Mike Melton | Automotive Business Mentor is live!

Ready for this. This is actually really good.

Got mashed potatoes up under there.

Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't ask for some.

Nah, ate that bagel before we came, so.

So what's made you each year, like, what's made you continue to The brotherhood, you know, each and every year, just getting better all the time.

Yeah, it's like, you know, nothing's ever the same. Like, some of the stuff is the same, but then you always learn new things, right? Um, and then of course, you know, some people come and go. You get to meet new people, learn from those people, um, just get to see different things. I like it. Yeah.

Have you ever had a master class or Like other groups with entrepreneurs when you're starting your businesses before you sold them?

It's always been me. Yeah, yeah, me with my 6th grade education. Yeah, so I'm self-taught basically. Yeah, um, other than what I've learned from Andy in the past 4 years, you know. Yeah, um, but you know, Andy's like the showman. Like, he's smart, but you know, Andy's the— he calls himself the showman, and his wife's the, the business, you know what I mean? Um, so it's kind of like what I do with my business, you know. I, I know how to actually run the business and I know the ins and outs of it, but my job is to get consumers in and show them how, how, how we do it, right? So it's basically what I do, you know. Um, and then, and then of course mentor meetings. Yep. Oh yeah, I love that.

Yeah.

There's a book called Entrepreneur Operating Systems that talks about that. In every good business, there's a, you know, the entrepreneur, the visionary, takes a lot of the risk, good with people, stuff like that. And then there's the operations, you know, expert.

Yeah.

Or genius, right? Yeah.

Handles operations.

Yeah.

Organization.

Yeah. So that's kind of like me. I do a little bit of everything. Like, she helps out with like and stuff like that. Um, but when it comes to like a lot of stuff, I— it's all on my plate pretty much.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, make a lot of, a lot of big decisions, you know. Yeah, right decisions, wrong decisions too, because not everybody makes, you know—

That's right.

And that's what a good leader does. It's like, you know, if you make a wrong decision, you know, you own up to it. And of course, if your team ever messes up, like, you should take responsibility as a leader, right? And a lot of times, like, you'll have managers or so-called Business owners, leaders, whatever, they'll blame somebody else for it. No, it's your fucking fault because you didn't train the person right.

Yeah.

And if you did train the person right and, and if they're still making the same mistakes, then it's your fault for keeping them on the company, right? So, you know.

Yeah.

And, and that's just where a lot of entrepreneurs mess up. Like, you know, you know, they go in there and they, they know how to do the work, but they just don't know how to build a team, you know? And they don't know how to treat people. That's the biggest thing. You can't treat people like bags of crap, you know. You got to care for more, more for them than they do for themselves.

Is it good?

So good.

Everyone's saying that.

Horrible.

Yeah, it's literally your favorite meal, right?

I know it is.

It's the, it's the Mike special.

Yeah, you're not wrong.

So how many people you got working with you?

We've got, um, We've got a team of 4, 5 advisors.

Now in the morning, do y'all have like morning huddles and stuff like to get this thing going?

Yeah.

Do you have a creed that you do or anything?

No, no, we do Monday morning meeting, um, go over KPIs.

That's so boring.

How do you get people fired up? It really is.

Yeah, you got to get people fired up. Yeah, it's, um, They're like, oh man, KPI meeting.

Oh man.

No, you're not wrong. Um, I've got 2— I'm like the junior, junior director of our firm in our city. Um, so I've got 2 other partners and, you know, we kind of equity share the responsibilities of leadership, management, stuff like that. I try to make it, you know, energizing and different.

You try or do you?

I do. I know that. Yeah, thank you. He does. Call me out.

Yeah, word selection. A lot of my guys say, well, I tried to— no, you ain't. It's either you're fucking doing it or you're not.

When he's out of the office, everyone is feeling it because they don't have the optimism, the excitement. Like, he really loves what he does. Yeah.

So a lot of times we'll have meetings and I want to— it won't even be about my company.

Yeah.

I want to know, you know, what are your wins this week? Like, what have you done at home? What have you done there?

That's right.

You know, that's right. Yeah. Even asking the tough questions of how's your spouse? How's things at home? You know, things with the kids, right?

Yeah.

You got to get them guys fired up.

Yeah, that's right. Do you have? Are your employees 1099s, W-2s?

Oh, we call it W-2. Pay them.

Yeah, we pay them.

Yeah.

Do you have any retirement plans or any benefits?

They're all young. They're 17 to 21. Hell, they don't. They don't even want health insurance.

Yeah, we try to do like company health insurance.

Right now we don't want it.

Well, most of them are all on their parents. They're all under 21.

Yeah.

So all of them already have that. Yeah, we don't— we hire young. We've tried hiring old, but they are set in their ways. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't work out.

Yeah, and they come from another place with their bad habits, and you can't cut that, right? So what I've learned is from like Michelin Tire is— so say you want to work for Michelin Tire, right? The corporation.

Yep.

You cannot know anything about tires, and if you do, they won't hire you because they want to train you the right way, their way. Yeah. So we're the same way.

Yeah.

Not unless you came from like a well-respected company and I know you know what you're doing.

Yeah.

Um, because we do working interviews. I don't just, you know, you can talk good all you want in front of me. Let's see you do the work. So that's how I hire people. You come in, I'm gonna pay you for the day, I'm gonna see how you work with the team. And I don't hire or fire anybody, I let my team do it because You're the one working with them, not me.

That's smart. Sometimes they'll see, they'll see things you don't, or they know that, and they're going to tell them stuff that they won't tell me, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, no, that's good.

Yeah, and they'll, they'll get rid of people real fast. They're like, ah, he's got to go. I'm like, fire that thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

That ain't on me.

Yeah, I know that takes a lot of hard work and dedication on the details, you know, to create a good culture like that, and you got to Protect it. Yeah, something, yeah, something that happens in our space is, you know, we've had an amazing culture, but we also have advisors that go get recruited or bought out from other firms. So it's like, you know, if you, if you don't keep working on the culture, just something can happen.

You drift and you look up and you're like, of course, how the heck did we get here? Probably the boring burn KPIs.

Yeah, what would you suggest there, Speedy Gonzales?

Man, you just got to go in there and fire them up, fire them up, man, you know. Talk about the wins, you know. Don't, don't really talk about the bad things all the time. Talk about the good stuff, you know. Yeah, um, you know, where you see the company going. Like, ask them, you know, where do you see yourself in 5 years with the company? Yeah, you know, get, get to know them a little bit more. I don't know if you do that.

Yeah, no, we do. Yeah, it's— that was my feedback is You know, we're in, we're in cells, or so it's all— everyone's running their own practice in there, and not all of them are high performers. Yeah, on their own. Some of them need pushing, coaching, etc.

Yeah. Well, just like, uh, you ever see Andy Frisella? Okay, so he's real big. So he said, if people come into my company and if they're not an A-player, they will be, and if they're not, they're gone. So that's, that's how I run it.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, he's so strict. Like, if you have a chair, you know, you got the chairs that have like the wiggle wheels that have a certain direction. Yeah, I'm like, well, that's, you know, that's high standards, man, you know?

Yeah, a guy we've— there's a guy named Ben Newman that we've done some other coaching stuff with, but he's Really close. He's in St. Louis, but he's really close with Andy. So he's done some retreats like this.

So what's your company name?

It's LaVoy Financial Group.

LaVoy Financial Group. And y'all, y'all handle billions of dollars of people's money and help invest that, right? So how do people get Get in touch with you?

Yeah.

Cell phone. Cell phone works great.

Okay. Email. Cell phone, email, uh, website.

You got thousands of people listening.

How do they get in touch with you?

They call me. 865-640-8205.

There you go.

Yeah.

I can tell you, for like, for instance, back to like the standards or like, you know, the company holding people accountable in the company. Just for instance, like one standard of ours that we're very big on is being on time for work, right?

Oh yeah.

Like if you're on time, you're technically late, right?

Yeah.

You need to be there early. So like we had a kid that worked for us, great salesman, right? Customers loved him, but he could not be on time. And unfortunately, you know, we have to hold the standards because if we don't hold him accountable, Um, the others see that as well and they're like, well, then we can slip on this because we're letting him slip on that. So as hard as it was to let him go because he was a good selfless— Super good dude. Super good dude. Um, and you know, our customers loved him, but like, you still have to hold people accountable.

If not, it breeds cancer in the company and it spreads real fast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We try to do that To a couple kids that, and like I said, we call them like the I call them the lost boys. Yeah. They're like my kids, and so a couple of them I've tried to save, but at the end of the day, it creates the cancer in the company.

And there's one she still wanted to bring back. I'm like, no, he's cancer. He cannot come back. But I don't care how good he is.

Yeah. He means well. There's you know some people they just need that extra help because you don't know how they grew up in life, right? And sometimes they're just set in their ways and. They feel very defensive because they've had to defend themselves their whole life. So I try to like talk them out of like I try to help them through that.

Yeah, which I've mentored him a couple times because I understand how he is. Yeah, the bad attitude and stuff like that. I was the same way. Yeah, but you got to learn how to control it.

That's right.

If you can't control it, you can't be here.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I used to you know they say the fun the fun personality. That's probably why I was. Amazing salesperson is usually late or unorganized and things like that, right? But, but that personality type, because I'm that, I was like that, they didn't— we don't understand what that communicates to the other person, the other customer, right? Or the other employees, right? So that, that was something early on I had to learn. Some mentors got on to me, so it's Like, you all making that decision is going to make him a lot better for that.

And that's, that's where a lot of businesses fail at. They just let people do kind of whatever because they feel that they're stuck with these people. But if you build a culture and, and a following, kind of like what we have and like what Andy has and like other big companies have, people want to come work for you. Like, they want to. I probably get 20 people every day that, that want to move out of their state to Come work for me. Yeah, you know, it's crazy. And then, and then people like somebody made a message today. It was like, oh well, you know, the automotive industry is just understaffed. I said, no, it ain't. They just don't want to work for you. That's the issue, you know.

Yeah, high turnover.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only turnover we have is if we get rid of them because they're not up to say the only where we've been very lucky.

Like you said, since we opened the doors. We've kept— one of our kids started at 15. He just turned 18 in March. So he's worked with us the whole time, pretty much. The one guy that runs everything when we're not there, he's worked for us for 15 years. Every business we've owned, he's gone with us.

And he's recently wanted to take a couple days off to be with family and stuff. So, you know, of course we give him that, right?

Yeah.

We're not always like, oh, you can't work all week, you're just fired, right?

He's also trying to find himself. He's worked for us for so long that he kind of wants to just find himself. He's very, very smart. Um, yeah, yeah, he's just trying to figure himself out too.

Yeah, yeah.

I would love to see all the young guys that come through your internship and like that you recruit, I would love to see them like step up to the plate and really be there for the long run. Yeah.

Now how do you compensate people? Like if they're doing really well, do you like do stuff for them, like trips or watches or whatever it may be.

Yeah, yeah, they've got a trip. Like, we've got a few trips that are qualifying trips, but we're also— they've changed some rules where we're, um, compliant by the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission. So they watch all the investment firms, but they've made some rules where they can't do any products based on—

is it like bribery?

Is it kind of like— well, so we're fiduciaries. My goal is to understand you all, your business, and your purchase plan, and then literally act in your best interest. Like, hey, knowing that we know about you all and your goals and where you're at, here's what we would do, XYZ. Here's what we recommend. So any product-based incentive— because that's what they used to do in the old days. Like, banks will roll something out and they're trying to sell you all CDs, and then it's the money market, and then it's annuities or something. So they went away with— they're cutting down on the limit for those incentivized trips, but we'll do that. Um, I think our— my personal differentiator, or our firm, is kind of doing what we're doing right now, is just sharing life together. Or what you talked about, you know, wrapping your arms around people, understanding their wives and kids' names and what their goal is.

Right.

You ever do any like company outings or anything like that?

Yeah, yeah.

I think ours went dead.

And we're we've got that house in Florida. We're about finished with the construction, so we're going to start taking another one.

Nah, it's okay.

We got to charge ours. They're really cute.

Yeah, I think the best—

you want to sit here?

Perfect.

Yeah, have a seat. Yeah, you're good.

You know, they've done it here, but they've— you figure out what your people want and you help them to change and be better people, you know? And that, that creates something. Forget the industry, your job, or what you do, but it's like If you're improving people's lives, and then that's just a vehicle. Yeah, we just out here making it happen.

Your camera went off over there. Wow! I don't know why. Oh, did you get the rest of the prizes?

Yeah.

Did you bring them in?

She told me to grab two. How long's it been off? I don't know, I just looked over there and saw it was going off.

It was black. Yeah, that was weird. Oh, because your speaker things are—

how many phones you got? 2.

2?

Well, because one for the plug.

I used to have 6 phones.

Yeah, cuz he's so big on social media and he started giving a phone number out, so we got one that can't trace back to like my personal—

Yeah, it's a prepaid line so they can't trace it back. Yeah, because there's some crazy-ass people.

Crazy, crazy, crazy people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People will be Googling us, which you can find, I mean, but if they hear my name, I still want someone to have that.

And there's a, there's a lot of keyboard warriors. And I'm not one of those. And I, and I, I always invite them. I said, let me tell you something, if you can't afford the fucking plane ticket, I will buy one for you. Just come see me. We'll talk about it in person. Yeah, they never do. They never take me up on that.

Maybe offer the Ritz-Carlton.

Oh, he'll talk crap back to his haters. He just gives it right back, and then he'll screenshot a picture of them and put it back in the comments.

Oh, and they're the worst looking fucking people.

Call them on there, you know.

Yeah, and they shut up real fast. But Andy told me not to stop doing that, so I stopped doing it.

Did you pick the menu for tonight? It was good. I was like, are we having tacos again? I'm like dying.

I'm like, you got to do the occasional. Yeah, so the occasional.

Wait, there's so many tacos I can eat. I love them. Yeah, I know.

Endless tacos.

Endless tacos. Yeah, this works. Totally like went a different direction this year, and we're way more prepared. I think last year because culturally here people are very carb and fat heavy here when it comes to the food, and so it was like we need more protein. Yeah, you gotta feed us some protein.

Like one time last year they did just eat dinner on literally just chips and sauce.

Eat dinner in Mexico.

Yeah, everyone was like where's the meat at?

Yeah, so we pivoted.

And then last year we went to that one restaurant, right?

Get that filet.

Yeah, yeah, we— they were cool. This is so much better. Oh, absolutely. That's why we experienced that last year. We were like, for the amount of money that we paid, um, yeah, I think our— I can't remember what we had last year, but it wasn't anything compared to this. It was so good. Is this her dad's restaurant cooking still, or no? Her brother. Oh wow, so her brother is in the restaurant.

Do they have a farm where they do their own beef, or just buy them? They just buy them. Yeah.

Sorry guys, you're good. It's great too because even when you guys went and ate at the restaurant, Jackie like makes sure she tips them and stuff, so it's also a way of just— because usually they don't take handouts, like that's just kind of how they are. They all work, and so it's like Jackie's way of being able to kind of like give them a handout without being a handout in a sense. So she like tips them heavily and pays a premium price so we can eat. Premium for Mexico, cheap for US, but Still.

Yeah.

So did y'all know each other in North Carolina or no? No, we didn't go after.

Really?

And they, they live like 30 minutes from our shop. Like, really? Wow. In another small town.

Yeah. So we were like kind of new in the company, probably about like 6 months in, and we weren't getting leads, right? Cuz we were like new guys back then. So we were creative.

We had this idea.

We were like, why don't we just get Andy to make an ad for us and we'll fund it? We'll pay for the That's me. And so we launched that, and that's where Mike came on board. And I was like, wait, this guy's got an 828 number.

He would never answer. He said that it was— never answer his personal phone, but I saw his email, so I looked him up and I put North Carolina. His shop pulled up, so I started calling the shop.

There you go.

Does he never answer? He never answers, dude.

I never do. I got so many missed messages and even I just don't check it.

I think he called the shop one time to hear how we like answered the phones or something.

You know, I'm missing out. If it's anything serious, they'll send you written mail.

And yeah, 370. This, this is my social media phone. That one's got way more. 370 messages I haven't even checked yet. That one's probably got thousands.

Yeah, probably. I think Bryson texted you. He's like, what did he say? I'm like, I don't know.

There's like—

I just scroll 15 texts back. Then Bryson started last week and he didn't respond, so let me go through all of them.

No, don't check them. I cussed him out after about the 20th one.

He's usually like, man, you okay?

Oh yeah, dude, I'll do that too.

I'm like, are you alive?

Yeah, everything okay, man? You okay? Might have been like, damn, I didn't even know you texted me.

All right, so we're at dinner with this guy. He trades billions and billions worth of dollars for people. Let's let you meet him.

How we doing? My name's Cullen. So good to meet you all. Cullen Lavoy.

Uh, tell me exactly what you do. Yeah, get straight to the damn point.

Right to the point. We'll do it. We're in the wealth management space, something we're passionate about, right, is just not over-tipping the IRS. How can you save money in tax? Watch your money, right? If you, if you're not watching it, you don't know where it's going. Uh, but then how can you delete some of those savings that you're over-tipping the IRS or not picking up a deduction here or there in your business? But how can you invest that and multiply it and get your money to work for you?

So basically, if you want to make a lot of damn money, you want to save a lot of damn money, That's who you call, okay? And now he's gonna give you his damn number.

That's it, 865-640-8205. Give me a shout.

All right, if you ain't heard that, what is it again?

865-640-8205.

All right, now if you got a lot of damn money and you want to make some more damn money, hit them up.

I know he's popping my social media cherries.

As soon as you say, man, I've been thinking about making social media, Mike's like, we're doing it right now. We're doing it right now. We're not giving you a chance to say that.

Yeah, you're the type of client I like. You're like, what the fuck are you saying? Like, no, no, first grade. Put your money here.

Watch him get like 50 texts now, right? Yeah, yeah, I'll post it. It's too late to do it, but I'll post it tomorrow.

You're like, man, this is his, uh, his personal phone number.

Oh, you gave your personal number?

Yeah. No, he only has one.

Oh, okay.

You can give your office line, but yeah, that was good. Yeah, I need my pass. Love you guys.

What the hell you got to do? You got to pick up your plane.

Oh, uh, we're—

here you go.

Thank you. I think you were here. Were you Bryson and Maria's first client, right?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, they were like babies starting.

If you do social media, just get straight to the fucking point. Straight to the point.

Always.

People don't like to beat around the bush.

They're gonna scroll.

I think what I— yeah, what I want to work on is like Just gotta ride it out, you know.

Don't ride it out. Boom, right here. You have it here. Don't ride it. Trust me, it'll fuck you up if you ride it.

There's just so much, you know, like you've got what, tire changes, rotations? Like how many service offerings y'all have?

Rotations, tire repairs, inflation, and tires.

So in financial planning, there's like, I mean, there's probably 30 to 50 different— Well, cool.

What's your top 3?

That exactly.

There you go. Yeah, simplify. Listen, there's a lot more. Let's just jump on a 15-minute call. Let's tell you, tell you a little bit about it. There you go. You know what I mean? You don't have to draw it out.

People like— and just for me, like, he has a very low attention span.

Well, I'm gonna tell you what, 98% of the world has low attention span.

That's what I'm saying. But also, like, if you don't catch my attention, even though I have a high attention Yeah.

Do you get on social media at all?

That's 5 seconds.

Right.

Yeah.

In the first 2 to 3 seconds, if you don't really interest, what are you doing?

Yeah, you're like, on again.

There you go. Done.

Done. I think that's with anything. Yeah.

Done.

Because someone's like, the next video might interest me.

So it's like this right here. Let me show you. So, uh, I made one about this boat today. You know the boat that's like capsized?

Yeah.

All right, here we go. Watch this. Money house businesses are just like this boat. So I'm gonna do something just like that, and then I'm gonna say business owners, salespeople, then I'll tell you what it is. Yeah, but I catch your attention. Yeah, yeah, first 2 seconds.

So you said you've been doing some social media since '21?

End of '22, when I had to build this business because my last company was a CBD company. And because it was so much gray area, like peptides are, yeah, you couldn't— like, you could not advertise them at all. Yeah. So you had to pay other companies. Like, there's a, there's a publishing company called Healthline. Um, you had to go through them, and they had certain ways that they could do it. And I was paying like $80 grand a month to advertise.

More than that.

And I refused to do that with tires. I was like, I got this.

Yeah.

I mean, we were making money, but our advertising Was killing. Like, our accountant was like, this is insane.

Yeah, we were doing like, I don't know, $400,000 a month or something like that in gummies and stuff. It's crazy.

Wow.

Yeah. Wow. Spend it to make it.

Yeah, I mean, we've been there, but it's the swings of that. Yeah, yeah. Like right now I spend $0 on marketing. Yeah, zero.

That's probably your best form of profit.

Yeah, I think the most we've spent in 3 years is maybe we did like a couple ads on Facebook.

Yeah, but so, all right, so I'm gonna give you a pointer, right? So if you ever have— and I'm gonna give you fuckers a pointer too, uh, so if you ever have content that does good organically, like I'm talking about a couple thousand views, yeah, what you want to do is put like $100 towards that and just boost that within a certain mile radius, whatever it may be, and you'll get clients out there. But it's got to be organic. If it doesn't do good organically, do not do it.

Yeah.

And I've only done that twice in a couple years.

Is that on Instagram or Facebook?

Instagram and Facebook. Yeah, well, mostly Facebook, because majority of the people with, with, with red is on Facebook and YouTube.

Yeah.

Let me follow. Bingo! I dominated.

Yeah, so right now I'm gonna show, uh, like, I'm gonna get online and show people how to build a personal brand because a lot of people don't understand how to do it, um, and I do. Yeah, and, and, and I tell all the— my young guys who work with me, like, they're starting to make videos now too, um, so What it does, it brings not only the company more money, it makes them more money too because you know they're getting a percentage of wheel tire sales, right? So it's like, all right, cool. I'm gonna show you what to do, and if you're doing something, I'm gonna say don't do this next time, right? Go ahead and post what you got, but this is the things you need to change. Yeah, yeah, that's good.

That's good.

Yeah, I mean that the what you're doing, the brand. You know, Andy, like building the brand and the CEO, that, that allows you to get out of the operations.

Yeah, yeah. So if you go back, scale the business. Yeah, if you go back to like my— well, I started on TikTok, right? And then I went to, you know, Instagram and stuff. And then if you go scroll down way below, it's all tire stuff.

Yeah.

And then I started building my personal brand. That's why it's like the Mike Melton.

Yeah.

Um, and of course I don't get like— if I post something tire related Oh, it's getting 300,000 views or more. But if it's like personal, it gets less. You know, it might get 25,000, 10,000, whatever it may be. Um, but that's just part of it. Yeah, but, but views and followers don't make a shit. Yeah, it is, it is shares, saves. It's just retention on how long they're watching that video is what really matters. Did you speak in Tampa?

No.

No.

You were going to.

I was going to, yeah. That's part of the, like, the royal family thing. We wasn't ready for that yet. And there's people that are in the royal family, they're just not taking advantage of it. It blows my fucking mind. Like, I would be so far up Andy's ass if I was in the royal family. He, he would, he would wipe a little bit out of me every time he shit.

Here again?

Yeah, yeah.

That's not a dingleberry, that's a Michaelberry.

I mean, I mean, it's, it's a million dollars to get in it. Yeah, use the—

use it.

Yeah, like, there's no way in hell I would not be using it. And there's several people I know right now that are using it, and there's several people that ain't using it. I'm like, do you just have too much goddamn money or what, you know?

So do you have to stay in the Brotherhood like for 10 years?

No, no, you can get a Royal Family. You don't have to be in the Brotherhood.

Like a million bucks?

Yeah, a million dollars for one year. But if you use it right, yeah, you're— you can make your money back in a month or two for sure, 1,000%.

Just the connections you make.

And what's that? And, and, and, and being in front of, you know, against What, 380 million views? I mean, you get 1% of that is some really good clients, right?

So yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and most of the clients that are watching him, you know, they're, they're ready to spend money, right? And, you know, and say you put a piece of content out there, people, people will watch you for 6 months to a year before they even spend money with you. That's just how it is. Because number one, they want to see if you're legit. They want to know you know exactly what you're talking about. And and people have bullshit meters. They they they know, you know.

Yeah.

And and there's so many fake ass people on the internet who are using ChatGPT to script a little stuff because I can tell.

Yeah.

Like and then they they've never built a business ever in their life. Never. They don't even know understand what it is to build a culture, build a business. Like, put your back against the wall, you know, lose everything you got. Like, I've done it several times. They don't understand that. They just— they read a book and they're on ChatGPT and they're like, oh, well, you should do this. Man, you don't know shit. You know, go build a real business.

That's right.

That's right.

Have that gut feeling of making payroll and yeah, some of that stuff. Yeah, paying everyone else first. Y'all are the last ones.

For sure. You may not, you may not get paid for months, even a year. Yeah, you got to pay everybody else and all your other stuff first. Yeah, and a lot of people ain't willing to do that.

If you could go back in time and do it again, would you?

Depends on what part of it. Um, I don't regret anything I did except spending less time with the kids and the wife. That's the only thing. Like, I had fun with what I was doing because I'm so crazy. Um, I like the craziness. Um, I was some places that I shouldn't have been, and sometimes it scared me, but sometimes it didn't because of how crazy I am. Yeah, like, I've had people come out of bathrooms and I didn't know they were there. Um, yeah, yeah. Um, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff, been in some crazy places that you shouldn't be in. Like, I've been into the craziest of the craziest ghettos inside Los Angeles, like Compton. And yeah, oh yeah, you don't go to some of these places that you shouldn't go to.

No.

Yeah.

Well, the people I would— yeah, I never carried a gun, but the people I was with, like, um, like there's one time we, we drove from North Carolina all the way to California, and I'm the white guy, right? They're like, you're the white guy, you're driving because they, you know, you look like the police.

Yeah.

They're not gonna pull you over.

Yeah.

And of course they did. And I get there and they're like, dude, they got like 6 machine guns in the car and I didn't even know.

Yeah.

And it's good that I don't know because if I get pulled over, I'm like, Yeah, not including whatever else was in the car. Yeah, that I did know about. But yeah, the guns was the biggest thing.

I think every experience in life, it made you some part of who you are, right? The good, the bad. So sometimes we wish we could redo certain things, but would you be the person The only thing I regret is just the time.

That's it. Yeah, like, I had fun doing what I was doing because I just—

I loved it.

I loved the thrill of the craziness. Never know what's behind door number 2.

Yeah, yeah.

Even, even like Larry, as crazy as he is, right? He's never scared of nothing. I don't care. He's never scared of nothing. Like, he literally almost shit his pants a couple Like, this dude's scared of nothing. And yeah, he was scared, but not me. Like, I— it didn't— like, it didn't faze me at all.

Yeah, you've got a calm— you've got a calming— a calming energy.

Yeah, yeah.

But he's had to change a lot though. Like, the last— he's been in the Brotherhood, what, 4 years now? Yeah, 3 or 4 years. 4 years ago he wasn't This person, you know. So it's not just like the people you meet, it's also how you change in it too. Yeah.

And now I can take some of my craziness and, and help other people not make the mistakes. Well, I was always smarter than most people. I'm the dumbest. I'm dumber than anybody here book-wise, but I'm smart as far as common sense goes. Like, I'm 10, 20 steps ahead of most people when it comes to stuff because I, I over— I think about a lot.

Okay, so in about 20, 25 minutes, we're going to be serving some dessert. A very good place that's known for really good dessert. Yeah, but we're gonna wait a little bit because I know what some of the businesses are stocked.

Okay, so all right, we're gonna go play some