What Does It Take to Reach a Billion-Dollar Valuation? w/ Albert Preciado 🏘️ EP111
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- So if you can learn one skill, like just one skill, the first skill you wanna learn is how to sell. Just to give you an example, we spend 80, for $80,000 we spend on ad spend, we make a million. Yeah. And we have 40 salespeople in our office, each dials 100 times, so it's 4,000 dials a day. And right now we're averaging 50,000 plus a day. - What's the goal? - I wanna get to a billion dollar valuation.

ladies and gentlemen welcome to a special edition of the money mondays we are here inside of the rv motorhome parked in front of ty lopez's mansion because we're throwing a multi-day event so i decided to convince trevor to bring the motorhome out here into the freaking front gate front parking area of ty's house

and just knock out back to back to back podcasts with friends that are living local, like Neil Patel, NFL players like Larry English. We had a lot of great guests today. And right down the street in his fancy penthouse is Mr. Albert Preciado. Literally right down the street. You can throw a rock at it. He's got, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 sales reps up there cranking away, doing six figures a week on one business, doing millions of dollars in the mortgage industry, millions of dollars in the real estate space. He has three or four different businesses. I'm,

probably more than that, but three or four main category companies doing millions and millions of dollars per month. And so we're going to ask him about how does he manage all this craziness? How does he manage mortgage guy, the real estate side of things, sales training, about to throw his huge event coming up this month.

There's a lot going on in Albert Preciado's life, so we're going to get into all of that. As you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. Recently, Albert was on the podcast, but because the huge Driven 9 event is coming up, I wanted to bring him back on, which I never bring someone on back-to-back that fast. I wanted him back on, especially with the convenience of being right down the street. So, without further ado, Albert Preciado, give us the quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money.

Yeah. So, you know, I just I want to say first, thank you for having me here. And then you've been around since my beginnings. And what I want to say is like I started from zero so anybody can create something. And it's just been really, really hard. It's really, really hard. I make it look easy.

But but and I say life is easy, but I say it because I'm trying to convince myself that it's easy because it's super hard. I see you working really hard, but I dropped out of college. I got into real estate and I started selling. So if you can learn one skill, like just one skill, the first skill you want to learn is how to sell. If you know how to sell.

You'll sell yourself like I've sold myself. I've sold the IRS. I've sold the Department of Real Estate. I've sold my wife. I've sold my kids and I've sold my employees and my salespeople from whether it's leaving me, quitting anything. And so if you learn how to sell and you have the courage to take risks and then also never, ever quit.

then you could make it far in life. And it's just been a whole, I mean, people don't realize that I'm 41. So I've been doing this since I was like 19, 20 years old. It's when I started working self-employed, dropped out. I quit my job as a teacher assistant because I was making nine bucks an hour. And so I started in mortgage, real estate. And then that's how I made my first million in 2016.

so let's fast forward to now you get this big penthouse there fun fact ty lopez had that office for years also that penthouse which was super cool that when ty transitioned and started moving to sweden and to his ranch in virginia he was leaving that office and then albert stepped into this big cool penthouse why decide to get this big fancy penthouse when you could rent a normal office or yeah no i don't call it a boring office but a normal office compared to being in a penthouse on sunset boulevard because if you're not growing you're dying

And Ty had half of my office. I have the whole floor. So I have the whole floor. And what I did is when I got that office three years ago, like three and a half years ago, we gutted it out. So we spent about a million and a half just remodeling the whole floor. So we put a gym, a bar. You've seen it. Locker room, showers. We have our studio. And it's like a cool, fun place.

But I got it before we needed it. So like the mistake I made is I got it just when COVID happened. So I get this whole office and they're like, you can't work from the office. Oh my God. And it's like, it's like nearly 20,000 square feet, the whole floor. 20,000 square feet on Sunset Boulevard? A hundred grand a month. You guys can do the math. Exactly. A hundred thousand a month. And, and so like it's COVID time. So I'm like, shit, what am I going to do? And, and so still say she's getting stressed out. So is my wife. So,

What I've learned through all my experience is that I always put ourselves in something that I take a big risk that has a big payout if I win. But if I fail, I'm going to go out of business. So every year, I kind of put us out of business. And then it just forces me to not sleep, figure it out, etc.

find other resources. You talked about Neil Patel. He's like my best friend. Like you ask him who's his best friend, he'll tell you it's Albert. That's a good best friend to have. And he's really wealthy. He's really successful. Super smart. Really smart. He's probably the smartest person I know for sure. And he always gives me advice. We get together every week. We go to lunch, dinner. And I talked to him before coming here. But when you grow, you have like a millionaire mentor.

Then as you grow more, you have a $10 million mentor. Then you have a $100 million mentor. Then you start getting billionaire mentors. So the level of advice they give you

It's just you can't compare it. So when these people tell me do this, do that, like I listen. But I think the thing that has helped me the most lately has just been getting advice from higher level individuals, net worth wise, where they have more experience and more success because I'm going to obviously listen to them more than anybody else. Sure. So speaking of taking a big chance on a big, big, big, big project, you have driven number nine coming up. Yeah.

Now you've thrown this eight times. I've spoken at like five or six of them, maybe more, maybe seven of the driven conferences where you're getting 2000, 2800, 2200, 3000, 1800 year after year after year. That is really difficult. This year you've grown your social media tremendously. You've gotten hundreds of millions of views across your podcast and viral videos. What is in store for driven number nine? So driven number nine, I'm going to make a huge announcement. It's March 29th. It's my birthday. So it's coming up.

And I'm just going to announce that Driven is becoming the next Virgin. So we're going to be Driven. Everything we offer is going to be Driven.

So it's going to be driven mortgage, driven real estate, driven escrow, driven solar, driven financial services. We have the it's the ninth year of the driven event. And then we also have sales training. We have the info products, but it's going to be like virgin, but better. So like like I'm not I'm thinking like the next the next immediate goal is obviously to get to a billion. But I'm already thinking trillion. How do we get AI involved, software, tech?

I'm talking to Neil Patel about that stuff. And if you, I mean, you know me well, you know that I'm going to take another huge risk and I'm going to put us nearly out of business again, but I'm going to go all in and I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm going to borrow money, borrow more money, use everything I have,

and just go for it because I just like, I'm a really big thinker and since I was a little kid, I just wanted something big and what we want to do, like our goal is to change a billion lives. If we change a billion lives, we'll become a trillion dollar company and people will laugh at me but people have been laughing at me since I said I'm going to be a millionaire and then I said, well, I'm going to,

get a Ferrari. They got it. They laughed at me. Oh, we're going to get sunset towers, the whole floor. They laughed at me. Oh, we're going to make 30 million plus in a year. They got it. They laughed at me. So like, to me, it doesn't really affect me at all. And people say things on my social media, they criticize me and, and people have to understand is that when, like for me right now, it's the first time that I've been really spending ad spend, but I never really ran any ads at all. Now we're running about a hundred thousand dollars a month in ad spend and

So I'm going to be in front of a lot of people. Of course. And people are going to see me and they're going to be like, they're going to not like me because I'm brown or because I'm Mexican or because I have an accent or because whatever. You know, they don't like my shirt that I don't button the second button because it just, it'll rip.

But they're going to hate me for some reason. But I'm forcing myself in front of so many eyeballs that it's normal. So some people, friends, they tell me, hey, they're saying this about you. I don't feel comfortable. They're saying this. And I'm like, cool. Like, I would be worried if nobody was talking. Exactly. Yeah.

But yeah, it's good. But once you get the sales part in, how good is the top sales closer if you don't have anybody to close? So that's why marketing is very important. And Neil talks a lot to me about that. So how important is it to have a personal brand in the business space? So for example...

I built a big brand over the years. Like we're going on Driven Event 9. And so it's a decade that I've been working on my brand. And it takes time and people want everything so fast, like they want to do it in one year.

And when you've done it for 10 years, it's going to be good. And I told Neil, hey, Neil, man, you're a year younger than me and you have more money than me. Like, what's going on here? And he's like, Albert, I've been doing that for 10 years more than you. I started my first business when I was 17. And I'm like, and he said, yeah, you need 10 more years.

And I'm like, shit, okay, so I get it. But But then if I if you look at five years back, and you look at where you were five years back, you'll realize them I've grown a lot in five years, and you look 10 years back, you're like, I've grown a lot in 10 years a person. But the thing is that we're such driven individuals that we want to get results so fast. And you have you have to be patiently aggressive.

So you have to be aggressive like you are. You work a lot, but you have to be patient enough to understand that it's going to take 10 years, 20 years, maybe 50 years. Because some of these big, huge companies, they've been around for 50 years. Like a rocket mortgage, they've been around for 50 years. You know when I went public? 20 years ago. Yeah. April 1st, 2005. Yeah. This is our 20-year anniversary. You know how weird that is to say out loud? It's been 20 years since I went public. Started my company six years before that. It takes time. It takes time.

Math and time compounds though. People are like, oh, how do you get all these interactions and social media followers? Because I posted 7,000 times. Yeah. I didn't post 7,000 times in one day. I posted once or twice a day for the last 15 years in a row. And just math and time compounds. And when you're in the game and you're just doing it over and over and over and over and over, you're going to win. How many mentors have you had? Well, I have main characters in my life along the journey. Yeah.

When I first started the clothing brand, I was 17 years old. We did a million dollars in sales, then $9.5 million. And I found this guy named Christopher Wicks. He owned Fender Guitars, Ocean Pacific, Body Glove, LA Gear, all these brands that were doing tens of millions of dollars. So he was the person helping guide us in the clothing space. Later, I had my best friend, who's actually the godfather of my baby. He was the founder of Marvel Studios, named David Mizell.

so he built the avengers and iron man all these all these movies and you've met him before he's talked me through a lot of the major junctures in my life and in between there i've had certain characters that are big in a certain category like really big in restaurants or really big in investing or really big at going public and i would ask them for advice there's certain guys like david where i just i've kept them by my side for you know

15, 16 years now. And when you find those people and you latch onto them because they're just farther ahead in the journey and they've gone through different things. He sold his company for $4.1 billion to Disney. He sold Marvel. And so he's very different in his journey. Now it's not that I'm going to ever sell a movie company, but I get to learn from him on what happened before, during and after.

after and so you've worked with a lot of the household names in the business game especially guys that have big followings and they're just part of your journey at one point grant cardone fit for you and later he doesn't at one point Patrick bed David fit for you and then you want to get someone else like you get different characters that fit for you along the path of your journey and then sometimes you find a friend like I've been close to you for many many years not as like a mentor but as a friend but like you stay close for a decade right and so

people that are listening like finding someone that you look up to and respect and especially if they're in a category they're in it's priceless because they can pave the way for you yeah and and to answer your question on the on the final part is because of the brand like I had I brought a like a sales leader you know he leads my sales team head of sales his name is Casey and Casey Cox and and so he brought the blueprint and he knew a lot of sales guys and

And when he brought those people in and the Blueprint combined with the brand, we just took off. Like companies that it took him 10 years to build, we already surpassed them by double in three months. Like this month, we'll make $2 million in just sales training, sales, easily.

like two million. We're shooting for three million, but last month we did a million for the first time. The month before that we did a 550,000. And then the first November, it was only like two weeks. We did one, was it 150 something thousand?

but it's been just growing more and then our sales people are growing, they're getting better. Then we're getting now better leads. We have a really good ads team that runs our ads. So we're running ads on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok and on YouTube. And then we're running, they're scripted ads. So no matter how much I like just talking, just kind of freelancing,

the ads team's like, no, you got to read from the teleprompter because there's certain words. And then Neil's involved too. So Neil has told us like what to do, how to do it. You know, he's a genius marketer. So he's like,

You can't say certain words because meta, TikTok, they could block you. They could ban you. And then if you do it too many times, they could just ban you from their platform. So he's like, you got to have it scripted no matter how much you hate it. So then now we're scripting them. So I'm just reading it, but I'm saying the hooks in order and I'm saying the words you can and I'm avoiding the words you can't. And we're getting banned.

like really good ROI. So just to give you an example, we spend 80, for $80,000 we spend on ad spend, we make a million. Yeah. And we have 40 salespeople in our office, each dials 100 times. So it's 4,000 dials a day. And right now we're averaging 50,000 plus a day in sales. We did 72K yesterday.

- What's the goal of it as you build this sales revenue up and you're doing this training? What's the goal? - I wanna get to a billion dollar valuation and I wanna add the tech and the software, the AI, and it's gonna be driven everything. So it's not gonna be just driven event or driven sales training or driven masterminds. It's gonna be driven mortgage, driven real estate, driven solar, driven financial services, driven escrow. So we're just gonna offer every single thing. I'm even thinking as big as driven airlines.

and and I'm crazy like I'm something's off with me and I said and people think I'm crazy people think they think a lot of things but but I go for it and and I like having people doubt me I love it somebody give you guys a quick example of what Albert's talking about when he mentions virgin now if you're listening out there whether you're watching on the YouTube or you're listening in a podcast can you name without searching online can you name the CEO of American Airlines

No. Can you name the CEO of Southwest Airlines? You have no idea. How about Delta? Nope. Frontier? Nope. You don't know the name of any of these CEOs of any of the major airlines. If they actually walked in right now, slap you in the face, you wouldn't know who they were. Even though they're running 10 billion, 50 billion, 100 billion dollar type airlines. But if I said Virgin Airlines, all of you know Richard Branson.

And Richard Branson is the only one that's a multi-billionaire, owns a private island, has his own companies, casinos, everything, vodkas, record labels, and Virgin Airlines. And it's because of a personal brand. And so what Albert's doing is transitioning and taking what's working for him in the driven space and then making it to his version of Virgin by building up his personal brand and tagging that name across all these companies. I did that with Elevator Studio. I have Elevator Ventures, Elevator Nights, my events I've done 56 times.

elevator mortgage elevator funding elevator syndicate my investor group everything is brand under the same name because it makes it easier for me to be building all these things and then putting my name on it not a white label but as the brand that people trust they know whether they've gone to elevator night they can they'll feel comfortable with elevator funding they know if they've gone through elevator syndicate they feel comfortable with elevator studio

All those different moving parts are based on one core brand that people can know and attach to me and I'll never sell Elevator because it's my brand. The same way he wouldn't sell Driven. He's building up his brand, his personal brand and finally realized, well I have the mortgage guys here, I have the real estate name here, I have the sales training name here, I have the Driven name here. Finally combining it all together to make one super brand. So as you scale this and you go through, what do you want to happen at Driven 9? What are some of the speakers that are coming? Who's any surprise guests?

We have a lot of surprises. We have a lot of surprises, but what I like to do with, I mean, this Driven event, we're going to announce the whole merging of the companies. And the main thing, though, is it's also going to be my birthday weekend, so it's going to be a good celebration. But my whole point of Driven is I want to do for people what Grant Cardone, Patrick Bidavid, and people like that did for me. And

And I want to give them all the experience, all the mistakes that I've made so that they don't make those mistakes. And the thing about Driven is we bring experts in different fields. So we'll bring a tax expert.

We'll bring a real estate expert. We'll bring a mindset expert, mindset coach. We'll bring people that are marketing experts. So we'll bring experts in every field and then we'll have operations, systems, processes, information, sales, all of that. But one of the main things that I see lacking in seminars in general is

is operations, systems and processes. So I don't like doing anything that's not worth my hour. So like if you're worth, if you make X amount of money a month, a year, you divide that by 2080, that's going to give you what your hour is worth.

So if your hour is worth $1,000, then you shouldn't be doing anything less than $1,000 an hour. Some people are worth $15,000 an hour. So you should just value your time because you can't get it back. And you want to focus on the big ROI, whatever returns you the most. So what I've learned making a lot of mistakes is hiring a lot of people. Grant Cardone, my mentor, he was my one-on-one mentor. I was his best student.

and he'll tell you that if you ask him he'll probably grin a little bit but i love gran cardone i have nothing bad to say about gran cardone uh and and he 11 years ago i went to his first seminar 30 people and he told me you got to grow your army but it's risky growing an army because you got to pay them and and you got to pay people right it's salaries and all that stuff

So now, we have over 500 people that work for us and I have like four assistants. I have a driver now, security. We have five full-time videographers in-house. Everybody's in-house. We have 40 salespeople on the floor.

We have a full-time accounting team, processing team, SIL runs operations. I get to do the cool stuff. I shouldn't do that. I get to do the cool stuff. So I'm doing podcasts with Dan. I'm going to parties, drinking nice champagne. I'm doing events. I'm recording stuff. So it's like the fun stuff. But what I do mostly is the vision part. So I'm a huge visionary. But

but a huge visionary compared, I mean a huge visionary working along a strong operator and having strong team employees and sales force and running the right ads and all of that stuff, you create like an engine that runs without you and you step away and it's still printing money and you don't have to be there all the time. And that's the best feeling and that's when you can exit. That's one of the things that Patrick Bedeved, also a mentor of mine, one-on-one,

11 years ago, him and Grant were my mentors 11 years ago.

And he told me, build your operation. So now I understand it. So he told me one thing that makes a lot of sense. If your business needs you 80% of the time, it's worth nothing. But if your business runs 80% without you, then you built a business that one day you can sell. So right now, that's what I'm working on. And that's one of the big things that we're going to teach at Driven9, how to create a business that runs on autopilot.

And it's a business that you can eventually sell. And that's what I want to do because that's what my mentors have told me, build a business to sell. If your business cannot run without you, you don't have a business, you have a job. You're not an entrepreneur at that point. You have a job. That's okay. But you have to understand that part when going into it. And so you build SOPs, which is systems and processes.

you're going to get stuck. You're going to get stuck dealing with all the nitty gritty, all the little headaches and all the little moving parts. And so you find people that can be strong operators like Albert mentioned, people that can run the show, whether it's from the secretary to the sales, to the manager, to the CFO or everybody in between. If you have to be there for every part of it, you have a job.

And a lot of times we can't just admit that to ourselves. We think that we've built this big business that's sellable. How can you sell it if you've got to be there to run it every single day? Yeah. If you have to be there to run it every single day, it's not a sellable thing because why would someone else buy it if they've got to keep you forever? Typically, if someone acquires your company, there's two options. They either get rid of you or they do what's called golden handcuffs. Golden handcuffs is that they keep you for one to three years, base minimum, and they pay you to stay on. And they pay you to stay on because they need you for the transition process or to run the business.

If you are instrumental in running the business, you are not appealing to be acquired because if you get sick or you get bored or you get shiny object syndrome and want to leave, you can jeopardize their acquisition. And so you want to make yourself not needed at your business. I know it's hard to say or it's hard to grasp the concept of it, but if your business can't run without you, you have a job. All right. Last question for our special episode. I need you to do me one favor.

I want you to look at this camera and tell the audience why they should go to Driven 9. Well, you should go to Driven 9 because it's going to change your life. And there's a lot of new events. There's a lot of new coaches, influencers. However, there's not a lot of mentors, speakers, coaches.

or events that the leader has been tested. And what I mean by that is I hired John Maxwell, paid him $400,000 to mentor me one-on-one. And that included his private jet, flying him. And he told me one thing that I'll never forget, a leader that has not been tested cannot be trusted. So you know me for a long time, decades. So I've been around for 20 years.

And I haven't gone anywhere. So I've been through the 2008 recession, you know, then 2020 COVID, 2023 was the worst year ever in my life, most challenging, especially for real estate, because rates went up to like 910. This year is even more complicated than last year, but I figured it out.

So when in business, you always have to figure it out every year. Every year you have like a test. And when somebody gets through those tests over and over and over again, then that's somebody you should listen and learn from. So Driven9 is going to be filled with experts that have a lot of experience, have been tested. They know how to get through big struggles, big things when they get

complex and you have to fight, figure things out. You're running out of money and all of that stuff that they need to figure things out in business, that's what we're gonna focus on 2009. And it's gonna teach you every single thing from marketing to sales, to building your personal brand, operation system process training, how to hire, how to fire, the good, the bad and the ugly about business.

Alright guys, I want you to make sure to check out Albert Preciado across all of his social media platforms. Check out DrivenEvent.com to go to Driven9. If you have any friends in the LA area or you want to fly in yourself, go to DrivenEvent.com. It's coming up March 29th for Albert Preciado's birthday weekend. It's going to be an amazing lineup. You can check out some of the speakers that are on there now and there's more surprises coming.

So, Albert Preciado, cross social media, dribenevent.com. Visit us at themoneymondays.com and make sure to have important discussions with your friends, family, and followers about money. And then Dan, whoever just sends a message or comments back, DMs on Instagram, whatever, Dan, or comments on the podcast, Dan, then I'm going to give them 50% off. Oh, perfect. Because they do, Dan. So, we'll put like some call to action and I'll send it to you and then they could just click on the link and then they get 50% off.

well you heard it here first so make sure to check out driven event.com you'll be able to use the code dan for 50 off

But it's very important. Have discussions with your friends, family, and followers. You've got to talk about money. You've got to talk about salaries, accounting, taxes, credit, understanding your scores, understanding how to set up your bank account properly, understanding budgets. You've got to have discussions because it's real life. Money is part of your daily life and it's not rude to talk about money. It's rude to not talk about it. But money is very important. It's super critical. We're going to talk a lot about money. Exactly. Yeah.

so see you guys next monday here at themoneymondays.com