"How I Became A Millionaire Before 20" - Dan Fleyshman 👑 E76

Speaker 1 19 years old, we get a licensing deal for $9.5 million.

Speaker 1 I became the youngest owner of a publicly traded company in history. And so, on the 10 year anniversary, I resigned so that I could start an online poker site called Victory Poker.

Speaker 1 And then, 10 months later, we're one of the top five most traffic sites. We're getting eyeballs all over the planet.
April 15th at 10:10 in the morning, online poker in America was shut down.

Speaker 1 Seized by the FBI. So, I'm going to walk you through my real-life story of the blunt, blunt, blunt truth behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Money Mondays.

Speaker 1 This is a solo episode where I'm going to go through my bio and talk you through the ups and downs, the roller coasters, the twists, the turns, how things progressed in this last 25 years.

Speaker 1 That's even weird to say 25 years.

Speaker 1 Last 25 years, since I was 17 years old, starting these various businesses, angel investments social media agency energy drinks poker sites acaibol chains sports card chains and everything between i'm going to walk you through the real life ups and downs along the way how did i get to these different businesses investments what happened why so this is more like story time as i like to go story time story time whenever my friends are about to tell us a story i get excited for them because i like to hear stories so i'm going to walk you through my real life story of the blunt blunt blunt truth behind the scenes of everything along the journey of the last 25 years and so whether you're at home whether at the car in the gym i will get this episode done typically in under 40 minutes this one probably be even faster than that

Speaker 1 because as i go through these things i'm going to showcase to you why how the thought process etc because you might be going through one of those things or you might face in the future or you might have already faced in the past and you might find things that are relatable that are very different you might want to wonder why i did my version of it or why it might relate to you And hopefully it helps you in some fashion now or in the future.

Speaker 1 All right, let me walk you through. So in high school, I was working three jobs, working at Ruby's Diner with a sailor's cap on, working at Qualcomm Stadium, selling peanuts and cracker jacks here.

Speaker 1 Selling cotton candy, ice cold lemonade at the stadium. I was working for oldie discount stockbrokers for $20 an hour cash under the table, which was crazy.

Speaker 1 I only got to work three hours a day, but that was a huge amount of money, obviously, in 1999.

Speaker 1 I'm in San Diego, and I'm saving up $43,000 during those three years, you know, from 15 to 17 years old, to go to San Diego State.

Speaker 1 Instead, I start my company trademarking the catchphrase, who's your daddy, for over 300 products. Now, trademarking only typically costs between 800 bucks to 1,200 bucks for one class of trademarks.

Speaker 1 Here's a problem.

Speaker 1 We did it for beverages. We did it for barbecue sets.
We did it for clothing. We did it for different countries.
And every time, $1,200 here, $900 there.

Speaker 1 You can do the math when you do 16 classes of trademarks like we did all over the planet in a lot of different countries so that we could license out this brand name along the way.

Speaker 1 18 years old, do $1 million in sales at the Magic Clothing Convention. 19 years old, we'd get a licensing deal for $9.5 million for a three-year deal with starter apparel.

Speaker 1 And the management team there was licensing us just for the UK for our clothing for the Hoosi Daddy trademark.

Speaker 1 Over the next couple years, build up the clothing. We're in in a bunch of stores.

Speaker 1 We're in Macy's, we're in Nordstrom's, we're in Steve Madden shoe stores, we're licensing out overseas, we got, man, we're selling t-shirts, clothes, shoes, sweatshirts, hoodies, hats, everything of this brand.

Speaker 1 Then around 22 years old, I decided I wanted to launch an energy drink because most of the 900 energy drinks tasted like cough syrup. That same main ingredient called taurine

Speaker 1 makes that

Speaker 1 that sticky taste that feeling when you're drinking an energy drink that aftertaste is by taurine. So went and and found a really good chemist.

Speaker 1 He gave us the brand, he gave us the feeling, he gave us the coloring for something called the cranberry pineapple and for the green tea.

Speaker 1 So we make a cranberry pineapple energy drink. Most energy drinks are the same color, the same style, the same flavoring.

Speaker 1 So we made one of the first fruit-flavored ones that was zero sugar, zero carbs, zero calories.

Speaker 1 And instead of a black can or a silver can like most of the other brands, I had a bright yellow can and a bright red can. Why? Well, it's cranberry pineapple.
So I made a red can and a yellow can.

Speaker 1 And the crazy scientist doctor that gave us the formulation said, once you hit $1 million in sales, I will give you the green tea and the zero sugar, zero carb, zero calorie version of that.

Speaker 1 Well, we had a year to do it, and I did in a couple months because I was obsessed with selling my energy drinks. And right away, I started calling distributors, calling chain stores, going everywhere.

Speaker 1 Boom. Surpassed the million dollars in sales mark.
Boom. Give us the green tea.
Bada bing.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden, we get Budweiser distributor in Orange County, California to be our first Budweiser distributor. And immediately, thank this man.

Speaker 1 He calls Tucson, Arizona, Phoenix, Dallas, Texas, Salt Lake City, and starts getting us into other Budweiser distributors around the country.

Speaker 1 Why would he do that? Well, the name is fun. The color of the can is cool.

Speaker 1 It's only $2 a can retail compared to to three dollars and four dollars of our competitors you know monster rockstar red bull etc we're selling through all these stores really well

Speaker 1 and then bevnet magazine beverage net magazine it's called bevnet is the you know the magazine in the space in the category and we win number one flavor of the year versus 900 energy drinks well you can imagine what i did with that magazine I ordered a ton of copies and I brought it with me to every distributor meeting, every retail meeting, and got us into 55,000 retail stores through 43 distributors, 21 of them being Budweiser, and the other half being Coors, Miller, Pepsi, and Southern Wine and Spirits.

Speaker 1 Southern Wine and Spirits for Las Vegas.

Speaker 1 So from 23 to 27, I don't remember anything but selling energy drinks. That's what I did.
That's what I loved. And I got us into these 55,000 stores.

Speaker 1 On April

Speaker 1 1st, 2005,

Speaker 1 I became the youngest owner of a publicly traded company in history. I'm 23 years old at the time,

Speaker 1 23 and a half. And all of a sudden, we're on CNN, Fox, everything.
This is pre-social media, remember? Like, social media existed for like MySpace and like the Facebook was around, right?

Speaker 1 But there was no social media. There was no Instagram.
No one was tweet, tweeting. There was none of these things were happening really outside because this is 2005.

Speaker 1 And so I'm trying to build a brand in the YouTube days and the MySpace days to build up this beverage brand.

Speaker 1 On the 10-year anniversary. So I started in 1999 on May 18th.
I know for sure because I had hats that said 518.99.

Speaker 1 On the 10-year anniversary, I resigned from the company so I could put another feather in my cap.

Speaker 1 I've been selling clothing, energy drinks, etc. for a decade straight, and I wanted to do something else because I've done the same thing for a decade.

Speaker 1 And so on the 10-year anniversary, I resigned so that I could start an online poker site called Victory Poker. Victory Poker, within 10 weeks of ideation, was live.

Speaker 1 and I was living in Malta and I have no idea where Malta is. So I had the idea.

Speaker 1 I brought together Dan Bilzerian, DJ Steve Aoki, Playboy Playmates like Sarah Underwood, Jessica Persiaga, all these interesting characters from models, DJs,

Speaker 1 stars, people that are just getting big in social media. Like Bilzerian, like Steve Aoki, they're starting to build their brand presence.
You know, social media is rising. It's around 2009, 2010.

Speaker 1 And then 10 months later, we're one of the top five most traffic sites. We can eyeballs all over the planet from all of our content because we built this huge poker train.

Speaker 1 23 poker pros that all had good names in the categories. They're all over TV.
I'm playing on TV and poker shows in London, in America, and everywhere in between.

Speaker 1 Some of our poker pros are coming in first and second place in major tournaments. They're final tabling on television shows all over the world, wearing the victory poker patch.
Everything's amazing.

Speaker 1 Holy smokes. I'm living in Malta.
I only have five employees, tens of thousands of new players coming in left and right. And then something called Black Friday happens, April 15th.

Speaker 1 10, 10 in the morning, I get a call from Dan Bilzerian.

Speaker 1 Where are you? Well, I'm at the Bellagio. It's like, why aren't you in Malta? I should have done my voice.
Why aren't you in Malta? It's my best impersonation.

Speaker 1 And I was explaining to him that I have a really big meeting at 12 o'clock with this gentleman who had actually sold the slot machine loyalty card for $440 million.

Speaker 1 So he was really big in the gaming space. He had owned the licenses to Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, like the slot machines.
He's a big player in the gaming space.

Speaker 1 And so I flew in to meet with him at 12 p.m.

Speaker 1 That day, I was going to meet with him at the Hard Rock, but I'm at the Bellagio, 10, 10 a.m., and my life is changing. Because April 19th, four days later, I've already booked out.

Speaker 1 the Gaia Resort in Costa Rica. Google it.
It's a gorgeous resort. G-A-I-A.

Speaker 1 Booked out this resort. I've got, again, models and playmates, poker pros, videographers, Trevor, who's sitting right next to me filming this podcast.

Speaker 1 We're all flying in to film and shoot this big marketing campaign because we just closed this really big deal at a large valuation, a $65 million valuation for Victory Poker

Speaker 1 for April 19th. I had the flights, the whole resort booked.
Everyone's coming in to shoot content. But instead, April 15th at 10.10 in the morning, online poker in America was shut down.

Speaker 1 My competitors were literally seized by the FBI.

Speaker 1 Not theoretically, but literally, if you went onto full-tile poker or poker stars or absolute poker onto their websites, you can Google this one.

Speaker 1 And everything I say you can Google because I'm being very blunt and open with you guys because it's important for our society to have blunt discussions about good, bad, and ugly, and everything between.

Speaker 1 You can Google it.

Speaker 1 Full-tail poker, absolute poker stars. It literally said, seized by the FBI, and they were just like gone.
Luckily, on Victory Poker, on my website, victorypoker.net, it just, everything was fine.

Speaker 1 I never got a letter. I never got in trouble, obviously, because I wasn't doing what they were doing.
They were miscoding merchant transactions.

Speaker 1 It'll take a long time to explain, but the main idea is, let's say Trevor wants to deposit 500 bucks on PokerStars. It would say like PS3.
I want to deposit the same 500 bucks.

Speaker 1 It would say like mattresses.biz on our credit card statements. That's not cool.
That's not kosher.

Speaker 1 And so they got in big trouble because they were doing that to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Full tilt was doing like $4 million a day in revenue.

Speaker 1 And poker stars were doing like $8 million a day in revenue. Like a lot.
I was a little engine that could. I started my whole company with 2.6 million, sorry, 2.4 million versus all these guys.

Speaker 1 That's what they were doing a day, right? Like I was, I was like a rounding error to them. And we were able to build up one of the top five poker sites on the planet.

Speaker 1 so I go to this meeting it's 12 o'clock and it was very intense you know because I just I don't know what to do you know social media is not getting that big then that we're like there's Twitter and there's YouTube but YouTube is not really social media to me it's media it's not social and so I'm interacting with people calling everybody to trying to figure things out

Speaker 1 and fun story

Speaker 1 I walk in to meet this multi-billionaire. And right when I walk into his room at the Hard Rock, I'm there with a guy named Steve Sear, very famous casino host.

Speaker 1 He wrote a book called Whale Hunt in the Desert. So he's taking me over there to meet this guy.
I walk in, the guy's like, man, you look like somebody died.

Speaker 1 And he hasn't shaken my hand yet, right? Like he just, this is our first time meeting. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I think my whole industry just died.
Turn on the TV.

Speaker 1 So he puts on ESPN right away. There it is.
And so

Speaker 1 he puts on speakerphone some guy named Steve Wynn

Speaker 1 that owns some casinos.

Speaker 1 And Steve's very upset because just recently, right before this, April 15th, he had done a mega deal with one of those poker sites very publicly for this huge, you know, thing that they're doing together.

Speaker 1 And he was very upset that he wasn't aware of what they were doing. And, you know, it's not his fault.
How could he know that, you know, what they were doing? It's not his lawyer's fault either.

Speaker 1 But he's very upset because publicly he just did this huge deal with one of the top three poker sites on the planet. Top two poker sites on the planet.
And everyone was talking about it.

Speaker 1 It was a great, you know, con conceptually it was a great deal and all of a sudden he has egg on his face because he's associated or attached to poker sites that just got seized by the fbi yikes

Speaker 1 so now i have a decision to make i mean i didn't get in trouble i didn't get a letter and nothing was wrong with i wasn't doing what they were doing i had wells fargo and kpmg accounting and i was on a big network like a poker network that was handling all the back end So I had no chance of getting in trouble because I wasn't doing anything like what they were doing.

Speaker 1 And I was very clean cut, very basic. And I just had Wells Fargo and KPMG Accounting watching everything, very big a firm and a huge poker network behind me.
My decision was, do I keep going?

Speaker 1 And now I have way less competition because those three sites accounted for more than half the whole poker world.

Speaker 1 Or do I do what I did and take the safe route and just pay everyone back? And so we put out all these notices and emails and social media blasts.

Speaker 1 You know, again, social media wasn't that huge back then. We were getting like five, six million views on YouTube videos, but that's not social media.
That's media. It's more like a television.

Speaker 1 so we're telling everybody withdraw withdraw withdraw and then we manually

Speaker 1 manually

Speaker 1 helped withdraw 41 000 refu refunds manually that's hard to do nowadays with technology imagine back then over a decade ago and so

Speaker 1 that part of the process and why i'm telling you the in-depth part of the storyline is i paid everyone back on April 19th, you know, those four days.

Speaker 1 I manually paid everyone back instead of being in Costa Rica with models and poker pros and photo shoots and campaigns, you know, announcing this new big deal we were doing, instead, we closed down, mainly paid everybody back so that I could sleep at night, that it was safe.

Speaker 1 Because I didn't trust what was going to happen if the government would pay people back. I knew that they had seized the funds.

Speaker 1 It took them two to four years to pay people back, and most people didn't get paid back. Again, I'm not anti-government.
I'm anti-slow.

Speaker 1 And I know how slow they can be because there's a lot of red tape and a lot of bureaucracy behind it.

Speaker 1 And there's so much paperwork involved and millions of players involved and so i just took the safe route to pay everybody back so i could be the good guy in the space and i could sleep at night and thank god that i did because it took them years to pay people back and only a portion and it was really because poker stars later stepped in and decided to put the money up for full-tail poker to pay people back when they didn't have to which was very nice of them and very good for the whole poker community

Speaker 1 So now, April 20th, I got a decision to make. I am unemployed.
I just lost my huge poker company.

Speaker 1 I'm living in a place called Malta, like in the middle of nowhere, underneath the boot of Italy, right? Underneath Sicily. And like, now what?

Speaker 1 And so I had a decision to make. Do I want to sit on the floor and cry about it and throw a pity party?

Speaker 1 Or do what I did, shake it off, start going consulting for land-based casinos and for some financial businesses, some other online brands, and teach them about what I went through and how I scaled it.

Speaker 1 How did I get so famous so quickly? How did I get us on television? How did I think about the poker market?

Speaker 1 How did I deal with affiliates and ads and everything to get, you know, more and more players and get tens of thousands of players to be coming into the site versus all these major poker sites?

Speaker 1 How did I work with the magazines? How did I work with the TV shows? How did I do all the things?

Speaker 1 Consulting helped a lot and it led to my next company, which is still around 13 years later called Elevator Studio. At first, it was a different name, and then we changed it to Elevator Studio.

Speaker 1 So get into social media.

Speaker 1 and I'm literally like driving to the Kardashians house to drop off fit tea in fashion nova dresses and like you know writing their caption for them on how they should post on Instagram or Twitter etc

Speaker 1 that changed and changed me and my mindset of I never wanted to be all in on any one company again I never want to have all my eggs in one basket because I went all in on this poker site and on the day after that was called April 20th now what I was all in on this one thing I didn't have a bunch of investments out there.

Speaker 1 I didn't have a bunch of deals going on. I was in it.
And so that changed my life.

Speaker 1 That terrible business moment led me to change how I operate to this day and forever, forever, forever for the rest of my life.

Speaker 1 I'm an angel investor in 43 companies and spread out my risk because of that situation. And I think about it all the time.
And I always think about it. I love poker.
And I love the game.

Speaker 1 I love the market. But again, I'm not anti-government.
I'm anti-slow. Here we are, 13 years later, and there's still only three or four states that are legally regulated for poker.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, you can go to most any state in the country, and there's casinos. Every state has the lottery, bingo, horse racing.
I can go in and bet my entire net worth on lottery tickets.

Speaker 1 And let's say I make $200 a week, and I don't have much money.

Speaker 1 I can spend all $200 buying lottery tickets, but I can't play a skill game like poker, and I can't angel vest into a company because that's illegal too.

Speaker 1 That's crazy. So I'm not anti-government.
I'm anti-slow. And so we only have three or four states that are regulated.

Speaker 1 So we are a long way from federal regulation on poker, even though poker is the only one of those that's a skill game.

Speaker 1 That's right, like Phil Ivey, Daniel Negrandiu, Phil Helmuth, these household name players. There's a reason that they have 5, 10, 15, 20 bracelets.

Speaker 1 of World Series poker bracelets because they have skills, not luck. Is there some luck and math involved? Of course there is.

Speaker 1 But over the course of time the skilled players have proven that they will win over and over and over Phil Ivy just won another bracelet a week or two weeks ago depending on when you're listening to this episode Phil Ivy is the legend of poker and so that moment made me decide I'm gonna start a social media agency start elevator studio

Speaker 1 And to this day, the butterfly effect of that is I've done over 110,000 paid posts, spent over $60 million with influencers, and I've W-9'd, you know, get the tax forms from 3,500 influencers just in the past year so I'm really helping as much as I can in the social media influencer space for brands products and mobile apps that all stemmed from the day I could have been on the floor crying about losing my victory poker okay

Speaker 1 social media agency is going on still to this day we do campaigns for brands products mobile apps a lot of fashion companies fitness brands supplement companies beverage companies, food and beverage brands, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And a lot of the companies I invest into, it allows me to help them scale because I can do social media work for them.

Speaker 1 So then,

Speaker 1 now what? For the first six, seven years, I just wanted to do everything by myself. I was doing the literally writing the captions.

Speaker 1 I would drive over to Tyga and Amber Rose and Scott Disick and Kylie and whoever I had to to drop off products. I thought I had to do everything for the first five, six, seven years.

Speaker 1 Then I had a wake-up call. It's around 2018, 2019.

Speaker 1 I decided I'm going to bring on a CEO. One of my main executives at the company named Dan Raff introduced me to a guy named Joey Carson.
Joey Carson had a very big pedigree.

Speaker 1 He was original CEO of Buna Murray. You've seen him.
He was on an episode the last month. Joey Carson

Speaker 1 was the original CEO for Buna Murray for eight years that created shows like Road Rurals, Real World, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Simple Life with Paris Hilton, etc.

Speaker 1 He did like eight or nine years with Fox, eight or nine years with Sony, worked with Dr. Phil.
He has this 30-year career of like big TV stuff.

Speaker 1 And so it was a big decision to try to convince him to come work for me. And I was very excited.
It took me months to do it. And that changed everything.
So now, go to 2019.

Speaker 1 I've got the CEO, Joey Carson, taking on Elevator Studio, taking on Elevator Syndicate, my investment group. You guys can check that out at elevator syndicate.com.

Speaker 1 I have 846 accredited investors in that group. It's free to join, by the way, but you have to be a credit investor.

Speaker 1 So he's helping me with elevator syndicate, elevator syndicate.com, helping me raise capital for companies.

Speaker 1 I've since then raised $44 million and growing for food and beverage brands and consumer products through the Elevator Syndicate.

Speaker 1 He's helping me with Elevator Nights to throw these events. I've thrown 54 Elevator Nights.
So, you know, these free events are 300 to 1,000 people.

Speaker 1 All these things have stemmed from losing my company. losing the poker site.
Who knows? I might be still running a big, huge poker site to this day, 13 years later.

Speaker 1 Who knows what would have happened if it would have just kept going?

Speaker 1 But instead, I don't have all my eggs in one basket. I've started to invest in companies, throw live events, et cetera.
So when the CEO, Joey Carson, comes in, that's now 2019, I start a mastermind.

Speaker 1 I've been speaking at a bunch of masterminds. I've been throwing elevator nights for free.
I'd thrown a few dozen elevator nights by this time, 2019.

Speaker 1 And I decide I've had this idea to make the most expensive, coolest, experienced-focused mastermind in the world.

Speaker 1 $100,000 per person, and everyone's going to have at least a $5 million size company, preferably $10 million or higher, to be able to even apply to join the 100 million mastermind experience.

Speaker 1 You can look at that one at 100 MME.com. 100 MME.com.

Speaker 1 So we sold out every year since 2019. I sold out that very first one within 10 weeks.
Which is crazy thinking back about that. People paying $100,000 to join this group.

Speaker 1 So we had 100 people, 100 grand each for the hundred million mastermind that only would have happened if I brought on the CEO to let me fly because I felt like I was chained and shackled inside the office because I had to do everything and once I brought on a high-level CEO to work with the team I was able to fly I start

Speaker 1 my angel investments start to become much more often I started to bring in way more clients for the business because now I'm out there speaking at events. I'm socializing a lot more.

Speaker 1 I'm throwing a lot more events. And everything happened because of the CEO, Joey, coming in.
It allowed me to skill as a personal brand. I started to grow my following.
I started to grow my network.

Speaker 1 I'm going out to as many events as I can. I'm speaking over 100 times a year, almost 200 times a year for a couple of those years.

Speaker 1 Boom, I'm just going out everywhere because the CEO helped me take over the business and I could start scaling. And by doing that, I'm bringing in clients.
I'm bringing investments.

Speaker 1 I'm bringing in deal flow because I'm out there being able to fly. I'm not shackled to the office.

Speaker 1 And so a couple of investments I'll just go over with you real quick, and then we'll wrap up this episode about the bio.

Speaker 1 So I'm investing in companies. I invested, obviously, in Everbull, which I talk about pretty often.
I put in 500K in Everbull

Speaker 1 2018, 2019, raised them $5 million.

Speaker 1 They go on to go from like 17, 18 stores at the time to now having 95 or 96 locations, opening one new one every six days. I invested into Cars and Coffee, my sports card chain.

Speaker 1 You can check that out at thecoffeebreakers.com. We've done over $32 million in sales, selling sports cards and Pokemon.

Speaker 1 I raise money for Icon Meals. I raise money for BLK water.

Speaker 1 I raise money for It's Skinny Pasta, a bunch of these different type of brands, Creatures of Habit, Oatmeal, a whole bunch of brands, $3 million, $4 million, $5 million, $6 million at a time.

Speaker 1 Joyride Candy, all these food and beverage brands, I've been raising $3 million, $4 million, $5 million, $6 million for each of these brands, which creates a lot of jobs, which is why I love it.

Speaker 1 I'm able to create a lot of jobs investing into these food and beverage and consumer product brands. And a lot of cool stuff happens when those guys scale, right?

Speaker 1 Everbull goes goes on to hire hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of employees and probably over a thousand by now and way more coming because there's 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 110, 120, 130 locations.

Speaker 1 Boom, boom, boom. They're just going to keep opening locations left and right because they've already sold over 430 locations of Everbull.

Speaker 1 So I like investing in the companies and I like the altruistic part of it is I really like the employees that get hired because of these investments.

Speaker 1 I'm going to keep doing three to six million dollars per month into these brands that go on to hire people.

Speaker 1 Along the way, I do a lot of charity things because I want to inspire and showcase how you can do charity wherever you are in the world.

Speaker 1 So I started my charity, Model Citizen Fund, where we make backpacks for the homeless with 150 emergency supply items inside. Half of it's food and drinks.

Speaker 1 The other half is poncho, watch, cleaning supplies, sleeping bag.

Speaker 1 duct tape, socks, all these things that people need. So Model Citizen Fund started in 2010, 14 years ago, and that's my charity that I'm going to be doing forever.

Speaker 1 We also started what's called the Trinus Kids Foundation to do toy drives, back-to-school drives, report card day, Thanksgiving food drive, four events a year for around 300 Latin families in downtown LA for Trina's Kids at Hubble Studio with the founder, Vince Ritchie.

Speaker 1 Now, that led to two years ago, breaking the Guinness Brook World Records for the world's largest toy drive. We brought over 118,000 toys to SoFi Stadium and covered the whole football field.

Speaker 1 Last year, we went even crazier. We did 10 city toy drive in a 15 day period and then did an extra 11 city as well just to be you know extra cuckoo.
So charity became a huge component to me.

Speaker 1 Again, this stems back to if you think about it, my charity started the year I lost and closed down Victory Poker. My social media agency started the year I lost and closed down Victory Poker.

Speaker 1 My life started and everything about my brand, my speaking, my events, my consulting, all the things, my network, the butterfly effect of losing the Victory Poker site, which should be me sitting on the floor crying about it, led to everything that you see in the bio and the career that we just talked about.

Speaker 1 Because that hard day led to this interesting life of situations from...

Speaker 1 Realizing and learning from the moment instead of sitting on the floor and crying about it and being resentful for it, which oftentimes happen.

Speaker 1 You are going to go through business struggles. You're going to have business situations.

Speaker 1 You're going to get sued. You do over a million dollars in sales.

Speaker 1 I promise you're going to get sued. You become a millionaire.
I can pinky swear you're going to get sued.

Speaker 1 It's a part of business and life. It's going to happen left and right, no matter how pure you are, how good you are.

Speaker 1 I can't even explain how many lawsuits I'm going to be in in the course of my life. I just know it's part of the game.
I've been in 17 lawsuits and I've won 17 lawsuits.

Speaker 1 17 for 17 for a very specific purpose, very specific reason. I go in with good intentions and I stay that way throughout the process of it.

Speaker 1 I keep all my emails, text messages, contracts and agreements and I always do my part very clearly in every single part of it from before, during, and after. And if you do those things,

Speaker 1 yes, do you need good lawyers? That is part of it. But really, to be blunt, it's because of My intention, my clarity, my paperwork.
That's it.

Speaker 1 The Lord helps explain all those things, but I have to be the one to live and breathe those things. And so I say that because you're going to go through struggles in your career.

Speaker 1 You're going to have setbacks. You're going to have breakups with partnerships, and people are going to change on you.
People are going to get jealous of you as you build your businesses and career.

Speaker 1 You might grow as a social media influencer. You might grow as a business person.
You might grow in your

Speaker 1 actual just career as a job. Whatever that thing is that you're doing,

Speaker 1 things change around you. And so I say this.

Speaker 1 If you know going in that things are hard if you know going in that lawsuits can happen businesses can fail breakups can happen from friends and partnerships you can think about a different light and not be so shocked when it happens i stay calm in the chaos because i expect the chaos i know that it's coming i know every day that i look at my phone people are going to be complaining changing things, customer returns, cancellations, refunds, shipping problems, every single day.

Speaker 1 This employee did this. They got into a fight.
They're They're dating. What should we do? What happens with that employee does this with that person? Like, oh, this client doesn't like this.

Speaker 1 They do love this. They want to scale.
They want to cancel. Every day is going to happen.
And so I just stay calm. People are like, oh my God, the light bulbs just fell and smashed on the floor.

Speaker 1 You didn't even react. Well, I know that it's going to happen.
I'm not saying I knew the light bulb was going to come down. I knew that something was going to smash.

Speaker 1 Meaning something's going to happen in the event or something's going to happen right here in this RV. That light can fall over.

Speaker 1 Right here in this RV, this table, something can happen, or the speaker could, or this podcast mic could catch on fire. And I would stay so calm because I expect things to happen.

Speaker 1 I don't want my podcast mic to stay on fire. I don't want that light to fall over.
I'm using the real life examples that things are going to happen.

Speaker 1 And they're going to happen all the time, especially as you grow in your career, especially as you grow in your business. And so as you listen to this bio version of...

Speaker 1 you know, there's a lot of other twists and turns that happen along the way in the career. There's a lot of other things that I invested into and people I invested into, et cetera.

Speaker 1 But I don't want to take up too much of your time because I like to keep these episodes to under 40 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute work is 45 minutes.

Speaker 1 So I want to try to keep this episode to under 45 minutes. What I do want to ask you to do is make sure to check out themoneymondays.com.
That is our weekly live calls where every Monday at 4 p.m.

Speaker 1 PST, I do this in-depth discussion with the guests, with the members.

Speaker 1 And then for about 40 minutes and then 20 minutes, I open up to live Q ⁇ A sessions and we're all chatting and talking with each other. And I've done that for over a year now.

Speaker 1 I'm going to keep doing that for many years. That's themoneymondays.com.
There's a free 30-day trial so you can come watch four weeks of it for free.

Speaker 1 And if you want to stick around, it's 200 bucks a month. That money all goes to the wild jungle to our animals here at the ranch where we are parked right now inside this RV motorhome.

Speaker 1 So check out the moneymondays.com. Make sure to help support us on the Money Mondays podcast.
If you noticed, I'm not talking about ads. I'm not reading to you ads or anything like that.

Speaker 1 I've been self-supporting this thing for the last year and a half because I want you guys to have a clean-cut episode.

Speaker 1 Listen, I'm not opposed to doing brand deals, but I've been avoiding doing any commercial reads just for the revenue, just for the money part of it, to make these podcasts have what's called a high listen-through rate.

Speaker 1 The reason that we've been staying top one, two, three on the podcast charts in the entrepreneur category, in the business category,

Speaker 1 is because we have a really high listen-through rate. And so I appreciate you guys.
And it really helps when you bring us new downloads and new people to listen to this. So share with your friends.

Speaker 1 Share on social media. Make sure you're liking, commenting, subscribing about the Money Mondays.
And I'll see you guys next monday