How to Build a Business (Even If You’re NOT Ready) 🏭 | EP137

What this episode is about

This content focuses on essential strategies for building and scaling a business, including insights on raising funding and the motivations behind entrepreneurship. It emphasizes the importance of discussing financial topics openly to enhance personal and community financial literacy.

Key takeaways

• Fan Basis: The Shopify of digital products, watching creators turn content into cash faster than you can say 'monetize.'
• Money talks: More relatable than your mom's FICO score—make, invest, and gift for financial nirvana.
• Scaling a startup: It's not rude to talk revenue; just ask the top 50 podcasts chart.
• Community is king: From faceless gurus to social media giants, Fan Basis boosts bankrolls with digital flair.
• In the business of influence: CEOs over selfies—personal brands finely tuned to rake in millions.

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Fan Basis, FICO score, Money Mondays
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Angel investing, iPhone 17
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Mandy Sachs
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Money Mondays, Otter PR, Dan Fleshman, Fan Basis
5. 40:00 – 50:00: 40/40/20, Bonus depreciation, Dan Fleshman, Lead Gen J
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Angel investing, Gary Cardone, Hansen's, Monster Energy
7. 1:00:00 – 1:09:47: Health, Miami Heat Arena, Jay Feldman, Money Mondays

Notable quotes from "How to Build a Business (Even If You’re NOT Ready) 🏭 | EP137"

• Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity.

  about Money Mondays · at 0:00

• So quick background on myself. I'm the founder and CEO of Fan Basis. I've been a serial entrepreneur. Started multiple different businesses. Had some sort of business running since I was about 13 years old at any given point.

  about Fan Basis · at 1:54

• The other nine to fail. That's kind of how it works. Now, the issue that people do is Oh, I want to start angel investing. And then they have access to deal flow, right?

  about Angel investing · at 14:16

• Up. You'll be able to hop on with one of our a member of our growth team, put referral code Dan Fleshman in, and we'll take extra good care of you, make sure you get the best…

  about Dan Fleshman · at 30:13

• To make custom sneakers. They want to start teaching about food, diet, fitness, health, etc. You might be able to send them here and then they can learn about fan bases and all…

  about Health · at 31:05

• Inspired by here at the MoneyMunddays and we'll see you guys next Monday at the moneymunddays.com.

  about moneymunddays.com · at 32:17

• Three-year track. Only did the first year and then left to pursue marketing full-time. Started a PR agency, Otter PR. We grew that to 60 employees, eight figures in three…

  about Otter PR · at 34:10

• Largest toy drive. That's been 12 years now. We're going to our 12th year now at the Miami Heat Arena coming up soon.

  about Miami Heat Arena · at 1:01:56

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Yash — Person · 6 mentions
• Dan Fleshman — Person · 2 mentions · first at 30:17
• Mandy Sachs — Person · 1 mention · first at 27:03
  Bases, we used to host a lot of charity sweep stakes. So, we partnered up with people like Dennis Rodman, Mandy Sachs, we did an event with Floyd Mayweather, where, a good…
• Yoshdafrey — Person · 1 mention · first at 30:43
  Month. and you can also find us on Instagram, fan basis, or my personal Instagram at Yoshdafrey. Always looking to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs and people that are interesting to have a conversation with.
• Gary Cardone — Person · 1 mention · first at 55:18
  I was interviewing Gary Cardone, Grant Cardone's twin brother. He's the biggest Bitcoin bull that I know. And we were talking about investing in Bitcoin. I'm man, I sold it all when like.
• Jay Feldman — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:08:42
  Jay Feldman or LeadGen. both on Instagram, lead genenj on my website or otterpr.com. I'm everywhere. If you search Jay Feldman, I'll pop right up.
• Dr. J. Feltman — Person · 1 mention
• Floyd Mayweather Jr. — Person · 1 mention
• Ryan Serhant — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

• The Marketing Playbook — Book · 1 mention · first at 43:06
  It's funny you ask. It's actually the theme of my book that I'm in the process of writing. It's the marketing playbook.

Companies & orgs

• Money Mondays — Company · 4 mentions · first at 0:07
• Fan Basis — Company · 3 mentions · first at 1:56
• Otter PR — Company · 3 mentions · first at 34:14
• moneymunddays.com — Company · 2 mentions · first at 32:20
• Everbowl — Company · 2 mentions
• Lead Gen J — Company · 1 mention · first at 40:58
  Draw them there and to keep them there and I've felt like that's the case with the lead gen J brand too I've built such an amazing team and they don't go anywhere yep on the make money side of this podcast, there's a question I like to.
• Monster Energy — Company · 1 mention · first at 53:17
  You know that the number one performing stock of all time is Monster Energy Drink.
• Hansen's — Company · 1 mention · first at 53:23
  More than any other company on the planet. Monster Energy Drink, which is called Hansen's the parent company. Why?
• Voyager — Company · 1 mention · first at 55:28
  Talking about investing in Bitcoin. I'm man, I sold it all when like Voyager went down. I lost all my cryptocurrency. He I think Bitcoin is at like 30,000 at that time.
• otterpr.com — Company · 1 mention · first at 1:08:47
  Jay Feldman or LeadGen. both on Instagram, lead genenj on my website or otterpr.com. I'm everywhere. If you search Jay Feldman, I'll pop right up.
• Erewhon — Company · 1 mention
• Model Citizen Fund — Company · 1 mention
• Quora — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

• iPhone 17 — Product · 1 mention · first at 12:52
  But I think Amazon's going to slow down next year. I think Apple's going to not be as good. The iPhone 17 came out. What happened?
• Pulse electromagnetic frequency unit — Product · 1 mention · first at 1:06:28
  Open my refrigerator, it's just all vials of peptides. M on my couch, I've got a $50,000 pulse electromagnetic frequency unit. So, there's some technologies and medications and pharmaceuticals coming out that are just next level. We're.

Concepts & topics

• Health — Concept · 3 mentions · first at 31:09
• Omnipresence (marketing) — Concept · 3 mentions
• Angel investing — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 14:20
• Joint venture (JV) — Concept · 2 mentions
• FICO score — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:04
  Ridiculous. We have to have discussions about money for your finances, taxes, FICO score. Should I rent? Should I buy?
• Bonus depreciation — Concept · 1 mention · first at 48:16
  So, what do you do about that? bonus depreciation. You buy real estate, short-term rentals, and every year, I guess, you find a new project to do that with. And that's kind of where I'm at.
• 40/40/20 — Concept · 1 mention · first at 48:44
  So, what I preach on stage and on social is the same thing over and over for many, many years. It's called 40 20. I do 40% low risk. I want to make between 5 and 9% for the…
• 40420 — Concept · 1 mention
• Paid advertising — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

• Miami Heat Arena — Place · 2 mentions · first at 1:01:59

Sponsors

• Dan Fleshman (referral code) — Sponsor · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:05 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. This next guest has built up a very, very impressive company. So much so that I actually joined as one of the executives to help on the advisory to help them scale because I was so impressed with everything they were doing. So, we're going to go into how to scale a company, how to raise funding, and a lot of things of why he even decided to build this company because what's really important for you guys is these podcasts are not just for you.

0:36 It's people in your past, present, and future. You might be at a lunch, you might be playing pickle ball, and someone wants to learn about building a tech company or being in a course or creator or someone wants to understand how to raise money or exit a company. You might be able to share this podcast with them. So, don't just listen to these podcasts for yourself. Think about the people in your life from your past, present, future. The whole reason for this podcast is we grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think that's ridiculous. We have to have discussions about money for your finances, taxes, FICO score. Should I rent? Should I buy?

1:06 Should I lease? There's so many questions we have that are part of our daily life. This is how you take care of your mom with her medical bills or your friends or your kids or dinners, lunches. There's so many things that you just spend money on that we need to have a discussion about it. There's nothing rude about it. We have to be able to talk about it. That's why this podcast has done so well because of you guys liking commenting subscribing sharing, etc. That's helped us drive us to being staying consistently in the top 50 podcasts on the planet. It's because of you. So, I want to thank you guys for that. Now, without further ado, as you guys know, these podcasts are under 40 minutes because the average commute to work is 45 minutes. The average workout is 45 minutes. This episode will be between 32 and 38 minutes for your listening pleasure. Yash, if you can please give a quick two-minute bio so we

1:49 can get straight to the money. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, one, I appreciate you having me on. Of

1:53 course. Um, so quick background on myself. I'm the founder and CEO of Fan Basis. Uh, I've been a serial entrepreneur. Started multiple different businesses. Had some sort of business running since I was about 13 years old at any given point. Um, prior to starting Fan Basis, uh, worked in the venture capital space for a few years. uh and then also built a uh another startup which I was able to exit at a pretty young age uh right when I was in college and uh after that I had a uh a lot of experience in the info product and agency world as well. I've had my own info products and uh agency specifically on the marketing side. So very very well-versed in the internet economy space and how to make money online space um which is kind of what led me to you know start fan bases.

2:36 What the heck is fan bases? Uh, so it's a good question. With fan, basically what Fan Basis is is the all-in-one tool set to sell digital products, services, and communities. The best way to think about us is we've created the Shopify for selling anything online. uh where not only do we handle your payments and processing, give you the ability to collect as much cash as possible, but we give you all the tools you need to actually host your business online, whether it be your course, your community, or integrating with about 10,000 different software platforms like a Discord or a Telegram. And on top of that, you know, what we love to do is help everyone that's on our platform make more money. So, we give you all the tools to build out an affiliate program or in, you know, increase conversions on your checkout funnel. Our whole concept and mission is to help digital entrepreneurs make more money and

3:24 streamline their operations. So, you know, we see a lot of people that join our platform that are already generating hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars a month online. And our mission is to, you know, have it so that we can enable them to double the size of their business after being on our platform for 12 months.

3:40 So, who is the perfect avatar? Like, who is the perfect person that should be on something like fan bases? There's three types of uh users on our platforms and sellers. The first is someone that's got a personal brand and an audience where, you know, they might be a quote unquote influencer, but they're not the influencers that, you know, you uh grew your career working with that have the managers and the agents. Instead, they have a COO, they have a head of sales, they have media buyers, and they're running their personal brand as a true business where all the content they're posting is kind of funneling towards whatever offer and business they're hosting on our platform. So, that's one uh which is what we call like the creator or the internet entrepreneur.

4:20 Second is more of a a community- based business where they have, you know, maybe they have no face to the brand, but they have a large social media presence and they have hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok. um think like a crypto trading group or a sports pick group or something along those lines where there is real community there and they've built a a really solid platform and they utilize fan bases to monetize all of that and help them make more money. And then the third type is more of a uh just an online business of some sort where it could be a marketing agency, it could be faceless YouTube consulting channel, um whatever it might be, you know, they're selling digital products and digital services and they can utilize fan bases to not only handle their payments but everything else in between as well.

5:02 So, you are spearheading the new world of making money, which is the main topic at the beginning of these podcasts is about making money. There's 15-year-old kids and 22 year olds, etc. that are making real money from selling things online, whether it's what's in their mind, what's in their hearts, what they're passionate about, and they're teaching people and making serious money. They're, you know, making courses, they're creating amazing content, etc. Walk us through the new age. You know, when you see these 15y olds and 22 year olds and 25 year olds, etc., start making $500,000, $46,000, $120,000 in a month. What changes for someone as a young kid as they start making that kind of money? So, it's really, really interesting because we have a very unique perspective on how people make money online. We have a bird's eye view on how tens of thousands of different businesses are operating.

5:54 And we also know what the guys that are making, you know, one to$10 million a month are doing compared to the guys making 10 to 20k a month are doing. Um, when it comes to this younger generation, it's crazy. There are like there's 15 year olds that are on our platform generating six figures a month. One of one of the hardest crazy

6:13 one of the hardest negotiations um our chief growth officer had was like three weeks ago. He was speaking to a kid that was a sophom sophomore in high school. Um he was selling a you know program on how to build an e-commerce business doing a phenomenal job doing that generating about $60 to $70,000 a month. Was giving him

6:31 15 years old. 15 years old. Giving him an extremely hard time about the rates on every single 2.6. I need 2.44.

6:40 Exactly. Um so it's it's wild. I I think you know there's been a a shift right where you you've been in the space for a while. Info has been something that's existed for 15 20 years now and it's obviously evolved over time. I think postcoid and this is when I kind of got involved in the space and you know I didn't even know what info products were until you know probably 2021. Um I think postco there was an actual shift in not only the way people consume knowledge from you know utilizing the internet or you know what really I think caused that was Tik Tok where you know people became really addicted to short form content and were consuming information quick very quickly before chat GPT when I had a question about something I would honestly go on Tik Tok before even anything else. Um, so I think what's that what that's done is also made it really really easy for people to acquire audiences. And some of these younger

7:32 guys, it's not like they're going and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to build up my audience to sell something online." You know, they're already building something online. And then they share their story utilizing different social media platforms. And people that are younger than them, even older than them, can relate and they're like, "Wow, if this 20-year-old kid can do it or this 18-year-old kid can do it, I want to learn from them and be able to do the same thing." and they're able to really cause a large ripple effect and get thousands of people the information and knowledge they need in order to build their own business and potentially change their life.

8:00 So, you've scaled this company every time I talk to you go from 40 employees to 50 employees and 60 employees and every time I go there I see there's just more and more employees. How do you attract employees to come work at Fan Bases and how do you keep them?

8:13 Um, it's a great question. We've actually never had anyone quit. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Uh, I think that

8:19 that's really rare in tech space, by the way, because everyone gets poached and recruited and they're constantly getting messages in their DMs and LinkedIn like, "Come, come on, come work for us."

8:27 Yeah, it's No, it's really funny. I mean, you know, one of our competitors that um is also in this space, you probably on a weekly basis desperately tries to offer one of our employees half a million dollars or a million dollars a year.

8:38 A million dollars. No one's ever going to take that though and leave. What I think we've done a phenomenal job at is creating a culture that I've never seen before. one, you know, the average age at our company is about 25 years old, 26 years old. On our growth team is probably like 22, 23.

8:54 Wow. Um, which is crazy to begin with. Um, it's crazy to me that half the people that we have at our organization are younger than myself.

9:02 Um, so that's one. And then second is, you know, anyone that's been here for more than 2 or 3 months has seen growth and been able to contribute towards explosive growth that they wouldn't be able to replicate anywhere else. And everyone knows that. So, you know, I think what we do a really good job at is before someone joins the organization, we filter out tons of people that, you know, might have the right talent and they might be a good fit for the job on paper, but we know there's, you know, they're not that individual that wants to be with fan bases until, you know, exit or IPO or the next 10 years where they're coming. We don't really like to hire people that just want a job. We want to hire people that want to be a part of what we're building.

9:42 Very cool. So, as people start making money and they go from making 60 grand, 80 grand, 120 grand, 150 grand, 200 grand, etc., when is it time to start to consider maybe I should start to invest my money rather than just keep hoarding and put in my savings account?

9:58 I think, you know, this is the most fundamental flaw that I see with some of these younger info guys. I have friends that just have like5 or $6 million sitting in a checking account. That's it. And I tell them all the time like, "Hey, I'm gonna make some introductions for you." They just

10:13 they just know they're really really good at making money, but they don't like to do things they don't understand in a lot of cases and that scares them.

10:22 Um, so I think one piece of advice I would give to anyone that's, you know, under the age of 30 that has generated over seven figures or even over half a million dollars and has that sitting in a bank account is start learning how to invest that because you can, you know, compound interest is a real thing. make a lot of money over time.

10:41 Um, I think that is a huge gap. You know, there's a info product to be built just here alone on teaching other info guys and agency owners, you know, how to invest their capital and make more money with that.

10:52 Yeah. I mean, that's my main speech. It's called 40420. Low risk investing, medium risk investing, high risk investing. I walk people through during my speeches from stage why you should invest to make 5 to 9% a year on your low risk investing just to fight with inflation. Someone you mentioned has $5 million in their savings account. That means next year that 5 million spends like it's 4.5 million. The next year it spends like it's 4.1 million. Three years from now it spends like it's 3.6 million. It's literally losing value. It'll still say 5 million in a savings account, but it spends less.

11:24 8 to 9% a year less. They go try to buy a Ford truck, it was 50 grand, now it's 54,000. They go try to buy this microphone. It was 200, now it's 240. They don't realize everything got more expensive. And it's happened year after year after year. No matter who's the president in between, it's still been around 8 or 9% a year. And so you have to invest to fight with inflation. And on the medium risk side, that's where you can make that 10 to 30% a year on like real estate business, you know, cash flow businesses and the stock market. A lot of people think of the stock market as the super risky thing. I look at it for the basics. Not rocket science. Do you shop at Amazon? Maybe you should buy some Amazon stock. Do you have an iPhone? Maybe you should buy one of the best performing stocks in human history Apple.

12:09 It's the Warren Buffett model. You know, he invests in things that he uses on a day-to-day basis.

12:13 He likes Coca-Cola, so he owns a lot of it. Yeah. Right. He likes chocolate, so he bought a huge chocolate company, right?

12:18 It's I I think what happened or what happens is some of these guys go and they're like, "Okay, I'm going to invest in stocks." They go on Robin Hood. I've seen it firsthand, right?

12:26 And they'll go regeneratively gamble, you know, $100,000 on a random company, lose 30 or 40 grand, and now they're like, "Oh." and they try to trade it and then it goes back up and they try to buy it again and they sell it when it goes down. It's called catching a knife. Like they're just like going through the roller coasters. I invest into things that I never plan on selling.

12:43 That's that's Yeah, that's exactly how, you know, my dad taught me how to invest as well.

12:47 Why would I ever sell Amazon stock? Yeah. But I think Amazon's going to slow down next year. I think Apple's going to not be as good. The iPhone 17 came out. What happened?

12:55 There three-hour waits outside of the store. I want to own that stock. Yeah. Right. If Netflix, everyone we know is watching Netflix. I want to own Netflix stock. It's I I don't have rocket science to my investment theory. I just look at companies. I see Tesla everywhere. I'm gonna buy some Tesla stock

13:10 at the very very least. Uh you know, get an get a private banker. If you have seven figures in an account, you'll get a private banker at any bank that you're at and you know, they'll be able to help you at the bare minimum. Get into a money market fund or

13:24 ATF 5% a year, something just something because it does compound especially when you start to make and have real capital. All right. So on the investing side of things, you can get bombarded with options. Real estate, stock market, cash flow businesses, angel investments, cryptocurrency, NFTTS, investing into your buddy's restaurant or nightclub. There's so many things people could do. How do you decide when there's so many different options what you like to invest into?

13:52 So one, it really depends on the deal flow that you have access to, right? That is the most important thing. It's like I can't tell someone like I personally like to allocate you know 10% of my funds to more like angel and venture style deals which have astronomically high returns. You

14:07 get it right. Yeah. Yeah. But it's you know way way more risky. I worked in VC. The whole strategy was you invest in 10 companies hoping that one succeeds and you expect the other nine to fail. That's kind of how it works. Now, the issue that people do is like, "Oh, I want to start angel investing." And then they have access to deal flow, right?

14:24 And you know, it's not like like I'm investing in one out of five deals I look at. It's more like one out of like 50 to 100 if that. Um where you need to have connections in the space that can get you access to these opportunities that make sense. And if you don't go and invest in a really good fund yourself, you know, don't, you know, don't try to be this is way more risky than being a stock picker, you know. um try to do it with people that are you know professional investors. So I think you know angel and venture that's something that a lot of guys in our space also like really get excited about and look at. It's very difficult to do that well.

14:58 Most people end up losing money because they don't have access to good deal flow and they also don't know what to look for. Um if you it's it's hard to now as a you know someone that's been in the tech space and built a tech company uh for many many years. I understand what things to be looking for because I've also gone through that myself. I've made those mistakes. You know, I can see when, you know, is this founder the person that's going to be able to build this into a 9 or 10 figure business. But, you know, most of the time you're not able to to really do that if you haven't had those experiences. If you build an info product, the same knowledge that you have doesn't really relate to building a tech company. You don't know about raising capital. You don't know how to burn capital, invest that properly in growth. Um, so you know, I I think it's important for anyone that's in the internet economy

15:41 space that's used to building cash flow businesses to understand that there's a lot more risk when it comes to angel and venture investing. Outside of that, personally, you know, I I uh like to have my different private banks set up. They, you know, the the other thing about private banks is obviously you know this, but most people don't realize is it's not like they're just investing your capital into the markets. they have their own different products that they give access to high net worth individuals for and that they have you know allocated towards only a select group of people. So I like you know opportunities like that because some of them are very very exclusive and have you know basically like nothing has guaranteed returns but you know if you know this investment bank is putting multiple billions of dollars into their own product you know I'm okay with putting a couple hundred grand into it

16:26 right um yeah so you know I personally am not fully invested in in real estate or anything like that my my father has a larger portfolio but I like to stick to things that you know I know well

16:38 so on the raising capital I saw a press release. You guys raised $20 million from some cool people like Ryan Sirant, venture capital firms, etc. Why raise capital? Walk us through the concept of raising capital of someone listening that might want to raise capital. What should they be thinking about?

16:53 Yeah, it's a great question. So, you have to think about it differently depending on the phase that you're in. when you're at a preede or a seed um uh you know round basically at this point you've gone some sort of initial traction or if you're preede maybe you just built the product out um the people that are going to get to invest here they're more they're they're investing in you that's purely what it comes down to they're they like the idea that you have but you have to sell them on yourself you know this is you're not betting on the horse you're betting on the jockey that's just how it works

17:22 mostly friends and family yeah exactly you know for preede friends and family is the best way to go about it um for seed. Try to get strategic investors. I found a lot of success with that. And um they one, if they're strategic, they'll understand what you're building. Second, if they're strategic, they'll also be much more likely to invest if they uh if you show them an opportunity and you show them that you're solving a real problem that especially they faced. Um when it comes to raising a series A, you know, in our personal case or my personal case, we were at the point where we were cash flowing pretty significantly. Um which means we were profitable. uh we didn't have to raise around. It was more of, you know, with the competitive landscape that we had, some other companies raised a lot of capital. We didn't want to be outgunned. Um and then at the same time, we had a plan for how every single

18:08 dollar was going to be allocated to, you know, turn us from where at that point we were maybe an 80 to$100 million company. We saw a real opportunity to, you know, take a little bit of dilution on, take $20 million in and grow it to a multiple billion dollar business with just that round alone. M so you know you really have to understand the ROI. I I see a lot of founders make mistakes and really a lot of founders even now especially now are making the mistake of just raising too much capital for the sake of raising capital and they want to announce around and get the PR headlines like that can't be the reason that you're doing it. You know you you really have to have a really solid plan in place and show okay like you know don't skip out on that financial model. Invest in that properly. Understand like where every single dollar is going to go and how you're going to make sure you get to

18:52 that next goal. How do you decide when the right time is? The best time to raise is when you don't need a raise. You know, that's that is really what it comes down to. Um, and I've gotten that advice from a few people. You know, we were cash flow positive. We had 20 investors knocking on our door that wanted to lead our series A. Um, when uh, you know, you have two months of runway left and you're burning a million dollars a month,

19:16 it's a little bit tougher to raise around at that point because you're not not as attractive of an asset. And even if

19:21 people like to invest in momentum. Exactly. And maybe you do have that momentum, but you didn't plan properly, now you're going to get screwed on your terms. You know, you're in a position um not of power. You know, that's that's really what it comes down to. So, the best time to do it is like if you you know, you see that you have like 12 months of runway or 16 months of runway left, assuming you're burning capital. Um then, you know, this is where you start planning for this. At least have those conversations. Maybe you can like I you know I I think a good approach is also going to these VC funds and say hey we're not raising right now but it's still good for us to connect and then you know show them what you're building get them excited about it and when you you know everyone wants the everyone wants something that they can't have right so if you can position yourself as that hot girl in school um they're going

20:06 to be following up with you for months and months and months and then when you are ready to raise that round you know instead of taking a whole threemonth process to go and speak to every single fund you'll already have 10 people that are ready to to write you a check. Now, also I think something that's a huge uh win is if you can give them projections that you know at that time when you connect that you end up beating. We were the first company that left lane invested in or I don't know if the first but they told us we were one of the few companies that gave them pro gave them projections that we absolutely blew through and this is not like I mean one we did this before we raised from them.

20:39 We connected with them about seven months prior and we gave them those projections then. But also the model that we built out, I mean we beat our own projections for the sake of doing that. We look at our projections as like worst case scenario. This is what we you know we have to hit and then we have our own internal projections of like what we actually want to achieve and and do. This is something where like if VCs don't see that very often. So, if you can show them projections that you're able to beat and then you actually stay true to that, they're going to be so impressed with you that they're going to, you know, they're going to prioritize your deal.

21:11 So, someone has built up a following, they're listening, they're like, you know what, I have 55,000 followers and my girlfriend or boyfriend, they have 100,000 followers. At what point can someone start making money as a coach, course, creator or influencer? So I think the first question you have to really ask yourself and understand is am I a good operator? Do I know how to build a business? Because we see a lot of cases where you might find someone that has two or three million followers, has hundreds of thousands of views and likes on every single post that they have and they're only making 50 to 100 grand a month. And yeah, I'm saying only making 50 to 100 grand a month because it's all relative, right? You know, 50 to 100 grand a month is a lot for a lot of people. But if you have 4 million followers and you're only making 15 to 100 grand a month, you have a serious issue with the way that you're building

21:55 your business. Um, at that point, you should be generating minimum seven figures a month. So, what that comes down to is the the ability of that individual to be an operator, right? Do they have the ability to put the right people in front of them and, you know, around them to lead their sales team, lead their marketing initiatives, um, create funnels and ideas? I think you know you don't and then at the same time I was just telling you about a guy um that's generating you know over a million dollars a month he's got 6,000 followers on Instagram and 70,000 subscribers on YouTube. It's you know it can scale very differently. It's how strategic you can get with it. So I think the best way to look at this is if you have a following of call it 50 to 100,000 people on whatever social platform it might be. You know at the end of the day Instagram and YouTube are probably the the two best.

22:45 Um one follower Instagram is worth 10 followers on Tik Tok. That's the kind of the rule of thumb.

22:50 Um what you have to evaluate do you think you're you know the person that can be a CEO? If not, find someone that you know that can be actually leading the business endeavors. And you can be that marketing engine. You just need to really be true to yourself and understand what are your skill sets and what are not your skill sets. That's what a CEO does. At the end of the day with what I do, you know, even for fan bases is I bring in the best people I can find for leading my sales team, leading marketing, leading customer success. You know, they're all hopefully better than me at all of those things.

23:22 If not, I didn't do my job well. So that's how everyone that's building any sort of business should be thinking about it. And at the same time, something that we've been seeing work really, really well, and what we're we're actually productizing this right now. Um, is, you know, if you have a large following, say you have a 100,000 followers in the fitness space. In the fitness space, we see this all the time because you get a lot of, you know, meattheads that actually like do a good job, they post interesting content, but they are not the guys to run their own business. Um, what you should do is find people that you see having a ton of success and instead of building something completely on your own, partner up with them. Do a JV. It's uh, it's called a joint venture, you know, where they've already built the infrastructure, they have a sales team, they have a marketing team, they have

24:07 leads coming in. Instead of building everything from scratch when you have to be true to yourself and know, I don't have the ability to do that on my own. um you can partner up with someone else and then be an extension of their business and split everything 50/50 uh and then eventually you can start your own business. So that's kind of I think the two best ways to think about it.

24:26 So why invest so much money into the tech, right? Not like come up with your four or five main features, scale the business and have this lean mean machine. Why go out and scale all the different versions, verticals and things that people are asking for for fan bases? Yeah, it's a it's a great question and there's kind of two approaches that people take. You know, up up until probably two months ago, three months ago, we were trying to just get every feature that everyone on our platform needed. What is a mustave? Uh where these are the things that they need to have on their, you know, in their business to be able to operate it and scale it, you know, efficiently.

25:03 Now, the way that we're thinking about it and where a lot of the investment is coming from is what can we add into the product that people don't know they need? And that's where real innovation comes. That's what, you know, that's what Steve Jobs's whole thesis was is how can we innovate, you know, and tell people and show them what they need. So that's how we're thinking about it. And the real advantage that we have over really anyone else in the space is we've our whole team is built from people that come from the space. You know, we've poached some of our clients that have joined and uh joined our executive team and leadership team and um you know, we've partnered up with individuals like yourself that can give us that advice that we need for everything that we're thinking about. So, we can validate the um you know, market for every single idea and product that we have before we actually build it. And then when we

25:49 release features like that, that's where we get insane customer loyalty because, you know, if someone's making $100,000 a month, for example, and they come and join our platform and they're making h 100,000 a month for the next 6 months, they're like, "Okay, great." You know, I'm using the service, it works, it's getting the job done for me. But if we can show them ways to get from 100,000 a month to 200,000 a month, that's where

26:10 I can charge them whatever fees they want. They're not never going to leave because, you know, we've been able to provide them with an immense amount of value. So that's how we're, you know, that's where all the investment is coming in where we're spending millions of dollars, but we're also making it back on the back end because it's helping all of our sellers make more money as well, which comes back to us eventually too.

26:27 Right. So talk to me about the charity side of things. Why do you think that a company like yours should have either a charity event or go support a charity, go to homeless shelter, go to a children's hospital, go feed at a senior citizen or homeless shelter. Like why do you think that char companies should have some type of charity component? Not necessarily the check, but getting the people together.

26:48 Yeah. Um, you know, I think it's super important. One, you know, we'll be uh supporting your toy drive as well. So excited excited about that. Um, but but the actual original version of Fan Bases, we used to host a lot of charity sweep stakes. So, we partnered up with people like Dennis Rodman, Mandy Sachs, um, we did an event with Floyd Mayweather, uh, where, you know, a good chunk of that all went to to charity. um one it you know obviously was for those individuals wanting to support their causes as well but we wanted to enable all of that and be able to spread those messages uh across the way I really look at it is you know I I've also grew up from I grew up in a way where I understood the importance of giving back pretty early my dad for example when we were growing up he would never do anything fun on his birthday he would always go to the soup kitchen which at when I was a kid I was like what the

27:38 hell you know let's do something fun Chuck-E-Cheese Yeah. Um, but now I get it, you know, and it's uh it it was inspiring as I grew up to like think about things like that. So, you know, I I see a lot of people that are very very charitable and they're silent about it too. Um, which, you know, I think it helps you one humble yourself and also give you more satisfaction in the long run and just better karma that you know, every uh anything that you put into the world always ends up coming back to you. So, there's only one question I ask on every episode, and I've never gotten the same answer in 200 plus episodes.

28:15 Fan bases becomes a multi-billion dollar company. But you're young, so you might start another company and another company, and you might invest into a lot of other companies. And so, you end up becoming this multi-billionaire over the course of time, but at the end of the day, you finally pass away. What percentage of your net worth do you leave to your children? That's a good question. Um, you know, there's there's a few different kind of models I've seen some multi-billionaires take. At the end of the day, I think the most important thing for anyone raising kids, because I, you know, I went to private schools growing up and I saw some people that were absolutely spoiled

29:01 for sure and were driving Bentleys in, you know, in high school. Um, and uh, you know, my and people that their families were very, very wealthy, but they were all very humble and their kids were raised properly. Um, I would want to put my kids in the position to be able to, you know, have everything that they need, go to the best schools, and, you know, be able to live comfortably to where, you know, when they're in college, they don't need to worry about working four jobs to be able to pay for it and things of that nature and be focused. But they need to have that level of ambition. So, I think, you know, I can't give you an answer on that right now because I don't know what my kids are going to be like yet. If I raise them right, then I'm more than happy to give them all of my wealth. Um, because, you know, I know that they're not going to be motivated by my wealth.

29:51 They're going to want, you know, have their ambition, their own ambition to achieve things that are much further beyond what I've been able to achieve myself. But if that's not the case, they're not getting anything. You know, they everyone needs to earn it.

30:02 Yeah. All right. So, where can people find fan base? You tell us everything. Uh yeah, absolutely. You know, anyone that's looking to build a business online, go to fanbases.com, go and sign up. You'll be able to hop on with one of our uh a member of our growth team, put referral code Dan Fleshman in, and we'll take extra good care of you, make sure you get the best rates, just as a favor for anyone that's listening uh um to this podcast. Um, and then on top of that, you know, what our team likes to do is not only help you get set up and run your own business on our platform, but like I said many times, we want to help you grow your business and get to that next level, whether it be at $20,000 a month or a million dollars a month. Um, and you you can also find us on Instagram, fan basis, or uh my personal Instagram at Yoshdafrey. Always looking to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs and people that are

30:48 interesting to have a conversation with. All right, guys. You're listening to the Money Mondays and again the concept of this podcast when you hear something like this, there might be someone in your world that wants to start selling a course. They want to be a creator. They want to start selling how to do stock trading. They want to start teaching how to make custom sneakers. They want to start teaching about food, diet, fitness, health, etc. You might be able to send them here and then they can learn about fan bases and all of a sudden they have one of the best companies as their platform all because of your referral, your recommendation.

31:19 So keep your ears out. Keep your eyes when you're seeing people on post on social like looking for a new company to work with on this, this, and this. You might be like, "Oh man, I remember fan bases. Hey, I'm looking for this, this, and this. Oh, wait a minute." And then you forward them a website or you forward them this podcast episode. This is really important. Your sharing of information and that communication, the butterfly effect can literally change their world and a lot of other people's simply by you helping them with referrals. So, as always, liking, commenting, subscribing is what helps us stay on the top of the charts. So, I appreciate you guys for doing that. It really helps us. When you're checking things out, check out some entrepreneurs like Yash. When you see their social media, when you see the company that they built, watching those type of things, watching that type of

32:04 information will help you learn compared to a lot of the noise and a lot of the bad stuff that people are following on social media. Try to filter out the same way you filter out what you eat, what you drink. filter out the things that are going into your mind so you can focus and learn from people that you are inspired by here at the MoneyMunddays and we'll see you guys next Monday at the moneymunddays.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. As you guys know, I keep these podcasts to under 40 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes.

32:43 This episode will be between 32 and 38 minutes for your listening pleasure. Now, this is very important. When you're listening to these podcasts, keep in mind it's not just about you. The things that you hear and the people that I interview might be for someone from your past, present, or future. We have to think about and talk about money because it's part of our daily lives. We all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think that's ridiculous. It's part of your rent, insurance, taxes, medical bills for your mom, kids, friends, employees. So many things come up with money. It is not the root of all evil. It is part of your daily life. And it's really just a utility and a tool.

33:18 The things that you want in life and the things that you need in life. And we grow through inflation and all the things that are going to be happening in our society. You're going to need more and more capital. So, we have to have blunt discussions about how you can make more money, invest more money. And so, without further ado, I'm going to have Mr. Dr. J. felt man. Give a quick two-minute bio. We get straight to the money.

33:35 All right, Dan, let's have some fun. Thanks for having me. So, really quick bio. Uh, went all the way through medical school. Parents pushed me that direction probably because of money. Money and respect. It's pretty much guaranteed as long as you make it through. About halfway through medical school, I started a supplement company. Supplement company took off. Got really good at marketing. Started a marketing agency. By the time I graduated medical school, my fourth year, we were making more than most of the doctors were making. And they were miserable. Every day I would show up to the clinic and just be surrounded by people that hated their lives. So I was distracted, became a family medicine resident, which was a three-year track. Only did the first year and then left to pursue marketing full-time. Started a PR agency, Otter PR. We grew that to 60 employees, eight figures in in three years. And then I

34:22 started teaching a lot of what I was doing to market that PR agency. So now, if you Google me, you'll probably see me as lead genen J on YouTube. We teach B2B lead generation and we install cold outreach systems for SMBs and medium-sized companies.

34:36 Okay. What is lead genen? Lead genen is making people aware of your product and offer that don't know who you are in the first place. That's the difference between lead generation and sales. Essentially, somebody who doesn't know who you are versus somebody who knows who you are. We handle that top of the funnel. People who have never heard of you before. We put your product, your offer out in front of those people. What percentage of entrepreneurs and business owners should have some form of lead generation?

35:04 150%. If there was uh I'd say it's the biggest pain point in most companies is how do you market? How do you get people to know about your thing? Some of the best companies and products in the world are, you know, go under the radar because they don't know how to get people's attention. So, we've we've gotten really good at that and doing it at scale. So, let's say entrepreneur, business owner is listening to this podcast and they're like, "You know what? I do need PR, but I want to hire in-house." What's the difference between hiring someone to work inhouse versus hiring agency like Otter? Sure. So, now we're talking about PR, and this is true of everything, lead generation, PR agencies. If you hire an agency, you're usually hiring years of experience and processes and relationships, and you're hiring all of the mistakes that they've made with past clients. So, if you bring someone in inhouse, you better hope that they're

35:55 going to be able to do everything and they're not going to be able to fall back on people with more experience. So, by hiring Otter PR, my PR agency, you know, we've got 60 employees. A lot of our publicists have 20, 30 years of experience.

36:08 Wow. Yeah. We've got a whole staff of writing staff. We've dealt with clients across multiple industries. We've got publicists that uh specialize in across multiple industries and have relationships right

36:19 at media media channels that cater specifically to those industries. So if you hire out PR, you're hiring all of that versus bringing somebody in house. You'll probably end up paying about the same that you would pay the agency. So although that one person is dedicated exclusively to you, are they going to be able to deliver the same results that an an agency of 60 people and you know 200 clients and all of those industry relationships are going to be able to deliver

36:47 sometimes. So often times I say when someone wants to hire in-houses when you want someone for paid media or PR especially like dealing with meta and Facebook ads, right? Someone that's really good at it doesn't need to work for you.

37:02 They can make two grand a day selling pillows or tables or microphones or water bottles. Like

37:06 this is the problem with hiring people for the lead genen agency. Sure. Right. Yeah. You want to find people who are good to work for me? Good luck. They're already making a killing on their own. It's the same thing across every other marketing.

37:16 So I'm often almost always recommending agencies because the wisdom of the crowd and

37:24 when you've got 60 employees, it's not just the fact of one employee or one good person. There's a lot of people in that room and you get to deal with your hundreds of clients. You understand and learn from what had worked for them, what was bad for them, what sucked for them, what was great for them.

37:39 So when they start running ads on TikTok or Facebook or press or whatever, you know which ones are working because you have the wisdom of the crowd from all that experience.

37:47 Yeah. Alex Hermoszi actually made a good point here. What he does is he hires an agency and is very transparent with them at the beginning. He's like, "I'm going to hire you. I want to know exactly what you're doing. I want to learn your processes. I want to be involved every step of the way. And he's intaking all of this and he's training somebody in-house to eventually take over from that agency. And I actually really like that model and I've done it a few times. The risk is you train someone in-house on what that agency is doing. Now you make that person ultra valuable.

38:13 They're going to go start an agency. They're gone. They're for sure going to start an agency.

38:17 Yes. And if they go start an agency, I'll I'll invest in them. Yeah. Because they're so well trained.

38:21 Yeah. Exactly. So it's a, you know, making somebody ultra valuable in marketing is hard. So that's why I feel like the job of marketing usually falls on the founder.

38:31 So I have an influencer agency and I have the exact same employees for 5 years, eight years, 12 years, and some of them the full 14 years that still work for me. I've only ever had two people leave and I forced them to go.

38:42 Good. Yeah. Because one of them was to go work for ClickUp, $4 billion company. Go. I get it.

38:47 Yeah. Um, and another one wanted to go start a company and I was like, I'll be investor or partner or send you clients and they went and did that. Now, outside of that, everyone's the same. Like, I named them off the top of my head all day long, like family, because it's been with me for so many years.

39:01 How do you hold on to them? There's a couple key things. One is compensation, but it actually isn't the number one driving force,

39:08 right? Paying someone 80 grand versus 92 grand is not like, "Oh my god, they're going to leave me right away. Now, if I pay them 80 grand, someone offers them 120, I better step it up, right? Because they should leave. I understand if there's that big of a gap.

39:21 Having some way to either have equity or some way to earn compensation based on their work. So, if they can get some type of percentage for something that they're doing or something that they're creating, that very much incentivizes them.

39:32 And the third thing is they are inspired to work there. Yes. Right. Either I inspire them, the brand inspires them, or they inspire themselves. That their work creates something. Their work creates magic. their work helps their clients. There is another fourth which is the community which is the other staff but that's not always the case because there could be working remote or working in a silo. So it's not always getting to work with a bunch of other people. And if you do those things and if any one is missing you might lose them. But I've been really focused on having all four things all the time. I'm constantly inspiring them. I'm constantly giving them ways to make extra money. I am constantly like I want them to win because of and also I will say if you give them respect and autonomy they definitely don't want to leave

40:13 right because they don't expect that at other companies I've learned that a lot through the lead genenj brand both companies are very separate Otter PR and lead genen J Otter PR is very much now like a hiring machine we've got HR we've got a whole recruiting arm and all the publicists you know they're paid what publicists typically get paid and we have a lot of turnover we're always trying to get them to stay by giving um raises the inspiration piece isn't quite there the way that it is for my lead gen brand

40:40 and I feel like a core piece of that and you can probably attest to this is the personal brand

40:44 they want to work with with Dan Fleshman they want to learn from you so as long as they feel like they're learning and they're a part of your inner circle your team

40:53 I feel like that's a big drive to to draw them there and to keep them there and I I've felt like that's the case with with the lead gen J brand too I've built such an amazing team and they don't go anywhere

41:02 yep on the make money side of this podcast, there's a question I like to ask, which is, what do you think people are held back by from making more money? Why do you think people go through life and they're making their 40 grand or 50 grand, 60 grand, 100 grand, and they're just complacent? They don't want to go to 120 or 150 or 200 or they don't want a side gig or a side hustle. Like, what do you think holds people back from making more money?

41:24 I mean, they always say you're the sum of the people you surround yourself with. I think that's the number one thing holding people back is they see what's around them and they don't feel inspired. they don't feel like it's possible for them to go make more money. If you want to make more money, surround yourself by people who are making more than you. I think that's the ultimate principle here. And I know it's probably everyone says that it's true. Uh by me sitting here with you, you make more money than I do. That inspires me. That shows me what is possible. Like what are you doing to make that money? Things that I never even imagined were, you know, ways to to earn. Uh what you're doing with your companies is is unique.

41:59 Uh, so I'm now made aware of of new ideas, new models, and when I think I'm killing it and I surround myself with people who are at that next level,

42:10 now I know it's possible and now I know now I have a trajectory to get there. If you're surrounded by people who are making minimum wage or people who are working in your office job and everyone's under 100k, you don't see the ways people are getting, you know, making a million dollars a month,

42:24 right? They're not talking about tax strategies. They're not talking about investment. you don't even know how to get there. You don't know the channels to listen to. You don't know the Makeoney podcast. So, if you're listening to this podcast, it's probably a good, you know, indicator that you're well on your way. Uh, so the biggest thing is changing who's in the room.

42:42 So, at what point for a company is it time to like start doing meta ads, start running ads on Tik Tok or go Tik Tok live or start doing PR or start doing SEO? There's so many different options of marketing that are out there. Yeah. Yeah. How do you know? Should you just do it on one or when is the time to start get building omniresence and start spending money across the board?

43:03 It's funny you ask. It's actually the theme of my book that I'm in the process of writing. It's the marketing playbook. Like which plays to implement when.

43:10 There's so many free ways to get exposure now that you should start with those. Uh make yourself searchable, make yourself findable. Every social media platform now is a social is a search engine. Yeah.

43:20 On Instagram, Tik Tok. All you got to do is optimize your profile and your videos and now people will start finding you for what you're doing. Obviously, making content is is great for, you know, driving free traffic. So, do the free things first and then once you've got a good way to a predictable revenue coming in, then you can start experimenting with marketing budget. And I think some really good ways to experiment are meta ads and Google ads. Obviously, that's changing a lot now with AI. Uh, cold outreach is another really good way for B2B companies to scale top offunnel marketing. Make people aware of your offer for the lowest possible price.

43:56 Then there's some like to haves. I'd say PR is one of those things that you probably shouldn't start with, but it's going to enhance all of the other forms of marketing.

44:06 Y it's if you get featured in Forbes, that itself isn't going to drive you business right?

44:11 What's going to drive you business is saying featured on Forbes and all your meta ads. it's going to be posting it on all those social media platforms. So all of the marketing channels then work symbiotically once you implement them in the right orders.

44:23 So what Jay's talking about is called the halo effect. The halo effect is I see you in the press, I see you pop up on a podcast and then when I see your ad, I want to buy from you more. There's some reason that I remember you. Whether I saw you on the billboard, the podcast, the press, etc. When I then see your ad or I see your call to action, I'm more inclined to buy from you. There's a famous quote or theory or statistic that may or may not be true, but maybe it's kind of close is you need to see something seven times before making a purchasing decision.

44:52 Yes. Whether that number is four times or 12 times, who actually knows? But let's just say seven times is the number. Well, if I need to see you seven times, well, you got to advertise to me a lot. I might not see your ad seven times. That's why you want to build omniresence and pop up in that article, be on the news, be on the podcast. And a lot of these things you can do for free, but it'll ultimately help you on the places that you spend money on.

45:11 Yes. And just to add to that really quickly, I think a big missed opportunity that most companies miss out on is that retargeting traffic.

45:20 Sure. So the hardest thing to do is get people to your website for the first time, get people to your social media account for the first time. People do need to interact seven times as according to that study before they make a purchasing decision. The easiest and cheapest way to get them back to your site, back to your social channels is retargeting ads.

45:37 You're hunting them. Follow them everywhere with omnipresent marketing. So set them at retargeting ads up everywhere. Facebook, Google, Reddit, Kora, Tik Tok, Snapchat. All of these platforms you can retarget on for pennies on the dollar compared to running top offunnel marketing campaigns.

45:54 All right, let's put on our investor hats. Investor hats. We've been making money, building up our business. We went from 1 million gross sales to three million. At what point do I start to look at what the heck to invest into? There's real estate, the stock market, cryptocurrency, angel investments, S&P 500. There's so many things I can invest into. Cash flowing businesses. There's so much. How the heck do you decide when there's so many options what the heck to invest into? It's a good question. I'll tell you what's worked for me and what doesn't work for me. So, I'm probably a little bit my earlier stages of making money.

46:26 We've been making real money for about 5 years now. I feel like when I started to have an overflow of money, meaning there's so much coming in that I can't invest anymore in my business without just wasting it. Like, I'm not going to hire these like $500,000 employees. I don't have any big machinery to buy. So, I started investing it into the stock market. And what I learned quickly by doing that, I was on Robin Hood just pushing buttons and buying stocks, listening to YouTube videos, and listening to other people on what stocks to buy. Did not work out well. I took a bunch of margin because Robin Hood made it really easy and then stocks crashed.

47:00 Lost all my money. Brought in my friend who's a financial adviser and what's worked for me to this day is any overflow I sent to him.

47:08 He's like, "Ready for another stack?" "Yeah, cool. Take it. Take another stack." And he puts it into specific stocks that we pick every two weeks. We put it into a couple safe ETFs that we've picked.

47:18 And that's been really effective. Our money's grown. He protects me from myself. And his full-time job is figuring out where to put my money. And I I get all these inbound I'm sure you get them more than me. People asking for investments in, you know, random real estate deals, investments in these random companies. I haven't done any of those yet, but I just I run them by my financial adviser. He tells me this is good, this is risky, this is eh, and I trust him. He protects me. So, I know a lot of people who have gotten involved in weird deals and now their money's locked up and they might never see a return. So, as you're getting started, I think you should put all of your money back into your business to a reasonable degree. As long as you have something that you think is going to grow the company or make your you more successful in the long run, the best thing you can invest in is your yourself and your

48:04 business first. Then bring on a financial adviser to help guide those investments. And now I'm at a point where it's like, crap, I'm going to have to pay a ton of money in taxes this year. My tax bill is looking real scary. So, what do you do about that? bonus depreciation. You buy real estate, short-term rentals, and every year, I guess, you find a new project to do that with. And that's kind of where I'm at this year. We're buying real estate, and we're taking bonus depreciation on it to mitigate my tax tax liability. Love to hear what you're doing.

48:35 That was a fantastic breakdown. Thank you. So, what I preach on stage and on social is the same thing over and over and over for many, many years. It's called 40 40 20. I do 40% low risk. I want to make between 5 and 9% for the year. I do 40% medium risk where I want to make between 10 and 30% for the year. I do 20% high risk. I'm crossing my fingers. I want something crazy to happen. 400% a,000% something crazy. And if this doesn't work out or takes a long time, I'm hoping that this and this covers the high risk.

49:10 And so what happens is the low risk sounds boring. So, I actually call it the boring side. 5 to 9% seems boring until you take out a compound calculator.

49:20 Right? If anyone's listening right now, after the show's over, look up compound calculator. There's a joke that Albert Einstein says, compound math is the eighth wonder of the world. Compound interest.

49:32 That was an Einstein quote. I don't think it actually was, but that's what every when you look on Google, that's what it says. So, don't believe everything Google says.

49:38 Uh, but that theory is put in your age. Let's say you're 34 years old and put in when you want to retire. Let's say it's 74 years old. So 40 years. Then put in a number like 8% a year. If you now contributed $10,000 and you do that for 40 years, it is staggering what that number is going to be. It's not 500k. It's not a million dollars. It's literally going to be three to five million depending if you put 8% or 9% or 10%. one little percent difference over the course of 40 years and compounded will literally blow your mind.

50:15 And so just put in your age, put in when you want to retire, put in how much you can contribute. And by the way, you want to get really crazy, what if you went from 10 grand to 11 grand. What if like seven years later you had a little more money, you put in 13 grand that year or 14 grand. What if you have a four-year-old child and you put in a,000 bucks a year for that child and throw in two grand or three grand, four grand for that child and they're four? What happens when they retire? They will have 5, 10, 15, $20 million. These not fake numbers. These are very real with just that 6, seven, 8, 9% type of interest rate. And so that's the lowrisk side. So that's for me is the S&P 500,

50:51 right? That's uh CDs at your bank. CDs at your bank are paying four or five% now, which is crazy at household name banks.

50:57 We're in a municipal bond ETF. There you go. Yeah. Taxree and it's earning like five six%.

51:02 Perfect. In the middle side, it's real estate, stock market, and cash flowing businesses. Those three main categories, real estate, there's a lot of options that would take me hours to talk about all the different options, but essentially fix and flipping, long-term holds, or cash like Airbnb and rentals. The cash flow business side to me is EverBull. I invested a lot into Everbold in 2018, raised a bunch of money 2019, bought a bunch of locations in 2020, sold the locations back to them 2023. I'm very active inevitable because that's a cash flow business.

51:35 Yeah. I invested when there was 13 locations. Now there's 104. Wow. And one new one every six days. I invested when there was a 10 20 million valuation. Now it's 175 million and growing. And so to me that's a angel investment but also cash flowing business. On the stock market side I just invest in the same 10 stocks over and over and over and over with no plans of ever selling ever. Why would I ever sell Apple? Do I think it's gonna be bad next year or the year after? No. Why would I sell the stock?

52:06 Why would I ever sell Walmart or Meta or household names like Tesla and Amazon? Why would I ever sell my Amazon stock?

52:13 Is that five? Will you give the the other five? Yes. I'm curious. They're just the household name companies. There's no rocket science to what I invest into. It's Amazon and Tesla and Walmart and Shopify and Meta and Google. I'll think of the I'll pull my phone up and find

52:31 those are good. You don't pick new stocks based on what what the economy market's doing.

52:34 I don't look at things like Nvidia which amazing what it did. Yeah. But it was also around for many many years where it didn't.

52:40 All of my losses in 2022 countered by my cho choice of Nvidia. We held that and it's done crazy. I mean

52:47 yeah it's been fun. And so I don't look at the shiny objects. Yeah. There's that's key.

52:53 Yes. Super key. Don't get distracted. I'm not a day trader, right? I want to buy things that I invest into or I'm a buyer of. I have Netflix stock. Why? Because I spend money on Netflix for the last two decades. And so do you. So does she. So does he. So does he. Everyone does.

53:09 Yes. And more and more people are going to. If everyone in the world is spending 15 to 20 bucks a month, I want to own that.

53:15 Right. You know that the number one performing stock of all time is Monster Energy Drink.

53:19 No. Really? More than any other company on the planet. Monster Energy Drink, which is called Hansen's the parent company. Why? because they're in hundreds of thousands of stores, probably a million gazillion stores by now, and they've just been doing the same thing for 25, 30 years, and they're in all the stores on the planet. That's it.

53:35 If Red Bull was public, it'd be the same story. Right. Right. And so my stock market is very, very simple, very straightforward. If you shop on Amazon, you should consider some Amazon stock. If you own a Tesla, how dare you not have Tesla stock?

53:49 Agreed. You're listening to this on an Apple product, a laptop or an iPhone or AirPods. What on earth are you doing not having some Apple stock? That's all

53:56 I noticed a lot of my biggest losers were companies that I had no idea what they did. No, no interactions with them, right?

54:02 And some of my biggest winners have been the Yeah. the companies I interact with and spend money with. So, that's a really good philosophy.

54:08 And then the last part is the high risk. To me, it's just angel investing and cryptocurrency. And really on crypto, it's just Bitcoin, Ethereum. I've been saying the same thing since 2014 and 2017 for Ethereum. I've just been saying the same thing over and over. Yeah,

54:21 I bought it at Bitcoin at 300 bucks and I'll buy it now at 115,000. I'm still a buyer. I made the very first news article about Ethereum. It was $19. I'm still a buyer at $4,500.

54:31 Are you dollar cost averaging into those things? I just buy because I I Bitcoin is inevitable.

54:38 Yeah. There's the supply is getting less and less and less because people die. People lose their phones, they lose their wallets, they lose their laptops. And so as more people lose their lives and lose their phones and lose their li their wallets, less of that 21 billion Bitcoin will ever exist, will ever be in circulation.

54:54 Less quantum computing cracks the network. But that's we got other problems at that point.

54:59 Exactly. You need guns and water at that point. Yeah. Um and on the other side of it, the demand keeps growing, growing, growing, growing. The people that have always liked Bitcoin buy more. People that get attracted to it start to buy it. And so if the supply is getting less and less and less and demand gets more and more and more, that's why Bitcoin is the number one performing investment asset in human history.

55:18 I was interviewing Gary Cardone, Grant Cardone's twin brother. He's the biggest Bitcoin bull that I know. And we were talking about investing in Bitcoin. I'm like, man, I sold it all when like Voyager went down. I lost all my cryptocurrency. He I think Bitcoin is at like 30,000 at that time.

55:34 He makes me whip out my phone on the podcast. It's like, I'm not saying another word until you start buying some Bitcoin. So, I whipped up my Coinbase and I set up

55:43 a recurring purchase for Bitcoin at 30,000 and it was the probably the highest yielding investment I've ever made.

55:49 Sure. We're still dollar cost averaging in now. It's like 115,000. Yep. Okay. Yes.

55:55 Let's focus on you again. So, on the investing side, you know, people have all these different options. You started to deploy capital. What happens is you get to a point where you can't invest back into your company,

56:09 right? or you got too much cash sitting in the bank. What people don't realize is they get this idea like I want to have millions of dollars in the bank. You've heard myself, Grant Cardone, and so many people, we or never have a lot of money in the bank because we're deploying that into investments. And here's why. Anything over 6 to 12 months in the bank is losing money to inflation. So, let's say you did have a million dollars in your bank account. Next year, it spends like 980,000, 920,000,

56:38 right? The year after it spends like 830,000. So it still says 1 million in your savings account, but it spends like 920. It spends like 830. Spends like 74.

56:47 That million is going down. Correct. You try to buy a Ford truck for 50 grand, now it's $54,000. You try to park in valet, it was 20 bucks, now it's 24. You try to buy muffins, it was $4, now they're $5. All these five 10% increments increases makes your dollar literally spend less. And so that's why I'm so adamant and so many wealthy people are adamant about the concept. Make that million go to 1,ion50, 1,100,000, 1.115. Like just those small increases will fight against inflation.

57:17 Yeah, that that's I think where a financial advisor so helpful cuz we have the not millions in the bank, but it's a lot. And I'm worried about def uh losing the value to inflation. It

57:28 is happening. But there's options. There's money market accounts that are essentially cash that have been earning 5%.

57:34 Sure. Yeah. We're now on municipal bond ETFs that's also earning like five, six%. So you have access to it and hopefully it's growing with compounding. I would have no idea what to do with that if it weren't for a financial adviser

57:45 just be sitting there, right? Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the charity side. Yes. from a PR side, why you think it's important for personal brands or for companies to have some sort of philanthropic, whether they're part of a charity or get their people, their family or their employees to be involved in charity.

58:04 From a PR side, it's an easy answer. It's actually one of the first things we do for some of our clients. If they're not otherwise interesting or doing anything uh really impactful that the media is going to take interest in, well, like we need to do some charity work for you ASAP. We need to find a cause and throw an event or do something to make make you philanthropic, make you interesting. That way you got a story. You've got a company doing some good in the world.

58:28 Uh so that's super important for PR. Most companies aren't interesting. A lot lot of them aren't aren't doing anything media worthy. So you want to do something media worthy. Uh get some media attention, do something philanthropic. Find a charity. So from a PR side, easy win. There are millions of charities out there on a personal level or for your company level. How do you decide what you would want to be involved in? Whether it's financially, time, or energy within a charity. Totally separate from PR. How do I decide what I want to invest in? First, it's personal. So, is there anything in my life or people that I really want to take care of? And that's kind of where I'm at now. And then there's the what is your cause? I think people need to have a cause that they're investing in and working towards to make success more than just collecting money. So on a personal side, I was this year I was

59:22 finally able to retire my mom. She was going to the office working in a cubicle with a bunch of 20-year-olds every day. Wow.

59:28 And I had offered a year ago, but she's like, "No, I'm not ready to like be retired. It feels weird." And then probably two months ago, she hit me up and she's like, "Is the offer still on the table? like I'm miserable, like can you help? So my mom's now on payroll. It's taxdeductible. Uh she helps me where where she can, but I was able to retire my mom and the thing that I'm doing with her is the philanthropy side. So my cause is animals. I've always been an animal guy. I know you love animals, too, but I grew up with, you know, a whole garage full of rabbits, mini kangaroos, prairie dogs. Animals are very close to my heart. Uh, and it's all because of my mom. She loves animals.

1:00:09 So, me and my mom together are opening a rescue. Oh, really? Yeah. Uh, that's going to be her new project. So, one of the stipulations for retiring my mom is you can't sit on your butt. Like, we need to find you a cause. We need to find you a purpose.

1:00:20 Stay active. Yes. Uh, so I think this makes a lot of sense. It's going to be a great funnel for a lot of my overflow money that's going to fulfill my purpose and her purpose, which is help animals. So, I think when you're deciding what to invest in, it's going to be what's what's closest to you so that you can feel the impacts of your money and your investment. I think donating to some random charity that you heard of that somebody says is good, I think is going to not have a long timeline on it if you can't immediately see or feel the impact of your money.

1:00:54 Yep. The reason I started my charity was that exact moment many years ago, 2009 200 Yeah, not 2009. I threw a charity poker tournament at my store in San Diego. I had 150 people show up. It's 1,000 bucks each. Some people put a little more. So, it was like we had to present this big check for like it's called $165,000. Post the picture the next day. Everyone's like, "Wow, that's so cool. 165,000." So, other people started donating. So, they actually get like a quarter million because everyone saw it. Super exciting.

1:01:25 Few days goes by, never hear what happens with the money. A week goes by and don't hear anything. Two weeks goes by. I'm not saying they did anything nefarious, but I got nothing to report back to all my friends I invited to my store to play in this traded poker tournament. What happened,

1:01:40 right? What did the kids get or what happened with the homeless or what hap like what happened? And so I decided to make very visual charities. I made I make backpacks for the homeless with 150 items inside. It's been 15 or 16 years now called Model Citizen Funds. World's largest toy drive. That's been 12 years now. We're going to our 12th year now at the Miami Heat Arena coming up soon. Like I created visuals, toys, backpacks for the homeless, things that you can see, feel, and touch. You don't even have to donate to my charity. You can go donate toys. You can make backpacks for the homeless.

1:02:12 You actually don't have to send us money to do that. You can do it. We're just efficient at it. If you want to do it at scale right?

1:02:17 Right. And more importantly, I want people to be a part of it. I'd rather you show up.

1:02:22 Right. I'd rather you bring all 60 staff with you. I'd rather you tell your 200 clients, hey, let's all bring toys to the Miami Heat Arena. That's more than you throwing in $1,000 or $10,000 or whatever, you know, like rather than the money part. And so I wanted to create charities that people could see, feel in touch for exactly what you said. And sometimes you just donated, you know, you swipe your credit card. That's easy,

1:02:42 right? You donated 500 bucks to this charity and you feel good for seven seconds and then you don't even think about it because there was no like emotion to it. You give a kid a toy, you give a homeless person a backpack with supplies,

1:02:54 right? Tangible. You can feel it. Yes. And I've seen the toy drives. You guys do a great job of showcasing like where the money is going and who you're helping. Yes.

1:03:03 I think that's so important. I call it building in public. I want them to see like we just got the stadium. Here's us at the stadium. All right. This is when the setup is going to happen. Here's how we're going to walk it in. Here's when the trucks are going to come in. I'm showing it so either people can replicate it on their own. Yeah. do their own toy drives

1:03:19 or they know that the work it takes to execute it and they feel a part of it when they show up. They feel a part of it. They're there wrapping toys for nine hours. They're there walking around with the kids and their parents like they want to feel a part of it. All right. So, there's only one question I ask on every single episode and I've never gotten the same answer before. We're at 200 plus episodes now. You build up your companies, you build up your investments, your stock portfolio becomes worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of time. You build up all these different companies, do joint ventures, but at the end of the day, at some point, finally pass away. What percentage of your net worth do you leave to your children?

1:04:02 It's the ultimate dilemma, right? Do you spoil your kids rotten or do you give it all away?

1:04:09 Depends on what net worth is. I think if it's billions, do I want to leave them half? No. If it's a 10 million, then you want to leave them half. I think the goal is to make your kids independent and don't give them enough to live on because that's when you really, I guess, ruin any opportunity of them learning and building for themsel.

1:04:30 I want to leave them just enough to be able to accomplish their dreams, to build their future, to build their company, but not enough where they never have to worry about money again. And I don't know what that number is going to be by the time I pass. Hopefully, it's at 150 years old

1:04:43 with uh modern technology. I plan on it being if they can keep me alive artificially, I'll do that, too.

1:04:49 Um I want to give them enough to accomplish their dreams and no more. So, I open up my speeches with what you just said. I scare the audience by saying, "Raise your hand if you have kids." Most of the room raised their hand and say, "Your children are likely to live to over 100 years old. Our parents typically live to 73 to 77 years old in my era. At your age, they probably live to 83 to 85 years old. 85 and a half technically for women. Your children will probably live to 104, 112, and some of them 120 plus

1:05:23 hopefully. And here's why. When I grew up, there was 7-Eleven, Jack in the Box, and McDonald's. There was no Whole Foods and Arowan. There was no smoothies. What do you mean smoothie? We had slurpies at 7-Eleven. There was no such thing as a smoothie with fruit in it. There was no cold plunges and saunas. We would You'd be a laughingtock if you got into a cold plunge. We'd think you're insane to get in a cold plunge when we were kids, right? And now it's cool. It's fun, right? And now saunas are part of life and we realize the health benefits.

1:05:52 Modern technology, think about the difference. 15, 20 years ago, there was no smartphone. So, think about what our parents and what our families went through when they were trying to get medical advice in the 80s, 90s, and 2012, 2010s. That sounds like a long time ago. That was 20 years ago, right? And think about what's going to happen in 10 or 20 years and 30 years and 40 years for our children.

1:06:16 From a medical perspective, this is the only part of being a doctor that I stay very involved in. It's the the new science that's emerging. You open my refrigerator, it's just all vials of peptides. M

1:06:28 on my couch, I've got a $50,000 pulse electromagnetic frequency unit. So, there's some technologies and medications and pharmaceuticals coming out that are just next level. We're going to be growing and harvesting organs. There's DNA treatments that are going to cause you to be able to bulk. Steroids are going to be gone. Just really unbelievable things that I completely corroborate. 120, 130, 140 is going to be very viable in our future. We're not even talking about the AI side of it. We're not talking about robot doctors. We're not talking about those things. I firmly believe that some of the major major major diseases that will be eradicated.

1:07:06 Yes, I can almost guarantee it. There's some that won't like cancer because it's what, you know, it's trillions of dollars. So maybe there's some controversy there. There's some like AIDS which obviously have been manageable

1:07:17 pretty much eradicated. Look at Mad Johnson. It's been he got it like 30 years ago, 40 years ago and look how healthy and amazing he is. Um, but I believe that the brain ones will be gone. I think the things that my grandparents, both of my grandparents passed away from, like Alzheimer's will be eradicated.

1:07:32 I hope so. I have a grandfather, too. 10 years very bad Alzheimer's. Half of my family's in danger.

1:07:39 And so, why I say that? Why do I Why do I lead an investment speech with that? The average person currently has $5,500 saved up in America. What if your kid wants to retire at 74? and lives to 104. They need 30 years of money saved up. What if they want to get by on five grand a month? I'm not talking about inflation or medical expenses. Let's just say five grand a month. Well, 5 grand a month times 12 is 60 times by 30 years is a lot. $1.8 million.

1:08:10 It's a scary thought to just get by, right? Well, unless you want them to be 84 10 years later working somewhere to make five grand a month. Who knows if they'll have those type of jobs then because of AIS and robots and things like that. And so I literally tried to scare the audience at the beginning by saying

1:08:26 I'm scared just sitting here. Yeah. Yeah. It works that if your kids going to live to 104, they need to have money and we need to be able to bluntly talk about it, which is the whole point of this podcast. All right. Tell them where they can find you on social media. Where can they find your companies? Tell them everything.

1:08:40 All right. On social media, either Dr. Jay Feldman or LeadGen. Uh both on Instagram, lead genenj on my website or otterpr.com. I'm everywhere. If you search Jay Feldman, I'll pop right up.

1:08:51 I love it. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. All right, guys. This is truly important. The reason that we're doing so well on the podcast charts is you liking, commenting, subscribing. When you're in the situation, you're at a lunch, you're at a dinner with your friends playing basketball, and they talk about a certain topic, you're going to hopefully remember episodes like this. When it comes to someone bringing up Legen or PR, you're like, "Oh, yeah, you should follow Dr. J. Oh, this happened here. Boom. Oh, you should listen to this episode. I remember they talked about this." It's not just about you. These things are going to come up in your life all the time. People are going to bring up things about paid ads, real estate, the stock market, health, and all the things in between. So, when you hear guests on podcasts, whether it's the Money Mondays or different podcasts, make sure you are referring

1:09:32 these things to your friends to help make their lives better, too. I appreciate you guys. We'll see you next week on Monday on the moneymunddays.com.

Questions about this episode

What is "How to Build a Business (Even If You’re NOT Ready) 🏭 | EP137" about?

This content focuses on essential strategies for building and scaling a business, including insights on raising funding and the motivations behind entrepreneurship. It emphasizes the importance of discussing financial topics openly to enhance personal and community financial literacy.

What is mentioned in this The Money Mondays Podcast episode?

36 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Yash, Money Mondays, Fan Basis, Health, Otter PR, Omnipresence (marketing). Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "How to Build a Business (Even If You’re NOT Ready) 🏭 | EP137"?

The episode runs 1 h 10 min; the transcript is about 15,213 words in 202 timestamped sections.

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