August 28, 2025 • 59 mins
In this episode, John takes listeners back to the basics—how to actually start a business. Too often, even highly educated and successful people confuse self-employment with building a scalable enterprise. John breaks down the difference between a hustle and a business you can grow, monetize, and eventually sell. He outlines the step-by-step process of turning an idea into a real business, from mindset and research to structure, branding, and scaling. Whether you’re considering a side hustle, dreaming of launching a startup, or ready to grow beyond self-employment, this episode delivers a masterclass in entrepreneurship and wealth-building.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome The Money and Wealth with John O'Briant, a production
of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. Yo, Yo Yo,
This is John O'Brien and this is the Money in
Wealth podcast series, season two on the Black Effect Network
(00:24):
on iHeartRadio. And I wanted in this episode, which is
being recorded during Black Business Month, it's not well known
that August is Black Business Month, and I want to
command iHeart and Black Effect Network for focusing on it.
I wanted to address the obvious, and I also owe
(00:47):
you an apology. As an entrepreneur and a businessman, I
think I've taken some things for granted, and many others
have taken it for granted. I think we take for
granted that people open the Wall Street Journal and know
what's being said in it, these phrases, these euphemisms, these
(01:11):
you know, what's the SEC, what's the fdi C, what's
a SPAC, what's a you know, what's a leveraged buyout?
And so I've tried to break down some of these myths.
If you go to season one, I go through a
lot of the basics, right about how what does this
mean and what does that mean? And you're going to
start seeing me go from industry to industry and break
(01:34):
this down. But one thing I've never broken down, and
it just dawned on me that I needed to do this,
is I never really broken down how to start a
business like the basics. And one of the reasons this
became so powerfully important was recently I was having a
discussion with somebody I love and care for and respect
who is highly intelligent, and we had an actual debate
(02:00):
about what they thought they were doing and building a business.
And it took me a while to understand that they
didn't understand what I was saying, and it was my fault.
I had never explained, no one's ever explained it to
even successful black people, educated black people, what these terms
(02:25):
are again. And so this individual was incredibly, incredibly smart.
Most smartest people I know had a history of running
a really professional services contract enterprise where they got contracts
for their talent, but they weren't on a payroll with someone.
They were effectively a self employment project. They had no employees,
(02:49):
They in most cases had no contractors. It might be
episodic from time again when there was an event or something.
They had no health insurance responsibilities, They had no payroll responsibilities.
They had no property tax responsibilities, they had no balance
sheet and income statement other than make sure their inflow
(03:09):
exceeded their outflow. They had a contract with in many
cases of corporation or government to provide a service. And
the presumption was that's a business. Well, it is a
form of business, but that's not building a business that
(03:30):
you can sell, right And the whole point of building
a business, please hear me, is to monetize it, create value,
and to have a liquidity event to sell it. Right now,
somebody's want to say no, no, no, no, John Walmart
(03:53):
never sold, or Amazon never sold, or Microsoft bill Ga
never sold, or Meta Facebook never sold. They'll come up
with these examples. But the very fact that those companies
have gone public means that they sell every day. They
sold when they went public, the founder got our founders
(04:17):
or founding family got a check, probably a big one.
Probably they got a big one. And they're still getting checks,
their families do dividend payments, et cetera. They still own shares.
But the public is buying and selling that company every
day based on its perception of its continuing success. So,
(04:40):
whether you're a small business and it's private equity private
equity literally your cousin, your father, your friend, or or
a firmness in the private equity business giving you an
investment private equity, or it's the public equity market going public.
All right. The whole point is is they're backing this
(05:01):
enterprise to grow it so that the leader that enterprise
prize can sell it so everybody wins. Right now, you
can't do that. You make money during the day, you
bill wealson your sleep. In order to do that, you
need compounding, You need employees, you need infrastructure, need real estates,
you need locations, You need something other than you running
around with a personal service contract. So I'm not today
(05:25):
talking about what most black businesses are comprised of. Ninety
five percent plus of all black businesses are effectively self
employment projects. They have no employees. And so when you
wonder while we are not building wealth. And I'm also
going to break down in a separate podcast how to
own and buy a home, that's another presumption I think
we make that's incorrect. We should not assume people know
(05:47):
the hows here, or the whys or the whats. So
I'm breaking this down and by the way, being a
small business owner, which is incredibly important, is very different
from being an entrepreneur. They're first cousins are different and
I go through that also in season one, it's the
season two of Money and Wealth. So tell all your
friends to download Money and Wealth and go back to
(06:09):
season one. I'm giving you an entire university, a library,
a ministry of finance if you will, in free enterprise
and entrepreneurship and capitalism even invite sized chunks. So now,
before I get into how do you start a business,
whether it's a self employment project, a personal services contract
fulfillment firm of one, or whether it's a business with
(06:32):
that has scale, employees and infrastructure, I'm going to walk
you through literally the steps of taking your dream and
making it real. Okay, because I should not be presumed
that people know how to do that. And that doesn't
mean that somebody's unintelligent because they don't know how to
do that. It means someone's taught you. It's what you
don't know that you don't know that is killing you,
but you think you know. By the way, I'm an entrepreneur,
(06:52):
I'm a business owner, and I used to be a
small business owner. I grew a small business into a
boutique business into a reasonably sized business. I would think
it's a big business because one of my businesses I
sold for one hundred and twenty million dollars. Maybe it's
a mid sized business by big boy standards. And then
(07:14):
one of my enterprises is a large enterprise because that
budget is you know, north of sixty five million dollars
a year. Okay, So I have experienced from the smallest
to the largest. But an entrepreneur is somebody who creates
something from whole cloth, Whereas a businessman our businesswoman takes
an existing business plan and scales it and operationalizes. So
(07:36):
a businessman businesswoman is taking basically an existing concept with
dentist office, a chiropractor office, a healthcare office, whatever, right
a service and making that thing work franchise businesses or
good examples of existing business plans. An entrepreneur like me
is nuts and taking creating new ideas from nothing and
(08:00):
backing them with in my case my own and others
private equity. Okay, and so in some case I'm my
own venture capital firm, if you will. For myself, at
least that's what I happened. So let me not give
you first a brief history of business and why this
is relevant to you, particularly during Black Business Month. Business
(08:24):
has always been one of the most powerful ways to
build wealth in independence, in America and around the world.
I'm thinking about my friend my brothers Strive Masiewa, who
is a Bill Gates of Africa, who's a billionaire and
an up from nothing entrepreneur from Zimbabwe. So successful in Zimbabwe,
they don't the government is afraid. I think that he
(08:47):
wants to run for political office there. So we can't
even go back to his own country. Not because he's
a criminal, but because he's so successful. Folks are intimidated
by him. But he is doing fiber optic cables throughout
the African continent. He was one of the first to
bring cell phones to the African continent. I believe it
was the first cell phone provider in Nigeria. And he
(09:08):
runs a multiplicity of businesses there is enormously successful. You
find your hero, your shee role, whatever continent you live
on and study them. Okay, So this is the way
for independence. All money is freedom right and you cannot
have freedom without self determination and you can eat. So
you need to understand financial literacy. Hello, what we're talking
(09:29):
about here. Financial literacy is a civil rights issue of
this generation. Why I founded Operation Hope and I'll want
you to go get financial coaching and counseling. Why I've
raised and deployed fifty million dollars plus a year in
money used for scholarships for coaching is building economic infrastructure
fifteen hundred offices across the country for you to plug into.
The one Million Black Business Initiative one MBB as an example,
(09:51):
is a resource for you to plug into in partnership
in that example, which shopify okay. In early America, immigrants, settlers,
and freedomen alike often turned business when other doors were closed,
owning a shop, a farm, or trade gay families. Not
(10:16):
just income, but dignity and independence. For Black Americans, business
was often the only path after slavery men. He could
not access land ownership or fair wages. We literally worked
for free. That was sort of the whole point of slavery.
It was bad capitalism wasn't personal. It became personal later on,
(10:39):
but it started it didn't start out as personal. Started
out it's just bad capitalism, free labor. So they built
their own when they could not get that opportunity from others.
Their own for their own barbershops, beauty salons, insurance companies, newspapers,
(11:02):
and banks. And because no one else would serve our community.
People didn't want to cut our hair, so we had
to cut our own hair. They didn't want to give
us medical services, We had to do that for ourselves.
That closed market, okay, that segregated market created wealth for
those who serve with excellence, the black community in that example,
(11:25):
because no one else would serve them, and so people
who did well, we're looking for quality services, and smart
black businessmen and women fulfilled that. And so thus you
had Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is cited often,
which became a symbol of this power. And there are
other places, by the way, places in the Carolinas and others.
(11:47):
Of course Harlem later on, but the entire communities won
in South Central by the way, that was very impressive
and little well known on Central Avenue. Entire communities built
on ownership, ownership that happened to be black. Globally, the
story is the same from Jewish merchants in Europe, by
(12:11):
the way, who it was illegal for Jews to own
land in Europe. They were discriminated against it ran all
around the world for most of six thousand years, so
they had to learn finance and financial literacy because they
couldn't own land, so they just figured if it financed
the land and undershard how the banking was not a
dignified business back then, investment banking less, so being a
(12:33):
merchant banker even less. So these folks took these businesses
that nobody else wanted and became experts at that through
financial literacy and through finance controlled land and businesses. And
it's one of the great success stories in the world
for a group that was and continue unfortunately to be
hunted around the world and discriminated against. But still they rose,
(12:56):
and I commend them for that. Goldman Sachs. By the way,
did you know that half of all Jews are dark?
Whole other conversation another time, that's literally true. Goldman Sachs
was a guy named Goldman and a guy named Sachs
who could not get a job on Wall Street. Don't
would hire them, so they literally just went door to
door selling financial services and built that up, slow by slow,
(13:20):
little by little, and that became well Goldman Sachs the
firm you know of today as an institution every big
business was once a small one. So you have the
example of Jewish merchants in Europe. And by the way,
Blacks and Jews share a shared history, even a shared
(13:41):
DNA going back six thousand years. And I will do
a separate podcast just on the history of business and
trade and commerce and capitalism. So come back for that
and how and how crosses with culture and how some
want us to all be in a constant argument with
(14:02):
each other. So you had that example, you had Indian
traders in East Africa. It has to be noted that
here that bad capitalism, I promote good capitalism. Bad capitalism
(14:25):
is where I benefit and you pay a price for it.
Good capitalism is where I benefit and you benefit more
in bad capitalism. Slavery, by the way, it wasn't just
white European slave traders. It was Indian slave traders from India,
the East Indian Company, I believe it was. There were
Asian slave traders. There were, believe it or not, African
(14:48):
folks who not slave traded from the coast, but who
captured folks in other tribes in the central part of
Africa and traded them monetarily. They didn't like each other.
These for warring tribes. Think about gangs today and they
didn't realize that were trading them in slavery. But because
no one had gone beyond the coast. Really, so Europeans,
unfortunately were best at a horrible business model. But bad
(15:13):
capitalism is something no different than our communities today. You
see everybody engaging in bad capitalism. I want to see
more good capitalism. That's what this podcast is about. Colors
green by the way that white, black or red blue,
it's green. I want everybody to be able to get
your share of it so you can build some wealth
(15:33):
and build some independence and some freedom, so you can
say what you like and do as you please and
empower who you choose. So again you have these entire
communities that were built up, and these examples from again
Jewish merchants and europe Indian traders in East Africa, Chinese
family businesses across southern Southeast Asia. Business ownership has been
(15:59):
the latter of poverty into the middle class and often
into lasting generational wealth. The reason is simple. A job
gives you a paycheck, but a business gives you freedom.
A real business it can scale, which is what I've
been discussing so far. In this podcast. It can be
(16:23):
passed down. It creates assets, not just income, and you
make money to today you build wealth in your sleep.
That's why today when we talk about financial literacy, wealth building,
and independence, we can't leave business out. Starting a business,
even a small one, is still one of the most
proven ways to move from surviving to thriving, to winning,
(16:47):
to controlling your narrative. And in my case, where four
hundred employees employing others and empowering others. So now let's
get into let's get into the substance of this. So
every big business started small. Amazon started with books in
(17:07):
a garage for you by you. At Fubu started with
forty dollars and a sewing machine. The brother who founded
that just called me a great guy. Operation Hope started
with a man with a mission. That's me. You don't
need a million dollars at a fancy office or even investors, right,
(17:28):
you just need clarity, courage, and the first step. I
never started with business loans. By the way, I have
some what I have lines of credit and things like
that facilitations for which is facility facilitating cash flow payment
haven't come in yet. So I have a credit line
that pays the bills until the payments from a growing
(17:48):
business comes in. Yeah, and I had even I had
one facility, a couple hundredion dollar facility for business that
I had recapitalized with some other partner. That was two
hundred million dollars, the largest credit facility that was done
for a person of color for more than a couple
of decades, so said Black Enterprise. And that was non
(18:10):
recourse that I mean, there was no personal guarantee. But
when I started businesses, I did not start businesses with loans.
I'm sorry. I did have credit cards and things like that,
but I didn't get like a proper proper loan. I
didn't grow it based on dat growd, based on hustle.
(18:30):
So the step one is the idea in the mindset.
So damon John who I decided Foo booze founder who
I just traded message with this weekend. Really great guy.
He started selling hats he made with a forty dollars budget.
The hustle you have in your neighborhood can become your
blueprint for entrepreneurship or or into or small business. You know,
(18:54):
don't wait for the perfect idea. Start where you are
with what you know search in research that Damon John's
story is quite inspiring. He's still growing in building businesses
to this day. Step number two research and validation. So
step number one was the idea in the mindset. Okay,
(19:15):
and the Bible says, there's no vision that people perish
and I love that. I have a whole thing I
do for myself. I have a graph that that created.
That's vision, mission, purpose, passion, strategy, plan, execution of the plan,
(19:46):
tactics to dos to Don's assessment, evaluation, reimagination, based on
the based on the assessment of what just happened and
whether it needs to be improved or not. Like a
software up grade, reset, refine the business plan, wake up
(20:06):
the next day, and execute on the refined business plan.
So you should never just be getting up and doing
what you did yesterday. You should always should be trying
to improve yourself. You should be in a constant state
of software upgrades, active software upgrades. When you got the phone,
if you have an iPhone like I do, when you
got the phone, my phone is a sixteen Pro. Within
(20:28):
a couple of weeks, iPhone was pushing to you a
software upgrade of sixteen point one, sixteen point five. I'm
now in eighteen something. I believe software software series, even
though the phone is sixteen pro iPhone realizes there is
no perfect and so they got to don't wait for
something that's perfect, get it out there in the marketplace,
get people to buy into it, and keep upgrading your
(20:51):
software as you go. And so the current software is
eighteen six point two. Eighteen point six point two, all right,
not eighteen eighteen point six point two? What's your personal
software upgrade? And are you keeping track of it? Are
you constantly obsessed with kaisan as they say in Japan?
Constantly improving? I am. I'm obsessed with knowledge and I'm nosy.
(21:13):
God gave you two ears and one mouth. You listen
twice as much as you talk. I'm nosy. I want
to know everything about everything, just like my friend Quincy Jones.
I late Quincy Jones share with me one of his gifts.
So all my business has started with being nosy, doing research,
having a vision, not being emotional, being passionate and purposal
and ever you make an emotional decision is going to
be a bad one. So don't make a business. Business
(21:36):
is not personal, okay. Capitalism is a gladiator sport. I
want you to take the emotions out of it. Yes,
passion is going to be necessary, but take the emotions
out of it. Step number two. Research and validation of
fruit prep service. One woman began asking church members if
they pay ten or fifteen dollars for home cooked meals.
(21:56):
She had fifteen orders the first week and grew from there. Uh. Now,
if you ask ten to twenty real people, not just family,
if they would actually pay for what you're offering, and
then you if they say yes, you might have a business.
But a business, an innovation, an idea without a customer,
(22:19):
a paying customer next to it is not a business.
That's my friends, Jim Clifton of Gallops quote. An innovation
or a cool idea without a customer, a paying customer
next to it is not a business. A lot of
people running around I see with business cards and least
for LEAs Mercedes and a least office space, and nice
(22:39):
clothes and and going to lunches and dinners and again
the business cards had CEO on it, and they're going
to cocktail receptions and they make some phone calls, they
have some meetings, and they have a PowerPoint presentation, and
they think that that's business, and that's not that's busyness.
That's not business. That's business. You got to be the chief.
Hustle officer chief, get it done, officer chief. I get
(22:59):
up in the morning, stayed up late at night, and
I outwork you, outrun you out and out hustle you, officer. Right.
An entrepreneur works eighteen hours a day to keep from
getting a job. So and there's the last one paid
and the last one to walk out and turn the
lights off. I mean, I used to sleep in my
office quite literally, the shriff's apartment when I lived in
(23:21):
Los Angeles, and when I worked in Los Angeles and
lived in Malibu, California, the sheriff's apartment in La County
Shares apartment. They told me one day when they saw
me in the convenience located the convenience store AMPM Mini
Market where I got gassed on my way home when
I finally finished my day of work and drove home,
which is often two three in the morning, four in
(23:43):
the morning. The sheriff saw me one day going the
AMPM Mini Market and they said, oh, there's the sleeper.
I'm like, excuse me, yeah, we call you the sleeper.
What does that mean as you're the guy who pulls
his car fore side of the road. That is very
dangerous to do this, and you go to sleep in
your car and we come and check on you. I'd
(24:04):
be so tired from working all day and doing meetings
all night, and then sometimes they wouldn't take a nap
in my office. I'd get in my car and I'd
drive home. I went to sleep in my office overnight.
I'd want to convey I want to go home and
take a shower and put in a fresh set of clothes.
I drive from West Los Angeles where my office was
(24:24):
at the West wait Gate, the Westwood Gateway complex at
Little Santa Monica and suppovid of Boulevard. The building is
still there. I was on the he floor. Brian Group
Companies was where we were located. I'd drive from there
down the four or five Freeway to the Santa Monica Freeway,
up PCH Pacific Goa's Highway to Malibu, and on the
(24:50):
halfway there to get exhausted and to pull off the
side of the road. You know, you start seeing three
three lanes and there's only two, and you remember you
roll down the window and you have to wet your
wet your your finger and put it on your eyelids,
some saliva on your eyelids, and then open the door
window and put your head outside the window. That was me,
all right, don't laugh. You know you did that, you
(25:10):
know you've done that. It just I just did it
coming home from my office. You might didn't come home
from a club. Who knows. But and I was completely sober,
like no, I've never I don't do drugs, don't drink,
so that those are not my things. But I worked.
I was a workaholic. I was an alcoholic. I worked aholic.
I was a passionateholic. Anyway, these the minute, these these
Shares officers said they knew me by reputation, I was
(25:32):
a sleeper. I knew I had to change some things.
That either a robber was going to kill me or
I was gonna kill myself by working myself to death.
So I'd need some more balance. But that is what
an entrepreneur. That's an example of an entrepreneur's commitment. And
I didn't get a paycheck back then everybody got paid
but me, I just had. I was fueled by my
vision and my passion and my NonStop hustle and again,
(25:53):
an entrepreneur or a small business owner takes no for vitamins. Okay,
let's now get into number three business structure and legal bases, right,
And I go through details of this in another podcast
when I discuss the different legal structures for starting a business,
So please go there and check that out. Cleaning a
(26:19):
service founder started with just supplies, but in ALLC, a
limited liability corporation, gave her contracts with offices and property managers.
So filing an ALLC turned her hustle into a business
(26:39):
others could trust. My point is the difference between somebody
with a good idea and good hustle and a proper
businessman or businesswoman is paperwork. Proper paperwork. I want you
to be. I want you to get obsessed with the details, right.
(27:04):
I want you to get obsessed with your accountant, get
obsessed with what to figure out what an income statement
is and a balance balance sheet. Remember, we had this
young man who wanted to come in and start a
business and operation Hope, and we were helping him. He
asked for help. He used to be a drug dealer,
to be really blood and he was trying to transition
(27:24):
his life. And I commended him for that and wanted
to help him with this transition. And he had already
paid money to lease a restaurant location and had already
bought a burner for the restaurant, so he was already
all in at least the facility had bought some of
(27:47):
the equipment stoves, burners, et cetera. And then I asked him, okay,
so tell me about tell me about your your balance sheet,
and he's like, what's that? That was like, excuse me,
Like he had the hustle, but no one told him
(28:07):
the business basics, right, So you need if you're going
to be a proper business person, you need an accountant.
You need at least access to a lawyer. You need
somebody to review your contracts. You can use artificial intelligence,
by the way, in the short short term, but don't
just rely on AI. You need you can have AI
for eight percent of the work and get a lawyer
to sign off on what AI is telling you to
make sure it's tight and right. You need an accountant,
(28:29):
you need a bookkeeper and or account and or a bookkeeper.
You're at some point you need a controller, somebody to
run the money with your oversight inside the business. At
some point I have a chief financial officer. I have
audited financial statements that people can trust my businesses because
I'm audited financial statements. Just like this lady. This LLC
limited liability corporation gave her respectability because it gave her structure, paperwork,
(28:52):
independently reviewed that people can trust. You really need to
have your books and records and a budget in place
for your business. Otherwise again, it's not a business, it's busyness.
You need to make boring sexy like you need to
have And if your account's trying to hang out with
you at the club or at social events, you need
to get rid of to get a new accountant. You
(29:13):
don't want people who want to hang out with you. You
want people who want you to be set up. They
don't want to hang out set up properly. I'm in.
So a limited liability corporation is cheap and easy and quick,
and even if you want to do business with your
family members, you should have a limited liability corporation and
(29:35):
everybody should sign the Dott line because when things get messy,
when things don't go well. There's two times when mess
happens in a business. When things go incredibly well, money
out of the blue changes people. There's a lot of money,
and unfortunately I've seen it in my own situation. People
I thought I knew, I realized I didn't know at
all when money showed up, and they think they should
(29:55):
have a piece of it, even though I made it titlement.
But also when things go badly, folks get amnesia. I
didn't say that, I didn't do that, I didn't guarantee that,
I didn't promise that. Or when you loan somebody some money,
they get amnesia. They don't want to pay it back,
but they certainly want some of the profits. So you
just want to have this all documented. So it's again
(30:18):
is A friend of mine told me she likes math
because it doesn't have an opinion, right, And so I
want you to to just be a non emotional and
mathematical and business like and have your paperwork in place
(30:39):
so you don't have to have these petty arguments with
anybody or disagreements. Step four, Plan and money. A mobile
(30:59):
car wash entrepreneur started with buckets, soap rags and under
three dollars investment. By the way, so did I that
this is also my example. I started one hundred business
ideas between age twenty from age ten age twenty twenty,
most of them failed spectacularly. Going to give you a
news flash, by the way, don't be embarrassed. Get embarrassment
(31:20):
out of your dictionary, right. All that failure is an outcome.
It's just an outcome to an experiment. It's not defining
anything about you. It's just this thing didn't work. Take
no for vitamins and understand this success has a thousand
mothers and failure as a bastard child like. No one
claims the failure, but no one remembers it either. Once
you succeed, everybody wants to own that, right. I mean, so,
(31:43):
just don't obsess about your failures. It's just the outcome
to an experiment. It's just a moment in time. Keep
it moving. It's hard to hit a moving target. Just
keep it moving. And so this mobile detailing business, clearly
it didn't work out or would be still doing it,
but it was something I did at a moment, and
it's something you do to start out as a whole
bunch of stuff. I've even read my different books that
(32:04):
go through up from nothing in the minmo. These different
books explain financial literacy for all Some of the books
that I the business that I started. So the key
is that this person kept their plan simple. Washington cars
per weekend, charged twenty five dollars each, earned two hundred
fifty dollars extra cash flow. Eventually this grew into a
(32:25):
mobile detailing business with employees like don't overcomplicate it. It's
just that simple. There's no flossing you notice in any
of this. Right Number five Branding in presence. So Etsy
jewelry seller invested in a twelve dollars domain name. Domain
(32:50):
name is is what you select? Is you know Joe's
jewelry company? Is what uses your online presence? It's real
estate on the internet? Okay, domain name, a twenty dollars
logo on a logo production service, right, and you probably
do it on ai now for free and free. Instagram
(33:12):
customers found her online, not in a store Shopify. That's
where I recommend, by the way, our partner for one
MBB a simple professional look, built instant credibility. And while
she had a business, and she's on the platform of Etsy,
which is trusted and respected, and she had her business,
her business and documentation properly done because well, in this example,
(33:36):
she went through operation hope. Step six sales and marketing. Right,
So tutor turned a small business owner. They posted free
math tips on TikTok build trust, then offered twenty dollars
an hour tutoring lessons. Within months, had twenty clients. Right.
(33:57):
Your first customers will often come from your network, you know,
relationship capital, that's what I call it. Then you can
expand with digital tools from there. Again, keep this simple number.
Seven operations in customer service. A barber working from home.
All right. My barber is Keith Williams, who's a mobile barber.
(34:17):
I used to have a shop. Now he's a full
time firefighter, but he also does a part time business.
And I'm one of his clients and I pay him
a premium to come to my house. And he's so
dependable I wouldn't go with anybody else. So focusing on
showing up one time, clean cuts, clean and clean, proper hygiene,
clean equipment, consistent pricing right, Never try to gouge your
(34:42):
clients any consistency and they need to believe they're getting
of value. And in this example, his clients referred to
others because of his utter professionalism. So consistency is a
superpower in business. Please write that down. Consistency is a
super power in business. People will pay for what they
(35:04):
can count on. Now, some people are now listening to
this and saying, what's the price that I am now
stopping at step step seven before to step eight. Some
people are saying, well, what's the right price I should
set my product for? And how do I know what
the right price is? And all that? And oh, I
don't want to overcharge somebody. Don't worry about overcharging somebody.
(35:25):
The market will tell you when enough is enough. When
you set a price and people throw their nose up
and sorry, roll their eye lets you and go girl,
you got your mind? You can you know you've charged
too much? Back it down a little again, do some
test discussions. But again, you're not taking advantage of people.
You're selling a product of service which alleviates a pain,
(35:45):
creates a solution. All capitalism is is solving problems. Let
me tell you what a capit table is. The capitalism
table is right, not a cap table. The capitalism table
is in negotiations so you feel better about getting to
the right price, and so you'll feel like you're gorging
people or taking advantage of people, or they're taking advantage
of you. Let me explain this to you. So on
(36:06):
the one side of the table in this negotiating table
is the capitalists, the producer of the product, and the
other side of the table is the consumer, the buyer
of the product. To typically black people are unfortunately just
the consumers. The capitalist job, please hear me. The business
owner's job is to extract as much money as they
can in negotiations from the person sitting at the table
(36:28):
on the consumer side, while giving them the least value
in return. That's the capitalists, the business owners. The entrepreneur's job.
They've got a product of service, something they've created, something
they control, something they're offering. Their job is to get
the most value out of that that they can from
a paying customer while giving the least value in return,
(36:51):
so they earn the biggest profit. Now somebody's in there going, oh, John,
that's so ruthless. That's horrible. No, it's just business. But
let me here's the other the second part of the story.
On the other side of this is the consumer. Guess
what their job is. Consumer's job is to pay the
least amount that they can from this capitalist producer in
(37:12):
negotiations while extracting the most value from that capitalist in return. Now,
is that person predatory? Is that person unfair? And here's
what happens in most good negotiations, right, everybody leaves that
table slightly annoyed. That's a great negotiation. Everybody leaves the
(37:34):
negotiating table slightly annoyed because nobody got everything they wanted.
So in Africa and developing countries in Latin America and Asia,
in India for sure, trying to go I missed someplace
in the back country of Australia. I'm sure you'll tell me.
(37:55):
If I'm a Caribbean I missed in and maybe East
Eastern Europe. Small shop owners, all they do is haggle
over prices. They negotiate, and they literally think about when
you're someplace traveling and you're haggling over prices with some merchant,
(38:18):
and it's sports for them. It's like they got the
thing down to with science and they're trying to figure
out what the price pain, promise, value proposition. Sweet spot
is with the customer. When you go to Walmart or
you go to Amazon or wherever it is you shop,
the price is already predetermined. The market researchers have already
(38:41):
figured out, here's a brush. It solves a problem with
nappy hair or kinky here or whatever. Here's a brush
or comb, whatever, a toothbrush, and here's what the market
has already said, it's going to pay for that, So
that the price is printed on the business. Fascinating printed
on the product, or now you have a barcode, but
it already knows that. Okay, the average person is willing
(39:02):
to pay this because the promise the value is much
more than the pain of the cost, and so the
transaction happens. But in development countries it's an active negotiation.
Now give you a funny little story. I'm doing a
deal which I can't talk about at the moment, but
one of the major investors in this deal is a
very big for an institution, very sophisticated, like a huge,
(39:22):
huge institution, and my partners were negotiating with them, and
after I introduce them on the rates of return on
this investment, and it got back to me that my
new partners in this new business were just mortified. They
thought they had offended the new investors and they really
thought this deal was done, like this was going to
(39:43):
fall apart. And we're talking about millions and millions and
millions of dollars and more importantly a really important partner
and friend of mine. And John, we know we don't
want to find you. We didn't want to fend them,
but we can't do what they're saying. And what they're
saying is right around the edge of you know, lunacy
whatever and says that. Al Now, I know these people,
let me call right, But I was prepared, preparred. I
(40:04):
was prepared for this all to fall apart. So I
called what email? First, Hey, can I talk to you?
Called my friend, got him on the phone, and I explained.
I explained, I explained, I explained the situation very delicately, diplomatically.
This is one or two times I remember where I'm
glad I didn't pop off. I'm glad I listened before
(40:25):
I decided to pop off, And now I'm glad I
didn't get emotional about this because because I would have
been wrong and I would have destroyed a great business.
So the guy listened to me and he and he laughed.
I said, why are you laughing? He said, John, we
were just playing with him. I said, what do you mean.
He's like, oh, just negotiation, like we're just we're just
messing with him, like we're just trying to figure out
what we can get. I mean, of course we're committed.
We just you know, we're in. We just want to
(40:47):
figure out how much we can get out of them
to our advantage. I mean, it's just it's business and sport.
These guys were just bored. This is what they do.
Like I said, call on, you should be you should
be ashamed of yourself. You petrified these folks. I went
back and pats it up, gout of the way, and
they finished negotiating their deal. And it wasn't personal, right,
And these were rich people on both sides of this negotiation. Right.
(41:12):
There's another time that I almost screwed a big business deal.
I had asked the founder of Shopify. I can tell
this story. I've said it publicly before. Toby Luki, great guy,
second richest man I believe in Canada, Really great guy,
good friend. I had asked him after George Floyd's murder.
(41:34):
I'm sorry. I had spoken for him for free doing
town hall relationship capital. Sometimes what you get is less
important than what you give. In fact, I've always felt
that that giving is more important than getting in fact,
whatever goes around comes around. If you give, you tend
to get, and if you're just focusing on getting, you
don't get anything except showing the door at some point,
(41:54):
because you're transactional, if you're a taker. Okay. So at
the end of this presentation by one of the wealthiest
men in the world, I didn't he like he realized
I did this for free. I just gave a town
hall to his employees about what happened with George Floyd's murder.
And he really appreciated that. This was me, of course,
twenty twenty and he's like, what can I do to
be helpful to you know, Black America. I'm like, well,
(42:18):
I don't know how many create an a million new
black businesses in America. And he's like, hmm, send me
something on that. So I said, okay, So I hung
up the phone and when typed up something. Never let
he's a business truth, he's a golden rule. Never let
the perfect be the death of the good. Don't let
the perfect be the death of the good. I didn't
(42:39):
wait three months, three weeks to write a proposal. Haven't
written have it? No? I just knocked it out quickly
and it was good. Enough and send it to him
before you forgot about me and start focusing on something else.
Don't let the perfectly death of the good. Don't enable gays,
don't don't admire the problem forever. Right, get to it.
Right is the end of the story. Can we please
(42:59):
start there? So? Anyway, I sent this this proposal to him.
Heard nothing. Days go by, a week goes by almost
two weeks. So I sent him an email. Hey Toby,
Dear Toby, I really appreciated the time I've enjoyed our
time together in the town. I appreciate you asking how
you do what you do to help. You probably got
busy distracted running a global business. Thank you so much
(43:19):
for even offering of being interested in trying to help
Black America to come up from self self determination. I
realized you to get back to me, and you probably
just didn't know. You want to be uncomfortable, so you
want to tell me no, don't worry about it. We'll
do something down the road. But thanks for being considered
and caring. Dear, signed John Bryant sent the note by email.
(43:40):
He responds and says, John, what are you talking about?
And I said yes, excuse me, yeah, I said yes.
I said, we'd do it. Well, I went, it was
in my spam folder. Always check your spam folder. His
commitment two lines, you know, was in my spam fold
That became Then I started working with his right arm
to I call him Toby. I it is Toby. Why
(44:03):
tob Y who now is on the board of Shopify,
great guy, and Harley Finkelstein who's the president of SHOPIFAI
and all these heroes. And she rolls at Shapafi who
I now counts as friends and who are great great
people helped me to to develop a and Kaz is
(44:30):
also another guy. The great guy there Ordan has helped
me developed one hundred and thirty million dollar business on
that two line email from Toby and then then they
came back and committed another sixty million dollars last December
because it was going so well. We've created nurtured supporting
advance through the one Million Black Business Initiative, four hundred
and fifty thousand black businesses since George Floyd's murder, which
(44:52):
there's only three point two million black businesses in Americas,
who has about twelve percent of all black businesses, which
is fantastic, And why they're doing this is they're doing
it out of some charity or some goodwill or some
crazy you know. No, they're doing it because it's good business.
Right that they've got two three percent of black shops
had black shops on the Shopify platform, and they want
(45:13):
ten percent of black shops. They want to grow their platform,
and they see this is a legitimate, profitable, emerging market
and they can do well and do good at the
same time. Good capitalism, that's exactly what we want it.
We don't want charity, we don't want handouts, right, we
want to hand ups. Right. So there's an example of
I'm glad number two. I didn't pop off and get
(45:35):
emotional and go, oh you're a racist, and oh you
don't want to do anything in the first place, and
I'm just wasting my time, And I mean I would
have just tore my whole rear end. I'm glad I
shut up and just was gracious. And remember how my
mother raised me and said thank you to the man
for being considerate. Now we're dear friends, by the way,
and Harley's on my board, and Kaz and I work
(45:57):
altogether our time, and me and Toby wirre good friends.
And Toby and I raise cars together. We will be
raising guards together. And one MBB is a great partnership
with Shopify and Operation Hope, and we're helping a lot
of people and doing well. I'm doing good, filling my mission,
and they're getting a good feeling for what they're doing.
But they're also getting the prospect of future customers because
(46:18):
five or ten percent of all these Shopify candidates who
get a free account become long term customers of Shopify.
And wouldn't that isn't that a win win situation. The
fact that investments We just gave twenty five thousand dollars
one MBB scholarship packages which includes legal support, accounting support
(46:38):
with professionals for a couple of hours, marketing support, technical support,
Shopify account for free. So I think it's a dollar
a month for six months basically for free if you
get your first sale. Those financial second one by the way,
assistance with setting up your free domain name, free website,
(46:59):
payment system, delivery systems, a business plan, financial coaching from
Operation Home. I'm just like a member at the moment.
It's a complete package worth twenty five thousand dollars. A
program grant we just signed for those we appointed. We
allocated for of those two earn your leisure at their
(47:19):
investments recently, and people went wild. And it was wonderful
to be able to do that for folks who wanted
just wanted a shot at self determination. But all that
came from me making sure I read my spam folder
back to to how to start a business step number eight.
So we just covered operations in customer service step number eight,
(47:41):
Growth and scaling. Right, So the lawn care business start
with a lawnmower. Hello, I use lawnmower. I'll go buy
a new one from who. If you can find a
use lawnmowork go, you know, go on on these online
marketplaces and find a used dependable lawnmower if you can
go buy one if you want to for the home
depot where for that's new to get a warranty on
(48:03):
it if you do that. But if you start with
the use lawnmore after six months, reinvest the reinvestor profits
into a second more hire. You know, you can hire
a teenager in the neighborhood. Within two years you have
five on your crew. Right. See that's compounding, right, don't
chase flash scale what works, reinvest profits, build and repeat
(48:29):
rents and repeat, keep compounding. All right, So with real people,
they all started small and they build big. Your idea
doesn't need to be perfect, It just needs to be
started one step at a time. Turns a dream into
a business. Doctor Dorothy Hypt once told me, John, I
(48:52):
like you because you're a dreamer with a shovel in
your hands. Here's my challenge to you write down one
business idea today and take one action this week. Just
those two things. Whether it's registering the name, calling ten people,
setting up a free website, or calling Operation Hope and
(49:14):
signing up to one MBB and or a whole financial
coaching and counseling or a smart business program. Just start somewhere. Okay,
So I'm going to give you now a peek into
ten businesses that you can start for under one thousand dollars. Again,
(49:35):
I'm really trying to make this really practical for you
and getting it at a level where you can pick
it up no matter who you are, where you are,
whether you have a full time, part time, and you
have a job. By the way, don't go quit your job,
start a business and being all this emotional stuff again,
don't give up your own shoes. You get some new
ones that make sure new make sure the new shoes fit.
(49:55):
Let your nine to five. If you're lucky to have
a great job, let your nine to five which has
helped insurance and benefits and all that stuff that your
nine to five job, financier, five to nine, dream rite
then down. Okay, businesses you can start for unto thousand
dollars examples. Here's some AI leverage future focused businesses content
(50:21):
plus AI micro agency. Use chat GPT, which I'm the
co chair of the AI Ethics Council with my buddy
Sam Altman, who's the CEO of Chat GPT. I use
chat GPT mostly I love it. Use chat GPT, Kenva
and cap cut to help small businesses create social media posts, captions,
(50:42):
and videos. Startup costs two hundred bucks, laptop software subscriptions.
AI enhanced enhances productivity, but human creativity plus local relationships
make this valuable. You're not going to be put out
of business, by the way, by a You're going to
be put out of business by somebody who can run AI,
(51:04):
by a business, or out of your job. That's another
podcast another day. I help do a whole series on AI.
UH number two AI Resume and career coaching services help
job seekers use AI tools to rewrite resumes, cover letters,
and prep with mock interview bots. Startup costs basically free,
(51:25):
just marketing and your time. AI is a tool, but
people still want human guidance and encouragement. This is a
really good business ledges that that one is like almost
anybody can do that and everybody, and it's gonna be
so needed. People know people, people are willing to accept AI.
They really have no clue what it is. Right nine
is my friend Van Jones would say nine percent of
(51:48):
black folks don't know a thing about AI, but nine
percent of white folks don't know a thing about AI either.
As equal opportunity to discrimination, we're all a little bit lost.
But the curious in the nosey and those who execute
on that nosiness win. Number three e commerce microstore with
AI marketing start a drop shipping drop shipping shop business
(52:13):
or Etsy digital production a product store. Use AI to
design product descriptions, logos, and ads. Startup costs by five
hundred dollars for samples, website and marketing. Number four AI
power tutoring, math, writing, eesl coding. Parents want tutors, but
(52:38):
you can pair your teaching with AI practice worksheets and quizes.
By the way, just if you're in the hood, go
to the suburbs, right. Just find folks who go to
places where there's a seven under credit score community, an
upwardly mobile community. Not saying that doesn't exist where you live,
by the way, I'm just saying this is the easy
thing for you to do. Go some place where you
have stable families, high credit scores, jobs, careers, but don't
(53:00):
have a lot of time, but they want the excellence
for their kids and become a tutor for their kids.
Startup costs virtually zero zoom zoom marketing, et cetera. Do
this virtually. That's also another great business. Number five. AI
driven research and data assistance for local businesses. Example, help
(53:21):
a local realtor or contractor pull neighborhood trends, pull neighborhood
trends right, market reports and customer insights with AI tools.
Startup costs three hundred bucks. Just marketing yourself basically AI
resistant immune trades and services. Okay, these are things that
(53:42):
you can do that AI won't put you out of
business doing in three to five years. Mobile card detailing
and car washing mentioned that earlier. AI cannot wash your
car at least not yet. Robots aren't here yet, always
in demand, hard to automate scale and it's scalable. Her
costs as I said earlier, about five hours for supplies
(54:03):
seven uh residential cleaning services. I love this business. AI
can can schedule, but can't scrub toilets. It is immune automation. Okay,
starter calls tune in bucks for supplies. My mother did
this business, by the way, back in growing up a
competing she she was a janitor right, she had a
(54:28):
janitorial janitorial business, and then she was a she was
a contract enitor for the school I grew up in.
Was like, come on, mam, I see you at home.
Why are you here? She like when she got laid
off from Ecdonald Doullad's aircraft between contracts. She was a
fabricator for seats and in airplanes seats I fly on today.
By the way, when she got laid off because she
(54:49):
was between contracts, she wouldn't go and get on welfare.
She goes to my school and find out whatever job
was available when she'd take it because she wanted to
be near me. Drove me nuts, But my god, I'm
so thankful. My mother loved me into excellence. She was
a security guard, she was a janitor. She was like, Mom,
you just you had a different uniform every week. She's like, yeah,
but I'm still your mother. I'm gonna kick your butt.
(55:11):
You mess up. Imagine, can't get out, can't get away
from your mom. I just love my mother. Just tell
me she loved me every day. Make sure you tell
your kid they loved every day. Number eight lawng cair
yard work service mowing heads, trimming, snow shoveling, depending on
the region. Started. Costs about one thousand dollars with used equipment.
(55:34):
Number nine. This was a great business. I know a
good person who did like twenty seven thousand dollars a
month on this business. Mobile notary service with remote work
and legal paperwork still requiring signatures. Notaries are in demand.
Startup costs. I just used notary two weeks ago. By
the way, it started costs two hundred bucks. Three hundred
dollars for certification and supplies. This is a great business.
(55:56):
By the way, notaries. Number ten. Personal fitness and wellness coaches.
My wife is a wellness expert. By the way, Shatra,
this is a hybrid model. So AI can give exercise plans,
but it can't motivate people like human coaches. I get
a lot of knowledge from AI, but my wife is
the absolute expert that I trust because I know she
(56:18):
cares about me and she's able to communicate in the
way that i'm that I can hear and listen. Again,
once again, AI is not going to replace you. Somebody
who's using AI and technology will add. AI can give
AI generated custom plans as a bonus for clients startup
costs which is certifications which are really optional and mostly marketing.
(56:42):
So some of these ideas lean into the AI future.
Some are immune to AI. Either way, you can start
these with less than a thousand dollars and build something sustainable.
The key isn't just choosing the idea, is taking the
first step today. This is John O'Briant. This is money
and wealth. This is Ben How do you build a business?
(57:03):
Just start? PhDs are good, PhDs are better. This is
a silvil rights movement, from civil rights to silvil rights,
from the streets to the suites, from protesting to partnering.
I'll see you the finish line. I'm so inspired by
this time and your place in it. Let's go tell
(57:28):
your friends about this podcast. Subscribe today John O'Brien I'm
Out Money and Wealth with John O'Brien is a production
(57:48):
of the Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts from
the Black Effect Podcast Network, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The dep
Welcome The Money and Wealth with John O'Briant, a production
of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. Yo, Yo Yo,
This is John O'Brien and this is the Money in
Wealth podcast series, season two on the Black Effect Network
(00:24):
on iHeartRadio. And I wanted in this episode, which is
being recorded during Black Business Month, it's not well known
that August is Black Business Month, and I want to
command iHeart and Black Effect Network for focusing on it.
I wanted to address the obvious, and I also owe
(00:47):
you an apology. As an entrepreneur and a businessman, I
think I've taken some things for granted, and many others
have taken it for granted. I think we take for
granted that people open the Wall Street Journal and know
what's being said in it, these phrases, these euphemisms, these
(01:11):
you know, what's the SEC, what's the fdi C, what's
a SPAC, what's a you know, what's a leveraged buyout?
And so I've tried to break down some of these myths.
If you go to season one, I go through a
lot of the basics, right about how what does this
mean and what does that mean? And you're going to
start seeing me go from industry to industry and break
(01:34):
this down. But one thing I've never broken down, and
it just dawned on me that I needed to do this,
is I never really broken down how to start a
business like the basics. And one of the reasons this
became so powerfully important was recently I was having a
discussion with somebody I love and care for and respect
who is highly intelligent, and we had an actual debate
(02:00):
about what they thought they were doing and building a business.
And it took me a while to understand that they
didn't understand what I was saying, and it was my fault.
I had never explained, no one's ever explained it to
even successful black people, educated black people, what these terms
(02:25):
are again. And so this individual was incredibly, incredibly smart.
Most smartest people I know had a history of running
a really professional services contract enterprise where they got contracts
for their talent, but they weren't on a payroll with someone.
They were effectively a self employment project. They had no employees,
(02:49):
They in most cases had no contractors. It might be
episodic from time again when there was an event or something.
They had no health insurance responsibilities, They had no payroll responsibilities.
They had no property tax responsibilities, they had no balance
sheet and income statement other than make sure their inflow
(03:09):
exceeded their outflow. They had a contract with in many
cases of corporation or government to provide a service. And
the presumption was that's a business. Well, it is a
form of business, but that's not building a business that
(03:30):
you can sell, right And the whole point of building
a business, please hear me, is to monetize it, create value,
and to have a liquidity event to sell it. Right now,
somebody's want to say no, no, no, no, John Walmart
(03:53):
never sold, or Amazon never sold, or Microsoft bill Ga
never sold, or Meta Facebook never sold. They'll come up
with these examples. But the very fact that those companies
have gone public means that they sell every day. They
sold when they went public, the founder got our founders
(04:17):
or founding family got a check, probably a big one.
Probably they got a big one. And they're still getting checks,
their families do dividend payments, et cetera. They still own shares.
But the public is buying and selling that company every
day based on its perception of its continuing success. So,
(04:40):
whether you're a small business and it's private equity private
equity literally your cousin, your father, your friend, or or
a firmness in the private equity business giving you an
investment private equity, or it's the public equity market going public.
All right. The whole point is is they're backing this
(05:01):
enterprise to grow it so that the leader that enterprise
prize can sell it so everybody wins. Right now, you
can't do that. You make money during the day, you
bill wealson your sleep. In order to do that, you
need compounding, You need employees, you need infrastructure, need real estates,
you need locations, You need something other than you running
around with a personal service contract. So I'm not today
(05:25):
talking about what most black businesses are comprised of. Ninety
five percent plus of all black businesses are effectively self
employment projects. They have no employees. And so when you
wonder while we are not building wealth. And I'm also
going to break down in a separate podcast how to
own and buy a home, that's another presumption I think
we make that's incorrect. We should not assume people know
(05:47):
the hows here, or the whys or the whats. So
I'm breaking this down and by the way, being a
small business owner, which is incredibly important, is very different
from being an entrepreneur. They're first cousins are different and
I go through that also in season one, it's the
season two of Money and Wealth. So tell all your
friends to download Money and Wealth and go back to
(06:09):
season one. I'm giving you an entire university, a library,
a ministry of finance if you will, in free enterprise
and entrepreneurship and capitalism even invite sized chunks. So now,
before I get into how do you start a business,
whether it's a self employment project, a personal services contract
fulfillment firm of one, or whether it's a business with
(06:32):
that has scale, employees and infrastructure, I'm going to walk
you through literally the steps of taking your dream and
making it real. Okay, because I should not be presumed
that people know how to do that. And that doesn't
mean that somebody's unintelligent because they don't know how to
do that. It means someone's taught you. It's what you
don't know that you don't know that is killing you,
but you think you know. By the way, I'm an entrepreneur,
(06:52):
I'm a business owner, and I used to be a
small business owner. I grew a small business into a
boutique business into a reasonably sized business. I would think
it's a big business because one of my businesses I
sold for one hundred and twenty million dollars. Maybe it's
a mid sized business by big boy standards. And then
(07:14):
one of my enterprises is a large enterprise because that
budget is you know, north of sixty five million dollars
a year. Okay, So I have experienced from the smallest
to the largest. But an entrepreneur is somebody who creates
something from whole cloth, Whereas a businessman our businesswoman takes
an existing business plan and scales it and operationalizes. So
(07:36):
a businessman businesswoman is taking basically an existing concept with
dentist office, a chiropractor office, a healthcare office, whatever, right
a service and making that thing work franchise businesses or
good examples of existing business plans. An entrepreneur like me
is nuts and taking creating new ideas from nothing and
(08:00):
backing them with in my case my own and others
private equity. Okay, and so in some case I'm my
own venture capital firm, if you will. For myself, at
least that's what I happened. So let me not give
you first a brief history of business and why this
is relevant to you, particularly during Black Business Month. Business
(08:24):
has always been one of the most powerful ways to
build wealth in independence, in America and around the world.
I'm thinking about my friend my brothers Strive Masiewa, who
is a Bill Gates of Africa, who's a billionaire and
an up from nothing entrepreneur from Zimbabwe. So successful in Zimbabwe,
they don't the government is afraid. I think that he
(08:47):
wants to run for political office there. So we can't
even go back to his own country. Not because he's
a criminal, but because he's so successful. Folks are intimidated
by him. But he is doing fiber optic cables throughout
the African continent. He was one of the first to
bring cell phones to the African continent. I believe it
was the first cell phone provider in Nigeria. And he
(09:08):
runs a multiplicity of businesses there is enormously successful. You
find your hero, your shee role, whatever continent you live
on and study them. Okay, So this is the way
for independence. All money is freedom right and you cannot
have freedom without self determination and you can eat. So
you need to understand financial literacy. Hello, what we're talking
(09:29):
about here. Financial literacy is a civil rights issue of
this generation. Why I founded Operation Hope and I'll want
you to go get financial coaching and counseling. Why I've
raised and deployed fifty million dollars plus a year in
money used for scholarships for coaching is building economic infrastructure
fifteen hundred offices across the country for you to plug into.
The one Million Black Business Initiative one MBB as an example,
(09:51):
is a resource for you to plug into in partnership
in that example, which shopify okay. In early America, immigrants, settlers,
and freedomen alike often turned business when other doors were closed,
owning a shop, a farm, or trade gay families. Not
(10:16):
just income, but dignity and independence. For Black Americans, business
was often the only path after slavery men. He could
not access land ownership or fair wages. We literally worked
for free. That was sort of the whole point of slavery.
It was bad capitalism wasn't personal. It became personal later on,
(10:39):
but it started it didn't start out as personal. Started
out it's just bad capitalism, free labor. So they built
their own when they could not get that opportunity from others.
Their own for their own barbershops, beauty salons, insurance companies, newspapers,
(11:02):
and banks. And because no one else would serve our community.
People didn't want to cut our hair, so we had
to cut our own hair. They didn't want to give
us medical services, We had to do that for ourselves.
That closed market, okay, that segregated market created wealth for
those who serve with excellence, the black community in that example,
(11:25):
because no one else would serve them, and so people
who did well, we're looking for quality services, and smart
black businessmen and women fulfilled that. And so thus you
had Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is cited often,
which became a symbol of this power. And there are
other places, by the way, places in the Carolinas and others.
(11:47):
Of course Harlem later on, but the entire communities won
in South Central by the way, that was very impressive
and little well known on Central Avenue. Entire communities built
on ownership, ownership that happened to be black. Globally, the
story is the same from Jewish merchants in Europe, by
(12:11):
the way, who it was illegal for Jews to own
land in Europe. They were discriminated against it ran all
around the world for most of six thousand years, so
they had to learn finance and financial literacy because they
couldn't own land, so they just figured if it financed
the land and undershard how the banking was not a
dignified business back then, investment banking less, so being a
(12:33):
merchant banker even less. So these folks took these businesses
that nobody else wanted and became experts at that through
financial literacy and through finance controlled land and businesses. And
it's one of the great success stories in the world
for a group that was and continue unfortunately to be
hunted around the world and discriminated against. But still they rose,
(12:56):
and I commend them for that. Goldman Sachs. By the way,
did you know that half of all Jews are dark?
Whole other conversation another time, that's literally true. Goldman Sachs
was a guy named Goldman and a guy named Sachs
who could not get a job on Wall Street. Don't
would hire them, so they literally just went door to
door selling financial services and built that up, slow by slow,
(13:20):
little by little, and that became well Goldman Sachs the
firm you know of today as an institution every big
business was once a small one. So you have the
example of Jewish merchants in Europe. And by the way,
Blacks and Jews share a shared history, even a shared
(13:41):
DNA going back six thousand years. And I will do
a separate podcast just on the history of business and
trade and commerce and capitalism. So come back for that
and how and how crosses with culture and how some
want us to all be in a constant argument with
(14:02):
each other. So you had that example, you had Indian
traders in East Africa. It has to be noted that
here that bad capitalism, I promote good capitalism. Bad capitalism
(14:25):
is where I benefit and you pay a price for it.
Good capitalism is where I benefit and you benefit more
in bad capitalism. Slavery, by the way, it wasn't just
white European slave traders. It was Indian slave traders from India,
the East Indian Company, I believe it was. There were
Asian slave traders. There were, believe it or not, African
(14:48):
folks who not slave traded from the coast, but who
captured folks in other tribes in the central part of
Africa and traded them monetarily. They didn't like each other.
These for warring tribes. Think about gangs today and they
didn't realize that were trading them in slavery. But because
no one had gone beyond the coast. Really, so Europeans,
unfortunately were best at a horrible business model. But bad
(15:13):
capitalism is something no different than our communities today. You
see everybody engaging in bad capitalism. I want to see
more good capitalism. That's what this podcast is about. Colors
green by the way that white, black or red blue,
it's green. I want everybody to be able to get
your share of it so you can build some wealth
(15:33):
and build some independence and some freedom, so you can
say what you like and do as you please and
empower who you choose. So again you have these entire
communities that were built up, and these examples from again
Jewish merchants and europe Indian traders in East Africa, Chinese
family businesses across southern Southeast Asia. Business ownership has been
(15:59):
the latter of poverty into the middle class and often
into lasting generational wealth. The reason is simple. A job
gives you a paycheck, but a business gives you freedom.
A real business it can scale, which is what I've
been discussing so far. In this podcast. It can be
(16:23):
passed down. It creates assets, not just income, and you
make money to today you build wealth in your sleep.
That's why today when we talk about financial literacy, wealth building,
and independence, we can't leave business out. Starting a business,
even a small one, is still one of the most
proven ways to move from surviving to thriving, to winning,
(16:47):
to controlling your narrative. And in my case, where four
hundred employees employing others and empowering others. So now let's
get into let's get into the substance of this. So
every big business started small. Amazon started with books in
(17:07):
a garage for you by you. At Fubu started with
forty dollars and a sewing machine. The brother who founded
that just called me a great guy. Operation Hope started
with a man with a mission. That's me. You don't
need a million dollars at a fancy office or even investors, right,
(17:28):
you just need clarity, courage, and the first step. I
never started with business loans. By the way, I have
some what I have lines of credit and things like
that facilitations for which is facility facilitating cash flow payment
haven't come in yet. So I have a credit line
that pays the bills until the payments from a growing
(17:48):
business comes in. Yeah, and I had even I had
one facility, a couple hundredion dollar facility for business that
I had recapitalized with some other partner. That was two
hundred million dollars, the largest credit facility that was done
for a person of color for more than a couple
of decades, so said Black Enterprise. And that was non
(18:10):
recourse that I mean, there was no personal guarantee. But
when I started businesses, I did not start businesses with loans.
I'm sorry. I did have credit cards and things like that,
but I didn't get like a proper proper loan. I
didn't grow it based on dat growd, based on hustle.
(18:30):
So the step one is the idea in the mindset.
So damon John who I decided Foo booze founder who
I just traded message with this weekend. Really great guy.
He started selling hats he made with a forty dollars budget.
The hustle you have in your neighborhood can become your
blueprint for entrepreneurship or or into or small business. You know,
(18:54):
don't wait for the perfect idea. Start where you are
with what you know search in research that Damon John's
story is quite inspiring. He's still growing in building businesses
to this day. Step number two research and validation. So
step number one was the idea in the mindset. Okay,
(19:15):
and the Bible says, there's no vision that people perish
and I love that. I have a whole thing I
do for myself. I have a graph that that created.
That's vision, mission, purpose, passion, strategy, plan, execution of the plan,
(19:46):
tactics to dos to Don's assessment, evaluation, reimagination, based on
the based on the assessment of what just happened and
whether it needs to be improved or not. Like a
software up grade, reset, refine the business plan, wake up
(20:06):
the next day, and execute on the refined business plan.
So you should never just be getting up and doing
what you did yesterday. You should always should be trying
to improve yourself. You should be in a constant state
of software upgrades, active software upgrades. When you got the phone,
if you have an iPhone like I do, when you
got the phone, my phone is a sixteen Pro. Within
(20:28):
a couple of weeks, iPhone was pushing to you a
software upgrade of sixteen point one, sixteen point five. I'm
now in eighteen something. I believe software software series, even
though the phone is sixteen pro iPhone realizes there is
no perfect and so they got to don't wait for
something that's perfect, get it out there in the marketplace,
get people to buy into it, and keep upgrading your
(20:51):
software as you go. And so the current software is
eighteen six point two. Eighteen point six point two, all right,
not eighteen eighteen point six point two? What's your personal
software upgrade? And are you keeping track of it? Are
you constantly obsessed with kaisan as they say in Japan?
Constantly improving? I am. I'm obsessed with knowledge and I'm nosy.
(21:13):
God gave you two ears and one mouth. You listen
twice as much as you talk. I'm nosy. I want
to know everything about everything, just like my friend Quincy Jones.
I late Quincy Jones share with me one of his gifts.
So all my business has started with being nosy, doing research,
having a vision, not being emotional, being passionate and purposal
and ever you make an emotional decision is going to
be a bad one. So don't make a business. Business
(21:36):
is not personal, okay. Capitalism is a gladiator sport. I
want you to take the emotions out of it. Yes,
passion is going to be necessary, but take the emotions
out of it. Step number two. Research and validation of
fruit prep service. One woman began asking church members if
they pay ten or fifteen dollars for home cooked meals.
(21:56):
She had fifteen orders the first week and grew from there. Uh. Now,
if you ask ten to twenty real people, not just family,
if they would actually pay for what you're offering, and
then you if they say yes, you might have a business.
But a business, an innovation, an idea without a customer,
(22:19):
a paying customer next to it is not a business.
That's my friends, Jim Clifton of Gallops quote. An innovation
or a cool idea without a customer, a paying customer
next to it is not a business. A lot of
people running around I see with business cards and least
for LEAs Mercedes and a least office space, and nice
(22:39):
clothes and and going to lunches and dinners and again
the business cards had CEO on it, and they're going
to cocktail receptions and they make some phone calls, they
have some meetings, and they have a PowerPoint presentation, and
they think that that's business, and that's not that's busyness.
That's not business. That's business. You got to be the chief.
Hustle officer chief, get it done, officer chief. I get
(22:59):
up in the morning, stayed up late at night, and
I outwork you, outrun you out and out hustle you, officer. Right.
An entrepreneur works eighteen hours a day to keep from
getting a job. So and there's the last one paid
and the last one to walk out and turn the
lights off. I mean, I used to sleep in my
office quite literally, the shriff's apartment when I lived in
(23:21):
Los Angeles, and when I worked in Los Angeles and
lived in Malibu, California, the sheriff's apartment in La County
Shares apartment. They told me one day when they saw
me in the convenience located the convenience store AMPM Mini
Market where I got gassed on my way home when
I finally finished my day of work and drove home,
which is often two three in the morning, four in
(23:43):
the morning. The sheriff saw me one day going the
AMPM Mini Market and they said, oh, there's the sleeper.
I'm like, excuse me, yeah, we call you the sleeper.
What does that mean as you're the guy who pulls
his car fore side of the road. That is very
dangerous to do this, and you go to sleep in
your car and we come and check on you. I'd
(24:04):
be so tired from working all day and doing meetings
all night, and then sometimes they wouldn't take a nap
in my office. I'd get in my car and I'd
drive home. I went to sleep in my office overnight.
I'd want to convey I want to go home and
take a shower and put in a fresh set of clothes.
I drive from West Los Angeles where my office was
(24:24):
at the West wait Gate, the Westwood Gateway complex at
Little Santa Monica and suppovid of Boulevard. The building is
still there. I was on the he floor. Brian Group
Companies was where we were located. I'd drive from there
down the four or five Freeway to the Santa Monica Freeway,
up PCH Pacific Goa's Highway to Malibu, and on the
(24:50):
halfway there to get exhausted and to pull off the
side of the road. You know, you start seeing three
three lanes and there's only two, and you remember you
roll down the window and you have to wet your
wet your your finger and put it on your eyelids,
some saliva on your eyelids, and then open the door
window and put your head outside the window. That was me,
all right, don't laugh. You know you did that, you
(25:10):
know you've done that. It just I just did it
coming home from my office. You might didn't come home
from a club. Who knows. But and I was completely sober,
like no, I've never I don't do drugs, don't drink,
so that those are not my things. But I worked.
I was a workaholic. I was an alcoholic. I worked aholic.
I was a passionateholic. Anyway, these the minute, these these
Shares officers said they knew me by reputation, I was
(25:32):
a sleeper. I knew I had to change some things.
That either a robber was going to kill me or
I was gonna kill myself by working myself to death.
So I'd need some more balance. But that is what
an entrepreneur. That's an example of an entrepreneur's commitment. And
I didn't get a paycheck back then everybody got paid
but me, I just had. I was fueled by my
vision and my passion and my NonStop hustle and again,
(25:53):
an entrepreneur or a small business owner takes no for vitamins. Okay,
let's now get into number three business structure and legal bases, right,
And I go through details of this in another podcast
when I discuss the different legal structures for starting a business,
So please go there and check that out. Cleaning a
(26:19):
service founder started with just supplies, but in ALLC, a
limited liability corporation, gave her contracts with offices and property managers.
So filing an ALLC turned her hustle into a business
(26:39):
others could trust. My point is the difference between somebody
with a good idea and good hustle and a proper
businessman or businesswoman is paperwork. Proper paperwork. I want you
to be. I want you to get obsessed with the details, right.
(27:04):
I want you to get obsessed with your accountant, get
obsessed with what to figure out what an income statement
is and a balance balance sheet. Remember, we had this
young man who wanted to come in and start a
business and operation Hope, and we were helping him. He
asked for help. He used to be a drug dealer,
to be really blood and he was trying to transition
(27:24):
his life. And I commended him for that and wanted
to help him with this transition. And he had already
paid money to lease a restaurant location and had already
bought a burner for the restaurant, so he was already
all in at least the facility had bought some of
(27:47):
the equipment stoves, burners, et cetera. And then I asked him, okay,
so tell me about tell me about your your balance sheet,
and he's like, what's that? That was like, excuse me,
Like he had the hustle, but no one told him
(28:07):
the business basics, right, So you need if you're going
to be a proper business person, you need an accountant.
You need at least access to a lawyer. You need
somebody to review your contracts. You can use artificial intelligence,
by the way, in the short short term, but don't
just rely on AI. You need you can have AI
for eight percent of the work and get a lawyer
to sign off on what AI is telling you to
make sure it's tight and right. You need an accountant,
(28:29):
you need a bookkeeper and or account and or a bookkeeper.
You're at some point you need a controller, somebody to
run the money with your oversight inside the business. At
some point I have a chief financial officer. I have
audited financial statements that people can trust my businesses because
I'm audited financial statements. Just like this lady. This LLC
limited liability corporation gave her respectability because it gave her structure, paperwork,
(28:52):
independently reviewed that people can trust. You really need to
have your books and records and a budget in place
for your business. Otherwise again, it's not a business, it's busyness.
You need to make boring sexy like you need to
have And if your account's trying to hang out with
you at the club or at social events, you need
to get rid of to get a new accountant. You
(29:13):
don't want people who want to hang out with you. You
want people who want you to be set up. They
don't want to hang out set up properly. I'm in.
So a limited liability corporation is cheap and easy and quick,
and even if you want to do business with your
family members, you should have a limited liability corporation and
(29:35):
everybody should sign the Dott line because when things get messy,
when things don't go well. There's two times when mess
happens in a business. When things go incredibly well, money
out of the blue changes people. There's a lot of money,
and unfortunately I've seen it in my own situation. People
I thought I knew, I realized I didn't know at
all when money showed up, and they think they should
(29:55):
have a piece of it, even though I made it titlement.
But also when things go badly, folks get amnesia. I
didn't say that, I didn't do that, I didn't guarantee that,
I didn't promise that. Or when you loan somebody some money,
they get amnesia. They don't want to pay it back,
but they certainly want some of the profits. So you
just want to have this all documented. So it's again
(30:18):
is A friend of mine told me she likes math
because it doesn't have an opinion, right, And so I
want you to to just be a non emotional and
mathematical and business like and have your paperwork in place
(30:39):
so you don't have to have these petty arguments with
anybody or disagreements. Step four, Plan and money. A mobile
(30:59):
car wash entrepreneur started with buckets, soap rags and under
three dollars investment. By the way, so did I that
this is also my example. I started one hundred business
ideas between age twenty from age ten age twenty twenty,
most of them failed spectacularly. Going to give you a
news flash, by the way, don't be embarrassed. Get embarrassment
(31:20):
out of your dictionary, right. All that failure is an outcome.
It's just an outcome to an experiment. It's not defining
anything about you. It's just this thing didn't work. Take
no for vitamins and understand this success has a thousand
mothers and failure as a bastard child like. No one
claims the failure, but no one remembers it either. Once
you succeed, everybody wants to own that, right. I mean, so,
(31:43):
just don't obsess about your failures. It's just the outcome
to an experiment. It's just a moment in time. Keep
it moving. It's hard to hit a moving target. Just
keep it moving. And so this mobile detailing business, clearly
it didn't work out or would be still doing it,
but it was something I did at a moment, and
it's something you do to start out as a whole
bunch of stuff. I've even read my different books that
(32:04):
go through up from nothing in the minmo. These different
books explain financial literacy for all Some of the books
that I the business that I started. So the key
is that this person kept their plan simple. Washington cars
per weekend, charged twenty five dollars each, earned two hundred
fifty dollars extra cash flow. Eventually this grew into a
(32:25):
mobile detailing business with employees like don't overcomplicate it. It's
just that simple. There's no flossing you notice in any
of this. Right Number five Branding in presence. So Etsy
jewelry seller invested in a twelve dollars domain name. Domain
(32:50):
name is is what you select? Is you know Joe's
jewelry company? Is what uses your online presence? It's real
estate on the internet? Okay, domain name, a twenty dollars
logo on a logo production service, right, and you probably
do it on ai now for free and free. Instagram
(33:12):
customers found her online, not in a store Shopify. That's
where I recommend, by the way, our partner for one
MBB a simple professional look, built instant credibility. And while
she had a business, and she's on the platform of Etsy,
which is trusted and respected, and she had her business,
her business and documentation properly done because well, in this example,
(33:36):
she went through operation hope. Step six sales and marketing. Right,
So tutor turned a small business owner. They posted free
math tips on TikTok build trust, then offered twenty dollars
an hour tutoring lessons. Within months, had twenty clients. Right.
(33:57):
Your first customers will often come from your network, you know,
relationship capital, that's what I call it. Then you can
expand with digital tools from there. Again, keep this simple number.
Seven operations in customer service. A barber working from home.
All right. My barber is Keith Williams, who's a mobile barber.
(34:17):
I used to have a shop. Now he's a full
time firefighter, but he also does a part time business.
And I'm one of his clients and I pay him
a premium to come to my house. And he's so
dependable I wouldn't go with anybody else. So focusing on
showing up one time, clean cuts, clean and clean, proper hygiene,
clean equipment, consistent pricing right, Never try to gouge your
(34:42):
clients any consistency and they need to believe they're getting
of value. And in this example, his clients referred to
others because of his utter professionalism. So consistency is a
superpower in business. Please write that down. Consistency is a
super power in business. People will pay for what they
(35:04):
can count on. Now, some people are now listening to
this and saying, what's the price that I am now
stopping at step step seven before to step eight. Some
people are saying, well, what's the right price I should
set my product for? And how do I know what
the right price is? And all that? And oh, I
don't want to overcharge somebody. Don't worry about overcharging somebody.
(35:25):
The market will tell you when enough is enough. When
you set a price and people throw their nose up
and sorry, roll their eye lets you and go girl,
you got your mind? You can you know you've charged
too much? Back it down a little again, do some
test discussions. But again, you're not taking advantage of people.
You're selling a product of service which alleviates a pain,
(35:45):
creates a solution. All capitalism is is solving problems. Let
me tell you what a capit table is. The capitalism
table is right, not a cap table. The capitalism table
is in negotiations so you feel better about getting to
the right price, and so you'll feel like you're gorging
people or taking advantage of people, or they're taking advantage
of you. Let me explain this to you. So on
(36:06):
the one side of the table in this negotiating table
is the capitalists, the producer of the product, and the
other side of the table is the consumer, the buyer
of the product. To typically black people are unfortunately just
the consumers. The capitalist job, please hear me. The business
owner's job is to extract as much money as they
can in negotiations from the person sitting at the table
(36:28):
on the consumer side, while giving them the least value
in return. That's the capitalists, the business owners. The entrepreneur's job.
They've got a product of service, something they've created, something
they control, something they're offering. Their job is to get
the most value out of that that they can from
a paying customer while giving the least value in return,
(36:51):
so they earn the biggest profit. Now somebody's in there going, oh, John,
that's so ruthless. That's horrible. No, it's just business. But
let me here's the other the second part of the story.
On the other side of this is the consumer. Guess
what their job is. Consumer's job is to pay the
least amount that they can from this capitalist producer in
(37:12):
negotiations while extracting the most value from that capitalist in return. Now,
is that person predatory? Is that person unfair? And here's
what happens in most good negotiations, right, everybody leaves that
table slightly annoyed. That's a great negotiation. Everybody leaves the
(37:34):
negotiating table slightly annoyed because nobody got everything they wanted.
So in Africa and developing countries in Latin America and Asia,
in India for sure, trying to go I missed someplace
in the back country of Australia. I'm sure you'll tell me.
(37:55):
If I'm a Caribbean I missed in and maybe East
Eastern Europe. Small shop owners, all they do is haggle
over prices. They negotiate, and they literally think about when
you're someplace traveling and you're haggling over prices with some merchant,
(38:18):
and it's sports for them. It's like they got the
thing down to with science and they're trying to figure
out what the price pain, promise, value proposition. Sweet spot
is with the customer. When you go to Walmart or
you go to Amazon or wherever it is you shop,
the price is already predetermined. The market researchers have already
(38:41):
figured out, here's a brush. It solves a problem with
nappy hair or kinky here or whatever. Here's a brush
or comb, whatever, a toothbrush, and here's what the market
has already said, it's going to pay for that, So
that the price is printed on the business. Fascinating printed
on the product, or now you have a barcode, but
it already knows that. Okay, the average person is willing
(39:02):
to pay this because the promise the value is much
more than the pain of the cost, and so the
transaction happens. But in development countries it's an active negotiation.
Now give you a funny little story. I'm doing a
deal which I can't talk about at the moment, but
one of the major investors in this deal is a
very big for an institution, very sophisticated, like a huge,
(39:22):
huge institution, and my partners were negotiating with them, and
after I introduce them on the rates of return on
this investment, and it got back to me that my
new partners in this new business were just mortified. They
thought they had offended the new investors and they really
thought this deal was done, like this was going to
(39:43):
fall apart. And we're talking about millions and millions and
millions of dollars and more importantly a really important partner
and friend of mine. And John, we know we don't
want to find you. We didn't want to fend them,
but we can't do what they're saying. And what they're
saying is right around the edge of you know, lunacy
whatever and says that. Al Now, I know these people,
let me call right, But I was prepared, preparred. I
(40:04):
was prepared for this all to fall apart. So I
called what email? First, Hey, can I talk to you?
Called my friend, got him on the phone, and I explained.
I explained, I explained, I explained the situation very delicately, diplomatically.
This is one or two times I remember where I'm
glad I didn't pop off. I'm glad I listened before
(40:25):
I decided to pop off, And now I'm glad I
didn't get emotional about this because because I would have
been wrong and I would have destroyed a great business.
So the guy listened to me and he and he laughed.
I said, why are you laughing? He said, John, we
were just playing with him. I said, what do you mean.
He's like, oh, just negotiation, like we're just we're just
messing with him, like we're just trying to figure out
what we can get. I mean, of course we're committed.
We just you know, we're in. We just want to
(40:47):
figure out how much we can get out of them
to our advantage. I mean, it's just it's business and sport.
These guys were just bored. This is what they do.
Like I said, call on, you should be you should
be ashamed of yourself. You petrified these folks. I went
back and pats it up, gout of the way, and
they finished negotiating their deal. And it wasn't personal, right,
And these were rich people on both sides of this negotiation. Right.
(41:12):
There's another time that I almost screwed a big business deal.
I had asked the founder of Shopify. I can tell
this story. I've said it publicly before. Toby Luki, great guy,
second richest man I believe in Canada, Really great guy,
good friend. I had asked him after George Floyd's murder.
(41:34):
I'm sorry. I had spoken for him for free doing
town hall relationship capital. Sometimes what you get is less
important than what you give. In fact, I've always felt
that that giving is more important than getting in fact,
whatever goes around comes around. If you give, you tend
to get, and if you're just focusing on getting, you
don't get anything except showing the door at some point,
(41:54):
because you're transactional, if you're a taker. Okay. So at
the end of this presentation by one of the wealthiest
men in the world, I didn't he like he realized
I did this for free. I just gave a town
hall to his employees about what happened with George Floyd's murder.
And he really appreciated that. This was me, of course,
twenty twenty and he's like, what can I do to
be helpful to you know, Black America. I'm like, well,
(42:18):
I don't know how many create an a million new
black businesses in America. And he's like, hmm, send me
something on that. So I said, okay, So I hung
up the phone and when typed up something. Never let
he's a business truth, he's a golden rule. Never let
the perfect be the death of the good. Don't let
the perfect be the death of the good. I didn't
(42:39):
wait three months, three weeks to write a proposal. Haven't
written have it? No? I just knocked it out quickly
and it was good. Enough and send it to him
before you forgot about me and start focusing on something else.
Don't let the perfectly death of the good. Don't enable gays,
don't don't admire the problem forever. Right, get to it.
Right is the end of the story. Can we please
(42:59):
start there? So? Anyway, I sent this this proposal to him.
Heard nothing. Days go by, a week goes by almost
two weeks. So I sent him an email. Hey Toby,
Dear Toby, I really appreciated the time I've enjoyed our
time together in the town. I appreciate you asking how
you do what you do to help. You probably got
busy distracted running a global business. Thank you so much
(43:19):
for even offering of being interested in trying to help
Black America to come up from self self determination. I
realized you to get back to me, and you probably
just didn't know. You want to be uncomfortable, so you
want to tell me no, don't worry about it. We'll
do something down the road. But thanks for being considered
and caring. Dear, signed John Bryant sent the note by email.
(43:40):
He responds and says, John, what are you talking about?
And I said yes, excuse me, yeah, I said yes.
I said, we'd do it. Well, I went, it was
in my spam folder. Always check your spam folder. His
commitment two lines, you know, was in my spam fold
That became Then I started working with his right arm
to I call him Toby. I it is Toby. Why
(44:03):
tob Y who now is on the board of Shopify,
great guy, and Harley Finkelstein who's the president of SHOPIFAI
and all these heroes. And she rolls at Shapafi who
I now counts as friends and who are great great
people helped me to to develop a and Kaz is
(44:30):
also another guy. The great guy there Ordan has helped
me developed one hundred and thirty million dollar business on
that two line email from Toby and then then they
came back and committed another sixty million dollars last December
because it was going so well. We've created nurtured supporting
advance through the one Million Black Business Initiative, four hundred
and fifty thousand black businesses since George Floyd's murder, which
(44:52):
there's only three point two million black businesses in Americas,
who has about twelve percent of all black businesses, which
is fantastic, And why they're doing this is they're doing
it out of some charity or some goodwill or some
crazy you know. No, they're doing it because it's good business.
Right that they've got two three percent of black shops
had black shops on the Shopify platform, and they want
(45:13):
ten percent of black shops. They want to grow their platform,
and they see this is a legitimate, profitable, emerging market
and they can do well and do good at the
same time. Good capitalism, that's exactly what we want it.
We don't want charity, we don't want handouts, right, we
want to hand ups. Right. So there's an example of
I'm glad number two. I didn't pop off and get
(45:35):
emotional and go, oh you're a racist, and oh you
don't want to do anything in the first place, and
I'm just wasting my time, And I mean I would
have just tore my whole rear end. I'm glad I
shut up and just was gracious. And remember how my
mother raised me and said thank you to the man
for being considerate. Now we're dear friends, by the way,
and Harley's on my board, and Kaz and I work
(45:57):
altogether our time, and me and Toby wirre good friends.
And Toby and I raise cars together. We will be
raising guards together. And one MBB is a great partnership
with Shopify and Operation Hope, and we're helping a lot
of people and doing well. I'm doing good, filling my mission,
and they're getting a good feeling for what they're doing.
But they're also getting the prospect of future customers because
(46:18):
five or ten percent of all these Shopify candidates who
get a free account become long term customers of Shopify.
And wouldn't that isn't that a win win situation. The
fact that investments We just gave twenty five thousand dollars
one MBB scholarship packages which includes legal support, accounting support
(46:38):
with professionals for a couple of hours, marketing support, technical support,
Shopify account for free. So I think it's a dollar
a month for six months basically for free if you
get your first sale. Those financial second one by the way,
assistance with setting up your free domain name, free website,
(46:59):
payment system, delivery systems, a business plan, financial coaching from
Operation Home. I'm just like a member at the moment.
It's a complete package worth twenty five thousand dollars. A
program grant we just signed for those we appointed. We
allocated for of those two earn your leisure at their
(47:19):
investments recently, and people went wild. And it was wonderful
to be able to do that for folks who wanted
just wanted a shot at self determination. But all that
came from me making sure I read my spam folder
back to to how to start a business step number eight.
So we just covered operations in customer service step number eight,
(47:41):
Growth and scaling. Right, So the lawn care business start
with a lawnmower. Hello, I use lawnmower. I'll go buy
a new one from who. If you can find a
use lawnmowork go, you know, go on on these online
marketplaces and find a used dependable lawnmower if you can
go buy one if you want to for the home
depot where for that's new to get a warranty on
(48:03):
it if you do that. But if you start with
the use lawnmore after six months, reinvest the reinvestor profits
into a second more hire. You know, you can hire
a teenager in the neighborhood. Within two years you have
five on your crew. Right. See that's compounding, right, don't
chase flash scale what works, reinvest profits, build and repeat
(48:29):
rents and repeat, keep compounding. All right, So with real people,
they all started small and they build big. Your idea
doesn't need to be perfect, It just needs to be
started one step at a time. Turns a dream into
a business. Doctor Dorothy Hypt once told me, John, I
(48:52):
like you because you're a dreamer with a shovel in
your hands. Here's my challenge to you write down one
business idea today and take one action this week. Just
those two things. Whether it's registering the name, calling ten people,
setting up a free website, or calling Operation Hope and
(49:14):
signing up to one MBB and or a whole financial
coaching and counseling or a smart business program. Just start somewhere. Okay,
So I'm going to give you now a peek into
ten businesses that you can start for under one thousand dollars. Again,
(49:35):
I'm really trying to make this really practical for you
and getting it at a level where you can pick
it up no matter who you are, where you are,
whether you have a full time, part time, and you
have a job. By the way, don't go quit your job,
start a business and being all this emotional stuff again,
don't give up your own shoes. You get some new
ones that make sure new make sure the new shoes fit.
(49:55):
Let your nine to five. If you're lucky to have
a great job, let your nine to five which has
helped insurance and benefits and all that stuff that your
nine to five job, financier, five to nine, dream rite
then down. Okay, businesses you can start for unto thousand
dollars examples. Here's some AI leverage future focused businesses content
(50:21):
plus AI micro agency. Use chat GPT, which I'm the
co chair of the AI Ethics Council with my buddy
Sam Altman, who's the CEO of Chat GPT. I use
chat GPT mostly I love it. Use chat GPT, Kenva
and cap cut to help small businesses create social media posts, captions,
(50:42):
and videos. Startup costs two hundred bucks, laptop software subscriptions.
AI enhanced enhances productivity, but human creativity plus local relationships
make this valuable. You're not going to be put out
of business, by the way, by a You're going to
be put out of business by somebody who can run AI,
(51:04):
by a business, or out of your job. That's another
podcast another day. I help do a whole series on AI.
UH number two AI Resume and career coaching services help
job seekers use AI tools to rewrite resumes, cover letters,
and prep with mock interview bots. Startup costs basically free,
(51:25):
just marketing and your time. AI is a tool, but
people still want human guidance and encouragement. This is a
really good business ledges that that one is like almost
anybody can do that and everybody, and it's gonna be
so needed. People know people, people are willing to accept AI.
They really have no clue what it is. Right nine
is my friend Van Jones would say nine percent of
(51:48):
black folks don't know a thing about AI, but nine
percent of white folks don't know a thing about AI either.
As equal opportunity to discrimination, we're all a little bit lost.
But the curious in the nosey and those who execute
on that nosiness win. Number three e commerce microstore with
AI marketing start a drop shipping drop shipping shop business
(52:13):
or Etsy digital production a product store. Use AI to
design product descriptions, logos, and ads. Startup costs by five
hundred dollars for samples, website and marketing. Number four AI
power tutoring, math, writing, eesl coding. Parents want tutors, but
(52:38):
you can pair your teaching with AI practice worksheets and quizes.
By the way, just if you're in the hood, go
to the suburbs, right. Just find folks who go to
places where there's a seven under credit score community, an
upwardly mobile community. Not saying that doesn't exist where you live,
by the way, I'm just saying this is the easy
thing for you to do. Go some place where you
have stable families, high credit scores, jobs, careers, but don't
(53:00):
have a lot of time, but they want the excellence
for their kids and become a tutor for their kids.
Startup costs virtually zero zoom zoom marketing, et cetera. Do
this virtually. That's also another great business. Number five. AI
driven research and data assistance for local businesses. Example, help
(53:21):
a local realtor or contractor pull neighborhood trends, pull neighborhood
trends right, market reports and customer insights with AI tools.
Startup costs three hundred bucks. Just marketing yourself basically AI
resistant immune trades and services. Okay, these are things that
(53:42):
you can do that AI won't put you out of
business doing in three to five years. Mobile card detailing
and car washing mentioned that earlier. AI cannot wash your
car at least not yet. Robots aren't here yet, always
in demand, hard to automate scale and it's scalable. Her
costs as I said earlier, about five hours for supplies
(54:03):
seven uh residential cleaning services. I love this business. AI
can can schedule, but can't scrub toilets. It is immune automation. Okay,
starter calls tune in bucks for supplies. My mother did
this business, by the way, back in growing up a
competing she she was a janitor right, she had a
(54:28):
janitorial janitorial business, and then she was a she was
a contract enitor for the school I grew up in.
Was like, come on, mam, I see you at home.
Why are you here? She like when she got laid
off from Ecdonald Doullad's aircraft between contracts. She was a
fabricator for seats and in airplanes seats I fly on today.
By the way, when she got laid off because she
(54:49):
was between contracts, she wouldn't go and get on welfare.
She goes to my school and find out whatever job
was available when she'd take it because she wanted to
be near me. Drove me nuts, But my god, I'm
so thankful. My mother loved me into excellence. She was
a security guard, she was a janitor. She was like, Mom,
you just you had a different uniform every week. She's like, yeah,
but I'm still your mother. I'm gonna kick your butt.
(55:11):
You mess up. Imagine, can't get out, can't get away
from your mom. I just love my mother. Just tell
me she loved me every day. Make sure you tell
your kid they loved every day. Number eight lawng cair
yard work service mowing heads, trimming, snow shoveling, depending on
the region. Started. Costs about one thousand dollars with used equipment.
(55:34):
Number nine. This was a great business. I know a
good person who did like twenty seven thousand dollars a
month on this business. Mobile notary service with remote work
and legal paperwork still requiring signatures. Notaries are in demand.
Startup costs. I just used notary two weeks ago. By
the way, it started costs two hundred bucks. Three hundred
dollars for certification and supplies. This is a great business.
(55:56):
By the way, notaries. Number ten. Personal fitness and wellness coaches.
My wife is a wellness expert. By the way, Shatra,
this is a hybrid model. So AI can give exercise plans,
but it can't motivate people like human coaches. I get
a lot of knowledge from AI, but my wife is
the absolute expert that I trust because I know she
(56:18):
cares about me and she's able to communicate in the
way that i'm that I can hear and listen. Again,
once again, AI is not going to replace you. Somebody
who's using AI and technology will add. AI can give
AI generated custom plans as a bonus for clients startup
costs which is certifications which are really optional and mostly marketing.
(56:42):
So some of these ideas lean into the AI future.
Some are immune to AI. Either way, you can start
these with less than a thousand dollars and build something sustainable.
The key isn't just choosing the idea, is taking the
first step today. This is John O'Briant. This is money
and wealth. This is Ben How do you build a business?
(57:03):
Just start? PhDs are good, PhDs are better. This is
a silvil rights movement, from civil rights to silvil rights,
from the streets to the suites, from protesting to partnering.
I'll see you the finish line. I'm so inspired by
this time and your place in it. Let's go tell
(57:28):
your friends about this podcast. Subscribe today John O'Brien I'm
Out Money and Wealth with John O'Brien is a production
(57:48):
of the Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts from
the Black Effect Podcast Network, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The dep
Host
John Hope Bryant
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