Creating Solutions for Common Problems with Ron Klein

Foreign.

This is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for panties on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now here's your host CEO of We Close Nodes, Scott Carson. Hey everybody, Scott Carson here. Just want to say thank you again for listening to the podcast. If you've been listening for a while, you're subscribed to the podcast. First of all, thank you. Second of all, hey, you know, if you're you're not one of our coaching students or you haven't signed up for one of our three day workshops, here's an opportunity for you. You want to check out our WCN membership. This is the biggest bang for the buck of the notice street. Besides our one on one coaching, this is our monthly membership for 97amonth that gives you access to all of our online training, our virtual workshops, our note weekends, our special one day master classes that we've taught in the past, anything that we have going in the future, as long as you're a live member, if I can't make you or save you $97 a month, I'm doing something wrong. But save you paying 997 or 99 bucks or 399 here or anything like that. We make it affordable at $97 a month and like I said, it gives you access to all of our past replays, our upcoming classes, our access to our special classes. We also do weekly coaching calls with our WC members and also our WC members also get first crack at tapes and lists of notes that we get in after our one on one coach to take a look at them. But it's a great way for you to go. You can also schedule call with me anytime to go through deals that you're working on marketing things, questions you got going on about a deal. We're here to help you. So how do you get signed up for that? Really easy. Just go to noteumbrella.com that's noteumbrella.com get signed up there for you 97amonth guys. Like I said, biggest bang for the buck of the nursery and we want seeds of the family. So let's get you signed up today. That's knownumbrella.com welcome to the no family everybody and thank you for always for listening. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everybody.

Hey.

Welcome to this episode of the Note Closure Show. As always, Scott Carson jacked up to be with you today. So excited to have our special guest today. Now our rock star has been around a while. He is known as the grandfather of possibilities. He is his. If you're in real estate, you probably use two of his things on a regular basis, if not one thing multiple times per day, which is kind of what he's known for. But what he is also is just an absolute innovator and entrepreneur and just a wealth of knowledge and resources for you out there in the business world. He's been tackling issues and problems taking place all across the country in business for years. And he is just an amazing individual. I am very honored to call him and his wife dear friends. Coming on almost a decade now. Who am I talking about? I am talking about a Superman. Mr. Ron Klein. Good morning, Ron. How are you doing today, buddy?

Good morning, Scott. Thank you so much. What a great introduction.

No, I mean it. I love sharing. If you need, I'm available for birthdays and bar mitzvahs and speaking events if you need somebody to introduce you at some point.

Well, we've known each other for a long time and I've been around for quite some time too. But I don't, I don't really want to give my age out because I might frighten people. It's such a big, big number.

Well, you would never know it from how active you've been and all the stuff that you've accomplished, stuff like that. I mean, you're well known for. When we first met, we met through our mutual friend Gregory at Secret a decade ago and Greg introduced you as the creator of the MLS and then the actual credit card strip as well. You want to talk briefly about that before we dive into the meat and potatoes of the episode.

By the way, the reason I'm still here is because I'm not empty yet. So going to be around for a while.

Yes, sir.

You know, I've told the story before and I told the story long, long terms when I was on your, your show once before. So I'm not going to drag it out. But briefly, I developed and invented the magnetic strip on a credit card. Created and developed MLS for real estate, voice response for banking, automated most of the New York Stock Exchange, created the corporate listed mun quote and trade system and in the recent years developed something with a, with QR codes which is a mobile marketing studio. But basically, and all through that, all through those creations, I created a lot of problems too. And I solved them because I didn't think it out clearly and I was young When I started. So back in 1964 was the first introduction to the credit card situation. And a large department store, I had no idea as to what was going to affect a large department store, came to me and said they had an issue and can I help them? And I was known as a problem solver. But I said, there are no such things as problems. It's only situations. And once you identify what the situation is, if you can identify it and find out what is the issue, you can turn it into a challenge. And the nice thing about challenges, there's always a gift behind every challenge. So they came to me and said, takes too long to do a charge purchase. In 1964, it was just a piece of plastic, the credit card with your account number on it and the your name. And they would put it into a little machine and do a squish to make a little piece of sales slip. And then the credit card companies would issue to the merchants every month a big thick book of all the negative account numbers, all the credit card companies, and they would have to look up in that, that big book. So the problem was, takes too long to make a charge purchase and the burden was on the wrong person. It was on the merchant. I said, let's attack that and solve it. And all I said was, and without getting into all the details, let's take all that information that's in a book, put it into a memory system, give the merchant a little keypad, he's the account number in, and if it doesn't come up on the memory system, the merchant is good to go. Then you do your squish. That was fine. That speeded things up. But the burden was still on the merchant to put the right account number in. And right around that time, reel to reel tape recorders came out. Because I try and learn something new every day and you know, record voice, record music. And I said, geez, if I could take a little piece of that tape, paste it on the back of the credit card, record the account number on that little piece of tape, and build a little device that mimics a tape recorder and make you the motor you slide it through. And I built synchronization and all that and so on and so forth. And that's how simple it was. Other words, identify the problem. And that was the creation of the magnetic strip on the credit card.

Awesome. Such good, such simple. And would you say that a lot of the problems that businesses face can be simply solved by thinking outside the box or looking at, or is it oftentimes they Overthink a situation, overthink a problem, and maybe their, their limited beliefs or their background stops them from seeing something that's outside the box as a solution.

Absolutely. In fact, I'm going to jump way, way ahead and give you a perfect example. When I finally got to the New York Stock Exchange, and we'll get to that story. But when I finally got there and I developed the bond system, one of the things was in order to be able to sell it was to prove it and show it. So I had to run a communication line, an ATT private line, from the stock exchange to the tester's office. And it ended up, and I had signed a contract with the exchange and so on and so forth, and that was the main data line from that stock exchange office to the participant's office. And after I got everything started, the exchange came to me and said, oops, we got a major problem. And this is after many contracts and building and negotiation. I said, what's the problem? They said, there's more than just bond information on that line. And I said, oh, well, the customer's been paying for this line. And they're saying, well, because the customer's paying for the line, there's too much information on there and they're going to get more than what they're paying for for the service. And I said, oh, that's serious. So you're going to have to abandon the whole process that you came up with because now you're co mingling everything and it comes out of the stock exchange. I said, how much time do I have to solve this? And they said, well, maybe we'll give you 24 hours, five minutes. And they said, what are you, a wise guy? And I said, well, I have a contract with you that I'm allowed to disseminate bond information and I'm in charge. Instead of the customer paying for the AT&T lease line, I'll pay for it. So now I'm in control of the line. And if I have a contract that says I'm liable only for the bond information, I just solved the problem. And they said, you did it again. That's a perfect example of immediately looking into a problem and solving it. In other words, it could have been a total disaster. And all I did was I say, well, if I pay for the line, I own all the data coming out. And because I'm under contract, the New York Stock Exchange, I can't take more than just the bond information out, so I'm delivering it. So I build the Customer for the AT&T line. Not attractive. Yeah.

Now, a lot of sense, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs a lot. You coach a lot of business owners and stuff like that through a variety of things. You know, what's kind of your. What's your process? Because one of the great things when you were. We were talking last week and I was thinking about today's episode. So many folks out there, entrepreneurs, business owners of all types, are looking into the new year. They're looking to expand their audience, they're looking to grow their business. And I know that you got a hot button for AI. We were talking briefly about this last week a little bit. A lot of folks are scared to embrace that. I'm not scared. I've been using it for what we do for. For a variety of reasons in a variety of ways. But what are some of the things that you look at that you see opportunities and ways for people to really.

Take advantage of that there's tremendous opportunity. When you look at AI, consider it as one instantaneous rapid advantage of the entire Encyclopedia of Britannica or the entire Google or the entire information source that you couldn't find anywhere else. AI is a wonderful, wonderful tool if it's harnessed and used correctly. And I'm going to speak in a very elementary sense what AI is. It's a computer educated with a lot of information constantly. And the more information you put in there, the more it's expanding its brain horrendously. So what may take us years to develop intelligently out of college, to learn, AI has it in seconds because it's being educated. However, it's so important, in my opinion, that the AI is categorized in certain areas of finance, real estate, whatever the sector to be. And then those that educate it must be very careful as to the accuracy and the validity of the data that they're feeding in, because garbage in, garbage out. Okay? So that's what's necessary. So I think it's so important that. And I'm going to really go out on a limb that science controls it and the government doesn't. Okay. Because there could be dangers with AI if it's used erroneously for the wrong things and put into the wrong hands. And it could be a tremendous asset. For instance, I've got a friend who just recently went to Amazon and kp. What is it? What's Amazon's book thing?

Oh, the Kindle reader.

The Kindle ktp. Yeah, ktp. Okay. And if they pay a monthly fee, they have access to KTP's AI. Oh, that was wonderful. He wrote the book in one day. In other words, all he did was select the categories and he selected this and selected that and it really did everything that. It processed the whole thing. Well, there's an area where it's used to its best advantage, but it's in its growing state and it has to be controlled and it has to be controlled environmentally from the standpoint of categorize it. Who is going to be checking the validity of the data to be fed in and how is it to be disseminated and that that's some of my, my concerns and my questions about the AI. Some of it must be valid and there's some that I guess would still be questionable. There should be some form of policing.

Do you find, do you find that with the rep. You know, like you said, guy wrote his book in a day. Do you think. I mean it's great that he has that, but do you think it diminishes the fact that he's an author using such a tool to kind of do the writing versus him doing the writing? I know, you know, when I write articles I still have to go back in and really look at and make sure it's 100 up to date and then tweak it a little bit for my own lingo and my own wording. But there's an AI out there with bard and chat GPT stuff like that. The more you spend time at, the more kind of focuses on it. Doesn't does that scare you anyway where people are just communing just literally just able to instantaneous create something like that. It's great for knowledge, but it also can be kind of. I think maybe it diminishes the value of that individual that authors mine. Do you or don't you?

I 100% agree with you because AI should be used the same way we use a search mechanism or an information source for checking the validity of what you're offering. But what we're, what we want to learn from is other people's ideas and creation. My innovation. In other words. Here's some of the things that I came up with. I just briefly quickly defined how I came up with the end the. The credit card, the magnetic strip on a credit card. It happened to be 35 pages of patent and it took three years for it to be awarded. I filed it in 1966 and it was awarded in 1969. All right. There's a lot of creation in there, a lot of smarts, a lot of good ideas. One of the things is. And somebody would question It. Well, Ron, when I have a tape recorder, there's a synchronous motor that keeps that tape flowing at a synchronous speed. Otherwise, if it would slow down, it would sound like Mickey Mouse, or speed up, it would sound like Mickey Mouse, slow down, sound like Dracula. So you have to control the right speed. Now, you came up with this magnetic strip on the credit card. Wonderful. But everybody is not the same speed motor. I pass it through fast, Scott passes it through slow. Okay, what's the accuracy of the data? Start, stop, synchronization. What does that mean? It's a. The function that I studied in school through my telecommunication knowledge and so on and so forth, and I understood it very well, and that's what I incorporated to make it work. In other words, before I would read what was on that magnetic tape, I had a couple of start bits and a couple of stop bits at the end. And I would say, okay, this is what the start bit looks like. The data starts right, right after that last transition of the start bit, and it ends when I go into the stop bit. So now I don't care who's pushing it through and how fast or how slow, it's accurate. So, I mean, that's a perfect example of my knowledge being put into something. But I used data that's available to monop to and actually formulate the synchronization.

Makes sense. Makes, makes good sense. Now, when you have entrepreneurs that reach out to you and want to tap into that AI of a brain that you have, I mean, you, you forget more things than anybody thinks about in a year, in a lot of times. We all, you know so much. You've been through and developed and seen stuff like that. What's your process for kind of sitting down and helping them unpack their ideas or unpack the problems that they're facing?

The one thing that I do that frightens most people and then gets them totally educated, I ask very hard questions that they've never asked of themselves. And I mean, I can do that to anyone. You understand your business beautifully and fully. What's the value and the benefit that you're offering? Can you define it very quickly? In other words, I always said, and you've heard me say this before, goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds. Most people and young people have an attention span of eight seconds. And it's going down. Can you totally define to me all of the benefits and value of what it is that you do in eight seconds? And in those eight seconds, are you getting everything across that Your business is possible, capable of doing. I can ask questions that you never even thought of and say, wow, I never thought I could offer that that's a good idea. Now, what you've done, you've enhanced what you're doing and you've created a new benefit. So my philosophy to all businesses is simplicity, enhance creative benefit. And that's done by people who are smart, daring, and different. What does smart mean? Not a PhD from Harvard. Smart means learn something new every day, pay attention, listen, daring, don't be afraid to make mistakes. If you make a mistake, if you paint something the wrong color the first day, paint it a different color until it's right. And the last thing, be different. If it doesn't provide a benefit, it's nothing more than a hobby.

That's philosophy makes sense. Do you also find too, a lot of entrepreneurs fall in love with their idea and not know their audience or know the size of their audience? They think it's a good thing because it's a benefit for them, but there may not be an audience out there for their product or service.

Well, you know, I always say, and I've been preaching this for years, I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person. Think about that.

Quote. I refuse to have a question that. That totally answers the question. Amen to that. Amen to that. When you see, when you're talking, like I said, when you're going through and asking those questions, is there a besides of them being able to define what their. Their advantages and what they provide, stuff like that? In the eighth second, the goldfish bulls, I like to say, mindset of that. What aspect of cooperative cooper, I call it coopetition. Let me say that where cooperation and competition should people be looking at doing. Obviously, it's always good to see what competitors are doing. And also I know that a lot of people get so bugged down. It's my product, my, my business, you know, my issues and stuff like that. I don't want to partner with people out there, but I'm from the big, big belief that if you want to go far, you got to get in the boat and row together. If you want to go fast, go by yourself. But if you want to go far, you got to align with other people. Do you see that happening a lot in. A lot in business too, for you with what you recommended?

Sure. And in fact, what you have to impress people with and have them answer it in very, very minimal fashion is what is the value that you provide? In other words, if I sit across from the table from someone. And I say, please define me. What's on your mind when it comes to. From the standpoint of defining your business and what it is that you do? It'll take multiple sentences and paragraphs for them to explain all this. And I'll say, got it. Okay. It's like the credit card takes too long burden on the wrong person. So I paraphrase what they told me in a half hour. And I come up and I said, is this what you just told me? And they say, yeah, that's kind of it. I said, okay, now let's ask some hard questions of what you told me and see if we can fill in and enhance what you're already doing and how we can align ourselves with other businesses so that we can offer greater value and greater benefits. If it's not a benefit, you can't sell it. And it's pretty much simplifying it. I'm trying to think of. Okay, here's another example. My business was building up after the credit card. I was known as the problem solver. And then mls. And that was an easy one, solving MLS and voice response for banking. The way I did that was I took advantage of the touchstone phone that came out and I said, here's a touchstone phone. What a great instrument. Everybody in the world who uses a touch tone phone does now have an input terminal. Did you know that? Yes, it's an input terminal. If you look at the keys, every key is made up of a matrix of two tones. The tone that is in the vertical aspect of it and the tone that's in the horizontal aspect of it. So you can get a lot of data out of that one key and interpret it. And that's how I came up with voice response for banking. I decided let's use the phone to go in to dial into the, the bank's computer. And now the bank can interpret your account number by what you key in first UID and then your, your account number. And then I built a magnetic drum, or I had a magnetic drum in those years, this was in the late 60s. And I put a, a read head and a read write head on every point on the magnetic drum. And it rotated pretty fast in those days, in milliseconds. And I put a different syllable on every read it. I had like 30 some syllables. And then I would take the digital data from the computer, convert it into digital points on the read heads and convert the ones and zeros into voices so it would sound very mechanical. And then later I synthesize it, but I just said, what's available in some other businesses that I can join together here to accomplish what I like? What do I want? What do I want? I want to listen on the phone to my account information. How do I do that? What are my resources? Who else is doing things that I can use to incorporate into my situation, to make my situation even more valuable? Now, this was an example I was going to tell you about. I got involved in, in as my business grew and that grew and I needed more employees and more people and more help. And I raised some private capital. In 19, late 1960, early 70, my first private offering was $750,000, which was like millions to me then, right? It was great. It allowed me to grow even bigger, hire more people. And this was before the days of software. So I didn't even have that capability of using the magic words of software. Everything was done with printed circuit cards and resistors and transistors and capacitors and flip flops. It was either a 1 or 0, 1 or 0. And that's basically what computers are all about. And you did it with flip flops. So I needed engineers to design the circuits, draftsmen to lay it out, the printed circuit cards and assemblers, production people to put it together. So I was up to almost like 125 people just to keep up with the manufacturing. I needed money to buy parts and process these purchase orders. And it was growing out of hand. So I raised that private money the first go around. And then I reached, reached a point where I went to my investors and said, I'm out of money, I need more money. And they said, well, let's do an ipo. And I said, what are you talking about? I was only 30 something years old at the time. They said, a public offering. And I said, what do you mean? They said, well, we'll go public. And I said, what's that? Like these little outhouses, we're going to have an initial private placement. And I said, I know nothing about public offering. I knew nothing about going on the exchange. I went to the library, got myself the 1934 securities act, read it cover to cover. I became an expert. S1 and S2 registrations and the prospectus and the whole thing, we put it together beautifully. We took the company public, I raised another couple of million dollars and we were soaring. And then I became attractive to an insurance company that saw many benefits in all of that. We were manufacturing similar for MLS and then also for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And they offered to buy me out. And I was just young, I was only 34 at the time. I figured, well, does that mean retirement? I mean I came from a working class family. I was born right after the depression in 1935. Snuck out 1935, if anybody wanted to hear it. And my dad was a postal worker. My mom works in a department store. I didn't know from relaxing, I knew from 18 hour days. So I said okay. And I sold the company to this big insurance company and I started fishing, I would fish. I went, I bought a little boat after about three weeks I said this is not for me, I have to go back to work. I went back, I relinquished my option stock and I said, just let me out of my consulting contract. I need freedom. And I figured I'm going to start something where it's a minimal amount of people, maybe a handful, more than one handful, that's it. And I just want it to be a cash cow where I generate revenue and I don't need a lot of employees anymore. I don't want to be a manager of that.

Right.

And I went out and I decided I'm going to sell other people's communication equipment, other people's products until I decide what I'm going to run into. And I was calling on an old client one day and I was selling modems, communication modems. They were in the communication business. And on his desk was a bid sheet. And I said what is this? And it was a bid sheet from Western Union. It was upside down. And I started reading it and I said, hey Paul, what is this? He said well, you know, we're in the communication business and we use a lot of refurbished teletypes all over the world. And Western Union puts these, their big warehouse which is only 60 miles from where I live. They, he said they put these things up and refurbish them every week and put them up for sale and you can bid on them, win them and put them to work. I figured that sounds interesting. I got myself a rental truck. I went down there and I saw they were refurbishing Twix and Telex machines, communication equipment and some of the older teletypes. And I figured, geez, I could be in the parts business. Everybody knows teletypes in those days. That was emailed in the 60s and 70s. And I said I could take these refurbished parts, sell them for 50 cents on a dollar to big companies like RCA and ITT. I'm gonna bid on it. I started bidding on it and I started buying totally refurnished refurbished Twix and Telex machines and selling them at a discount that people, local people, ham radio operators, people that want to use them as IO terminals. It was pretty good. And then the big mistake came when Western Union contacted me and said, we're putting up 12,000 of the old, old teletypes up for sale. These were used on battleships for communications. In the Navy, they were used everywhere, the total communication systems. And we're putting them up for sale because we're going into the satellite business and we want to divest ourselves of this. And I figured, wow, now I can really be in business, right? And a little shop with parts. I went and bid pennies on the dollar for these things. Pennies. And I got a notice days later. Congratulations, you won 12,000 teletypes. That scared the crap out of me. I figured, how did I win them for pennies? Did none of the people bid on them? Well, the problem was, here's Ron making big errors again. 4000 were in a warehouse close, close to my home. 6060 miles from the home. The other 8000 were all over the nation.

Wow.

They were in Texas, they were in California, they were in Chicago. Fantastic. Okay. And Western Union said, now, you know, you have to take possession of these within 30 days. I said, oh, yeah. I said, all I have is a garage, my house. I said, I have no facility. I said, we're very sorry, but you've got 30 days to take these hundreds of pounds of machines in your possession. Otherwise, we're going to put them on a train and they're going to be on your front lawn. Okay, what do you do then? You really have to be innovative. Does anybody have any ideas? 8,000 of these things that weigh a couple hundred pounds each, with keyboards, printers, paper tape, punch paper, tape readers. What do I do? Think about it. What would you do, Scott?

Well, the first thing is do is figure out where they're at and see if I have any friends or family in that area that could help me out for a little storm for a while to pick them up. That would be the first thing I would do. And secondly, I think I would probably look at my clients and look at their same geographic area, see where they're at, and see if they could hold it. If I could have something pick up there and they hold it for me for a little while, that would probably be the two logical things I could think of.

I may be wrong on that, but okay, very good. You're fired. Okay, remember, I bid pennies on the dollar for these things, right? I had 4,000 in a warehouse 60 miles from my home. They were pennies I already had. Okay, if I took the profit just from selling the parts there. So what did I do? The obvious thing to do is call the junk man. The junk man came and looked at samples of these machines. He said, you got a problem? He said, let's look at the bottom of these things because they're communication terminals up the bottom. Each one of these machines was loaded with hundreds of printed circuit cards. Because they were electronic, they communicated, they were dialed up, and so on and so forth. And then they had the printers and the keyboards and so on. And he said, let's look at these printed circuit cards. He said, these were manufactured years ago. They were all gold traces.

I was going to say. The next thing is, yeah, they were.

Used out at sea. They didn't want them to rust. And gold at that time was $35 an ounce. And right around the time that I bought these machines, it had soared up to seven odd, seven dollars an ounce. He said, we can take all these thousands of printed circuit boards, submerge them into a cyanide bath. It eats the gold off the boards. It becomes gold salts that surfaces at the top. We'll do an assay and we'll split the profits. I said, you got a deal, partner. We had so much cash now. I had cash and I had 4,000 machines near my home base. But now I had 8,000 pieces of pure junk. Because they had no electronics, they were no longer operable. They had keyboards and printers and punches. Who wants that? But he discovered that the cabinets, because they were used at sea, were very rich in chromium, in the steel. And he discovered early in the 70s, a foreign car dealer had a rust problem with their steel on their cars that they were importing here in the US because they didn't have enough chromium. We contacted that foreign car dealer and said, we're making a gift. We gifted 8,000 machines, they shipped them over to the Far east, and that was it. That's how you solve problem.

Very nice. Yeah, definitely got outside the box there.

Now, what did that do for me? In addition, I was now in the parts business. But three months later, I got a telephone call. Guess who called me? The New York Stock Exchange. And they said, we called Western Union because they had 273 special teletech machines that hang on the wall that we need for expansion. We're trading floors, we're expanding our trading floor, and we need them as inquiry terminals. And you guys have them. And they said, no, we sold those to a little company called General Associates in New Jersey. I get the phone call and the exchange said, are you interested in selling them? I said, I got a better deal for you being innovative. I said, I'll give you a full payout lease on them. You'll own them after the lease, as long as you give me a maintenance contractor to maintain them on the trading floor, as long as you have them. And they said, absolutely. I was now in the maintenance business at the New York Stock Exchange, maintaining their equipment that I was leasing to them. How's that?

That's really good. That's really good. That's awesome.

Any questions?

Yes, I would say when you think about today's business, what are some things that you're working. I know you've been big with the QR codes and then on barcodes and stuff like that. What are some things that you've been working on the last couple years that really excite you?

Well, I don't know if your audience knows this, but this was. It's purely coincidental. I'm totally blind now, and I was partially blind a few years back from true glaucoma. And I was working with a blind gentleman. And I came to him and I said, what would you like to have that? And he was very, very knowledgeable about a lot of things and a lot of gadgets. I said, what would you. What would be on your wish list as a blind person that you would like to have? He said, I'd love to be able to walk into a room and have somebody be able to love to be able to identify them right away, or I'd like to be able to open up my medicine cabinet at home and be able to identify the difference between my aspirins and my blood pressure medication and so on. I said, let me think about that. And two weeks later, after I thought about it, I was just introduced around those in that year where what came to the United States was the invention of the QR code. It was created by Toyota through a subsidiary many years before in Japan for manufacturing purposes. They never officially patented it, but they patented it open source, and they introduced it here in the US and nobody in the US was using it yet. And I saw it because it had some basic elements and advantages. And I said, geez, if I could do some tricky things with that code, this could really help them because we could paste the code on each device. Oops.

You're good.

It's not disturbing. It's Arlene's phone.

You're good, you're good.

Barely here, I'm gonna shoot her because she left it in here. Anyway, I said I could do some interesting things with that code and make it so that blind person could paste it on the lid of their, of their pantry products, on their medicine chest products, and talk into their smartphone, tell it what it is. And now anytime they point it at the code, it'll tell them what it is. And I made it programmable that they could change it. It's coming up on expiration or so and so forth or this used to be my green shirt on the hanger, now it's my red shirt. And that worked out real good. And I started putting it together and he thought it was fantastic. Simple, very simple idea, but very useful for blind. And today I'm using it for myself. But what came about from that was I said, I've got an idea. If it's good for the blind, why can't I make it adaptable for the sighted people? And then it became nothing but a programmable front door to a mobile marking studio that had infinite applications. And I don't want to waste your time of going through all those applications now, but that was basically how I got into still being innovative. Because my mind doesn't stop. I started asking myself hard questions.

Right, exactly. It's definitely interesting how that's worked to help you without you knowing it when you got involved. But now QR codes are used so fluently throughout a lot of things, people have understood the, the opportunity behind them and how effectively. Like I was using three or four today with different things we're doing in business.

Well, the fallacy that most people have with it though, the QR code, they're using it just to point to a URL and that's it. And it's done. My QR codes are front door, that's programmable to point to any URL and to point to multiple things. So for instance, it's smart shelf tags for products in the big market, chain markets where you go in and you want to learn something about a product or it has an opportunity for coupons or whatever, you point it and it takes you to a location where you get all of the information on it, the allergens and et cetera, et cetera, and the videos of the company people, marketing people telling you the benefits. So it's an in aisle clerk right there at the point of purchase. And then if that product wants to change, they can change the code direction from the office. The codes are programmable and that's what makes it so different. So there's lots of things to it. And it's used and I'm using it in real estate applications on cruise lines, for instance. On a cruise line, instead of printing paper every day of what's. What's on the program, they have a little thing sitting in your stateroom with the code on it. And the people on the ship, they program that code every day as to what's on the program. And you wake up, you turn on your phone, you point it and it tells you what's the program for the day. And you can schedule it and so on and so forth, push buttons and say, yeah, I want to be registered for that. Register for that. So it turns your phone into a terminal. It's one idea.

Well, we noticed it recently, definitely, you know, instead of getting the flyer every morning, what's going on, you just scan it and everything's updated and exactly like you said it was. We made it easy. And obviously saving millions of dollars in paper and printing and people pass it out. Now you don't need the manpower. You're saving on that, put into something more, cleaning or doing something else in the ship. Passed up paper, which is unique.

Think about this, Scott. The code can be put on anything. It could be put on handy hands outs, could be used at trade shows, be put on a piece of paper. It could be put into a magazine or catalog or a magazine itself. And it's just a piece of paper, Right. However, when you scan it, it'll come alive because it'll take you to that. Let's say you advertise in a magazine and a full page ad is $10,000. Now you can say, I put my QR code in there and I only need a quarter of an ad. And on that QR code, when somebody scans it and I give them a reason to scan it, a prize or a reward. Now when they scan it, I tell them all about my products, all about what's in that ad. It comes alive. I show them how it's being used. I take them to the buy page if they want to buy it. I can do all kinds of things. It comes alive from a little piece of paper. And that's what's so interesting.

It is. I literally have it on the back of my.

Yeah, I can change it. I can be sitting in my office and change that to meet something else and it never becomes obsolete.

I've. I use that with my business cards to program it to change what's going on. Love it. And I'm glad you brought that up. Definitely. I have you mentioned Arlene there with her phone ring a little bit there. You guys have been married for just a few years.

Yes. September will be 65 years.

Wow. Congratulations.

Thank you. Guess what? It's working out so well. We're going to start living together.

I love it. I love it. I love it. What would you. I have to ask this. What would you say is your secret? What's been. If you had two or three tips for folks out there, what would you say has been your secret to longevity with. To a happy and fun marriage?

Well, I'm going to quote Arlene on this. Respect. Pick your battles. And I learned something new from Arlene every day. She has qualities and things that are just fantastic. She has some things that drive me nuts.

Yes.

And I have some things that drive her crazy. But we learn so much from each of us, and it's just. It's beautiful.

Amen to that. Well, that's a. That's a good partnership There is. Like you said, learn something and respect definitely is one of the most important things out there to make things happen.

If you're. I'm not running over my time.

No, you're good. You're good. We're still good here. I had a couple more questions for you, then we'll wrap it up there for you. When you are sitting there where you maybe think of this, maybe you don't, when you're sitting there thinking about things, where do you see opportunity in today's world? We talked a little bit about AI and how to implement, but if you're sitting there thinking about on a regular day and basis, where do you see opportunities? I'm sure opportunities lie everywhere, but where are the biggest things that you keep seeing? Hey, there's an opportunity for that. There's an opportunity for that out there.

The first thing that comes to my mind is, and I'm not being critical of the people that are out there today, but people don't want to work or people want a minimum amount of work, okay. If you give them a task and it encompasses too much work, they're going to lose interest. However, if it encompasses a minimal amount of work which still has a benefit, you'll communicate with them. And that's the summation of everything. So when I think about what can I do to enhance something that somebody's involved with and minimize the amount of work and give them the opportunity of greater benefit, we're communicating makes a lot of sense there. You have to talk simplicity. Because if you don't talk simplicity, then that old rule comes in Again, I refuse to have a battle of wits with another person. And it's not fair if the person is not knowledgeable about it or if you see you're losing them, you better relate it to something that's understandable.

Right.

How about airplanes fly? In other words, if I want to talk about something in the aviation field and I'm going to bury them in a minute because they don't, they're not interested in technology. But I said, you know, you have any ideas that how does this great big steel thing fly? No. You know what the principle is? Are you interested? Because I've got something I want to talk to you about that they're now putting in pilot seats that if a pilot gets drowsy, it automatically vibrates the seat and the co pilot takes over. You know, I can get into other conversation. They say, well, it is interesting, so on and so forth and. But first they want to know how does an airplane fly?

Makes sense. Yeah, it is. Well, that's, that's the most important thing is being able, when you're communicating, to understand and, and speak at their level, not speak above their level. I think everybody gets so used to using jargon and lingo and their neck of the woods, we often forget, hey, this person is not in what we do on a day in, day out basis, they don't understand it. So you could be speaking English, but to them you're speaking Latin.

Right. And what is it that you can, that can, you can speak with, with someone that is giving them the contribution. In other words, it's contributing something that of interest to them that they want to be smart, daring and different and learn something new each day.

Definitely.

In other words, you have to make it interesting. And that's why in, in the, for instance, one of the most interesting things. I'm going to be 89 years old. Why am I going to be 89 years old? I've got a wife that cooks the most healthy fuel in the world and I love it and it's delicious and I don't eat chemicals.

Right.

And since the pandemic, we've been eating even better.

Yep.

I mean, I, I eat pure, pure fuel. Excellent food, all my colors and everything is excellent. The way she prepares it, there's a lot of other good stuff out there, is very tasty. But I don't care for chemicals because I wouldn't be going on 89, I'd be in a box at 60.

Right. That's so true. You don't want to. What's the word? I'm like preserve yourself because with chemicals.

Here'S the thing, we've got a lot of I, I have a lot of broken parts but none of our life threatening.

Right.

And with age you have to expect broken parts. Okay. And I live accordingly and I adjust accordingly to those broken parts. So I go for oil changes every 5,000 miles now instead of every 10,000. But I didn't force myself to have serious conditions because of not living a good healthy life. Now some of us are misfortunate and are can, you know we conduct things or we catch things that we hope we didn't have to. But a lot of it is self inflicted I think.

No, I, I agree totally with you. I think a lot of the things that we people deal with and struggle with health wise it you all go back to diet and what they do in a day out basis and you can track it all from there with the sugar or the chemicals or the poisons. In a lot of cases, stuff like that, it's definitely the more you can eat.

Sugar is poison.

Exactly. Totally is. I've dealt with overcoming diabetes and the first thing I did when I went to my doctor and they gave told me what my blood sugar was and my A1C and he said full blown. I said well let me go back and let me change my diet, eliminate most of the sugar from my diet and start eating healthy. And that was immediate, immediate results in the coming down now where it's not even in the diabetic level anymore. My doctors basically said hey you're good, you weren't diabetic.

So wonderful. And look at the carbs. Diabetics shouldn't be consuming carbs because carbs turn to sugar.

You know, good carbs. You should be eating good carbs of vegetables and stuff like that. That's a. You know.

Exactly.

Yeah. For those out there that those entrepreneurs are struggling with an idea. Who's your ideal client that you work with? Ron on a regular basis? Are we talking about starter? We talk as we've experienced means we got an idea. What, what do you, who do you like working with?

Actually all levels. I've, I've had Starter clients. I've had clients with good businesses that have been run well and they're looking to really take the next loop or the next jump. And then I work with some corporations where each department has their challenges from within and I find it very, it's exciting to be confronted with all these different situations and, and they're all very similar to me because ask the hard questions that they never Asked themselves and analyze what is it that you can do to enhance your present business? Or what is it that you can do to turn your situation into a challenge? You have to establish what's the given in your situation, what's the solution you're looking for? And don't get caught up in that journey. That's just the journey. That's. That's what's happening in between. So you really have to look at what it is. What do you have and what is the situation? And once you can define the situation and nothing is a problem, nothing is a problem. It's only a situation. And some of those situations, like I say, can be turned into a challenge. And how beautiful, because there is a gift behind every challenge.

Amen to that. One of our biggest challenges that our students face is raising capital. And a lot of them struggle with the conversations or, oh, I may not. I'm not good enough, not smart enough. And I want to bring it back to what you said a little bit earlier on. You said when you first started off, when you went on your own, you raised three quarters of a million dollars, which is a huge amount of money in today's world, was. It's still a huge amount of money back then. What would you say was the key to your success in raising that private capital that people can learn from you today?

What's different today? Let me see if I understand the question.

No, what. What can people. What was the biggest thing that helped you raising that capital? Did you raise it from friends and families and existing clients? What was. What was some of the. Your tricks for raising capital even back then?

Go to a professional and give them define my problem, my issue, and say, here's my issue. What do I need? Friends and family. That was an opportunity if they wanted to come in. That's not what we depended on. You have to understand. Are you familiar with a reggae?

Yes.

Okay, reggae. I'm going to simplify it. A Reggae has two tiers. Tier 1 is $20 million. Tier 2 is up to $75 million. Both tiers in a reg A are for a period of 12 months. The biggest difference in a reg A is you have to have blue sky states in tier one to raise the 20 million. And in tier two, if you're going to raise up to 75 million, you can. You don't have to worry about blue sky. It's all states included. So once you understand that, go to a professional and say, am I subject for a reg A and do I fit the parameters or do I have what I need to submit for a reg A that could be the first try. Or go to professional fund for fundraisers, you know, a VC or if your business can survive with angel angel group where each angel group invests a portion and, and you're going to have more than you know. You can have up to 25 or more people supporting your business and what they're looking for, it's what they're looking for in the return and what you think you can give them and how you're going to use the funds. Professional advice would be the best.

That's that makes a lot of sense to work with professional capital raisers and people that understand it and knowing your product and knowing the solution that you solved, the problem that you're solving and the opportunities and the benefits that you offer that your competitive advantage which is ties in with being able to tell exactly what you're doing in eight seconds to grab people's interest out there.

Do you think anybody would want to hear and don't be shy and say no if they don't. Would they want to hear the success of the bond system in New York?

Yeah, yeah, sure, tell us.

Okay, real quick. When I got the call from New York Stock Exchange for to put the teletypes in that was the sale. Fantastic. I was now on the trading floor every day at the New York Stock Exchange. When a unit would break, I had a technician that I hired would replace the unit and I would take it back to my little shop in New Jersey. They would repair it there. So I had two employees, repair guy and a guy who would swap things out. And they the New York Stock Exchange gave us radio. Meanwhile, I'm walking the exchange every day seeing all kinds of things because when I first got there at the end of the day paper was stacked up to the knees because they used mark sense cards and a lot of paper and vacuum sheets and so on and so forth. I got rid of a lot of that by automating it. In 1983 I saw on the bond floor trading fund they traded corporate listed bonds. Now the New York Stock Exchange changed capital or equity and then they also traded the corporate listed bonds. And that's the debt from the those that list their equity on the exchange. And I see in that market on the bond trading floor they're throwing their hands up and down and they're shouting and hollering on the phone. And I went to the exchange and I said what are they doing? The equity market is totally automated. They have machines that do all this and it's an auction market on the bond trading floor. And they said, yeah, Ron. And I said, well, I could automate that. They said it'll never work. They've been doing it like this for 205 years and they're never going to do anything. So I said, would you give me a contract, an exclusive license to disseminate quotes and trades on corporate listed bonds if I can build a system and prove to you it'll work on the bond training floor here? And they said, sure, we'll sign that contract. You'll never get it through. These people won't even listen to you. Well, I did. It was fairly simple because I built a little computerized filtering machine with a boob tube to watch it. And I would get the quotes and the trades and so on and so forth and they would come out before these people would exercise something on the bond trading floor. I figured, fantastic. I proved it to the exchange, I showed it to them working and they said, nice job, Ron. Good, now what are you going to do? I started calling. There was 1500 corporate listed bond traders on Wall street and their people on the trading floor. I started calling every one of them in the morning when that's the only time you can get a hold of them. If I wasn't buying or selling a bond in the first five seconds, they'd hang up on me. I figured, oh, Ron, you did a wonderful job. You developed this thing. Who are you going to sell it to and who are you going to talk to? These people won't even talk to you. So I figured, how do I solve this problem? I found out who was the leading bond house on Wall street and befriended the biggest bond manager in that bond house. And we became friends. And I said, I got a system. I'll run the private leased line from the exchange to your office. And that was the story I told you earlier. I said, I'll run this line free of charge to your office, give you this special filter, little filter computer and video terminal for nothing for 30 days. Please just try it. He started using it. His phone rang off the hook and they're saying word, word. You're being so successful with this. Joe, what are you doing? He says, I'm using a special box. And they said, well you, you seem to be topping all of our bids. It's making it as difficult buy bonds. He said, well, you need one of these Ron Klein boxes. They said, well what the heck is a Ron klein box? In 90 days, in 3 months I had all these 1500 traders calling me saying what Is it that you have that we should look at? And I explained it to him and I said, okay, I'm going to take advantage. I said, you've got to join my buying club if you want this thing. And they said, well, what's that? And I said, it cost you $10,000 a trader just to join one time. And they said, that's pretty stiff, but we can make that in the likes a month. Okay, we'll do it. So that was $10,000 on 1500 traders. And I said, okay, but now you have to buy the little computer device and the video. And they said, no, we don't buy anything. We only rent on Wall Street. We don't buy product. And I said, gave it some thought, came back the next day and the box cost me $150 with the video terminal. I said, how's 300amonth? They said, fantastic. It was only in for 25 years.

Wow, that's awesome. That's.

But it's solving a problem.

Yeah.

Simplifying exactly how to do it. So that's my storage, folks.

I love it. I love it. What's the best way for our listeners and those folks watching this to connect with Iran?

Okay, first thing is my website. Well, you've heard the story, so you don't even have to bother go to website, but it's the grandfatherofpossibilities.com. my email address is Ron Klein. That's R O N J L E I n@the grandfatherofpossibilities.com and then to circumvent all that, you can call me on my personal cell phone, 941-374-5739 and we'll talk.

Awesome. We'll put both of those links and information into the chat roll or into the comment sections and in the description there for you, Ron, as always, it's just been an absolute pleasure visiting with you today on the note closure show. Thank you for sharing your wealth of knowledge and we look forward to the next problem that we'll solve out there.

I can't thank you enough, Scott, for having me on.

Well, yeah, definitely, definitely. We, we gotta stuff and I were just talking. We got to make it out to Sarasota and take you guys to dinner sometime or some lunch some point.

Yeah, I'll give you some free consulting and enhancement and we'll take it to the next level.

Sounds good, Ron. Good stuff there. All right, guys and gal will go out there. You heard from Ron. Go out there, take advantage of his expertise, pick up the phone, give him a phone call. He is a wealth of knowledge and he has just a an amazing heart to helping entrepreneurs overcome obstacles and grow in the business. So go out, take some action, buddy, and we'll see you all at the top.

Thank you, Scott.

Thank you, Sam.

It.