Month: September 2017

If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.

I got this email asking me why I didn’t just rely on word of mouth marketing since that’s what the big companies do. I sat there stunned. I really think that one of the reasons that many businesses are not very successful is fallacies and misconceptions. Let’s break this down.

Word of mouth marketing, stealth content marketing and authority marketing are all forms of marketing you can use. You can use one of these or all of these to promote your business.  I’m going to break down the differences.

Let’s say you are a small company and you don’t have any money. You have to depend on word of mouth marketing because you don’t have any money. That’s how it is going down. I think people misperceive what they’re doing.

Let’s say you own a sugar shack and you sell Jimmy’s Sugar. You open up your business with $500. You know your sugar is good, but you don’t have any advertising budget. So, you tell Big Mama. She tells Karl and Karl tells Julie. That’s your word of mouth marketing.

Word of mouth marketing typically has some tiers. If I go to a restaurant and if I wanted to recommend an app to someone I could say, “This is app is really good, you should get it.” That’s a nod in the right direction. They may or may not get it. But if I grab my phone and show them what I think they should do and get excited about it and they download it, that’s effective word of mouth marketing. There’s a big, big difference.

I’ve done that to people. People have done that to me. Not only do they tell you about the app, they tell you why you are stupid not to get that app.  

You have people out there all day saying you should try XYZ. Unless there is some context with that word of mouth marketing, something may happen or it may not. It may happen down the road, possibly. If there is a strong context, then that person is going to take a stronger action.

Let’s go to what I do, stealth content marketing. This is something I’ve done since 2009. I embed Easter eggs and inflammatory statements throughout my videos because I want to know how many people make it to that point. I may do this every ten minutes or so in the video. I’ll see their reaction in the comments. A good way to get someone to remark in the comments is to tell them “not to put it in the comments.” Invariably some people will do it. It’s really crazy.

I’ll give you a good example of something else I do that’s been working well, instead of just saying, hey, I’ve got some stuff below the video, I will show a message instructing them to Click Show More under the video. You have to show people how to find it or they won’t find it. It sounds condescending, but after seven years doing this, I learned that fact.

If you’re just going to rely on word of mouth marketing, it works, but word of mouth marketing with strong content works better. Stealth content marketing works way better. I piss people off on purpose. The thumbs up and thumbs down does not impact your rank. It’s the view time that matters for your ranking.

You can hire a bunch of people to come in and give you a “thumbs up” on your video. That’s the reason YouTube took it out of the algorithm for determining the video’s rank. They know people would play that angle. But, it’s hard to “game” view time. They actually check view time. That is the strongest indicator of a channel’s strength.

When I make a video for one person, it resonates very well, because it’s not talking to just everyone. You know if you go to the bar and you try to talk to 20 different women and all the women see that you’re doing that, they immediately lose interest. They think, “I’m not special.” It’s the same thing online.

Many people start a business on fallacies. If you ask business owners who is the biggest spending block in the country, many don’t know. Now that I’ve thrown that question on the table, I’ll answer it. It’s white women from the age of 14 to 35 years old. The second largest demographic for spending is women. That is who is spending the money. If you start a business and you don’t know these types of facts, you’re operating at a disadvantage. All you have to do is go to the US Census.gov and the information is there.

When you have the demographic numbers, this is where stealth marketing comes in. I have a confession. This channel is for men. A lot of women watch too. There is a reason this channel is for men. There aren’t a great number of channels that cater to men, because they are catering to other people because they think the money is there.

I had to create an experience. You have to know who you are selling to and what they’re buying. You have to know what’s in their mind and heart. I know a lot of dudes want to have financial freedom and choice in their life. That’s really, really big. If you’re a YouTuber, you really need to live in your analytics.

I review my analytics every day. This information is free. Your channel may not grow as large when you have a very specific niche, but your money will grow large because you’re talking to who you need to be talking to. The issues I talk about on this channel are money, building a business, and personal issues you deal with as an entrepreneur, such as your family and romantic relationships. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to go through this stuff.

Knowing what my audience is experiencing gives me great power putting together my shows and products. I don’t put out anything now without testing it. That does drive people a little crazy. I fail like 75% of the time. All of this stuff dovetails into your marketing. When you do your marketing, you have to know how it will impact every part of your business.

Some people put together marketing campaigns that are wildly successful, but their infrastructure can’t handle all the new business. There are literally businesses that have gone out of business, because they got too much business too quickly and their infrastructure wasn’t ready.

If you’re going to be in the world of word of mouth marketing you have to ask yourself some questions. Number 1 – who is your customer? This type of marketing is cheap and it works.

Let’s jump into authority marketing. It’s a whole different beast. This is when someone like Sean Combs or P Diddy can go to a brand and say, “I’m going to throw a party for your brand. How much will you give me?” Then the customer gives them money. They can make deals without making money because they have so much authority.

You can get authority if you work for it. There are many channels right now that are ripe for monetization because they have authority. But, they don’t know how to do it. They worry about offending people when they ask for money. It takes six months to two years to build authority if you just keep working at it and putting out content.

While word of mouth marketing is cheap, it can take a while. What you need is strong word of mouth marketing, content marketing and authority marketing. That’s what will bring you the most money.

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If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.

Hustling has exploded. The economy has improved, yet hustling is still exploding. Why is that? What’s really going on? Conventional wisdom was always that if people have jobs or the ability to get a job, they wouldn’t hustle. I believe people realize that things have changed. They realize that even if their job is secure right now, that may not be the truth; two, three, four, or five years from now. So, people are hustling because they recognize that they have to.

I have a lot of members of the Hustler Mindset Project who are not poor and who are not interested in storage auctions, but they are really interested in preserving their way of life and also increasing it. Seriously, we’re going to see some fundamental shifts in the way work is performed. The new economy will favor people who like to read, research, learn and learn some more. You’re going to have to be bold and have courage.

You will have to do so many things you aren’t doing now just to stay even in 10 or 15 years. It can be scary. I am excited. I’m extremely, extremely excited about the future. I am blown away by the tools and technology that are coming compared to the things that are already here.

Understand the things that you do related to online commerce are going to get better. I can’t even predict what you will have that will enable you to make money. Right now there is somebody working on some software or technology that will enable you to make more money, if you are in the pool now.

Hustling saved my life. There was a time that if it weren’t for hustling, I would have been really, really poor. I’m talking the “whites of West Virgina” county poor. I’m talking scary poor.

I remember one week where I started off hustling and I only made $150 at the beginning of the week. I kept hustling though and by Friday, I had $1000. I couldn’t do that with a regular job. With a job, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you will only make what you agreed upon when you took the job. That does not change.

You might get a performance bonus, or if you’re in sales, you might get a Spiff. Only in hustling do you have the ability to increase your income from day to day. The other side of that is you can make absolutely nothing. There are no guarantees.

Guess what? These days, having a job is just as risky as hustling. As I said earlier, there are people who are starting to understand that fact. They’re awake. Their eyes are wide open. They can’t sleep at night because they know what’s coming.

There’s another group who are in denial. They still believe in jobs as the only respectable option. Hustling can still have negative connotations. Hustling saved my life. Hustling is my best friend. Hustling is the reason I am able to talk to you today. There is no negative connotation for me. I’m a hustler. I’m a staunch opportunist. There is no shame in that. This channel was created for me to market my products. I am proud to be a hustler.

I don’t want to have a prestigious job title and chump change salary. That’s what’s going on. People have these titles that sound really good, like you are the Director of Internet Marketing and you make $35K a year. Fancy titles do not pay the bills.

Don’t think that hustling is a bad thing. Jump your ass into the pool. I’m serious. Right now, the water is cold. When the water is warm because of all the bodies in the water, that’s not going to be when you want to get in the pool.

It won’t be a slow march into the pool, there will be a massive number of people jumping in. It is better to be in that pool before everybody else jumps in. Timing is important. You want to beat the herd.

You want to start hustling on some level today. I don’t care if you have a job. I don’t care if you’re fat and happy and just living life, you need to start hustling now.

Let me scare you for a minute. I’ve talked to a lot of people. A lot of people can’t get a raise or they are losing their jobs and can’t find another one to replace their previous income. This is happening for two reasons. The first reason is technology. If your job can be replaced by an algorithm, at some point in time, it will be.

That’s why you need to become a hustler. When you view life as a boss, life becomes totally different. You start seeing the opportunities that come with change and how you can use them, instead of worrying about whether you will have a job tomorrow.

There is a return to consumers wanting quality in the USA. People want quality items. Some manufacturing is coming back to the USA. Why? These other countries are experiencing an improved lifestyle and they are now in the middle class. They are demanding more money now. It is not as cheap as it once was to go to these countries and setup a business.

The ability to call the shots is a benefit of being the boss. So many people working on a job have no power at work. They have few options.

As your own boss, you will be able to control your own future. You will be able to control your destiny and own your destiny. That is why you want to get in the pool.

Here are a few tips to help you avoid the pack and the herd. Number one – you need to get started. If you keep waiting for the perfect time to start, one day there will be no more sand in the hour glass. True hustlers don’t fucking wait. They create the opportunity. You have to become part of the hustling landscape.

Number two – pick something and get started and stay started. Don’t be worried if it doesn’t work out. If it doesn’t work out, you will learn something. My first five businesses were turkeys. I started them when I had a job. I was in the military for most of them. That’s why I am telling you to get started now, while you have a job.

I know so many people who were hustling on the side and then they lost their job and they went to full-time hustling. Most hustlers exceed their job income as soon as they go full-time and put in the effort. It makes sense to have something to transition to.

When you get started and your back is against the wall, it’s a scary, scary proposition. Start now. Failure is not a bad thing. It is just part of life.

You have failed since birth. Think about how you learned to walk. You went from crawling to walking to running. You went for months until you got good at it.

As long as you have forward progression, you will get where you want to go. If you have 20 things you want to do, pick three and start them all. One will emerge as the clear winner.

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If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.

What if you design your business for your life versus designing a business to make money and ignoring your life? That’s just something to think about.

What kind of life do you want to have? Have you even thought about that? Do you want to be free? Maybe you’re a person who likes to be where the action is. This is what I’m finding out. Many people don’t know what they want. They want someone to give them what they think they want. Then if it’s not what they want, they’re mad.

When you set up your business where you’re living the life you want and you’re making the money you want, then that’s fun. I have a friend who makes a lot of money. I’m talking about seven figures a month sometimes. He’s totally miserable. It’s not because of the money. He got caught up in a situation and he can’t get out of it. He is the family bank. Everyone comes to him, so he’s stuck in a situation he doesn’t want to be in because of the money.

I don’t think money should be your main goal. I think money should be a goal and you should have some metrics and income goals. I think freedom to live your life the way you want should be your main goal. Then the business comes on the back end of that.

What people often do is put the business on the front end and then try to work out the life thing later, which doesn’t work. I know this from employee life. Just to be very blunt about it, I made a very poor decision about the person I married. All of it was on me. I was working sometimes two or three jobs. Sometimes I felt like I had three kids, if that makes any sense. It created a lot of stress and pressure that I grew accustomed to in a strange way. That’s not a good way to live a life.

One of the things I see that a lot of people struggle with is a lack of focus. I believe in multiple streams of income. I really do. But I think you should nail down the first one before you go after the second one and the third one, and then the fourth one and the fifth one.

You’ve got to be able to handle a lot of stuff these days. You can’t just jump out there and build four businesses at the same time unless you’ve done it before. That’s a different kind of animal.

I want you to ask yourself this question. If you could live the life that you want, not this prescribed life that someone else said you should have, what would it be like?

When you’re designing your life, have you thought about the things that make you happy? I’m not talking about the things you’ve been told you should want or like. An example of that is for a while I didn’t own a house. People would say, “You’ve got to own a house.” I’d ask, “Why?” People would tell me, “It’s the best way to build wealth.” I would shake my head and disagree saying, “I have a business and that’s a better way to build wealth.”

Going back to lifestyle and living the life you want, since my business life isn’t predicated on driving a Bentley or living on the beach, I have time to do content marketing and build a tribe. People ask me how I do this stuff. You pick something. You stick with it. You put tons and tons of effort into it. You keep doing it. That’s how you build authority.

You can build authority in six months, but you will be working your ass off. The typical timeframe is about two years. Let’s say about six months to two years is what you can expect, with most people being at two years or more. I built authority on this channel in 12 months because no one else was doing it.

I was making all kind of mistakes. I was fucking up left and right. But, no one else was doing it. Now there are a lot more people in the video marketing space.

YouTube is hard. YouTube is very hard. That’s why I’m doing it first. Then I’ll do Facebook later. Content marketing is slow, but it’s more doable than all of this other stuff. When you get it, you can make it happen.

When you are doing your life plan versus your business plan, you’ve got to explore it. Honestly, it may take you a year or two to figure it out. You may have to go through five or six phases to figure out what you like. It takes work and time.

That’s another problem. People don’t put in the work. They want instant answers. Life doesn’t work like that.

Those are some of the things you have to think about. Let me give you a few tips. Number 1 – try as much shit as possible. Just do it. You need to explore life.

Another thing you should do is create a wish list of the things you want to do. Write down everything you think you want. Then start doing it. I’ll guarantee that some of the things on that list, you will decide you don’t want to do it.

When you are developing that business life, it is really important that it all dovetails together with your personal life. That’s just something for you to chew on.

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If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.

When I say rich, let me give you my parameters. This is the number one source of wealth for me. It’s health. If you’re healthy, you have a tremendous amount of wealth. People who that their health for granted have never been really sick. I mean sick where you are laid up for months.

When I’m talking about being wealthy, I’m talking about having the ability to control your time. That is the second source of wealth, to me. I’ll give you an example. I’m doing this video right now and I’m also running errands. I’m making money and I’m also saving money at the same time. I can control my time.

The next source of wealth is knowledge. If you have your health, time and knowledge then you can get money. You can always get money. But, most people chase money for the sake of chasing money with little regard to the construct of how money is gained. You can make money while you sleep or while you’re on vacation, if you understand how income is constructed.

Once you understand how income is earned, you will have a different mindset. The fear of working for yourself will go away because it’s a plan and a system and a process.

Your biggest problem on YouTube and the internet is discoverability. If you have a crappy video but you have a mechanism to be discovered, you will do so much better than someone who has an awesome video that no one knows about. There are plenty of videos like that on YouTube. The videos are awesome and they have no views because the person doesn’t understand how YouTube works.

This is another tip for some of you YouTubers, because I see it a lot. People get pissed off at YouTube or they get tired of the trolls, so they shut down their channels and they delete their videos. That’s a bad move. The longer your video is up, the older it is and if it continues to get views, it goes higher up into the YouTube ecosystem.

Having your videos out for a long period of time is a very important asset. I only deleted the videos I had to delete. They were just horrible. There were some videos I thought about deleting, but I left them alone. One of the ones I thought about deleting that wasn’t that great has 6000 views. Next year it will have more views. Then the next year it will have more.

The reason I am talking about this on this video about getting rich is because information is one of the greatest sources of wealth there is. Notice when I gave you the chain of wealth, there were three things that actually came before money. Most people understand the concept of getting rich as having a lot of money.

Those that have a lot of money understand the concept of being rich is having control of your time and building stuff and having control of your environment. That’s true wealth. When you are the King of your world literally, you are rich. That’s wealth.

I’m trying to teach you to play this game. Get yourself healthy. Get yourself to a point where you can control your time. Then acquire as much knowledge as possible about your subject of interest. Find out what’s going on in the world. Read. Write. Ponder. You will see some things that other people will miss because they’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the world.

I’ll give you an example. YouTube is one of the best things to happen to me. I don’t care how many changes they make. I don’t care what rules they implement. I am a YouTube diehard fool. When you look at what they give you for free. I actually get paid for this. When I think about that it boggles my mind because some complain about the ads. A YouTube channel is a form of wealth. You have your own voice. You have your own media channel. At no point in history could the average person go in their bedroom and put up a video and have it go literally around the world. That is what you get from YouTube for just a contribution of your time.

When I say health, time and knowledge being part of wealth, they are equally important. If people understood the power of YouTube, they wouldn’t do the stupid stuff they do on YouTube. YouTube got me three reality TV show opportunities. YouTube got me my first real week of book sales. YouTube got me a ton of new and interesting friends around the world.

I know that the work I do today is how I get paid tomorrow. So, I am working my ass off today.

Let’s move away from a discussion of wealth on a purely fiscal basis. It is your health, knowledge and time that will make you money. If you don’t have those things and you don’t have control of those things, the money you make will be severely limited.

Most people work a certain number of hours and get paid for those hours. When you move to a paradigm of how much value can I create, it’s a different ballgame. I have a book I wrote in a week under one of my pen names and it does not make a tremendous amount of money. It took me a week of my time to write. I’ll say it took me about 20 hours.

That book routinely makes $30 to $50 a month. I wrote that book 13 months ago. So, that book has made me $1000 for 20 hours of work so far. If that book only makes me $20 a month for the next ten years, I am thrilled, because each month that book sells, I get paid more and more per hour.

It is a big jump to move from trading time for dollars to trading value for dollars. It is a much longer relationship. When you trade time for dollars, once you get paid, it’s a wrap. That’s why I love being a creative person. I can create something this year and get paid for it the next ten years. I don’t know of anything else out there where you can do that legally. I know there are stocks and stuff, but I am just talking about something you create with the tools you have.

Now, let’s talk about another form of getting rich. Let’s talk about creativity. We live in times that are staggering for those who take the time to educate themselves. These are great times.

These are the best of times for me. Instead of being road kill because of change, I am exploiting change. I don’t care how old you are, at some point you can decide to exploit knowledge. There is no age limit where you can’t exploit knowledge.

I want you to wake up with a smile on your face each day. I don’t live with an alarm clock, and I haven’t for maybe ten years. This is what I want you to know. When you control your time, you control all of it.

So, get your health together. Get your time together. Get your knowledge together. Get your creativity together and you can be tremendously wealthy. Those things that are tremendous on their own can get you the money.

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If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.

People don’t want to hear the truth because it is painful. The first truth is, if you’ve never started a business before, the chances are it could take a couple of years. No one wants to hear that.

We are about to go through the mother of all recessions. It may be worse than the Great Recession. You have all of these people out here wasting time looking for a shortcut. There are people on this channel who have been looking for shortcuts for nine years, or as long as I’ve been on YouTube. If they would sit down and apply themselves, they would be much farther along.

When I had my storage auction business, I used to sit at my desk and watch the customers. As a storage auction buyer, every week you are looking for stuff to buy. Every week, you’re making deals. I knew how buyers thought. I knew what people wanted because I was a buyer.

Being the customer is not the same as knowing the customer. I got challenged on that point by someone who has no real business experience. I will say this to you. If you have no real business experience, I’m probably not going to listen to you. That’s like a fish listening to a bird about how to swim. The bird may have studied swimming. The bird may have watched many fish. But the bird is a bird and the fish is a fish.

You’ve got many people out there who are trying to hack success because the hard work of setting up a business takes time. There are certain things you are not going to be able to immediately overcome. This is where I am going with the participation trophies. There’s a $1000 challenge. As your trainer in Hustle Camp, my goal is to make you better, not happy. My goal is to make you successful, not comfortable. There are no participation trophies.

When you have a poverty mindset, you expect and crave immediate gratification. People want immediate gratification because their life is hell. Immediate gratification is not going to make you rich or financially solvent. It is not going to put $10K in cash in the bank. Most people can’t even come up with $1000 that is not on a credit card.

A lot of the stuff online is built on slippery slopes. I know someone who had his whole business built on Facebook. Then he got put in Facebook jail. His income vanished. He was freaking out. This person had to go out and get a job. There’s nothing wrong with getting a job, but he didn’t have any other skills.

As we head towards the recession, one of the things Hustle Camp is going to do is teach you how to make yourself recession-proof. As everyone talks about the recession, they talk about buying silver and buying gold. Let me ask you this, if you are in the middle of the woods and you need food and you have $100,000 in gold coins on you, what are those gold coins going to do? You would be better off with no money, three guns and a bunch of ammunition. If you’ve got a gun, you can shoot something and cook it. If you’ve got a gun, a knife and some matches, you can shoot something, start a fire, cook it and eat.

Let’s say you’ve got $1 million in gold coins and no gun and no survival skills. You have no way to eat or get water. Do you see where I am going? The gold thing is a hedge against inflation to keep your earning power high. It is not going to help you if you are in a situation and you have no skills.

Essentially, you need skills sets. You need businesses that serve people. Learning how to start a business is hard. That’s what you’re going to have to do to ride out this next thing that is coming.

In August 2009, I started this channel and I have made a great living in this and have accumulated assets. This business was started in a recession. What we’re going to do in Hustle Camp is to explore new skill sets you can learn.

Get your financial house together and then build a business. If you’re struggling to pay your mortgage and your car payment, most people crumble under that kind of stress. A few people perform. That’s not the norm though. Most people crumble. Why do you think there are so many people on welfare?

I don’t think hard times make you stronger. I think hard times reveal who you already are. The strong people just do what they do and the weak people are eaten up by the environment.

If you start a storage auction business today, you can have a customer list of 100 to 300 regular buyers in two to three years. While you are getting there, you will not make the money you want to make. If you stick with it and continue to serve and add customers to your list, you have created your own economy. It takes time.

You have to hustle to get started, but it is not going to help you build a long-term durable business. Let’s look at Donald Trump. He is an excellent salesperson. He’s probably one of the best I’ve ever seen.  He could probably sell ice to eskimos. As a manager, he’s a disaster. That’s why you rarely see companies started by someone who remains CEO.

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Question: How do I become a great salesperson?

Answer: Find a product and sell it every day. Find something you believe in.

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Question: What should be my first business? I am in school for business and I am also black and have a few felonies.

Answer: If you go out and start a business, no one does a background check on you. You can do anything, except own a gun store or a liquor store. My question to you is, what are you interested in? What people are you interested in helping out? One of the things I do here is help out beginning entrepreneurs, because when I was getting started, there was a lot of bullshit out there. There’s still a lot of bullshit out there.

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Question: What’s the best marketing strategy for my book? I have a couple of thousand followers online.

Answer: The best marketing plan for your book is more books. Write more books. That will increase the number of people following you. Develop a catalog or a series of books and continue to write. Another thing you should do is create a following before you write your book, which takes time.

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Today, one of the things you want to do is leverage your local online resources. You can use YouTube to pinpoint locally. You can use Facebook to pinpoint locally. If you have a physical location and you use Facebook, it will help you do better.

You need to do your research before you go wide online. Sell to your friends first to see if your product or service is something people want to buy. Test it, then take the feedback you get to move forward and go online.

If you like this, be sure to get on my email list for updates to live streams and special offers. Subscribe today!

If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.

Today we will talk about how to make money for the next ten years. There are many signs that we are in a recession and not heading for a recession. I know, you’re thinking the stock market is doing well and unemployment is low. That’s misleading.

I’m in the process of looking for warehouse space for a client. I noticed there is an abundance of warehouse space. I’m going to give you a little context. In 2002, I rented a warehouse and it was about 3600 square feet. It was $1000 a month.

Fast forward fifteen years into the future. I found a better warehouse that is cheaper and was recently built out and remodeled. Here is another thing that happens. You won’t hear a lot of people talk about this if they haven’t had this type of business. I had to have a warehouse in 2002 because I was bringing in large 50-foot containers of furniture from China.

We were able to move into a larger space because a big corporation had closed out their lease and left early. So, I went over and talked to my landlord and was able to get in. I saw a lot of big companies getting rid of their warehouse space and breaking leases. That is usually a big sign that bad times are coming. Wealth is what you make based on output. When companies are constricting, that’s a sign the wealth isn’t there. I see it everywhere, since I’ve been looking at a lot of warehouse space.

Another thing to remember is that with this meltdown, there is opportunity. There is a lot of opportunity, if you’re positioned and you’re capitalized well. You used to be able to get a lot of business credit off your EIN number without them checking your personal credit scores, but that game has changed. A lot of that stuff is going to go off your personal credit scores even though it doesn’t show up on your personal credit file.

If you want to get into this deeper, join Hustle Camp. We will discuss wealth building through entrepreneurship. I think it is the fastest way to get wealthy. It is the fastest way to leave something to your kids. It is the fastest way for you to get out of the hell hole you call your life.

Let’s get into the first thing you need to do. I’m talking about debt. You’ve got to work on getting out of debt. You have to raise your income, so when you pay more than the minimum payments, you still have money to put in the bank as “attitude money.” It’s going to be very important to have access to cash.

When things constrict, your dollar is going to go so much farther. I’m seeing this with this warehouse space. This warehouse space should cost about $3K a month, but it’s a third of that. That is telling me that when this recession hits, the people who are making it rain with their businesses are going to be in a position to leverage that dollar times five or times 10 and in some cases times 100.

The thing that is so disheartening for many people is they are trying to get out of this cycle of going to work and paying bills, get a little money and have a little fun. You’ve got to start taking steps now. We’re already in a recession. These things can go on for a long time. This is going to be like what happened in Japan. It’s going to be like the lost decade.

There are going to be many people who are caught short because so many people are living on credit. They’re not living on cash flow. They’re not living on earnings. They’re living on credit. They’re leveraging themselves so that if anything happens, they’re in trouble. The whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

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Question: Are big limits still available on business credit cards?

Answer: Yes. Let me tell you how the banks are doing that. The banks that are going to offer you the best bang for the buck is the ones you have an account with. The branch manager is going to be monitoring your account. They’re looking at your income instead of your credit score to determine the credit amount they will give you.

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Question: What happened in Japan?

Answer: Japan had this ten-year period of economic nothing. They had no growth, no appreciation, no increase in wages. It hit the whole country. It’s going to be worse here.  

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The second thing you have to do is raise your income. If you’ve got a job, keep your job. You need to start a hustle that is going to put $2K to $3K a month in your pocket in addition to your job income. You need to do that now.

Once you get $10K to $20K from your side hustle, then you start yourself a business. You need to have high income and low expenses. You want to be able to live on 30% of your income. If you’re crushing it, you should be able to live on 10% of your income. That’s where you want to be.

Everyone is going to be constricting. There will be massive layoffs as the holidays come around and companies try to make their balance sheets look good for Q4 and Q1. That’s going to create opportunity. That’s going to create cheap employees. That’s going to create cheap inventory. That’s going to create cheap warehousing, office space and retail space.

So, if you’re living on 10% of your income, with 90% going into an account, opportunities are going to be there for you. I’m going to tell you something that happened to me in the storage auction business years ago. I had plenty of cash. I was on Craigslist and noticed there was this office that was closing. They had nice furniture. He had Ecospace which is a high-end brand of Herman Miller. The dude was in the position where he couldn’t give it away because he owed money. He told me he needed to sell it all.

I asked him if he would take $15K for everything including me moving it all. He said if you give me $15K, it is all yours. It was two floors of furniture. I sold it to a guy for $50K. Because I had the money, I was able to make this deal.

You’ve got to be positioned to win. While this was going on, I was still out there buying units. I was still out there doing my regular thing. This was a one-time thing. I took the money and reinvested it in the business and kept working.

You have to develop financial discipline. You must do this. What’s going to happen is those people who can’t be patient and wait for delayed gratification are going to be eaten alive by those who are prepared. There are going to be deals all over the place. People will be selling cars to feed their kids. It’s coming.

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Today, we’re going to talk about how to get out of poverty.

About eighteen years ago, I fell into a really bad situation. I was ass out. I didn’t have any money. Most of my friends turned their backs on me. It was really, really bad. There was an half almost three-year period of economic stagnation and regression. I fell pretty deep. It was a life-changing moment.

I realized something in terms of changing your economic status. I’m not going to give you the “work hard” edict. There’s much more to it. I made a decision. I executed. I had really good strategy. I did something in six weeks that I couldn’t do in two and a half years which was move out of the boarding house and move into a nicer house and into a better job.

What I did in six weeks was I changed my social economic class. I went from poor to middle class in six weeks. It was a better standard of living and three times the money. I was associating with a better type of person. Things were really, really good.

After I got laid off the third time in eighteen months, I went home to that room in that boarding house and I took a bunch of sheets of paper and I started to think. I was scribbling all night.

I realized that working two jobs wasn’t going to move me out of that house. I knew going back to school was not plausible because I didn’t have any money. My third option was to get a better job. That option was the most viable. That’s what I did.

I knew the job had to be really good and it had to be on the bus line. I didn’t have a car. This was the nineties, and I felt the job had to have the potential to make $40K a year.

I went to Monster.com and I came up with this plan. I found these jobs. I did not write my resume first. I found the job and then I tailored my resume to the job. I applied for five jobs. Three of the people called me back. I had to increase your income. Then Rentacrate hired me.

The next thing that I did was become disloyal. I was going to get out of that job before that job left me. I decided to always be looking for something else. That’s when I met this girl who was making $185K a year selling office furniture. I became her friend.

Ultimately, I got into the office furniture business and became a sponge. Then there was this racist event where I walked into the conference room on a Monday morning and the faces were red. I didn’t say anything. I knew if I didn’t handle the situation the right way, I could end up back in that boarding house. It took me six months to get out of there, but I got out of there and I haven’t had a job since then.

You can’t take money out of the equation. There are a lot of people who will say, “It should not be about the money.”

“Fuck that noise.” Money buys you the power. Money buys you the access.

I had a situation where I was pulled over by the police. I had bought a car from a private owner. I was flying. I was in a brand-new car with no tag. I had the bill of sale in the visor. I got pulled over. It’s raining.

Here’s another little tip. I knew the possibility of me being pulled over was very high, because it was a very nice car. I pulled into the service station and I pulled up to the pumps under this awning.

This white female officer comes out. I give her all my papers. She goes to her car and comes back and tells me my license has been suspended. I said, “No it’s not.” I had just done Uber, so I didn’t believe my license could be suspended.

I wasn’t mad. I said, “This is clearly a mistake.” She says okay and goes back to her car. She’s in there like five minutes and then she comes back and says, “Your license was suspended for a ticket in 1989.” She said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

I agreed. We’re just having this conversation. She said, “I’m not going to arrest you. This is clearly a mistake.” She told me to go to the DMV and get it cleared up.

So, I go down there and get it cleared up and it was dismissed. This happened because I was privileged person and I have a certain air about myself. I didn’t get mad. Because I was expected to be stopped, I was prepared. The windows were tinted, so she didn’t know I was black so it wasn’t racial profiling. Money matters, even if you’re black. You can’t name one famous black person that has been shot by the cops.

My goal in that last couple of jobs was to get as much out of the job as I could and then move on. I did not stay in those last two jobs long. I used them as stepping stones instead of allowing them to step on me.

I’m going to give you some doom and gloom. The next recession is going to be worse than the last one. The last one was pretty brutal because there are many people that never recovered. You’re going to see the emergence of classes.

There are rich people and that’s never going to go away. There is some semblance of a middle class. They are people that if their car breaks down, they can get it fixed. If they have a huge medical emergency, if they don’t have a good family unit, they’re ass out. With the middle class, one big crisis makes everything fall apart. The middle class doesn’t have money, but they have resources and better jobs.

The other group are the poor. They have two and three jobs. They have roommates. They have to do this to live because they don’t make any money. These two groups will be impacted more than any other groups.

There’s another class and I’m a member of it. It’s the creative class. That’s a whole different ballgame. The creative class includes coders, web developers, app developers. That’s going to be a whole new level of wealth. You’re going to see trillionaires in our lifetime and they’re going to come from the creative class.

Another reason you need to get some money together and get into a higher class is you can meet people you can do business with. Money does not care who makes it. I’ve seen this over and over again.

Changing classes is not just about money. If you want to move out of your socioeconomic class, you’re going to have to change how you think. You’re going to have to change who you associate with and who you date.

Rich people do not want to hang out with poor people any more than they have to, unless you’re serving those people. That’s just across the line, for all races.

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What is Hustle Camp? It is a formalized structure for you to build three streams of income. I’m going to tell you why you need to do this. You have people who want to start businesses. The first thing I hear is I don’t have any money.

One of the big problems that I see is people lack a structure. This is not magic jelly beans. This is not some overnight success program. This is a structured process to teach you how to hustle and to begin to start your business.

Let me explain. When you’re out there “getting money” and doing whatever you need to do to get money, you are handling your business; but you don’t have a business. Handling your business is paying your bills. “Get Money” hustlers, which is most people, hustle out of necessity versus hustling for choice. Hustling for choice is totally different than hustling out of necessity.

That creates a problem. If you’re hustling out of necessity, for you to “amp up,” you need a crisis. That’s not the best way to build a business.

Hustle Camp is going to consist of a Facebook Group, Boot Camps, a t-shirt, and online tutorials. The person who sells the most during Hustle Camp gets a $1000 prize. Let’s talk about that.

To get the prize, you must be a member of Hustle Camp. It’s a paid product. The other thing you have to do is be active. This is the reason for the Facebook Group. You have to post what you’re doing and what you’re selling.

If you’re a member of B School for Hustlers, you’re a member. You don’t have to do anything extra to join. If you bought 30 Days to $2500 last week, you are a member of Hustle Camp.

The goal of Hustle Camp is to get people to $5K to $10K a month in hustle income. What you’re doing when you’re hustling is you’re creating a job for yourself. That’s what a hustle is. You are trading time for money.

The stuff I am going to teach you in Hustle Camp is what allowed me to enjoy robust passive income for three years. This is the secret. You have to go out here in the real world and get yourself some experience and then crush it online.

Why would someone take Hustle Camp? If you’re having a really hard time getting out of that job or it’s a big struggle for you to pay your bills, then Hustle Camp is probably for you. If you’re doing okay but you can’t figure out how to do better, then Hustle Camp is for you.

What we’re going to do is get an anchor source of income. That’s going to be your biggest hustle. Then you’re going to get two secondary sources of income. If you had $500 a month coming in somewhat effortlessly, then you had $2000 coming in here and $300 coming in there, that’s $2800 a month hustle income.

Then once you work out the kinks, you can grow them. What people are trying to do is leave their job and go straight into hustling and build a business and also take vacations and days off. No one has time to be grinding. That is a false narrative.

I expect this group to be small. We’re not going to have a Facebook group where folks are not contributing. There’s two types of people in this world. There are folks who want to do something, then there are the folks that do it. I want the folks who are doing stuff.

Let’s talk about how does resell hustling contribute to making money online. First of all, before you can be something, you have to do something. This is what’s going to kill a lot of people in this next recession. You have a lot of what I call “Fluffy Entrepreneurs.” They have a great Facebook page, but when you go there, you don’t know what the hell they do. When you research them, there’s nothing. You can’t find anything.

Far too many people want success without the work component. I have proven to myself, that if you give unmotivated people great information, it doesn’t matter. Last year, I put up a lot of great courses for free. This was the thought process. I would give these courses away. People would utilize the courses, make money and buy my higher-level package. That was the plan.

I was Boo Boo, the fool. I had one guy. He got the course. He said, I made $1000 this week. There was no love, nothing. I figured it out. It didn’t hit me until later. They believed, “G – You’ve already got money, we don’t need to raise you up. We don’t need to support you anymore.”

Just because I have money does not mean I don’t want more. Where does this thought process come from where people want to dictate how much money you should get based upon what you already have? A lot of you can’t make money as entrepreneurs because you are undercover socialists.

Every mentor I ever had felt comfortable talking to me because I didn’t want shit from them. I’m not a groupie. Don’t be a groupie. It’s bad if you want to be a supreme hustler. It’s not going to work.

I’m not going to soft peddle how hard it is to get started. Here is the disconnect. If you are so great the way that you are, why are you struggling? I asked myself that question many, many moons ago. I thought I was a hot commodity. I thought I was the shit because I was smart. But I was broke.

The thing is I was smart. I had a lot of potential. But, I wasn’t working as hard as I needed to work. I wasn’t putting in the time. I wasn’t putting in the effort. I didn’t have a strategy. I was operating on hope. I was doing all the wrong things.

The group is going to be really, really wild. It’s going to be crazy. We’re going to talk about a lot of stuff. We’re going to be focused on getting you set up.

The group is all about getting those three income streams. If you’re not willing to do the work, don’t get in it. You’ll be disappointed.

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Today I found this old Daytimer that was 20 years old. I had these plastic inserts inside that were full of business cards. As an experiment, I decided to look everybody up. I went to Facebook. I went to LinkedIn. I could only find a tenth of the people I had business cards for. They might not be in the same field, but these were all the people I could still find. The rest were gone.

When I met a lot of these people I was an account executive. There was one person who used to intimidate me and the first thing that came up on her was a foreclosure last month. I did a Google search and she’s the only person with that name.

I noticed a trend and this is why history is so wonderful. This one guy, when I first met him, hustler was the word that came to mind. I researched him and he still has his same business and he works out of his house. He’s still doing his thing. Everyone that I looked up that is still doing what they were doing or something at a higher level had a high hustle factor.

Half of this group of people that I found that are still doing well are financial people. It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you do it well. One of the things this mentor of mine told me was to pay cash for my toys and to only finance stuff I would have forever. When he told me that years ago, I did not understand that. I do understand now.

What I learned from this trip down memory lane was that all the people that were hustlers or really pushed it, those were the ones still in business. All of those nice people with the great credentials, their asses are gone. They’re out of business. I can’t find them.

On a sad note, quite a few people are dead. A lot of them are gone. It makes sense of course. One guy, he’s got to be 90 years old, but his company is still around. He’s at the same location. I think he owns the building.

One of the lessons I got out of this exercise is that you should never let anyone dissuade you from being a hustler. Hustlers are the people still in business 20 years later. They’re still living in the same house and have the same business addresses.

I urge you to read the letters Gary Halbert wrote to his son from prison. There are some serious business lessons in those letters. It’s free online. There are 25 of them. Take the information and put it to use.

Things are changing. This is what is happening. China recently over took the USA in car sales. That trend is not going to reverse itself. You’re going to see less people in the USA buy cars. The reason we have such a high purchase rate is there are a lot of people in families with four, five or six cars. There are also a lot of individuals that have two and three cars. That’s about to change dramatically because having a car is a very costly expenditure.

Another fact to consider is that we are going into a global economy. I’m going to set up a trip soon to establish some business ties. All of my information is saying, “Go east.” That’s where the money is. That’s where the money is going to be for decades. All of those economies are coming online.

There is a Google app that you can use where you point your phone at a foreign language and it translates the information into your language. It’s essentially data recognition software with a massive database. Books will be read around the world.

One of the things I want to do is expand the opportunity base. I am a nerd and I’m fucking proud of it because it is my nerd power that has gotten me where I am. Nerds like me are going to create fortunes they can pass on to their kids. That’s how a group of people can emerge from bullshit.

As a little nerdy kid, I was picked on for being smart. That is a dangerous to a culture. If you insult the folks who have the intellect to raise the group, you’re damning the group. That’s a problem. It’s changing, but peer pressure is powerful.

When I make that trip overseas to the Republic of Georgia or Hong Kong, I’m going to put out the information step by step of what I did and how I did it. There’s a reason I’m putting it out there. I’ve been saying this for a long time. We’re about to go through what Japan has been going through for two decades.

I feel like the future is the East. It’s because of emerging economies. Technology is making new things possible.

I’m talking to the black folks now. From 2009 to 2012, there weren’t that many folks on team G. I kept track and the ratio was like 90% white and 10% black. Now there are more black folks which is a wonderful thing.

The thing is everybody is a mutt. We have the same problems. When you travel around the world, it opens up your eyes a lot. Only 15% of people in the U.S. are passport holders. It’s one thing to see something on TV and quite a different experience when you see it in person.

One of the things that is happening these days is people are using the internet to build their own distribution center. Prince is a good example. He created iTunes and made more money from that then he did in the prior decade. When you’re in the owner’s seat, it is a different mindset. It’s a whole different thing.

You are better off creating businesses than relying on the stock market. You just are. If you can create a microbusiness that make you $500 to $1000 consistently a month, you are good. Say it takes you an hour a month to run that sucker, that is better than any fucking stock you can buy unless you just get in at the equity partner level.

Germany is a good example of the power of creating stuff. They are the strongest country in Europe. The reason is that they have a long history of making things and they’ve become very, very good at it. They are also very good at exporting. That’s why they have money.

Some of this shit is boring as fuck. A lot of it is producing things that people need. It is regular, run of the mill stuff.

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There’s this thing I call the layoff monster. I’ll share my experience with you. There was a period of time within 18 months that I got laid off three times. It was just like clockwork, every six months. Being told they don’t need your ass is not a good feeling. It was really crazy.

The third time was at Powertel. Two weeks before I was laid off, I was Salesman of the Month and I was about to do it again. I want you to understand that. Before the metamorphosis of my personality and I became about hustling, I was the company man. I’d go to work and work hard. I would do what was required. For a long time, I was very happy to do that.

In every job I had except for the last three, I was that guy that got extra favor. People looked out for me. One time I actually quit a job and then when I wanted to go back, they created a job for me. I was that type of employee.

When I got called in to be laid off after getting Salesman of the Month, I believe something in me snapped. We’re taught if you do the right thing and you do good things. Then good things will befall you. In other words, you reap what you sow. I learned in that 18 month period after being laid off three times, that my idea about reaping what you sow was not necessarily the case.

I’m not a very religious person. I do believe in God. I never subscribed to that “God’s got something better in store for you” philosophy. That never resonated with me at all.

That third time I got laid off, I knew I had to do something different. There was shift in my consciousness. I became the guy who focused on exploiting opportunities for me. I’ve never gone back.

I made a conscious decision that I would never be in the position to be laid off again. It was an active decision when I was sitting there in that chair. It has taken me a long time to piece it together. I was sitting there thinking, never again am I going to do my all and be put in a position where someone can say, “Thanks, but no thanks. You go away.”

Let’s talk about the indoctrination of the American worker. This is one of the reasons you feel so bad when the layoff monster hits you. From birth, you’re indoctrinated to be a worker. I’ll give you a great example. The third year of my business I was telling my mom, “I’m an entrepreneur.” She said, “What you mean to tell me is you still don’t have a job.” My mom grew up in that world where you were no one if you didn’t have a job.

This idea starts in our school system. The school systems were designed to create workers for the assembly line. If you go to a higher-level school, like Montessori schools, they don’t have that because their schools are about learning. Whereas the regular school system is about creating the “worker bee.”

That’s why you feel so bad when you get laid off. You don’t have a job. You don’t feel productive. You feel like a worthless member of society. Who wouldn’t feel bad with that kind of weight hanging on their shoulders?

So you have all of these negative emotional feelings for being laid of, and you don’t have any money coming in. Then you have a financial calamity. It’s a serious calamity. People have lost their marriages, homes, and cars due to layoffs.

When you get laid off, it’s a monster that touches every part of your life. We’re not taught to create an existence outside of a job. People say you’re crazy when you go out and start a business. They say it’s risky.

People don’t think, they just react. That job you go is the result of a business started by someone at some point in time. Someone created that. Wrap your head around that. Someone started this risky thing.

So, when I was sitting there in that chair off Peachtree Street, I made a real strong, active, positive decision with a ton of emotion behind it. That’s another key part of making a decision. When you make a decision with a lot of emotional energy behind it and it’s a good decision, usually good things happen.

When you make these decisions, you have to become introspective. When you asked people how they became successful, they usually tell you the regular stuff like work hard and show up. They tell you to have a goal, which is true and part of the deal.

What they aren’t going to tell you is when they made that decision to be successful. See this is a dirty little secret that many people don’t know. A lot of folks are waiting on permission to be successful.

When you get to the point where you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired and you start making decisions to the contrary, you can create more change and benefit in your life in mere months than you did in the previous years.

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