The Best Of: Money & Wealth (Part 3)

to get upset with you. She just I mean she was on the board of I think it was Weight Watchers, and something happened when something went down where she didn't like what they were doing, and so she made some moves that they didn't like, and so they said, well, we're gonna we don't appreciate you doing syz Oprah. So we're going to I just saw her a few weeks ago. I love her. We're gonna you know, we don't want

you to think to be our spokesman anymore. Can you imagine somebody saying this to Oprah and she's like, that's cool, let's find no problem. Didn't raise her voice on sold all over stock tied to the deal. The stock then plunged. I think this is the weight watchers. Don't quote me in this, but whatever weight management company she was associated with, you can correct me in the comments or confirming in the comments if I'm right. The stock plunged when she

sold her shares. They forgot that she had a strong economic interest. She wrote a very smart, financially literate and intelligent deal. It's all about the details. When she cut that deal to be their spokesman, she's like, I'm not gonna rock the mic. I'm going to own it. And that's what I want you to do. I want you

to own the stage. Don't just dance on it. I want you Quincy Jones says, if you think that you're in the music business and you don't own music rights, publishing rights, licensing rights, some kind of rights or ownership interests. You're not in the music business. You're a temporary performer,

you know. Jones and Iced to talk about Michael Jackson and how Paul McCarthy got very upset with Michael because Paul McCartney said that Michael should own publishing, shouldn't just be an entertainer, And Michael realized that he was smart, and so God gave you two ears in one mouth to listen twice as much as you talk, and so he's like, okay, cool, that's really smart. I should own publishing rights. Okay cool. So he had it owns. We went I was trying to own his own publishing rights,

Michael Jackson's rights. But then he's like, well, who else should I own? The Beatles? So he went and bought bid for the Beatles publishing rights, and Paul McCarthy lost his mind. He was extraor I think to this day, extraordinarily effect. I no, based on public reports, published reports. In his own words, he was very very, very very

very unhappy with Michael Jackson. Now it might have been on the edges I go that your friend tells you that, you know, he didn't say no. He's not even another go because Paul McCarthy didn't say any publishing rights but ours. He didn't say but but the Beatles. In fact, there's a little bit of arrogance assumed that Michael Jackson, who was the biggest pop star in the world at that time, did I did not have a right to own the Beatles publishing rights too. But he didn't say, you can

own any rights but the Beatles. He was giving this advice against like a tutor gives, like a mentor gives a mentee. Didn't realize that that that that the student was going to become the teacher. Michael when bought the Beatles publishing portfolio, Paul McCarthy lost his mind and and and could not say a nice thing after about his once good friend. Michael Jackson. Just didn't. He didn't, He didn't do any unethical He just outbit everybody else, including

the Beatles. The Beatles could have outbid Michael Jackson, they could have bought that portfolio, but didn't believe in themselves as much as Michael Jackson believed in them, and he bought that portfolio. Do you know that when Michael Jackson was doing all that spending and the reason he didn't go broke was because he owned that publishing rights, which which Sony ultimately ended up purchasing, was worth a billion dollars his his he never weighed that kind of money.

And tour, you knew you toured. You made ten million back in the day, ten twenty million. The tour that took him out when he passed away got restless. So I think that was he's gonna make fifty million. Is to get the number right, We have the number right, fifty million. But his portfolio was worth a billion back in that day. It was worth you know, seven hundred million. And that's in large part because he owned his portfolio plus a few others, but mostly the Beatles' rights. It's

what you own. And so getting your credit score now you know Michael Jackson's credit score was He's Michael Jackson. He is in Presario, and he had these relationship capital amongst people in the music business, and he was savvy about business, and so he made a case, a credible case. You know, the word credit comes in the lot who were creditito, which means credibility. Did you know that? So he had credibility with those who could who could work with him to back him to buy the publishing rights.

Now he got into trouble financially later on and had to sell his half of the publishing and ultimately as a state, I think right now is trying to sell all the publishing rights. But the reason Michael Jackson was able to live the life he lived was not because he danced from the stage, because he owned the music being played on the stage. So on the stage you live on. The credit score you have gets most of the yes. Is that you want you want to become you want a prime home loan, The answer is yes,

good credit score over seven hundred. My mother's credit score was eight fifty four when it the smith got rest her soul, and the computer just said yes to my mother midnight. When my mother went to computer to apply for a loan for something a home mortgage or consumer loan or auto a loan, whatever, the computer just said yes. Because now it didn't say are you black, or you let you're female? Whatever. He said, Oh my gosh, he's

an eight hundred credit score plus over seven hundred. By the way, it's just fine, perfect, actually seven fifty yet golden. But my mother's credit score was eight to fifty four back back when it went that high, and the computer just said, yes, you're approved. And you've never seen a riot and a seven hundred credit score neighborhood in all of your life. Right, So I want you to get

your credit score right. I want you to get your debt down, your savings up, your credit score up, because if you can do that, the bank just says, yes, the banks are not racist. Okay, they're capitalist machines. They want to make money and they cannot make money unless they make a loan. Now, is there somebody racist at a bank? Sure there is, right, they are racist people everywhere. But as a rule, like racism and banks, I did a thing on banks. We go and listen to that

podcast or break this down. But one hundred years ago, yes, there was a racist bank. It was Joe's bank, as family owned it, and he didn't want to give any loans to black people. Yes, or maybe even the women. Women couldn't even get a loan before nineteen seventy two, you know that. That's that nineteen seventy two women. I did a Time article on this, you should read it. I did a podcast on this, you should listen to it.

But women did not have rights financial rights before nineteen seventy two, nineteen seventy four crazy, not eighteen seventy two, eighties, seventy four, nineteen seventy two in our lifetime. So the bank wants to say, yes, they can't make any money unless they make a loan. Again, on a hundred years ago, they were discriminating issue because they could because it was owned by a family. Now a bank is publicly traded

and they want their stock to do well. They want their they want to perform for their shareholders, which means they need to make good loans. So if you're pooking them boo booing them, whether you're poor white or poor black, your credit score is five hundred, not making you alone. They're not making you alone. I wouldn't make you alone, okay, But if your credit score is seven hundred, you're not black or white, You're not red or blues and politics black and white isn't race. You're green as in a

good credit risk. Those of you not familiar. I'm an entrepreneur and I built businesses and enterprises and nonprofit organizations, and I've been at this my whole life. I started not in the womb, but I was, you know, it was role modeled by my mom and my dad. We model what we see right, Right, And I often tell people when people say, why the kids in the inner city want to be rap stars, athletes or drug dealers? Right, And there's nothing wrong with being want to be a

rap star, just you can't. It's hard to scale. My friends Killer Mike and t I and the jay Z's of the world, and even you know, the R and B stars that I love so much, like my brother Howard Hewitt and all these you know, the impresarios. You know, there's only one Quincy Jones in the world. Right, it's hard to scale. You can't reproduce personality like that. They're unique, right.

And athletes same thing. Right, There's something like five hundred thousand young men trying to go into the believe it's the NBA, see the NBA, of the NFL, and of that, you know, like eighteen thousand of them. Make them into college, make it into college sports. And it's like one two. I think it's this is the NBA. Make it actually into the pros. I think it's like sixty and so, you know, and of course, nobody should want to be a drug dealer. And you've heard me say this before.

You know, drug dealers are unethical and it may be a moral business, but they're not dumb. They understand import, export, finance, marketing, wholesale, retail, customer service, security, territory logistics. Right, These are not dumb people. These are really smart guys and unfortunately sometimes ladies with a really crabby business plan and bad role models and

bad mentors. And one of the reasons that I do what I do is that you know is what we don't know that we don't know this killing us, but we think we know like no one gave us a shot, no one gave us a plan, no one gave us, gave us training, right, no one gave us a proper business plan for our lives. It's my I think it's my fourth book. The memo with the book that's out now is Financial Literacy for All, which, by the way, thanks everybody for continuing to make it a number one seller.

It's number one in business finance on Amazon nationwide for the last three months. So if you haven't don't have your copy, get a copy. If you have your own copy already, leave a review please online. And it's coming to black bookstores near you. If it's not there, already I'll do this American Aspiration tour. I'll be stopping at black business bookstores. I'm doing a book, a couple of book events at Walmart. The CEO Walmart did the forward

for the book. Doug Millan, good friend of mine, coach chair Financial Lucy for all with me And yeah, there's some other surprises coming the end of the year with the book. But you know what was that to do with this podcast episode? Like my shirt today says my hustle looks different, My hustle looks different. But my mom and dad I understood a had blessings like the other people didn't have. My mom. Yeah, I grew up in the hood. I grew up in South Central incompetent. Yes,

all that's true. I was homeless, all that's true. But my mother, I was economical helmless, by the way, which is different than most people's homelessness. And you know, it was almost an intentional situation because I could have gone home and hung out with my mother, but she would have you know, she was worrying about me. She wouldn't worried about me, and she would have forced me to go get a job at mc Downdela's Air crab and Boying Aircraft when she down Dose Aircraft which is now

Boying Aircraft where she worked. I didn't want to do that. That wasn't my calling in my life. So I was willing to roll the dice on me, swilling to bet on me. My hustle looks different. Well, my mother worked a job. She also had a small business part time selling making handicrafts and selling that plus food that she made. H she sell it to her co workers at Medwndular's Aircraft. She would and then the supervisor got mad at her. He would threaten there like I'm going to expose your

side hustle. She's like, well, I'm gonna expose you of being accustom my side hustle and let me ride around his bicycle on the campus oft BC down Douglas air crab and sell it to all my coworkers and your your piers. So when I go down, you going down zip it. My dad owned his own business right and my grandfather was a sharecropper born in eight seventy one RB. Smith.

So I got it honest. Like my mom had a sense of yes, I am gay that to me, my dad has sense of yes I can and get that to me, all right, So my hustle was different, and I want your hustle to be different. If I want you to have a choice, like I want you to have freedom, I want you to have freedom of self determination and not just the freedom to go work where you want. That's cool. Most people are going to work for somebody else's that's perfectly fine, and we need that,

We need to encourage that. We need to build the middle class. But sometimes you want to You may choose to take a higher risk and to get more reward if you succeeded that you go from cashing a check working for somebody else to writing a check, hello, working for yourself. Can I get any man? I tell you this is this is the church. What is happening now? And what have you done for me lately? This is the pulpit of finance. This is the weekly ministry, not pulpit.

No disrespect to pastors of the cloth. This is my ministry of finance. Right, small m and an opportunity again. Money and Wealth. This is this is my Money and Wealth podcast series on the Black Effect Network on iHeartRadio. Come in to you every week with something that breaks this down at a level and in a way that everybody can understand. Again, you're not dumb and you're not stupid. It's what you don't know that you don't know that's going you. But you think you know in a blind

town or one eyed man's king. If you don't know better, you can't do better or keep people like John? Can you get on with the ten businesses? Right? Let me so in these in these unique times, right. So, I recognize you have hustle. I recognize that you're nine to five. Your job may finance your five to nine your side hustle, beautiful. I know that you want to go from the bottom of the top. I know that your role models may

be limited because you model what you see. But we don't see a lot of business people in our neighborhoods. And when I was coming up, you know, I didn't know there were businesses in my neighborhood. I knew there was a nail salon, I knew there was a you know, a liquor store or whatever, but I didn't equate that to business. I didn't realize those were capitalists, right. I didn't realize that was free enterprise. It took a banker coming into my classroom and breaking that down for me

when I was nine years old. In my financial literacy course, which I hope to one day get indoctrinated into every school in America home economic course to financial Literacy for All legislation, I'll be working on that. You can go

for the Campaign if America. By the way, on our website and operation help go to the Campaign for America under the book Financial Literacy for All book page in sign up for the Campaign for America to ultimately build a list that would go to legislators that would encourage them to make financial literacy in the legislation of the land. But that's how I got it right. Banker come in my class froom giving me tools and then I and then my eyes lit up. I saw businesses everywhere, so

I wanted to make it's easy for you. Here are ten businesses right that you can start. Now. You know, some of these I could go for one hundred thousand, but I'm going to do this. I'm going to make this approachable. Right, ten businesses you can start for twenty five thousand dollars a year because these are lean times, right, Folks at too much month at the end of their money. Right now, these are leaner times. If this was two

thousand and one the pandemic hit. Now the stimulus money is flowing, I might do a podcast that's one hundred thousand dollars business, but you've got less money, day, less resources, right, So I wanted something that's approachable twenty five thousand dollars and you can even finance some of that if you need to business person versus entrepreneur. People use these phrases interchangeably. They're not interchangeable. You can be an entrepreneur and be

a small business owner. You can be an entrepreneur and be a big business owner. You can be an entrepreneur and not be a asiness owner. You can have an entrepreneurial mindset and run a nonprofit. Run your life just as almost like a you know, an entrepreneur mindset if you're just running your life. What might be an upgrade on being a hustler and I mean hustler in the positive sense of the phrase. You can be a business owner and be entrepreneurial, and you can be a business

owner and be an entrepreneur. But don't presume because you're a business owner you are an entrepreneur that that is a bridge too far, and words matter, definitions matter. And by the way, don't be an entrepreneur and presume that you There are people who are entrepreneurs who are horrible. Horrible business owners need to be need to stay in a mellion a ways away from actually running and owning

a business. Uh you know. This is analogous to a great recording artist, is a great uh you know, a track star athlete or a great you know, performer who has a business manager who handles the left brain work while they handle the right brain work. Left brain is analytical two plus twe equals four and all that stuff. Left brain, sorry, right brain is creative, making the best, the most amazing music or whatever on the planet. But

don't confuse those things. Because you have a genius in one area, it automatically means you have a genius in another. That is a mistake. To assume is to make an ass out of you and me. Literally, that's how it's spelled. So don't assume, right, don't. It's a horrible thing to do in business or life is to make assumptions. Just ask the question, don't assume. Just ask the questions and get the answers. So now let's let's get into an

unpack uh, the substance of titles entitling in business. Before I get to that, me deal with a one huge misnomer. I've already dealt with one misnomer which is not so huge, but business an entrepreneur, it's just something that irritates me because I am an entrepreneur, I am a business owner, I am an executive. These are three different categories, and there are three different talents. And I'm also a getted none person. I'm all lot of execution. I'm also a

thought leader in some ways. These are five different categories of talent. And so you want to be the Michael Jordan of your space, right, Michael Jordan was not just a great basketball player. He had he was had intellectual genius. He has strategy, he you know, he had placement, he knew timing, he knew you know, he had you know anyway, so he had you know, he was high frequency, high frequency thinker, and he was very observant of He could figure out what his opponent was doing, who is whoever

is assigned to him. Within one and a half games, he had figured that guy out. So he is paying attention not to his own game. He understood his own game. He's paying at ten and the other how he played the game. So we can map out how to reverse engineer success in that situation. Here's a bigger git. That's important leadership versus management, leaders versus managers. I made this mistake, me, John O'Brien. I screwed this up time and time again.

Is I built close to fifty entities now around the world, three of which are the largest in their category. The largest minority owner of single family rental homes in America. Company I built and sold and still have an ownership interest in it, but I don't run it anymore. That's a Promise Homes company. So a couple of years ago, built and still lead. That's Operation Hope. Largest nonprofit financial literacy Promise Homes is for profit, the largest financial literacy

financial coaching organization in America. You know, forty plus states, three hundred physical offices, fifteen hundred physical and satellite offices, millions of clients, billions of dollars deployed on the for profit side, a few hundred million dollars in that one business of activity and transactional value. Then the largest financial inclusion holding company in the country. Four hundred employees all that stuff. Okay, so does that make me a leader

or a manager? Well, I'm both. In fact, I'm more than that, if you listen to the titles I mentioned earlier. My mistake was that I could take somebody who was not even a manager a tactician, and turn them into a manager or no jump over management, and make them a leader by giving them a title because I like them. You can put wings on a pig and hope it will fly. It won't. If you put wings of a pig and hope to fly, It's not the pig's fault,

it's yours. That's what I was doing. I was taking people I cared about, I liked, I thought were amazing, giving them a title, giving them a paycheck because they said they could do it, they wanted it, they desired it, told me they could handle it. Don't worry, had no experience in the situation we're talking to me about, telling me they could do romanticize what I was doing by looking at what I was doing. Oh my god, that's so easy and not easy, and just fell right on

their flat on their face half the time. And you know, sometimes ruin the relationship because I'm pushing them to be the best that I see in them. But what I see in them is not what they see in themselves. How I see them is not how they see themselves. I remember there was one dude who worked for me and really talented in many areas, really talented the areas, great in community, great with kids, great, I mean great

with anything black is in black issues, great personality. And one day I noticed that on the on the business card, the signature line on the email that we assigned to them at the company and I pay for the email, title had changed to regional CEO. And I'm like, well, hell, I don't have a regional CEO. I called chamber my my my manager liked, did I change titles? Did I

approve channel title changes? And I just don't remember it. No, No, you have regional you have market precedents and market leaders. You don't have a regional CEO. You're the CEO. John, thank you reminded me. I appreciate that. So I call this person. I'm like, look, you know you already CEO chief executive officers. What that means you got to write a check or cause checks to be written, like you got a hunt CEO is a hunter, and uh, this person didn't want to. They wanted to flass. They wanted

to have fun, they wanted to enjoy themselves. They wanted to chill. They wanted to go to parties and receptions and go to the White House and go what go go do what they do well. And I'm like, that's only part of the job. It's a very small part of the job. Actually, I hate going under these receptions and all this stuff when all I'm doing is just talking about blah blah blah. I want my problems have to have a beginning and middle and an end, right.

And so this person told me that they were good at a word i'd never heard of before, ideation, And I'm like, wow, okay, it just taught me something. And I've learned that word ideation. It's a really important word. But I also realized I had put this person in the wrong job, and to their credit, they quit. But I had been paying them for a long time to not do the job that I asked them to do. They decided to do the job they wanted to do.

I mean I'd come in and they'd be in my office doing photoshoots in my office, right and I was out traveling trying to raise money, and I had a budget, and they had to meet the budgets. If you're gonna have this time, you gotta meet the but ian. You want to get rid of somebody quickly give them a fundraising go.