Jason Stone is a serial entrepreneur with multiple seven and eight-figure business ventures across multiple verticals of weapon marketing. He’s widely known by over nine mil. Actually it might be 10 million people around the world, 10, almost 10 million as millionaire, mentor and Instagram. Jason utilizes his experience and passion as a motivator mentor teacher and social media influencer to help others create success.
I love that Jason, welcome to the run G podcast. Awesome, David, thanks for having me. Yeah. Excited to have you, you know, we say the life of an influencer. We do have influencers as guests on this show and they are influencers. However, in your case, influencer might be a little bit of an understatement because, as we just said, close to 10 million followers, I believe.
Right. So how old is a brand now? 2014, we started. So eight years, eight years. Yep. We’ve been proposing every single day for eight years straight. Wow man consistency. So I, you know, I do wanna talk to you about how you built that brand. But first I wanna go back to the beginning, shocking to think that there may be somebody listening to this show that does not follow you, but for those introduced to you for the first time, who is Jason Stone, where are you from?
Where did you grow up? All right. So way back, just an average kid from Bedford, Ohio that took bigger than average risks. So, you know, as an entrepreneur, we take risks and, you know, throughout our life, we, we have to, you know, risk first rewards. So a lot of people, they, they’re too complacent in their comfort zone to get out and take those risks.
And that’s what us entrepreneurs do. At the end of the day, we’re taking bigger than average risks. So I grew up in Bedford, Ohio, blue collar family. My, my dad worked for the state department. My mom was a nurse and, you know, I grew up in a trailer park. Actually. I, my, my dad worked a couple of jobs while my mom was going to school.
We had, they had, they had me early. And that’s what I knew growing up that, you know, go to job, go to school, get a job, work 40 hours a week, get a job somewhere. And that’s, that’s my, that’s what I knew growing up. So my parents worked there, but to the bones, my grandfather was one that actually put me through college.
Cuz obviously my parents couldn’t afford it. I was not paying very, I went to engineering, mechanical engineering. I’m. There’s no way I was gonna work a job to pay for my school. So lucky I was fortunate enough. My grandfather left my mom. Some money, went to mechanical engineering. I think I went there super slow, like three classes a semester took me almost six years to graduate.
Why? Because I was building a business while in school. I’m like, I’m not, I’m not gonna do what my parents did. I’m not gonna be working for the man. I took one co-op job in college and that’s, that was like the turning point of me either getting a job. Or trying to figure out how to make money on my own.
I, I remember going driving to driving to work 45 minutes rush hour traffic, 45 minutes rush hour traffic on the way home, just hating life, like old ass car with a cassette player. back in the I’m 40, 42, 42 years old. so this is a long time ago. This is before cell phones. And, I just, I said to myself, my hands are on the steering.
Like just, I’m not gonna do this anymore. I’m not gonna do this anymore. I cannot, I hate this. I had these big baggy suit. I don’t even know how to dress back then going to work. Oh man. So it sucks. That’s when I started my first business, Tre stone performance engineering, and I always had a. A passion and a hobby for cars, making cars go faster.
I was all working on my cars under the car, jacking it up, changing the oil, doing this, this and that under the hood. And I started Treadstone performance engineering. We’re a high performance turbo charging parts company for cars, and we sell turbo chargers and parts worldwide. We have distributors all of the world as a brand that I’ve had for own over 20, 20, some years.
And that, yeah, it really interesting. And actually, when I was preparing for this interview, I wanna ask about something like super profound that you said you made a comment and I saw an interview with you where you were talking about that time specifically. And you said the turning point for you was when you had a realization that you couldn’t let your formal education get in the way of yourself education.
Can you just unpack that a bit? Cuz that’s super profound. Yeah. I always always say that I’m a pocket. You know, that was when I was in my car. I’m like, I gotta figure something out. I’m not, even though I’m going to school, I’m gonna get this degree. My parents want me to get a good job, go to engineering school.
You know what makes 60, 70, $80,000 a year. And because, so I was like, I’m not gonna let my formal education get in a way of my self education. That’s so that’s why I went through college very slowly. So I wasn’t bombarded with homework and books. I had time to figure out a business plan, put a business plan together.
I started, you know, selling parts on eBay. I used to go to the. Junkyards when it was snowing out 20 degree weather with a backpack full of tools, a torch, I get up under cars and take parts off of cars to go sell ’em on eBay. And that’s literally how my business was born. Busted my knuckles up, freezing my ass off in the junkyard under a car, taking a tur charger off
Those were good old days. So I didn’t let my formal education get in the way of my self education. I was self taught. You know, there wasn’t really many mentors back then. Like, I wasn’t really following anybody. There was no Instagram there, no social media. I just learned everything on my own. I wish I had a mentor way back then.
So that’s, that’s probably why the inspiration came for me to build this account millionaire mentor, you know, cuz everybody needs a mentor. Everybody needs. So someone look up to, to give hope and inspiration that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Once you put in the hard work consistent and you just do it day in and day out, you’re consistent with this hard work and, you know, success will come to those who put in the work.
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. So I just a interesting comment. I, I really appreciate that. You said that now let’s talk about the, the, the Genesis of the millionaire mentor brand. what’s the story about, or the story behind how that account was created or what was the catalyst behind? Me. And my wife had a personal Instagram account, 2012 to 2014, a couple years.
She actually had like 10,000 followers. I had like a couple thousand. We just post, you know, going, going out, taking pictures of, our car, vacations food, whatever our life. Just broadcaster annoyed there wasn’t stories back then either. And, we took the kids to Disneyland and came back home. They walking in the front door, actually cracked, open a little bit and I’m like, I got this wave of like fear.
I’m like, oh, why is my door open? Someone’s been in the house. So I like. The first thing I did is ran upstairs to my gun drawer. I got the gun and the thing of these people are still here. I know they’re here like two days ago or day before, and I’m, I’m running around a house like this peeking around the corners.
ready to like defend. I told the car kids BAK in the car, get back in the car, call nine one, call nine one one. And, You know, the house was ransacked, completely taken everything. So, because we posted, we were on social media, in Disneyland for the weekend on father’s day. someone came to the house, they cut the power to the house, you know, all, all alarm systems have 24 hour backup.
They waited for the bar. Barity backup to die. Just everybody little pro tip out there, get a battery backup for your alarm system. that’s what I did after that. So someone cut the power to your house. You got battery back on your alarm system. So that’s why they, they, you know, they, it was an inside job and, it’s unfortunate.
So me and my wife were at the hard rock. We got in a little fight and, decided to delete both of our Instagram accounts. I’m like, cuz we talked about it. We like, what, what do we have social media for? Like, let’s get rid of it. We don’t need it. Social media. We’re done with it, but we never, I never took action on it.
But until that night, you know, I’m like, , let’s do it. I deleted, that wasn’t a really a good thing to do, but actually it turned out it was the best thing that ever happened to us lit literally because of that event. That’s why I started millionaire mentor. Couple weeks later, I’m like, I’m missing Instagram.
Like what do I do? Like. I’m not gonna create another personal account. And, I saw one of my boys, he was selling diet plans. He’s like, can you guys he’s ripped, he’s got the muscles. He’s posting pictures of ’em on Instagram. You know, I’m seeing all these a hundred dollars payments come in. Been making a couple grand a day and takes him no time, no work to do it.
So he was building a personal brand back then. And it’s funny today, he has one of the biggest supplement companies in the world because of Instagram using Instagram influencers to promote his brand was called one of nutrition. Yeah. I, I need to do the same thing. He used a lot of Instagram influencers and to promote the brand.
And anyways, this that’s how millionaire mentors was born out of adversity because. I just wanted to start. So like why, why millionaire mentor now? Why did I pick that account? Well, I was, I was following a lot of motivational accounts, which was just like the black and white quotes. And I was following a lot of luxury accounts.
We post the luxury photos, the vacations, all this and that. So I combined the two into one. I took luxury photos, combined them with. Cool quotes, motivational quotes and boom, who wouldn’t wanna follow account named millionaire mentor. I’m like, what is the most catchy name that someone would wanna follow though?
It was, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s how millionaire mentor was born. And I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty good teacher and I never really held back. Information. I know a lot of people that I talk to, some of my friends, they’re building businesses and they’re, they’re, there’s just so secretive and lack with their ways of doing business.
And I’m just free. I’m like, I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Everything is in my brain is gonna come out flow too. And through, through me into whoever I’m mentoring. So I, I, I could never really hold back information and not a lot of my friends did that in the past. When I went and asked for. So that’s kind of like the, how I, I, it’s an incredible story.
It’s an incredible story. Really interesting. And it is brand and gold millionaire mentor is a fantastic name. but you know, like to your point, it is the prison mill mentality. Sometimes when you’re building a, you know, a business as like, you don’t want anybody to find out your secrets, but the thing is, if you’re really passionate about what you do, you know, you know, people either.
If they are gonna copy, it’s a cheap knockoff or they can’t do it as good as you, they can’t execute like you do. Right. So,
so you did make, your name as an influencer. You did build that brand and you didn’t show yourself. So that was intentional, correct? That was intentional. It wasn’t by. I was actually scared to put my face out there on the Instagram account, cuz I didn’t, I didn’t know what I was doing back then. I didn’t know what kind of stuff I was really gonna post.
I thought I was thought I was gonna start a personal account. I decided not to make it a personal account. I, I wanted to grow with following. There was no story, so I didn’t really post too much of me on the page, which I wish I would’ve done. More and more, you know, but I plan on putting myself on the page more and more.
It’s kinda like a mix. You, you got a lot of these theme pages now that people follow for, for, to give value, whether it’s health and beauty, whether it’s wellness, fitness, vacations, luxury, you name it like quirky type of video that people follow these theme pages on Instagram and they make a lot of.
so I didn’t know what I was doing at first. And these theme pages, they, they sell brand ambassador endorsement, shoutouts, and it’s insane. Like the amount of money these, some of these pages make just from selling shoutouts. It’s crazy. So what was the revelation for you then? Like, like what made you say I’m gonna grow and monetize a brand on Instagram or, or was that always your original intent with the, the count?
I think what really. Caught it for me, which really stood out was like, when someone asked to pay me for me to post them on the page and I had, I had no idea. I could even do that. And like 20 bucks, you’re gonna gimme 20 bucks just to tag you. I’m like, this is the easiest $20 I’ve ever made in my life. All gotta do is take your content, post it.
And you know, as long as it’s fit, as long as it fit with my brand, it was on theme. It was on the same niche. Why not? And then that’s when the light bulb popped. I’m like, If I just had more followers, people would pay me more money. Brands would pay me money to post their products. And that’s when I clicked.
And that’s when I just, I that’s, when I, I stopped, I literally stopped working at Treadstone and then focused on millionaire mentor almost a hundred percent that was like years ago. And it’s been social media ever since. Well, it’s interesting. And you brought it up. So what, how would you define the niche for the brand?
Like, like how would you describe it? You know, it is a mix of a few different things. It’s well edited. It’s aspirational, you know, luxury obviously, but how would you describe. Inspiration and motivation to the masses. Yeah, that’s simple. Yeah. I mean, it’s got a cool aesthetic too. I remember the, the account, cause I’ve been following it for years, but it, it had a really cool aesthetic to it as well.
You know, like it had a, you know, these, you had a compelling picture and then the quote and it was just, it was, it was repost gold. You know, people were reposting that stuff. Right. Like crazy, I would assume. yeah. Making viral, shareable, relatable mm-hmm viral content. Would, would you say that the brand has evolved at all since 19 or not 19 20 14?
Or is it the same? It’s been a while. so it’s actually pretty much the same. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been consistent with the, at least the bio. Like, we haven’t really changed much in our bio. Number one, lifestyle, entrepreneur publication, motivation, inspiration. Opportunity. Right. And so of course you, you talked about the first time you actually monetized the account, right?
Somebody paid you for a post. So, but now affiliate marketing, you’re heavily involved with affiliate marketing with, with the brand, right. With the account. So can you just break down the power of affiliate marketing and why, you know, it, you can make a lot of money doing that if you do it, right? Yeah. I mean, I’ve actually died down.
A lot of the affiliate offers that I’ve been used to run. I was actually the first guy on Instagram to run an affiliate offer for the information product. Like literally, and, and then like the leads would come in. I would be on top of every single leader board of every single affiliate launch. There was crushing the top, you know, five spots of the leader, board a sales.
I mean, it was just insane because there was no algorithm back then. It was, if you follow me, I posted, you saw it. I wish we had that same chronological feed we do now, but there’s just so many counts, so much content going out. Instagram’s gotta make their algorithm. And, you know, that back in the day was, is just, I used to drive thou I always to put thousands of opt-ins into a lead magnet a day thousand leads a day.
Wow. So that, that was, I made a lot of money in affiliate marketing back then. I kind of downed, I died down. I don’t really run too many affiliate offers if, and at all, I thought that was a big driver for you. so here’s a question like you have a full time team. Now that powers the account. Correct. What does that team look like?
Like, can you describe the structure a little bit? So I have my account manager that oversees a lot of the, he does the posting. He does the, you know, the sales. I have another sales guy that helps with sales. I have another guy that helps with DMS, and then we have a team of content creators, maybe three to 5, 5, 4, 5 people.
Consistently creating different pieces of type of content for us from the content writers to video guys, to my real guy, to my carousel guy, to my regular quote, post guy, you gotta got a different content guy for just about every type of piece of content we have. And then we got the crypto page nft.news global, which grew to a million followers in like six months.
Do you know what posts do best and why? There’s a strategy that we use to, and this is like a top secret strategy. I don’t if wanna share it. well, we’ll edit it out, Jason. No, no, no, I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. Remember I share everything. I don’t care. I was just joking. no, it’s called the unicorn post.
Like you see what it’s gone viral before. You go to other accounts and you see that a post has gone viral. What you do is you try to mimic a similar post, if not the same post reformatted on your account, or you can also create, like a tweet that went viral, you can convert that into an Instagram post.
you can convert it into a video that plays for two to three seconds with some music. Or no music, you know, it’s kind of like a little glitch going on right now. It’s taking a picture, turning into a one to two second video, getting hundreds of thousands of views on it. Cuz people look at the quote and they view it 1, 2, 3, 4 times type times.
And boom, Instagram sees, oh wow. This video has a lot of views, pumps it up, shows it to more people. There’s a little hack for you. But then the we’re going back to the unicorn is just reposting and repurposing content that has already gone viral. So it’s like a no brain. Mm-hmm . Yeah, it’s interesting that the ever changing algorithm, you know, everybody’s trying to get a handle on that, but it’s good to get your perspective, moving to the topic of just entrepreneurship, moving away from the brand a little bit, the importance of personal brand.
This is something we’ve been talking about. I mean, we’ve got a big real estate company, a lot of agents work for us and it’s something like we’ve focused on. what can you say about the importance of building a personal brand for anyone in, sales, the service industry, the financial services, especially if they’re on social, how important is.
I mean, it’s, it’s super important guys. Like you look at like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you know, Elon Musk, like he’s built such a huge following and on Twitter that he can move markets because of his personal brand. He can move Bitcoin because of his personal brand. Remember attention is the new currency.
You know, that currency that he has can make him millions and billions and billions of dollars. What just example of him tweeting about Bitcoin or. Anybody with a large following has a personal brand and can move and sway audiences in, in people’s thoughts, you know, whatever they want. So your social media is your new resume.
It’s your personal brand. And like, how do you even describe personal brand? Like. You’re you’re yourself like? Yeah. It’s a well personal brand. Yeah. It’s interesting because it’s, it’s evolved a little bit, you know, like you said, it’s, it’s your resume, you know, in the service industry, you know, especially in real estate, you know, your Instagram account is now your business card.
People don’t want your business card to go check out your Instagram. Yeah, that’s right. Like literally, you know, that’s how it works. I wanna ask you about a quote of yours. Perfection is the enemy of progress. I love that, you know, we say done is better than perfect. Why is it so important to understand that when it comes to content and consistency on social media, Because so many people wanna, they see other people’s content.
They see this well formatted, curated video with subtitles and status bar, and they, they see that they figured that they have to do the same to start their personal brand on Instagram. Well, everybody starts. From scratch every your, your first, you know, your first push, push up your first squat, your first, it’s not gonna be the best.
It’s not gonna be a lot of reps. It’s not gonna be where you want your first, whatever you consume is it’s not gonna be the best. So just get out there, put some content out there and you can perfect it as you go. Like perfection is the enemy of progress, like you said. And if you’re trying to perfect everything on the, the first round, which I’m a perfectionist and it does hamper.
Ability to put out different projects. And I, I suffer from it as well. I, I want to make it perfect, but at the same sense, we need to start somewhere. So we all start chapter one. So don’t compare your chapter. Your chapter one is someone else’s chapter 20 and they’re way down. They’re way up wherever you wanna be.
You’ll get there if you just put in the work. Yeah. Couldn’t more, you know, execution. Trump’s all, especially in entrepreneurship.
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I just want your thoughts on the power of visualization and the money conscious mind, which I’ve heard you mention. Uh mm-hmm , you know, we’ve been talking about this, the popularity of millionaire mentor is directly related to that concept, right? Why is visualization so important to success?
Visualization is so powerful because we, we constantly need to saturate our minds. With the images of what we want. And if you saturate your mind with the images of money, with the images of where you want your business to be the grand vision, the light at the end of the tunnel, you cast that vision. You write a vision statement, you write a mission, a personal mission statement, and then you have a business plan and you have a date and you have a goal in mind of how much money you wanna make.
And you read this statement every single day. You will achieve it. It will happen for you. But if you’re not thinking about your business plan, if you’re thinking about Netflix, you’re thinking about girls, you’re thinking about the next bar you’re gonna go to, or the next video you’re gonna game. You’re gonna play.
You’re never gonna get there. So we, it takes sacrifice and, and, you know, visualization is everything. So that’s why meditation is so crucial. Cuz it allows you to visualize, it allows you to. Time to spend with yourself to figure out what you want to figure out your goals, your dreams, your aspirations, write a business plan, re playing in your mind every single day and, saturate your mind with the images of money.
And you will have it very well said. I’ve been playing golf my whole life. And I only recently moved the needle because of visualization. I started to focus on that. It’s everything. okay. We’re gonna wrap up with a couple personal development questions. If you’ve got time, we’ve got a couple minutes.
I hope you do. Yep. We hinted at this earlier. but I know you said, you regret not focusing on your personal development mindset earlier. what are some habits or daily routines that are important to you and your success? Well, I think number one is your morning routine is the most important routine that you can.
And just discipline in general. So discipline yourself to write down maybe 10 things, just Google morning routine, you know, wake up early at this time, brush your teeth, drink some water. One of my favorite things to do is when I open my eyes, I have five seconds. I say five minutes, but it’s too long.
You’ll go back to sleep. Five seconds, the power of five make decisions within five seconds. So it’s 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 make a decision. Yes or no, I’m gonna do this because if you say, I don’t know if I should do this, your mind’s gonna make up all these reasons why you shouldn’t be doing this. Why you don’t want to go to the gym, why you shouldn’t eat this healthier conscious food while you should be doing work instead of playing.
And if you. Your mind starts playing tricks on you of making up all these excuses. So if you have five seconds to make a decision, when you wake up, open your eyes, get outta bed, not just, just get outta bed, just turn and put your feet on the floor. That’s it. Put your feet on. Even if you’re still sleepy.
I don’t wanna wake up. You stay there, you do some stretching, stretch every morning, a little bit, get the blood flowing a little bit. The rest of your morning routine is up to you. Whether you wanna journal, whether you wanna meditate, whether you want take some time yourself, whether you want to get the most important task of your business done within the first two, three hours of your day.
That’s what I do. I, I make sure I get the most important tasks I have to do that day done in the morning, and that could be going to the gym. It’s whatever you want it to be. So the morning routine is everything. Guys. I think discipline yourself to have a really good morning routine, write down some goals of what you wanna do in your morning routine and stick to it.
If you comp accomplish three or four out of the 10. You’re good. Yeah. Fantastic. what other projects are you working on now or currently involved with that you want to mention? Ooh, I would love to tell you guys about my new NFT project it’s called. Mm. And Ft. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna host a, once a year, super conference covering all verticals of entrepreneurship three day event.
That’s gonna be fun. We’ll have some celebrity come in, maybe do a boxing match, maybe do something, celebrity singing some after parties, dinners, we’ll have some games going on. Some pool, some ping pong, some chess, some VR gaming. And, alongside speakers from all over the world from personal development to e-commerce to sales and marketing, social media, personal branding, real estate law taxes.
I wanna do the biggest, one of the biggest events in the world. Just very similar to what Gary V is doing with Von and V friends. And then we tie in a bunch of different, cool NFTs where we, you know, you get to go to go to dinner with me and my wife. You get to come hang out and play poker with a boys night, or you get to go golfing 18 holes of golf with me on the golf force.
You know, very cool experience. Go to dinner, go to lunch, go to brunch. Play and pool, whatever, you know, we’re gonna make up a cool, a ton of cool NFTs. And this is a very, very big project hosting an event. This big 5,000 to 10,000 people is, is, is a big undertaking. we’ve done little events before I’ve been doing ’em for years, you know, never got over 500 people, but you know, I, I think we’re, we’re shooting for the stars here.
We’re gonna ma we’re gonna bring in some very well. He notes speakers for each of the days. And I think it’s gonna be a really cool, cool time. Where do we go for more information on that on Instagram, we are. Mm, NFT dot. It’s actually in my, in my Instagram bio, one of the things you can click. Okay.
We’ll put that in the show notes as well. okay. Jason, you’re opening a bottle of champagne one year from now celebrating something you’ve accomplished. What would that be? Just, you know, just helping impact people. Start their business help impact people to, to, to, to make a decision in life, to where I’m getting testimonials and people like Jason, thank you so much for helping me with this.
Thank you very much for helping me with this and in, in those testimonials and just having that, that you help somebody, you know, giving gifts to people, helping people. There’s no better feeling in the world than I believe that. So, and like, if you could do something nice for somebody, if you, if you do enough nice things for every.
You’re gonna get everything you ever wanted. Incredible. Yeah. Fantastic words. thanks so much for joining us today. Jason really appreciate you breaking down the making of one of the most successful brands in social media, as well as the life of an influencer. I really appreciate that a ton of value here.
thanks again. Besides the social media accounts, is there anywhere else you want the listeners subscribers to go. We have, mill mentor.com. So a personal’s a blog about entrepreneurs, different entrepreneurs stories. Mm-hmm , I do have a podcast that I might be coming out with very, very soon to go along with, with the blog.
Let’s go. and then we got the, the cool NFT Instagram page, the NFT blog as well. We got coming out and. Best, but not last but not least the NFT actual my own NFG. Mm NFT. So that’s really cool. Yeah. Looking forward to it, man. to see what’s next with you. So thank you very much.
