Scott Duffy interviews Myles Kovacs, From DUB Magazine, Business & Burgers: Season 1 Ep. 3

I'm Alan Taylor. My buddy Scott Duffy and I are in search of the best burger in America. Each month we visit a new city to try some of the top restaurants, pubs and brewhouses while sitting down for a candid conversation with some of the top entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers and celebrities. I don't know about you, but I love talking business over a burger. Welcome to Business and Burgers.

Being that Scott and I are both former surf bums, we head south to another killer beach town, Oceanside, California.

We try out some more outrageously good burgers at the local Taphouse and Kitchen, also known as lth. We couldn't be happier than our pal Miles Kovacs joins us. Miles is the president and co founder of Dub magazine, which is topping the charts in the automotive lifestyle scene. Miles is a self made man and a millionaire. In fact, you may have seen him on ABC's Secret Millionaire. He shares with us how he turned his hardships of growing up in East LA into the character he needed to become the catalyst for change, for the betterment of companies and communities alike.

I am so psyched to have you here because again, the first time I heard about miles was that TEDx talk. There was a lot of pain there. Can you take us back to that talk?

Well, you know, it was the first time I actually spoke in front of my parents. So that was really difficult to be vulnerable in front of your own parents.

Right.

Especially parents that pushed you to be tough your whole life. So to be vulnerable in front of them was very difficult. And then driving through my old neighborhood and stuff, I mean, it was, it was tough.

And you grew up in east la.

Yeah.

Tell us about kind of how you.

Grew up seeing all the gangs and the drug dealers and all that stuff and just kind of how everybody's so pissed off, you know, and that's what makes it tough. So you become really hard, you know, no emotions. I'm writing a book right now and I realized I never seen my parents hug or hold hands or kiss in my whole life till this day. I think a lot of that was just kind of reprogramming myself to be vulnerable and to be okay with whatever happened to me, whatever I saw, whatever you know, things that really affected my life. There's only two outcomes, you know, when negative things happen. We've become either bitter or we've become better. I was bitter for so long, once I realized I wanted to be better.

My life changed.

Tell us about your school experience.

I barely graduated high school, got kicked out of school. Going to school is probably one of the worst times of my life because it reminded me of how stupid I was. Right?

Yeah.

But see, that's the funny thing, because the Miles that I know is the magazine publisher of Dub magazine and deals with the biggest companies in the world, the auto industry. This lifestyle magazine is iconic.

It's so ironic to hear you talking about having struggles, reading and things like that when you're the publisher of this incredibly successful magazine. How did you teach yourself to read?

What I tell people is follow your passions. So I was passionate about lowriders. So I learned how to read by reading Lowrider magazine, not by being in school, but when I'm in these classrooms and I'm getting instructed to. I get so much anxiety, I usually leave.

But how do you get over the anxiety? Now?

You got to think about kind of the root of it. So you have anxiety, you have fear. Yeah. You have, you know, nervousness. I started speaking and I was extremely nervous. I mean, really bad. I didn't want to do it. My first actual engagement where I spoke was in front of 200 GM employees for general Motors. And they said, you know, go up there and speak. And I was just like, no way. Like, I can't. All I was thinking about that time is, what if they don't like me? What if they think I'm stupid? What if they think I'm ugly? What if the big monitor falls down? What if my, you know, mic turns off whatever it is, Right? That's all I thought about the whole time, and that made me extremely nervous. Well, extreme nervousness is caused by selfishness. We're only extremely nervous when we're only thinking about ourselves. So what I do now is I think about everyone there that I'm trying to spread a message to or help or give them tools or guide them. So it's not about me. Once I transitioned my life from being just about me to everybody else, my nervousness went away.

So I want to get back to where this man got started. I mean, as the delivery driver for a wheel company to one of the most iconic lifestyle brands dubbed magazine.

You know, I mean, got kicked out of high school, went to continuation school, and then I went to a local rim store and started working as the delivery driver making minimum wage. But one thing my dad told me, and this is probably the only great advice he told me, right? He said, if you're going to go work at McDonald's, be the best McDonald's worker. You're going to go work in a warehouse, be the best warehouse worker. Thanks, Pop. Right. Big aspirations for me, man. I remember that. I said, you know what? I'm going to be the best driver. I'm going to go and pack it, Pack more tires, more rims in there, get done faster and everything else, right? And that was my goal. The phones would ring, and at the time, we would advertise in, like, lowrider and trucking, all these magazines, but they wouldn't sell out of state sales. So they'd be calling from Texas, Louisiana, and they would hang up. The people that work there would be upset, like, we don't sell there. And I'm like, hey, we should try to sell there. So I actually went from the delivery driver to setting up mail order for them, and it was because I saw that there was a need, and I took that from zero a month to 200,000amonth in sales by myself. I ordered the stuff, packed the stuff, did the western union, everything. So I cut my teeth on business 101 right there when I was 16 years old.

Guys, look at this.

Look at that.

Burgers here.

Nice.

Looks amazing.

Oh, brother.

Amazing.

Tell me what we got here.

So we have our 6040 burger. It's 60% beef, 40% chorizo, stopped with fresh guac, guacamole. It's got some charred queso blanco on top and fried fritas, which are like fried potatoes on top, on top of the sunny side egg.

So first of all, I have never had chorizo in a burger.

You're gonna love it.

Super fired up about that. I've never had an egg on a burger.

Have you had an egg on a burger?

I've had an egg on a burger, yes.

Have you ever had an egg on a burger?

Where have you been? I always put egg on my burger.

Oh, my God. All right, well, this looks unbelievable, and I can't wait to dig in.

Chef, you knocked it out of the park, man.

Beautiful time to eat.

I love a place where the burgers are designed by a courageous and passionate chef. This burger is unbelievable. Chef Daniel brings a whole new meaning to the word hamburger.

Like Miles, owner of local taphouse and kitchen, Gabe Hogan is concerned with the betterment of the community, donating to multiple local charities while supporting the local culture. Lth was a place to celebrate, relax, or just have your spirits lifted. With their insanely creative, eclectic menu, including delicious cocktails and, of course, beer on tap and lots of it.

I want to go back to dub and what was the inspiration for starting dub magazine?

You know, the inspiration for starting dub was really just to make car culture socially Acceptable, you know, because it's kind of street and, you know, people thought, oh, if you had chrome rims on your car, you're either a drug dealer or pimp or, you know, and this.

Is 17 years ago.

This was 17 years ago. So I mean, it evolved, you know, and then market evolved and the whole rim culture become so popular. I mean, they have 22, 23 inch wheel stock on a manufactured vehicle. A lot of the celebrities with Dub Magazine, they made it cool. When people think of Dub Magazine, they don't think of me and my partners. They think of like Tony Hawk and Snoop and Shaq and they think about those people. So, I mean, what's been awesome is just we gave people a forum and a platform to show off, because before Dub Magazine was there five seconds outside the club when they're driving away in their Lamborghini. So it gave them a safe platform to show off. And it also educated the consumers on what they were doing and how much it cost.

So, Miles, when you first started Dub Magazine, obviously you knew at some point you were gonna have to deal with the big three, the big auto manufacturers. Where did you draw from to go and stand in front of these guys?

I was so eager to go to learn from them. So let me see what these guys are all about. Let me learn their lingo, let me figure out what they do and let me figure out how I could benefit from them and how they could benefit from me. So one of the things that I took away from the first meeting was besides just getting like kind of thrown out of there and hey, we would never do anything with you as long as we live, was I went and got all of their reasons why they weren't going to do business with us. And I came back three weeks later with solutions for all their excuses. Then I went back, they gave me more excuses, and I came back with solutions. So I went back and forth with solutions to every excuse until they had none. Then they had to do business with us, right?

Where most people, they hear the no's, right? They hear all these and you can even call them no's. You call them excuses, and they hear the excuses and then they go away. And so it sounds like you almost like thrive on the excuses.

You know, I'm a problem solver, so I thrived on going in there and working away or an angle for them to understand. These guys were all white, 60, 70, 80, 50 year old men, right? And I'm talking to them saying, hey, aren't you passionate about Snoop Dogg? You know what I Mean, they're like, who the hell is that? You know, Let me ask my grandkids, right? So I got that all the time. And it was just like there was no emotion or no passion for Snoop from these particular people. So I'm like, okay, how do I evoke their emotion? And then I would talk to them about them and said, imagine James Dean going on stage or going on a TV show or this movie, driving your car. How would that make you feel? I'd be on fire. I said, well, that's the way these consumers in the younger generation feel when Snoop's driving your car on stage.

So the connection that you have with all magazines lately is that the industry continues to evolve, Right? So how did you evolve with that, using technology?

Well, technology makes you more efficient, for sure, but it's what you do with that technology and then also what you're going to do. What's your ego going to do? Do you need that big building? Do you need that big sign? Or are you going to operate with no office out of your house? With all the technology today, you could run an operation from everyone working at their home through, you know, all these different technologies. I mean, you could see people every day. And most importantly, I mean, you don't really meet that many people face to face anymore.

It's such a good point, and we hear it so often that you can work out of your house, you can be effective having a distributed team. But I think that sometimes people still fall down on the technology side. It's kind of like, what are the things that you need to start with? You need to start with a basic office suite of tools like Word and Excel and365 that everybody on the team is able to use. So you're all operating from the same thing is, I think when everyone's using the same tools and technologies, it just makes doing business that much easier. Everything's talking to each other, you know.

Well, it does. And then also, too, if there is an issue, multiple team members could help.

That's right.

Right. And that's the beautiful thing.

And you don't have to be a technology expert. You don't have to be an IT person or anything like that, but everyone's. You're right. So you talked about climbing Mount Everest, and I thought had an amazing metaphor that came from that experience. Can you share that?

Everyone around me, like, you know, in the hood, in the streets, all that stuff, people, my family, they're all like backpacks. The big mistake I see with a lot of entrepreneurs is, oh, I Want to stay grounded. I need to take everybody with me. The only people you need to be around you are the people that make you better, not the people that make you bitter. So I had to get rid of all the bitter backpacks. But before I climbed, I took them all off and I said, look, be right back. Climbed it and then came back and I said, here, this is how I climbed it. Not one of them wanted to climb. So I felt bad. I was upset. And I'm going in there like, you know, just, you need to do this. You need to. I realized at that point that was kind of a turning point in my life. You can't change people and you can't get people to do what they don't want to do. That's it. So what I do now is I try to find people that are at that tipping point of change and that people that want it. Most people are looking for a quick fix. So they don't want a solution, they don't want to fix it. They just want money. They want, you know, like this band aid. Right, right. So I get asked constantly for money, but I don't give money. I give solutions. And to me, that was significant because as I sat there, I had a, you know, 8,000 square foot house, 15 cars, Lambos, Ferraris, everything. And I was the most miserable, you know, so at that point I said, okay, I'm no longer gonna live half full or half empty like a glass. I'm gonna right size my life. I'm gonna get a smaller glass and it's gonna be oozing out with joy. So I went from a, almost 8,000 square foot house to a 652 square foot house. And I've never been happier in my whole life.

Is that where you are now?

That's where I am. But I have a view.

I got a view. Killer view. Yeah, but, but the reality of it is when you could put prove that you could go in there to the bare essentials and you could be happy. One of the most kind of satisfying things for me, and it gave me just ultra confidence, is knowing that I'm the same person whether I walk out of an 8,000 square foot house or 652 square foot house. That's power.

So before we get done with our burgers, we're looking for a little advice for folks from your perspective. Perspective advice on. I want to be an entrepreneur. Give me some advice.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to be an expert at your field. Like you got to really know who your Customer is right. And I see a lot of people that don't understand that. They're not prepared. So be an expert at whatever field you're in and be willing to change directions constantly. And it's sad because I watch so many MBA business school guys come out and they're like, well, the map was telling me to turn left, but there's a wall there. So I hit the wall. It's like, dude, come on, man. When the map's telling you to go somewhere and there's nothing there, you gotta find another map, right? You have to be able to use your common sense or intuition. And that's the only reason why I've been successful. I'm a street smart kid. Intuition, common sense, they don't teach you that at Harvard, Yale, mit, UCLA, or whatever it is. So I told myself, and I tell all the street kids in the world, if you educate yourself, not necessarily just in school, you'll be smarter than everybody in the world.

So with all of these lessons that you've learned, right, and everything you've shared today, my question is, if you were looking back and talking to yourself like when you were 20, and you got to tell yourself one thing, one piece of advice, what would it be?

If I had to tell the young Miles, something I would tell young Miles, learn to love yourself and learn to laugh at yourself. Those two things changed my life. Who's your hero? You're my hero. You're my hero too, right? And this chorizo in this burger is my hero. Okay? I've never had chorizo in a burger before.

This is good.

Yeah, this is really good.

Miles, you've been the best brother.

I really appreciate you being here with us.

You're a guy that I've enjoyed watching grow because no matter what, you're a hard working guy and I've enjoyed being in the trenches with you. So thanks for being a good example to me, my kids.

And is there any advice for me from two successful guys?

Eat less of that burger and less bread.

That's not gonna work.

I always feel inspired after seeing my pal Miles. And there's so much to take away after our sit down. But here's some food for thought. There's only two choices when faced with negative outcomes. Become bitter or become better. To be a successful entrepreneur, commit to being an expert in your field and be willing to change directions in an instant. Learn to love yourself and laugh at yourself. Along with a traditional education, learning to use your intuition and common sense will give you the edge you need in order to succeed.

Next time on Business and Burgers, we head even further south to Ocean Beach, California to see what all the talk is about at the famous Hodads. Is it just hype or is it well deserved? Joining us is Matt Theriault. After going from a successful music business to bagging groceries, Matt reinvented himself and his business to create one of the hottest real estate firms in the country. Join us next time and take a bite out of business right here on Business and Burgers.

Check out more episodes of Business and Burgers and our B and B blog at our website, businessandburgers.com also, don't forget to visit our Business and Burgers Facebook page and give us a big thumbs up. Join us each Wednesday for an all new Business and Burgers presented by Microsoft, where we get to the meat of a successful business.