Grant is the CEO of Cardone Enterprises, Cardone Capital, an international, speaker, entrepreneur, and author of the 10 X Rule, as well as the creator of 21 bestselling business programs. Grant also owns and operates seven privately held companies and a portfolio of. 4 billion in multi-family properties.
Check that out. That’s with a b, named the number one marketer by Forbes Magazine. grant is also the founder of the 10 X Movement and the 10 X Growth Conference, the world’s largest business in entrepreneur conference. as time permits, we’re looking forward to talking about sales, marketing, and of course real estate and Cardone Capital with one and only.
Grant Cardone, good to see you again. Welcome to the G P G Mastermind this week. Hey, thank you, man. I love all the work that you’re doing, you know, getting so many different people on your shows, and that’s awesome and, and, I look forward to being part of this and hopefully I can, I’ll learn something today either way, but hopefully your audience, gets something from this as well.
I do. Thank you for that. You are very busy. I know this, and I’ll just jump right into it. You know, coming out of the pandemic and all the weirdness. Of the, of the lockdowns and everything else. You’ve had an incredibly busy year, and I know you recorded a couple of TV shows this year. Yeah. you got the 10 X Growth Con coming up, and of course all you’re doing with Cardone Capital, which is super impressive.
But looking back on the year, how are you finding time to do all you do grant? Like what does a typical day look like for Grant Cardone? Like how do you prioritize the big rocks daily? Well, the number one most important thing today was your interview. So I’m like, we gotta do that. Right. And, you know, what really happens for me in any given day, I don’t, I don’t think about having too much to do ever.
I don’t wor I, I’d rather have too much to do by the way, than too little to do. I, I do a lot better and I’m a lot happier when I got a lot to do. So be, be, you know, I would just suggest everybody don’t complain about having too much to do because if you keep complaining about it, you’ll have nothing to.
And I think every. You know, has had the experience of like a day going by in a snap of a finger because you had so much to do, as opposed to nothing to do, and it feels like the day never ends. There’s an old saying about, you know, if you want something done, find the busiest person and give ’em the task.
Because the person that has nothing to do will not get it done. So, I don’t really worry about too much. Giddy. I don’t think about I got too much to do. I don’t really think in terms of that, but I also don’t do stuff I don’t want to do. You know, I was driving to the office today. I was late, I was doing this interview with O’Leary and I was a moment late, and then two guys, two grownups.
Adults are driving through our pub, our private parking lot here at the office on bicycles, and I almost hit one of ’em. And of course, you know, your response is when you, you hit somebody on a bike on your property, you want to get out and beat ’em up first, you know? And, and so the point of that story is, I, I made time for this thing that just showed up on my radar outta nowhere, wasn’t on my schedule, and, and I made time to be an idiot for a moment.
And got emotional. So I don’t think it’s real that people don’t have time. You guys make time for whatever happens. The drama, the Instagram, the YouTube clickbait Grant, Cardone’s going bankrupt. video that you guys find time to, to watch where somebody basically breaks down my company, but they don’t have me in the interview.
If I’m not in the interview, guys, like it’s click. So, yeah, it’s a good breakdown. Yeah, it’s a good breakdown. I mean, you know, they come for the tallest tree, right? the tallest nail. I do wanna, I, I wanna ask you, you know, before we get to Real Estate Cardone Capital, branding and marketing, I wanna ask you about, branding and marketing, because it’s hard to find someone who’s more prolific on social media than you.
Right. grant Cardone, the Cardone brand, I’ve said this many times. I call you Mr. Content. Right. Forbes named you, the number one marketer, and obviously, many agree with that. there might not be an exact blueprint, to what you’ve done and what you’re doing. I think you have, 15 million followers on social, and then I’ve heard you say this Yeah.
That you have an additional 150 million that see your content regularly. So that’s massive. So it’d be really good to get your, you know, your perspective on branding and marketing, especially for those on the call today who are in a service industry like, like real estate. Is there a formula? Yeah. That you see with personal branding?
Well, you know, the first thing I would tell you guys to do is pretty much disregard everything that you’re hearing about marketing. it can’t be true because it’s outdated, because these platforms did not exist, period. In the story, the measuring of metrics, r o, roi, these, these are mythologies, these are accounting people that wanted to somehow put some valuation on market.
So they’re like, okay, I spend a dollar, you get, you know, $2 back. He’s, he’s a gu. He’s a damn accountant. Accountants are not creators. Accountants are not entrepreneurs. Accountants are dealing with past the past. I have an accounting degree. You do not create finances as an accountant. You account for finances that have already happened.
You create budgets that are arbitraries. They, they’re not real. They’re, they’re speculations about the future. The entrepreneur is the one that makes them happen. Okay? Today, I know after being in business for 40 years, marketing is the single most important thing your company can do. The second most important thing your company can do is more marketing.
And the third most important thing your company can spend money on and spend energy and time and resources on is marketing. The cost of not marketing is infinite. Okay. No, great company can be a great company on word of mouth only. It’s impossible. Quit bragging about your word of mouth. Oh, I built my company on word of mouth.
I hear this when I was doing undercover, billionaire, almost every the show, the TV show, undercover billionaire. I’d run into these companies. We do word of mouth advertising. I’m like, you bragging or complaining? Oh, we’re bragging. I said, well, that’s nothing to brag about. It just says you’re stupid and that you, you haven’t committed to scaling.
I didn’t start any social media. I didn’t have one follower on social David until 2011. Is that right? 2000. Yeah. I’ve only been doing social media marketing for 11 years. I, I’m 64 years old. I got introduced to social media when I was 53 years old. It’s not native or easy or, or, or normal or natural. For me, what I saw, the beauty of social media was, number one, it was.
Number two, I could bang it as much as I wanted. Okay? Like as much as I wanted. They won’t stop you. No matter how much I drop on it, I can say anything I want and it’s not regulated and it’s free. This is perfect for me. Okay? You know, everybody told me to do, oh, there’s a specific time. This is a myth.
There’s a specific time you should market, you know, the time of day. number two, don’t market too much. Number three, don’t monetize. Gary Vaynerchuck. It became famous for don’t monetize. I’m a, I ain’t got a. My daddy don’t own a wine shop, bro. I gotta monetize. Okay? I need money. I, I got two kids I have to monetize.
So I broke all those rules. Number one, I market constantly. The best time for me is right now, I add links to almost every post that I do. I’ve, I’ve raised, $1 billion in cash for Cardone Capital doing this, and I’ve sold a billion dollars worth of products over the internet and nobody really even knows I exist.
Also the 15 million people that follow me and follow whoever follows you is not as important as the voyeurs that won’t follow you, that will not like you, will not comment, you don’t even know they’re watching many of them, or watching on burner phones. The most qualified audience I have is not my followers.
It is the foyer audience. See, see, once I’m in something, I’m in it. Like, back to your first question about time management. , look, I just take whatever’s in my face. Okay? Then, then I’m gonna make room for whatever I’m doing in that moment. And if I have to push stuff back because of it, I push stuff back.
But, but I don’t wanna skip, you know, you don’t wanna miss a moment. Some of you know me, some of you’ve never heard of me. Some of you that know me probably break into a couple categories. I don’t like him. David, I can’t even believe you’re having him on. then there’s another category. I’ve heard something about him.
I don’t know. I’m not quite bought in. There’s some of you that are fans. You like me? Okay, so now my, I have an opportunity right now to, for those that don’t like me or don’t know me, to actually change their mind about me and know me. And, and this goes back to your question about the marketing piece. I am not interested in two things.
One, I’m not, I never go for a viral video, ever. I’ve never worked for a viral video. I’ve never tried to get. , 15 million views. My daughter has more views on a TikTok that she did than I have on any video that I’ve ever done. . So, but I don’t go for viral and I don’t go for likes. Okay. I’m not interested in whether people like me or not.
I’m interested in whether people know me, whether they like me or not, doesn’t matter to me. I can convert people that don’t like me. I can convert people that like me. You know, you can lose people. Which, if I can make, if I can turn a, a, a fan into a non-fan, then I can turn a non-fan into a fan. But the thing I’m most interested in, For you guys that are taking notes and trying to figure this game out, particularly women, I think women suffer more from trying to get people to like them on social than men do.
That might be a little sexist, by the way, me saying that, I’ll hold myself accountable for that already as it came out of my mouth. , I heard it, but, but I know you guys spend more time looking good. Okay. I, I know women that redo their posts. You, you. Oh, I didn’t look good. The light. Look, the post is not for you.
The post is for the audience. My wife, you know, she’ll redo a post three and four times until it looks perfect. I’m like, baby, you’re not. Go, you know, are you gonna go back and watch this? She will. I never rewatch my material because I’m not dependent upon one drop. The frequency of social media is what’s gonna build the trust with your audience.
People are gonna, they’re gonna decide on you in the beginning based on your frequency. I can trust this person to deliver content to me. That’s why David, you call me Mr. Content, nobody’s ever called me that before, but bro, I have a lot of content. Yeah. Well, listen, it’s, it’s, you know, consistency is, Key.
We all know that, especially on social media. I mean it’s, you know, just as long as you’re putting out content, good, bad, or indifferent. Interestingly, you know, we had Ty Lopez on, he was talking, you know, the, here in my Garage video, the, the amount of work that went into that video, like it was unreal. Like he had copywritten that over and over again.
The hours and weeks and months that went into that video that people thought went viral on a whim. It wasn’t, there was a lot of work went into that. Yeah. But putting out the content is key. Right. Consistency. And, you know, you, you touched on it, you talked about undercover billionaire, that was part of building the Cardone brand this year.
That’s the discovery, channel series. I, I wanna ask you, I’m curious about this, how you enjoyed that experience and what were the biggest lessons you learned personally, from that show? Or I guess, you know, what can entrepreneurs and business builders take from watching that series with you? Well, let, let me back up a second.
Just tell you how it came about. Okay? It’s kind of based on this 10 x principle. We had done an event in, Miami, Marlin Stadi 34,000 people. It’s the biggest business conference ever held in the United States. To date, that was a public ticket. I mean, Microsoft could hold a big event, right? But, but you’re not selling tickets.
This was a sold event. 34,000 people, everybody paid except 2000 people. Those were first responders, policemen, firemen, nurses, et c. . So 34,000 seats were sold or so, and when we got done with that, I’m like, guys, how do we 10 x that? How do we go from 34,000 to 340,000 people in an event? It’s an exercise. 10 x is an exercise in big think right?
To to, to get yourself out of, out of, successful action so that you don’t get rote and automatic and just kind of like grooved into some success. And you’re like, Hey, what could I do? Well, You know, my staff was like, well, there’s no stadium that big. It’s gonna take da, you know, hours and hours for pe.
Even if we could find one hours and hours for people to load in. I’m like, yeah, but what is big enough? You just keep asking. But how could we do it? Well, the only way to do it is a TV show. Okay. the 1.1 million people watched Undercover Billionaire the first night it dropped. So we, we actually achieved, we went from 34,000 people that cost us 10 million.
Two, I paid nothing except 90 days of my life. The most torturous, hellacious, worst, 90 days of my entire 64 years on this planet were, were on this show. I would not recommend it for anybody. I would never do it again. It was terrible. It was awful away from my wife and kids. The fact that you even bring it up, David makes me want to like, you know, kill myself this morning, but, but, Okay.
It allowed me to expand my audience. Now what’s the, the, the other bad news about this is Discovery Channel. This is behind the scenes Me and Discovery Channel still today hate each other. Okay. They hated me while I was doing the show. I hated them. We fought every day. They wanted to do the show a different way.
They kept trying to get involved, but the deal was they were gonna follow me around in a. I was gonna lose my name only at a hundred dollars, an old truck, and there was gonna be no interference from them for me to shoot this show. They were gonna follow me around and I was gonna build a million dollar business.
When we got there, they started interfering. They started setting up meetings and I’m like, what are you doing guys? There was 19 of them in one of me. And plus whatever their discovery channel is back at home. So I’m a, I’m an, you know, I’m a free guy. I’m a guy that works for myself. I’ve been working for myself 35 years.
I’m not used to people telling me what to do, and I’m authentic and transparent, and I’m honest. And I took that deal with them. I told ’em I was gonna build a 10 million business, not a million dollar business, and I was gonna do it in under 90 days. And I told ’em I would never spend their a hundred bucks.
And they didn’t like, They, they wanted to manage the process. And I’m like, no, you’re not managing the process. I’m doing this deal by myself. they came to me one day and said, we got a meeting with you with this guy. And I’m like, I don’t know that guy. And they’re like, yeah, he’ll be good tv. I’m like, Hey, this is what I got for your TV show.
Okay, follow me around. There’s 19 of you guys. None of you have ever built a business much less one in 90 days. Leave me alone. Turn your cameras on and follow me. I built a five and a half million dollar business in 90 days during Covid in Pueblo, Colorado. If you guys have ever been to Pueblo, Colorado, I got the entire 5.1 million out of the city.
Like there, there was nothing left when I finished . So, anyway, it was a terrible experience, but I did it because I knew I could build a bigger audience. What’s crazy is they delayed the drop of the show. Because of Covid, the show, the Covid pushed it back and it was gonna get dropped in November. This is 2020, November 20, 20.
40 million people were outta work. And I told Discovery, drop the show people needed. And they’re like, no, grant SH TV dies during Thanksgiving. I said, not this Thanksgiving. Everyone is home. No one’s traveling. People need this show. They need to see a guy actually making it during Covid, building a business outta nothing.
And they said, no, we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna not release the show until the first of the year. I begged them, I pleaded with ’em. I even offered to pay them to drop the show because I thought America needed it so bad. What did they do? They waited until January. January 6th, discovery Channel dropped undercover billionaires.
Okay. Who remembers what was happening on January 6th? ? Yeah. I’m an estate grant. Uh uh Dude, it was crazy. It was like, yeah, the lois ratings on cable TV history was January 6th, 2021. What’s the point of that story? Never push back a start. Yeah, what a interesting case study Grant. I’m sorry I asked about it, but I had to.
Yeah, yeah. I had to, I had to. But,
you, but you also mentioned it, and I’m, I’m, I’m fascinated by this, is, is disproving the myth that you need money to make money. They, they gave you a hundred dollars to start Correct. And you said, I don’t want it. Yeah. I don’t want it. So what’s, what’s more important than, than money to make money or, or, you know, what do you need to make money?
Well, you need, you need a strategy, right? You need a strategy. And my strategy was I didn’t need any money. I needed people. So for instance, the first five days, all I wanted to do was meet the right people in town. And the way to do that is to go to business owners. So I’m flying into Pueblo. They told me, 30 minutes out from Pueblo, you’re gonna be going to Pueblo, Colorado.
Cuz I didn’t know until then. So I couldn’t do any research. . So I opened my phone up, put in, put in Pueblo, and I searched businesses for sale in Pueblo. The reason I did that was because I wanted to see who was selling a business. Now discoveries like, bro, you don’t have any. I said, I don’t need money to buy a business.
There’s 32 million small businesses in America, 60% of them, 18 million of them break even or lose money. Half of ’em are for sale. On any given day that I could literally walk in like today, if I was gonna go start a new business today, I wouldn’t start a new business. I’d go buy one that’s existing going into 2021 or 2023.
I would tell you guys it’s gonna be easier for you to buy 10 businesses next. Then to raise your revenue 10% next year, and you could literally buy 10 businesses like yours with no money. Literally take it over and pay the owner for that business out of future revenue. They’re tired, they’ve been through covid, now they’re gonna go through a recession.
This is gonna be a nasty, nasty recession. It’s gonna hurt a lot of businesses. And, and so you could go buy those businesses. So I looked up a, a se, a bunch of businesses and one was an r. Okay, an RV park. So first thing I did, I said I’m going to an RV park when I get to town. Went to an RV park. Guess what the guy was trying to sell six months ago.
Ended up selling it to his son. His son took over. They have 60 RVs that are empty, one of which I ended up sleeping in. Rather than my truck. We tried to buy the show from Discovery. They’ve done nothing with it, by the way. They’ve bombed it. They’ve ruined a billion dollar enterprise. They had a hit show the first year and they destroyed it.
Just cause to show you, man, when you start changing stuff that’s working, don’t do that. You got something work and lean into it and they, you know, mess. They mess the show up. So we tried to buy it from ’em. We’re still trying to buy it again, but until I can buy it, I basically took the show ripped the.
Off, off of discovery. I’m gonna add behind the scenes to it. I hope they sue me. You can tell ’em I said this cuz it’ll bring the show more attention and you’ll be able to see that gctv.com and we’re gonna show behind the scenes what they didn’t show you, didn’t show you, wouldn’t show you, couldn’t show you.
a and so you don’t need to go to Discovery Plus and buy it. You can if you want to, but go to gctv.com and you’re gonna see what they didn’t show. Now we’re gonna produce eight TV shows this year because when I get upset with people, what I do is I say, okay, if I think I can do it better than them, then go do it better than them.
Yeah. So we’re producing eight television shows this year, all entrepreneurial shows. The Real Estate King is one of ’em. We’ve shot six episodes already where I get dropped off in cities and go help people buy real estate, big commercial apartment. We’ve done, we’ve done six cities. I got four more to do Nashville, Atlanta, Tampa, and Miami.
I’ll do those in January. We have a show called Mini Moguls where we’re out discovering the most successful kid entrepreneurs in the world. I’m doing another show with a, a guy that, does marketing. He, he does entrepreneurial kind of takeover shows. Me and Rick Ross are doing a TV show called Hustler House, where 15 hu.
Supposed hustlers go live at Rick Ross’s house and me and Rick torture them for 30 days to find out who is the ultimate hustler. we’re doing another show called Inside the Mind of an Entrepreneur to figure out how you guys think. Cuz you’re definitely wackos and I’m missing, I don’t know, handful of shows, but it was, did, did you mention, I was talking to Jared about Unbreak.
Oh, yeah, we’re gonna do it. Well, we’re doing a release in January with a million people. We think there’ll be a million viewers online. it’s a free, it’s a free event in January to show people how to build an unbreakable business over five days. That’s not a TV show, but it is a, it’ll be a like, like what you guys are doing right here.
It’ll just be a million people rather than six. Very cool. Very cool, man. I, again, right? It’s hard to find somebody more prolific. With content online, then Mr. Content himself, grant Cardone, you know, speaking of, you know, content and disruption, how much have you enjoyed watching, what Elon’s doing at Twitter over the past six weeks?
He’s so, so excited. I was on the call the other night. I’m glad you brought that up. I was on the call, I don’t know, it was two and a half hours at eight o’clock or nine o’clock at night. He was flying in at six 50. Yeah, I was on that too. I was on that too. I was, I, I’m gonna tell you, my life was changed that night.
David, listening to him. Because I’m like, okay, here’s a guy, you know, one of the wealthiest, smartest people on the planet in his plane, talking to a bunch of people he don’t know and who probably can’t really help him. And I was just like transparent, authentic, taking time to share with people, and it inspired me to keep being me to do that.
I get a lot of flack because people don’t like whatever my delivery or my confidence, or my belief in what I’m saying. I get excited about it and they take that as. Whatever. Right. I don’t, I don’t like it, but you know, I, I, I listen to him, man, and he just gave me permission to keep doing that and not to be, you know, not when you, when you become successful, a lot of people just go into hiding.
and he, he hasn’t done that. And so it really inspired me to do more stuff on Twitter. I’ve added a lot of followers since he came on, so I don’t know if they’ve li lifted shadow bands on, on me or cuz I’m, I’m, I’m, you know, I’ve been very outspoken about. The vaccine and different things like that, that, that are, you know, I think people should be able to have free speech, so I’m very inspired by that.
We’re gonna do, this weekend, we’re gonna take our real estate conference that we’re doing that people, there’s 2000 people coming to Miami to go to live. I’m gonna stream that on Twitter spaces for free. Despite the fact that we sell online video of it and we sell seats to it, we’re gonna do it on Twitter spaces free and, and to be completely frank and transparent with everybody, I’m doing that to get Elon’s attention cuz he needs content providers on Twitter.
He needs advertisers. In. Very cool. I, I mean, I, I guess we’re learning lessons, watching, you know, what he’s doing with Twitter, you know, especially entrepreneurial lessons for sure. It’s been fascinating to watch and of course, being fully transparent, you know, he is dropping the Twitter files, which is, I mean, you know, was very interesting and, and looking back, I think it’ll be, you know, it’s history making in a way.
I think we’re watching a piece of history unfold before us. I don’t, I don’t know if we’re appreciating that, but, you know, I’m paying close attention. That being said, and I know one of the questions in the chat, if I can reference it, somebody’s asked what the biggest mistake you’ve made in life. Another way I might ask it is, what’s the biggest mistake you see maybe entrepreneurs, making entrepreneurs and sales professionals making, well, let, let me handle the first, you know, the, the, the first question, which is the biggest mistake I’ve made?
, the single biggest mistake I ever made in my life was thinking small. Now, continue to make that mistake today, even today, right now. I still think too small. I wanna pull away from problems I have rather than multiplying them. The solution of problems is to multiply ’em, make, make 10 times bigger problem as a way to solve the one problem you have.
You’re not gonna get away from problems. It’s impossible, and that’s what causes people to shrink. They’re trying to pull away from problems. Elon’s leaning into ’em, right? So the second biggest mistake I made, and I interviewed Kevin O’Leary on this, was not doing due diligence on people. And what I mean is asking people hard questions.
You tell me you did something, show me. You, you tell me you had, you invested 500 grand in a project, or you’re great at money or you’re hiring an accountant and you’re great at money and you’re gonna manage my money and you’re gonna good. Show me your money. Most people do not ask those questions. And I did this back in 2007.
trusted this guy, this guy, does it mean this guy was smooth, man, he started going to my church. You know, he takes us to dinner, brings me in, shows me all his projects, but he never showed me his money and he ended up ripping me off and it cost mo more than the money that it cost me. It’s embarrassing.
I knew there was something wrong. By the way, if you guys go back and never look at when you’ve been ripped off or betrayed or tricked hoodwinked, there was probably something you saw that you didn’t pay attention to and didn’t ask deeper questions. So those are the two big mistakes that I. Interesting.
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okay. I do, I do wanna move into, so yeah, very interesting, to ask that question. before we ask about Cardone Capital specifically. You know, you interview and you deal with, and you partner with some of the most successful, you know, entrepreneurs, business builders, you know, entertainers in the world.
Is there a commonality you see among successful people? Like is there one, you know, singular, you know, trait that you see among very successful? Well, yes. One, one. The one thing that’s really like, I, I’ll just tell you behind the scenes, like I’ve interviewed Usher Mayweather, I put on these big stages, right?
I don’t know Donald Trump, Kevin Hart, Dana White, John Travolta, Kevin Turner that worked with Sam Walton and Bill Gates. These people get nervous too, man. I’ve seen some of these people. Like shake sweat. I had a guy, he’s worked 12 billion Tillman futa, man. He, he got on that stage. I had to make him comfortable.
I mean, this is a guy with a 300 foot yacht, multiple planes, helicopters, 600 restaurants, a trillion dollars worth of revenue over his career. Still gets nervous. I’ve seen Broadway stars, man. I mean, a-list. Celebrities nervous. that’s one thing. The second thing is, And I, I learned this from an interview with Kevin Turner that, that worked with, Sam Walton and Bill Gates and King Griffin.
The super successful people are not content people. You, you guys call it happy, but, but, but you’re, you’re confusing it with contentment. They’re happy, they’re just not contented. They’re, they’re divi. It’s what Kevin calls divine discontent, and that gives me approval. The, the, the positive part of that, it gives me permission to be a bit not satisfied, right?
Because my whole life basically I had a psychologist or psychiatrist or some health and fitness magazine or mental health magazine telling me I had a problem cuz I’m never completely satisfied. And the truth is, I think that’s God’s way of getting you guys to keep pressing to your next level, your next.
And, and, and, you know, in my house. Now, do we not, we’re not looking to be satisfied. We don’t want to be satisfied. We’re always reaching for our potential. My wife’s always pushing me to do more, be more impact, more, help more people, create more wealth for myself, for other people. Like we, we have, we have permission now to be more, there’s nothing wrong with me or you because I want more.
Well then why should. To be everybody. Yeah. Why would I be happy with what I’m doing if I know I can do more? Yeah. Yeah. A thousand percent. I, I love that. I, that’s such a fantastic breakdown. I think it’s, I, I, I think it’s important to note, you know, even, you know, captains of industry and I interview, you know, same people you interview and it, it, it is incredible how nervous they get and, you know, for anybody listening, you know, The more you do it, you still get butterflies, but they just fly in formation after a while.
Right? So that’s it. You just gotta learn to like , break through it. But, fantastic breakdown, grant, really appreciate that. Now, I do wanna ask you about Cardone Capital, cause this is fascinating to me, what you’re doing with that. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a. Like a real estate syndication, if, if I’m correct, right.
Where you pull money from retail investors to buy Yeah. You know, multi-family properties, that’s what you’re doing. Right. what’s interesting about Cardone Capital, for those that don’t know, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, is, is, is you’re bringing the product to a retail investor, which otherwise the Goldmans, the BlackRocks, people.
You know, can’t invest in these, in these products, and you’re bringing it to a retail investor, which I find fascinating. So how big is that, that opportunity for Cardone Capital and for the retail investor? So, you know, there’s a number of things that we’re doing that has never been done and very different than what, wall Street particularly has.
I’m gonna go back to your comment about Elon. Okay. E I wrote a book called, if You’re Not First, you’re Last. And it basically, it was a book about, I was trying to figure out, I write my books for me. , I’m trying to figure out something. I have a problem. Okay. Like no one knew me. 10 years ago I wrote a book called I I I, the book.
The book was like, what would I have to do to get known to be first of mine in a bunch of different industries? Because I had a problem. I was only known in one industry, and the industry got hammer. in 2008, my income got hammered. I didn’t have customers, they got cut in half. My prices went down. My family was at risk.
It like, it just got terrible in 2008 for me. . So I’m like, oh my God, not enough people know me. Okay. I was, I was dependent upon one industry. Now, now we’re in 50 in. To, 10 years later. So I wrote in this book, look, you, you make a list of what your competitor won’t do and do it. This is why Elon bought Twitter, by the way, I believe I, I don’t know this to be true a hundred percent, but I believe he bought Twitter because he can do with it what Washington Post, c n n, CNBC and Fox News will not do, which is share the.
And there’s a whole big, giant ass audience out there that’s like, I will pay for the truth. I’d rather pay for the truth than get, than get lies, for free. And I think he’s doing what, you know, what is it called? Mass media or, problem again, the mass media, whatever they call ’em. Right? Mainstream media.
mainstream, mainstream media. Yeah. What mainstream media won’t do. So, That, that’s kind of what I’m doing in some of these spaces that I’m in. Right? I’m making a list of what will my competition not do to the Cardone Capital. So I basically looked at who would I want to become in the future. Okay, well, wh when we started building real estate out, I’m not, I don’t wanna become my uncle that, that had 80 apartments.
I want to become Blackstone. Harbor group that’s got a hundred thousand units, Starwood’s got 140,000 units. These are, these companies are worth, you know, Blackstone’s got Blackstone added 30,000 units last year. 10,000 are in Florida. Okay, so what, what will they not do? First of all, Blackstone only takes money from institutions hedge funds, and, you know, big, big, big, Hartford, 58 billion pension funds.
helpers, teachers, credit Union, they, they don’t talk to Annie. My, my, my, you know, personal executive. That’s, that’s a non-accredited investor. They, they don’t care about her. They care about big, big money sovereign funds. So what won’t they do? Number two, they don’t have long-term 10 year cycles.
They have short three year cycle. Three and five year funds. They tell you that’s for you. It’s not for you, it’s for them so they can get their exit. Okay, so we didn’t build a three or five year fund. They don’t pay people every month. They pay people every quarter. We pay people every month. So what we did was we went to the retail investor.
We use social media. They don’t use it at all. Okay? We use we. We don’t ever go to rich companies or super wealthy people. We give accredited and non accredit. $25,000 investor, a $5,000 investor or a 25 million investor, exactly the same res returns invested in the same deal. We pay every single month. We have a 10 year cycle.
We don’t do redemptions. Okay. Blackstone offers redemptions. You know, you guys know why they offer redemptions because where they get their money from, like MetLife requires there to be a provision for redemptions because they know at the very beginning of a downturn, like we’re in right now, they’ll make a phone call, Hartford or New York Life, Hey man, we need 2 billion or the Florida State Pension Fund, we need our 2 billion back.
And Blackstone will send ’em the money back and you guys are left holding the. You don’t have direct investments in Blackstone. What you have is basically some piece of paper sitting in a mutual fund or an IRA with Vanguard and you don’t even know they’re invested in Blackstone. Yeah. We also pass on all the benefits that I as an owner would get in those assets and Blackstone does not give that to you.
But it’s not just Blackstone, it’s Blackstone, Starwood. It’s the whole list of guys that run real estate in America. And my goal is to, to literally become those guys, but do it by crowdfunding with regular people like you guys. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s so interesting and you know, when we had you on the show last, I think your portfolio was close to 2 billion, now it’s at four.
So you’ve grown and scaled really fast. Like, well, we were, we were probably closer to 5 billion before this contraction. We’ve already rebooked our, our assets. pulled ’em down a billion dollars. But again, like I’m not selling anything. Okay. This month, every month, this year, since February, we paid 4 million to our investors.
This. While other firms are having trouble, we’re paying 6 million out to our investors. . So a hundred percent of the money, a hundred percent of the money goes into the, to the real estate, 100%. There’s no broker fees, no management fees. Nothing comes out before the investment goes in. There’s no middleman.
We, we don’t pay a bank any money, like you literally invest directly with me into the real estate is blacked backed by real estate. The money stays in that one real estate deal until, at which time we go to sell that. Yeah, it’s a fascinating model. I do wanna ask you, we have to ask you like, well, again, we’ll wrap it up soon, but, we have to ask you about you, you know, your strategy when looking at potential deals.
Like what’s the criteria, when you look at putting a deal together, because I think this is really important to ask you about if we have you on. Yeah. So, so, number one is location. , we, we never compromise location for. everybody knows the term location, location, location. Most people don’t really know what that means.
Location for me means I have job migration into my location. Two, I don’t have a government making it impossible for me to collect my rents so that that counts. That knocks off about 25 states right there that we will not invest in, including great real estate states by. with barriers to entry three, it has to cash flow from day one.
We don’t build assets that are empty. We only ex, like, I closed on a deal. I want cash flow next month. Hmm, four. We want to buy under replacement costs or under the, the, the cost of the last person that bought it. basically that’s code for I wanna steal something. And number five, there’s gotta be upside in that property so that that’s a short.
But thanks. but I’ve been doing this 35 years in real estate. The. 30 years was very quiet. The last five years I got noisy about it. First 30 years I was figuring out what I was doing, and now I’ve never, ever lost deal in a real estate. I’ve been through 2008, 2000. I’ve been through bus collapses. I’m gonna go through this cycle.
These cycles, what we’re going through right now are the best opportunities to add real estate. And this may be the. Opportunity you guys get to actually own real property in America that creates wealth long term. Hmm. Fascinating. Very interesting. I hope everybody was taking notes and grant, you know, just going into 2023, I just wanna ask about, you know, words of motivation, goal setting.
for some, you know, their goals this year might be different. or look different than they did in years past. A lot of uncertainty going into the new year. So, so like what do you do to strategize in goal set for the new year? Or is it just part of a five, 10 year world domination plan that you have?
or what, like what do you specifically do to, you know, goal set for the new year and what, what should people be thinking about or what’s the most important thing for entrepreneurs, sales professionals think? So, so what I’m looking to do all the time is, is w we, we did about 150 million in revenue this year, in 2022.
My goal is to take that to 1.5 billion in revenue income. So gross top line income now. Now, how do I do that? Now what I have to do is I gotta start working on how do you do that? You cannot grow a business 10 times. I cannot grow that much revenue with the audience that I. And I can’t spend enough money in advertising to do that.
So what do I have to do? How do I do It goes back to the question earlier. Everybody’s gonna tell me I can’t do it, but how could we do it? If we could do it, how could we do it? Well, I know that there’s that much money on planet Earth. The leader, the visionary, has to be like convinced completely. This is possible.
You guys have to be convinced because if you have two people working for you, 20 people working for you, or 200, it will not be possible to them. They’re not you. You have to hold the vision. So the first thing you gotta do is get sold on the concept. So what I just go through this little drill. Okay. 1.5 billion in a year.
Does anybody else make that kind of money? Yes. Is that money available on planet Earth? Yes. If I took that much money, much money off of planet Earth, would I be doing good or bad? Now, I’d help more people, period. So I’m like, okay, the money’s there. Other people are doing it. I can do it too. How can I do it?
And now I gotta figure out, okay, can I do it in 12 months? Probably. Is it a worthwhile goal to work? To work? Seems like it to me. Seems like it’d be a lot of damn fun. The one thing I know for sure I need is people. I need more people to know me, more people to work with me, more partners, more investors, more connections.
I need more people. I need more haters. I need more people talking about why I’m a piece of garbage and I’m just a con man, and a scammer and a jack, and, you know, a scammer and a scammer and whatever else they call me, right? And I’ll agree. I, I need a bunch more people waiting for me to go busted and bankrupt.
I need my family to be annoyed because I’m not available. Okay. Because where, where I’m gonna go, I’m going to leave some of my family members behind. , they’re not all on. They’re not gonna all take this ride. The ride you guys are on. If you’re gonna go on a big ride, you’re leaving some people behind.
Yeah. The people who love you, David, the people that love and support you guys, they say they love and support you, but you gotta understand what they’re saying to you is, I love and support you the way you are. Yeah. And those people unconsciously do not want you to. They’re threatened by your change, so just be aware of that going into 2023.
It also sounds like you’re hard on yourself Grant. sounds like you’re hard on yourself, but Yeah, very. And that gives me permission to be hard on other people. Yes. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s a, it’s an interesting conversation, I think, I think it’s important to take stock of where you are and where you’re going.
I always say work backwards from where you want to be. Yeah. 2023 is gonna be interesting, for a lot of people. So just, I hope everybody’s been paying attention what Grant says there. to wrap things up, I know there’s a couple questions in chat. I don’t think we have time to get to them. Grant’s time is, is, is valuable, but.
Coming up, you’ve got the Growth Con coming up in February, I believe. and, and the projects you talked about. What do we have to look forward to with your, future projects, especially Growth Con? What can we expect there? Did you announce speakers, et cetera? Did you do that? No, we, we never announced speakers before our event.
Everybody’s surprised, but I can tell you who we have offers for. I got offers out for Jay-Z. Dave Chappelle. One name I can’t mention, but we talked about earlier, the, Barry Stern Lick at Starwood. All the people that I wanna meet with and talk to, I’m sending invites to. So we, we send ’em big checks and say, Hey man, Jay, I’d like to have you at my conference.
When you’re ready to cash this check, just accept it. Let’s. Is, is is Ab Stallon. Maybe he can do the, Jay-Z intro. I don’t know. He’s the new album Drama. Jay’s, Jay-Z’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met in my life. I met him on multiple occasions. He’s a fantastic human. I would love to meet him, man.
I, I, I’d like to do, the, the Beckham and his wife, me and my wife and his wife in, in, in Victoria, do do an interview with those guys about couples. Kanye. I was gonna have Kanye man, but he just kind of slipped overboard on me. I’m, I love Kanye West. I love his music. when he was ragging on Balenciaga, I’m like, yeah, that’s cool.
Let’s rag on Balenciaga. I don’t like those people. Anyway, he never liked their clothes, and, and then he went a little bit too far, so everybody’s telling me I can’t have him. Andrew Tate, if I had Andrew Tate, my kids would not come to the event. They’re like, I hate that guy. So some of this is my wife and kids keep me from having some of these more controversial people.
I, I gotta tell you, you know, like I interview all the time too. Just like you and yeah, it’s funny what gets us going, you know, like people we wanna interview. I’ve interviewed people, my daughters have not been happy. I can tell you that as well. It’s the same thing, but it’s, you know, it’s what intrigues us.
Grant, final question. What’s your definition of success? I wanna know what the Grant Cardone definition of success is because a lot of people on here, they want to have a successful year coming up. A lot of people on the call today are very successful. So what’s your definition of success? Well, you guys look like a bunch of successful people.
So one thing I would, I would define success as is all of us having a party together and getting to know each other better. You know, maybe we’re on a yacht in the south of France or the Mediterranean or something hanging out for a week or two. I’ll buy as long as you guys are fun. So that would be successful, right?
Because those are memories and experiences, right? Right. Life is. You know, you can have all the money in the world if you don’t have some positive experiences to go with it. That doesn’t seem like a success. But also it would also be reaching for my potential, you know, like once the trip’s over, what else am I doing?
You know, and, and what am I doing to find the next level of grant to find out what else can I. , whether it’s charitable or financial or physical, maybe it’s my physical health or health, or maybe it’s my wife and I trying to figure out how to improve our relationship. You know, as we, as we, we’ve been married almost 20 years now.
How do we make that better as it changes because it’s changing. , how do I, how do I improve the relationship with my children as they go through, you know, teenage years? So, by the way, I was with her Mosy, I, I actually was in Cabo. Two days ago, somebody’s talking about Alex harm being here, and my daughter and I went out into the ocean on a, on those little sea bobs, and we would go from boat to boat just saying hi to people.
We didn’t know anybody. And the third boat that we went up to was Alex was on, so he’s like, Greg Cardone, what are you doing in the ocean? That would be weird. You know, you pull up to Greg Cardone in the middle of the ocean. That would be a strange one, right? ? Yeah. Yeah. grant. Okay. That you know, I can’t thank you enough for, joining us today.
It’s been an absolute pleasure. you know, really appreciate you, jumping on, drop some gems and some knowledge as a. Relates to branding, marketing, and of course real estate, the economy, some other things. Can’t wait to see you and what you have in store for the new year. Cardone Capital as well, 2023 and beyond.
really fantastic. Where do you want the people to go? You and obviously follow you on social. where else do you want everybody to go and, and click through? You know, like, you know, if you Google me one time, I’ll follow you around the internet forever. So, you know, the thing that I’d most like the audience to do is, you know, you guys check into Cardone Capital.
What I’m doing there, I am literally gonna change finance. No one has ever done this before, allowing everyday people. To invest in institutional quality assets, I am gonna buy the best real estate I’ve ever bought in my life, and I’m gonna share it with people just like me, and I’m not gonna use the banks or institutions or hedge funds to do it.
This has never been done before at the level I’m doing it at. And I’m literally gonna build a 40 billion or 50 billion treasure chest of institutional quality assets that your family and my family keep for long periods of time. 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It’ll, it’ll build massive generational wealth and the exit will be first, your cash flow you get every month.
Second, appreciation over long periods of time. Three, we either become a a, a Blackstone, which would be a major. that you would become a, an investor in a future bank. This has been done many, many times. By the way, JP Morgan was a person. Okay? there, there, you know, like the, these institutions, the, these j the Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs, this guy was a damn like grinder.
Okay? That became a major. So that’s what I’m gonna, I’m gonna build here. Okay. So they exit, or we either exit and sell to one of these groups, or we become a. And we all become owners in a piece of paper on the stock exchange, or we become some of these names that I’m talking about right now, but it’s gonna be a big win for everybody with me.
So if you guys like real estate, you like real estate investing, you like it as a safe place, check out Cardone Capital and invest in my next deal, alongside me. Fantastic. as we always say, everyone, success leaves clues, the one and only. Grant Cardone. Thank you so much for joining us today.
