Spending $40M a Year on Ads, Future of AI, Best Ways to Make Money in 2024 | Brandon Bowsky DSH #287

Most people, yeah, it's a boss relationship.

Clearly, you can see it.

There's pros and cons, man.

Like, I've been taken advantage of by a lot of people.

You gotta be stuck being so nice.

You gotta stop being so great to people.

But in reality, like, if I let people being bad change who I am as a person, then who am I?

Yeah.

You know?

And I've done well this far.

So I'll continue to make that mistake.

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And here's the episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, he is back for part two.

Brandon Bowski, how's it going, man?

Good, dude.

Just living, you know, yeah.

Different day trying to figure out where I am all the time.

Yeah, you party hard, man.

Party harder than anyone I know at your level.

Dude, not anymore.

Yeah.

You're back?

Not at all.

Dude, I haven't drank in like two months.

Whoa.

Yeah, I don't go out at all.

What sparked that change?

Dude, honestly, man, I just was like, what am I doing this for?

Yeah.

You know, like, sure, industry events, but I was most known in my industry for my marketing role.

But second most famous thing I've ever done was spent 97 grand on a table for like half the industry and then had three drinks.

And that was kind of when I realized I was like, I don't like being drunk.

And any of my friends know this.

It takes me like easy 12 drinks to be drunk.

You have a tolerance.

Yeah.

So if I have like six to eight drinks, my body feels it, but I'm not drunk.

Right.

Like I feel like the next day, but I didn't actually get drunk.

Yeah.

If I have like 12 to 15, yeah, I'm going to be drunk.

But to get drunk and do that much damage to my body is just not worth it.

So we're going to see a whole different beast then because you were already doing nine figures a year getting drunk every weekend.

I can't even imagine.

It's going to be fun, man.

Your new form coming in.

That's going to be fun.

Are you still all in on that AI customer service company?

Yeah, dude.

So V agents, we're doing the thing.

So replaces qualification agents, customer service reps, calls, texts, email, and chat.

Yeah.

Have you launched it?

Has it been?

So our launch was actually this week at a show in Sure Tech Connect here in town.

Went really well.

Show was kind of slow this year.

Halloween.

Yeah.

throws a couple of

on one yeah people are people have their plans this month and yeah these are not those plans yeah

how do you think f1's gonna do in Vegas I mean I think it's gonna crush I think it's annoying obviously we you know we have to deal with the traffic but I think for like spectators it's gonna be awesome yeah you're big on events and shows in general why do you feel so strongly about going to trade shows and stuff um you know man it's good to meet people and a lot of people try to disconnect themselves from the brand too early and i feel like when something's a startup you need to be as involved as possible like Like my marketing company, I'm on call.

You know, we do over 100 million a year and I get a call here and there and maybe I talk about it an hour a day or I work an hour a day on it.

A finance company, I have an interest in, it's a startup.

So we're a few months into that.

I work every day on that.

You know, the tech stuff, I work every day on that.

But there comes a time where you can step back.

I think what a lot of people do is they try to put people in place and have an expectation of them delivering something.

And that's why most companies are mid.

You know, they hire people that are good, but they're not there to give the direction.

There's no soul.

There's no culture.

There's nothing to it.

And that's something you've with.

Most, like you said, most employees hate their boss, but you're there for your employees, right?

You've built that company culture.

Well, I think the number one thing is like making sure people don't feel like they work for you.

And whenever people start new businesses or come to me for advice, it's always with

like X, Y, Z works with me.

Yeah, obviously, hierarchically, they work for me, but they work alongside me.

We share a common objective.

And I don't talk to them like I'm their boss unless absolutely necessary.

Wow.

Yeah, I try to avoid that at all costs.

I'm just, I ask things of people and they know what I expect.

So they usually deliver on that.

So even like your bottom-tier employees that are maybe

still collaborative.

Wow.

Yeah.

Like my QA reps that, you know, don't make close to what my core team makes still treat them the same way.

That's impressive because most people, yeah, it's a boss relationship.

Clearly, you could see it.

There's pros and cons, man.

Like I've been taken advantage of by a lot of people.

Yeah.

And a lot of the times when that happens, people are like, you got to stop being so nice.

You got to stop being so great to people.

But in reality, if I let people being bad change who I am as a person, then who am I?

And I've done well this far.

So I'll continue to make that mistake.

Yeah.

I haven't seen the nice guy route at the highest levels, but you seem to be pulling it off somehow.

Good team.

Yeah.

Honestly, good team.

I have amazing people in my life.

Everybody in my team is like family to me.

We do a lot of retreats.

We do a lot of like hangs.

We do all these events.

We have a suite at T-Mobile.

We do F1 box there every year.

you know so it's just matter of keeping people happy yeah you gotta go on trips you get a box everywhere man i see you allegion stadium partying dude i i honestly man uh allegion to me i can't justify so not a big sports ball guy yeah you know when i was like five years old

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I learned that if I'm not immediately pretty good at something, I don't want to do it.

And I grew up, never met my dad.

So I was like field day where they have to do all the sports and stuff.

There was t-ball.

And I was like, all right, how hard can it be i just swing a bat and hit a ball right and i played basketball and i ran track before everybody got tall and i didn't and uh it was great everything was cool i walk out onto the field they're like all right you're gonna swing this bat and hit this ball i was like sweet easy light work and i cock back swing hit the t ball falls on the floor everybody laughs i was like never touching a baseball bat again literally have not touched a baseball bat again there's some traumatic sporting experiences as a kid yeah you do you get laughed at you get yeah it's you up yeah i still uh remember i missed a freak game winning free throw in like high school in the league that doesn't even matter, but I still think about it.

Yeah, it's one of those things where you're like, had I made that, it altered the trajectory of my life.

Yeah, everything happens for a reason though, man.

100%.

But growing up without a father figure, I mean, that must have taken toll on you, right?

Dude, you know, my grandfather passed away a month ago was like a mother and father in one.

I grew up with my grandparents most of my life.

Incredible dude.

Great work, ethic, kind as hell.

If I'm nice, he's the nicest man to ever walk the face of the earth.

He made me look like a

nice.

Just a very selfless guy.

I mean, even on his deathbed he's sitting there asking me so how's your siblings how's everything i'm like dude i'm trying to have a conversation with you you're dying bro yeah and he was like you know why do you think bill gates and elon musk don't agree on things and i'm like how the hell would i know that i didn't even know they don't agree on things what are you doing dude damn let's talk about some important he's like yeah okay

man yeah i i grew up kind of without a father too and i didn't even realize there's some things you don't learn you know not having that in your life 100 i didn't know know how to tie a tie.

I didn't know like basic man stuff for a while.

YouTube.

YouTube?

YouTube University.

I cheated.

I got those clip-on ties.

I had to

have a basketball team.

You ought to wear a tie every game.

Oh, yeah.

I dropped out of 15.

So there was no basketball team for me.

Dropping out of 15, I mean, were you living with your grandparents when you dropped out?

Yeah, so I went to AP Psych class one day, and the teacher was an idiot, didn't even know his own material.

And the guy would always say the wrong thing, and I'd correct him, and the class would get pissed at me.

They'd be like, dude, shut up.

Just let him talk.

And I'm like, no, because you guys are going to go into life knowing the wrong information.

Right.

So one day he was like, you know, since you know everything, why don't you just quit school?

And I had skipped like a year and a half.

So I was like a junior and a half, effectively a senior if I took a couple summer classes.

Yeah.

But I had like 15 med school hours and like 12 college credits.

Damn.

So I was like, okay.

Yeah.

You know what?

Don't you need your grandparents' signature for that?

Yeah.

And he signed it?

Yeah.

Wow.

I went to my grandfather and said, this is what happened.

I don't really want to go to school anymore.

I wasn't going to school anyway, dude.

I skipped like 90 out of every 180 days to the point where they were like, you're bordering truancy.

And I was like, oh, I'll do it online.

Wow.

And I convinced my grandfather I would do it online.

I did it for two weeks.

Was like, yeah, f this.

So you've always had that rebellious mentality.

I think it's that

I just don't believe in boxes.

And I think like a lot of people try to put things into boxes that they're told to live within or to understand.

For sure.

So like, as an example, I dropped out of school 15.

Never passed geometry.

Didn't pass algebra one.

Didn't go to school enough to pass it because understanding a formula that I'll never apply in life made no sense.

So when it comes time to like do a calculation, like I'm very, very fast at calculations.

Everybody that knows me knows I'm with numbers, but I get to my conclusions in such a different way than everyone else because they were taught formulas and I was taught logic.

Interesting.

Like when I was in second grade, we were couch surfing, my mom and I.

And we went to, I got like into some crazy magnet charter school thing.

And it was all these really smart kids.

And I was finally like, hell yeah, my people.

Yeah.

And so I'm in this class.

They're doing like five, seven, eight years advanced.

In second grade, we're doing like middle of high school stuff and all these cool projects.

It was so awesome.

I wish we weren't that poor.

I could have stayed there.

Yeah.

But when I went back to regular school, one thing I took back with me was logic puzzles.

And, you know, logic puzzles are just words that you have to draw a conclusion or figure out the answer or whatever.

And usually they're basically word math.

So I'm in second grade.

I'm in my class.

Miss Maz, never forget her.

Awesome chick.

Shout out Miss Mazer.

And

she was like, like what are you doing and i was like oh and i man-explained her logic puzzles i was like oh they're they're like these puzzles with like math and like you know you have to figure out the answer and then you write it down and she's like flipping through the book she's like you did all these i was like yeah she's like okay here's the rules during math you can do this during every other class pay attention and i was like okay fair trade and i think that was really like a pivotal moment for me in like enablement of me trying to be who I want to be.

Yeah.

And understanding that like, I am a little different.

That's That's awesome in second grade for a teacher to hold your hand like that.

Those elementary school teachers are so pure, man.

Dude, some of them sucked.

Yeah.

You know, we all had that one or two teachers that were just like the worst.

We're like,

yeah, we remember her name.

You forget the names of some of the good ones, but the great ones always stand out.

Yeah, I got one in fourth grade.

Miss Fenton, man.

Game changer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was my mazer.

I'll tell you, I think Miss Eiselman.

was like my third grade.

I think that was her name, Eisenman Eiselman.

She was miserable.

Yeah.

I was hanging out with a buddy of mine, like my oldest friend from when when I was like seven the other day and we were talking about how like she sucked we're in our 30s now dude I would get detention for like being different it was kind of weird yeah anything that isn't like to the book yeah they want you to conform so hard even as a kid it's crazy but dropping out at 15 when was that big financial breakthrough for you

uh

11 years later oh so it took a while yeah so dropped out at 15 uh played video games was top 10 in the world and wow was famous on another game and i just kind of like did a lot of gray hat stuff on the internet.

And at like 19, my grandfather got diagnosed with cancer.

I freaked out, started going to raves, partying, doing stuff.

And after a while, I was, you know, partying way too much, started selling stuff, started DJing because I realized most people's music tastes sucked.

And then I started traveling around, playing shows, direct support to a lot of guys.

That was really cool, but it didn't make any money.

So I had like a finesse where I would, I had a promo company with 200 promoters and I would get all the tickets and I would distribute them.

But any show that I thought would sell out, I would hold back 100 tickets.

I'd wait for the sellout.

I'd sell them for double face and I'd make like five grand that month.

Ticketmaster.

And then I had all, yeah, and then I had all the comps that I had from being an artist, from having a management company, from being me, whatever.

And I'd sell like 20 VIP passes.

And I'd make like eight grand every month or every other month on top of all the other shit I was doing.

And that was like what got me through music for all those years.

Nice.

Yeah, because music, you got to fund the travel and everything.

Yeah.

You got to figure it out.

I mean, like, dude, dubstep back in the day, if you got paid $500, it was a good deal.

Like, the best guys in the biz were making 10 grand.

I remember that phase, the dubstep phase.

Yeah.

And it's like, I got like three grand one show.

I was like,

you know, I got $1,500 a bunch of times.

I was like, we're doing the thing.

Yeah.

But.

So you stacked that up, saved six figures, and then you.

Oh, you didn't?

No.

So my stepdad stole all of my mother's money.

Oh, damn.

And left her like completely broke with three kids.

So I took all the money I had from selling stuff, from tickets, from everything, and kind of funneled that into keeping them alive because I'm dumb.

And just me being too nice as usual.

And then I had no money left.

Damn.

So I was working in restaurants on and off from 15 to 24 for like legal money.

And we moved to South Carolina after that happened.

My mom was like, would you get a place with me?

I was like, yeah, sure, why not?

We got a place.

I was there for like six months running this wine bar.

Not for me.

You know, when I got there, they were like, there's the mountains and the beach things to do.

And I was like, what's that mean?

She goes, well, the mountains are about two hours yonder.

And if you want to go to the beach, take a day trip.

And I was like, what the hell does that mean?

She's like, take a day trip.

I'm like, you're not speaking English.

She goes, you, like, I'm targeted.

Take a day trip.

And I'm like, a day trip.

She's like, yeah, you're going to wake up at 8 a.m., gonna drive on over, get there about noon, hang out there till about 4 p.m., drive on home.

So I was like, yeah, it's ain't for me.

I grew up 15 minutes from the beach my whole life.

Of course, I was too poor to have the time to go or the ride there, but you know.

So after that, I had a startup that was called Festi Crates.

It was a subscription box for like Rave and Festival Apparel accessories.

And flopped.

We had 500k views, I think, on all of our promo material, 17 sales.

I went to my partners who were my two best friends at the time,

boyfriend, girlfriend that I got together.

Was it, guys, we're out of business.

And they were like, no, we're going to make it work.

And I was like, no, we're not.

And they were like, well, we are going to, so we don't think you should have a third of it.

I was like, done.

I give you 10% if you make it work.

If you're that confident, I owe nothing to our investor.

They were like, yep, deal.

I was like, okay, bye.

It flopped.

Yeah, it flopped.

I ended up living in my car.

We had like crazy falling out.

They broke up.

We're all still friends to this day, but

it took a couple of years to rekindle that.

Yeah.

But I lived in my car for a little bit, was doing like consulting, helping people set up call centers, which ironically, I'm back to doing now, just kind of as a passion thing for extra money, too.

Yeah, I definitely want to dive into the call center stuff.

But going back to the friendship and business, I'm so cautious with that these days.

I've lost too many friendships, dude.

Anytime somebody wants to do business with me, I mean, there's like two people that I was friends with, one of which I bought his entire baby registry, like a personal friend

that wanted to do a deal.

I was like, okay, here are the terms.

If you me, it's going to be a problem.

Like, these are the terms.

Are you sure you want to do it?

These are the terms.

Yeah.

Entire baby registry.

Couldn't make it.

Sent my girlfriend to his baby shower.

I mean, like, very close friend.

Ends up totally fing me over.

Damn.

But he's doing, you you know, 25, 30, probably 40 million in revenue now, having f ⁇ ing me over and cirqued a contract.

So now I have to sue the guy.

And it's like, dude, we were friends.

Holy crap.

The money got to him.

Yeah, it was just like the opportunity was there.

His other business wasn't doing so good.

And he was like, here's a pivot.

It sue me.

Wow.

And I met up with him at a conference and I didn't know what to say to him.

So I walked by and I was like, you know what?

I want to talk to him.

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Well, click the application link below in the description of this video.

We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to you about business and life.

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So I walked back over to him with a group of people.

There's like five of us.

Yeah.

And I'm just like, hey, man.

And he goes, hey, listen, man, we're good, bro.

Like, my family, we love you.

I love you.

My daughter loves you.

My wife loves you.

Let the lawyers do what the lawyers do.

And I was like, okay.

Because if that was true, you wouldn't have f ⁇ ed me over, you know?

You would have just done the right thing.

That's rough, man.

Money changes people.

Dude, business partners and friendships are really, really hard to maintain.

Yeah.

Because when things go wrong in business, people don't know how to compartmentalize the personal side.

Like I can be your friend and still not like to do business with you and do it.

But if I really don't want to work with you and you're my friend, our friendship, like you said, it's over.

Because if I decide I don't want to do that anymore, people commingle that.

And they're like, oh, yeah, we were friends and then this happened.

Or when people have ideas, you definitely get this because you get pitched a lot of ideas.

You've told me some really smart ones.

And like sometimes people are like, I have this great idea, do it with me.

And if you don't do it with them, they take it as an insult.

Or if you go to do it and then you're like, hey, you know what?

This really isn't for me.

Or like, I don't really have the time for this.

Or I don't think it's going to work as well.

They take like a personal attack that you don't believe in their idea.

And it's like, no, I just don't know that I could do your idea.

Right.

And it becomes a huge issue.

I mean, even today, like, I try to avoid the business friendship thing.

I like to do business with people and have them become my friends.

Like, I like when people start as coworkers, colleagues.

you can call them employees if you want and then become my friends, become my family.

And some people don't, man.

Like we had a guy here for the last year or so who just never assimilated into our culture.

Wow.

He wasn't really that great at the job.

He was good, but he wasn't like our team is top tier.

He was like upper mid.

And so it didn't really work out.

We ended up, you know, letting him go, giving him a check and everything.

And nice guy, but never bothered to assimilate in our culture to the point where I didn't even know he existed.

I couldn't have told you if he worked for me.

You didn't know his name?

I knew his name, but I couldn't have told you if he worked for me.

You know, when I had like 300 people in a call center, ironically, I knew everybody's name.

I knew everybody's wife, everybody's kids, everything.

That's impressive.

Everything.

And I'd walk in, I'd bust balls.

I would like freestyle.

I'd just have fun with people and make it a good environment to work in.

But when happened and I lost half my net worth, all people saw was, oh, this guy bought a, you know, big house on the water, private beach, all that.

He's got a Ferrari, a Lambo, all these cars.

People were like, oh, he's it.

Oh, I made that money years ago.

I'm getting k right now.

I was losing like 250 grand a week and and I kept keeping people employed because I didn't want them to be screwed and

right.

So to me, I'm like, I'm this great guy trying to help people.

And then they all, when they finally did have to get let go, we did shut that company down, that one particular one that had a couple hundred employees, they were all like,

and that's kind of when I realized, like, it's really, it truly is, what have you done for me lately?

It's not what have you done for me.

Nobody cares about anything other than what happened right now and how they're impacted.

Yeah, people don't think long term, right?

Yeah.

And it's also, they're the main character of their own story, you know?

Like you're effectively as an employer, if you don't know the people, you're an NPC.

Yeah, that's true, man, for sure.

But going back to call centers, I mean, it's 2023 and they're still working, huh?

Yeah, so I mean, I haven't had a call center since 21 when I sold one to Bank Capital.

But I help people start call centers.

I finance call centers.

I provide them with, you know, capital to grow.

A lot of that feeds back into them spending money with my marketing company.

But call centers still work.

It's not the same as it used to be.

You know, the days of effectively outbound calling people that don't want calls are kind of dead.

But, you know, getting consumers interested in a product, having them call in and make a purchase, that's very much still alive.

So warm leads.

Yeah.

So you have like three types of lead product.

You have your data leads, your warm calls, and your cold calls.

So when I say cold calls, okay, sorry.

Inbound calls.

transfers, data leads.

An inbound call is a consumer taking their own initiative initiative to make a phone call to buy a product or service or to inquire about one.

A data lead is somebody filling out a form, usually not thinking they're going to get called, which is why we all hate filling out forms.

You know, we go online and we're like, I want to figure out how much auto insurance is going to cost.

And we have 27 calls.

Never, ever, ever, this is to the audience, never request anything credit, debt, or finance related on the internet.

You'll get destroyed with calls.

And then you have transfers, which are those worm transfer product where a person gets a phone call that they probably didn't want, and then they get transferred after being qualified to a person to sell them a product or service.

Yeah.

So we focus only on the consumer-initiated side where the consumer takes the action.

They're genuinely interested.

It's a very high-quality, high-value product, and that's why our revenue is so much higher than everybody else in the space.

That makes sense.

And you're also spending 40 mil a year on paid ads, right?

Yeah.

In excess.

On Facebook?

So we use all platforms, you know, Facebook IG, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Snap.

And how did you manage to scale to that?

Because people can't even dream about it.

Lots of accounts, man.

I mean, you know, the thing for me was I started out in 2018.

We had a very, very high cost product.

So the average industry product was like 230 in the insurance space doing like short-term plans.

We were doing 500.

Jeez.

So I had a button in my system that said broke under 250.

So if somebody didn't have $250, we weren't even going to talk to them.

And I realized later, like, hey, my friends would like those.

So I started downselling them.

And I did it to buy this exact watch, actually.

I think I told you this story before, but I wanted to buy this watch.

Girlfriend wouldn't let me.

Now a lesbian, you remember?

And

so I really wanted the watch, made two grand a week, five grand a week, 10 grand a week.

And I was like, hey, it's a real business.

But they started complaining that some of the people were even too poor for them.

And when that happened, I was like, what do we do with poor people?

And there are all these different government benefit programs, Obamacare being one of them.

And I was like, duh.

So I convinced a Medicare agency to give me a few agents to allocate to this.

They pivoted their entire agency.

They have hundreds of agents now.

And, you know, sometime later, they wanted to sell their company.

So they divested from me a bit in making me their main marketing partner.

And I was just one of their marketing partners.

So when my revenue took a dive, I went to the old company that I sold to Bain and said, get in health, get in health, get in health.

And they were like, okay, we think we're going to get into health.

And I'm like, get in health.

Then they finally got in and we kind of scaled them to the moon.

And we were able to help them grow.

And, you know, now it's the exact same thing where we're just a part of their business.

Yeah.

So to prevent that from happening again, partners and I raised a bunch of money.

So we're now financing and incubating insurance agencies so that they can grow.

And as they grow, they obviously buy marketing.

So it keeps my business afloat, helps them grow, helps them make a lot of money.

And they don't have to come out of pocket millions of dollars to get into the business.

I love that.

Yeah, I've been studying the insurance game recently.

It seems like a lot of guys can make eight or nine figures in that space.

I think a lot of people do, but I don't think a lot can.

So you got to think that there are hundreds of thousands of people with insurance licenses.

Yeah.

There are only handfuls of people that make it to that level.

They have to be the owners of the company.

Yeah, you definitely have to be the owner of the company, or you have to be somebody with a massive downline.

Yeah.

You know, like a big tree with, like, you know, you got one guy in early and he grew to 5,000 employees, something like that, where you're able to make that dollar off the top that really adds up.

Yeah.

But the majority of the time, yeah, it's people owning the business, but it's so lucrative if you can do it right.

Yeah.

A lot of people do it wrong, but for sure.

So is that your plan to get to the billion dollar mark?

No, no, tech.

For sure.

Yeah.

I mean, the insurance stuff is great.

And don't get me wrong.

Like, I do very well.

I flew private for a year and a half.

That taught me a lot.

Was it worth it?

No.

Okay.

What I will say about private, if you are flying less than two hours, always fly private.

If you're flying greater than like three, don't fly private.

Because if you're flying two hours, Let's equate like time to money.

Let's say from all ventures combined, let's call it 20 grand an hour, 25 grand an hour, depending on the week.

If we were to say I spend half an hour stressing to get to the airport, an hour at TSA, 30 minutes for my bag, I'm out two hours for that leg.

My flight's only two.

Now I have to fly back.

So I'm spending equal time waiting and stressing.

And like, what if I brought a water bottle?

I might get frisked, you know?

Like, got grabbed because I brought a soda with me or something.

I don't drink soda, but you get it.

Yeah.

So that to me is really stressful.

And it's a massive waste of time.

But if you're flying like five, six, seven, 10 hours, like let's say I'm going from my Florida place to my Hawaii place, dude, that's a 10-hour flight, 11 if you get bad winds.

Yeah.

Flying private there is a lot of money.

I mean, that's cheap.

Yeah, it's like 150K round trip type thing.

Yeah.

Not a good situation to be in, you know?

And the types of planes you have to buy or rent to get that far, not like they're beautiful, but not fun on the wallet.

Yeah.

Like when my grandfather was doing bad, I flew back and forth to Florida so many times to make my head spin, 90K each way from here from LA.

And it's just like every time I get there and when he did finally pass, I got there and I was like, dude, you know, I really thought

I spent 450, 500 grand on this this year that you were just going to be like, just kidding.

I'm still living, you know?

And I was hiking in Colorado because he was unconscious on a ventilator and intubated.

I was hiking in Colorado.

I get a phone call FaceTime from my uncle.

It's my grandfather.

And he goes, Brandon, where are you?

And I was like, oh, I'm hiking in Colorado with my girlfriend.

He goes, when are you going to be here?

And I was like,

i don't know next couple days he's like you're not gonna make it he was right wow got on a jet the next morning had two hours of talking to him a lot of that was about trivial that he just wanted to learn you know talk about and then uh i had my assistant overnight a photo of us from when i was a kid it was a painting of me and him when i was three yeah and when i got there the next morning couldn't open his eyes and i was like it out i was like dude you need to open your eyes the painting is here You have to open your eyes and see it.

And after like an hour of trying every like 10 minutes, he finally opened his eyes, said that he saw it.

And then I felt kind of a little more at peace.

Wow.

That's, that's insane.

It was fed up.

I'm sorry you went through that, dude.

No, dude, it was rough.

Like that was like mother and father in one mentor, borderline idol.

Like there was not a greater human, a harder worker, like a kinder soul.

Wow.

What did you do for work?

Sales.

Yeah.

So I grew up in a family of salespeople.

I mean, by age of three, I knew how to manipulate people.

You know?

Sales does get a bad rep for that.

It does.

But the thing is, like, all of life is manipulation.

Social engineering is, like, the most basic thing as a human.

Your kids manipulate you.

Right.

When a kid wants food, it cries.

You know, when it shits, it cries.

It's not crying because it's sad.

It's crying because it thinks that will elicit the response that gets you to take the shit out of its diaper.

Interesting.

I never thought of it that way.

Yeah, kids are the most manipulative things on the planet, man.

They're not as innocent as we make it seem.

Well, I mean, they don't understand what they're doing.

It's human nature.

But, you know, the smarter a kid is or the more gifted they are in that skill, you know?

Yeah.

Damn.

So have you gone through a lot of successful people?

They end up losing everything along the way a few times.

Has that happened to you?

I mean, I lived in my car in 2016.

That was rough, right?

Like had the startup fail, hit rock bottom.

I remember the worst time of my life.

I went to Walmart.

Ever tell you a story about me going to Walmart multi-grain bread roll?

Oh, you did, I think.

Yeah.

Went into Walmart.

Stole a multi-grain bread roll, had a seed stuck in my tooth and could not afford to rip the tooth out, my wisdom tooth.

And I walked around for like four days, just tears streaming down my face from the nerve.

Not even pain, just the nerve.

Yeah.

And that was where I was like, okay, this sucks.

And I couldn't afford my car payment that I was living in.

So I pretended everything was fine, went to the dealership, traded it for a four-door, thought I would Uber.

And I basically told myself, you got 45 days to figure out how to make this payment or you're dead.

Like sh ⁇ .

Damn.

And I did three Uber rides.

First one, smelliest dude I've ever met in my life.

It was so bad.

The guy like did not believe in deodorant and was construction.

Oh, man.

I was like, okay, my car's going going to reek for a week.

And I don't like those air freshers.

They don't smell good to me.

Yeah.

You know, like, not good for you either.

Yeah, that too.

So I was like, all right, fine.

Next one will be better.

Next one I get, three frat kids in South Florida.

So very entitled.

They're like, hey, take us to, you know, whatever club in Fort Lauderdale.

I'm like, cool, no problem.

Got you guys.

They're like, yeah, we'll take care of you, but we left our credit card at the barbershop.

Can you run us back?

I'm literally at the strip.

So I take them back.

I come back and I'm like, yo, like, you said you're going to take care of me.

Like, what's the deal with that?

And the guy was like, oh, yeah, thanks, man.

I'm like, no, like, actually, though.

And I, like, got out of the car, walked into the bar, left my car in the middle of the road and was like, yo, like, do we have a problem?

To the point where.

No, I literally got removed from the venue by security because I was this kid over not giving me a tip.

Like, that's what my life came to.

Oh, my God.

You know, now my average tip, like, I walk around with $100 bills for everybody.

But at that time, it was like that $20 meant everything to me.

Wow.

Dude.

Yeah.

That was rock bottom.

That's probably a message not to to do Uber.

Yeah.

No, definitely not.

Do not do it.

You don't want to do it.

People smell.

Yeah.

My third guy was really smelly too.

And then I was like, I'm out.

Yeah.

So what'd you do from there?

Started like helping people in call centers.

Okay.

Doing a lot of like call center consulting, a lot of like bedrooms.

I mean, I now have a bikini company with a girl that's at Kiki the brand and the bikini company crushes girl that lived in the house with her father, was in college, whatever.

And I was building a call center out of his living room.

And at the the time i had a girlfriend and i was just like

man if i didn't have a girlfriend and then some years later i didn't have a girlfriend so you got with her uh

happens

uh but you know some time later she had done kind of what i did and helped everybody around her and kind of like ran her situation um a little too lean so i had to infuse some capital and you know now have a piece of that and it's really cool to like watch the growth and the learning experience from her going from making a ton of money to opening a cafe for her sister's dream to, you know, employing all of her friends and learning the hard way that your friends and family will sometimes take advantage if given the chance to.

And just all the that I had to learn, but she learned it on a smaller budget.

Yeah.

So that really hurts.

Yeah.

But yeah, everyone goes through that with success.

Family, friends, they all try to get their piece of it.

You know, it's unfortunate.

Yeah, it sucks because...

You know, you have two options.

You can become jaded like most people do and just hate everybody and suspect everybody and have these like negative feelings about humanity, or you can just be like, Okay,

this is just unfortunate.

It is what it is, comes with the territory.

I'm not going to change who I am, but it sucks.

Yeah, for sure.

So, if you lost everything, all your money right now, all your assets, but you still had the mindset, all your knowledge, and your connections, how long would it take to make a million?

30 days.

That's it, maybe 45.

What would you do?

Uh, so I could do any number of things and still do that.

I mean, I'll give you a great example.

I had a guy, I do an Ask Me Anything on Discord every Thursday, right?

Free advice to anybody, anywhere, anything that won't hurt my business, I'll tell you.

And this guy was like, Yeah, I have this course for tech sales.

I'm like, okay.

He's like, Yeah, I teach people how to get jobs in tech sales.

And I'm like,

okay, what's that like?

He goes, well, I explain to them what tech sales is.

And I'm like,

okay.

So what's, what are they paying you for?

He's like, well, they're paying me to explain to them how to get a job in tech sales.

And I'm like, okay, so go on Indeed?

Like, how are we doing this?

And he's like, no, I kind of like teach them what you'll be doing and like skills you need to develop.

And I'm like, how much do you charge?

He goes, $1,500.

I i was like holy wow i did the math on it was like wow i could run this as an offer and make like 30 40 million a year my eyes closed just doing one call a week that's like i'm in the wrong business people actually pay for that yeah well the thing is like everybody that has a goal of doing something more knows like there are opportunities that pay better than others right yeah like insurance tech sales those are all businesses that are lucrative they're never going anywhere And so getting a tech sales job is like guaranteed six figures.

So for somebody who's working like 50K a year and wants to move into it, you know, paying $1,500 to have access to a six-figure industry is kind of a good deal.

Yeah.

So, I mean, like, I get all these ideas that I teach people how to scale, but then they come to me and I'm like, oh, this is what you could do.

That makes sense.

Dude, it's been super fun, Brandon.

Anything you want to close off with or promote?

Digital social hour.

There we go, baby.

Where can people find you?

At Dowski on IG.

I don't really use any other platforms, discord.com or discord.gg slash dowski.

Yeah, definitely message from guys.

He always helps out.

I love how much content you put put in the group chat, man.

I really appreciate you helping people out.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, I'll see you next time.