investing, two points. How many different companies, ventures, maybe you can include stock market, real estate. How much investing do you actively do? Everything you said I do. Yeah.

I'm an angel investor in 43 companies. I cherry pick one company every month or two to keep investing in two through the elevator syndicate. Separate from that, I invest into real estate alongside other people. So I don't do real estate. I say, oh, here, Justin, here's $500,000. You do real estate. Oh, here's $20,000. You do real estate. I buy pieces of other people that are don't do real estate. I say, Oh, here, Justin, here's 500,000. You do real estate. Oh, here's 20 grand. You do real estate. I buy pieces of other people that are experts to do real estate. The stock market, I have one main rule. I've only buy 10 stocks and

I buy them over and over and over and over and over. And I never sell them under any circumstance. Because if you believe that Apple will be here in five years, why would you sell it? I believe that Google, Netflix, Facebook, Walmart are going to be here in five years. Why would you sell it? They're going to keep growing. And so I just buy the same things boring over and over and over and over and over. And so investing is a part of my daily life, but it doesn't take as much time as people think. If you like stocks or you like to shop at Walmart, buy some. You watch Netflix every night, buy some Netflix stock. You have a Tesla? Buy some Tesla stock. You have an iPhone?

And you spent $1,500? Buy $1,500 of Apple stock. If you would have just bought, this is one last thing I'll say, if you would have bought the exact amount of Apple stock as you've spent on the iPhone each year for the last 15 years, you would be a millionaire. There's 15 iPhones,

and they're only $1,000, $1,500 each. That would make you a millionaire we're going to end it on that boom guys I appreciate you listening

and watching this episode you need to follow Dan Fleischman on every single platform period let him know exactly the handles

you want him to follow at and where they can best find you so it's all at Dan Fleischman it's also important for you guys you should have

the same screen name on every platform amen see take it it from 60 million worth of spend. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for what you do for the entrepreneur world, people, humanity, friends like myself. We appreciate you, dude. Well, let's do it again. Let's do it again. Peace. Later, guys.