Joey Carson's Secret to Influencers Signing MILLION Dollar Contracts 🤑 E70

What does it take for someone as an influencer or just a character, you know, person sitting at home

to actually go out there and make a show and actually get signed?

So here's my answer to them.

Every agency in town, they have scores of assistants and their sole job is to scour

all the TikTok, Instagram, everything looking for that little thing.

That's why I say if there's something special about you, television will find you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very, very special edition of the Money Mondays because I have the CEO of it all.
Not just my agency, but all. When I say all, syndicate we have elevator nights we have elevator rolling fund we have elevator speakers all stemming from elevator studios our agency that's spent over 60 million dollars with influencers doing 110,000 paid posts over the years but what you're intrigued for is this gentleman has a 30 year long tv career before joining me half a decade ago so how did i convince him i have no idea it took me five months of negotiations to get him over here so if you guys have ever watched in the past real world road rules keeping up the kardashians simple life with paris hilton you can blame this guy sitting two feet to my right because he was the original ceo for the eight years of Beuner Murray.
So remember when you watch those reality shows at the bottom of the set of Beuner Murray? That was his fault too. After that, he worked with Sony.
He worked with Fox. He worked with Dr.
Phil and some amazing people during the course of his career focusing on the TV and film industry. So how did I get him to come over to a social media agency back in 2019, 2020? Well, he saw the overarching vision.
I wasn't just focused on influencer marketing. And because he had that three decade long career in managing $100 million budgets and $300 million budget and $50 million budgets, it was a big leap for me to say, can you come here to work with my social media agency? I want to become what's called a venture studio.
A venture studio is when we go into invest or take equity of companies, whether our clients, our friends, or people that inbound come to us through our live events or through our social media. Over the course of time, as you guys have heard, I've done 43 angel investments or venture studio investments through Elevator Studios because of this gentleman sitting next to me.
Along the way, we have what's called the Elev the elevator syndicate you can check it out at elevatorsyndicate.com that is for accredited investors we have 846 accredited investors and growing in that group and we've raised 44 million dollars over the last three years for food and beverage brands and consumer products what we do is we put in three to six million dollars per per deal into companies doing $2 to $20 million revenue.

You guys see me post about those type of companies all the time. Everbowl, Icon Meals, it'll take too long to list all the companies.
But you guys hear me talk about them throughout the podcast because it's important to me. We find companies doing $2 to $20 million because we want companies that we can help pour gasoline on the fire.
And these companies have gone on to do some great things. And so, without further ado, make sure you listen carefully because this is the one human on the planet that I listen to because he is my CEO, Mr.
Joey Carson. Well, thank you very much.
I can't believe we're actually sitting together on the same couch in the same place. At the same time.
Right. That never happened.
Okay. So, Joey, typically I say give us the the quick two minute bio so we can get straight to the money but if you need a little bit more in two minutes because your career go for it well i think you covered a lot of it there been very uh blessed with my career came out here in the late uh 80s after i graduated from college actually to pursue a music career last thing i wanted to do was get to do was get a job.
So I spent the first 10 years of my career working in the studio system. I worked for Columbia Pictures Television first, and then I worked for Fox, which was really the big leap in my career early on because it was the early days of Fox when the network was just getting going.
We were doing everything. We did all of the daytime syndication show, all the talk shows.
We did cable television shows. That was back in the days for the older people in your audience would remember movies of the week.
We did that. So we had a lot of fun.
And I had great mentors in that job and they gave me a lot of leeway. So I.
So before I had joined Fox, I had never been to New York in my life, and suddenly now I'm flying there almost every other week, doing all the production in New York and that sort of thing, which is really good. And I went about as far as I could go at Fox, and then that's when I folks at Buena Murray, uh, John and Mary Ellis.
I had actually known of them and worked with them at Fox. I'd actually given them money for a pilot at the time.
Yeah. Uh, and we, it was a really nice experience working with them.
And then I found out through an agent friend of mine that they were looking to kind of take this company to the next level and that sort of thing. So we met and I joined them.

And we did a lot of really cool things together.

We did a lot of things for the first time that people had never done.

You know, when we did The Simple Life, that was the very first network primetime reality show,

which you just don't see. Like all the network shows that are on now, they're all game shows and that sort of thing.
So we did that, and obviously that changed the landscape a lot. We were the first people on that show to put video content on the phone, which was kind of an idea that I had had.
In fact, a lot of the things we did that I did back then and we did together and I've done since really basic entrepreneurial things like how do we create a new revenue stream, right? And so like when we did MTV's big popular show, The Challenge, well, that originally was the real world road rules challenge. So we got cast.
Again, it was like, how do we come up with something? So we said, well, let's take people from Real World and Road Rules. Right.
It's like Marvel versus DC. Right.
And it had been going on for a little while and it was popular. And so we thought, how do we turn this into something else? So that's when we, as a group, we were like, well, what if we had men versus women? And what if we did a theme around this, where we had the gauntlet or the inferno? And so we turned that one show into like five different franchises.
But again, which again, we're all great. It's still going now, but like bigger than ever.
And, but that really just came out of a basic entrepreneurial need of like, how do we, you know, get more money in the door and do different things. At the round, the same time I did, I was fortunate enough to work with Steve Lipscomb when he started the World Pucker Tour.
So I was a founding board member of that. And we went through that entire process actually from getting the show up and running to being sold, which is a great story, probably too long long for this and then we took the company public and then we sold it again and i think it was 2010.
um so i did that after actually after i left buna murray uh i had a spent a couple of years in silicon valley which was really interesting and i i didn't know at the time I i had an idea with some other people to create an online virtual world or a massive multiplayer online game as they call them and i did a four million dollar series a raise straight off the deck that we did and which to me i was like okay it was to me it was almost like, okay, we sold a show. I've kind of found out later, like how rare that is.
So that was a really fun experience and did that for a few years. Ultimately, that company didn't survive due to the 2008 financial crisis.
And then after that, sometime after that, I went to work with Dr. Phil, he and I had been friends since he moved to California.
I was the first person that he met when he, yeah. And he's from Texas.
I'm from Texas. He played football.
I played football. He was a huge tennis player.
I'm a huge tennis player. So we just started hanging out, spending a lot of time together.
And we're just, you know, the best of friends for well over a decade before I ever went to work for him. And actually after I left

Dr. Phil is when you and I met.
Which by the way, I just realized this, next week it'll be six years

that I actually started. So we were already having lunches and talking.
But yeah, I think

next week is the six-year anniversary of us being together. That's when this episode comes out.
So it's coming out on our sixth anniversary. Yeah.
This comes out next Monday. There you go.
Okay, Joey. So we cover three core topics here.
How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. On the make money side, how do TV stars or especially reality stars make money? Well, it's different now than it was 20 years ago when I first started.
Originally, pretty much the only way a reality TV star would make money is by getting an episodic fee, which back in those days is really small, maybe $3,000 an episode, maybe $5,000 an episode, sometimes in rare cases, $10,000 an episode you it was just you know so if you're in 10 episodes and you got 10 000 an episode you made you know 100 grand that was it later on actually honestly i think really paris hilton was the first one to really break that boundary like when we originally did that show,

she had this vision of becoming everything that she is today. But back then it was just an idea for her.
She was like, I want to have a fashion brand. I want to have a fragrance brand.
I want to, you know, all these things. And no one had really done that before.
And so she used the show to kind of springboard herself into that stratosphere.

These days now, it's still pretty much the same. It's very hard for a reality star to carve out.
The only thing they can really carve out is like whatever their existing business is. But by being on television, like I remember even back in the Simple Life days and even with World Poker Tour, what we used to say at World Poker Tour is the show is the commercial for the tour.
Right. So if you're on a reality show, it's really a commercial for the ventures that you're doing.
And because where are you going to get that airtime right like you know a 30 second spot cost you know tens maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute and it's a commercial here you're just your brand is on television right uh so it's there's a lot of free promotion there so the smart and and again since paris was really the first one to do it i mean obviously you've seen what what the Kardashians have done. I mean, there's multi-billion dollar companies going on there, strictly as a result of that.
So, it's, you're not really going to, I always tell people if they're going to be on a reality show or whatever, you're not going to make money. In fact, it's probably going to cost you money by the time you get a lawyer to review the contract and all of that.
But think a little bit down the road of how this benefits your personal brand. A lot of kind of what you talk about in personal branding, right? Okay.
So I need you to do a reality check for people. Okay.
We're in Hollywood. We're in Los Angeles where people from all over the planet fly in with visions of grandeur.
They're going to be a star, whether it's a music star, an acting star, a TV star, a social media influencer, etc. Walk us through what it takes to actually land a full, not a little cameo, to land a TV or movie role.
Well, if you're an actor, it's very, very difficult. And the competition that you are up against is staggering.
So think about it. If you have been in plays all your life, and maybe you went to college and you got a BFA in college, and then maybe you even got a master's you got an mfa from a prestigious school like yale or something like that that's still no guarantee that just because you have that education it does not really matter when it comes down to a casting session right right it just what so what you want to uh i have a very close friend who's like a very well-known famous acting teacher her name is leslie khan and she has a line that i think is is really good and she says i don't want your acting to be the problem right so when you walk in there your acting is.
And so then it really just becomes about your interpretation of what's on the page and how you read for that role. I'll give you an example.
Think about it. Most people watch any TV show and they think, how hard can it be? Right.
I could do that. I mean, how hard is it? I just memorize some lines.
That's not the case. Damon, no problem.
Tom Cruise, whatever. Yeah, they're just...
And these guys are so good. Yeah.
And they've been around for so long. And this is the sign of a true master.
It looks like they're not acting at all. Right, and they're not in cap rips.
Yeah, it looks like they're not doing anything. But that's because...
But if you take any pro athlete, pro musician, and when they're doing... Like you know michael jordan lebron it's like ah you know right but they don't realize like what's behind that right yeah the 200 000 shots beforehand exactly and so i think and the same thing is true for writers a lot of people want to be writers again it's like how hard could that be yeah i'm funny right yeah i mean or everybody wants to write a script how hard could that be well it's really hard and so with acting i tell people you know treat it like you have to think about it you're coming out here competing against professionals that have been doing it for a long time that would be like me saying you know what i'm going to go play on the atp tennis tour now i'm a really good tennis player i'm nationally ranked in my age group i have been like my whole life but that's a far cry from being go fight with federer right i wouldn't even get a point and so people what they when they think about it when they say i'm going to come to hollywood i'm going to be an actor that's literally like saying i'm going to go be in the n be in the NFL.
So that's the reality check. But the way to mitigate that is just like LeBron or Steph Curry or anybody just shoots a thousand balls a day.
You have to do that with your acting. You have to be practicing every single day, doing scenes.
You and I would do a scene for at least an hour. Think about it.
If if you want to be a professional athlete what's better if you're going to train one hour a day or two hours a day or three hours a day right or be like kobe and train all the hours of the day yeah you have two days you train in the morning you train in the afternoon so people think and it's hard look you come out here you got to work so most people they have to get a job when are When are you going to have time? Right. Well, you actually out here, you've got to work.
So most people, they have to get a job. When are you going to have time?

Right.

Well, you actually do have time to practice and rehearse and do scene work and those sort of things. But, you know, then you go on the audition.
The other thing that's different about, here's the other reality check for everyone out there, is that in the old days, if you got called in for a role to read, you would go down to the casting director's office and wait in line, almost like the doctor's office. And then you would go in

and read in front of the casting directors, the writers, the other, you know, studio executives,

whatever, that's all gone. Everything's on zoom now.
Wow. Yeah.
So, so look at it this way.

If you're a casting director and before you might see 10, 12, maybe call it 20 people a day,

Thank you. So look at it this way.
If you're a casting director, and before you might see 10, 12, maybe call it 20 people a day. Those are appointments, people coming in, doing all that.
Now you're on Zoom, and you're seeing over 100 people a day. So if you're an actor, and so now every actor has to make, we call them self-tapes tapes and so an actor will make a tape well your tape has to be good like within three seconds or else boom you're out onto the next person so it's that much harder to break into it as an actor that's not saying you it's you can't do it of course a lot of it also depends on what you look like like what is the

role like you and i would never be cast for the same role right i'd get some old guy role um so that's a huge part of it so and remember if if they're looking for somebody that's in my age group that looks like me there's probably seeing 300 other people that look exactly like me and And might be better than me.

Probably are better than me.

Okay.

So, there is a lot more platforms now for people to work with compared to back in the days when we we could name the channels before mtv bet vh1 abc c but like we could literally name the 30 40 channels and there was 99 total right now there's a thousand plus channels that we can't even think of, never even seen in our lives. And there's Hulu.
Apple has their own platform. YouTube has their own platform.
I can't even name how many platforms. And then there's sub platforms with Peacock having over here.
HBO Go changed their name to this thing over here. And Cinemax changed their name to this this and there's just like a whirlwind of platforms and each of them need content some of them have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars in funding to create these platforms to fight against the holy mecca which is netflix right with so many shows that are out there there are a lot more roles but how do you stand out once you land a role so now you've gone on to a tv show now how do you stand out when there's thousands of other shows well depending on how what your contract is with the show and confidentiality and all the things surrounding about that it can actually help you enormously because and actually as the studio if they're like if they're bringing you in and you have a following of 2, 3, 4, 10 million people, that actually helps the studio.
So they're also looking at that as well. And that's really true in the book space.
Think about it. How many authors have come to me in the past couple of years with good pitches for books, good outlines, and they've gotten the meeting with, say, Simon & Schuster or somebody like that.
And ultimately, they've been turned down because, and the note always is, go build up your social media following and come back because they need help getting it out there. So it's almost incumbent upon you and your brand, your brand, especially in these areas to really work on that because it's only, it's just going to be one more reason why the studio is going to choose to work with you.
Like, let's say you're on the edge and you're really, it's close or whatever, but if you have an active, engaged following and, and are popular for lack of a better word, that's going to help you.

Conversely, though, a lot of people think that because,

like let's just say somebody has a big social media presence.

I can't even count the amount of times people have come to me in these last several years,

especially since you and I have been together,

and saying, hey, create a reality TV show around.

How many times does that happen? That was my next question. Yeah.
That's my next question. Let me ask you the question.
That was legitimately the next question. So we're also in L.A.
and Hollywood, and we are bombarded. You and I with Elevator Studio, we have 3,500 influencers that we've W-9'd.
We've actually physically have their tax information and paid yeah that was just last year and all of them not all of them but most of them think that they could have their own tv show what does it take for someone as an influencer or just a character sitting you know person sitting at home that think that their household is funny their family's hilarious they should have a show because everyone seems to think that what does it take to actually go out there and make a show and actually get signed everybody thinks they are a reality show and the truth is you're not and so here's my answer to them if you're worthy for lack of a better word of having a reality TV show based around you, television will find you. I always tell people that.
And here's why. Every agency in town, every production company, so think William Morris, CAA, UTA, on and on.
Every production company, like Deanna Murray, my old my old company all these other companies they have scores of assistants and interns and their sole job is to scour all the TikTok Instagram everything looking for that little thing and so that's why I say if there's something special about you television will find you because the leap from social media to television it's not like from here to here it's from here to the moon beyond yeah it's back in the day this goes back as far as my fox days in the 90s and even in the early and Buda Murray. We would have celebrities, especially after the Paris Hilton Simple Life thing happened.
We took pitches from countless celebrities, which I major, major household names that you know. And they would come in and they would say, we'd say, OK, like, what's going you should do you should do a show about me and we're like okay um what's what's the show well i lead a really interesting life and i do this and i travel around and i i have you know crazy kids and this and that and we'll just say yeah that's uh not a show we're all pretty similar in our lives, to a large degree, right?

So I'm not saying that to discourage you.

It's like you say, this is a reality check on reality.

So the best thing you can do as an influencer or as a personal brand

or any type of entrepreneur, if you're a business guy,

is just do what you do and be great at it. Look at the people that have broken out, guys like Gary Brecca, right? Or Andrew Huberman, right? Even Joe Rogan.
I mean, Rogan was back in the- The Fear Factor guy. Yeah.
That's who he was back in the day. Yeah.
He was the host of that show for a long time. Great show.
Super nice guy. Put in the work.
Yeah, he was the host of that show for a long time.

Great show.

Super nice guy.

Put it in the work.

Decades before we even think about it.

Right.

And his podcast, he's the first one to say, I just started it off as, you know,

I just kind of thought it was fun to do and talk to people.

Yeah, smoke weed, talk to your friends.

But that became the brand, right?

And his own personality stood out in that. That's what makes him so huge.
Okay. Last question, because we actually have to host the Money Mondays, our weekly Zoom call.
By the way, you guys can register for that. TheMoneyMondays.com.
We go live every Monday, 4 p.m. PST.
Myself, Joey Carson, and some of our business friends will hop on there. Actually, wow, I got to go.
So're gonna have joey back on because we talked all tv this time i want to bring him back on to talk about the agency influencers in that whole world and all of our craziness and our investments so joey carson i have all the guests i've never had the same answer and again i don't think i'm gonna have the same answer right now uh okay a hundred years from now when joey passes away you're gonna be many many years hundred years 120 years from now you're gonna have robot arms and biotechnology and keep going and let's say you've got a hundred million dollars at the time what percentage of the hundred million dollars do you leave to your two daughters?

All of it.

Because I trust them to carry the values that I hopefully instilled in them to do the right thing with it.

Both for themselves and for other people.

To create opportunities, to give to various charities, whatever.

But I would trust them. I love that.
you said it's so clean so powerful all right guys we're gonna bring joy back on i might even film it tonight for all i know um we are bound by our responsibility to you guys that are part of the money mondays.com it's really important to us so i'm glad to see a bunch of you guys there 100 of the profits goes to the wild jungle so if you want to go on there it's 200 bucks a month all that money goes to the wild jungle to help support our 209 animals because they are very hungry as you guys can imagine over at wild jungle you can check us out on social media at wild jungle w-y-l-d but as you guys know we grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money and our guests here think it's rude to not talk about money so it's really important for you guys to talk about it with your friends family followers staff etc because it's real life legal accounting finances irs tax debt borrowing money your fico score your credit score all these things are real life stuff nothing i said is evil all of it is reality and we have to able to have these discussions. Thank you guys for keeping us.
We've been number one to number two for I think 66 out of the 72 weeks we've been live. That is all due to you guys.
So it's really important for you to like, comment, subscribe, et cetera. As you notice, we don't do ads here.
We are running this out of passion. We want you guys to have these real discussions.
We have a 93% listen through rate because of you guys. And because we don't sit here and read a bunch of two minute, five minute commercials.
Not that I'm against commercials. Obviously we are an agency.
So we like that concept. We just don't want to do it here.
We're going to hold out as long as we can. We've been holding out for 70 plus weeks now.
So we're going to keep fighting the good fight, just paying for this ourselves because we want you guys to talk about money. We want you guys to be out there investing, understanding it, having open discussions.

So check out Joey Carson.

Check out our company called Elevator Studio.

It's at Elevator on social media.