How much will it cost to go outer space now? And do you think it'll be affordable in the future?

You can. You can pay as little as 50,000 for what's called an atmospheric balloon ride, and that'll take you a hundred thousand feet up. You can pay all the way up to 110,000,000 for a week long stay on the International Space Station.

50 grand. How long do you go up for? Is it.

It's a twelve hour trip. Six up and six now.

That's great. You. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the money Mondays. We are sitting in an RV motorhome out on the streets in front of Hubble studio, where for the last ten years, I've been throwing charity events with Trina's Kids foundation. So we're going to be talking about charity today, obviously. I also throw my elevator nights here, my free event, we've thrown it 53 times, I think about ten to 15 times. We've thrown elevator nights here for free. But why are we parked in front of elevator studio, Hubble studio, right this second? Because Shannon Graham is here. He has traveled all the way into town. And so I decided to drive the motorhome. We left the ranch, we left the wild jungle. We came over here to Hubble studio to find him here. So we're going to dive right in. There are three main topics that we cover here on the money Mondays. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. Shannon is going to be one of those best answers you've ever heard for all three of those categories. Because he's been teaching and coaching for years and years, people pay him $150,000 for one on one coaching.

And so you're going to get inside of the mind of someone that normally charges a lot of freaking money to figure out what's inside of his brain and what you can do to better your life. So please give a warm round applause to Shannon. Crap.

Thanks, Dan.

All right, so dive right in. If you could give us a quick two minute bio so we can get straight to the money.

Yeah. Well, I have been coaching. This year will be 20 years.

Whoa.

And I started when I was 21, and I've done a lot of entrepreneurial things in my day. I started my first business when I was in my early teens. And my latest venture, Astronaut, is a space company focused on sending entrepreneurs to space.

Okay, let's just dive right there. Say that again. Astronaut sends entrepreneurs into outer space.

Correct.

Okay, walk us through that. Well, let's not talk about money for a second. Just talk me about space.

Well, it's two part. So I'm a closet space nerd. I have been for a long time. And in 2020, it was a big year for space. Bezos went to space, Branson went to space, William Shatner went to space. And four civilians, for the first time ever, went to space. So it was a monumental year for space. And crypto was booming. I mean, everything was just like, the abundance was flowing. And we live in an interesting time as far as being visionary and making the world a better place, as far as, like, as long as you can communicate an idea to people that they can get excited about and want to get behind, you don't have to be the one that knows everything. You can just be the leader of it. And so the closet space nerd in me was like, okay, man, it's your time. And I kind of had this idea, know, there's problems and challenges in the world right now that many visionaries are on a path to solve for. And it's kind of like using Einstein said, you can't solve your problems with the same level of thinking that created them. And so what's required is an elevation of perspective.

And there's this amazing experience that happens when you go to space and you see the earth from space. And it's called the overview effect. And every single person, all 600 and some od people who have been to space all have this experience where they see the earth from space and they're changed. They have a deeper desire to make the world a better place. So my thought was, well, what if you sent people to space who already have a desire to make the world a better place, and you elevate their perspective? What would happen? And that's how astronaut was born.

Okay. A lot to unpack there. How much will it cost to go outer space now? And do you think it'll be affordable in the future? Five years, ten years, 20 years, 30 years, et cetera? Yeah.

So right now, it's a range of price points, depending on what you consider space. You can pay as little as 50,000 for what's called an atmospheric balloon ride, and that'll take you 100,000ft up. And that's not quite space by most people in the space industry's definition, but you can see the majority of the world at that point, and you're certainly what I would consider at the edge of space. That's 50,000. You can pay all the way up to 110,000,000 for a week long stay on the International Space Station.

You can just fly up there for $110,000,000 and hang out for a week. Yeah, 110,000,000, no problem. Yeah. Okay. So for 50 grand, how long do you go up for? Is it.

It's a twelve hour trip. Six up and six down.

That's great. Yeah. Okay. It's a nice date night. Yeah. Okay. And so when you plan to take entrepreneurs outer space, what's the ballpark it'll cost now. And what do you think it'll be in the future?

Well, I'm likely going to do something either in the 50,000 range, probably up to like 250,000.

I got a lot of clients for you in that range. Yeah, like a lot. A lot of people want to go to space. How long would they go with astronaut? How long would they go with you?

How long would the trip take? Yeah, 12 hours. Same thing for the atmospheric ride. For the 250,000, that's a much shorter ride because that's actually a rocket. So goes up, zero G, comes back down. It's a much shorter experience.

I know we're not talking about money right now. This is too fascinating. So if I go up zero G, I have to go through training first?

Yes. So that would be more like a SpaceX ride. There's training involved with that. The atmospheric balloon ride. No training. You just get in, go up, come.

Down, and you'll feel fine. You won't feel weird.

No problem.

So, cool. Yeah. Okay. All right, let's go. Actual topic. All right. On the how to make money side, there's different aspects of your life. One is obviously, you have a whole freaking space company. But two, for two decades, you've been dealing on the coaching side. Talk to us about why people at any stage of the game, whether beginner, amateur, experienced, or have a huge company, why should they hire a coach or a mentor?

Yeah. The answer is because no matter how fast you run or no matter how good you get, you can never outrun your own blind spots. And so the advantage you have of hiring a coach is that those blind spots become available to you. You have someone that can show you those little things that make all the difference. Think about someone who's a professional athlete. For example, like Roger Federer, arguably one of the greatest tennis players of all time. The difference to him between winning and losing could just be the fraction of an inch. If that racket is turned just a little bit too much up or down, that's the difference between winning and losing the game. So a coach can look over your shoulder and determine those little inches that can help make the big difference. And so, for years and years and years, people that are at a high level understand that in order to get to the next level, they have to have someone over their shoulder to help them see where those blind spots are. Now, that could be in performance, it could be in mindset, but all of that translates to a massive ROI at the end of the day.

So fascinating. Yeah. So, like, Tim Grover was the trainer for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. And I always use that as an example because you're talking about two of the best of all time in basketball and in stubbornness, winningness, and everything in between. Like, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant are my two heroes, and they did it. And both of them hired Tim Grubber for many years, and he did it for Kevin Durant and a lot of other NBA players. But when you think about if the best in the world hired.

Yeah.

How dare you think you're so egotistical that you can't go hire a coach.

Yeah.

Even if you're a bazillionaire.

Yeah.

You could be a household named legend, and you still hire a coach for sure, for at least a certain topic of your life. Right.

Of course.

And I think now what's fascinating is there's so many different ways people look at mentors, coaches, masterminds, college school, et cetera. Some people love it. Some people hate it. Some people promote it, some people have whatever. To me, it's a fascinating subject. And that's why I ask people, especially yourself, at the highest level, how do you decide when it's time to bring on a coach or a mentor?

I think the point when you decide it's time to take on a coach or a mentor is the moment you are clear that you want the next level. And you know that what got you to where you are won't get you to where you want to go. So the mindset, the drive, the skill set, the mindset, the whatever that got you to where you are is not what's going to get you to where you want to go. And so when that certainty of I desire whatever the next level looks like for that person and the clarity of like, and I can't get there on my own, that's the moment.

Okay. Switching to space. You're taking on a big project by wanting to put entrepreneurs in outer space. It's very expensive. It takes a lot of capital, research, approvals, permits, licenses, and everything between. How do you decide when you have something? I don't want to call it cushy, but you've lived and breathed something for 20 years doing coaching, that makes you millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. Why take on such a big undertaking that's not just expensive, it's a gazillion dollars to do what you're talking about. Why take that on in your life when you could just keep making millions of dollars coaching and helping the world that way?

That's a great question. It's similar to. You could probably ask Elon the same thing. Like, why, when Elon sold PayPal, did he not just cash out and just sail off into the sunset?

And he literally risked it all to do the next one.

Yeah, he'd literally put it all into Tesla and SpaceX. And the answer for me is a, because I just have a passion for space and I love to be involved in that world, but also because space is going to democratize. So this answers, I didn't quite answer this part of your question earlier, which is the price of going to space is going to democratize tremendously over time. So right now, it's kind of like a billionaire boys club kind of thing, but that's rapidly changing. I mean, 50,000 to have an atmospheric experience, that's not bad. And that price is only going to continue to come down as things improve over time. So going to space is going to be very normalized.

It's going to be wild. It's wild.

It's going to be like, I'll call you up one day and be like, so the moon this weekend? And you'll be like, yeah, fuck it.

Double date.

Yeah, it's ten k each for a double date.

Yeah.

Because that's true. There's currently two aspects of space. There's the commercial side, which is like NASA exploration. How far out can we go? What can we learn about these different planets and things like that? And then there's the tourism side. I've done everything in life. I've made all the money, I have all the toys, I've had every experience. I guess the only thing left to do is go to space. That's cool. But that's more of, like, the fun side. I want to get right in between those two and pioneer a sector in the space industry that I'm calling space transformation. And so I want to get in early so that as it grows and as it becomes more normalized and a thing, then I'm already there and in the game.

Do you think it'll be like at Universal Studios? Like people just wait in line and go on rides like they can end up having 20 or 30 rockets that just kind of.

For sure as the technology, like propulsion technology and things like that, as that advances and innovates and democratizes, then it becomes even easier to do multiple trips a day.

So, fascinating. Yeah. Okay. I'm just thinking about going outer space. Yeah. All right. At what point do you believe that humans can actually live or stay long periods of time on, like, a Mars or a moon or another planet?

How long until we can do that?

Yeah. Ballpark. Will it be in our lifetime?

Oh, for sure. With the speed at which technology is advancing, this is how I like to think about it. Think about the last hundred years of technological advancement. Pretty. Absolutely wild. And then think about the last ten. The last ten compared to the last 90 is where you've seen the most amount of growth. So if that's true about the last ten, then think about the next ten. You and I will be around ten more, easy.

Damn right.

And with longevity, the way that it's going, that's over 150 easy. I would put money on it, no question. 150. You and me, no problem. And we'll look and feel like we do now. And so we will, without a doubt, be on Mars in our lifetime and be able to sustainably live there.

So crazy. Okay. On the making money side, I am very passionate about this very core topic. The reason I have a Money Mondays podcast, the reason I do speeches about money, the reason I'm preaching about my 40, 40, 20 investment theories, is you listening at home have to figure out ways to get wealthy, not just rich. And it can't be rude to talk about it. And here's why. What Shannon just said is, people are going to live to over 100 years old. Let me give you a realistic example. Technically, people pass away currently between 73 and 77 years old. 73 for a man, 77 for a woman. That was for our parents, our age group. Now it's 83 for a man, 85.5 for a woman. So if you retire at 65 to 75 years old, you really only need, like, four to 15 years of money, right, saved up to cover your life. Your children, if you're listening at home right now, your children are likely to live to over 100 years old. Because when we grew up, there was 64 ounce slurpees at 711 everywhere. There was no equinox. There was no whole foods.

There was no health food stores on every corner. There was no gyms everywhere. There was no fitness apps, first form supplements. None of that stuff was around. We had Jack in the box and Burger King and McDonald's. And we had the food pyramid. Remember the food pyramid? That's what we grew up on. And cereal was healthy. Right? Now, we've learned so much in society, and we have so much access to fitness, medicine, health, and everything between. But wait, there's more. Hospitals are everywhere now. Medical clinics, technology, a lot of the things that killed families, members, and parents in our past. Those same exact diseases won't even exist in five years, ten years, 20 years, and 30 years, they will figure out a way to eradicate Alzheimer's, leukemia, and a lot of forms of cancer. Not everything, but a lot of these major diseases that killed billions of people over the course of our generations of our world will not even be here soon. And so why does all that matter? Why did I go down the rabbit hole? Because you listen at home. Your children, when they live to over 100 years old, but they retire at 65 to 75, they live to 104, they need 30 years of money saved up.

Let's not talk about inflation or medical expenses or anything crazy. What if they just want to get by on 60 grand a year for 30 years? That's $1.8 million. You know how much the average American has saved up right now? One $200. Yeah, $5,500 in savings. One $200 saved up in a cash account on average right now. That's a long way away from $1.8 million to just get by.

Yeah.

Not counting if you have a family of two or three or four or five, et cetera. See where I'm going with this? And so, while a lot of people think it's rude to talk about money, I think it's insane not to talk about it. Yeah, we have to talk about getting rich, and we have to talk about getting wealthy. The only way to get wealthy is through investing. And that's why this podcast exists. That's why it's important for us to have a discussion with guys like Shannon that I've actually lived and breathed this space for so many years so you can live at home and think about the things that make sense to you. Low risk investing, medium risk investing, high risk investing, et cetera. Building your career, dealing with taxes, IRS savings, loans, everything in between. You have to have these discussions. It is not like, oh, I can get to it later. Never comes when it comes to this stuff if you don't do it now. And so that's why I'm so passionate about this topic, and I want to go into some more questions. All right. On the making money side, someone out there decides they want to be a coach in a certain niche, right.

There are some people that do life coaching. Some people do business coaching. But most of the time, people want to be a coach in a niche. Fitness, health, how to help single moms, how to help business owners do XYZ. A lot of times it's in a niche. When someone wants to first get into coaching, I have a very blunt answer for it. What do you say to people when they want to get into that space?

I say, do it. The caveat is always this. I believe it's beautiful to help people. So if someone has a desire to be a coach, it's great. And the one thing that you have to make certain of is there's a difference between having a good intention and having an ability to actually produce a result.

There we go.

So you got to have the chops. You got to be able to produce whatever niche it is that you want to get into for the right reason, which is to actually be able to help people. So you have to have certainty that you can actually make a difference.

All right? This is a PSA to everybody that wants to be a coach. You cannot be a 19 year old life coach. You have not lived enough life. Okay? You cannot be a personal trainer unless you are certified and gone through years of actual studying certifications about food, health and fitness. Please. You want to be a business coach. That's fantastic. If you built a business or you have an MBA and you really understand what you're trying to teach, I love the idea of you becoming a speaker or a coach. If you are an actual expert, and I'm not saying that you can't become an expert. You got to put it in the time, energy, and really the experience to become an expert before you go to try to coach other people, before you got to speak on stage, you need to really understand everything. You live in a day in society when you can learn a lot, if not everything, and more on the Internet. If you want to become a coach, a mentor, or a speaker on stage, go get as smart as possible about every single angle and every single little detail about the niche that you want to teach.

That's all I ask. Please don't try to be a life coach when you're 19. Please don't be a fitness coach if you're not certified. Please, please don't be a business coach if you've never done millions of dollars in sales.

Yeah, and a PSA. I think the allure is that there's so much money to be made.

Sure.

And it's sexy and it's relatively easy to get started. There's very low barrier to entry, so that's cool because the opportunity is there for everybody, and there's people who do make a lot of money in that world. So it's, you know, I can jump into it as well. And for those of you at home listening to what Dan is saying, he's completely right. If you slow down and do the work first, put in the time to develop mastery and expertise, you actually do yourself a huge favor, because no one else is doing that. Everyone else is just trying to get in the game as quickly as possible and look like they got it all figured out. If you take the time to actually figure it out and be an expert in whatever it is niche you want to get into, you will be so far ahead of the game, you'll set yourself up for massive success.

Difficult question. How does someone choose, okay, they're an expert now. How do they choose the ballpark of what they should be charging for their time? I'll give you guys a quick example. Shannon charges $150,000. That's as high as it gets, right? I charge $100,000, but 100% of what I do is for charity. And I only pick twelve people a year. I had 171 applications this year. Those twelve people then donate to charity, either to the toy Drive model citizen Fund or the wild jungle, et cetera. Years went by before I decided on doing that, right? And I have five levels of masterminds, and I have free events. Let me walk you through the world of coaching and speaking, et cetera. I have elevator nights that's totally free. I've thrown it 53 times, a lot of it right here at Hubble Studio. As we talked about around the time this episode comes out, I think actually the exact same week, we will then be having our 54th event at the La Convention center, elevator nights for all women speaking. And we had a huge response for that. So there's a free event, right? Free teaching, free mentoring, free coaching, free networking.

Then I have, for $200 a month, people can actually do themoneymondays.com. We donate all that to the wild jungle, moneymondays.com. Every Monday at 04:00. You can have interactions on Zoom with me, guys like shannon, et cetera. Then it jumps. There's live events, aspire tour, $100 tickets, $300 tickets, $500 tickets, and there's also VIPs, $1,000, $15 tickets for Aspire tour. We've got twelve events every year. 30, 00, 40, 00, 50, 00, 60, 00 people at every single event. So free $200 a month and then live events. One hundred bucks to five hundred bucks on average. Then we have our master classes. These are two to $300 for one weekend. Learn about money, learn about finances, et cetera. Jump to the next level. $15,000. This is called the money is mastermind. We have 706 members and we grow around 100 members per month at the 15K part, $20,000 operation black site. We do that at the ranch with Beijos, Coolion, Tim Kennedy, Ray Cashcare, Michael Chandler, et cetera. Where you learn about shooting, fighting, how to get a handcuffs, et cetera. So that's 20K. We have $50,000 for what's called the chairman's club. Chairman's club is where you learn about investments.

You get to interact with other people that are doing millions dollars revenue. Then the top of the funnel, the top tier one is called the 100 million mastermind experience. It's $100,000 per person. I started in 2019, it's only 100 people, 100k each. You have to be doing at least 5 million revenue, mostly doing ten to 50 million revenue. All that being said, all those years of events I've been throwing, all those years of free events, paid events, and everything between. I then just after all that, started doing one on one coaching last year. So you hear my frustration when people say I'm a 19 year old life coach. Yeah, I did a decade of free events, half a decade of these big events. Like before I even considered doing one on one coaching. So just keep that in mind when you're thinking about you becoming a coach. Get really smart about your topic. Go experience it. And by the way, hire coaches so that you can become the most elite version of yourself. You go hire Shannon. Guess what's going to happen to you? You're going to level uP. You go hire guys like Pedros Coulion.

You're going to level up. You go learn from like, you go learn from the best of the best. You will level up. Okay, end of my speech. Go, please.

Well, pricing is an interesting thing, but I think that it comes down to a few aspects. The first is, goes back to what you and I are talking about as far as what is the return on investment that you can provide? That's one of the most important parts, because the return on investment that you can provide will dictate how much you can charge. You know, you can provide a really amazing return on investment. I know the same thing simply because I've been doing it for so long and so I can justify that price tag no problem. It's sexy to charge that much. And so a lot of people are inspired to do that, but a lot of people don't have the chops to be able to really produce that kind of roi. So you have to be really real with yourself. What is the return on investment? I truly feel like I can get and kind of work the numbers backwards from there to figure out a price tag. That's part one. Part two is, what kind of income do you want to create from this coaching business? What's the ideal, either annual or monthly income?

And then you kind of say, okay, well, what's my capacity? How many people can I work with? And then you kind of work the numbers from there. So you reverse engineer the income side and then the actual deliverability, and that's kind of the magic equation.

All right, so let's talk about the investing side. When you start to make money, you have your businesses, you do your coaching, all this income is coming in. How do you decide what you invest into when you have all these options? Real estate, private equity, stock market, cryptocurrency. There's so many different options for you. How do you decide what types of investments you want to do? Or do you split it up, or what do you like to think about?

Yeah, my approach is very similar to yours. High risk stuff, medium low, very similar. There's not much of a difference, really. The only difference is that I put a very large emphasis on investing in myself. You are always your greatest investment. And as I like to say, investing in yourself is the only investment out of all the investments you could make, where you get to choose the ROI. That's wild. What if I said, dan, I got an opportunity for you? It's 150 grand. Oh, and by the way, you can choose what the ROI is going to be. I don't know a single person who wouldn't do that, because think about just investing in general. Many people could do it, but they don't. Why? Because they have stories about it. Well, I did it that one time, and I lost a bunch of money, and I don't want to do that again. Well, what if you could pay somebody to help you unwind all of that so that you could get back into investing? What would that mean for your family? What would that mean for the charities that you want to contribute to? Right. What if you could invest in your skill set so that you can produce a higher amount of value in the marketplace?

Well, now you can charge more money. Now you can make more money. Do you see what I mean?

Absolutely.

It's always the best investment to invest in yourself. I'm a coach. Obviously, that sounds self serving, but that's not as a coach. That's as a person who has spent a lot of money investing in myself in lots of different ways, spiritually, from a nutrition standpoint, fitness. I mean, just all the different categories you can imagine that you can invest into. 40 years of Zen. Dave Asprey's intensive neurofeedback training program. Easily one of the greatest amounts of money I've ever spent. One of the largest Rois I've ever experienced. So that's where I start, because that's going to dictate my ability to be able to produce more value and to be able to have a quality of life. That is what I really want at the end of the day. So my approach is a combination of yours, high risk, medium low, combined with myself.

So someone out there is listening and they realize that they need to invest in themselves, and they just don't know who to trust or what organization to go to or what school to go to or what mastermind to join. How can someone go down the rabbit hole to figure out who can really help them and what they want to do?

Yeah, I mean, it's tricky these days. The Internet is tricky. Yeah. Lots of glam, lots of glitter. Everyone wants to seem like they're something, which is not wrong necessarily, I think, really look for. It's one thing for me to say that I'm something, it's another thing to look at the people that I've worked with and see what type of results they've experienced.

Testimonials.

Testimonials. And again, that is something that could be faked or whatever, but I like to believe that most people in the business was helping other people. Genuinely want to help other people. So I like to look for. Well, this is the result that I want to get. Has this person helped other people like me get a similar result? And usually that's a good place to start.

So someone's at their career, they're making money. They hit 80 grand. Now they're doing 110 grand and 150 grand. They start saving up some money, right? And now they're like, whoa. My house went up at 200K in value. My stock market went up. Boom. That all went up another 100 grand. Like, they start to have some real money. When is it time for someone to start really deploying capital back into investing?

When is it time? I think any time is a good time. How would you answer that? I don't know.

So the famous answer is the best time is ten years ago and the second best time is today is now. Yeah. And so I talk about bitcoin all the time in 2014, but I still bought bitcoin this week. Yeah, for sure. So quick story. So bitcoin was $340 and I was going around Las Vegas explaining to the mayor, the governor, the casino owner named Derek Stevens at the D Hotel D casino, about why they should put a bitcoin ATM in 2014 into one of the most financially regulated buildings in the world, which is the casino. Yeah, they are way stricter than a bank. Right. After six months of back and forth we did, it got approved all over the news. You can look it up. And we placed this bitcoin ATM at $340. Bitcoin is over $70,000 now.

Yeah.

That is 200 to one return. Yeah, 200 times. Like, if you can look at my Coinbase right now, you can see the date and time when I bought it for $340 in my Coinbase sitting in my phone right this second. Now you can also look this week where I bought bitcoin at 68,060 9000.

Yeah.

If I believed in it back then at $340, why the heck wouldn't I believe in it ten years later for sure? When there's finally market adoption, when people finally listening to my craziness for the last decade.

Yeah.

So. So if you have a conviction in something again, I didn't go sell a kidney and buy a zillion bitcoin. I bought some bitcoin and then I bought some more. And then I bought some more. And I bought some more. I bought some more. Ethereum was $19. I did the very first interviews about Ethereum in Inc. And Forbes magazine in 2017. People thought it was crazy. It was $19. Now it's almost $4,000, 200 times what it was. I'm still a buyer of Ethereum this week.

Yeah.

If I believed it in $19, I believe in it 4000.

Yeah, I think you're making a good point. What I'm hearing you say is what you did is you established a habit. I'm going to make a habit of investing. So I think the answer to your question is when is the best time to get into investing? Right now. Right now, this might sound a little like out there, but I really believe this is true. And it's not about figuring out what the best investment is per se. Obviously you want to be smart and things like that, but to your point, it's more about starting the habit. If you start the habit everyone's going to make some mistakes. I've made mistakes. You've made mistakes. But that's not the point. The point is getting into the habit of doing it so that five years from now, ten years from now, that habit is going strong. That's the point, is to develop that muscle.

I preach to people, go buy $50 of bitcoin. Go buy $100 of Apple stock. Right? Go buy $80. If you can afford 80,000, great. If you can afford $80, great. The concept is the same, right? Go buy little bits and pieces over and over and over and over and over of the things that you believe in. Okay? If you're listening at home, you've probably heard me say this before. If you listen to the podcast, raise your hand if you believe that Apple will be here in five years. Okay? Why would I not buy stock? Right? If you believe Apple will be here in ten years, why would I not keep buying stock? Yeah. Walmart, Google, Netflix. If you can spend $20 a month on Netflix and they have 240,000,000 users, and they're going to only have more users because who the hell cancels Netflix? Nobody.

Never.

And more and more and more people are adding on Netflix, they're going to go from 240,000,000 to 340,000,000 to 440,000,000, and their overhead is pretty much going to stay the same.

Yeah.

They're not shipping a product.

No.

You guys get me. So why wouldn't I want to invest in Netflix, one of the best performing stocks in history.

Yeah.

Do you believe in Elon Musk? Okay, there's the only human in history to have four multi billion dollar companies at the same damn time. Yeah. I want to bet on that guy. Yeah. Regardless of what you think in the media, what you think about him with weed or him in the news or him on Twitter, who cares? He has four different, at the same exact time. Multibillion dollar companies. Yeah. It's never happened before. It's hard to happen anytime soon. And so I want to invest in that stock. I'm investing in that person. You might not like Zuckerberg. I do. His stock went up 122% this year. Yeah. So you might not like him. I love him. Yeah. Right? And you're like, I don't know if I like Facebook. Okay, well, what about Instagram, right? He bought Instagram for 1 billion, and now Instagram does 1 billion every three weeks in revenue.

Yeah.

Hey, the guy. I don't really care about Facebook or Instagram. I don't care about social media. What about WhatsApp? He bought WhatsApp for $18 billion. Yeah. And so that's why his stock does so well and why it's going to keep doing well year after year after year. Will there be ups and downs and roller coasters? I don't care. Why? Because I'm not going to sell. Why would I sell my Apple stock? Why would I sell my Facebook stock? Why would I sell my Tesla stock, my google stock, my Netflix stock, if I believe in it now and it's going from a 1 trillion to a 2 trillion to a $3 trillion size company, why would I sell it then? Yeah.

Never.

And the reason that you don't have to sell, and the reason I don't sell is I buy small, medium, small, medium type size accounts over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over rather than going and buying everything in one shot, no matter how much I believe in Apple, I wouldn't sell the RV, motorhome and go buy apple stock. Right. I wouldn't go sell my house or sell these microphones to go buy Apple stock. I would buy small, medium amounts of apple over and over and over. And that will remove what's called a visceral reaction. A visceral reaction is you buy apple stock for $200, it goes to 220. You're like, I'm a genius. I'm going to sell. You buy Apple stock for 200, it drops to 160. You're like, oh, no, I'm an idiot. I'm going to go sell. I don't care about the price going up and down. I just want to own Apple.

Yeah.

Does that make sense? I would just want to own bitcoin. I just want to own Google and Netflix. I just want to own the things that I believe in. And so if you are out there listening and you like Ford, buy a little Ford stock. You like Tesla, you like Netflix, you like an iPhone when you spent one $500 an iPhone, go buy one $500 Apple stock. All right. The third and final chapter. Yeah. We're talking about how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. Why do you think it's important for entrepreneurs specifically for their business or for their household to be adding philanthropy into their life?

Well, because I think one of the best things you can do with money is give it away. And I think that there are people that. I think when people that are genuinely good get money, then they can do good things with it. And you're a great example of that. Correct me, if I'm wrong, but the largest toy drive in history, that's amazing. And as a kid that grew up in a household with a single mom that made 12,000 a year, we were the recipient of some charity. And I can still remember to this day what that meant to our family, meant the difference between getting toys on Christmas and not. I mean, that's a big deal. And so for guys like you and I, it might not be a big deal from a financial standpoint, but what that ends up meaning to somebody changes everything. For me, most of my charity work is with children. And the reason is because children are 20% of the population and 100% of the future. It's the greatest investment you could ever make, because they're going to be steering the boat. And if you can install young early on into a child's mind that someone cares, it's one of the best things you could ever do for them.

Someone that they don't know, that doesn't have any interest in their life or whatever, as far as being connected to them. Someone that's completely outside of their world can care, makes a huge difference. And again, I say that with such conviction, because I know it was true for me. And so what a gift we have to be able to give those families. And so as an entrepreneur, I think that it's great to get money, it's great to invest money, and the best thing that you can do with it is give it away.

So here we're parked right in front of Hubble studio. We're literally up on the sidewalk where normally 400 family members stand in line to get toys for our toy drive. This started ten years ago. We literally just had our ten year anniversary, and there was eight of us sitting on the floor wrapping toys. And then year two, there was like 19 of us, then there was 50 of us, et cetera. And the toy drive grew. On year eight, we took over sofa Stadium, 118,000 toys, and broke the world record against broke world record. And then we did it again. And then we did it again. For the ten year anniversary, we went to ten cities in freaking 15 days to do the toy drive, and we ended up doing eleven cities just to put a cherry on top. The toy drive, to me, is very similar to you. When my parents got divorced at eight years old, I was with a single mom living in San Diego in an extra room of an old lady. She was like 90 something years old. Her apartment, she had two bedrooms in the extra room. I would sleep on the floor and my mom would sleep in the bed and how am I going to afford toys, right?

How am my mom going to do that? And so all that was instilled in me, and because of that, I started selling baseball cards, I started selling candy at school. I started doing all my hustles because of those moments of not being able to afford it. So for me, there's an emotional attachment to helping with Thanksgiving, food drives and back to school days and toy drives, homeless backpacks, backpacks for the homeless, et cetera. Because of the way I grew up and the way I watched people around me, I sincerely don't remember, and I don't know now any of my entrepreneurial friends that grew up rich.

Yeah.

My friends that have big companies, I don't know. One of them with a story of growing up upper middle class with money rich. But the difference will be interesting if society. This will be my last question is there's going to be millions and millions and millions and millions and tens of millions of kids that do grow up rich. Yeah. Because the real estate market happened, investing happened. Crypto, crypto happened. A bunch of exits happened of companies. People became wealthy, and millions of companies were formed. And so now there's a lot of people that are rich and they have two, three, four kids that are growing up rich. What do you think from a society perspective, when parents start making serious money and their kids are growing up rich, what do you think happens to our future as so many millions of children are going to grow up in a different type of household?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think the important component to the answer of that question has mostly to do with parenting, because many of the parents of those kids that grew up wealthy did not grow up wealthy. And so ideally, they're going to pass on what they learned when they were younger as far as not being entitled to anything and not treating people differently just because you have money and et cetera, et cetera. So if they can really instill some of those values into their kids, then I think it's going to be very positive because then those kids will grow up and be able to start companies and do cool things, and yet they'll still have that grounded sense of, like, it's important to treat people right and to not think I'm better than anybody else.

All right, guys, I want you to make sure to check out Shannon Graham across social media, especially on Instagram. It's important to have these discussions. We all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. We here at the money Mondays think it's rude to not talk about it because we need to have conversations about your taxes, your accounting, should I get a loan? Should I rent something, should I buy something? What happens if my friend borrows money and they don't pay me back? We need to have these blunt discussions because this is real life. You really have to pay your electricity bill. You really have to pay for your car. Note like, you really have friends dealing with money situations. And there's just a lot of money things that happen on our daily lives because that's how the world rotates. And so when people think that money is the root of all evil, I just think money is a tool. It's a utility for life. And we have to have these discussions. So check us out on the moneymonds.com. Make sure to like share, subscribe, comment, all those things to help us. As you see, we don't run ads here.

We've been doing this for over a year. You guys have helped us stay number one on entrepreneur charts and top five on the business charts for over a year now. And it's really important to us. But we are not doing this for ads. We're doing this for you guys. And we really want you guys to share this content, get people talking about it. And we will see you guys next Monday. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the money Mondays. We are sitting in an RV motorhome right outside of Hubble studio right this second. We are moments away from having the LA Convention Center, a big event there for elevator nights, the all women's event, the Aspire tour. There's a lot of action happening. We're doing a big networking event here at Hubble studio right around the time that this podcast is coming out. There's a lot of moving parts, a lot of action coming. And so I'm really excited because our guest just landed fresh off the airplane. She came straight over to us. This is a very, very, very busy entrepreneur. He has built a company that many of you at home, when I say the name, you're like, oof.

And have stories and memories right away. It was called four loco. He also built a brand called Drink Koya, which is one of the fastest growing drinks in the healthy category right this second. You've probably seen drink Koya at all your health food stores, your gelsons, your whole Foods type locations. And this brand has been blowing up because there's a lot of investors, a lot of interesting athletes, influencers involved in the brand, which is what you really need to stand out. And only certain brands can do it. And he's going to talk about those topics. So right now we're going to get right into it. Chris Hunter, please give us a quick two minute bio so we can get straight to the money.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So let's see. I grew up in Ohio, not from an entrepreneurial family, so blue collar, kind of just. We didn't have a lot of money. So something that I always aspired to have right when I moved to Chicago, had no clue what I was going to do and just tested the waters and learned a lot of the things I didn't want to do. And at the age of 25, I was selling vodka for a startup company, and I was selling a lot of it mixed in with Red Bull. So I figured, shit, I know just as good as these guys, I'll give it a shot. And myself and two partners started fusion projects, which is the parent company of Four loco. So we started that back in 2005, grew that to what many people know or may have experienced. Rode that roller coaster, got a PhD in crisis management, as I like to say, launched a few other brands under that. And then I transitioned out of that company into the better for you space, really, for personal alignment. My life was very different than what it was when I started for loco.

So health and wellness was a core component, and that's where I am today.

So on the money Mondays, we talk about three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. How do people make money in the beverage game when it's so dang expensive to build a brand?

Yeah, the beverage game is not for the faint of heart. It's a super competitive, as you know, industry. Really cutthroat, really expensive. My perspective is kind of jaded. I mean, when we launched four in its original format, it did okay. We didn't raise much money. But two years into it, when we iterated, we launched four loco, and it just took off. And so we were very nontraditional. We didn't do a lot of marketing. We didn't spend a lot of money. So my take on how do you make money in the beverage industry is you just iterate till you find something that hits and then go all in on it.

So I always say people vote with their wallets, right? It's easy to get your grandma and your friends to try your drink and try the Ford loco. Oh, yeah, it's good. It's very different for someone to buy it out in the wild, meaning buy in a grocery store, 711, Costco, et cetera. But then you got to back it up. It's got to be good or interesting or functional or make you go crazy like Fort Loco did. It has to do something and for people to come back and to stand out. And so let's talk through a couple of things. In the beverage game, there's one thing in the cooler space. I say eye level is bi level. If I took $100 bill and wrapped it around drink Koya or for loco and I put it at the bottom shelf, th nobody would pay $4 for $100 bill because they can't see it.

Right.

But in order to get the eye levels. Bi level to the eye levels of the shelf, you got to pay for it. Can you talk us through what are slotting fees and what does it mean to deal with these chain stores to get that eye level space or really be on the major shelves at major chain stores?

Yes. It's a little bit different in the alcohol game versus the non out game. And so in alcohol, you actually can't pay slotting fees, illegal to do so. You have this massive distribution network that kind of works with the retailers and puts their highest priority and most profitable items eye level. In the non out game, it's a completely different world. It's money talks. And a lot of times you're paying what you called slotting fees, which can be in the form of free product. So we want our first case free. We want to fill the shelf. We'll see how it goes. Sometimes it's hard money. You got to hand over the cash. Absolutely. And that's just the beginning. As you mentioned, getting it on the shelf is a nice feel, good win, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't pull off. And getting one person to try it one time is great, but if they don't buy it again, you've lost. Right? So it really is like that velocity is that key metric. You got to keep turning.

So you go meet with the grocery store and it's day one, and we're going to have two very similar answers. And you're like, I got drink Koya. I know it's a good drink. It's a good brand. I got all these things that are going on. When you first interact with a grocery store, how do you convince them to take you when there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other brands in the similar category?

So the first one is really just passion. Right? People just have to believe in you and you have to sell a story and you have to believe in the product, and someone has to be willing to take a chance on you, right? That's the first one. Then you have to make that store work so I can get data or a selling story, even if it's one location, saying how well it's selling, comparing it to other products, and that gives me the ammunition to go pitch other retailers and continue to grow. That one story is key.

So I'm going to tell you guys an old story. So back in the days, I trademarked the catchphrase, who's your daddy? For over 300 products. I was mostly doing clothing at the beginning. Did a million dollars our first year, 9.5 million our second year with starter apparel. I had a big licensing deal with them. Bada bing, bada boom. Now I'm 23 years old, six years later, and I go public on the stock market with this hoosier daddy clothing brand, energy drinks. And I raise the money for the energy drink division. April 1, 2005. I didn't know there was 900 other drinks on the market when I was doing this. And I'm 23 years old, I'm a baby, right? And so I went out, and my goal was to get into some stores first. So I went and gave it to some seven eleven s. I gave it to the Budweiser distributor in Orange County. I gave it to some local distributors in San Diego. We jumped in the back of our trucks and drove it around just to get our drinks into the stores originally, but then it was time to sell. Now, when I walked in to meet with the chain store, I'd be like, hey, we're in those 711s.

We've been selling at four cans a day, three cans a day, whatever. The numbers were right. We already have Budweiser distributor in Orange county. How many would you like to order? So I never, literally never asked them for a sale. I asked them for how many that they wanted. And in those meetings, I'd also say, yeah, we're going to meet with Costco today. We have a meeting with 711 today. I wasn't in those stores yet. I was explaining who I'm meeting with, which was true. I wasn't lying, who I'm meeting with. And then when I get to Costco and 711, I'm like, yeah, we met with Budweiser earlier. We already got into 100 of these local department stores, local independent stores. And I would just walk, walk them through the process, and I'd say, how much do you want to order? And out of the 55,000 stores, we're in, 43 distributors. I don't remember anyone saying no, and I know why. Because I never asked.

I love that. I have a similar story. I mean, it's about changing the narrative and having confidence, right? And so I remember our first distributor. They called me, and they said, well, it sounds like, you know, some people, we're going to order in some product. They ordered in one pallet. It cost us more to ship that pallet than we made, right? I flew in and I changed the narrative from asking for the sale to saying, hey, this is on allocation. I can only give you five cases max. And it changed the discussion, like, well, why can't I have more if I want it? And I think 80% of those customers ordered the max, ordered the five cases, but everybody ordered something, and we sold it out in one day. So creating that momentum, then the distributor had to reorder was super imperative.

Was there one main story that started Fort Loco? Was there one main situation or one main news article or TV thing? Was there one main thing that started the fire?

Well, I'll tell you, the moment we put it out. So we had four. Our original version, it was 6% alcohol wasn't really working right. We had this false confidence that it was selling because distributors were buying it, putting on shelves, but it wasn't turning. Once we had that realization, we said, shit, we better innovate and figure out what does work. And so we looked at the shelf. We saw higher alcohol products. So we came out with a product called four maxed. It did okay, didn't set the world on fire. My partner Jeff was talking about a 24 ounce can, and my take was, there's no way that somebody. It's too much, right? It's sweet.

It's a lot of alcohol.

And we were only talking about 9% at that time. But we got a flavor house to make it. And the first flavor we made was fruit punch. And I got the sample bottle, and I tasted it, and my partner Jeff called me right after, and he said, hey, what'd you think of that product? And I said, man, this stuff tastes like liquid gold. I knew we had something there because it was so strong, and the flavor covered the alcohol. So that was my first reaction to four loco. The first time I knew what it was going to do was when we sent it to a distributor in Charlote, North Carolina. And what normally would happen is we'd send product in. I'd call them a few weeks later, hey, how you guys doing? You need more? We're fine. We're fine, right? This time I called, and they said, hey, we need another truckload of that stuff never had happened before. So within two weeks, without anyone on the ground there, they sold all of it out. We knew we were on.

Yeah. Now it's showtime. Yeah. All right, so someone has a beverage company out there, or any type of consumer product. Here's what you don't know. You get a big chain store that says, hey, I want to order $1 million of product. You need to come up with $300,000 to $500,000 to make that product. Let's just walk through a real life example. Chain store says, I want to buy $1 million, and it's January 1. You're not going to ship it till March 1 to April 1. Somewhere in that three month range, when they get it three to four months later, they now want net 30, net 60, or net 90. That means they're not going to pay you on terms for either 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. What if your product is like four loco or drink coy and it sells through really well, so you shipped it around March 1. They start to sell through it around March 15 and March 20. By April 1. Like, shoot, we need a new order because we sold through a third of it or half of it, and they got to place another order. But this time we want it for more storage.

We want $3.5 million. You got to come up with another one point five to two million dollars to make $3.5 million a product. But you haven't been paid for the first million. Yeah, you see the problem here. It's a good problem to have still a problem. So there are things like factoring, where you can do what's called po financing or factoring of your orders. Pretty expensive. You can sometimes pay two to 4% for that. Money. Doesn't sound like a lot. That's a lot when you start to think about your margins on beverage products or you got to go raise capital. So walk us through what did you do as you started scaling chain stores so quickly? How do you scale, and how do you have the capital to handle production in a fast growing market?

So with four locos a little bit different than Koya, so one in alcohol, the AR is golden. Every distributor is going to pay you for that product because they put their license at risk if they don't.

Wow.

So you will get paid if it's 30, 60 days, whatever it may be. Our terms were all 30 days. So we did have to get some financing at the beginning. That was not my strong suit. It was one of my partners. So he handled all those relationships to put in our line of credit and our rotating line of credit. Essentially what happened when we launched for loco is that it was selling so fast, it was unbelievable. Luckily, we get paid by the distributors, not by the retailers, which is a little bit different in Onox. So that's a different situation. With Koya. It required us to raise money. Almost day one, we went out and raised seven and a half million dollars in a three tranche deal. So two and a half million dollars. Two and a half later, two and a half later. It gave us the money to grow exponentially because it's really hard to say no to those customers. When Whole Foods calls you and says, we're going to launch you nationally, that's really hard to say no to.

Yeah, seriously. Because once you do that, by the way, keep this in mind. Similar to what I was saying earlier about, like, I'm already in 711 or I'm already in Costco, I'm already in Ralph's or whatever. That makes it easier to get in other chain stores. If Whole Foods takes you nationally, it's over, right? You go talk to any other chain store and you're like, oh yeah, we got a Whole Foods national. You're in. There's not a question of whether they're going to take you at Ralph's, Vaughn's, Albertson Smith's, et cetera. All of them want you because Whole Foods took you nationally. So why does that matter to you guys listening? You might have a consumer product. Do whatever you have to do to get into that first chain store, even if you're only getting into one location or three locations or five locations, a favor or a friend, or finding someone on LinkedIn or Twitter, get into those first few locations and use that to get the data, and use that to get the leverage to talk to the other chain stores about why you can actually sell through at a major store. Okay, so you're building this crazy brand.

You're flying by the seat of your pants because, holy smokes, you guys were all over the news. Everybody was talking about it. How do you build a plane while you're flying? Like, what happens as you're trying to scale a business from employees financing, dealing with the orders, dealing with the media, hiring sales reps, national sales managers, going to conventions. There's a lot that goes on with the beverage brand or any consumer product. How do you figure out what to do when you're building the plane while you're flying?

So again, I'll tell you two different stories. So with four loco, we were lucky that there were three of us. My partners, Jason, Jeff and I were all active in the business, and so we kind of divided and conquered. Jason was a finance guy. He was also handling a region for sales. Jeff was an ops guy. So he was handling production, also handling a region for sales. I was a sales and marketing guy, or M. And so we kind of divided and conquered because in alcohol, you have to have a distributor that's exclusive to a region. So we had to set up 325 distributors, what? Across the country, mixed between the Anheuser Bush network, the Miller cores network, and then the all other, like the Heineken network. So my life for a year or two was on a plane Sunday night, launch meeting Monday morning, work the streets until Friday, come home and do it again.

Right?

Rat alongs are super important. So that was that. So we really built it on the go. We'd go launch a market, we'd hire somebody to backfill ourselves, and literally all you had to do was put it on the shelf and it would sell. With Koya, we intentionally built the company different. We started with a little bit more of infrastructure, back office support. Again, finance wasn't my strong suit. Operations is not where I want to spend my time. So we built that on right away. And then I was going to be in every sales meeting anyways because it's what I do. So we hired sales a little bit later. So I think it just depends on where you are, what kind of beverage that you have. One thing we didn't do, we never built goodwill in the marketing from a PR perspective, with four loco. And so when shit hit the fan, as you said, we didn't have anything to fall back on. The narrative was being created in the market real time. And that's really difficult to overcome from a mainstream press perspective. So maybe I would have done that different.

So when you're building a brand, you're building a company, whether it's for loco, drink, koi, et cetera. How do you decide when the right moments are to take in capital or more importantly, when to exit?

Well, the exit question is really driven by the options, right? So I think a lot of people build it really early and have this plan that I'm going to build it for this ideal acquirer, but that acquirer may not be ready for a multitude of reasons or may never want to acquire you. So I think really what you have to do is look at building just the best fundamental business, right. So the exit, I think, will really just depend on the options and the offers. Right. In terms of what was the other one?

When do you need to raise more money?

How do you decide raising money? So I took the approach with Koya to only raise money when we absolutely needed it, and a lot of investors told us we should take more money, give ourselves more Runway. But in my experience, more money and bigger budgets isn't always a good thing because you can spend money on things that are not productive. Right? Again, when we started Fusion, we were told you got to have t shirts, you got to have chotchkis, all these things that people told us we had to have to have an alcohol brand, we spent a bunch of money and did nothing. So I think budget constraint is a good way to launch a product and then raise more money when you want to pour fuel on the fire of what you know is working.

So now you're building up your brand, you're building up your product, and now it's time to invest, right? You start to make some money from your career and you're doing millions and millions of dollars. How do you decide when your time to diversify and to do some personal investments from what you're building as your business?

Well, I think I started doing some investments when we had taken a little money off the table with fusion and did the typical thing, which was go into all the wrong things. I invested in what I knew that was bars and restaurants. None of them were there was actually one. That was a great investment. But I learned my lesson through some losses and I said, let me leave this to the professionals. And so I really went to financial advisors to start investing in safer bets. Safer than restaurants and bars, right? I wouldn't say it was until late infusion, when I had a decent amount of disposable income and my safe investments were relatively big, that I started investing in more risky startup food and beverage investments. So I think it depends on what your comfort level is for everybody. For. I wanted to have that nest egg that was pretty certain before I started doing really high risk but high reward investments in startups.

So on the making money side, we talked a little bit about that part. On the investing money side, people have decisions to make as they're building within their career. At some point, you have to decide whether you want to keep investing to your own business or start to invest outside capital outside and to diversify. How about investing into your team and scaling, especially when you're scaling that fast with your businesses. How do you go out there and find the right sales managers, the right executives, the right director of marketing and head of sales and agencies? How do you find all these different types of people to help you scale such a big business?

Well, I think we made a lot of mistakes hiring as many do. The game changing thing for me was we found an advisor who brought in these personality or behavioral assessment tests and we used them on ourselves. Me and my partners did first, and it was eye opening how on point they were and what it really helped us do was interview better. So we would use typical recruiting agencies and then we'd have the candidate, but interviewing them and really understanding them is tough. So this was another tool that helped us assess if they were exactly what we were looking for. It's not good or bad. It might just not be a fit for the way we do things or what we're trying to accomplish. So I would say that's the biggest tool that we unlocked. My mentality is we're going to stretch ourselves beyond our bandwidth and we're going to backfill to relieve ourselves. Right. We're not going to hire ahead. That's just the way I like to do it.

So because of your career, because you've had some very successful aspects of your business, especially in the beverage industry, how do you decide what you put your name, time, money, energy into when you could do a water, a juice, an alcohol, whatever, I'm sure drink, prime would say, hey, come work for us and we'll give you a zillion dollars. Come here. Because you helped scale these multiple brands, how do you decide what you put your name, time and energy into?

I mean, for me it's really about what I believe in. Right. It's really important that I'm actually identified with and aligned with whatever I'm selling. Right. So prime is a great example. The brand is on fire, no doubt. Fastest brand to a billion ever. Phenomenal. It's not allowed in our house. It has sucralose in it. My wife is the gatekeeper and that would just not fly. I'm not going to go launch a brand or run a brand that isn't aligned. Right. From an investing standpoint. It's really a little bit of gut and a lot of team, right? So who are the people behind it? What's their plan? And then just do I understand what this is? So I'll give you an example. I invested in a brand called Drippy, which is the THC beverage, right. Emerging category. They recently took advantage of the Farm act bill and used some, what is it, d nine. That can be shipped nationally.

Right.

But I understood it. Even though I'm not a huge THC consumer. I understood that this is the alternative to alcohol, and this could be considered the four loco of the THC beverage. It makes perfect sense, right, for me to be involved, invest and support it.

Very cool. So someone wants to get a job in the consumer product, food and beverage space. What would you say to them about how they can decide to choose a brand that they can potentially go work for?

I mean, if you like the product, go shop the aisles. If you find something that you taste and you like, reach out to them. Be aggressive. I think supporting a brand, even through your social media, it will get you on their radar. Right. There are a ton of recruiters in the space. Some great ones, like force brands who have deep ties in the industry, who can put you in touch. But sometimes interning for free isn't such a bad thing, right? Especially if you're just starting your career out.

So we mentioned ride alongs. I want to talk about what ride alongs are. You have to literally go on the streets. And in my example in 2005, 6789, I was out there at southern wine spirits. We had 21 Budweisers. We had a bunch of coors, Miller, Pepsi's out of the 43 distributors. And I would literally fly in, and at five, six, seven in the morning, I was going into trucks with them. So you see a Budweiser truck. Little Dan was on the truck, 23 years old. Like, let's go meeting with stores and helping place my drinks on their shelves. And because they had around 18 to 22 sales reps in a region like a county, we could get on almost 500 locations in a week, because we'd go see ten to 20 stores each per truck. There was around 18 to 22 trucks. You can do the math. We'd go see three or 400 locations. Not all of them fit for an energy drink. Some of them were what's called on premise, which is a restaurant or a bar or nightclub. Not all of them would take us because Red Bull, monster, and Rockstar would pay to be an exclusive for that restaurant or bar or nightclub.

So sometimes we'd get in, sometimes we wouldn't. And so we'd go visit, let's call it 18 locations in a day. There's 18 to 20 trucks, and that's a couple of hundred locations a day. Over the course of five days, boom, you've seen 1000 locations, and around 500 might pick us up. We would then leave that market, and I'd go do it again. And I'd go do it again. And I always talk about, like, from 23 to 27, it was like groundhog day to me. Yeah. I don't remember anything else. I don't remember a party. I don't remember a girlfriend. I don't remember life. Those things happened. I had a girlfriend and I had life and I had food, but I don't remember any of it. Right. I went to car washes, I went to gas stations, I went to liquor stores, I went to grocery stores. And all I cared about was making sure my can was facing the right way.

Absolutely.

For four years of my life. Right. So talk us through having to have an obsession when you're, by the way, it's not healthy for everyone. So I want to be clear. You have to have an obsession when you want to scale a brand, product, or service. If you really want it to grow and beat out the hundreds of other brands, products, and services on the same shelves, you have to be obsessed.

Absolutely.

Talk to us about that part of the entrepreneur mentality that people may not understand, that you can't just be, like, sitting in your office and scaling a beverage brand.

Yeah. The absolute key to success in the beverage industry is feet on the street. You have to do store visits. There's just no way to really impact the business from behind the computer. Right. So you go in, you do the meeting. As you mentioned, you get the approval, but you have to be in those stores and your team have to be in those stores. And often, which you may have experienced, it's like the last man in wins, right? Whoever went in there last moves the shelf around, gains the space they want, hides the competitors. It's a street level game, and it's kind of funny now because my wife and kids will laugh. We'll drive down the street, I will peek into a 711, and from the road I'll say, oh, they have three flavors of koi, and they say, how the hell do you? Because that's all I'm doing all day, right. So you cannot underestimate the value of feet on the street and presence in store. We launched nationally with Starbucks back in October. And I was in a meeting, a finance meeting, me, and the guy said, let's go grab some coffee. I walked into the Starbucks, noticed Koi on the shelf.

I asked the woman behind the register, she said, I think we have something back. I said, I'll go get it, grabbed it, brought it out, stocked a shelf right there. And the guy that I was with was so amazed by that. But that's what it takes to be successful in beverage.

Absolutely. Okay. Why is it important for brands to align themselves with charity?

Nowadays, well, from a brand perspective, we have not aligned ourselves with a charity. I do see why people do it, and there's cause based marketing around it, and then there's just things that you should do. From a personal perspective, we like to support things that, again, are aligned with us and meaningful. But I can't speak to why a brand should do it because we haven't done it.

Do you want to?

I would love to. I think it has to fit if there's the right cause. I'll give you an example. There's a brand that's in our space, I won't name them. That has a partnership with a human trafficking cause. Great cause, no doubt about that. It just, for me, doesn't click on what is the connection between the brand and the cause. So if I were to ever do it, I think it would just have to really be aligned with the brand and what the brand stands for.

Absolutely. So in your personal life, a lot of things happen in the career, right? People make money, they lose money, they go through ups and downs, and as they hit a certain pinnacle, they start to have what's called generational wealth. One of the questions I ask a lot of celebrities, athletes and business people is a pretty emotional one, and I've never had the same answer once. As you scale through all these businesses and Chris enter, passes away, and 100 years from now, 200 years from now, modern medicine, you're going to live a long time. At some point, when you finally pass away, and let's say you've got tens of millions, hundreds of millions, God willing, maybe you have billions of dollars, what do you leave to your children?

So my wife and I have had a lot of conversations around this topic. We don't leave them a big bucket of money to go make all kinds of mistakes with. What we do is try to find ways to support them, doing what makes an impact for them. And I'll give you an example. I only want my kids to do what makes them happy, not what makes money. For me, it was very different growing up. All I wanted to do was make money. I would figure out a way to do that. That was first and foremost. Fortunately, my kids aren't going to have to do that. I would love it if one of my son says, I want to be a teacher. Teacher isn't a high paying job, and we can subsidize his income so he can live a certain lifestyle and do what really drives him. From a passion perspective, I'm not going to say numbers, but will we leave our kids something that I think they could do damage with to themselves or the world? Probably not. We will make sure that they have a nice life. And I also think there's real value in accomplishing things on your own, and I would be robbing them of that opportunity if we gave them everything on a silver platter.

Absolutely. All right, guys, the money Mondays is very important to me because we need to have these discussions. We have to have these topics because we all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money, and I think it's rude to not talk about it. We have to have discussions about real life stuff. If you die with zillions dollars, what do you leave to your children? If you're hiring staff, should you pay them 60 grand or 80 grand? 100 grand? People need to be paid salary. We need to talk about it. People need to get commissions. They need to understand, should I ask for 1% or 2%? 3%? They don't know because it's rude to talk about it. So it's important to have these discussions. Share it with your friends. Check out Chris Hunter on social media. Check out drink koi. Obviously, as they're scaling their brand, it, make sure when you go to the grocery stores to taste it because it's freaking good and it's healthy for you. So that's a good combination. And it's rare to have that good combination. And really, as I mentioned, we don't do this. There's no ads on this show.

We've been around for a year now. We've been number one for 43 weeks because of you guys. We've been number five to number three in the business category. I need you guys to have these discussions. So share this with your friends, talk with your employees about it, talk with your family about it, and then ask the right questions and bring it up to your friends and family and coworkers, because we're in a very interesting time in our world, especially during election years, where there's a lot of chaos. And these are the times to really get closer to the people around you and really buckle down and really figure out what's going to go on your world. Any last words? No.

I love what you're doing. I mean, I think it is important to talk about money, and not only as a family, but as a broader group and share the information. And much so, great job doing what you're doing.

All right, guys, we'll see you guys on moneymodies.com. And right here on the Money Mondays podcast next week.