This is a spoken presentation (YouTube video) by Jayson Lowe using a grocery-store analogy—specifically a "can of peas" example drawn from R. Nelson Nash—to explain the idea of becoming your own banker. The core lesson: when you own the distribution (the "store"), you must not undercut your own business ("don't steal the peas")—instead capture retail flows to increase business capital, turnover, and long-term profitability. The talk links low retail margin dynamics (example: buy at $0.57, sell at $0.60) to behavioral choices about using or preserving business capital.
Chapters
You know, do you shop at your own grocery store? And she said, yes. She said, well, for the things that I have here that I need, I don't have everything I need here. Yeah, I understand that. So you shop at your own grocery store. Let me ask you a question. Do you pay retail costs and go out the front door through the cash register like everybody else, or do you take the groceries out the back door? And it was, it was awesome because she looked over at her husband and she said, well.
We'Re going to talk about getting into the grocery store business. We're laying the foundation now. We're going to start expanding on the banking process or expanding on the banking process. Why are we talking about getting into the grocery store business? Well, let me take you through this and by the end of this little example here, you'll see why Nelson used the grocery store business as an analogy for the importance of banking and how it works. Now, getting into the grocery store business, the first things first. We want to consider a business in which you are both a consumer and a seller of the product. So if you own a grocery store, you both need groceries and you sell those groceries, you have an unlimited market because everyone uses groceries, does that. Starting to sound like banking. If you, you need access to capital and everyone else has access, needs access to capital, and to use the banking function similar to grocery store, somebody has to perform the distribution function. It's as simple as that. Now if you're going to get into the grocery store business, the smart thing to do would be to study the business for a couple of years, get a mentor, start to learn it. Well, you're here today to learn about becoming your own banker. So you're starting that learning journey. You need to purchase a superior location. What are the three rules of real estate? Location, location, location. Bit of a cliche there. We need to build an attractive building because we want to attract good customers. And then we need to stock the shelves with high quality merchandise to attract again, good customers. Now, a lot of people don't realize that in the grocery store business there is a very low margin of profit. So we need to turn the inventory at least 15 times per year just to break even. If we turn it 17 times, we're going to become profitable. If we can turn it 20 times, we can retire early or enjoy passive income early. So you can see we're already starting to paint the picture here of volume and we'll expand on that as we go. If we increase our volume, we increase our profitability. Now here we have a Grocery store. Now, you can see that we have. This is a little nice image of our grocery store. Now, it's important to see that at the front front door, you can see it right there. We have our cash register and our cashier. Now the question is, we have the back door. We have. The inventory is going to come through the back door. And we're going to use the example of a can of peas. This is an example that comes directly out of R. Nelson Nash's book, Don't quote me on this, but I think it starts on page 15. It is the grocery store example where he starts to break down how the grocery store relates to the process of banking. Now, if you owned a grocery store, I'm talking to you, the listener. If you owned a grocery store, would you ever shop for groceries at someone else's grocery store or would you shop at your own grocery store? If you shopped at someone else's grocery store, it'd be like stealing from your own business, wouldn't it? You would never go and shop at someone else's grocery store. So you, if you could become your own banker, you would never go and store your money or borrow from someone else's bank. You would shop at home and borrow from your own bank. Now, I'm lucky because my lovely wife does the shopping in our house. So let's just imagine if it's you who does the shopping or your spouse or you do it together, you're going to come to the grocery store. You own the grocery store, so you can do whatever you like to do. So the inventory comes through the back door. It goes to the front door. So your captive customers are going to be shopping for groceries, and we're going to buy a can of. Or we're going to sell a can of peas for 60 cents. Now, the can of peas, though, that's coming into the store, after we get that inventory sold, the capital comes in, we purchase more inventory, and as you can see, more peas comes through the back door, whatever that inventory is. But the peas that we're purchasing are being bought for $0.57. So again, the margin is very, very low. $0.03 on every can of peas. Now imagine this, folks. You're shopping at your own grocery store. Your customers are purchasing these cans of peas for 60 cents. But you're the owner of the business. You get to do whatever it is that you want to do. You're purchasing them at wholesale prices for 57 cents. And if you go into the grocery store, you walk down the aisles and you're filling up your grocery cart right now the question is, are you going to go out the front door and pay retail costs like everybody else, like your customers, or are you going to pay 57 cents because you've already bought the inventory and go out the back door? I actually talked to somebody the other day, Dan, who owns a grocery store, and I said, you know, do you shop at your own grocery store? And she said, yes. She said, well, for the things that I have here that I need, I don't have everything I need here. I understand that. So you shop at your own grocery store. Let me ask you a question. Do you pay retail costs and go out the front door through the cash register like everybody else, or do you take the groceries out. Out the back door? And it was awesome because she looked over at her husband and she said, well, until he started talking my ear off about this whole becoming your own banker thing. She goes, I actually used to go out the back door. She goes, now I go at the front door and I pay retail costs. She said, oh, interesting. Tell me more about that. Do you see why that makes sense to do that? She goes, yeah, I can see why that makes sense. She actually saw the value in it. And I'm going to expand on that in a moment here. A lot of business owners, whether it's a grocery store or what have you, they've already bought the inventory and they feel like, hey, it's my business. I can do whatever I want. I can pay wholesale costs. I can walk out the back door. I've already paid for it. But what they don't realize, they don't realize that they're actually stealing from their own business. Because every single time we use a can of peas for 57 cents, how many times do we have to sell another can of peas to make up for the profit? To make up for what we lost, your customers are going to have to pay for that. We have to sell 20 more cans of peas just to make up for every one can of peas that we used. So we're actually stealing from ourselves. So instead of going out the front door or the back door, what we're going to do is we're actually going to go through the front door and we're going to pay retail costs, but we're actually not going to pay retail costs. What Nelson taught us was pay a little bit more than what you're calling for, putting an extra 2 cents in the cash register. You're just flowing your own capital back for your own business so you could purchase more inventory to Create more profit for your own business. Now imagine 10, 15, 20 years down the road when you go to sell your business, you're going to be so much more profitable. Think about what your business is going to look like. The books versus the person down the street who's been going out the back door for the next for the last 15 years. You know the highest amount of theft comes in the retail industry from the employees. A lot of people don't know that. So if you're sneaking out the back door, the employees are going to start behaving in the way that you behave. And what I mean by employees, those captive customers, your family members. If you're running your own banking system and you're running the family bank and you're not paying back your policy loans, if you're not paying back your policy loans at a higher rate of interest than what the insurance company is even calling for, then you're stealing the P's. Think about that for a second. Why would I pay higher interest? Remember, we're talking about owning and controlling the banking function. All you're doing is pumping more energy through your system. Pumping more energy through a company that you co own to create more profitability. That's exactly what we're doing here for the banking system. So your family members, those who are involved in the family banking process, are going to follow your lead. So what would Nelson say? Don't steal the peas. He says once you understand the grocery store example, the rest of the process of becoming your own banker becomes ridiculously simple. Don't steal the peas.
