John Malott built 327,000 affiliates in a Dead Sea skincare company that hit $250,000 monthly residual income, then launched Build Your Empire to mentor young founders. He spent 13 years with LegalShield before pivoting, and warns about losing control when scaling fast.
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Um, but I wonder, so, so then that's where the first money comes in, but then did you— then they sell the MLM and then what's next? Is Build Your Empire next?
No. Okay, so a company called Prepaid Legal bought this company. Yeah, Prepaid Legal became LegalShield. And, um, it just— at first I was like, this didn't make sense to me. And then we, we had a bunch of felons on our team. We couldn't get— they couldn't get licensed. You had an insurance license and we We ended up working our way through that, but then it exploded. That was when things really started to roll. They had a great product, it was inexpensive, you know, the pitch was easy because I knew a lot of people that had legal problems. Anyhow, I'm not trying to promote them. They get me wrong later on, so don't— no, I'm just kidding.
Affiliate link.
I got a lot of friends there. They're good people, just we went our— after, you know, basically 13 years there. And I had a strong residual income, which they took away from me. We won't go down there. See that tear welling up?
Yeah.
Residual income is what I work for, man. Yeah, you work for cash. Like, I'm not a house flipper. I'm more of like an apartment building guy. You know, I want rent. And I had built, you know, I had 50,000 or 200,000 customers, 50,000 reps. And at one point, because they didn't like the way I was doing things, they— yeah, they stopped.
I can't believe they were even allowed to do that.
Yeah, they probably weren't. And they actually— I had people later on say you could do, and what didn't matter, you know. Anyway, so it opened up another door for me though. Yeah, that's where things really started to crank. I got involved in a skincare company.
Okay.
And, uh, out of that they were bringing in minerals from the Dead Sea, and, and I was the last guy to think skincare. Like, what do I know about skincare? For me, skincare was whatever soap went on my head, went on my body, and I'm out. But it was that, that changed my life again. My first— and part was revenge to get back at Yeah, last company. So first year, a million bucks right out the gate. And that's nice. I've got a quarter million dollar a month residual income. We're in 8 countries. We had 327,000 affiliates.
That's great.
It just started cranking, man. And did that for 8 years. And then that's when Build Your Empire came in towards the end of that.
Okay.
And then Build Your Empire became, you know, the vision was to take world-class entrepreneurs to bring up the next generation of world-class entrepreneurs, you know, to bring the Grant Cardones and connect them with, you know, the, the, the John Malats when, you know, he's 20 years old trying to figure shit out. Got it.
Okay.
And so that's how that whole thing came to be.
And, you know, and so what's the structure of like Build Your Empire? Like, how does that work? Is it like a— do the younger people like pay to be in or is it—
Right now there is no structure.
Okay.
Because we, we went through a transition Yeah, we had, we had some people, you know, on the team, some young guys that really told us they could do a whole lot of stuff that they just couldn't do. My partner and I got an incredible partner for 20 years, Josh Denny. Him and I own investment companies and a lot of other stuff. And we kind of let them have it.
Okay.
Which, looking back, was a, was a big mistake. Cost us a lot of money and gave them a lot of credibility. Yeah, they had this you know, Instagram page with 1.2 million followers. And yeah, and then we started doing events, was kind of our space. So we, we said, let's do Build Your Empire events. And, you know, the events— I love the event business. Yeah. And then of course COVID hit and put— basically put us out of the event business.
Gotcha.
I like the live events. I like the crowd. I like that whole feeling.
And I actually saw that on YouTube. It's like 3 and a half hours long. I watched— I didn't see all of it, but I watched some of the clips of it. It looked sick.
Yeah, we had the Build Your Empire Mansion, you know, so we put these kids up in a, you know, 12,000 $1 million house that they lived in and did absolutely nothing for the brand but helped themselves. They did a lot for themselves. I think they're all doing well now. You're welcome, fuckers. I'm sorry.
Hey, you give back in different ways.
Yeah, I can't hold it. You know, look, I, you know, if I was 20 years old and, you know, I got— yeah, I live in this beautiful house, I got whatever, you know, maybe I did the same thing. I don't know.
