The Money Mondays - Dean Graziosi + Joel Marion Share Their Secrets to Success | E16

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Dean Graziosi is a highly successful entrepreneur, investor, and best-selling author who has transformed the lives of countless people through his teachings on personal development and financial success. Dean has written multiple New York Times best-selling books, including "Millionaire Success Habits" and "The Underdog Advantage." He is also a well-known real estate investor and has been featured on numerous TV shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King Live. Dean is the founder of multiple successful companies and in this episode, he's sharing his best business advice, money strategies and personal success secrets for building unlimited financial freedom. --- Joel Marion is a highly accomplished entrepreneur, fitness expert, and author who has dedicated his life to helping people achieve their health and fitness goals. Marion is the creator of the "8 Week Transformation Challenge" and has written several best-selling books, including "Always Eat After 7 PM" and "The Cheat System Diet." Joel is also the co-founder of BioTrust Nutrition, a leading health supplement company that has helped millions of people improve their health and wellness. He has been featured in numerous media outlets, including Men's Fitness, Women's Health, and CBS News, and continues to inspire and empower people around the world to live their best lives. In this episode, Joel shares the behind-the-scenes secrets for what it took to build success both financially and otherwise in his life. Learn from his industry expertise to grow faster, make more and give more. --- In this episode: 0:00 - Dean Graziosi shares epic advice on how to take control of your financial future 39:55 - How Joel Marion went from $0 to $100M in under 1 year 😲 --- Like this episode? Watch more like it 👇 He Makes Multi-Millions Trading PENNY STOCKS 💰📈 Timothy Sykes | E15: https://youtu.be/EE2Dwe4Mvj0 Codie Sanchez & Pace Morby on Acquisitions & Real Estate | E14: https://youtu.be/F0vWu6r0WMo Watch ALL Full Episodes Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k --- The Money Mondays is a business podcast here to teach you how to make money, invest money, and donate money by showcasing some of the world's most successful people and how they do the same. Hosted by serial entrepreneur Dan Fleyshman, the youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history, this money podcast gives you an exclusive behind the scenes look at how the wealthiest celebrities, entrepreneurs, athletes and influencers make, invest and donate money. If you want to learn more business and investing while you work to improve your financial life, you're in the right place! Subscribe for new weekly episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@themoneymondays?sub_confirmation=1 Dan Fleyshman, The Money Mondays Learn more here: https://themoneymondays.com Watch all the podcast episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k Subscribe for new weekly videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DanFleyshman?sub_confirmation=1 Let’s Connect... Website: https://themoneymondays.com Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-money-mondays/id1663564091 Twitter: https://twitter.com/themoneymondays LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-money-mondays/about/ TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@themoneymondays FB: https://www.facebook.com/The-Money-Mondays-110233585203220/

And if you think of a career sometimes, you're kind of sometimes the voice behind the voice. Sometimes you don't want to say too much because the boss might not like you and give you the promotion. You're taught to be quiet and get the work done as an entrepreneur or someone doing their own thing on the side. You want to be out there. You got to make the moves. You got to take uncomfortable action. You got to persuade people. You got to sell. You got to do all these things. And I've been spending a lot of time thinking somebody could do great in a career and then think when they start being an entrepreneur, it feels weird. Congratulations, it does.

Because now it's time to be you, not the version of you that your company wants. So this was a long answer to a short question. The question was, should you do a side hustle? Should you start your own business? And the answer is yes, if you desire more, also know that you might feel a little uncomfortable. You might say, oh, this doesn't work. And it's easier just to get a check. But is it easier just to get a check when you're not living into your full potential? When you're not living into the man or the woman you're supposed to be? So, and I think where the greatness can lie is a side

hustle or starting a business on the side can lead to the thing that you're destined to do, right? And if you never try it, then if you have two jobs rather than a side thing that could be your own thing, you don't get to lean into you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays. I am so excited about today's guest. I've been watching on TV for decades and so have you. This gentleman works with everyone from Tony Robbins, his own courses, his own businesses,

mastermind.com, which is the parking lot we're sitting in right this second. He just did his huge launch with Matthew McConaughey. I could go on and on. The intro could take the whole 40 minutes. I don't want to do that. What I want to do is talk about three topics. How do you make money? How do you invest money?

And how do you give it away to charity? This gentleman embodies all those things because he loves philanthropy. No, it's how to make money. No, it's how to help other people make money. And that's what's so important to me. It's having discussions about how you guys can make money, invest money, save money, et cetera.

Please give a warm round of applause to Mr. Dean, Gracioci. Hey, man. What's it going on? Good to see you. And the crowd goes wild. Hey everybody, what's going on? All right, so the way it works is we do a quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money, but we like to keep the podcast 40 minutes because the average workouts around

40 minutes, the average commute is around 40 minutes, so that's why we keep it to 40 minutes. So I'm so excited, I know I can do this one for three hours with you, but let's go dive in, give us a quick bio and we're going to start talking about the money. Yeah, before I do I could do this one for three hours with you, but let's go dive in. Give us a quick bio, and we're going to start talking about the money. Yeah, before I do, Dan, I have to tell you, you know, you and I aren't best friends, but we've known each other probably five years. Yeah.

And I have to tell you, every circle on me and the reason you're successful in so many ways, I want to tell you, from my perspective, we all have blind spots. And again, we're not best friends, but we talk several times a year. We see each other at least once or twice a year. I get to see what you're doing.

And I want to say every circle you're in behind your back, what people say is you're one of the most caring entrepreneurs they know. You're willing to help people, you're willing to serve. And some people without realizing, keep score. I mean, if this guy, if I promote his stuff, he promote mine, if I help him with the contact, he can help me. And I watch, you know, you gotta be crazy

not to be able to see patterns. And I watch the people that are most successful are the ones that give unconditionally and are good at business and you're both. And I just wanna give you that kudos. I know why this podcast is doing so well is because you hear to surf. And that's kind of at this phase of my life,

I realize that's the main ingredient. So I wanted to share that. I mean, that's in my heart. So keep watching this guy and listening to him. Bio, I'll go quick. Only to share a bio just so we have a little landscape and context of where things are. I know what it's like to want more. I know what it's like to want more.

I know what it's like to not grow up with money and not feel like you had an advantage. Want more out of life. I watched my mom struggle working three jobs to make nothing. And I just remember the young age saying, I gotta make money to solve this problem. Yeah, my mom. I didn't know how.

But I just knew she got home at 10 o'clock every night after a third job tired and we still didn't have enough money. We still got evicted from our trailer. Like, I don't mean that to be rude, but we literally came home. Our stuff was on the street. We moved in with grandma. So I've been at a place where I had a desire for more, not sure how to get there. So I know that part. If you're if you've got your back against the wall right now, I know what it's like to try, get a little momentum and fail and go, damn, maybe I should go get a job. Maybe I should work for someone else fail and go, damn, maybe I should go get a job.

Maybe I should work for someone else. Maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe I didn't go to college. Maybe my dyslexia is too strong. Maybe people don't believe in me. So I know the self-doubt today's world they call it in Poster syndrome. So I know that part. But I also know when you don't give up, when you keep going through, even when people doubt you, and you doubt yourself, and you just get up and drag yourself through another day. I know what that feels like. I love Augment Dino in the world's greatest salesman. He said, life can be hard when you let your emotions determine your actions.

If you spin it around and let your actions determine your emotions, you can really solve a lot of problems. And I think looking back, I didn't know I was doing it. I think that's what I've done. I didn't feel like doing it. I felt like an imposter when I felt like it's not going to work. I just got up and did the work. And so I also know what it's like to do all the things that didn't work.

And I also know it's like to be a multiple New York Times best-selling author and start over 13 companies. And like you said, I'm blessed to be partners with my dear friend, best friend, Tony Robbins. And we're doing some amazing things we own mastermind.com, and we just got done doing an amazing impactful launch with 2.5 million people registered for the event by midnight. When we're doing this, it was only last week, but we had 550,000 people on live. It was live.

Live, and then by midnight, 2.8 million people had watched the video, and we know we made a great impact. And that's bigger than most TV shows. Yeah, exactly. They have zillion dollar budgets and years of production. That's so wild. So yeah, that's not an exact bio of what I do, but I just think it's easier to relate of a context. I promise you wherever you are. I've been there. So let's deliver some great stuff today. And also say, take what serves you from this and throw the rest away.

But what does serve you? I'm gonna encourage you to do something with it. If something's said by Dan or myself today and you go, oh my God, that, that's me, or I could do that. Forget the rest of the podcast, but go do that one thing. Sometimes we get, I love that you listen to this podcast. I hope you listen to a bunch of great podcasts. But don't get stuck in just listening and going, oh, that sounds good. It makes you feel

good while you're working out or while you're on a commute. Well, stop the car. Pull it over. Stop working out. Grab a pen. Write down something and say, I am taking action on this one thing today. And in most cases, it can be uncomfortable, but that's usually where our juice, our next level lives on the other side of that uncomfortable thing. Why do you think that people are addicted to just listening and learning and going to event after event after event rather than actually taking the action? It feels good.

Right? It feels good. Yeah. Right? It feels good. And it's great. Like listen, I would rather someone listen to books, listen to audios, listen to podcasts, go to events than not.

For sure. But don't get addicted to the way you feel. Don't get addicted to the learning, get addicted to the uncomfortable action. And I like using that word, I've been using that since COVID. Just I said it one day, someone said, well, this is uncomfortable. No crap. Yeah. It's all uncomfortable.

But on the other side of uncomfortable is a next level of life. Like living the hard way today lives, creates the easy way tomorrow. You hustle, you put the time in, but look what you're able to build on the opposite side. It's easy to sit on the couch, complain on others and not complain about other people

in the president and life, but it's really hard in 20 years from now when you don't have a nest egg, you didn't create any wealth, you didn't create financial freedom. So when do you want to put the time in? Now or then? On the making money side of the world. Why do you think it's important for people to either have a side hustle, an extra income,

thinking about being an entrepreneur, tutoring on the side, or driving air being on the side, having extra income. Why do you think it's important in modern society and the way the economy is going right now? Why should they consider having a second income or a side hustle? I think it's, you know, listen, if you're completely content with where you are, I would bet to say you wouldn't be listening to this, right? The money mundeys, right?

You'd be listening to something else. So if you're listening to this, you have a desire for's, right? You'd be listening to something else. So if you're listening to this, you have a desire for more. And here's the fact of the matter. I don't want to be overly pragmatic, but the fact of the matter is if you want more, you have to do more. And it doesn't just mean hustling, like hard work is great. You need the hustle, but hustle in the right direction. So I'll break this up in two pieces. If you want more, you got to do more. And in today's world, I don't know if a career is promised to anyone, things change in a moment. AI could wipe out some industries and it's going to, you know, people, right,

it's going to create new ones. People think, oh, it's going to wipe out everything. They thought that was the internet. They thought computers. There's always shifts. This means other industries are going to grow, and some are going to shrink. I don't know where you'll be caught in that, but here's what I know. If you're a career-oriented person, this is something I want to go, I want to have this conversation with you for me.

I know there's been a long week with the Maconoha thing, so if my ADDs kicked in, I apologize. But this one's really important, is I've always worked for myself. At 17, I started cutting firewood. 18 I started fixing rec cars by 20. I was buying shabby real estate and renovating at night by 22. I had a tow truck company.

So I never I never looked through the lens of a career. And if you think of a career sometimes, you're kind of sometimes the voice behind the voice. Sometimes you don't want to say too much because the boss might not like you and give you the promotion. You're taught to be quiet and get the work done as an entrepreneur or someone doing their own thing on the side, you want to be out there, you got to make the moves, you got to take uncomfortable action, you got to persuade people, you got sell. You've got to do all these things. I've been spending a lot of time thinking somebody could do great in a career and then think when they start being an entrepreneur, it feels weird. Congratulations, it does. Because now it's time to be you, not the version of you that your company wants. This was a long answer to a short question. The question was, should you do a side hustle, should you start your own business? The answer is is yes, if you desire more also know that you might feel a little uncomfortable. You might say, oh, this doesn't work and it's easier just to get a check. But is it easier just to get a check when you're

not living into your full potential? When you're not living into the man or the woman you're supposed to be? So, and I think where the greatness can lie is a side hustle or starting a business on the side Can lead to the thing that you're destined to do Right, and if you never try it then how if you have two jobs rather than a side thing that could be your own thing You don't get to lean into you So quick down the rabbit hole concept of why I'm so passionate about money and people making more money and making it so that it's not rude to talk about money is I Think as people are becoming healthier. We're working out more. There's healthy food options We didn't grow up with healthy food. There was no healthy food restaurants

We went to jack in the box McDonald's because yeah, there was no such thing as healthy food. Whole foods doesn't exist when we were kids True story there wasn't a gym on every corner when we were kids There was one and it was 18 miles away, right now people to live longer. And so a little bit down the rabbit hole, you're not going to die at 77 or 82 or 84 or any more. I think you're people are going to live to $9,100 and God bless them even more than that. Because of that, this is down the rabbit hole, they need more money. And we've got to be blunt about it. You're not going to retire at 65 if you're going to live to 100. That's 35 years of not working. You know how much money need for 35 years?

A lot, even if you can live on 30, 40 grand, time's up by 35. Yeah. Starts to really make you think. Really, really great way to look at it. And so I am passionate to make it not rude to talk about money. We all grew up thinking it was rude.

And I want people to consider why they should have some extra income. I'm not saying to be like, oh, super hustle, you gotta work for 24 hours a day, don't sleep, I am not saying that at all. But you need to start considering investing. Even if it's a hundred bucks a year, 500 bucks a year, 1000 bucks a year,

whatever you can afford over the course of time, those things compound you're gonna need to. If we keep facing nine percent of your inflation, and you're gonna live 10 or 20 or 30 years longer, God bless you, you need to have more money. Yeah, sense of urgency. Okay, so on the money making side, people have a lot of options. You know, they have a lot of different things that they could be doing or could be considering and could be working on, etc.

I could call it tasting it. When tasting it means when I want to figure out what career, what I want to be working on or thinking about, tasting it is go trying it out, study, etc. What's your version of trying things out? Someone could figure out if they want to get into a career, passion or hobby. Maybe I want to work in solar. Maybe I want to work for Dean. Maybe I want to work in the real estate space. How does someone figure out their next chapter in life? Really great point. Here's, again, being an entrepreneur for 30 something years, I know this might sound cocky or arrogant at this

pace in my life. But I believe that with the right mindset, the right work ethic, the right focus, you could be successful in any area. Even if it's overly, you feel it's overly saturated. There's people in every industry. There's hardly anybody inventing anything new. So remember that we have this flawed perception that we have to create something no one's ever done before. No one does. We just make things better than they used to be, right? So that's number one. Number two, if you're going to put the time, dedication, effort into this, it might as well be something that aligns with something you like. Like I'm at a phase of my life, I work more than I've ever worked. I know you do too. I love what I do.

I love it. I spend time with my wife, my children, and I work. I literally don't do anything else, but I don't feel like I work at all. I'm never seeing anything. Right. So my whole point is when you talk about, I always say, investigate, be an investigative reporter, lean into the things that align with who you are and who you'd like to be and stop

thinking just the money. Because I believe you can make the money in anything. Listen, we're all going to be biased. If you talk to somebody in real estate, they're going to say you should look into real estate, right? We're all going to be biased. Me, I just spent the last five years, Tony Robbins, and I help people get into the self-education. He's selling what you know.

Of course, a coach, a program, right, a workshop, a mastermind, right? Masterminds have changed my lives. What you do, change my lives, my life. I mean, it's why we own mastermind.com, right? So I could be biased and say you should think about selling what you know, but what if I was really doing you a service, you should be doing something that aligns with who you are, what you like, or what you do, because if you you're gonna spend that much time on it, find something you like and I agree I

would read books, I would look under the hood, I would find people who've already done it, listen to lots of podcasts, find something that sparks, listen my daughter 16, I'm doing it right now, my daughter is coming to work at my office starting on Monday, right? She can put in 20 hours a week. I want my daughter, I don't want her to work for me forever, but I told the team, I want her to spend two to four hours a week in each department in the production team, in writing. I don't want her to do what I want to do. I want her to go, oh, that sucked.

That sucked. The counting, oh my God, numbers. But dad, when I was in production, I love the video. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The video, then go down that rabbit hole. Absolutely love that. So Gary Vaynerchuk, GaryVee came up with this name,

cards and coffee. And as a hobby, it was March 2020, October 2020, that whole range. I was like, oh, all open up a sports card store because the passion. One store is now a national chain store. It's amazing. $27 million in sales.

I just did it because I liked it. And because it was like, oh, it's an excuse to talk to Gary more often. It's open. I'll open a card shop. It's fun. And now all of a sudden, it's like this whole chain store thing.

And so I believe in that concept of trying things out that you're passionate about, like you just said. So if you like, oh, I love music, well, maybe you become a music tutor. You don't realize that that's your side job. You maybe work for an accountant, but you do music tutoring on the weekends. And that makes you actually 200 bucks or 400 bucks or 1000 bucks a weekend.

And then it becomes your actual profession at some point. Okay. So we talked a bit about the making money side. Let's talk about the investing side. But more than investing capital, that's one thing that we normally talk about. Since we have you, since you're one of the legends of the entire space of coaching masterminds, becoming a better human, let's talk about investing to yourself. Talk us through what is mastermind.com?

What's the concept behind it? Why does it exist? Why did you create it? Because you could do anything. Obviously you guys could have done. You and Tony could have created any type of a company. Why did you focus on mastermind.com and what does it do for a society? So masterminds truly have moved the needle for me more than any other one thing in the

world. You get people in a room with all the same similar desire, sharing their greatest capability, sharing their biggest fears and everybody in the room helps you bust fears. It is the collective wisdom of the room. But why we started Mass to mind is simply this. Tony was 17 years old. Tony Rob was 17 years old. Didn't know what he was's gonna do in his life and

Went to a Jim Rohn event It's meant 47 bucks that he didn't have and Jim Rohn downloaded in two hours his life experience and Tony got massive momentum So much so that he went and got a loan for a thousand bucks from a bank at 17 years old Two days for his 18th birthday and went to the $1,000 immersive event with Jim Rohn. And Jim Rohn, only thing he taught Tony was knowledge. And look what Tony's been able to do to learn from somebody who's already been there. Right? So the hardest thing to learn in life is on your own through trial and error. The fastest way is to find somebody who's already been there. If I wanted to do, I hit you up sometimes and say, hey, this is just swimming lane.

Help me out. And I'm here for you for the same thing. I don't want to try to figure it out if someone's already done it. For me, Tony Robbins was that gift to me 27 years ago. I bought his course off an infomercial and it made me look through a different lens. I realized my past could be the wind behind my sail that life happens for us. Not to us that I could focus on solutions, stuff that you say is obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me at the time. And because that man took the time to create a course

to sell it to me, I know that I've done unbelievable things since then, and I wanna give that gift back to the world. Not only the stuff I've learned, and Tony's learned, we get to do that, right? But we help people like Matthew McConaughey and other people at mastermind.com take what they know and put it out to the world because the fastest way to get where you wanna go

is just find somebody who's already done it. When you say do a side hustle if you've spent 10 years being in a Counten there's somebody on day one saying how the hell do I do it find somebody who's already been there and Learned from them. So I use this example. Let's say that there's Dean and Damon John standing here in front of a forest and there's Dan and Aranum person standing in front of forest forest. And there's Dan and a random person standing in front of forest. And the other side of it is the whole clothing industry. How much faster is Dean and Damon John

going to go through the forest to the end of the clothing industry to make millions of dollars versus me and the random person? It's not going to be close. Because they're going to chop through. And Damon John knows we're a duck. He knows where to jump. He's got a max R. He's got a little pitfalls R and we're going to be over here bloody and scratched up while trying to go through the forest and fighting through the trees when Damon John's been there for

20, 30 years, right? And so to me, that's where the way I try to describe why a coach is worth it, why a coach is important to you in any category that you're in of life. Just like you said, whatever that niche is, there are coaches out there, there are masterminds out there, there are mentors that are out there that you can learn a lot of it for free online. And then when you find the one that you believe in, that you could go and grab onto and grab onto their sit, you know, grab onto their tails, I think it's really important to people to do it. And that's why I'm so passionate about masterminds and talking about it because I believe that that's also why I do elevator nights for free.

Yeah. 51 times for free. Wow. That's my excuse to just get it. We're doing an amazing job. Get everybody to learn more. Okay. When it comes to investing into yourself, I think that a lot of times, people don't know when or why or how or how to find it. How would you say people can figure out who their guide could be or who their coach could be or where is there when a research or I would love to simplify and say find someone that aligns with your core values first right that listen this is in no way disrespect. There's people online that are doing amazing and they show their jets and their Lamborghini's and that's that's their jam and that feels good to you don Don't be embarrassed about that if you want the fancy watch and you want to do

that that person might speak right to you dig in and just make sure that they've walked the walk and talk the talk. That's the only thing I'd say, right? There's there's a lot of people doing that that actually made it and with real businesses and they're doing amazing and there's other people that you know rent the Ferrari on a weekend and borrow someone else's watch. So I'm just say find someone in the lines with your values. And there's other people that are more quiet and more subtle and they're very more intellectual or more pragmatic or more, you know, some are more, you know, visual, some like to write. I would literally find someone that

aligns with your values. And they have the outcome that you want. I know this sounds like duh. But some people don't. Like I said, it's people like, yeah, I want to stop following this guy. I don't like the way he treats his wife. Her the way he talks about his wife or never talks about his wife. Right?

If you're someone who relationships is important, even if you're learning about money, you gotta find someone because in today's world, you could find somebody that aligns with how you feel about relationships, about business, about money, about philanthropy, find someone that align lines, go deep, and then I know even if you don't,

I, you might say I don't have the money right now, don't do not discount the ability to cut a check for speed. Just what you said about Damon John, I was trying to think about, Damon John's standing there for, he's got the map to get through the woods to the other side. It might cost a lot to cut him a check But how much time money and effort does it cost to try to figure out on my own and

Sometimes when you try to do it on your own you give up halfway through and you just walk out of the woods and go I'm gonna go back to my job Let's win. So don't be afraid to cut a check for speed So over the over the decades you've also been involved in a lot of live events your own live events masterminds etc. Why do you think it's important for people to attend live events, especially in business, the different niches that they're in, etc. Why is it important to attend networking events or learning events? There's a lot of reasons.

Some of the ones we already said, but one is to realize you're not crazy. Sometimes when you're the dreamer, if you're listening to this podcast, you're the outball, you're the black sheep, you're the one that is looking, you know, shooting for the stars, maybe your family, your friends, in fact the person, maybe you sleep next to every night, right? Maybe you think too big, you have big thoughts, and sometimes without realizing you're dimming your glow to match the people around you. And then you get in a group where people inspire you and you realize you're not alone, and other people dream, and some people dream and actually achieve it

And you can learn on how they achieve that and all of a sudden you feel a part of the collective You feel a part of something bigger than yourself and you realize you're not alone It's easy to be the naysayer. It's easy to you know fall in and and dim your glow like I said earlier to the people around you Get in a groups masterminds workshops live events. You're sitting next to people You go to lunch with people that may inspire you really just to inspire you to be the best version of yourself. So, on the actual investing capital sign, are there things that you'd like to invest into, was it real estate, is it companies, are there things that you'd actually like to

invest capital into and why? Yeah, I kind of go into phases. I'm invested a bunch of companies that you guys suggested, which are amazing, grateful for that. I love start, that really start suggested, which are amazing. Grateful for that. I love startups, not really startups, but I love the entrepreneurial journey. I probably have more of my investments in small mid-sized companies on their way up because I believe in the human, right? I believe in the hope and the dream.

I was there, so I love doing that. That's a big part of my investing. Real estate has been a part of my life forever. This was the first year, last 12 months, I bought a lot of commercial property, like A plus properties, Buffalo Wild Wings and FedEx buildings and grocery stores and things like that. And here's what I want to tell you.

When I say stuff like that, I don't want to act like, I know what it's like when I could only invest 100 bucks a week. So just know it's all part of it. If you make 1,000 invest 100. If you make a hundred thousand and ten grand, right? Best a million best a hundred grand, whatever whatever the number is, just get in that cadence of getting used to. Listen, if you got your main thing, then there's the side thing, use the side thing to start putting stuff away so your money could start making money. And like Dan said, we're going to live a lot longer. So I would encourage you.

This is not what this podcast is today. I would encourage you to get financially literate. It's best you can read books, listen to podcasts. I took a long, I went a long time of knowing how to make money, Dan, but not knowing how to make my money work for me. I really did a long time. I was doing amazing and I realized I was really far behind him really understanding the power of compound interest This is not the podcast for it, but I'm gonna urge you today go get some financial literacy Especially if you're in your 20s or 30s or 40s. You have so much time for your money to grow even if it's just a little bit each month So we actually made a free calculator. It's a vengiers calculator.com And it's because of Kent Clow there.

And he kept talking about compound interest. And people just, it's hard to get. It's hard to get. It's hard to get. Mine blowing, the numbers. So here's what you guys got to do. Go to vendgerscalculator.com. It's free.

There's no email. There's nothing. It's just a fun little tool to use, a little widget. And you just type in, let's put in 9% a year. Put in your age, and then put in 30 years. If you guys put in like 5 or 10 grand a year, let's say you make 20, 30, 40 grand a year. If you put in 5 to 10 K year, it's not a couple

of hundred thousand at the end. It's one to two million dollars. I know. Imagine if you do that for your kid, and you put in 500 bucks to 1000 bucks, and say, hey, everybody that comes to the birthday party don't bring toys, bring them 50 bucks or 100 bucks. And you put that into a pool.

And that four year old becomes 24 34 years old They're not gonna have a couple hundred grand. They're gonna have a couple million dollars I know it sounds crazy to talk about yeah, but just by adding a thousand bucks five grand two grand three grand Go to a compound you just google search a compound calculator or a vintage calculator dot com whatever you want And just type in these numbers. It will blow your mind and again That's a big part of this part of this podcast is I want you guys to be considering investing, whether it's real estate, whether it's cash flowing businesses, whether it's into the stock market, cryptocurrency, or can walk through all the different types of

investments you can choose from, a little bit at a time. And if you do that over the course of time and you keep putting that money away, a couple things happen. One, keeps you hungry in your core business. So let's say you make 50 grand a year and 5 or 10 grand a year you're investing, you're hustling a little bit harder, right? On different side, let's say you're making six figures a year, seven figures a year, you're hustling even harder because now you're putting in 50K, 100K, 200K, as you're making more money in your career, it makes you want to work harder. The other thing is, with inflation being around 9% a year, you don't want hundreds of thousands of dollars in your bank account.

I know this sounds weird. Anything over 12 months of overhead, you have to deploy. Here's why. Let's say you've got some pretty fancy number of $500,000 saved up. You have top 1% on the planet, right? $500,000 saved up. In 2024, that $500,000 is worth $450,000.

In 2025, it might be worth $400,000. I know that sounds crazy, but you've got to deploy capital. I want you guys to have six to 12 months of your overhead saved up in case of emergencies, situations, whether it's your personal life or your business. That should be your goal number that I just covered life. And if you could build up that type of capital to cover your overhead, I'd say you've got two or three

grand a month in overhead, gets a 25 to 35 thousand dollars saved up. The money above that, you really got to consider investing into low risk or maybe even medium risk things. Alright, on the investing side, people have a lot of options, right? How, as they start to make a little bit of money, and they start to save up 10 grand or 20 grand or 50 grand again, the numbers we're talking about today with Dean, it's all relative relative whether it's 10 grand or 100 grand or 500 bucks. It's all relative to your situation When is that time that they should consider either investing more capital out there or this should be investing money into themselves? So here's what I'd say we all need leverage in life right leverage pushes us forth, right?

I'm gonna quit smoking. I'm gonna quit smoking. I'm gonna quit smoking. You have emphysema I quit smoking that day. That's leverage, right? I Would say go get this financial calculator that Dan just shared start doing some research and understand that's Some people say I missed the last 10 years. Yeah, but what's what's the best time to plan a tree? Decay to go second best time today. Yeah, plant the tree today So what I'd say is get some motivation, get some leverage. So it's 50 bucks, 500 bucks, 5,000, 50,000. Whatever the number is, I would start by understanding what that could mean for you and your life and the safety of a future that

is unknown, right? Then secondly, I would start looking at the things that align with you. For me, real estate was really exciting for you. So I went deep on real estate. Then I started understanding different companies and I started looking at companies that I like their products. I like their services. And I wanted to invest in the things I used. And then you understand that you could find

a bunch of things you use and there's pools of, you know, there's a way to invest in multiple companies at once. You guys already know that I'm not talking like you're completely naive. But I would find the thing that motivates you to do it and then find the thing that excites you or you're already used so you could start

living into the things you already do. I think where people get scared sometimes is when they just give money to a financial advisor and say, okay, put it someplace. They don't know where the money went. They're hoping they're getting interest rate. They don't know what their fees are. And I'm not saying that that's off, especially if you're a financial advisor. That always just scared me when, even as my 20s when I was naive, I'm like, I'll just

go buy real estate. I don't want to give it to somebody I don't know. So just do a little homework so you understand. So there's a scary statistic that around 80% of athletes, especially in the NFL NBA, go bankrupt within five years of leaving the league. Wow. It hurts me, every time I talk about it. That's sad. And it's hard to work.

They put in since they were five years old. And they got a $4 million contract, a $20 million contract, some of them a $30 million contract, and we've watched so many fade away and go bankrupt. Why do you think that my take is that it's either the surrounding of their friends that are around them or the lack of education, which is part of why, because we didn't learn these things in high school and college.

Why do you think it is, and what could athletes or entertainers, influencers, anybody that's making money, what could they do to protect themselves over the course of time? Yeah, really great question. I think, I mean, here's the thing, for someone to be a professional athlete, for someone to be a professional athlete,

for someone to be a professional athlete, they had to hustle their whole lives, right? And if they weren't focused on being center-fielder or they weren't focused on being a quarterback or whatever position, a forward, like they never could have got to that level of excellence, right? How many kids are the best, best, best in their high school? They're the best in their city. They're the best in their college

and don't even make it sit on the bench in the pros, right? I mean, tens of thousands, I'm so, to put that much work in, you don't have the time. I get it to understand how financial literacy, where should I be investing, right? You trust other people. So the only thing I'd say is you got to know enough so you're not dangerous. I believe I believe some of my companies have done so well because when I started with no money, I had to work each department. So I still know all the departments are my companies because I had to work them all. I think you should know enough that you can call bullshit for lack of a better word. And simultaneously, find

the right person to invest smartly and here's another thing I got the chance and I got the chance to sit with Deon Sanders and he called me out of the blue one day my phone rang I picked it up he goes Dean it's Deon I love all the stuff you're doing fly to Texas I want to spend time with you so I find myself a week later in Texas and I'm sitting with him at lunch and while we're at lunch people are coming in pitching their ideas and Half of them he's a really smart guy. I have them as a But when I see they're really exciting and they sound good and I could see how someone if you don't have the time to really

Understand business how you could invest in a lot of 100 and all of a sudden it's all gone So I'd say do enough research to understand to not be dangerous, find the right people in your life who protect you, and just know that delayed gratification is the greatest thing on earth. You could take that money today and be able to live amazing for the rest of your life, or you could have a blast for five years and then struggle. There are hundreds of thousands of players in college, different sports, tens of thousands that are getting

pretty good, and they're actually on the team, thousands that I ever have a chance to go to the league. And if you're a hundred that actually gets a start, each year. But then only a few, each year become great. What do you think is a difference between amateur, pro, and greatness? Don't we see it in business, too?

I mean, we could say that about businesses, about anything. At this phase of my life, it's those that go upstream and work on their mindset. I really believe it takes a lot of determination. You've got to find the gift in getting your teeth kicked in. You've got to find the gift in failure. You've got to find the gift of people talking behind your back.

You have to find the gift in your talking behind your back. You have to find the gift in your body with everything telling you you shouldn't and you still do it anyway. You have to find an unbreakable mindset to keep moving forward. It doesn't mean that you have to be the smartest person in the world. I surely am not. But I know even when my body and everything says no, that I'll keep moving forward. And I've been blessed and I know you've met way more people in me But I had dinner with Michael Jordan and one of the greatest gifts Michael Jordan told me is I did it with a headache And he said that was my model for a long time. He's like even I didn't feel good I just knew I had to do it and that takes another level of mindset and determination and focus and you might think I wasn't born with that

Well, none of us were we have to work on it We have to find the thing that deep inside of us inspires us, that moves us forward, that when everything says no, you still jump out of the plane and hope you grow, you know, the parachute opens on the way down. If you guys just Google, I'll look it up on YouTube,

Michael Jordan Flu game. And it's still on the most iconic sports cards and covers of a magazine, et cetera. And it's just Michael Jordan has slumped over. He's still scored like 30 or 40 points at night. Did it with a headache? Did it with a headache? Yeah.

Michael Jordan's my number one favorite of all time. Yeah, I got to drink a bottle of Pino with him. I tried to smoke a cigar and almost threw up. So, all right, last phase of questions. So, we talked about making money. We talked about investing money. Today, we talked about investing to yourself. Now, let's talk about the charitable component.

So I say a describe it as giving it away. Why do you think it's important for people or businesses to have a charitable component to their lives? I think you could call it karma, you could call it whatever you want. I think the universe allows us to go faster and stronger when they know we're looking out for it. I, real quick, I, because I helped raise money, not because I'm super cool, but I got to spend a week on Neckar Island with Richard Branson, and I get up at five every morning, so to take one morning, he said, hey, you want to go sail around the island? Absolutely.

Hell, yes. So me and him at five in the morning, we around the island and I asked them that similar question about Making money and am I doing enough for people and what he said to me is If you have the gift God whatever you believe the desire to make more money and you know how I think we are ethically Obligated to go do it make as much as humanly possible do not feel greedy because what you could do is give it all away He said I spent the first you know, he's kind of got to what's his name, Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie said, first half of his life making it second half, given away. He's kind of in that place, Branson, right now, with Virgin

Unite, given away so much of his time and his money. But he made me shift my focus. You know what he said to me? He said, some people are destined and thank God for them that they go to a soup kitchen and serve. Thank God for those people. He said, some of us destined and thank God for them that they go to a soup kitchen and serve. Thank God for those people. He said, some of us get to walk in and hand them a hundred grand to pay for the soup. He said, if you're the type that can hand the hundred grand, then you better go out and make it, then you can give it all away. And it kind of shifted my mindset in a big way.

That he probably doesn't know is an hour sale. He goes on to meet a lot of people. He impacted my life that day because I never stopped thinking about that. And what we've done, and some, you can get really creative. Like we just, with McConaughey, we just did this event. On the way in, you could upgrade to VIP. And it's just say, you could watch it free on YouTube,

or you could be on Zoom. You upgrade for 45 bucks. And on the way in, we said, we'll provide 25 meals out of that money to feeding America. It's amazing. Right? We provided by the time we're done. We're at two million meals Come on. It's us a little bit out of each transaction and now we got two million meals going to people who need it right?

So what we do to Tony's a great Tony gives away more than anyone would ever imagine But he nudges me in these areas of like hey, how do we insert it in what we're doing that? We barely notice it but we're really making an impact and I believe my life has grown businesses grown because we do things like that I love tying in charities to every aspect of life whether it's sports cars I know you do everything I can just because We do four main charity events a year and they don't it's not about money Yeah, I don't really actively raise money. I would just try to showcase the people how they can do charity without money You can do a toy drive Where start our first toy drive nine years ago?

There was eight of us on the floor wrapping toys. There was no money involved. Yeah, yeah There was 25 volunteers and there was 60 then we fill up freaking so-fi stadium Yeah, I'm the course of time. It's just compounds because it was nine years of talking about a toy drive I never asked people to donate to my toy job You go do a toy drive in Philadelphia or Atlanta or New York or We do a Thanksgiving food drive. You go do a Thanksgiving food drive I don't need you to donate to the Thanksgiving food drive I want you to do a Thanksgiving food drive make backpacks for the homeless It's all I've been focused on for 10 years you go make backpacks for the homeless

You don't need to buy buy backpacks. I want people to go do more charity. I want people to talk about money That's why the whole concept is Last question with so many different charities to consider that are out there, how do you decide which one is close to you that you're willing to deploy your money, time or energy into? Well, I'll tell you, for me, I ask my wife and kids, and I make them do research, and then we come up,

and then we have a meeting and say, what about this one? What about this one, and we come up? Feeding America was a big one for me, because they are got really creative in getting food from grocery stores that are almost the dates almost gone or farmers that have a surplus and they got, they have all these chains of getting food at next to nothing.

And when you donate to them, you're really paying for the trucking and the services to get on the ground. So your meals go a long way. You know, but the things that hit your heart and and you know, I just flew down to spend a day with Matthew McConaughey, and he's doing it. Did a charity event two nights ago. It was amazing. And it's helping kids, all of them, some is helping kids with heart surgery.

Some of it is helping kids that don't have good home life, and he's building little houses and next to schools where they can go and meet people and practice gratitude. And just we got done. There was like four or five kids' charities. My wife and I, we said, which one, which one to make is the most cry? And now I want to work harder. Every time I see that, and I know you feel the same.

I just want to work harder to be a better version of me, make more money so I can serve more. And it's one of the most addicting and amazing things you can do. What's the name of your new podcast? Own your future podcast. Own your future podcast. I'm excited that you finally did that. Right, when I saw those top 10 right out the gates all right guys

You've been listening to the money Mondays. We're here with Dean grass you'll see please make sure to follow him all across social media Check out his new podcast. He's obviously has multiple books. You can go look up over the past If you heard about mastermind.com go research that as well But the main point of this podcast is to talk about money and remove that thing that it was rude to talk about it in our childhood. We need people to talk about rents and leases and apartments and sellers and have open discussions with their friends, family and followers.

So if you can, like and subscribe to the podcast, share with your friends, check out the moneymundays.com. We do a weekly Zoom call every Monday at four o'clock. We want people to have these discussions. It's important for our society, it's important for our country, it's important for our planet since it's important for you to learn about money take action Thank you to our guests Dean Garcia. I'm so happy that you're here. I'll see you guys soon. See you guys next Monday Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the money Mondays and the easiest episode I've ever done by far because this is my dearest friend, business partner, co-founder of the 100 million mastermind.

This guy has built a company from zero, so $100 million in sales in a calendar year. I mean, repeat, he did a $100 million sales in a year. Okay, you guys ready? You're going to watch this one? I feel like you're going to watch this one. So the Money Mondays has three topics, how to make money, watch this one. So the money money, it has three topics. How to make money, how to invest money, and how to give it away to charity.

Joel Marion embattles all three of those things because he loves charity. He knows how to make money, knows how to help other people make money, and he knows how to invest money. So please welcome my dear friend, Mr. Joel Marion. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

It's time to do this. All right, Joel. So the way this works is we do a quick two-minute bio, and then a way we can get straight to the money. Okay, yeah. So Joel Marion, I, you know, if you rewind back to the beginning part of my career, I started with a high school teacher.

I always had a passion to do something more and have more impact. I really got heavy into health and fitness. I grew up as an athlete, got heavy into health and fitness in college when I stopped playing sports competitively from high school to the transition to college. And I made my own physical transformation, and then I wanted to help other people do the same thing. So I started, I want a big national, actually global body transformation contest. When I was 19 years old, actually global body transformation contest.

When I was 19 years old, I got my foot in the door of a couple magazines. I started writing for a magazine called Muscle Media, and then I was in Men's Health, Men's Fitness, and all the way down, I had hundreds of articles published. There would be any magazine that even had so much as a lifestyle section at it. I had something to publish. And then I had my first print book when I was 24, 25 years old that that was published. I thought that was going to be the path to be the path to, you know, my career was to be a bestselling author and just turn out bestseller for

bestseller and sequels and all that. bestselling author and just turn out bestseller for bestseller and sequels and all that. And that book did not do in the marketplace what we all had anticipated it to do. And that's when I understood that I needed to be in control of my own destiny by learning marketing. So, as I was teaching, I kind of was burned the candle at both ends. Really long story short, it was, you know, over the course of the next year, I kind of was burning the candle at both ends. Really a long story short, it was over the course of the next year. I've reached my relationships, if you're watching this on video, you can see I'm wearing a hat,

this is rich in relationships, and it really was, you know, the number one thing responsible for almost all my success in business, besides doing the work and learning the skills and all that, is developing relationships. So I got to know all the who's who and health and fitness marketing and then I ended up repackaging my failed print book into an e-course and we launched that eight, nine months later in 2000, almost that 2008, 2009, and I'm doing the biggest launch in fitness history on a platform called ClickBank, which is still one of the largest digital retail places in the world for people

sell information. And then I became known as like the launch guy. I was partnering with somebody every quarter or at least another one of my own products. And I met a guy, Josh Bazzone, through that, he was coming out of supplements and getting into information publishing. I partnered with him on a launch called 70 Belly Blast Diet.

We did a little north of a million dollars in a week on that, selling downloadable digital information. Very low cost to that type of business. So you know, you walk away from that, even after you pay all your affiliates and all that, you're making half-million dollars in a week. And then you have the best part is you have this customer list and this email list, which I'm sure we'll probably talk about email. Oh, yeah. That you can just go back to over and over again to sell more products and services and to continue to serve your community and your track was to have all these customers now. Josh had an idea of getting back into

supplements. We had worked together really well and maintained a friendship over the next couple of years. He said there's nobody else in the world that I want to do this with rather than you to handle the marketing side I'll handle your operation. He's a good marketing as well but he had really had the experience in the supplement business on the operation side. So we complimented each other really well. We resetted goal to do 10 million our first year. And we both had in our information publishing companies,

we have built those companies up to the low eight figure level. And we said, well, if we can do eight figures off the bat, this would be a huge win. We ended up launching in July of 2012 and from July to July, we did 80 million. And from the first full calendar year of 2013 is when we just eclipsed, I think we did 103 or 104 million. So, Ren at company successfully for 12 years sold it at the end of 2021. And now just focusing more on giving back. I started coaching basketball.

So the luxury of being able to do some things that have been on my to-do list, my bucket list, so to speak, for passion plays that I didn't really have the time to do. And running this huge company and multiple other companies. Still super busy, but I get to pick and choose a little bit more what I'm working on these days. So a year and a half ago, you sell your company for over a hundred million dollars, and now you're coaching basketball.

How do you make the decision to, first, to make a decision to sell the company? And second, to then choose the path of, you know, I really wanna help high school kids play basketball better. So we built the company to sell it from the very beginning. It was always with an exit in mind. That was kind of the intriguing thing when Josh came to me

and, you know, proposition, because I was already promoting another supplement company and I was making very good passive commission every month. So I'm like, I really want to take on all this work of running a company with inventory and supply chain and all the complexity when someone else is doing that. I'm just getting paid by selling their stuff. But he explained to me, you know,

different in the personal brand business or the, because the information marketing is very personal brand as well. Everyone's signing up for you. They want more information from you. So it's a personal brand and you're selling your own, either the face of the company, very different business to really exit from, because it's completely dependent

upon you. For the settlement company, he kind of explains how you can develop equity value. And hey, if we do this right, maybe we could sell this thing for like 30 million and somewhat later, right? And obviously we crushed all the original numbers, but we had some ups and downs to that.

It was really like a five year plan to grow the company and exit it. And in 2016, which was about four years into running the company we had grown year over year. And we were doing close to 130 million a year at that point. And we went to try to sell the company unsuccessfully and we just learned while we're really good at the revenue side, there were some other dark spots or some blind spots that we had of things that we needed to correct. So we went back to repackage and reposition

the company and the goal was to flip it in three years, took five years. It was a five-year plan that took 10 years to execute. We had always had intention to sell the company and to build the company, to XA to hand it off to somebody who could hopefully bring us into retail and take us overseas and international and make the brand that we developed and that we cultivated and that we grew to a certain point. You know somebody who could help take it to place that we weren't able to take it. So we were able to successfully exit at the end of 2021 and then the whole thing about basketball was, you know, kind of a silly,

sad interesting story, but worked out really well. I was watching last-gen university, the basketball edition on Netflix, and Kat and I were sitting there, and Kat my fiance. And we're just fell in love with this eight-part docu-series, and I'm seeing this coach who's running, is the head basketball coach at East LA Community College,

which is junior college, and all these kids who should have been playing division one, but had no mentors in their life, flunked out of high school, didn't have the academically eligible, and he was mentoring them to help them, you know. It's very altruistic what he's doing because, of course, he wants kids to be there and he wants to win games and championships, but his role goal is to, I don't want you to

stay here if I want you to prepare for the next level and to get you that division one scholarship that you deserve enough. So I saw the impact that he was making and a lot of these kids were sharing their stories and the back stories of where they come from and a lot of them from single parent households. Just through the sport basketball they were in the mentorship that they were getting from this coach as a father figure really resonated with me. I was a high school teacher. Again, the early part of my career I did miss working with young people.

So I said to Kai, I said, you know, if I had the time to do it, if I could do anything, if I could literally do anything, and this is what I'd be doing. I'd be impacting kids, I'd be around the sport that I love, so I stayed close to basketball, I had season tickets to Miami Heat right there. First one, one C, first row, one C on the left side of the half-court line, and the other C don't know the right side of the half-court line. So I had for six years and was there for both championships that they won with LeBron and D-Wade and Chris Bosch. Love this sport. And you know, it's just getting me a little antsy to get back involved and Kat said, well, if you're saying that this

is what you would do, if you could do it, it's what's stopping you from doing it. You really, you really, to do anything you want to do at this point, right? There's nothing that you're doing that you have to do. You get to choose at this point. So if this is what you want to do, go after it. So I thought about it for a few days and then ended up where we're building our ranch. There's a school that's right down the road on the same road called Slam, Sports Leadership and Management Academy, it's a charter school. And inquired with the head coach there, told him about my background. He got my email immediately responded and said, you know, we'd

I love the meet-check and come up to the school. I'll show you the facilities, go out the lunch, save it's a good fit. And then I was, that was coach, yeah, I was a rest of the history, I was coaching, coaching the next week. And, you know, I, getting to know the kids and coming into a new environment was, anytime you're doing something brand new,

it's, it's, you got to develop that relationship in that rapport, you know, so it took me a little bit, you know, a few weeks to gain the trust of the kids, but throughout this whole season, we ended up going to the Final Four and stay playoffs. Just had opportunity to bring in a lot of NBA trainers and give this school resources that they've never had access to. They're used to just carpool and then going to games, away games, hopping in minivans, parents and coaches minivans. Now we have charter-bots transportation and then we did away trips and we took my jets. It's a different, quite a different experience for the program and for the kids. But very rewarding for me. We brought the first tournament

to the school. We brought Tim Hardaway senior and Hall of Fame. We brought the first tournament to the school. We brought Tim Harkaway senior and Hall of Fame just got inducted in the NBA Hall of Fame. He came and he spoke to kids at the tournament that we hosted and then we have even bigger plans to grow the tournament for next year. It's just a way to get back. You can get back with your resources and with a big part of your resources at your time though, right? And so you can be charitable with your money. And sometimes that's a great way to provide impact. But I think one of the even bigger ways that you can make impact and even more of a, you know, being generous is with your time, right? Because that's the one thing

that we all have the same amount of. You can be a billionaire and write it, and write it relatively easy check. But when you got the same 24 hours a day, everybody else does when you're choosing to give four hours a day just on a practice day. Right. Six days a week and then there's a way games and you know road trips and all that. It's it's a lot. It's quite a quite a bit different from a different standpoint. Yeah. So along the way of your journey of building up

biotrust and the company, you also built up over 20 million person email lists. It is unfathomable, I don't even know how to explain it. I know lots and lots of lots of emails, and they're happy when they have 100,000 to 100,000, let alone the few people that have a million. This is a humongous difference going from the people that are big time having a million

to having 20 million or more. Walk us through just the concept of why emailmo is so important and what people should be thinking about when it comes to Emo. I just talked for a second about how I end up doing it. I was always obsessed with scale and getting the numbers to work. Kind of a nerdy number sky behind the scene and that's one of my superpowers when it comes to marketing is understanding the data and the numbers. So I just like, well, the more people I can get promoting, and that's how when I launched my first e-book, that's how it worked. I just had the top 20 guys in the industry all promoted me at the same time, and then next thing you know, like we pulled off this, this

launch that no one else had done a half million dollars in three days before. So when it came to email, I just saw that it was working. And when it got to 100,000, I just wanted to get to 200,000 to a million and get as many different lead sources that I possibly could, whether it be affiliates or paid media or other email lists or ad networks and banners and all this stuff. And one of the things that you and I have talked about often is just how I did it and how I invest in leads is we're always buying things at a loss and waiting for them to materialize to be worth over buying leads. For example, at $2 and we're only making 80 cents back on day one.

Most people are like, wow, this is really scary. It's fine if you do one lead, you lost a dollar 20 on, but scale that and we're, we're bringing in 500,000 leads a month, you know, all the time. So, right, exactly, yeah, yeah, six, 700,000 dollars, negative, but you only play that game for so long when, you know, your numbers because now, the leads that you bought six months ago are now worth

$3.00 and now your balance sheet and your P&L starts to turn positive. So the early days, you know, your burning money, unfortunately, had positive sales coming in in different ways. But you know, it's just you're waiting for the cash flow to catch up. And if you know and you understand your numbers and an email. So to go back to the question about what's important which people be looking at people will tell you who don't understand email that email is dying channel and that it you know some people even tell you that it's dead now which I mean if I look at my income statement every month I doesn't look very dead to me but I still have two other email companies that you know we we have outside of biotress so companies that, you know, we have outside of biotress. So it's far from dead. It's something that is ever changing. The algorithms are ever changing just like

social media and all these other platforms that you have to learn to understand and you're either going to grow with it or you're going to get left behind. So for us, it's just more about understanding the email delivery and the Gmail, the hotmail, the Yahoo's, the AOL's, which we call the big four. And then of course, a lot of other smaller ISPs and this Apple domains and all that now, but still the big four and Gmail's probably about 40% of everyone's mailing lists

is a such a big inbox. But they changed years ago to the tabbed inbox. And now messages used to go to one thing and get up 20% open rate. And now they're going to this thing called the promotions to have and they're getting a 10% open rate. Well, what does that do to your income? Well, if you don't figure out how to get back into the primary inbox and like 40% of your list, you're getting half the open rate. Now that's going to 20, 25%

hit to your income just like that unless you figure that out. So we had to figure out ways to do testing and subject line testing and split testing and on how to get our emails into the primary inbox and domain reputation, IP reputation and all these types of things. I literally taught a two day course all about email delivery, which it was just me talking for eight, nine hours a day

and going through a 400 page binder that I put together all about email, how it works, and how you can stay on top of delivery and list hygiene and all the things to make sure that your emails could deliver the inbox. If your emails are getting delivered the inbox still is very, very viable channel, but if your emails are going this man box, and that's another thing,

when we're list size doesn't matter as much. We have 22 million records, but we're only actually emailing four or five million of those records. I've got greedy and said, hey, I wanna just blast all 22 million. Next thing you know, all my messages would be going to the span box

or getting blocked or throttled, or I send a sale that expires a three day sale, and then my emails getting throttled because I'd have way too much volume going out and too many negative metrics where They get the email about the sale week after the sales over That's obviously not gonna work out But yeah, I mean email is still my bread and butter and I think

For the foreseeable future is still gonna be the way the number one way that people transact online So the line that I always stuck in my head I I've told you this over and over and I've said this on stage over and over that came from you is I effectively lose money better than anyone else. And you kind of gave the main idea about 80 cents versus two dollars in that you would lose 600 K a month, but you'd catch up over the course of time. Why should people be considering that maybe they can't afford to lose money necessarily, but at least break even or come close and not always focus on being profitable on day one.

Well, actually, they'd be thinking about that concept in general. Well, the lifetime value of your subscribers and your customers is really the numbers that you should be fixated on as a business owner. If you don't understand those metrics, it makes it very difficult to make media buying decisions. Break even, obviously, if you can be break even, then at least you know everything in the future is gravy at that point, right?

And you lose anything up front, but it's a lot more tricky when you start going negative. But if you lose 10% like man, like you have to be a complete idiot with long marketing and follow up to not be able to gain 10%, right? You may not even know at what, how many days exactly did you make that 10% back and all that, but it's gonna happen. to not be able to gain 10%, right? You may not even know at what,

how many days exactly do you make that 10% back and all that, but it's gonna happen. I mean, you can pretty much guarantee as long as you have good products, good customer service that people are gonna come back and reorder exactly. So for us, we just really focused on how deep can we go so that it's as tolerable as possible. And there's a lot of benefits to doing that,

where number one, I can afford, just to buy more media, because I'm willing to go deeper in the hole. If I'm okay with making 80 cents on a $2 lead up front, that's obviously gonna open up a lot more traffic for me to buy. The other thing that's great at that point is now I am able to

outbid everybody else on all the platforms because with somebody else, might only be willing to spend a dollar on that and make 80 cents and be negative 20%. I'm going negative 60, negative 70% on day one because I understand my numbers. So, in my email business, I have like four or five employees and I have a couple of people in customer service, but my main guy that I rely on, so heavily is my data analyst and my reporting guy.

So his job is to take all these advertising channels that we're going to put them in slice and dice all the data in separate buckets so that we know and understand from Facebook or from this email list or from this affiliate, how much are we spending, how much is the lead ultimately worth at $30, $60, $90, $180 days, and through all that data, we can just put different, I can afford to pay $3 a lead on some channels because they're higher quality leads, they back out faster. Without knowing that, if I just said, oh, I want to be $2 a lead on everybody, I want to be overpaying for some and I want to be underpaying for others.

So it's really just a game of maximization of knowing the data, owning the data, and then understanding what you can pay for a lead so that at whatever your tolerance is. Hey, I want to be break even up front. Well, you're going to get one that's the, some people will say, oh, I want to be break even up front. Well, you're gonna get One that's that some people will say, oh, I want to make some money up front You know, it's well, you're gonna be able to buy more traffic if you can be break at break even

You're gonna be able to buy more if you can be at minus 10% if you don't be able to buy more if you're at minus 50% So the more the the further you can push that envelope It's just gonna open up more volume and that's ultimately how we built, you know, the more the further you can push that envelope, it's just going to open up more volume. And that's ultimately how we built, you know, the probably the largest, definitely the largest email list in the fitness space and maybe, you know, it's from email list that I'm aware of that our single company owned and not databases

that are all merged together. One of the largest in, you know, the e-commerce retail space. So we talked a lot about the making money side. Let's talk about the investing money side. But first, before talking about investing money, I want to talk about investing into yourself. 2019, I came to you, I said,

you are the only person I could think of after all these years that I would want to create a match to mine with. $100,000 per person for the 100 million match to my experience. Four months later, we had sold out 100 spots and $100,000 per person for the 100 million mastermind experience. Four months later, we had sold out 100 spots and $100,000 each. Why do you think it's important for people,

whether they're paying $100,000 for a mastermind or five grand 10 grand 20 grand, most masterminds are around 10 to 25,000? Why do you think it's important for people to join masterminds or get high-end coaches, et cetera? Yeah, so at the very beginning of my career back in 2008, when I was trying to do this ebook thing on their marketing, I hired a coach.

Craig Valentine was actually our very first member and a hundred million mastermind. At the time, in 2008, I was a five-figure check that I had to write for that, which was way more money than I had, but I understood that if I was going to really accelerate my ability to learn and know what to do and be able to execute on what to do,

and also relationships again, relationships get connected with the right people that can help accelerate that path that you're trying to walk down or ride down or run down or it's ultimately the more people you know it's going to be a faster ride. So I knew that. I was smart enough to know that early on that relationship should be key if I knew the right people then I could get in the right doors and that's ultimately how I got all the top people in the industry to promote that first

launch that changed my life. And if I hadn't hired Craig as a coach and you know got some of the introductions that I got through him, it would have happened much, much slower if at all, you know, and I know that. So, I always encourage people that look, you're going to make an investment if you can get in the right rooms around the right people. And just we talked about this last night, and just from an investment standpoint, and learning where to put your money.

Like that pays for our masterminds many times over. If you can just make two or three investments throughout the course of the year, it's gonna pay for your 35K or your 100K or 25K for whatever mastermind group. It's having those right conversations and learning who's an expert at this and how you can partner up with them passively

and put some money into that bucket, a bucket. And then on your own business, you're just gonna, you learn from other people's experience both good and bad. You're gonna learn from all the wins, like, hey, here's what's really working on our business. And then like next year, you know,

you go and implement that. And when you're running a good business and you already have some level of scale now you take that one little tip or trip that you learned from that round table that you in that small room at a mastermind that you that you sat in and then next year you know it added into another $50,000 a month to your revenue or your income and then probably even more valuable than that is learning from other people's negative experiences on where they made mistakes and what not to do. So somebody brought an advertising channel to my attention yesterday and asked me what do you think.

And I said, you know, we tried that back in 2018 and I would not recommend it. It's a high volume. It seems very enticing but low quality. High volume low quality when it comes to lead generation customers and email delivery is a bad combination. You know, it's 50,000 leads a day, but crap data that all is ultimately, it looks real good at first, you know, and then even on paper, it might look like it backs out where you're only paying 11 cents a lead and you're making 15 cents a lead, but it's affecting your deliverability by 20%, 30% on your $2 and $3 leads, and now you're actually losing money. But there's enough paying attention to all the numbers and all the impact.

So I was able to steer that individual away from that channel, which had you not had that conversation with me or been part of this mastermind, had the relationship, then you very well could have made the same mistake that we made and it could end up costing a couple a hundred thousand dollars. So you invest a hundred thousand dollars to help generate

more investment opportunities, new knowledge in your business, new strategies and all that, but also to get steered away from the things that are just going to make the road a lot more challenging, take you a lot longer to get to where you ultimately want to go. The fastest way between any two points is a straight line, right? And when you have all these resources and people to help connect the dots, if they can help you connect them in the straightest line possible, you're going to get to where you're going faster. Then when you hit that goal, whatever your five year goal is, maybe you hit it in a year, right?

And then from years two to five, you're just traveling places that you weren't even on on your map before you got around the right people and started having the right conversations. So your certain hats says rich in relationships. On the investing money aside that's allowed you to now invest I think ten fifteen million bucks you mentioned in the last just in last year. So into private equity deals these are food and beverage brands tech companies consumer products etc. How do you decide who you invest into and why?

Well, we like to invest in companies where we can add some strategic value. I like to invest in sectors where I understand the business, at least to some degree. Food and beverage is where we really have probably 80% of our investments because it's very similar to the supplement space, you know, or physical goods, applied chain, all that. And then the multiples in the food and beverage space are even better than they are in the supplement space because instead of getting a multiple

and profit eat a multiple on revenue, on top of the revenue. So we've really done well and stuck to just our investment thesis, investing in companies and brands that are somewhere between two and 20 million in revenue. And I know you and I have talked a lot about that and we share that philosophy with our group. We don't want to invest in an idea. We want, okay, that's a good idea. Show me that you got some legs on that.

And then I can help you add fuels of the fire with something else. Right. Exactly. But if somebody can't get it to two million on their own, it's just not the right time for me to step in. It's just, sure, I could get in a super low valuation, but more times than not, those deals are not going to work out. If I conceive that somebody's already got it to a $2 million, $5 million, $8 million, run rate or something, that's a lot less risky than a pure startup and just an idea, right? So we choose companies that are established between $2 and $20 million in areas,

you know, that we're familiar with the space and how we can add value. They understand grocery and retail, we understand online, so we can come alongside them and be their online partner, which obviously we've sold, you know, probably close to a billion dollars online at this point. And with our expertise come along on side them for e-commerce and knowing that they have the experience and the expertise and the grocery and the retail space. There's not any company besides from some cash flow problems with the current economy, you know, there's not one company that we have invested in that's not performing or that's not growing or that's not doing very well. So I think if you choose, I did a whole talk on 11 criteria that I look for when choosing

company investing. And if you have your own investment thesis and you can go and put a check in all those boxes, you'll be able to invest in companies that are going to have a much lower risk profile than if somebody just talks to you about some new idea and some company that's going to explode and blow up and you don't really know and you're just taking somebody's word for it. That's kind of novice investing and those things don't really work out that often, but when you can get educated and you can add value and you're in the right types of companies

and they're established and they already got some runway there, you can de-risk it a lot to where, you know, and even for us, I feel like if a company's retail was failing, then we could just blow it up online. So I have a lot more control. I like to be in control than just Super passive So also in the investing side from relationships you've co-invested into real estate transactions clever investor and coal had or Dave are et cetera How do you decide what types of real estate transactions you're looking for and what types of returns are the main idea that you'd like to see in a real estate deal?

Yeah, so real estate I just try to partner with people who have been there, done that. They do it for a living, they're an expert. Just like when we raise money, people are putting their trust in us to help, you know, to be a great partner and to choose a deal, to vet the deal, and to also be able to add value, right?

So same thing, I'm looking for somebody who's been there, done that, has a great track record in real estate. And I just ask you, don't well, tell me about the last four or five projects that you did and what were the investor returns or how are things going. And they can show me their track record very easily. Here's a multi-family thing that we did. And here's the investor's got 18% annual returns. And ultimately got 2.1 times their money at liquidation.

And at this amount of tax savings, and they could show me very quickly the success that they've had. And that gives me confidence to put my money with them on the next project that they're getting into where they say, hey, I'm really excited about this one. Relationships are huge. I think people know that I'm very connected as well, so that if I have a good experience then I'm going to tell other people that I had a good experience. I love connecting people with other people to have great experiences. And they also know that if I have a bad experience then I'm probably not going to share anything positive with them when somebody comes asking me,

hey, should I invest with someone? So I'm going gonna say, well, I can't tell you yesterday, but I can tell you my experience and here's my experience. And if it's a bad one, people probably aren't going to move forward to choose to do business with that person. So people are giving me their best deals. You know, it's like, hey, just giving the thing that you're most excited about,

and you already got a track record that you're being super successful, but like giving the thing that like, you know, is where you're most excited to put your own money. The other thing that I'm always looking a track record, but you can super successful, but like giving the thing that like, you know, is where you're most excited to put your own money. The other thing that I'm always looking for is like if somebody has not invested themselves in the project, I don't care how great they say it is, it's not for me. Because if you can't part away with your own dollars, you must not believe in the project that much. Because if you're telling me, I'm gonna get a three extra turn on it, and why would you not put at least $10,000 of your own money into that so you can turn it into 30, right?

So there's talk, and then there's obviously backing up that talk with writing your own check and being part of it. So we've invested over and over again with people who have been there done that, and they can easily show me a one-pageer with, here's my results for the last five to 10 transactions that I did that gives me confidence and then I'm in with the next one and they all have worked out as well. So last year between our syndicate we invested I think almost $44 million amongst these

companies, Icon meals, skin tea, cards and coffee, ever bull, the candy company Joystick or sorry Joyride, Joyride candy company, the chicken one, five million. Yeah, the cook's venture. Yeah, six million, five million, Calliflower foods, we invested twice, six million and then another two or three million on top of that.

So they just got their new brand, they merged with the brand Mikey's and they just got a $1.8 million P.O. into Krugger's. Oh awesome. So I really love the Food and Beverage Space. Obviously we co-invested together through Elevator Syndicate. We have 846 investors in ElevatorSindicate.com. Last and final question on the charity side.

You are very philanthropic. And with bio-trust in particular, you were, I don't mean remember, how many hundreds of thousands of meals, probably more than that that you were doing. Talk us through why brands or individuals should add charity and philanthropic efforts into their lives. Well, one I think as an entrepreneur and somebody who is creating products services that's for the good of people, it's kind of your duty, your service to try to help make the world

a better place. You're doing that through your products, but how else can you do that, right? One of the really cool things that we did is we partnered with our customers on charity efforts. So where one, we would donate a meal for every order. And so we did close to six moon, I own the company close to six million, or is it close to six million meals? Six million meals? Yeah, six million meals that we were able to donate

to right here in America as well, because people think you got to go over to Africa or some third-world country to find people who need food. No, there's tons of people right here in the United States of America who are malnourished and who are not. Go to sleep hungry. Kids, the charter school that I teach I have the school was on free lunch program because that's that's the only place These kids are guaranteed to have actual like legitimate food their day like if you didn't have that free lunch program Like they're not sure if that kid was gonna get food, you know So and that's right here in Tampa Bay, you know like right in my own backyard at school that I'm that I'm coaching that so

for us We chose to do that as a way to get back and it also created a lot of buy-in from our customer base and then people like to do business with companies that are philanthropic and have a cause that they're associated with. Another thing, we partnered with Make A Wish, we became companies founded and we're my partner in Austin, Texas. So it's a Texas-based LLC. And we partnered with Make a Wish. And what we did with Make a Wish is we did like a match thing. So any time our, we asked our customer on the order form,

would you like to donate one, three? There's one, three or five dollars. And on average, I think the average donation will say two bucks. And it's a radio button on the order form and we had make a wish there and said that, you know, your all proceeds are gonna go directly to make a wish and it's also gonna get matched

by bio trust. So we did that and we actually found that it increased our order form conversion by 12%. Wow. So it's like a triple win, you know, we're winning because we're getting more customers We're having higher conversions the increase in order form conversion More than paid for the extra few dollars in order that it cost us has brought us more profit in

It's a pay for all the donations and then some and then now our customers are now meeting us So we became the largest donor in the state of Texas for a make a wish every year since we started that. I think we started that two or three years and to run the business and we did it for another nine years. So it's pretty amazing when you get your customers you know in on it with you. They love to be part, it led to the impact. We always send out in our newsletters, just all these different wishes that we were granted through making wish and the stories and you know,

that creates that emotional connection with your customers and with your subscribers and your buyers as well. So they could see the good that you're doing in the world. It's good for business, but it's good for humanity. So you can do good while doing good, right? All right, guys, you've been listening to the Money Mondays with Joel Marion.

Make sure to check out at Joel Marion on all social media, especially on Instagram. He has a podcast called Born to Impact. It's a very powerful podcast. He's an amazing guest over the years, Born to Impact. What's the title of your book? The most recent one was always eat after 7 p.m.

Yeah, I love the title. Always eat after 7 p.m. So I don't always eat after 7pm. So check out Joel Marion across social media platforms, born to impact podcasts, check out the book, and again, the whole concept behind the money Monday's is, we all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. And I think it's rude to not talk about money. We need people to talk about accounting, finance, taxes, leases, FICO scores, credit. You got to understand your credit.

You got to know why you're renting or paying for a lease. You got to know why you're buying. What happens if your friend loans you money and you don't pay it back? Like you got to know these things and have these discussions with your friends, family, and followers. So please like, subscribe, share the podcast, make sure that you have these discussions with people around you so that we can make the country a better place. We are going to see you guys next Monday. we can make the country a better place. We are gonna see you guys next Monday.