Entrepreneurs: Stop Negotiating Against Yourself-The $2 Billion Deal Strategy with Todd Drowlette + Others

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following is a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
What's the one decision that can make you millions or
costs you everything? Today we're talking to founders who stood
in that moment and made the call.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
I'm Richard Gearhart.

Speaker 4 (00:19):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, and we're your hosts today.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Welcome to Passage to Profit, the Road to Entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Our guest today is Todd Draulette, a self made millionaire
and ane star who's closed over seventeen hundred commercial real
estate deals, and later in the show he'll reveal the
one negotiation mistake that can cost entrepreneurs millions.

Speaker 4 (00:41):
We also have two amazing presenters. I really do want
to hear what these people are gonna say myself. So
we have Chris Klein, COO and co founder of Bitcoin IRA,
and he's going to tell us the true story of
bitcoin in twenty twenty six. I really got to hear this.
And then this amazing woman, jessics Lawarski, who found it
Ignite Reading and is helping kids learn how to read,

(01:04):
and that is a real problem unbelievably, but yes it is.
So I'm so excited to get into the show today.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Okay, and on top of all this, we're going to
be talking about Taylor Swift and a trademark dispute over
her signature. But first, it's time for your new business journey.
And I want to ask the panel, when you look back,
what was the one decision or moment that most changed
the trajectory of your business? And what did it cost
you to make this decision? So, Todd, welcome to the show.

(01:32):
What was the one decision that you made that changed
the trajectory of your business?

Speaker 5 (01:37):
I wouldn't say there's one.

Speaker 6 (01:38):
I say almost every day you're constantly making decisions. I
think people think there's like a certain point where the
world perceives you as successful and it's like, oh, just
on Easy Street. But like as an entrepreneur, every day
you have to make the difficult decisions. If you're the boss,
everybody brings all the problems that they can't solve or
don't want to solve to you. So every day you're
making new decisions. And anybody who tells you what the

(02:00):
hundred percent certainty that they're certain of anything, they're making
it up because part of being an entrepreneur you have
to everyone has to believe that you're a hundred percent
certain and this is what we're doing. I heard a
great quote, like I'm not a huge fan of On Schwarzenegger,
but he said once he said, if you have a
plan B, you don't really have a plan A.

Speaker 5 (02:16):
He's like, you need to have a plan.

Speaker 6 (02:17):
A, one, two, three, four, So you need to know
where you're going and just keep going. So in my organizations,
people need to know this is how we're going. But
I've never I'm not a planner, and when I decide
we're doing something, this is what we're doing.

Speaker 5 (02:28):
We figured out as we go.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
That's great. Yeah, Chris, welcome to the show.

Speaker 7 (02:32):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I
couldn't agree more. It's every day right, and entrepreneurs at
the end of the day, we like our masters of
jumping off the cliff and building the airplane before we
land or crash. I suppose for me, I think we
were in alternatives within the retirement vehicles for three or
four years and the challenge came across the desk should
we try out bitcoin? And this was twenty sixteen, so bitcoin.

(02:53):
Nobody in this room probably knew what it was. I
barely knew what it was. The price of bitcoin was
less than one hundred dollars and it was crazy, and
we made a decision board and I to say, you know,
let's just make a hard pivot because it was a
new territory that wasn't saturated with over cost and advertising
and other things. And what it cost us the domain
was four hundred dollars bitcoin irate dot com and I
remember that was the most I ever paid for a

(03:13):
domain in my career. So you got off chief, Yeah,
I got off way cheap. And then there was legacy
parts of the business. So usually one of the things
I learned over the years is the business will always grow.
Not everybody will keep up with the growth of the business.
And there we lost some staff that didn't believe in
the pivot Hindsight twenty twenty for them. But obviously that's
part of the process. Not everybody's going to buy into
your dream, and you have to accept that.

Speaker 8 (03:33):
As an entrepreneur.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
So when you're an entrepreneur, you're facing this decision about
whether to get into a new market or adopt a
new technology like bitcoin. I mean, what advice would you
give to them in making that kind of decision?

Speaker 7 (03:47):
Close your eyes and jump and you won't regret it.
I mean, you're gonna make bad decisions. I'm sure, I'm sure.
Talk can you even speak of with some of the deals.
You have so many deals, this has to have been
deals that you lost money on or that you regret
getting into. And so you have to have a kind
of like golfers will say, you have to have a
goldfish brain. You're already moving past whatever just happened seconds
ago or days ago to get to the next challenge
and take it on.

Speaker 6 (04:07):
In commercial real estate, there's a saying, you know, forty
years ago, the used called a Bloomberg lease. It was
three pages long. Now most pages, most lisas are seventy
eighty ninety pages. They say, alas is a sum total
of your bad experiences.

Speaker 5 (04:19):
Sorry, talking.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Right, exactly, absolutely, Jessica. What was the one decision that
you made that changed the trajectory of your business?

Speaker 9 (04:30):
Thanks so much, Richard, Thank you, Elizabeth, and it's really
great to be here with you, Todd, and with you Chris.
Oh my goodness. Narrowing it down to one decision when
I agree, there are There are so many in being
a leader, And what comes to mind for me is
that I began incubating night reading within the national nonprofit
that I was running, and very quickly recognized that it
needed to spin out and be a for profit, standalone

(04:54):
company in order for us to build out the tech
infrastructure and scale to meet the needs of our nations
literacy crisis. So I found incredible impact investors who believed
in our mission. And then, as Chris said, I took
the leap, which was terrifying, especially because I'm a single parent,
and I left the comfort and stability of the role

(05:17):
that I was in to follow my passion and do
something to help kids.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
So what were you feeling when you made that decision?
You said you were terrified. Tell us more.

Speaker 9 (05:26):
Oh, I was scared out of my mind. I was like,
Oh my gosh, what if this doesn't work? What if
I have just walked away from stability and a higher
paying job in order to pursue my passion. And I
just had to trust my gut and my heart.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
Elizabeth, when we started Gear Media Studios and we started
the accounting piece, which is like, oh, man, you know,
there's so many pieces to this. We had Gear Media
broadcast protections already for this radio show and everything, so
we just decided to roll the studio into that and
have our accountant do all the work for us that
she was already doing. Plus this so I didn't have

(06:07):
to start with a brand new accountant and brand new
set up quickly and all that. So I think maybe
further down the road we might split it out as
Gear Media Studios, but for right now, it just took
a huge burden off.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah, great leveraging resources that you've got, and what prompted
that decision.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
I just was overwhelmed. And you know what, it's not
my favorite thing to do, quite honestly for me.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
This week, we're going to talk about hiring our first assistant.
When the law firm started, I was literally working out
of the attic of our house, and we had the
attic remodeled and we had an office set up and
so I could have an assistant. And this was about
six months in, and as an entrepreneur, you get used
to doing everything yourself all the time, and for me,

(06:51):
it was just amazing to have somebody to help out.
But I felt really uncomfortable hiring somebody because I wasn't
sure if I could afford to pay them, and I
wasn't sure if we're going to have enough revenue to
cover the cost. But it turned out to be a
good decision for us in any case. Now it's time
for our amazing guest, Todd Drawlett doesn't just close deals.
He turns commercial real estate into much watch television with

(07:14):
over two billion in transactions, seventeen hundred plus deals, and
a hit A and E series that captures real negotiations, exploding, collapsing,
and clawing their way.

Speaker 8 (07:25):
Back to life.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Todd has built a multimillion dollar empire by outworking and
out maneuvering everyone in the room. Today we're talking to
the man who says, in business there are no scripts,
no excuses, and no mercy. If you're not ready to win, he.

Speaker 5 (07:42):
Should be my publicist. That was like the greatest introduction ever.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Jeez, what was the most intense, high pressure moment you
faced in your career?

Speaker 5 (07:51):
So those were earlier on.

Speaker 6 (07:53):
As I've been doing this so many times and for
so long, it just doesn't affect you the same way.
Like I was talking to somebody that you seem unaffected
by everything, and I'm just very baseline all the time,
I don't react, but negotiating for a living, I always
tell people, and like people have tells, it's like when
I'm talking to somebody, I'm looking at how they look.
I'm listening to what they're saying. The man in what
you're saying it is there a slight hesitation? Is there

(08:15):
a pattern differential and what they're saying? So I used
to get nervous like anything, but it's like anything you
do something a thousand times, two thousand times, it kind
of just wears off.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
But I mean that's kind of part of the goal though,
right is you do want to get comfortable working in
routines and making decisions. That's sort of the bread and
butter of the business, and then the growth comes from
executing consistently but also taking calculated.

Speaker 6 (08:39):
Dress Yeah, it's one hundred percent taking calculator risks because
there's no guarantee in.

Speaker 5 (08:44):
Life about anything.

Speaker 6 (08:45):
So from a real estate standpoint, I know it inside
and out, and I don't really I don't think about it.
But that's why it's like, Oh, we started a TV
production company, going to networks and trying to convince them, oh,
there's one hundred shows on TV about residential real estate
and agents and flipping, but there should be a docu
series about this trillion dollar industry. You woun't believe how
people are, like, Nope, nope, boring sounds boring. And then ironically,

(09:08):
when we got the show, Barbara Corkran from Shark Tank
was actually.

Speaker 5 (09:11):
Like a supporter and was like, oh, I'm really looking
forward to watching the show.

Speaker 6 (09:14):
And she told the story when they were doing first
season Shark Tank, all our friends are like, Barbara, no
one's going to care about business or watching a bunch
of shows, and she's like, here we are, you know,
nineteen seasons later.

Speaker 4 (09:24):
So yeah, well we met her when we first were
starting this and we told her we were doing a
show about entrepreneurs and IP and she looked at me
and she went boring. Well I feel well, here we
are almost eight years later. Sorry, Barbara.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
You reinvented yourself right when you went from commercial real
estate to media production, right, And what advice do you
have for entrepreneurs who are wanting to reinvent themselves and
take themselves to the next stage.

Speaker 6 (09:54):
So commercial real estate has always been like my profit center,
so to speak. So I've made enough money from commercial
real estate that I could do like Passion projects. So
I own a software company, the TV production company. I'm
just somebody that my whole life. If I decide I'm
going to do something, I just say, hey, I'm doing this,
Like if I could give advice to entrepreneurs. So many
people try to convince other people to do something like hey,

(10:15):
I need to raise money, or I need to do this,
or I need to do that. Hey I was thinking
about doing this thing. I've always just said I'm doing
this thing and I'm starting now. Do you want to
be a part of it. If not, I might touch
base with you in three months or never again. Everybody
wants a proven sure thing and then they want to invest.
It's like nobody needs you then. So one piece of
advice I would give is just start doing it. And

(10:36):
if you have to do it on the smallest scale
to prove that it works, then do it.

Speaker 4 (10:40):
Todd, I have a question for you. Did you build
your brand before you went to get on television, before
you pitch the A and E Show. Had you done
a lot on social media and with the website and
trying to build a brand for yourself in the media.

Speaker 6 (10:53):
For social media, like I hate social media. Like I know,
everyone says you have to do it, Like I get
hold like along doing social medi When I was growing up,
I'll be forty five the in a month. When I
was growing up, there was like the truth and then
there were lies, right, But like the world we live in,
everybody say is like, oh, well that's my truth or
that's this, and like with social media, Oh you're not
a tax attorney and you're not an accountan or CPA,

(11:16):
but you're.

Speaker 5 (11:16):
A tax strategist.

Speaker 6 (11:18):
So there's all these people on social media that are
complete charlatans that tell people to do all these things
that are like, if not felonies, they're ridiculous and they'll
take one tiny little piece of truth and then they
take all this garbage.

Speaker 5 (11:30):
So I just I'm not a fan of social media.

Speaker 6 (11:32):
So I have one, but I'm told constantly I need
to some more time working on it.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
Did you have to build a brand? Did you have
to work on building?

Speaker 5 (11:41):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (11:41):
Sorry, so what did you do to build that brand?

Speaker 10 (11:43):
Then?

Speaker 4 (11:43):
If you hate social media, which I agree with you,
I don't care for it either.

Speaker 6 (11:47):
Well just built So building the brand was just doing
the work. So no network would have given two cares
at all about me, except so a lot of the
people that are on TV today in the real estate world,
they weren't real estate agents. But because the Buriered entry
of real est state is solo, you go take a
course and bam, people go, oh, you're a real estate expert.
I'm like, really, you went past a seventy five hour

(12:07):
course and now you're an expert. So because I have
the track record, you know, I was the youngest exclusive
Starbucks broker in the country when I was twenty two.
I worked with a lot of big global brands, so
that helped. And then just getting the resume. If I
went and pitched the show ten years ago, they would
have been like, get out of here.

Speaker 5 (12:24):
So it was literally just the.

Speaker 6 (12:25):
Resume of their like this guy seems nuts, so but
maybe he has, you know, the bandwidth to do it.
And then the show did well and they're like, oh,
I'll be.

Speaker 4 (12:32):
Dip one more question on that, and then I handed
off to Richard. Did you take any presentation skills training
or media training before you tried to get on TV.

Speaker 6 (12:41):
I was born in Saranac Lake, New York, which is
a very very small place in upstate New York and
there was a woman called Sister Carolyn. She was a
Catholic nun and she had a program called Summer Sampler,
and my mother put my brother and I in that
program and it was improv So from the time I
was three years old, we were doing improv So I
never where most people have a fear of public speaking.

(13:03):
From the time I was three. You know, I remember
this woman who's the director, used to say, just say anything,
be like, here's where we're starting, here's where we're ending.
This as a script. It doesn't matter if you hesitate,
if you talk. So a taught you to not be
afraid of speaking. It also taught you to pay attention,
which I've realized I haven't done a good job of
answering your questions, Like the first question answer, I'm like

(13:23):
a politician. I go, yeah, say whatever I feel like.
But so it taught you to like listen to people
and react and be on your feet.

Speaker 5 (13:31):
So I did a lot of that.

Speaker 6 (13:32):
And then negotiating for a living, I have to literally
be listening to what you're.

Speaker 5 (13:36):
Saying, what you're not saying, and so many deals fall apart.

Speaker 6 (13:39):
I always say, every good commercial real estate deal dies
three times before it happens, so I have to anticipate.
I'man anticipating what people are saying. I'm anticipating what they're thinking.
So it's just integrated. So it's like, oh, go to
a TV show. It's like, well, it's not like a
standard reality show. We're an actual docu series. So they're
just filming what's actually happening. So I don't need to
be an actor. And and if you do enough interviews

(14:01):
and things, you just sort of you know, I used
to get nervous, and I'm like, it doesn't matter, Like
if people like me don't like me, who cares.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Yeah, Speaking of negotiation, what are your top negotiation strategies
for entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs are negotiating all the time. What do
you think makes for a good negotiation.

Speaker 6 (14:20):
That's kind of a loaded question, but I would say
number one, if you're just talking about we're in the
middle of the negotiation.

Speaker 5 (14:26):
If you want something, to say it and then don't.

Speaker 6 (14:28):
Speak till the other person speaks, because so many people
will negotiate against themselves. They'll go, oh, i'll pay five
hundred thousand, I mean maybe five point fifty, and then
they're staring the person like I never talk. I'll just
let the person keep talking and let them negotiate against themselves,
and then when they get done, I'm like, okay, now
we're gonna start from wherever you just ended up.

Speaker 5 (14:45):
People do that all the time.

Speaker 6 (14:46):
People don't like silence, so that's a huge thing where
people just screw up and negotiating. They also will be
too friendly and they'll just put all their cards on
the table and go, well, I'm gonna be honest, or
I tell people all the time, I'm a very direct,
straightforward person, but well, I'm just going to give you
my bottom line, Like, don't do that. Never do that negotiation,
because no one ever believes it's really your bottom line.
So people can kill deals before they even start because

(15:08):
they just put their best foot.

Speaker 5 (15:10):
Forward and go, I'm an honest person.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Here we go and be a good negotiator. You kind
of have to hold some things back, right. You have
to have a strategy going in understanding what it is
that you want as what an outcome is, and then
take three steps back and start from there.

Speaker 5 (15:25):
That's the biggest thing.

Speaker 6 (15:26):
So many people start going after whether it's a goal,
a negotiation, whatever, and they don't even know what their
actual goal or end is.

Speaker 5 (15:33):
So you need to know what are your absolute deal breakers.

Speaker 6 (15:35):
And I always say never threaten something you won't do, Like,
don't say if you do this, I'm going to punch
you in the face. You better be willing to punch
that guy three times your size and the face, because
if you don't, nobody will ever believe.

Speaker 5 (15:44):
Anything you say the rest of your life.

Speaker 6 (15:46):
So if you're in a negotiation you say I want
this raise, and if you don't give it to me,
I'm leaving. You better be prepared to leave because if
you stay, you should have just left because you'll get
treated terribly for the rest of the.

Speaker 5 (15:57):
Time you're there.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
How do you balance being as active in your career
as you are with ordinary life, family life, having some
sort of balanced life, or do you not have a
balanced life.

Speaker 6 (16:10):
I didn't have a balance life for a very very
long time. I was like the stereotypical entrepreneur that I'm
just working eighty ninety one hundred hours a week and
I'll worry about my life later. And then when I
turned thirty, I had my first panic attack. I thought
I was having a heart attack driving to a showing,
which I've done thousands of times, and for ten years
I literally had at the worst, I was having six

(16:32):
fol blown panic attacks a day that could have last upwards.

Speaker 5 (16:35):
Of twenty minutes.

Speaker 6 (16:35):
So literally you can't catch your breath, your heart's racing.
Like some people sweat, I don't. I didn't sweat from
But it was just like I would describe it if
you went to the top of iHeart Studios and held
me off by my ankle over the edge. Whatever way
you'd feel is how is how it feels. And I
grew up and I always thought to myself as somebody
who was mentally tough. I can do anything, like I
can literally take on the world. So it's really for

(16:58):
someone who's an entrepreneur, it's just a mind bang because
you're like, oh my god, my brain is giving out
on me.

Speaker 5 (17:04):
This is the thing that I make my living, this
is my identity, this is who I am. You're good
or giving out on me?

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, you're losing control. How did you handle that? How
did you address it?

Speaker 6 (17:13):
So when I went to the doctor and the doctor said, oh,
well you're thirty now, so your brain chemistry just changed.
That happens when I believed it to be true that
was my first mistake because they started giving you different drugs,
and you try different drugs and terrible side effects and
it's not really helping. The problem is if you're having
a panic attack. I've learned now it's like I do meditation.
So in two years, I haven't had it. I haven't

(17:33):
taken any medicine in two years, so I've beat the
panic attacks. But a very famous book, How to Win
Friends and Influence People, by del Carnegie. I recommend it
to everybody, especially negotiating. A lot of people don't realize.
He wrote a second book, and that book was called
how to Stop Worrying and Start Living. In that book,
actually there were so many people back in the day
that had panic attacks and anxiety disorders, but they didn't
call it that.

Speaker 5 (17:53):
They didn't know what it was.

Speaker 6 (17:55):
So but when they're describing me, you're like, yep, that
was all the problem all those people were having. So
there was a thing in the book that was kind
of an AHA moment for me, and then I started
meditating and making sure I was sticking to my exercise regiment.
It said, if you realize that panic and anxiety comes
from your subconscious, it's basically just an alarm that's trying
to tell you there's something in your life that's out
of balance or out of whack. There's like something that

(18:16):
you're walking through every day that you're ignoring or not addressing,
that you need to address and change. So it says
if you know that it's coming from your subconscious, and
your conscious always overrules your subconscious, that essentially, when that
panic starts to happen, if I told you white House,
gray Elephant, you can't think of those two thoughts at
the exact same moment. You can think white House, gray Elephant,

(18:37):
gray Elephant, white House, but you can't think of those
two things at the same time.

Speaker 5 (18:40):
If you realize that.

Speaker 6 (18:41):
And then you know your body's trying to warn you
when that's coming. If you tell you like I would
tell myself, peace and calm, Peace and calm, and I
breathe in slowly, hold for three seconds, breathe out in
the morning, like you know, make sure I'm like loose.
Eventually it'll be like twenty minutes and fifteen minutes and
ten minutes, five minutes. Eventually it gives up and it
just and then eventually you can retrain and reprogram your brain.

(19:03):
But when people tell you, oh, your brain chemistry just
fundamentally changed.

Speaker 5 (19:07):
I don't think that's true.

Speaker 6 (19:08):
It's not true because then you don't try to you
don't look for the things. That's just the pharmaceutical industry
basically just trying to say, take this pill, take this pill,
but you're not solving the underlying problem. It's like in business.
If something's going wrong in your business, you can't just
close your eyes and go it'll be okay. You have
to go what's the problem and fix the problem.

Speaker 4 (19:25):
So Tom, you're going kind of deep here, which is
really cool. I appreciate that. I think a lot of
people suffer that, but they don't want to talk about
it and they don't know how to fix it. And
I love that you did that. Is there something about
yourself that you don't normally talk about that you'd think.

Speaker 5 (19:40):
You can now?

Speaker 6 (19:41):
I have people tell me I'm interesting, and I laugh
because I'm like, I don't think I'm not interesting of
a person, But a lot of people are worried what
other people think about them, and I'm just I'm not
like Unfortunately my well a being in a business I'm in,
you have to have very thick skin, and then in
the property management business. Tenants complain about everything every day
and it's like this never ending thing. So if I
internalized every criticism or every praise, like I would either

(20:03):
have a huge ego or I would be jumping off
a building. So I just kind of operate based on
what do I want to accomplish, what do I want
to do, and that's my barometer. If people like it
and they think it's cool, that's awesome. If they don't
like it, it's like I'm doing it anyway.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
So that's good. That's a great way to live, right.

Speaker 6 (20:19):
But I will say that the panic thing a lot.
I think the stigma's gone away over the last like
ten years, or at least it's a lot less. But
when I tell people, I don't think I've ever told
that story, and I had somebody be like, you know,
I've had that, or my brother's had it or my
So the more I talk about it, and the more
people talk about it, if people want to talk about it,
that's the first step to figuring out how to fix
that problem.

Speaker 5 (20:38):
Because living with panic is terrible.

Speaker 4 (20:41):
Well, and it's amazing because you're super successful and you
think that people having panic attacks are like, I'm not
going to be able to pay my rent next month.
But it's everybody, right, It doesn't matter how successful you are.
It still happens to all.

Speaker 5 (20:53):
Of us, and it comes out of nowhere.

Speaker 6 (20:54):
So it's like when it just gets triggered, you don't
The worst part about anxiety is a lot of times
you don't consciously know what it's coming from, because it's
coming from your subconscious So it's the process of figuring
out why is this happening to me?

Speaker 5 (21:07):
And that's doing the hard work of figuring that out.
But I think I.

Speaker 6 (21:11):
Defended it off for so long because I'm a serial
entrepreneur and I run multiple businesses. I could stay busy
for so long until my body was just obviously one
day like nope, Like you're not superhuman, welcome to humanity.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
Well, I have a story about anxiety that I'll share
with our audience at the end of the program. But
coming up, we're going to be talking with Todd and
later we're going to hear about future proofing your retirement
and how to make your kids more confident Readers. Passage
to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Kerhart will be back
right after this commercial break.

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Speaker 1 (23:43):
Now back to Passage to Profit once again, Richard and
Elizabeth Gerhardt and.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
Our special guest Todd Drellette.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
So, Tod, you were telling us during the break you're
going to begin your second season of your Any TV show.
Tell us a little bit about the show and what
happens on it. For our viewers who haven't seen it.

Speaker 6 (24:00):
It's called The Real Estate Commission Arizona A and E Network.
It's the first and only show about commercial real estate.
Unlike typical reality shows, it's a docu series, so it
follows me and my team at Titan Commercial Realty Group
doing actual deals with real clients. So it just kind
of follows that, but it really gives you the behind
the scenes. So our second season we start filming in

(24:22):
a couple of weeks.

Speaker 5 (24:23):
If there are business.

Speaker 6 (24:24):
Owners, business executives expanding looking to buy investment properties anywhere
across the country, if they want to be a part
of the show, they can apply at the Real Estate
Commission dot com.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
You sponsor a business camp. Tell us a little bit
about that.

Speaker 6 (24:35):
So it's called the Titans of Tomorrow. It's a free
business camp we do every year. It's a two day camp.
We do it at Sianna University, which is my alma
mater in Loudonville, New York, which is the suburbs of
the state capitol. For a lot of people who don't
know in Albany. It's a two day camp and essentially
there's teams of five the first day, we give them
crash courses and everything entrepreneurship and running a business.

Speaker 5 (24:55):
Generally it's kids are from like.

Speaker 6 (24:56):
New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, but they can technically come
from anyone. Why it's open into two hundred and fifty
kids from ninth grade to seniors in high school, and
then they can apply at the business camp starting right now.
It's a one page application at the Real Estate Commission
dot Com.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Todd draw Let, a and E star who's closed over
seventeen hundred commercial real estate deals.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
Where can people find you?

Speaker 6 (25:18):
On the A and E network or Yeah, or at
the Real Estate Commission dot Com. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm
on Facebook, toddrell out, I'm the only Toddrellet in the country.

Speaker 4 (25:27):
Now it is time for AI use cases Business Owners Roundtable.
I am going to ask each of our guests one
way that they're using AI in their business and then
we'll have a discussion. So I am going to start
with Todd Drawlette with the Real Estate Commission dot Com.
What is one way that you are using AI in
your business?

Speaker 6 (25:46):
I use AI to basically streamline leases, drafting leases and
drafting letter of intent for non binding documents. That you
use as a basis for a lease or purchase contract.
I use it to summarize things for me.

Speaker 4 (25:59):
Okay, excellent, So Chris Klin with Bitcoinira dot Com.

Speaker 7 (26:04):
We have a standard in our business that every department,
so whether it's finance, whether it's sales, revenue marketing, every
single department has to have one AI initiative every quarter
that they begin. In the end, my most recent one
that I'm probably most excited about right now is we
actually it's not my department's the technology. There's such a
thing called AI police for the AI. So when you
have so much AI working in your business where you've

(26:26):
got code being built and calls being reviewed and contracts
being and all these other moving parts, that there's now
police that can watch the robots, watch the robots to
keep them honest and make sure that they're doing and
which I think is just absolutely mind blowing to me.

Speaker 4 (26:39):
Jessica Swerski with igniteedash reading dot com. What's one way
you're using AI.

Speaker 9 (26:45):
When we think about leveraging AI, it is about making
the humans dramatically better at what they are doing. And
we are imagining the ways that AI can analyze our
tutoring session data quickly flow where kids are struggling, prepare
tutors to show up with the exact right instruction to

(27:05):
support kids because we want them empowered by AI. And
then we're also currently leveraging AI. This is so exciting
to extend the opportunities for kids to have targeted instruction
outside of that synchronous one to one engagement with the tutor.

Speaker 4 (27:21):
Well, Richard Gearhart, what's one way you're using AI in
your business?

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Well, this last week I had a complete and total
dumpster fire with AI. I really wanted to throw my
laptop against the wall. I was trying to analyze our
firm's profitability and get some performance metrics, and so I
put a lot of information our financial statements, the lawyer timesheets,
invoice records into Microsoft Copilot so that I could have

(27:50):
Microsoft Copilot analyze the data. And it kept coming back
with wrong answers. I mean it was even wrong compared
to the information that I put in there in the
first place, like what is the revenue number? And it
would say, okay, well here's your revenue and then but
I'm looking at the financial statements and our revenue number

(28:10):
is different, and so it just got really frustrating for me,
and you know, it just says to me, it's it's
not there yet. And part of it is probably I
didn't write the prompts in the right way, but I
feel like the questions I were asking that it should
have been able to give me a good answer.

Speaker 4 (28:28):
So yeah, So for me, this is Elizabeth. That was
Richard with Gearhart Law. This is Elizabeth Garmedia Studios. So
I use it every day. I use Gemini and Chat
EPTM perplexity, and usually perplexity is in the cloud model. Lately,
I've been using Google Gemini more than anything else. It's
the one that's done the latest upgrades. I think it's
better than but I do have to still use Chat

(28:50):
for some things because I've been writing these blogs and
I put them through them and said, can you optimize
these for LLLM search and give me the FAQs and
give me something I can put Schema code with for
LLM search. And I had like some little jokes and
like a you know, kind of a fun blog but
still serious, and Google Gemini just completely sanitized the whole thing.

(29:12):
I was like, oh, but Chat reipt left my extra
little jokes and stuff in there, so you really I
think you have to use them for different things. Google
Gemini is getting to know me a little too well, though,
because it like gives me these personalized answers like, oh, well,
for instance, if you and your meetup co host Sonya
Sacha for your next meetup on podcasting one oh one

(29:34):
wanted to do this, And I'm like, I didn't ask
you anything about Sonya or the meetup or anything. You
just brought that up.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, I mean recently chat CHIPETI said something like, I
think your son.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Sean would like this. I was like, I don't remember
putting Sean's name on.

Speaker 4 (29:49):
Our podcast though. Yeah, so he knows we have two
kids because they've both been on our podcast, and it
brings up the kids to me too.

Speaker 8 (29:56):
This is why you say please and things.

Speaker 9 (30:00):
Just looking at how quickly Google Gemini, for example, or
like the latest version of Claude, and it's mind blowing
what AI can do. And I look at that as
so much opportunity, and we have to make sure that
our young people are ready to harness that opportunity because
this is not going away and the job market is

(30:23):
going to be how well you can manage a team
of robots, right?

Speaker 4 (30:28):
That is so true. And we've been saying on this show,
I don't know for the last year or so. You
got to learn it now because what I'm hearing now
is with the job market changing, the people that aren't
using AAR are the ones that are losing their jobs.

Speaker 5 (30:42):
Right.

Speaker 4 (30:42):
You know what that new employment's going to be, don't you.
It's going to be making the parts and fixing those robots,
because there are going to be jobs, just different jobs, right,
And no matter what the jobs are, kids have to
learn how to read in order to do those jobs. Absolutely,
and we will get to that. Anyway. This has been
AI Use Cases Business Owners round Table. You're listening to

(31:04):
the Passage to Profit show. We will be right back.

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Speaker 1 (33:07):
Passage to Profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Quick shout out to our friends at WMOX ten ten
am in Meridian, Missouri. Thanks for listening, and if you're
new to Passage to Profit, it's a top rank entrepreneurial
podcast and radio show heard in thirty eight markets. It's
a place where founders share what really works. Now it's
time for IP news. Here's a surprising fact. Your signature

(33:36):
can be worth millions if someone designs a logo that
looks close to it. That alone can stop a federal trademark.
In today's Intellectual property news, Taylor Swift's company successfully pressured
a betting manufacturer to abandon its application for the trademark
Swift Home. Kathy Home had applied to register Swift Home

(33:57):
for pillows, mattresses, and sheets, but Taylor Swift's company, TAS
Rights Management, filed an opposition with the US Patent and
Trademark Office, arguing the cursive Swift in the proposed logo
closely resembled her trademarked signature and would likely cause customers confusion.

(34:17):
Shortly after that filing, the company walked away from the application,
and that.

Speaker 4 (34:22):
My friends, is the power of trademark enforcement. She obviously
has a very active team looking out for because the
trademark application was filed, it hadn't even gone very far
in the process, and they caught it very early. According
to the filing, Taylor Swift owns federal trademarks covering her
name on products including clothing and bed linens. So when

(34:42):
a company tries to register a similar brand, her watchdogs
catch it, and if it has a stylized signature look
like her signature, the legal issue becomes what's called likelihood
of confusion. So people may think that these are her
betting products, or that she endorsed this brand, and she didn't,
and she protects her brand foraciously. So there you go.

Speaker 6 (35:04):
My signature is so terrible. I couldn't make any claims
for anything.

Speaker 8 (35:08):
According to Jessica, my ice nature is also terrible.

Speaker 9 (35:11):
I can help both of you with handwriting.

Speaker 7 (35:13):
We had something similar Big when I Ray, because we
became like the Kleenex or the band aid, and so
it was very It's been very difficult to get and
hold that one because people will say, what, it's the
product itself, And when you're dealing with Big One and
you're talking to the trademark office that it's like heads
are spinning.

Speaker 9 (35:29):
So yeah, Well, meanwhile, you can't trademark ignite reading because
the word ignite is like the word imagination, and it's
too common leaders descriptive.

Speaker 4 (35:39):
So when you pick a name, you have to be
really careful. It's that's why Apple it's computers, but it
can't say computers in its name.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
Right, Well, you can say computers.

Speaker 8 (35:48):
You can trademark that.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
We're getting into the les trademark law doesn't require proof
of bad intent. It focuses on customer perception. And when
you're a global brand and a fourteen time Grammar winner
whose Airis Tour became the highest grossing concert tour in history,
your name is not just a name it's a commercial asset.
So Kathy's attorney stated that the company hadn't yet used

(36:12):
the disputed mark in commerce and decided it wasn't essential
to its business. But that tells you something important. When
the legal risk is high, sometimes the smartest move is
to step away.

Speaker 4 (36:22):
What's also interesting is that the companies had reportedly signed
a coexist agreement previously, but once the new logo resembled
Taylor Swift's actual signature, it was like, no, can't do that.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
And here's the takeaway for entrepreneurs. Before investing in branding,
you have to do the proper due diligence and analysis.
You want to make sure that the name is not
going to be confusingly similar to other trademarks out there,
and especially not Taylor Swift's. Trademarks and celebrity brands are
very aggressively protected. So if you're going to go up

(36:58):
against Taylor Swift, well you better have your ducks.

Speaker 4 (37:00):
In a row, because trademarks aren't just about words, right,
Their identity, endorsement and consumer.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
Trust very good.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
Now it is cryptocurrency guy Soving.

Speaker 8 (37:13):
Known as Matthew Brodrick.

Speaker 4 (37:14):
Yes I love them. Chris Klein with Bitcoin Ira is
going to tell us why we should buy bitcoin, are you.

Speaker 7 (37:26):
Well, I think that if you are a fan of
the future of cryptocurrency, and I'm sure you've probably seen
a couple more times than with people considering offering bitcoin
as part of the purchase for real estate. There's that
you talked about the reality shows, by the way, which
having lived in Los Angeles, I know when they're at
that restaurant, it's at like four o'clock in the morning,
and that's all paid actors around them, having breakfast or lunch.

(37:47):
It's all stage. So it's really cool. I can't wait
to check your show out. But there was the flipping
or million dollar listing here in New York where the
kid the guy offered like thirteen thousand bitcoin a long
time ago, and that would be billions upon billions for
a couple million dollar building. So it's just crazy what's
happened to it. I have the luxury and privilege to
sit at the crossroads of bitcoin and retirement, and in

(38:09):
our country today, we have a retirement crisis on our hands,
much like literacy crisis that Jessica's talking about, where only
half of Americans are actually even participating in a retirement
program in any way, shape or form with belt tightening
allowing corporations everywhere, because if anybody runs a P and L,
your most expensive part of your business is people, whether
it's their salaries or it's otherwise. And so there's places

(38:30):
where you've been health benefits or just I mean, I
don't know about the other entrepreneurs here.

Speaker 8 (38:34):
But we got insure.

Speaker 5 (38:35):
It makes you want to throw.

Speaker 8 (38:36):
And it's every year, right, thirteen percent increase, and I
wish I.

Speaker 5 (38:40):
Made those types of annual increases revenue.

Speaker 7 (38:43):
So what suffers is the retirement contribution match. And when
the contribution match isn't there, like pensions of yesteryear, the
incentive falls off. Plus we all feel rising cost. Inflation's cumulative,
you know, I was my favorite story about inflation is
it may be going down this year, but let's not
forget if you were working out. Let's say one year
you gained eight pounds, the next year you gained six pounds,
then you gained seven pounds, and then eight pounds. But man,

(39:06):
last year I lost five pounds. You're still fat because
it's cumulative, and you're gonna have to lose a lot
more weight to get back down to your original fighting weight.
And that's what inflation does to us over time, and
also in elasticity of goods.

Speaker 8 (39:17):
I mean, my wife will buy the.

Speaker 7 (39:19):
Twelve dozen cage free brown eggs because that's what we
eat now. Even though regular white eggs are going down
like to lower prices, other things are not. There's a
lot of inelasticity and pricing now. So it's a privilege
to be there. Because it's getting more expensive to retire,
people are worried about it more often than not more people.
We're an aging generation. The boomers are getting there, the
next generation is getting there. I'm turning forty one this year,

(39:40):
and i feel like I'm not even equipped for retirement
and to put in some retirement inside your retirement, some alternatives,
whether it's real estate, which we have a lot of
folks that do that, or gold and silver or land.
We even have a guy that does John Deer farm
tractors in his IRA account and leases them out to
local farms.

Speaker 5 (39:57):
Are you self directed IRAQ?

Speaker 8 (39:58):
Yes?

Speaker 7 (39:58):
Self directed, and so we were able to wedge in
a bitcoin ira back in twenty sixteen, and since then
we've grown to over two hundred thousand users in about
twelve billion in assets under custody. So I won't convince
you to buy a bitcoin, but if you do consider
the tax advantages of a retirement in general, that's how
you create generational wealth. It's how Peter Teal got a

(40:20):
five billion, seven billion dollars wroth ira is because he
used He put tucked his Facebook shares and his Uber
shares into his wroth ira settings. So often it's a
tool that the government gives us, and they take everything
to not use that one tool they give us as
just a real big disservice to ourselves.

Speaker 4 (40:36):
So can you put bitcoin into a roth Ira?

Speaker 7 (40:39):
Yes, ma'am, that's through us. That's what you can do,
and up to eighty five other cryptocurrencies.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
So tell us what is bitcoin? I don't understand cryptocurrency
or bitcoin any of that stuff, So maybe you could
explain it to me.

Speaker 7 (40:51):
Yeah, in the simplest way. It's a new way of
thinking about digital money. We've already seen the digitization of money,
right cash, I meany people have cash? I mean I
usually hold onto a couple two dollars bills to tip,
like the valet or the coat check.

Speaker 8 (41:05):
So typical currencies we know.

Speaker 7 (41:06):
It has been around thousands of years in different ways,
whether it's through barter and trade cavemen in the Roman times,
golden coinage started to come out. Then we went to
fiat currency, which is since nineteen seventy one, all the
dollars that are created by the Federal Reserve are no longer.
They're backed by the good faith and credit of the
United States, not by gold holding and held in depositories.

Speaker 8 (41:27):
And that's part of why the.

Speaker 7 (41:29):
Purchasing power of our dollar has gone down and the
cost of everything has gone up. If you look at
almost every chart from nineteen seventy one on, there's actually
a whole website about it, like past nineteen seventy one.
It shows all these charts of things that have gotten
worse or otherwise since we went off that standard. Bitcoin
brings us back. It was born during the Great Financial
Crisis of two thousand and eight, so I was just

(41:50):
getting out of college. So I'm also an entrepreneur born
from crisis because there were no corporate jobs, so we
had to do something different, and it came out as
a fixed supply currency that is not controlled by any
government or any national sovereignty. It is driven by consensus
by nodes and power and investors throughout the globe. There

(42:10):
are only be twenty one million bitcoin that ever exists,
and so if everybody has, if having one bitcoin at
some point will change your life because the scarcity shock
will continue to grow. And in fact, maybe your daughter
and my daughter might see the last one get mined,
but it will be about twenty one forty, so our
children will be old like eighties nine.

Speaker 5 (42:29):
However that bitcoin is will probably the most valuable one
that at.

Speaker 7 (42:31):
That point the last one, yeah, exactly, And so that's
that's in essence what bitcoin is. And then crypto. Just
to differentiate is other types of cryptocurrencies or tokens for
different utility. Ethereum is probably one you may have heard of.
It's the backbone of the future of the Internet. It's
a way where we'll probably get some of that privacy
and security back that we're looking for because we can
control our data.

Speaker 8 (42:52):
XRP is another one that you'll see all over social media.

Speaker 7 (42:55):
Is it will revolutionize digital banking. So right now we
all pay our employees once a month or every two weeks,
and we have to go through intermediaries, you know, the
payroll company.

Speaker 8 (43:05):
Those things.

Speaker 7 (43:05):
I envisioned a day where my daughter will work an
hour if she does work if she's not an entrepreneur,
and she'll get paid instantly because processes and transactions can
go at hypervelocity and they don't have to be slowed
down by old school banking regimes.

Speaker 4 (43:18):
There was a guy a few years ago, I don't
know if it was Bitcoin or ethereum or one of
the other ones. He lost his password and he had
four hundred and fifty thousand dollars and he couldn't get
it out.

Speaker 7 (43:28):
That is the beginnings of bitcoin. So the essence is
it's called a wallet and a seed phrase. So when
I send you bitcoin, you'll give me a wallet address,
which is kind of like me giving your email address
I send you, but you don't give me your password
to your email. And so the key is the password
to the email, and it's a series of twenty four
to twenty five words, and they look a lot like
those USB drives or what you put photos on. And

(43:50):
so one of the stories is a wife here in
Jersey found one in a drawer and was cleaning out
the drunk drawer and tossed it and there was about
four hundred and fifty thousand at that time, probably now
fourteen twenty million dollars. So the guy actually bought the
dump that he knew it went to to try to
hunt down his bitcoin ledger. Those are the scary stories
that you catch that are in the headlines, and so

(44:12):
that there are bitcoins that'll never be found again. So
like that will that will always sit in this.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Some bitcoin though it sounds so risky because I've followed
it over a period of time and it's like one
day it's up and then the next day it's crashing.
I mean, is that really a sensible place for people
to put their money?

Speaker 7 (44:28):
It's went in doubt zoom ount mentality. So in the
last ten years, bitcoin is up sixteen thousand percent, and
I don't know any other asset class that's done that,
And well probably I wouldn't be surprised. By twenty thirty five,
twenty forty, you'll be talking about seven hundred and fifty
thousand million dollar bitcoins.

Speaker 8 (44:43):
Volatility is there.

Speaker 7 (44:45):
It's really Bitcoin didn't invent volatility, it just exposes it. It's
twenty four to seven global, so there's not like a
Tomorrow Friday afternoon, all the stock markets take a nice break,
right and readjusts before they reopen on Monday.

Speaker 2 (44:56):
So what percentage of my retirement assets that I put
in bitcoin?

Speaker 7 (45:01):
I will not provide that direct financial advice, especially on
the media, but I will tell you that most folks
do somewhere between five to twenty five percent of their
overall portfolio and their.

Speaker 4 (45:11):
Retirement So how did taxes work on bitcoin? Let's let's
say so our account actually did tell us to open
a roth ira. So let's say that we decided we're
gonna put bitcoin in the wroth ira. So then when
do we get taxed on that bitcoin?

Speaker 7 (45:23):
So with the wroth ira, this tax structure is you
make that money and you don't get taxed on it,
or you get taxed on it now and you're putting
post tax money into the account. Okay, it'll grow tax deferred,
so no taxes. And then with a wroth in particular,
because you pay the taxes on the way in, you
won't have to pay them on the way out, so
we tax free income.

Speaker 8 (45:40):
That's a very popular tool.

Speaker 7 (45:41):
It does get more prohibitive for entrepreneurs if you're making
over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year or
two hundred and fifty thousand as a couple it gets,
you're not eligible for a roth so traditionals are out there.
Steps are very popular for small business owners like ourselves
because you can do upwards of almost sixty thousand dollars
a year, which is great because what you're doing is
if you make one hundred thousand and you put the

(46:02):
eight thousand dollars a year in, now, you've lowered your
tax bill income to ninety two thousand. And I don't
know you guys, I'm only forty one, but I've only
seen taxes.

Speaker 8 (46:09):
Go up and I don't think they're going to slow
down anytime.

Speaker 4 (46:11):
So I just want to follow this up real quick.
So then let's say that we put it in something
like a roth Ira, we take it out ten years
from now and it's like blown up in value and
it's a ton of money. Do we pay any taxes
on that? And how is it like cashing out of stock?
You just go to the broker and say, I want
like United States dollars for this instead of this.

Speaker 7 (46:33):
Yes to both those, So when you pull it out,
when you distribute it, you would attribute it completely tax free.
You could also just sell it and leave it in
the roth Ira wrapper until you're ready to take distribution
and hand it out into your kids or your grandkids
and an inherited roth iray, so you pass that tax
savings down to the next generation. And yeah, I could
go on my mobile app right now and we could
buy some bitcoin and sell some and get us dollars.

(46:56):
We could swap it for gold. Our next generation, which
is the big buzzword, is tokenization. So your world's going
to get tokenized in some fashion where it's difficult to
get a buyer to come in and say, oh, I
want to do the fifty million dollars for this building
here on Fifth Avenue. If that's even that's probably cheap
for Fifth Avenue, isn't it. But to fractionalize that so
that there's a more liquidity market around it and more

(47:18):
people can get involved in that. So on our book
of twelve billion, we have probably about three or four
billion in real estate, venture capital, private equity, private shares
that we're building a tokenized in secondary marketplace for that,
so you can swap it into any kind of asset.

Speaker 8 (47:32):
You could even do it into your business.

Speaker 7 (47:34):
At some point people will start tokenizing instead of just
doing IPOs, and those sides of this will.

Speaker 8 (47:38):
Be a fast track to grazing capital.

Speaker 7 (47:40):
And that's why the government has wrangled with the Clarity
Bill and all this regulation around it, because those are
all the answers, and they'll do the same thing with AI.
Next is how do we answer all these things that
could go wrong in this new technology. But it's a
train that's on the tracks and it's full speed and
it's here whether.

Speaker 8 (47:56):
We like it or not. Just like our AI conversation
we just had.

Speaker 6 (47:59):
It's a bitcoin be like actual currency that gets used
every day, or do you see it more as like
a Mickey Mantal Rookie card, or a Pokemon card or
a Picasso.

Speaker 7 (48:09):
It depends on your use case. That's a great question, Todd.
I consider my bitcoin more like gold. I'm holding it
and handing it down to the next generation. There is
light coin, there's four times as many that would more
think like silver to gold, more of that used in
that case. There are places already in this country where
it is being used on a day to day basis.
El Salvador, Zimbabwe, parts of Turkey. Wherever currency crisis has

(48:31):
happened over the last five to ten years, you will
find bitcoin is reigning supreme. Most recently in Iran when
the real basically plummeted to zero value in dollars. Sence,
Bitcoin itself in terms of the real went parabolic, and
the number of new wallets opened in that region at
that time online was something of the numbers we've never
seen before. So when things go bad, I'm not saying

(48:52):
that things will go bad in the US, but other
currencies have followed suit and have to really debase their
currencies drastically. That that's where people run to because gold's
a little hard to take a bar goal down to
the store and get groceries. Bitcoin's a lot easier for transactions.

Speaker 4 (49:05):
Would we be using it on Amazon?

Speaker 8 (49:07):
Yeah? I think so.

Speaker 7 (49:08):
Actually, light Cooin almost this was one of those that
almost worked out for them. Ticketmaster Live Nation was finishing
a deal with light Coin, which is more of a
market like a merchant services crypto, right before COVID hit
and then the whole that whole industry just kind of
was gone for two years, so that deal kind of
dried up. Time kills deals. But I hear that there

(49:28):
may be back at the table doing that. So just
like you go and you see PayPal, Apple pay credit card,
they'll be cryptocurrency, and even now a lot of the
betting sites take it and they give you premiums for it.
So if you give bitcoin to like DraftKings or the
predictive markets, they'll give you more promotional rewards for signing up.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
So a couple of questions first in your IRA, can
people just buy small amounts of bitcoin, like fractions of
a bitcoin? If they have two thousand dollars to invest,
they could sign up for your offering and yep, and
invest that amount of money. They don't need hundreds of
thousands of dollars to buy a whole bitcoin.

Speaker 7 (50:05):
I'm glad you asked that question because that is one
of the most common misnomers when I talk to folks
as well. I don't have one hundred thousand dollars to
afford a bitcoin.

Speaker 8 (50:12):
You don't need it.

Speaker 7 (50:13):
It actually goes to the tenth decimal point, which is
known as the satoshi And that's kind of a weird name.

Speaker 8 (50:17):
But that's what it's called.

Speaker 7 (50:19):
And the name of the inventor, Yeah, the acronym or
the a pseudonym of the person that invented it.

Speaker 8 (50:24):
And so you can buy one satochi.

Speaker 7 (50:26):
It's a couple of dollars and dollar cost average your
way in they'll be to build up to a bitcoin
will become more and more difficult. But having just a
half or a quarter, like you can go down and
buy five dollars with a bitcoin for an array of
any setting your maximum embery years seventy five hundred if
you're under fifty, eight thousand if you're over fifty. Our
firm has a minimum of one thousand dollars to get started,

(50:48):
just to set up all the tax process and all
those types of things.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
So if somebody is like looking to build a secure retirement,
what are some of the habits that they need to
develop in order to make sure that they have money
available when they retire?

Speaker 8 (51:05):
Start early.

Speaker 7 (51:05):
Financial literacy is just about as bad as reading literacy
these days for kids. I was joking about the mayor
town might be worse. It might actually be worse. Financial
literacy is just you were joking about the p and
ls and the things. I went through business school and
we didn't even dive into some of those things heavily.
It was learning rules and like things that I don't use.
No offense to my alma matter. Thank you for the
piece of paper, And here's your one hundred thousand dollars.

(51:27):
But there was definitely a lot of things that were missed.
And maybe I just didn't go to that class. It
was the University College of Boulder. I might have missed
that week. I don't know that it was a big
party school. But learning, being able to learn those things
is critical, and starting early is really critical if you
can get your kids starting. Isabella started, We're just starting early,
mean though, I mean, is this problem when you start

(51:48):
making money?

Speaker 2 (51:49):
I mean yes, so you you siphon off a piece
of your monthly paycheck.

Speaker 7 (51:55):
Yeah, if you can, and percentage, yeah if you can.
If you can max out that contra every year starting
when you start earning income, So that's seventy five, that'll
that'll make a world of difference when you get to
your thirties, forties, in the fifties and even Warren Buffett,
you could do no crypto and just put it in
cash and fixed income. Get some yield to compounding interest
will be powerful to get you there if you want
to be creative. So Isabella started when she was four.

(52:17):
She did some commercials. So I set up a roth
iray for her, and she had earned income and now
she works. If you don't have your kids on the payer,
We'll put your kids on the payroll because that really helps.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
So she's what if you're older, What if you're in
your forties maybe and you really haven't done you know,
started early, like you recommend it. What can a person
in that situation do?

Speaker 7 (52:36):
In that situation, what I often find is entrepreneurs are
the least prepared for retirement because we're building. We're putting
our retirement in our business right, our shares of our business.
Our plan is that someday somebody will buy it for more.
We can exit leverage those shares. However, and and if
you if you should have an LLC, you should have
an escorp setup. And if you're not, if your account's
not doing that basic stuff for you, then fire your

(52:57):
account personally. But those escorps and things so that will
make you eligible for set by rays. If you're a
high earner, there's a tool called the solo K you
can put up to about one hundred and eighty thousand
a year away.

Speaker 8 (53:07):
So if you have a really good year and you.

Speaker 7 (53:09):
Don't want to give all of its Uncle Sam, that's
when you use that tool to tuck away those funds
in tax deferment and grow them tax free.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
Okay, and if you're not an entrepreneur.

Speaker 8 (53:18):
If you're not an.

Speaker 7 (53:19):
Entrepreneur, do the max contributions as the best. But you're
probably in that age. You're gonna need to think outside
modern into modern portfolio theory. So traditional portfolio theories. I
did stocks, bonds, mutual funds. It's like my grandfather's economy.
He bought ge stock, He had his pension from here
and walker, and that was success for him. That was
the way his market worked. Our world, you're gonna have

(53:40):
to think outside the box a little bit. You're gonna
have to think about real estate, precious metals, cryptocurrency.

Speaker 8 (53:45):
Have that.

Speaker 7 (53:45):
You still want your bonds, your mutual funds, your stocks,
but you need to take at least a quarter of
your overall portfolio and put it into yes, more volatile, yes,
more risky assets, but you have a longer time horizon.
This isn't money you're taking off the kitchen table for
your kids to eat. This is money that you won't
probably tap into for thirty or forty years, and you
have the best amount of time for those assets to

(54:06):
mature through that Votel stage.

Speaker 5 (54:08):
So Chris.

Speaker 4 (54:08):
One last question quickly, does cryptocurrency mirror the stock market?
If the stock market crashes, what happens with crypto?

Speaker 8 (54:16):
So that's a great question.

Speaker 7 (54:18):
All markets are acting very weird since COVID, and I
think that's because of how much liquidity has been injected
into the market. We've printed more money in the last
three years than we did in the one hundred years
before that, as far as putting currency into the marketplace,
which is landing in lots of different places. For example,
silver over the last month look like a crypto stock.

(54:39):
If you look at the charts, it barreled to one
hundred and twenty five dollars an ounce and then crashed
down to what seventy five dollars an ounce, And these
are not words you normally hear with things like gold
and silver. There is a correlation with the tech stocks
and bitcoin because investors treat them as such. So right now,
some of the softwares stocks are getting downward pressure because
AI is kind of messing up their valuation because it's like, well,

(55:02):
you suspend five years to build a software that nobody
else could build, and AI is being able to build
competition much faster.

Speaker 8 (55:08):
There will be a day where.

Speaker 7 (55:09):
Decoupling occurs between those and that'll be win. Scarcity of
the acid, especially with bitcoin, will kick in where it's like, okay,
there's only so many of these to go around. That
hasn't happened yet. We're hardwired as a country and as
people to abundance, like we grew up with just more
and more and more and more and more. There'll be
a day when scarcity starts to kick in and you'll
see that decoupling take place. But right now, everything, I mean,

(55:31):
I'm an economist at the end of the day, and
I'm having a hard time keeping track of some of
these things.

Speaker 8 (55:34):
Just some of it just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 7 (55:36):
So diversification, as everybody will tell you, is key as
putting things in a lot of different baskets, not just.

Speaker 4 (55:40):
One great Well, how do people find you bitcoin?

Speaker 8 (55:43):
I ray dot com.

Speaker 7 (55:45):
They can download the app and one cool thing because
you guys, look at all these questions you had, and
you're my target demographic.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
We have real cryptoreal people, so I'm a target for
many people.

Speaker 9 (55:56):
I'm really strong.

Speaker 7 (55:58):
Yeah, well you actually, shockingly enough, seventy five percent of
our clients were born before nineteen seventy six, so it's
not a someone misnomer, that's a young man young woman's game.
It's actually your generation that loves that assumption.

Speaker 4 (56:13):
I think it's pretty obvious, okay, but last on.

Speaker 7 (56:18):
That so you can actually call there's real people that
have helped thousands of Americans put this into their retirement.
It's eight seven seven, nine, three, six seven, one seventy
five and you can talk to a real human being
about crypton and retirement.

Speaker 4 (56:29):
Is that your company?

Speaker 8 (56:30):
Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 4 (56:31):
Wow, that's awesome.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
Passage to profit with Richard analyst pier Hart.

Speaker 4 (56:35):
We have been hinting about this the whole show, and
now we are finally ready to get into Jessica Slawerski's
ignite reading and she is going to talk about our children, right,
so please tell us what it is, what you're doing everything.

Speaker 9 (56:53):
Thanks so much, and it's been really fun as a
lifelong educator and a teacherpreneur to sit and listen about
what you're doing in commercial real estate and then to
hear all about bitcoin. And by the way, my head
is still spinning thinking about all the thumb drives I've
thrown away and wondering what may have actually been on

(57:14):
those thumb drives, so lesson learned could have been a
security code, right, So I run ignite reading. I'm a
lifelong educator. I started my career as a classroom teacher.
And you know, not a lot of people know that
we have a literacy crisis in our country and that

(57:36):
our national reading rates for children as young as fourth
grade are showing that we only have about thirty percent proficiency,
meaning as we look at our young people, only about
three and ten of them know how to read. And
if you don't know how to read when you're in

(57:56):
third grade or fourth grade, you are not going to
magic learn how to read before you hit middle school
or graduate from high school, if you're even going to
persist to graduate from high school. So this is a
massive problem, and it's a problem that doesn't need to
be a problem because we actually know what it takes
to teach kids to read. And this is all about

(58:17):
making sure that we put everything we can into ensuring
that they learn to read on time, which is before
they leave first grade.

Speaker 3 (58:25):
Why aren't kids learning how to read?

Speaker 9 (58:27):
For decades, there has been a misconception in K twelve
education that learning to read just kind of magically happens
by placing beautiful books in front of kids and telling
them to guess words or use pictures to try to
figure out what the words are. I am not making

(58:48):
this up for real. That is how so many classrooms
we're teaching kids to read. And yet what the research
shows and has shown all along, is that learning to
read is not natural. It doesn't magically happen. It's not
something like learning to speak. The thing about oral language

(59:11):
is that our brains have evolved such that speaking is
a very natural process, which is why our toddlers might
walk around using certain colorful words that we didn't actually
teach them, but they probably overheard us entrepreneurs using in
one of our many meetings. Learning to read is not

(59:32):
like that. Our brains have not evolved to the point
that reading is natural. We have to literally hard wire
the brain to be able to look at a word
like passage or a sentence or a phrase passage to
profit and automatically be able to read it. And there's

(59:53):
a process for doing that. So little kids need to
learn to crack the code. They have to learn that
these squiggly lines are letters, that each letter makes a
specific sound, and that you then begin to put those
letters and sounds together to read words that are increasingly complex,
and to then read sentences and then to read paragraphs.

Speaker 4 (01:00:15):
When we were in Atlanta, I had a meeting with
the teacher of my daughter and she said, well, your
daughter is sounding these words out. She said, she's not
learning that here, we're doing word chuge. She must be
teaching her at home. And I said, yeah, I read
to my kids all the time, and I am teaching
her to sound out these words. And she's thirty now,
so she was in that demographic that just kind of

(01:00:36):
got lost, right.

Speaker 9 (01:00:38):
Yeah, there is an entire generation of kids who did
not learn how to read, and heartbreakingly, that's still happening
in many classrooms and school systems across our country.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
So what's the solution.

Speaker 9 (01:00:52):
Here's the good news, A little bit of optimism is
that there is a lot of policy happening right now
that is mandating that school systems abandon these ineffective strategies,
that they adopt evidence based reading curriculum, and that they
train teachers to use these programs. That is necessary, and

(01:01:13):
it is not sufficient because the other layer of this
is that all of our brains are different, and when
you're a classroom teacher when you're a parent. That is
what makes teaching and parenting so special maybe also a
little bit maddening. And you can't just teach one lesson

(01:01:33):
and then assume that you're done, because the different learners
in the room in front of you, their brains may
need different things. I'll give you an example. The letter
S makes the sound, the letter H makes the sound,
and when you put S and H together, they make
one sound. When you're a little kid, that is downright

(01:01:55):
mind blowing. For some kids, you can be taught that
one time, and then you can start practicing sounding out
some words that have that sound. For some little kids,
they can learn that once they can practice it, it's
mapped to the brain, and then they can start reading
words like shack. For other kids, they might need to

(01:02:16):
have this explicit direct instruction ten times, other kids one
hundred times, other kids a thousand times before it is automatic.
And so a one size fits all lesson is not
going to work. And the solution is that we have
to stop approaching teaching and learning with the factory model
that we had at the beginning of education hundreds of

(01:02:39):
years ago.

Speaker 5 (01:02:40):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:02:40):
We have to leverage technology. We have to differentiate instruction,
and we have to give our babies exactly what they
need as learners when they need it, so that they
learn to read on time. And that's what my company
is doing. We're providing that individualized one on one instruction
every single day to make sure kids learn to read

(01:03:01):
on time.

Speaker 4 (01:03:02):
So do you have people that are working one to
one with children, then we do is this localized? Is
it across the country.

Speaker 9 (01:03:09):
So we are operating in twenty four states nationally. We
have a core of highly trained, highly accountable tutor educators.
So what we figured out is the flywheel to recruit
and train at scale non educators to be expert reading

(01:03:30):
instructors who that are meeting one on one with kids.
So that human component is essential, but then we leverage
the technology to ensure that all day, every day, they
are teaching exactly what that child needs based on everything
we know about who that child is as a learner
on their journey to becoming fluent readers.

Speaker 5 (01:03:51):
Is it tutoring or is it during the day like
getting pulled out of their.

Speaker 9 (01:03:54):
Classroom, And it is tutoring, but it is embedded during
the school as part of that literacy ecosystem. So the
teacher does the whole class lesson. The teacher then may
do some small group instruction and then these kiddos get
another at that or another opportunity with their ignite reading

(01:04:16):
tutor who they meet with virtually for fifteen minutes a day.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
I learned how to read, but I never knew the
difference between right and left very well. So if somebody
says go to the left, I have to really think
about it. It's not reflexive, and I just say, if
I want to say go to the right, then I
have to think about it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
Do I mean right or do I mean left?

Speaker 2 (01:04:36):
And so maybe I had a similar experience when I
was a kid on those things.

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
So Jessica, I did want to ask you, how did
you identify this problem? Because that is oftentimes one of
the biggest things for an entrepreneur is to find a problem.

Speaker 9 (01:04:51):
I started as a fifth grade teacher in the Bronx
in New York City, and I was so excited to
be a teacher, and I was just like, I'm going
to teach them all these great books, and we're going
to read Bridge to Tarabithia even though it's depressing, and
I'm even going to tackle Shakespeare with them and do
Romeo and Juliet, and then very quickly realized that almost

(01:05:14):
half the kids in my classroom still couldn't read. And
I was a fifth grade teacher, and my teacher prep
program had not taught me, of all things, had not
taught me how to teach kids to read. And I
went my first two years of teaching trying everything to
teach them to read, but having not been trained and
equip myself, I was pretty much useless, and that was

(01:05:38):
an awful feeling. I vividly remember crying during my prep
periods because I was so frustrated, crying on the train
on the way home. I cried a lot, and yet
I didn't give up. And in my third year of teaching,
I went to a different school. They made me a
first grade teacher, which was terrifying because I taught fifth graders.
And now these were like such little babies, and they

(01:06:00):
feed their pants and vomited and forgot they were at
school and called me mommy sometimes, and yet I loved
them so much, and I was taught how to teach reading,
and I remember in that moment being so grateful that
I finally knew, and then so angry because I was like,
this is not hard, and I just lost two years

(01:06:22):
and my kids, all of my kids i'd been teaching.
I can't get those kids back. And that was when
something was ignited in me, just a desire to want
to help as many kids as possible learn to read.
And I had no idea how that I was going
to do that. I had no intention that I would
become a CEO or start multiple companies in service of literacy.

(01:06:46):
I just thought, I want to help kids learn to
read as many as I can everywhere?

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
So what could parents do to help their kids learn
how to read? Sign for signing up with your program?
Are the things that parents can do to help their
kids read backs.

Speaker 9 (01:07:02):
The easiest, most simple thing that they can do is
read to their kids every night, even if it is
only for five minutes. And coupled with that, also simple
is talking to their kids, talking and talking and talking,
because all of that rich oral language that plays a
role in kids' ability to be reading ready, and once

(01:07:27):
they do learn to crack the code, it comes in
in terms of comprehension, which is another important piece of reading.
So Todd, I'm looking at you when I'm looking at
your beautiful wife, and I know this is going to
sound kind of crazy, but you all can be reading
to your baby even while she's still pregnant. You could
pick up a really cute book. I highly recommend Moe

(01:07:50):
Williams Pigeon series, one of my favorites. Don't let the
Pigeon ride the bus or drive the bus and Todd,
you could read a night time story to your baby
that's not even here yet. That reading aloud to your
kids is so powerful, so meaningful, and then also speaking
singing all of that oral language. And those are simple

(01:08:10):
tricks that families can do. More sophisticated things they can
do would be advocating showing up at the schools saying
how are you teaching kids to read? Why am I
looking at your school's literacy data and seeing that there's
only thirty percent proficiency? What's happening here? This is not okay?
The advocacy train is a bit more complex. But we
also need parents who are going to fight not only
for their own kids, but all of the.

Speaker 8 (01:08:32):
Kids, getting them to want is he Caine read but
wanting to read? Because it is?

Speaker 7 (01:08:35):
It's a practice, right, It's just like anything we do.
You need touches and those syts of things, so I
would do and I travel a lot for media tours
in business. I buy two of the same book, so,
like we just finished last year, I remember I was
on the road. Phantom Toll Booth is one of my
favorite as a kids. So I pick Tara Bathia, I
pick all the ones, line, the which, the wardrobe, anything.
I know she's going to be reading the next year.
And I'll read a page, she reads page. I'll read

(01:08:57):
a page, she reads page. And that was frustrating at
first because she just wanted to get through the page.
And eventually she started realizing that there's a voice to reading.
And I think that's when you get that. That's you're
talking about cracking the code. I feel like once you
hear it in your head as you read it, that's
where I think really start to click.

Speaker 9 (01:09:13):
I love that you went here, so you are getting
at how to make reading a pleasurable experience. So many
thoughts on this. The first is reading is not going
to be pleasurable if you don't know how to read.
And so many kids who aren't being taught to read
then have books placed in front of them and they
are in such a struggle to even just decode the

(01:09:36):
words on the page. They can't do the work of comprehension,
which is where the joy of reading comes in. So
cracking the code leads to fluency, which is the bridge
to comprehension. And when I talk to parents or even
educators about how to get kids to fall in love
with reading, thing number one. We must urgently teach them

(01:09:57):
to read, and we have to know beyond a shadow
of a doubt that they have learned to read. Thing
number two. Let them read whatever they want.

Speaker 4 (01:10:04):
Okay, So this is my one piece of advice because
both my kids are readers. Captain underpants exactly.

Speaker 9 (01:10:12):
It's sillier. Those are the gateway drugs.

Speaker 8 (01:10:18):
She doesn't like history class.

Speaker 4 (01:10:19):
So how can people find you?

Speaker 9 (01:10:21):
They can find us at ignite, dash reading dot com
and they can also find me on LinkedIn. Jessica Slewarski.

Speaker 4 (01:10:31):
Okay, thank you. Passage to Profit with Richard Elizabeth GARHARTT
will be right back.

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Speaker 4 (01:11:51):
Now, it is time for Secrets of the entrepreneurial mind,
and we are going to start with Todd Droulette with
the Real Estate Commission dot Com. Todd, what is a
secret you can share with our listeners.

Speaker 6 (01:12:05):
So this secret is from a friend of mine whose
name was Bob Behar, who passed away a couple of
years ago. He was a founder of the NASCAR track
in loud, New Hampshire. He was a NASCAR guy. He
was a developer, builder, casino developer. The one piece of
advice he gave was anytime you can buy a dollar
for fifty cents, buy it.

Speaker 5 (01:12:24):
He said.

Speaker 6 (01:12:24):
People make their mistake and go broke when you buy
something for a dollar hoping it goes to two, hoping
it goes to ten. His advice was always you make
money when you buy, not when you sell. So make
sure it's a good value when you buy it, and
then you'll never get.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
Hurt and be a good negotiator. You kind of have
to hold some things back, right. You have to have
a strategy going in understanding what it is that you
want and then take three steps back and start from there.

Speaker 5 (01:12:49):
That's the biggest thing.

Speaker 6 (01:12:50):
So many people start going after whether it's a goal
and negotiation whatever, and they don't even know what their
actual goal or end is.

Speaker 5 (01:12:56):
So you need to know what are your absolute deal breakers.

Speaker 6 (01:12:59):
And I always say throw and something you won't do so,
if you're in a negotiation, you say I want this raise,
and if you don't give it to me, I'm leaving.
You better be prepared to leave because if you stay,
you should have just left because you'll get treated terribly
for the rest of the time you're there.

Speaker 4 (01:13:13):
That is so true. Thank you Chris Klein with bitcoin
ira dot com.

Speaker 7 (01:13:18):
I like your guy, because right now would be the
time to buy bitcoin.

Speaker 4 (01:13:21):
Okay, is that's your secret?

Speaker 10 (01:13:23):
Ye?

Speaker 7 (01:13:23):
Mine actually comes from my co founder and business partner,
Camilla Country. He's a serial entrepreneur and five or six
years ago he said, you, Chris, when we walk as
businessmen and ladies. When we walk, you're headed in a
direction and you need to keep your compass. But you're
gonna have initiatives along the way. Treat those initiatives like seeds.
Toss them ahead of you. Toss them ahead of you,
and as you continue to walk, you're gonna see which
ones germany into little ground lanes. Those are the ones

(01:13:46):
that you water and the ones that don't. Those are
the ones you ignore. And that's a great way to
keep your business moving forward without getting pulled in twenty
directions like stretch.

Speaker 4 (01:13:53):
Armstrong, love that. Jessica Slawarski with Ignite dash Reading dot Com,
what's your secret?

Speaker 9 (01:14:00):
I think my secret to entrepreneurialism is that I see
a problem and instead of just being annoyed by it,
which I think so many of us who aren't crazy
obsessive entrepreneurs can just be like, well, that's annoying and
go on with their day. And for me, I cannot
let it go. And that's my pattern. I get bothered
by things that shouldn't be the way they are, and

(01:14:21):
I can't sleep until I do something about it. So
my secret is to be obsessive and to just go
for it, especially when it's a big, hairy problem that
can solve so many of our societal ills.

Speaker 4 (01:14:34):
Excellent, Thank you. Richard Gearhart with your Heart Law. What
is your secret?

Speaker 3 (01:14:38):
Expect the unexpected?

Speaker 8 (01:14:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
I have a friend who once said, where leaders go,
there are no maps, and so you don't always know
where you're going as an entrepreneur. But that's part of
the fun, is charting new territory. But it's also not
going to be easy, and you've got to expect a
lot of ups and downs along the way.

Speaker 4 (01:15:00):
Profound and me. Elizabeth Gearheart with gear Media Studios. Mine
today is going to be trust but verify and you
all know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this
AI stuff, right. Don't believe Google, Gemini or Chat, GPT
or Cloud. Ask them all and then use your own
brain to figure out which one is right.

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):
So that's it for us.

Speaker 2 (01:15:19):
Passage to Profit is a Gear Media Studios production at
the nationally syndicated radio show appearing on forty stations across
the US. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been
recently selected by feed Spot Podcasters database as a top
ten entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P two

(01:15:41):
P team, our producer Noah Fleischman and our program coordinator
Alisia Morrissey, and our social media powerhouse Carolina Tabares. Look
for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our
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can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, x and on
our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this

(01:16:02):
program is believed to be correct, never take a legal
step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearheart Law
is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You
can find us at gearheartlaw dot com and contact us
for free consultation. Take care everybody, Thanks for listening, and
we'll be back next week.

Speaker 1 (01:16:21):
The proceeding was a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.