Making Money Online? Here’s What No One Tells You | Dion Pouncil & Brandon Bowsky 💰 EP120
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays. We are here in Miami, Florida at Drew's The Move podcast studio. The Move has three studios in this building. At some point, they're going to have multiple more studios here because it is amazing what they're doing. They're so busy. I'm glad they got to sneak us in here to make this episode for today for your listening pleasure. As you guys know, these podcasts are under 45 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. This episode will be between 32 and 38 minutes for your

listening pleasure. Now, we only cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. With our guest today, Dion Pounsell, he has trained over 20,000 students how to trade in the stock market. I'm going to let him get into more details about what that means. I don't want to mess it up. I want him to explain what that means for people and so that you guys can understand

Maybe you want to learn. Maybe you want to research and dive into that space. We all hear about it. We all see it. But I want to dive into why does he do it? How has he been doing it? Why have 20,000 plus people paid to learn from him? And while we do that, we're going to cover those three core topics. How to make money. How to invest money. How to give away to charity. Now,

As you're listening to this, keep in mind, you're not just listening for yourself. These podcasts are designed with billionaires and zillionaires, stock traders, influencers, celebrities, everyone in between, so that you might be able to listen to something for your past, present, and future. There might be people that you know from your past, present, and future that you could talk to about stock trading that maybe you're not interested in it, but you could learn about it on this episode. And vice versa, there's going to be other episodes that you might listen to someone and it's only impactful for you. So

So the whole point of these podcasts is to bring you different types of characters to talk about the three main topics so you can get different perspectives for the people in your life. All right, without further ado, Dion, give us the quick two-minute bio so we get straight to the money. Yeah, single-parent home, south side of Chicago, played baseball through high school, college, and minor league independent professional baseball, transitioned into business in the corporate world. I already knew that that wasn't for me. Got into entrepreneurship.

doing different type of side businesses, created an agency that worked a little bit, got some data from it, went to Silicon Valley in LA, raised some money for tech, didn't work out.

Met a billionaire guy in Dubai. He's like, you're smart. You should go work for my hedge fund. Start from the ground up. I did that. Three months later, the fund sunset. I got inspired, studied, got my license of a series three, became a professional futures trader and investor. And I thought if this was my background and I got into it,

in an untraditional route, how many more people would be interested in that, want to learn that and do it for themselves. And so started a program to be able to teach people how to trade and invest the professional way, but from a unique standpoint. And we've helped create four or five, six and seven figure traders now with over 20,000 students worldwide.

So on the make money side, when can someone actually get into the stock market? When can they actually trade? Do they need tens of thousand dollars, hundreds of thousand dollars, or can they start with a thousand bucks? Yeah, man, I started my first live trading account with $1,500, 1,500 bucks, 1,500 bucks. So you can start from anywhere as long as you're 18 and have the ability to open up a brokerage account. You can start and bet on yourself. And many of people have done it. Um,

The more information you have about it, yes, you can get more and better edges, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to make money. How can someone first start studying? Where can they first start listening to certain podcasts, watching certain YouTubes, listening online? Where can people first start to learn about this? Yeah.

Um, I'm kind of anti going down to YouTube, uh, university rabbit hole for trade and investing because the difficulty is that, um, most people don't know how to separate the good from the bad or the truth from the BS. Um, but what I would say is first, if you can find a proven coach or mentor, um,

Ideally, that you may be able to meet in person or you can find out about their ability to actually do what they say they can do would be the first option if possible. The next thing would be, yes, you can then find a online course of somebody that's actually doing it in real life. And then if you can't do one of those two options, then I would look at books from proven trading and investors to start there.

Do you have one main website or one main place that people can look at? Yeah. So for us, it's trade like the pros dot com. That's my whole thing is teaching people how to trade like the pros without going through all of the BS. But if I were starting the book that literally inspired me outside of the fund was Beat the Markets by Edward Thorpe.

I came across his book prior to trading and investing called Beat the Dealer because I like numbers and taught myself how to count cards for blackjack reading Beat the Dealer and made a substantial amount of money off of that in Vegas. And so two years later, I came across his book, Beat the Markets. And this guy, if you've ever seen the movie 21, where Kevin Spacey plays the guy that teaches his students how to crack cards.

Count cards and go to Vegas and make money this that movie is based off of ever thought real life So he was a college professor out in Boston math and physics major Created an algorithm to beat the dealers in casino got bored and now Runs a 50 billion dollar fund that's fully algorithmic And from trade and investing so that book is what inspired me to get over the hump and that's where if I had to start today right now, I would still start with that book and

Can someone have a normal nine to five job and do trading on the side? Yeah, absolutely. So the nine to five as an excuse is out of the window now. One, I

I am licensed in futures. The futures market is open 22 hours a day, six days a week. The crypto market is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The forex market is open 24 hours a day, six days a week. Stocks, bonds and options is open eight hours a day, five days a week. So literally, no matter where you are in the world, as long as you have an Internet connection, you can put your money to work for you and trade and invest.

Do you think the stock market at some point will be 24-7? Yes. A couple of brokerages like Charles Schwab have already announced that they will allow 24-hour trading in the initial big indexes and things like that. So I think it's inevitable. I probably think we're less than 36 months away from the major exchanges making all of their major indices available 24 hours because they have to be able to keep...

interest from people who are looking at the crypto markets as well as sports betting and sports gambling, which is getting huge. So they have to be able to keep some market share and some mind share because the younger generation is not necessarily interested in long-term investing right now. They're definitely big on trading, but long-term investing is not something that is kind of top of mind. And when they think about these legacy investments,

exchanges, the first thing they think about is stocks. And for a lot of them, stocks is boring and stocks move too slow, especially if you don't have the amount of capital to really make the moves that you want. So a lot of people, when they picture the stock market, they picture the New York Stock Exchange, all the guys in suits, writing down a piece of paper and holding it up to trade. Like, is that still going on? Is that still happening? Yeah. So that's called open outcry. So those are people in the pits yelling they want to buy and sell. That is

only available in Chicago right now, I believe, at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I think that might be the one or one of less than probably 10 open outcries around the world. Everything else is essentially computer-driven. 80% of all trades globally are done by algorithms. So it is computers...

It is people behind computers making manual or discretionary trades, or there are algorithmic quantitative traders and investors like myself and others, or you have hybrids where they'll get these signals from the algorithms and then they'll still make the trades or investments manually. So there's an epic TV show called Billions.

My favorite show. On that show, there was what's called a quant. And they were hiring multiple quants, but there was one main quant that became truly the star of the show. What the heck is a quant? Yeah, so a quantitative developer or a quantitative trader is a person who studies math

and science that they're very good at statistical models and the quantitative side of data analysis. And then they also can program via computers. So then they can combine that as a hybrid and they can take those models and actually code them into algorithms to trade and invest for them fully automatically. Now, the thing a lot of people get

Overwhelmed or they get nervous when they hear about the word quant or they hear the word algorithm Algorithm simply is just a step-by-step process So if you get up every day and you have the same routine you get up you check your phone you brush your teeth You take a shower etc, etc That's your daily routine or daily algorithm And so whatever it is that you do that can be done on the computer can actually be programmed and can be automated and it follows that same step-by-step process and

Why that's powerful and important when it comes to trading is because it doesn't have the same default of

negative things that a human may have. The algorithms don't get tired. They don't have partners or kids. They don't have jobs. They don't get distracted by social media mentions, et cetera, et cetera. They just follow the same step-by-step process efficiently and effectively the same way every single time. And when it comes to trading and investing, you actually would prefer that because some of the biggest mistakes and biggest impacts on people's negative trading are the human element.

So on the investing side, outside of the trading side, would you ever just invest into Apple or Tesla or Google or Netflix or Facebook, like S&P 500? Would you ever just deploy capital that just sits or are you always active? Yeah, 100%. I think you need a hybrid of a passive portfolio and an active portfolio. So passive is where you're just putting the money to work for you bigger picture long term, think generational wealth building, and think active for trading. So first and foremost, in the eyes of the IRS,

366 days is the first day of an investment. So investing and trading are similar, but they're different not only in general by definition, but they're different in the eyes of the IRS. So long-term capital gains and long-term capital losses start at 366 days and beyond. So that is what an investment is. So one year or longer is an investment.

One year or shorter is a trade. That's everything from nanoseconds all the way up to a year. So the first thing that everybody really needs to understand is that investing and trading are different. Now, when I think about investing, the simplest thing that anybody that's listening to this can do right now is a dividend portfolio.

the diversified dividend portfolio. And one of the easiest ways to do that is look up what's called the dividend aristocrats and the dividend Kings. So dividend aristocrats are companies that have paid dividends and increased their dividends every year for the last 50 years. And dividend Kings are every company that has paid dividend and increased their dividend every year for the last 25 years. So you can do two things. One,

You could take out or Google or research a dividend calculator and you could put in this dividend calculator how much money you want to make a year without working. And you say, I want to live off of $100,000 a year. And that dividend calculator will tell you how much you need to put into a dividend portfolio and how much that dividend portfolio needs to pay you monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually.

for you to literally put your money to work for you and you never have to work for that money again, as long as those companies stay around.

So now you've got the dividend calculator and you know how much money you want to live off of a year. And then you obviously need to get that capital. And then you put that into a dividend portfolio. And I personally, if I'm starting from scratch, I would do a dividend aristocrat portfolio or a dividend king portfolio. And obviously this is not trade and investing advice. But if I'm starting from scratch and I'm looking to invest and not be active, that is what I would do to have a solid portfolio portfolio.

And then the next step with that is I would take a loan against that portfolio because loans are tax free. And then I would actively trade. And as long as my active investments of my active trading is outperforming the interest payment on my loan, then I'm capturing that spread tax free.

So I often talk about what I call 40/40/20, low risk investing, medium risk investing, high risk investing. In the middle, I talk about the stock market. I talked about my top 10 favorite stocks. But over here, I talk about the S&P 500 averaging over 11% a year for the last 92 years. What are your thoughts about the S&P 500? Is it something someone should research? Is it something that you consider?

Yeah. If you are looking for passive, if you're looking for just an index fund or you're looking for something to where you can put it in and not necessarily think about it as often, then the S&P 500, the QQQ, these type of ETFs are.

low to medium risk, they are consistent and they've been proven over time. And if you are not looking to actively trade, and this is what I tell people all the time, if you're looking to produce daily, weekly, monthly income, that's trading. If you're looking to just grow your wealth over time through slow accumulation or compounding interest, then you can look at investment portfolios. So the S&P 500, most popularly traded instrument in asset

on the class is the SPY ETF. You can look at that. You don't need a fund manager. You don't need a course. You don't need a mentor. Do your research to make sure that you're educated and informed. Select you a high quality dollar cost averaging strategy frequency of what and when you want to put that amount in. Keep that same amount and that same consistency of frequency. Set it, rinse, repeat, and keep doing it. So I walked into your hotel room and you had this whole entire

setup of just computers and things going on and charts going on. Do you do that in all these cities? Like what was that? Yeah, no. So Miami is always one of my favorite cities. We own real estate here and all of that. So it's not a hard sell for me to come to Miami and do extended trips and things of that nature. And I've been traveling now for I've been in 10 cities in the last 45 days, including three countries. But this was the longest

part of the trip that I had the opportunity to sit down for a second and catch up on some things. And I have my actual hedge fund that I'm licensed and I run and I have a team of quantitative developers that work with them for me to create my trading strategies into algorithms. Then I have just my personal money management and trading accounts and stuff like that. And then I have the program where I actually teach people how to trade and invest. And I go live with them twice a week.

And so when I do that, I feel more comfortable being at my station, being able to see the things that I'm looking at for my business and or my fund while separately on another screen, I can be able to teach and lock in and focus on them. And when I'm traveling all the time, although most of my stuff is in remote service, if I'm only on the laptop, I only have one screen and I can basically only be able to lock in and focus on what that is and not really see what

what else is going on. Although I look at my fund and my team as like, we're like NASA mission control. We're not really actually up there, you know, managing the rocket ships in person, but we're in NASA just making sure that the algorithms and the technology works and does what it's supposed to do. So when I have extended trips, I mean, it costs me 400 bucks, a hundred bucks a screen to buy four, four screens costs me,

$50 to get a dude from TaskRabbit to set it up. So 500 bucks, it was set up when... That was a serious setup. Yeah, but it took me...

Three minutes to order those screen on Amazon. They came same day. Shout out to Jeff Bezos with the same day delivery. The TaskRabbitDude showed up at 9 o'clock. It was all done within four hours of me thinking about it. So it wasn't really a big thought or big deal. And then, you know, I got family and friends down here. I'll just give the screen to somebody and go to the next city. Might have to make a training video about how to set up shop with...

- Five hours for 500 bucks. - Literally. And then, I mean, we made the first couple of trades, we were on the community and we made $1,100 in three minutes. So it literally paid for itself from the first day we had the next point. - So you go live twice a week with Trade Like The Pros. - Yeah. - What are they watching?

So when you join Trade Like The Pros, you have the actual course where I actually teach you step by step. And one of the main things in the way I teach is I start with the glossary first because you can have the best strategies, you can have the best programs,

program in the world, if people literally don't know the words that you are using, it doesn't matter. And when you're talking finance, you're talking trading, you're talking investing, you're talking about Wall Street things, it's literally like learning another language, right? So we start with the glossary. We teach people first, then we teach them the strategies. We teach them the math because...

I believe the chart patterns are bullshit. I don't believe that, you know, real high level professional traders use chart patterns. So we are not chart patterns over here. We're very data driven, proven things that can be substantiated by math and backtesting. And then part of the program, you get the community. So you get our private trading community where you're able to be connected with everybody via discord and Slack. Um,

And then I actually trade live with you a couple of times a week. So we're there watching live in real time. The algorithms work and generate signals and trade fully automatically, as well as me coaching and teaching them through things. And then I'm answering questions for them in real time. So,

With the program, we have a 24 hour AI teaching assistant. We have a 24 hour trading co-pilot. We have customer service humans. And then we have me teaching and answering questions live with the community. And that makes them not only feel that, um,

The program is valuable and over delivers, but it also makes them feel comfortable. They can ask questions in real time about what they may be seeing, what they're thinking, especially, you know, this year with all of the market volatility and every five minutes there's a news announcement or a tweet or somebody comes out and says something, the market goes crazy. It gives them some comfort to be able to say, hey, you know what? I can get a professional thought or professional insight on this in real time a couple of times a week.

So someone did it. They went to trade like the pros.com. They bought your course. They watched all the videos. They spent a year and they built up a bankroll. Now they got hundreds of thousands of dollars. They feel a little bit empty inside because they don't do any charity stuff. Why?

Why do you think it's important to incorporate philanthropy or charity into people's lives? Yeah, I think it's important 100% because if someone didn't do it for me, then I literally wouldn't be here, right? Because I grew up in a single parent home on the south side of Chicago in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. And if it wasn't for my coaches and my pastors and my mentors to be able to step in and help fill that gap for my mom as well as my other teammates and stuff like that,

to help keep us out of the streets, keep us on a straight path, then that would have impacted me substantially. Second, I played for the RBI local and national team, which was sponsored by the Boys and Girls Club of America.

So without those people investing in donating and philanthropic efforts into Boys and Girls Club and to the RBI programs, I literally wouldn't have been able to afford to do some of those things, right? So I think it's important in general because I am a product of that help, that service, that commitment, that philanthropy. And then when you start to get money and you get to a certain level, it's only so much you can buy. It's only so much you can do. And you start to realize that all these materialistic

material things that you may have wanted and things to do don't bring you any completeness or value because you start to realize that it's really from

You and within so you start to look at money as really just what it is a tool It's a tool for you to live and design a lifestyle that you wanted to live But then it's also a tool for you to be able to use and help other people and I think that's why It's extremely important to put money in its proper place of how you view it And then you can also use that to help other people enrich their lives So the only one question I ask on every single episode and I've never got the same answer. I

So you're going to be going public later this year through an ETF. Maybe you do multiple companies, a bunch of different investments and become worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of time. But you've got two beautiful children. Yes. Yes. So if you accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars, what percentage of your net worth do you end up leaving to those children? Yeah. So for me, I'm only thinking B's and T's for sure. There we go. But.

As a numbers guy, like from in our program, I teach people about the 5% rule that you should never trade or invest in an individual opportunity more than 5% of your available cash balance. And I teach people that that's not only a trading rule, but you should look at that across your entire portfolio.

And that allows you to never put yourself in a position where you blow through all your money on one opportunity. And as I look at my daughters, they're already trust fund babies, literally. And there are a thousand times beyond my starting point.

I want to put them in a position to where they not only know what money is, they know how to use it, but they're educated on how to protect it and grow it. Because I knew how to make money and I knew how to work hard and I knew how to hustle. But I started my first company when I was 25. I made my first million when I was 28. I was broke again by 29 because I didn't know how to protect the money. Sure.

and do all of those things. And I had to learn through that once I got into trading and finance. So yes, I want them to have money. Yes. I want them to know how to use money, but I want them to know how to protect it and grow it so that it can be in for generations. And nobody in our family or bloodline has to start where I had to start. So I always say generational curses ran in my family until they ran into me. Right. So that's number one. Um, number two is from a percentage standpoint, um,

Me personally, I want to make sure that it follows more of the kind of Rockefeller Rothschild model to where it's waterfalled through the generations.

So it would start with at least 50 percent strategically allocated to my seeds and my bloodline so that they have that wrapped in trust with rules. And then the other 50 percent would be set up in philanthropic efforts that they will manage through the family trust and things like that.

Where can people find you on social media? Where can go to the trade? Like the pros talk us through everything. Yeah. So, um, all social media platforms. I'm just Dion Pounce. So my name, uh, the program where you can be able to learn, earn, and hopefully return for your family is trade like the pros.com. And then as we are going public as John, uh, as Dan, uh, uh, alluded to, um, let's restart that one. Okay. So, um,

Yes, I can be found at Dion Pouncil, which is all of my social media platforms. The website is trade like the pros dot com for anybody that wants to join the course or learn from me. And then, as Dan mentioned and alluded to earlier, we are in the process of getting ready to release our first ETF public on a New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ZPG. And that is Fusion Quant Technologies. All right, guys.

The whole point of this podcast is for you to have discussions with your friends, family, and followers about money. A lot of us grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous. We have to have these discussions. We have to be able to be blunt about it because money is part of your real life. It's part of your daily life.

So you have to be able to talk about accounting, taxes, finances. Should I borrow this money? Should I loan this car? Should I lease finance? Should I get this apartment? Should I buy a house? These are all real life things with your salary. There's so many questions that's part of your real life. So have these discussions. Check out Dion Pounce across social media. Check out tradelikethepros.com. We will see you guys next Monday on themoneymondays.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays. Now, as you guys know, normally this podcast takes place in an RV motorhome for the last 120 episodes in a row, but when I'm in town here in Miami, I have a special guest who drove over an hour to be here. I had to make an exception. So

So we're inside the Move Studio with Drew's The Move. It's an amazing studio. It actually has three studios in one building, so it's very useful and very versatile. And so my guest is actually here so we can shoot VSLs, sales pitches, commercials, ads, paid ads on all the different platforms. We're like, why don't we make a podcast? It's perfect timing. And so I've been wanting to interview him for a long time because he spent over one billion

and created all this e-commerce magic for brands, for products. He's going to get into the details of it. I can't explain as good as he can. But what's really important is he finds brands or he finds products or he finds people that he can help scale at a rapid rate because of the efficiencies of how much he's spent over the course of time. So without further ado, we're going to cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. But first, we're going to have a quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money with Mr. Brandon Bowski.

How's it going? Thanks for having me, Dan. Appreciate you. Let's see. Background was a professional gamer when I dropped out of school at 15, got into DJing and producing electronic music.

After that, I ended up doing a brief stint as a manager of electronic artists. Partners screwed me over. Had a subscription box startup in 2015 when that was still hot, brand new. Failed miserably. And then ended up living in my car. And somebody said, go try insurance. So I did. And ended up growing a pretty big agency, hundreds of employees from 30 at the time when I started there. Left that, started my own thing, made a few million dollars, and then that turned into...

I wanted to buy a watch. Ex-girlfriend didn't want me to spend money, so I decided I would make the money on the side. She couldn't get mad. That led to a lead gen empire that did hundreds of millions of dollars and powered over a billion dollars in revenue for clients. Well over $5 billion, probably close to $10 billion now in insurance premium. And then now today, just focused on scaling coaching and mentorship programs that can help people get the lives of their dreams.

So on the make money side, why are people scared or not understanding how to make money online via social media or paid ads? I think the majority of people just don't want to put themselves out there and they're deathly afraid of failure and they're even more afraid of being perceived publicly failing.

To me, and I'm sure you've had this happen, failure just happens. It's just life. And if you're not failing, you're probably not going to learn because you only learn from your mistakes. You don't learn as much from your successes. Your successes are usually blind luck. It's like we had this idea. The idea did well. Okay, great.

Now, that doesn't universally apply to every idea we're ever going to have. We're going to try tons of I had a gym over a million dollar loss biohacking gym before its time. Now there's tons of biohacking stuff. It's a craze. But in covid during a pandemic, having a gym major L and I've had a million other ideas. I mean, dude, I've had over 100 registered corps. I probably only made money at 15, 20 companies.

And a lot of people don't see that part. They just see the flashy cars, the nice houses, living in a million cities, private jets, all that stuff, and think, oh yeah, it must be nice, or oh, that guy got lucky. It's like, no, you just fail a lot. And a lot of people are very, very afraid to fail. I like having blunt discussions.

I like talking about failures and lawsuits and headaches and employees and situations and partnerships and all the things that come with it because that is real life. You're going to have situations, especially as you scale. You go from 1 million to 5 million to 10 million to 30 million to 100 million, et cetera. There are different devils and evils and situations and partnerships and the way people change around you before, during, and after every situation. It's a fascinating dynamic, but people don't talk about it because they want to pretend like everything's perfect all the time.

If someone's ready to make the leap, right? They're making 60 grand a year in their job. They want to start making a little bit of money online and hopefully replace their income at some point. I tell people, don't quit your day job because even when you successfully do something, you're going to pour the gasoline back on the fire to keep doing it. So even if you make money, you got to put it back in.

And even if you scale something, you got to put the money back in. And so I say, don't keep it, you know, don't quit your day job. What are your thoughts about someone? They're making 60 grand a year, but they want to make, you know, an extra 1000, 2000 bucks a month online. What should they be doing? Researching or what? Yes. I mean,

I want to agree. Never quit your day job. I tell people that no matter what they plan on doing, pivoting to, if you have a stable source of income and you don't have a massive surplus of savings, like a big war chest, do not quit your job that provides you the meals because otherwise you're screwed. And a lot of people are like, I want my back up against the wall. No, you don't. You really don't. You're not built like that. No. And you, and you might be, and you'll find out the hard way, but most people, 95, 99%, they're not built like that. To me, I think you take the thing that you're doing well,

Think, what could I do like that in my off time to make extra money? Or if I want to do something totally different that I don't like that thing I'm doing, let's say I want to probably tell people to start in sales. The reason being, if you sell something someone else has already proven, a lot of the guesswork is taken out.

and you don't have to quit your day job yeah exactly and you get to learn you get to learn how that operation functions what all the different roles are all the different teams the different departments and then you can eventually replicate that over time when you have something that you can sell that is your own yep and i think a lot of people

They chase the next shiny object thinking that buying some information from somebody or paying somebody to mentor them, which is oftentimes really bad deal because they're not ready for the mentorship. And they just think if I pay this person, they'll just tell me how to be successful. No, I mean, like people like us that have been successful, we can only tell people the answers to the questions that they have for us to try to download or upload to them. Everything that we've ever done, it's never going to happen. We couldn't spend enough time if we tried.

So I think a lot of people are looking for the wrong thing and they should just be looking for what is the low hanging fruit opportunity where I can put additional money in my bank that can eventually replace my day job doing something I maybe like more or if I don't like it more on the road to doing something I like more. I usually think that's sales.

So let me break down the don't quit your day job concept. So let's say Bowski and I decide we're going to invest into your company and you make green t-shirts.com green t-shirts.com. You've already tested the market. You already know that brown, blue, yellow, you just know green is the one, right? You've already tested it. So we put up 250 K each. We give you $500,000. So go launch green t-shirts.com. Great. You go out there and crush it and do $1.2 million in sales the first year.

Bowski and I are happy. We're proud of you. Good job. You already succeeded far better than we could have expected for your first year. Guess how much you made on $1.2 million in sales on your first year? It rhymes with zero.

And you actually might be in debt. You actually might be calling us for more money because when it works on green t-shirts, if it's 1.2 million sales, you probably need to spend 400K to 600K on the actual shirts, the inventory. You probably spent $200,000 on paid ads. You probably had Bowski help you do it. He still had to spend the money for you, even if he's more efficient at it, still spent it. So four to 600K on the inventory, 200K on the paid ads. You got an office for five grand a month. You got three employees at four grand a month each. That's another 12 grand a month.

You went to the trade shows at the convention called Magic in Las Vegas. You went to the ASR show, the action sports retail show in Huntington Beach. Bada bing, bada boom, that's 30 grand here, 50 grand here, 20 grand here. You paid some taxes. Then you hired an accounting firm, you hired a law firm. That's 40 grand, that's 20 grand. You see where I'm going? Even when you crushed it at 1.2 million, we're proud of you. Your valuation went up. Maybe you're worth 3 to 5 million now, so kudos to us. For you, you made zero.

And then next year, you really crush it. 1.2, you jumped to $3 million. Guess how much you made? Rhymes was zero again. Why? Because now you spent 1.2 to 1.5 million inventory. You spent $600,000 of paid ads. You got a bigger booth at the convention. You went from four employees to 15 employees. You see where I'm going? You're going to keep pouring the gas on the fire because that's what you should be doing. How dare you try to pull out 50 grand when that 50 grand has turned into 200? Why would you pull the money out to cover your overhead?

So what if you didn't quit your day job? What if you had money saved up? And then once you had the money saved up for a year or two of overhead, then you made the leap. We would actually like you even more because we felt more comfortable for you.

We want you to be able to pull out some money later, not at the beginning. First, we're protecting our investment. Second, we want you to start making some money. But if you go out there and start pulling out $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 for your overhead, you're going to be literally hurting your own business and hurting the scale and hurting the valuation. That $50,000, $100,000 is worth $300,000 in sales. That $300,000 in sales is worth a million dollars to valuation. So what's the $50,000 worth it?

I'll tell you the worst part about the 50 grand. When the person starts taking the 50, 100 grand, let's say you're crushing it and they have the ability to grow and scale, or they could stay at their like 1.5 million number where they're able to pull out 300 grand a year. We as investors, we're screwed for sure. Not only are we screwed financially because the valuation is never going to go up because they're not growing. And because the profit, even if we own a chunk of the company, it's going to take forever to pay us back, but we're screwed because that person's life just changed.

and a lot of people when they experience that first big shift where they go from making 50 60 100 grand to half a million plus or 300 grand plus or you know in this day and age especially around a million plus when they start making that type of money everything changes and most people don't keep the hunger they think i'm rich now and in insurance we call the ferrari boys because they would make their first you know 500 grand and spend 300 on a ferrari or a lambo

And it's a real problem, but everybody does it because they want to keep up with the Joneses. The reality is most of the people they're trying to keep up with don't have it either.

And you start to see who has it and who doesn't when they have it for 10 years straight. But these people, they see, oh, my friend has this watch. I got to go get a better watch or my friend's got that. I got to get this. The second you start taking that money out and it hits the bank, people don't realize it's so easy to spend money. And it's easy to make money too. Don't get me wrong. If you have a good plan, it's easy to make money once you know how to make money. But when you're learning how to make money and you might've just lucked into some and you start blowing it, recipe for disaster.

So on the make money side, last question before we go to the investing side, you mentioned insurance a few times. Yep. We have mutual friends and some of my friends that have insurance companies or working on insurance or going to work with some of our friends. Why is insurance space a good business to go work maybe as someone's first job in sales?

Man, well, it teaches you how to prepare for rejection very well and how to get accustomed to it because a lot of the time when you sell insurance, you're either knocking on doors, meeting people face-to-face, or you're making phone calls. Those are like the three mediums. Not a lot of people sell digitally, and it's just not scalable. People don't want insurance until you explain to them why they need it typically, or they know that they need it, and they come to you to get it. And it's a matter of are you cheaper? Are you more personable? Why should they buy from you, etc.?

I think it's a really good opportunity because one, it makes a lot of money. Insurance is a great business.

Like it makes money. It's been around for a long time. It's a proven model and it's all based on actuarial data. So you have a plan and you have loss ratios and you know exactly what it costs for you to fulfill that plan. So maybe it's, you know, 50 cents on the dollar, maybe it's 80 cents on the dollar plus plus. And you know that that margin there exists for either the company to make money, the agent to get paid or whatever the situation might be. And there could be upsells, cross sells, all those things. That's for the carriers to worry about. For a salesperson though, it's a tremendous way to make a lot of money.

Because let's say you're doing life insurance. You sold one person a policy a day and you took a standard advance. And let's say you service the customers and they pay off. You could make a thousand dollars a day, a day, a day, just, just selling like one person, one family, a life insurance policy. They can make 20 grand a month. A hundred percent. And I'm not even a life insurance guy. I'm a health insurance guy.

You could do the same thing in Medicare where the LTVs are around 1200 and you could sell a person, have $300 in client acquisition cost, and you're the one selling, you're the one servicing, you could also make $1,000 a day there. But instead of advancing it, it's realized over time in small little chunks of $30 bonuses here, there, et cetera. In health though, the reason why I liked health and why I told people to get into health, now it's very seasonal because the American Rescue Plan Act, Inflation Reduction Act stuff that made it all year round is coming to a close at the end of this year.

But even as a seasonal business, you can work for three months and make enough money to live for the entire year and try all the things you want to try. Because let's say you can enroll 10 people a day, which is not a hard thing to do, by the way. The average guy can do that. Any average Joe. You enroll 10 people a day and it's not sales. Everybody needs health insurance. 10 people a day. The average one of those plans will be worth somewhere around 350, 400 bucks, depending on your commission levels, contracts. Let's even round down to 300. You got three grand a day coming in. Your cost was 100 bucks per day.

So you've got $2,000 a day in profit as an independent guy just sitting in his bedroom selling health insurance. Whoa. And a health insurance license, a couple hundred bucks to get. So you go do that. You spend two weeks studying. You take the test. You're out the door. You start your own agency so you have a business for write-offs. And again, $40,000 in a month. You do that for three months, you have $120,000. Most people, their households make $100,000 a year now. Dual income households.

So if you've got that 120 grand and it's all residual income and you're answering the phone, answer some questions for your clients and be a good guy, whatever, you've got the rest of the year to play around and figure out what you want to do next or pick up a new hustle or something else. And that's why I like the don't quit your day job, but also do something that creates recurring income. Because the recurring revenue model, it's great if it's profitable and insurance is a highly profitable way to do it. So I like that as a vehicle to get started.

Because I've seen it work for so many people and I've taught so many people how to become millionaires doing it. I don't like sell a course on it. I'm not like out here trying to train people on it, but it really is one of the best ways. All right. So now they made the money. They listened to you. They took the leap. They went and sold insurance. They got into that space. They made six figures. They got some money to invest. But there's real estate, the stock market, cryptocurrency, angel investing. There's so many different options. How can someone research or decide what the heck to invest into?

It's a terrible question to ask me. I try to invest in as little things as possible other than myself. I try to stay pretty liquid or I buy assets that I enjoy because I think happiness ROI is really important. Like being able to get happiness on the money that you spend. So for me, it might be having a few nice cars or a really nice house or maybe five houses in different places and

being able to travel. Those things make me happy and are good investments for me because the happier I am, the better I perform. And not everybody's like that. And obviously not everybody has the same money to play with. I think when you're making your first bit of money, I personally believe high yield savings. If you are somebody who can repurpose that money,

So a lot of people don't think about how to repurpose money. They just think I have money in a bank and it's going up and that's good. Not necessarily because the value of the dollar is going down lately. So you can put it into like an S&P and try to battle inflation or an index fund or something like that, which is fine. You can put it in a high yield savings again, try to battle part of inflation. That's fine. But I think people should always be looking for what the next thing is.

And just be open to different ideas. Like you've talked about franchises to me where I've been like, Hmm, it's actually not a terrible idea. That could be a good idea.

And for some people it would be. And for other people, real estate's a good idea. Some people are naturally more risk tolerant and trading might be good for them. I personally will not trade at all. My buddy convinced me to put 300 grand into a crypto project last year. It wasn't like a meme coin. It was like a real project. I mean, it was world coin backed by opening. I took a fricking bath on it. I threw another a hundred grand in still. I'm taking a bath.

And I think it's less than half of what I put into it. I mean, it's a terrible, terrible situation. But I was just like, yeah, sure, I'll gamble it. But for some people, they do that with their entire livelihood. I think gambling, high-risk investments, I consider them gambling, should be made with a very small amount of the money that you have to play with. And I think otherwise, you should do your research, do your due diligence, make safe investments. I don't think real estate is the greatest investment.

primarily because the market's been flat. And I think that most people are buying overvalued properties with way too high of interest rates. And it just doesn't make any financial sense because you can't even rent for the mortgage right now at a lot of places. So if I can't rent the place out to pay the mortgage, why would I invest in that property? But people think I buy real estate, I get wealth and it's just not how it works all the time. You have to be savvy. So my advice to people on investing is research every possible opportunity.

And then find the wins, follow the wins, not the wins from five years ago or 10 years ago, the current wins, see where people that you know are winning. And if you don't know where people are winning yet, don't rush to put your money anywhere, save it. But my personal philosophy is invest in myself and invest in businesses. I believe it because if I can partner with somebody and I trust them to do the work and they have a proven track record, I want to give that guy my money. Just the same reason people want to do business with me because I'm good at what I do or business with you because you're good at what you do.

That's what my advice would be. Get good at something, invest in yourself and keep scaling that thing that you're good at until you can't anymore. And then start thinking of where to park your money. So you referenced investing in yourself a few different times. What are some ways that people could invest into themselves?

So I used to be anti-course, anti-program, anti-mentorship, all that stuff. I'm still somewhat anti-mentorship depending on like, you really have to know that you can extract value and you know that person's real and you know that they have knowledge that you want. But lately I'll buy any info product just to see what people are doing. I just want to know what makes their offer tick. Why are they structuring it the way they're structuring it? Could they have done it better? Is there an opportunity to do it better? Is the character even real? Is the program valuable?

Like those are reasons that I spend money. And I think a lot of people, when they're looking for new skills, they do the thing where they get on the phone with a high ticket salesperson, they get pressured into buying something. And it wasn't even the right fit for them, the right program. And I'm not saying that there is a right program, but knowledge is important. And the more you learn about more things, the more conversations you can have. And if you're, I've said this to people that have paid me for, I have a $50,000 program and it teaches you how to do lead gen.

Soup to nuts, 50 chapters. I mean, it's an in-depth thing. And for 5% of revenue, we'll coach you through it. It's a whole thing. There are people that do nothing after paying that money. And there are people that go balls to the wall and crush it. And there are people that I taught this to for years for free that have been really successful. But I don't tell people to give me their last 50 grand. And people have tried and they're like, oh, my back's against the wall. I'll do better. It's like, hell no, I don't want your money. Because that guy's going to call me 472 times about why he's not doing the work right.

And I think that people rush to invest in something because they think that they can do a thing, but they should first look internally and see what could be best for me, like my personality type, my risk tolerance. And then what of those things do I think I would enjoy? Like I always tell people before you make any investment in yourself or decide on any business venture, you should always think and ask five questions. The most important one is what do you do every day to someone who already does it?

And the reason is if you ask somebody what they do every day and you don't want to commit to that lifestyle, for example, if I said I make $10 million a year and I run a call center, I don't. But if I did and you said, oh, I want to travel the world and work remotely, that would be a bad fit. That's a non-starter. Now you might say, well, I would grind away to make $10 million a year and then go do that. But the odds of you succeeding as much as the person that's teaching people is not very high. Right.

So I would say that's a mismatch. Now, if somebody told you, here's how you can make a million dollars a year traveling the world and it was real and you saw people doing it, you knew people that had done it, that might be a good fit because it aligns with what you want. I think a lot of people don't do good enough vetting of what they really want and what they think they'll actually be good at. The last topic is about charity, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. Why do you think it's important for a brand or an office or a manager to have some type of charity component into their life or into their corporate culture?

Man. So I've never forced anybody that works with me for me to donate. I personally donate more to individual causes than I do to big charities. A lot of the time, because it takes a lot of due diligence to know that a charity is a good charity. Like I know a lot of the work that you do is very good. Like I've done the toy drive that you did, the world record holding toy drive came there, brought some toys. That was awesome. Super fun to watch. That was really cool. Great experience. Strongly recommend everybody does it, but yeah,

I was on the advisory board of a nonprofit that puts homeless people in houses. And I got to learn a lot about homeless people, why and how they become homeless, that some of them actually become accustomed to it. It's almost like Stockholm syndrome and like it and think we're crazy for having homes, jobs, responsibilities, bills, et cetera. But I think you should always do something that you believe in. And as someone who briefly lived in my car, it's like, all right, I was one step away from that. Like,

What would have gotten me there for me? It was a failed business for some people. It's a divorce or it's drugs. So that really resonated with me. Like these people just need somebody to help them.

them, whether it was donating clothes or, you know, renting rehab beds at, uh, you know, sober living facilities and putting them into those. There were a lot of really cool things. We did a lot of community events, a lot of speaking, uh, events, and that was really nice, but people should always find a charity they believe in and do the research to make sure that they're doing good things with the money because just donating to goodwill and saying that you did charity, it's BS. Like when I first made my first million dollars, I

I had a lot of credit card points. I had like 1.8 million at the time. Later, I had almost 15. But at the time, I had 1.8 million. Yeah. I just didn't spend them for like a year or almost two years. But 1.8 million points. And it was coming up to Thanksgiving. And a lot of people were really depressed at that point. It wasn't even a bad economy. They just couldn't go see their families and whatever.

And I just discovered this pocket of people online that were like veterans or just random people that couldn't afford to see their families. So to me, I was like, how many of these people can I use a million points to help? So I took a million points. I think I ended up using 890,000. And I sent people to go see their families. They weren't all like veterans. I'm not saying everybody was a real charity case, like that actually needed the charity. Some of them were just people that like couldn't afford to see their families.

But I got thank you letters from moms. I've gotten like moms adding me on social media for years to come and messaging me like, hey, here's a picture of that time. You never forget. You changed our life. So cool. So every year I try to like find individual causes where not somebody's dog got sick. Go fund me is not like, oh, my cousin's cousin's best friend from college's sister died at 30 years old. Let me donate. Like, I don't know these people. I want to know where my money's going.

So when it's somebody who's like, yeah, I haven't seen my kids in two years because I can't afford to go see them and their mother has custody. I want to pay for that guy for the guy who's like, yeah, my, my parents are getting really old and they're not going to be around much longer and I can't afford to go there. I want to be that guy's helper.

So that's my philosophy on charity is just try to help others. And the other thing is I run my companies like a socialist, like a socialist dictatorship. Everybody gets a lot of money. Everybody earns a lot of money. And sometimes that's burned me and I've had people screw me, but watching people buy their dream houses, their dream cars, whether it's exotics or, you know, my COO is making seven figures a year and bought a BMW five series. That was his dream car. Cool. Actually at least it, but whatever people's dreams are watching them achieve them is really powerful and it makes you feel good.

And so being able to provide those dreams to other people in need, that's kind of where I like to do my charity. So final question, we're going into a crazy summer where the media is going wild. The economy is going wild. There's a lot of action that's happening throughout the internet to say the least. How can people stay calm in the chaos as we go through this?

To me, bury your head in the sand and don't pay attention to it. I try to avoid the news as much as possible. Nobody is writing news to tell you good things. They're writing news to get you to click, to get you to feel something, and it's often a negative emotion.

I don't want to be subjected to that. I stay in my little bubble. I keep a tight circle. I have good friends and I try to spend good time, meaningful time with people I care about and spend the rest of my time working on projects that I think will either better my life, lives of others, or, you know, just having fun. That to me is how to, how to win. I don't think people should be consumed by what's happening in the market because the reality is you have no control. And a lot of people think, oh, well, if I just joined this activist group, we'll have control. Nobody cares.

Nobody cares about your picket sign. Nobody cares about your opinion. You don't matter. Not even if there's a million of you, you don't matter. So stay in the world that you can control with your friends, with your family, do meaningful things that make you happy and try to just continue to get ahead because we live in a capitalist country where the best thing that could ever happen and a weird tangent and an anecdote to end this. But when I was really broke and I was living part-time with my grandparents and I ended up living in my car full-time,

I was like, man, I've got to figure out a way out of this. And I had a job and I was doing sales and I went to work every day and I worked eight to 12 hours, bell to bell. I would stay late, whatever. And people that knew me were like, how do you just work knowing that like everything is collapsing on the outside? And for me it was compartmentalization. And I think it's one of the greatest skills that anybody could have, whether it's as an entrepreneur, as an individual in a relationship anywhere, because if you can put aside all the fires that are burning and just put up a wall and

you can make it through anything. Most people, they let the fire burn down the house while they're trying to make dinner. And that was the number one skill. So to me, compartmentalize the outside world. If people are negative, remove them from your life temporarily or distance yourself, be less responsive, even if it's family or friends.

And they will eventually come around and not be so negative, especially when you're on like an entrepreneurial journey or something like that. But I think the number one thing people can do is just shut out the outside world. Don't pay attention to the news. Don't look at the stock market. Even if you have money in it, don't look at it. You put it in there to stash it away and not pay attention. Don't pay attention. If everyone's crying about it, don't even look. It's just going to upset you. What good is that going to do? It's Schrodinger's cat. You don't know if there's money left or not. Don't open it.

All right, everyone, you're listening to The Money Mondays. Check out Bowski on social media. It's B-O-W-S-K-Y across Instagram and other platforms. Listen to themoneymondays.com for your friends, family, and followers. What do I mean by that? A lot of times you're listening to different characters that are coming on here, whether they spend hundreds of millions on paid ads, they're investors, traders, stocks, business, billionaires, et cetera. All of them have different perspectives and not all of it's for you, but it might be for your friends, family, and followers. It also might be for people from your past, present, and your future.

So when you're listening to these podcasts, just keep in mind there are tidbits of things that may apply to you later for someone else in your life. And so if there's something here that's, you know, someone's building an entrepreneurial business, you might want to be forwarding the podcast to someone like that. Let them hear from someone like Balski. Follow him on social media. Check us out on TheMoneyMondays.com and we'll see you guys next Monday.