David Carlin - Co-Founder of Residual Payments | Residual Payments & Passive Income

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott DeClaire. The success story podcast is part of the blue wire podcast network as well as the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot podcast network has other great podcasts like marketing made simple hosted by Dr. J.J. Peterson. Now marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work. If you like any of these topics, you definitely want to go check out the show how to write and deliver a captivating speech, how to market yourself into a new job, how design can help and also hurt your revenue, creating a social media ad strategy that actually works. If these topics resonate with you, go check out marketing made simple wherever you get your podcast. Today my guest is David Carlin. He's one half of the David and Patricia Carlin they are entrepreneurs investors and thought leaders who have literally dominated the payment processing industry for over two decades. They helped bring many of the first e-commerce brands online including Star Wars, Sony, Time Magazine, some of the first dating websites and first massive multiplayer games. Through his wildly successful e-commerce business and multiple joint ventures, David's ingenuity and integrity coupled with his art of the deal make him a driving force behind residual payments and his wife Patricia, well if you're in the payments industry, you've likely heard of Patricia Carlin for more than 20 years. She has been on the leading edge of digital payments in both the US and abroad with a lengthy list of credentials. She is branded as one of the most influential people in payments. In fact, she was involved in the very first online merchant account in history. As a world renowned expert, she has earned millions of dollars in residual income through integrating payment solutions for businesses. She has amassed billions of dollars in career sales. She has crafted her career by representing the most prominent e-commerce brands and businesses in the world and now they not only help merchants understand how to build scale and grow their businesses through both product market fit, e-commerce solution sales and marketing, but they also teach people how to replicate their payment processing model. So we spoke about payment processing. We spoke about the landscape. We spoke about options for merchants. We spoke about how merchants end or brick and mortar can scale their business, how they can find product market fit, how they can find the right team, how an early stage entrepreneur can make him or herself redundant. We also spoke about the opportunity that they set people up with as a side hustle, basically emulating what they do for merchants and allowing people to start their own business and turn payment processing into a side hustle that creates residual income. So there's some great entrepreneurship lessons for people that are starting their stores. Also, some great side hustle opportunities that David breaks down. Let's jump right into it. This is David Carlin. He is one half of David and Patricia Carlin, an entrepreneur, an investor and a thought leader in all things, payment, e-commerce, marketing, sales, brick and mortar. So we met in prison. No, I'm just kidding. No. I'm from Philly originally, outside Philly, but I'll say Philly because I'm not going to take exactly where I lived because my parents still live there. I've always been an entrepreneur from day one, an entrepreneur from where were those books? We got the magazines as a kid and you sold stuff and you got points to get all the stuff in the magazine. I know what you're talking about. I don't know what the name for it is, but I know what you're talking about. Yeah. I was just always a hustler and I had a great family and a dad to look up to who worked his AS off. I don't know if I'm kind of curious how it does. I will try to keep that totally cursed. You can totally curse. I've always had that drive to be an entrepreneur my whole entire life, just to be whether it's wanting fancy things or whatever, I just had that drive. From doing that magazine as a kid to owning a DJ entertainment company to doing other things that whatever we're not going to get into that, we'd legal now, but we won't get into that. Other businesses from I used to even buy cars. I used to buy cars and I'd find cars cheap and I'd drive them for a month or two and then sell them for a higher price, like just things. Ways to make money is not working for somebody. Any way to make money, yeah. I mean, even my wife and I, we have such a same origin story where I barely graduated high school, it's complete high school anyone who's watching this, but college we both lasted like a couple months and we're like, why are we both in college if we own our own companies? We didn't know each other at the time, but like, why are we listening to somebody else when we're wasting our time? So we kind of met, I met Patricia over 10 years ago. I had been in, I was in retail, I owned a bike company, we sold online, offline, our stores, all that stuff. And I always had employees, I had all this overhead. No matter if you do a huge day, the next day resets, right? It doesn't matter. Every single day resets, every single day. And when I met Patricia, I'm like, the hell are you doing on that phone? Where's that money coming from? She had clients all over the world because she's been in this industry we're about to talk about how we make residual income off of credit cards. And my unintentionally, I started learning about the business for my wife, how her setting up people to accept payments online or offline, once she set them up, one time, she gets paid off that account, potentially one, two, 10, 20 years, however long they're in business as long as they stay with her. So got married, literally met my wife, moved in two weeks later, not because of the residual income. But I'm about this lifeless, get this residual income. No, it wasn't that we just moved like, I'm very quick when it comes to doing anything good or bad. I don't think about it. Let's just do it. And we moved and she's the same way we moved in, got married the same year and worked together. I've never slept a night apart from my wife in 10 years. And we've built all of our companies together for 10 years, managing multiple different companies. But our main companies are selling credit card or debit card processing, making residual income off of credit cards. It's such a niche. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time and I think of different ways to start side hustles and to make money while you're working your nine to five and then eventually graduate out of your nine to five. But I've never heard of this before. So walk me through how she even got started in this because it sounds like she was the OG in this. And then you picked it up and you just blew it up. So what was it? Was it a job that she was in or what's the story there? Yeah. She worked for payments companies. She's been this industry for 23 years now. Okay. So she was actually like, I'm definitely going to butcher us and stay as wrong. But it was like flying out to Marin County to the Star Wars to group on to all these companies back in what 98 ish or whatever if she was here, she would tell me, you know, when people were going online, when online payments wasn't even a thing yet. It was only adult in the beginning, which, you know, some people may know or may not know what wasn't really involved in that. But that's what she was doing. Right. So working for these payments companies and helping all these massive payments companies digitized their archives, etc. and start selling online. So she's been there since day one of online selling, working with the biggest MLMs, the biggest neutral companies, the biggest biz ops, the biggest companies online and offline. So she's a beast when it comes to online business. And then myself coming from the marketing, team building, branding, social media world of just kind of all of our companies, that's kind of where I like to design at things, I like structuring things. I like doing things differently. Right. So with her knowledge and my marketing expertise, we kind of combine together and then just went to the moon with our payments company. So even to this day, you know, I'll land in a count that's a big account that's life changing or I'll land somebody who come and clean and does my yard work. And I'm like, and then give me the square terminal, right? Hey, run your payment. I'm like, why are you going with square? I can give you a little rate. So there's opportunities everywhere you go. And like I always tell everybody is, you've been around our business, your whole entire life. You just didn't know you could profit off of it. You didn't know there was a middle man or a middle woman that is making money on that transaction. Also as a business owner, you didn't know you could set yourself up direct, which is also another thing that we'll talk about today. So you've been around this business through your whole entire life. You've shopped online, your whole online or offline your whole entire life. Pretty much everyone owns a credit or a debit card. So you understand how all both of them work. We now created residual payments unintentionally, which is the largest trading platform in the world, teaching people like yourself and everybody else, how they can make residual income off of credit cards for their own business or for any businesses they land that aren't their own business. So whenever you think about starting a business, you always want to figure out how to make money while you sleep. And that's obviously difficult. But you know, there's ways you can do it. Like you can set up if you're non-technically set up a course and you sell that a thousand times. Or if you are technical, you can be a developer. You can do like a self-serve software product and people can purchase that any time and they can check out and you know, there's a monthly recurring revenue. This to me blows my mind that this is something that actually isn't. And I want to understand this, that this particular industry that you're in, that you're teaching people to do, that it's not just owned by stripe or by a square or by all these other check out. And now you're seeing more of them in the news. You're seeing fast in the news and you're seeing all these other companies in the nearly that was actually just a huge bus, right? So walk me through the industry, help me understand what the average person can do and why there's this misconception that the stripes of the world own all the checkouts online. Yeah, I mean, most people will actually use a thing. I have a lot of clients who use stripe and PayPal. Keep them all every done and see how many people saw online where they do a $100,000 in stripe won't give them more volume or PayPal won't give them more volume. But they just hired a marketing company and now they do a half a million. I fill in that 400,000 or whatever it may be, right? So sometimes I'll tell people like, don't get rid of PayPal. If someone wants to pay with PayPal and they have money in their PayPal account, don't lose a sale over me. Take that money. You know, like so at the same time, if you want to do stripe, people, it's ease of use, right? Stripe, et cetera, did a great job, which no shout out to stripe, but good, you guys did a good job, maybe that. But, but you know, ease of instantly approved, right? But stripe is what's called an aggregator, right? And essentially as quick as you're approved, this is quick as you can be shut down. We hear all this horror stories of money being held accounts getting shut down a lot to, especially as PayPal, the same thing. And you just wait, right? So you're essentially renting a home when you go with stripe or PayPal, when you're going with the traditional merchant account, which is what we teach, you're owning a home, right? You're making sure that you're fully compliant, you're going through extra steps. But everyone's like, why don't I do the paperwork, Dave? I don't want to take the extra day to do it because stripe gets me approved in 10 minutes. I'm like, but what happened six months from now when all your money's held and you can't fulfill your orders and your whole company goes on there because you didn't want to do one day of work. What does that sound like, right? So, you know, when it comes to the payments, you know, this is, that's the easiest thing I've ever had to do is land merchant accounts to make residual income. I used to literally golf almost every single day, work from like, literally this, a cell phone, that is it. Creating a coaching or a training platform, whatever the hell you want to call it, is the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. And we unintentionally started teaching people because people were asking us exactly to the context of this conversation and exactly how I met my wife. What are you doing on that phone? How did you buy that? What are you doing? How can I do it? So we started teaching people offline. And once we saw a holy crap, people could do this. That's the only reason why we built the platform. So, yes, do we teach you how to win over Striper PayPal? Do we teach you how to win over new businesses, existing businesses? Yes, that is one part of the equation is the merchant account, setting up the credit card, the debit card processing. We show people how to be brand, payments, and business consultants. After you set up the merchant account or switch them over, whatever it is, we then show you how to add all the other value added services from branding, payroll, marketing, gift cards, buy now, pay later, blah, blah, blah, blah. Any other ways you can help that business owner automate their business so they can be more profitable and more efficient, solidifies your relationship and you're not a one trick pony where you just sell or sling merchant accounts. I understand. Okay, so let's talk about the status quo, what people are usually exposed to when they start. So the person that is starting a business, not the people that you're teaching over, but the person that's actually starting a business, the entrepreneur, say they want to start dropshipping and they open up, I want to understand, so to like lay it out, super simple people understand because not everybody here has ever even operated in Shopify. So you open up a Shopify account, maybe you have some sort of plug-in that dropships products, and then you're presented with all the standardized checkout options and I'm sure there's like the Shopify option and you're probably going to get some ads for like PayPal integration and Stripe and whatnot. So where does your, I understand all the value add stuff, but where does your core product, where does that fit into the stack and how do they actually execute that if I'm starting a store from scratch? So if someone's starting a Shopify store, the next step is to cancel your Shopify store. I mean, no, no, it's good. I like it because all these easy options, they've been, they've had so much explosive growth because they, they're so easy, so simple, right? But obviously, there's a cost that comes with that. If you don't, what happens is, and Shopify did a great job, shout out to them too, sort of, you should partner with us so we can stop competing, but I'm sure they don't care about us, but Shopify, if you build a Shopify store and you love it, it's great because it's ease of use again, right? That's how Stripe and everyone's getting in Shopify ease of use, right? Because no one wants to do any work as we know. So they get people set up, they set you up with Shopify payments. What they don't tell you is once you're all set up, you did all that hard work and you built your whole store and you love the way it works, you're paying essentially if you ever were to leave Shopify payments, but keep your Shopify store and call a person like me to switch over your payment processing, but keep the same exact store, Shopify can charge even more up to 1% for you not to use their payment processing, which makes it almost impossible for someone like myself to save you money. Now, with that being said in the same breath, we have a higher risk merchants, whether it's their business model, the way they run their business, the products they sell, what have you, where people don't care about incurring that fee because they need to, they need the volume, right? They need to keep scaling their company. So I would try to help someone move off to a different platform or plug into Shopify. What happens is Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, whatever you want to sell on, you want to sell on it. What we do is you fill out an application, takes you 10 minutes, you get approved, and then we just give the, let me give it a simplest terms, it's a few numbers that come that you plug in the numbers in your backend. It's like unplugging from one Wi-Fi network and plugging into another one. Like an API key? Like an API key? Like would it be like an API key? Yeah. I didn't know if we could go that. You can go that. No numbers. You just keep it simple. That's all it is. Then triggers to the new merchant account. So everything front facing stays exactly the same. Okay. And that API key, what you're doing is now you're creating a direct relationship with the payment process. So you're skipping the tech piece and then you're getting a much lower rate on that. That's what that's what you're actually teaching over. So imagine, imagine staying, let's say yeah, let's make it, now you would be, imagine having a retail store that stays exactly the same, but your landlord calls you and say, hey, I'm going to lower your rent, but everything stays the same. Got you. Perfect. Yeah. Same store. So what would you just less money out of your bank account in the month? So what would you recommend for somebody starting, for somebody starting to sell online? What would be the best setup? What, what do you recommend if somebody started to scratch it? Listen, I need to, I need to figure out how to set up a store. You were just on to talking to the podcast. I don't want to go shopify. How do I set up from scratch? Everyone's completely different, right? So I don't, just like I don't, in our team, we don't send like automated messages online. Like you're like an entrepreneur like me. Like we don't do a, like everyone's completely different, right? And I have a conversation just like I do with anybody else, usually in a gray sweatshirt because I have 5,000 of them. And what are you selling? What are we, what are we going to set you up with today? That's going to be good for you for another year or two or three. We don't want to have to redo this again, right? Where do you think your company's going to be in two years? What do you do? Because a lot of people, as we know, they buy crazy point of sale systems or crazy terminals or crazy automation online. And sometimes it's so robust that you don't even use 90% of it, right? Some people are just starting out and they're like, I need to build out a crazy website. I need a web developer. I'm like, how many products do you have? You're like, two, like why not just do one quick landing pages, right? I have ones that you could get created in two seconds and literally have that link for that one product. Or I have people that built out Shopify stores with 500 products and I'm like, do all of these sell? They're like, no, only these five. Well, what are we doing? You're maintaining all these products. They don't even make you money. So everyone's completely different. I just learned about their business and then depending on their business, the funds they have to start that business, I gear them in the right direction. Why do I do that? One, because I'm out of asshole. I'm a good person. But number two, I always tell my clients in the beginning. If you listen to me, because I've been in payments with my wife for over 30 years combined, we get to see the best markers, the best brand people, the best of everything because I see people's numbers. It can't lie. I see their sales, right? And if I point you in the right direction with the right platform, with the right merchant account, with the right x, y and z that you specifically need for your business, I number one, going to solidify that relationship with you. And number two, if I can show you how to make more money, can I make more money? No one's ever said no to me on that, right? So I'm saying, so listen to what I'm saying, because I have a very vested interest for you to stay in business and for you to be successful. Because as long as you're in business, I make money. And then that's just it, right? That's just the conversation. So I don't know what platform some people, some people may go on a different funnel platform. They may not go and shop a pie. It just depends. And then 25% of people who join residual payments, which is our training program, it's not a real step. But I think it's a real stash. We're probably looking up before you just start throwing numbers out there. Our business owners, like enough of them are enough of them enough of them are business owner. Okay. And so let's, okay, so that makes sense. So I understand, I understand the value prop. I understand why this educating business owners on this is important. I think that it's probably something that I would have considered when I was starting, I've started a few shop five stores. And I've never really considered this because I think that there's not enough education about all the alternatives and different ways to set up stores and payment processing systems and save use, you know, that percentage on that revenue is huge, especially with volume, right? But yeah, well, you're talking about now, which I think is actually very interesting. It's a side hustle opportunity. It's the, it's the, you're arming people with the knowledge of this. And then they're going and selling. They're going and selling the solution. And then walk me through the actual side hustle opportunity. If you go to a merchant and you pitch this solution and you sell it, what are the dollars that somebody could make actually doing this? So I'll go rough around the bout because the same thing we do on social media. I don't, everyone's like, what can I make? I don't know how hard you're going to work. You know, it's like, I don't, there's no, anyone who joins, right? I told compared to other side hustles because some of these things are a lot of work to do. And I think it's, this is a smart, it's a win-win. And I think that business opportunities where your client is going to be making money or saving money, it's an exceptionally not easy, but it's less of an uphill when you're trying to sell that product. Think about it this way. And lecture me even say it. I always tell everyone, let's go to a cell phone bill first. We can worry about being millionaires later if that's what you want, right? A cell phone bill first, right? Because once you learn, you can land one account, then you're like, okay, I can land three. But I always tell everybody, think about it this way. If you're not a business owner coming, which you guys can hit me up, we can switch your merchant accounts, you know, put money back in your business. Some people join, they're like, I'm just here to switch my merchant account and take it over and save money. And I'll be on my way. Cool. Do that. No problem. For other people like you're saying who wanted it as a side hustle or maybe a side hustle turn into a full-time gig. I always tell everybody, think about this way. Think about someone who wants to open up a restaurant. They have a dream of opening up a restaurant. They work, I don't know, a restaurant for five years learning everything there is about how to run a successful restaurant. They either saved up every single dollar and never did anything with their lives because they saved up every single dollar or they went in debt, right, and took out a loan. Finally, open up their dream restaurant. I have the ability and anyone else who joins residual payments has the ability to knock on that business owner's door, never say this, but be like, congratulations on your new business or your existing business. I'm now here to make a percentage off of all your hard work and all your risk. And when I set up your merchant account, I need you to get to work. I'm your new partner that took zero risk. I'm now making, I don't know, half a percent, point two percent, one percent depending on the account on all your sales. If you go under, I will try to do everything in my power to try to save your business and help you. But if you go under, I don't have my house on the line. I just land another account in our our oldest account, which is mine, too, because it's my wife's, but it's still my, some married tour is 15 years old. Probably haven't talked to that merchant in five years. What else can you think about setting up somebody one day, which we teach you in less than three days you can learn how to do this and go after your first account? How you can land an account that could potentially pay you for two, five, ten years. You set it up once. Obviously, you want to keep track of your clients or else you're going to lose your clients and text and emails. But after you switch their merchant account, you're their honorary business partner that has zero risk, but makes a percentage off of every sale. So everyone's different. It can be, you can make up to two percent on accounts on high risk, but I also tell people not to price people, you know, astronomically, because then you're not going to have it forever, right? But there are pricing programs that we do offer that people have access to where you can eliminate people's fees completely and make one percent. So if you have a client join a hundred thousand dollars a month, you set them up, you did a call, you did an application, now they're happy. A lot of people could use a thousand dollars extra month off account if you're making one percent. Like we all have bills. And that's why I always tell everybody it's like, I don't want the big wins in the beginning. I want you to land your first account. Like I said, it gets rid of a cell phone bill so that you can be like, I just met Dave online. I didn't trust him, but now oh my god, I got paid this actually works because I need you mentally to know that this works because I always tell everybody to exact point. If in 30 days from now, you're like, I'm going to go build an Amazon store, drop shipping store or something. This doesn't work. Call me when you do. I'll set up a merchant account for you and then I need you to get to work. I mean, that's the way you got to think about it. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now security is one of the major issues big tech is currently facing from AI scrapes to data leaks, starting your business solidly can be just as difficult as growing it securely. HubSpot is on a mission to help your business grow better with the CRM platform that grows with you. Start your venture with HubSpots, either to use secure website builder that scales with your business. As you grow, ensure your team of two is just as secure as your team of 200 with secure sign on content and asset petitioning and scalable team permissions. Whatever comes next, make sure your business is ready for it. Learn how your business can grow better at HubSpot.com. What you got to think about when you're going to these merchants, it seems like such an easy solution and it seems like something that you can set up, I'm sure there's a whole sales strategy to it and you probably set up some outbound campaigns and you identify your customer profiles and you're reaching out to these people and then you have your discovery calls and you're going through and you're trying to pitch them and close them and whatnot. You have your whole sales process for this particular product. But what's to stop? This seems like a very low barrier to entry. What's to stop a merchant from just turning around to being like, I don't need you. Thanks for the info. I'll do this myself and not give a percentage. So for even a lot of our clients will have, we'll kick them back, right? So the merchants, that's where again, if you're just selling merchant services, you're a one trick pony, right? That's where it's not just that. It's all the other services. That's why I say, I'm not going to get into all those today, but there's 30 other service, not 30, probably close to it, that you can sell after you learn the merchant services piece. Also, for all entrepreneurs, you need to learn about this because you may be in payments for a year or two. You may be a lifer in payments, but you're probably going to own other companies along the way. This is something you need to learn regardless of whatever you do. Whether you like payments or not, I don't care you need to take this training for your business. You need to ask the appropriate questions in the beginning, right? You don't just assume someone wants to switch with you and that's never actually, I never had anyone ask me that question. But when you offer someone value that, hey, I'm going to do X, Y and Z. A lot of people are so busy on their own businesses that they want that person to handle all the support. By the way, you don't have to set up terminals if you don't want to. You don't have to handle support. We have all the teams that you get the leverage that will handle all that support for you. But essentially, when you become not a number, not, oh, I was paying 2.7. Now I'm with the 2.5 guy, right? When you're with I'm with Dave, he not only showed me how to put money back in my business, he showed me how to make money in my business, you become a valuable asset to their business, something that they can't live without, right? So I'm at the belief and that's how we are successful and still are referral partnerships. And just asking people, asking people the right question. If I could, for example, Shopify, if I could, you know, get you more volume, you know, I make it to the same rate of Shopify, I don't know if I'll save you money. But if I can get you on a different platform that can save you money, but you have to move off Shopify, would you move off Shopify? I'll never leave Shopify. Glad I asked. Now I can move on to somebody who does want to work with me. So because of this past year and everything, there's so many people starting businesses and most people just want to, they love the business they're in so they don't want to do anything else. They want to run their business, but they don't realize they can save money. So when you come across somebody who just wants to run their own business and you say, Hey, what would you do if I could put 500 bucks a month, month back in your business? What would you use it for? Why go on vacation or I'd use it for marketing? Great. After I save you that money, we'll have a separate conversation. We got six grand to play with right now. I'm going to refer you to the best marketing company for your niche because I know that that six grand, how many times do you hire the wrong company? And then that six grand goes like this and then your business goes on because you trusted the wrong person. I'm going to connect you with the right person. It's going to help your business. So again, it goes on to asking the right questions in the beginning, but then not just leaving it at merchant services, going into everything else and really having that consultation with your client. The way you're supposed to be selling anyways, right? It's always consultative. It's always understanding all the pain points that they're solving for and they're trying to figure out. Now I'm curious. So that's a great, that's a great segue into sort of like a second topic that I want to go into when you're scaling mostly e-commerce. I know that there's probably a little bit of brick and mortar, but I assume the bigger opportunity is e-com. Maybe is that right or no? Oh no. Okay, it's both. Okay, so all right. So then let me ask you that. So you're putting payment solutions in e-com and brick and mortar. This like startup playbook, this thing that you sort of deploy and you teach people to deploy. What are some of those things? You don't need to go through all 30, but I am curious for entrepreneurs that are trying to start brick and mortar or are trying to start their first e-commerce store. What are the things that you try and help them figure out? First thing I actually did a video on the sun. I took up the other day. I just do random rants. If you like random rants, you can go follow us and meet the car lines I took to our Instagram. But I was going to ask you at the end anyways, I don't know. I'll point multiple times. Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, forefollowed notes. That was the thing. That was the thing. But sorry. Sorry. I always tell people in the beginning, right? Do you know if your product or service is going to sell? Yeah, I know it is. How do you know? I just know. Have you gone out and given this product or service are free to people to test the market before we spend all this money? Why don't you go do that first? I'm not here to spend your money to spend your money, right? I always tell people, let's start with the bare minimum of entry on the easiest and quickest way outside of Shopify to get your product or service online or offline so we can test the market and see it, right? You don't just create a story. You can't, anyways, and create a Facebook page and start running a million dollars now. You can't, anyways, and you still wouldn't, right? You have to make sure that people like your product and service them. And even if you think it's perfect, I guarantee you six months later, you're going to be like, that was trash. Let me refine whatever it is. I'm completely selling. So that's first and foremost is let's get this product or service out there. I don't care if we're losing money. We're actually making money because maybe the gardener video reviews back. We can book gardener testimonials. We can guard garnery different use cases and then find out what's the core products that we or services that we need to sell. Number two, are you making sure your privacy policy terms, conditions, refund policies? What are you going to do if you actually, what if this goes viral? Let's say someone makes a video on TikTok, which happens all the time. It's random example. Put your product on TikTok and goes, I love it. You're a one person show and holy crap overnight your business skyrockets, but overnight your business goes completely under. You lose everything because you didn't have the support in place. Are you prepared if this actually works? That's another question that no one ever thinks about. You know, and then you could come in to charge back, charge back problems, refund problems, automation problems, and then also after helping and learning about their business and then finding them the best solution for the quickest and best solution for them to get started is usually about three or six months or what have you will have calls and try to re-evaluate where they are to make sure that they're not losing the drive that they had in the beginning for that business where they loved making pottery, right? And they're selling it on Shopify or what have you. They loved training people for whatever skill they have. And then six months later, they actually are successful and they haven't hired anybody and they're now pissed off in their own company because they can't do the art anymore. They're handling all the day-to-day support, right? So we want to make sure re-evaluate where even if you think at a certain point or even day one, if you have money, like let's find out the quickest and easiest way, whether it's using a VA's in a different country or someone in the U.S., finding someone else who has a skill that can alleviate the burden of the stuff you shouldn't be doing so you can make your company more successful quicker at the same time. And also for some people who don't have a lot of money but have a great business idea, I will tell them, do you want to wait 10 years for this to be a success or do you want to do it in two? I want to do it in two, okay? Well, what are you missing today? Because you're trying to do a million different things. You're so great on social media, but you suck at video editing. You suck at building the website. You suck at support. You suck at everything else. You're so much gold online. People love you online. That's what you should be doing. If you don't have the money to hire employees today, let's bring people into the company and give them sweat-earned-in equity, right? Let's go get a videographer who's starting out like you who wants to get their name out there and give them a small pay upfront, but earned in equity. All these in people start a company, start a company with other people who are maybe like-minded entrepreneurs like yourself that you can all create a company together and build a service. So that's smart. So you know, you focus on product. You focus on people. You focus on hiring for things that you aren't good at. Making yourself redundant and all the things that you suck at. Do you suggest trying to find people to bring to the market? So you found product market fit, essentially. You gave your product out for free people like it. Now it's time to scale. So scale is marketing plus people, and that will sort of help moving your right direction. But do you bring people in right away? Or is there a certain point, certain revenue where you like to wait through to hire and to onboard? Well, I guess your personal experience would be something that you teach over anyway, so. You know what I do in the beginning? It's funny. Some of our companies, even the bigger are the smaller ones. We don't get into other companies. I do every job in the beginning with even the hires. Even if we don't have a hire, I will bootstrap as much as possible until I have to hire someone until it cuts into my day because I'm a weirdo and I work way too much. But I need to know how everything, every department works in our companies. So if I or someone else ever has to get rid of that person or replace that person, then I know how that job works, right? Because I don't ever want to be relying on someone holding me against the wall where like, Dave, if you lose me, you have no idea how this works. I'm like, that's true. I can't fire you. I wish I'd, you know, blah, blah, blah. So you need to understand even when you're partnering or hiring other people, you need to shout out to them and you understand what they're doing. So if you ever need to replace them or what have you now, the reason why I send earned in equity is you don't want to have resentment. You don't want to give someone 5% of your company because they told you they're going to kill it for you and they don't and then you have a bad partner so it's so unstuck with you and you have to get rid of them later on in life. You say, yeah, you talk to big game. I love you, you know, for what you do online, if you hit this two and a half percent, which you can talk to your attorneys, two and a half percent will get kicked in. If you hit this, five percent, if you hit this seven and a half in a certain time thing and you can also have caveats in there that if you do X, Y and Z, that can be gone away. We can, we can touch on, um, on that later. Now every single person I hire is a partner and every single person I hire doesn't really have a role. They don't really have a role. We're fortunate enough where we have multiple different companies. I hire people that's why I always tell them that you're getting, listen, you're getting, you're getting hired to do this project for this company. If in six months, you don't like what you're doing or you want to move on to a different department, you're doing a good job or move up or move to a different company, you have to let me know and then you have to be prepared to train the new hire and find the new hire and get them and train them for 30 days and then you can move on to another project by doing that. It gives everyone to know day one. I can move horizontal. I can move up. I don't, I'm not going to be stuck on a project. And also in the same breath, I don't care if someone has a, a master is in this or they've been doing this for five years. I always ask them, I know you've been doing it for five years and you look like you're successful in it. Do you like doing it? I'm not hiring someone who's, who's really good. I'm, I want to hire someone who's could learn to be really good, but loves that, right? Because I want you to like your job, because everyone who works for us works completely remote around the world. So that's also another thing to constantly working on different projects and to feel like, like I tell everyone else, like if you have a crazy idea, like I said at the beginning with Pat, let's just try it. I mean, if it's really dumb, you know, Bobby tell you, you need the most crazy idea. That's right. Let's try it. You're, yeah, you're my partner. You're not my partner on paper. If you're not, you're my employee, but we're all working together for the greater good. If we all do this together, we can all benefit in the long run. And then a lot of people like that, because they feel like a mini CEO in their, it does. And now that you have this entirely remote workforce, I'm curious, how do you find the people? Because you mentioned you want people that love what they're doing. You want to find people that are okay with moving and training and helping their peers succeed and upskill as well. But how do you find people that you can trust to work remotely? What's like that one thing you look for? What's the question you ask them in the interview? So hopefully no one's listening to this who works for me. You know, I'm also, like, you know, remotely, right? We could, if we wanted to, um, via, um, I believe, via Hubstaff, via Hubstaff, and we use Hubstaff for tracking all the hours, et cetera. You know, I could have it on people's computers remote, seeing if they're logging in there in and out every five minutes I wanted to. But that's, you know, I can jail, right? We do all of our communication through Slack, right? We use Slack for everything. We use Basecamp, Child to Basecamp to slap some, you know, they sponsor me, please. But, um, it's okay. But, uh, Basecamp's amazing for all the different jobs, right? There's a special project, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and you can tag the right people to it. Now, we're very fortunate that our companies grow every single month. They never go down. They just grow. So if someone's not doing their job, we know because it's like everyone's just way too busy. Let me also say this, nobody has any hours or days they have to work. Nobody. There's no agreement, but everyone works seven days a week. I will say, I will say that as well. So, you know, most people want to be home with their kids. They want to be home with their families. We all know from this year, and no one has any roles. I mean, people know they're pecking order essentially of newer versus older, but I'll give you an example. First person, let's go overseas because a lot of people like to hire virtual assistants. A lot of our employees in the US and a lot of our employees are overseas. The first person I ever hired overseas, not the first person, but the first person for this team, uh, for one of our companies. Um, I guess say his name, I'm gonna put his stuff out there. He was one of the first hires. And then now he runs a team of like 50 people over there, right? That all we have all different departments, but he started with one where I trusted him. And because I gave him that trust and really took care of him day one, he's now florist to running a team of 50 people. So in the beginning, it's not about throwing out equity, just to throw out equity. It's about earned in equity. It's not about giving someone a high pay and you're going to get better. I truly believe and maybe what works for us is saying, Hey, you're starting out at 70 grand a year, whatever, it's still random number out there. And you're starting on this project. Well, I want to be very clear. You can move up across anywhere you want throughout working for us. We're not going to watch you. We're not going to watch your hours. We're not going to, you know, there's no set schedule. You will be working seven days a week. So I just want to be very clear about that. But you also will, if something happens, you got to, you got to go with your wife to the ball game, go to the ball game and then just get back to work when you're done. So when you're saying that in the beginning for people, you're going to get a better caliber person that really feels like they're being appreciated and they're other than someone telling them what to do every single day. And a lot of it's just, you know, I'd rather take less time to hire and take more time to fire. Luckily, I've never had to in any of these companies fire anybody. Well, because some of other people, I'm not the one that doesn't anyways, but the most part of the good team. Yeah, like no turn over. I want to, I want to ask you to explain something because I know that you're going to get shit on for this. What do you mean when you say somebody's working seven days a week? Because if you don't explain that, I know you're going to get, you're going to get hate. So what does that mean? It means seven days a week. It means, you know, like, for example, also when I'm running my teams, I don't anymore. We're too busy. Well, let's say I'm going golfing. I won't tell them I'm going golfing. I'll tell them in the office working, right? Because I want everyone to think I'm working 20 times harder. Now, someone says, hey, Dave, I want to take a vacation this week. Okay, what did you make sure everyone things covered? It's not like, hey, you work a week, you take off a month. Like, that, let me be very, very, very clear about that. But everyone knows that no one's watching and they are working seven days a week for our companies. Now, if someone comes in and says, you know, I can only work two days a week or three days. I'm like, well, what's the other project? And we need people that are full time. So I tell people right away, this is a seven day a week job. But if you work two hours on Sunday, you get your work done or you work four hours on Friday, that is what it is. But I think people are really excited because their ideas are being heard. There's constant projects we're working on. There's constant evolution in the company of just, just new things, new things, trying new things. We're essentially like a startup that never stops starting up. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. If that makes sense, you're watching new businesses and whatnot. They see a potential now. And a lot, sorry, and a lot of these people have worked for companies before or at the same time, I have a lot of people that have our building payments companies on the side that work for us, that we're helping them build their company while they're working for us. And I always just tell them, just be honest with me. If you end up wanting to go on your own, just let me know beforehand. If you end up wanting to go to a different department, let me know beforehand. But 1000% if I can give you this much leeway to do to still live your life and enjoy your kids growing up or enjoy your wife or or if you're a young entrepreneur and you want to travel the world and work for us, I want seven days a week from you. And if I give you that much, I understand. And so you've basically made them many CEOs. Like if they win, if you win, they win. Everybody's winning. And that's sort of like lighting a fire to get them to put in the hours when they have to put in the hours. It's not like you have a set schedule, nine to five Monday to Friday. It's like, we know what has to get done. Let's figure out how to get there. Yeah, I mean, our companies too. Like, the one thing I was always bad at, I would, even my earlier years with other companies, I would think paying people more or giving more would make them work harder. It wasn't really that. And now with this model that we that we use, there's been people that have worked their fricking asses off and now have gotten equity in some of our companies for no reason. Just surprise them. Hey, man, you got 1%, you got 2%, or hey, here's a bonus or hey, here's this. Like, you know, I think whatever you're doing, whether you're running a company or you're posting on social media, you should do it because you enjoy it. And if you're hiring the right people and you enjoy being around them and creating whatever you guys are creating together and it actually works and makes money, that's a bonus. Or if you post something online, you enjoy creating it and you got you went viral or it got you sales, that's a bonus. Enjoy what you're doing work harder than everybody else because at the same breath, I mean, no one wants to work the rest of their lives, right? And the people who are working for us, we're training them that if you ever end up not working for us, this is what running a company is like. It's not, I don't care what anyone says, one hour work week or anything. Let me see your bank account from your one hour work week. I'd like to see how much money you're really. And if you have something that's the lottery, I'd like to learn about it, right? But unfortunately, owning a business or working for a business where you're a small CEO in the business is hard work. It is what I want to talk about. I want to talk about growing businesses. I want to talk about strategies that you use. I want to talk about strategies that you teach over to both Ecom and brick and mortar. So how do you scale a business? We talk to a product, talk about people, what's the marketing play? And you can break it into two. And I'm actually curious because I've never spoken to somebody that's scaled brick and mortar. I do speak to people that's the scale Ecom. But what's the marketing difference between Ecom and brick and mortar for when you want to grow a business, find more customers, sell more stuff? I mean, I would never go back to brick and mortar if you'd pay me. So the one bike company that I had, you know, I'm an artist. It's not a good art, but we designed like you could like come with your bike and be like, I want this picture on a bike with wooden handlebars with videos playing my wheels with these colors. I enjoy the art piece of it, right? That's what we manufactured products also. It was super cool. So I enjoyed it. But man, like, you know, theft employees like all just that buying and selling it never again, right? So now, you know, our Ecom was crushing our store. And that's where, you know, before we sold the company, like I would have just had a smaller store and just really just focused on the Ecom near the end, but we got into payments, obviously. So the one big thing as well, what I always did is every single person that bought got a review, give us a review, give us a review, give us a review. Number two, you know, outside of asking people, which we always do, you know, what do you like about my product of service? If I'm going to close a deal or a sale, whether it's a product or a service, and it doesn't go the right way, whether I mess it up in butcher the sales process or the customer, I'll ask them, what made you not go with me? What, they're all stopped the conversation. I can see this is going the opposite way. Where did I lose you? What did I say that was wrong? What message did I send you online? If I sent you a message online to try to get your business, and you finally responded, why? Well, they may say message was great, Dave, but you doing a keg stand on your Instagram almost lost me or message sucked, but then your videos were great, no one ever asked why? Why did you come here? How did you hear about us? You know, who can you, and then in the same breath, who can you refer me to? Again, that's spider effect. And then how could I potentially get a video testimonial from you that I can repurpose? So if you never visit my store again or my e-com store, your video could create more sales for me in the long run. I'm running you on automation. So there's all different weird ways to do that. But I really just think the passion, like the passion I have for all the training and everything else is helping people. And I've taken the, you know, for the DJing days, the bike days, all the other companies, and I used to sell cars, all that stuff, kind of the passion for like the Pandora's, but that's the wrong phrase. But like, kind of trying to figure out how to do something better than other people. Like the Rubik's Cube, like Selvets. Yeah, Rubik's Cube, that's what you saw me like. That's not a Pandora's box. I love the words for that stuff, but that's where seven days of weeks comes from, right? Every single day, I am scared that someone else is going to, or I'm going to lose everything, right? And every single day, I said this on another podcast, it's the second second time I've ever said it. My insecurities drive my sales. And what I mean by that is me either working harder, or, you know, me having to post more online or whatever it's because I'm so insecure that I need to win. So other people see me winning that I keep working harder. And there's nothing wrong with saying that. Like all post videos, I'll be wearing a diamond chain. And I'd be like, I bought this kind of like the diamond chain, but I also bought it because I need you to like it. Most people can't be so comfortable with themselves that they're putting on some type of act or they're reading some type of script. Scripts don't work, buying leads, I don't believe works in a lot of businesses. I believe in building relationships that then can pay you dividends in the long run. Most people don't have long term thinking. And when you're starting a business, you need to have long term thinking so your business is a long term thinking. But the insecurity piece, that's that's a tough, that's a tough thing to motivate people. Like it's not good to be motivated by insecurity. I mean, it's good to be motivated by wanting more. That's fine. But you in particular, that's, that's difficult though. No. It used to be. It used to be. I used to and then same thing like so with social media. I was posting on social media all over the place following, you know, what it's got to do today. Let me try. He went viral. Let me, let me try that. Let me, let me, everyone does everyone else's dances, right? Let's say you talk about TikTok. They're doing things that are not like, Matt creating something, usually your brain to create something, whether it works or not, but enjoying the process is what people are losing. Like I said, if it, if it works great, but you enjoyed it. So I'm now, like I tell people, like I will have stain shirts, you know, I will, I will say the wrong things. I will curse. I will mumble my words. I will have a bright red face. I'll have an oily face. I'll be fatter for the day. I'll have a bad video content. But I'm like, but I'm showing up and I'm like, I always tell everybody if I can do this, I want to show myself maybe in a worse light for you where you can look at me and be like, that Dave guy's like me. Well, if that idiot could do it, I should be successful. I hope that drives somebody, right? And there's no, I think when we're all equal and I can just maybe I, maybe I put a little clad online, right? Like I just, I'll say it now. I bought a Rolls Royce translations. And it was, I was very happy. Yeah. Thank you. It was a Rolls Royce colonating. One, I'm probably saying that because I need everyone to realize that I'm not a small time, because I justifying I was talking about, but I posted the video of why I bought it and how long I waited to buy it. And you eventually asked, I want it 1000. I bought it for myself. But if you think for a minute, I am not going to be loving every single person staring at me while I'm driving that, then I'd be lying to myself. But no one I want to say that. So if you're as honest with yourself that you could be with your merchants, you're going to win and you say, Hey, yeah, I bought this product for a hundred bucks. I'm selling it for 200 bucks. But let me tell you why this is my markup. Let me justify why I'm doing this. And then you're going to be comfortable with yourself. And you're going to enjoy the process more than trying to be something. So you're all about, and I think this is actually a good lesson. It's all about just owning who you are being authentic, because you feel like in the world of social, and I don't disagree with you in the world of social media and all this like people just put on like a face and they try and do what they're supposed to do and they're trying to say what they're supposed to say. And you're saying, I agree that that kills sales. I think that also kills your will to create and to produce and to build because eventually like you, how do you be motivated? How can you be motivated always being someone that you're not? I think it's impossible. Yeah. And just life's too short, man. It's just it's just too short. You got to find the right person that you want to work about with. I always tell some people, I always ask, like, why did you join our program? Like, because of Pat, I saw your Adam. And I always tell people they're like, you know, Dave, which our course is inexpensive. You know, obviously I have upsells. I'm a salesperson. I teach at a sell. I am 1,000% corner of upsell you. Very clear about that. But I'm an upsell you with value. That's why I always tell people and I always say that, you know, they're like, well, Dave, why is course 1 and 2 a couple 100 bucks? I'm like, because I have to keep retargeting you. I'm like, let me stop retargeting you. I'll make it cheaper. Like you make my cost higher to acquire you. It's a, but people laugh. And I also think laughter is such a great thing in business of, you know, if we were talking to Scott, I'd be like, I mean, we're supposed to have a call because someone connected. I'd be like, I don't know, Scott, where are you from? Let's talk golf. Let's find some kind of common ground to as much as I want to work with you. I'm also judging you if I, you know, as if, you know, as such, as much as, you know, I want to work with you. How do you know it might not be in the opposite foot, right? Where six months from now, I may fire you as a client, right? So, when you just have that conversation with people, just like you would talk to your friend, there's going to be a love of you and hate you. But at least, like we said, you're being yourself, and you can go to sleep at night knowing you worked your ass off, you know, you're enjoying what you're doing, and you're enjoying the process of finally not only learning how to build a business, but potentially learning more about yourself in what's what's your advice for people who burn out. Why do they burn out? How do you not burn out when you're going so hard? Every single day, I burn out. So, if you're not strict, listen, I mean, some companies aren't as big as ours, right? So some stuff, it can be enforced and do stress. When you have thousands of people, thousands of customers, it's just naturally, this is going to be shit every, this is going to be stuff seven, seven days a week happening. And, you know, it's a roller coaster. Every single day, ups and downs, one day you have your biggest day, next day, everyone hates you, right? It just is what it is. It's how you compartmentalize and how you deal with that to make sure that you're ongoing, right? Essentially, something happens with your merchant, something happens with your business. If you have a team you're running, you want to make sure as the leader, you're not showing that stress, right? And with burnout, you know, if you really come to a point where you're just burnt out, move on. Like, no one's stopping you. Well, you know, as long as you have a place to live, or, you know, don't put yourself in a situation like I always tell people like, like, example, for that Rolls Royce, like I could have bought that truck, the colonane. That again, that's exactly the need. 2021, 5,000 miles, I'm just, I'm not going to say, okay, you know, I could have bought that 10 years ago. But for whatever reason, you know, even though we had big month big year, I just waited, I kept waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. I always tell people that if you have burnout, or you want to switch, you know, don't take your money and spend it on a vacation or a car, because you deserve it, because you worked hard, save the money. There's, you can miss, you can miss a trip, you can miss something on the weekend, but there's nothing worse than missing out on a business opportunity. And what I mean by that is a potential new venture for yourself. Someone telling you about a crypto, you should invest in or joining residual payments, like someone should tell you, you never know where some not having that capital, where you spent 5,000 on a trip. But what if that 5,000, you couldn't invest in that opportunity, could have turned into 100, right? So keeping yourself as liquid as possible. So if you ever do find yourself like, yeah, fuck this job, you know, fuck this company, I hate it. I'm making money, but I freaking hate it. I just wanted to do yoga in Costa Rica, whatever, something completely random. You have a nest egg to go do that. But if you're spending money like an idiot, you're going to burn yourself out with that and not be able to lose the burnout because you have no money to leave. I just want to take a second to thank the sponsor of today's episode swag.com. Now, you know, if you've ever received a corporate gift or swag in the past, how many of those gifts did you actually keep? Probably not many, which is probably because the stuff you got was not so great. I've gotten like a lot of stuff from great shows and from companies in the past that I've just thrown out the second I get it. So this is why you need to check out swag.com. I've been on the receiving end of getting garbage gifts. I've also worked in companies where I only had access to a really, really small inventory of stuff that I wanted to give my customers and my employees. And I knew that it wasn't going to resonate. I knew that it was going to suck. So what is swag.com? Well, it's like swag upgraded. It's the best place to buy custom gifts and swag the people will actually want to keep. So they sent me a box because obviously they're sponsoring the show and I wanted to see what it's all about. You know, I've worked in businesses. I want to make sure that the quality of their stuff actually was up to my standards because I can tell you right now that when I get garbage, it goes right into the trash. It like it really goes right into the trash. It's not going to get back from the trade show or the conference or whatever. So I received one of the custom swag boxes from swag.com. I loved the unique packaging. So it was a beautiful unboxing experience. I love the actual products they sent me. And there's a whole bunch more that obviously they didn't send me. But the stuff that they did send was absolutely beautiful. It was very high quality. And I can only imagine that if I actually got this when I was working for companies, I probably would have actually used it. And to be honest, I'm going to start using them for people that work on my show and in my company as well because I know that this isn't just a novelty gift that somebody's going to throw. It's stuff that they can actually use. They have so many unique and customizable gifts that I've never seen anywhere else. They have custom yoga mats. They have custom apple air pods. They even have branded kayaks, which I did not know was a thing. So they carry all these premium brands like North Face, Yeti, Nike and more. And it's all customizable with your company's logo or artwork. So you're even able to create custom swag boxes full of great branded items. And then you actually deliver them in a custom unique box with swag.com. They take care of all of your swag at their warehouse and they ship it to individual addresses. Or if you prefer, you can just send it to a bulk location in one single shipment. It's easy to manage from their online portal, which you obviously get access to. So if this is something that you think would benefit you, if you have clients or customers or a team and you want to go the extra mile and you actually want to give gifts that people appreciate, which is the whole point of giving these gifts in the first place. Go to swag.com for the perfect swag and custom gifts. Right now they're giving everybody who's a success story podcast listener, a special offer. It's 10% off your entire order. But only when you go to swag.com slash success and enter promo code success 10. Remember for 10 percent off, go to swag.com slash success and use promo code success 10. Well, that's why you invest in things that pay you. That's why you that's why you invest like. So so what's your income? So what's okay. Yeah, exactly. So what's what's your opinion on investing your assets and things that make you money versus being liquid? So if I invest in real estate or if I invest in crypto or stocks or if I even put all my money into a course or if I buy a business, I'm no longer liquid. But now I have a revenue generating thing or or or potential, you know, a capital gaining thing. What's your what's your opinion? Let me talk about residual. When people join musical payments and they're going to join like our high ticket, like we have, you know, we have programs that are six, nine months, 10 or a year, they're not cheap. You guys, some might get into it, but they're not they're not expensive, but they're they're very great value for what you get, but they're not they're not cheap for some people. And I always tell people, listen, can you afford this? I don't want you to give me your last dollar because then it's going to translate into your sales. You're going to be so desperate to get that money back that you're going to go so hard that you're probably not going to close deals or you're going to have quick accounts because you're just you're just out for money. You're not out to build relationships. You know, that that's the main thing when when when people are starting their companies to make sure that, you know, they they have the capital as well, also to sustain the company, you know, later on, right? So you don't go and start store and, you know, have 10 grand, but not 30 grand left over whatever whatever whatever happens. So when actually, you know, it's funny enough, no one will ever say this, I completely lost track of your question. You're you're you're like going to it. Then I thought you're going there. No, the question was if if you're trying to balance out the risk, right? When you invest in something, there's risk. Oh, yeah, I got. And then like, so you you put money in something that pays you back or do you put a percentage of your money in a portfolio and then you keep some liquid, you can't be liquid and invest in most cases at the same time. Yep. So, uh, and then guys, anyone ever is on a podcast. So I'm just just saying, if you don't remember just because I was about to go on a tangent, I'm like, I'm probably going to go so left field. People were watching. What the fuck is he talking about? No, just say it. Just say, um, you know, we have it really, my wife and I are in partners of everything, right? So it's always a joint conversation with whatever we do. And we haven't, I don't really invest in many companies where we don't own them. Um, I have crypto, I have real estate, like, um, this is how the market's crazy. We're going to sell our house and probably make two million dollars on super excited and like less than six months. I didn't intend on doing it. Um, we had some real estate properties, but I'm sort of diversify a little bit, but payments just pays so much money that I don't really don't diversify that much. Really. I, I keep that capital there so that like, we just, we just built the whole entire CRM. We wrote the whole entire code for it since CRM is launching soon. And it was great because now I am in a position that, yeah, hire the best, hire the best. Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, let's try that. Now we're putting on live events. Yeah, hire all those celebrities. Like we have Rick Ross, Rayquan, um, grand coroner, all these celebrities are going to be on our events because yeah, do it. hire this. I, I now am in a position where I can, because I saved, yeah, instead of just kept investing, investing, that I can now build my own companies. Now when it comes to crypto or investing in anything else, besides, you know, if you're investing in building your, your training company or your, to make residential income off of payments, because you know, once you join, this is something you have to rest your life. It's not like you bought a product and then it depreciates like payments is going to be around forever. So let's say you paid 10 grand to work with us for a year or something or random number, you know, that's your only thing. I don't want you buying leads. I don't want you doing anything else, but I, but I truly believe I've never, like if Scott, if you told me something tomorrow, like Dave, yo, this coin is going to double or this, or this housing market by this house, we can sell it. Let's say it was 50% of my income and you were like, this is guaranteed. I won't do it. I won't work my whole entire life to take a gamble on one thing that could take all the money I took to work. I see so many people that are successful and then bet on one thing because I need that next level and they lose everything. So never go more than 10% of what you're worth into anything. That's smart. I like your ideas about investing because you literally live in a, in a space where you're asking people to invest, but still it's important to know that that there's, there's cash flow issues that you could run into if you do get other opportunities. And I think people overspend sometimes on investment and they don't realize that life happens. That's also an issue. Yeah. I love it. And that's where even the, you know, it was just so, it was such a weird feeling to talk to my wife and was like, I want to buy a Rolls-Oish, like, yeah, good it. Like, you know, half a million dollar cards. But yeah, sure, go get it. Like, it's just, and by the way, I am going to finance. I'm an idiot. So I'm not bringing all my cash in that car without all my cash. But like, I could easily use a check. Give me the car. Yeah. But I want that capital. You never know. I don't, I don't really care. I just want my capital, right? Cash is king. So it's just so amazing outside of like the car purchase because who cares what the car purchase. But the, the business to be like, hey, Dave, I got this. Do it. I got this. Do it like, I don't have to, I can be like, let's say Scott, let's say I'm worth 10 times more than you. Let's say I have a million dollars and you have 100,000. We go, we start the same exact company. You may take five years to get to a level. I can get two and one because I have the funds to hire the best of the best, right? So or hire somebody and they suck. And I spent, I mean, not much. But I've paid for some stuff, 30 grand, 40 grand, 50 grand, didn't work out. All right, go get the next person because I'm in that situation where you may have put 30 grand out, and just using a random, not seeing you personally, you may have put 30 grand out. And that was your whole nest egg. And now you're like, just shot it all on one. Guess I'll work for another year to save up to try to that again. Like that's crazy thing, right? So that kind of also goes back to the beginning of getting early investors, hardening with people. So you don't have to keep putting out money, right? A videographer may cost you $100,000 a year for whatever it may be, bring someone in and give them equity. It may only cost you 20 grand a year because they have equity in your company. So there's all different ways to structure it. The old just depends on their company. No, smart. Okay, let's, I want to, I want to just give you the floor any other like closing points that you wanted to bring up, because then I want to do a couple of rapid fire to close it out. But I guess I'll give you the floor in a second, but like last thoughts for entrepreneurs starting something. What is the most important advice you give over for somebody that wants to start side hustle business, whatever it is? Just be unique, you know, like no one needs another person who's doing the same old crap. And that's why even in payments, right? Like that's where we're trying to teach people to be unique. Like don't just be a one-trick pony and whatever you do. And unfortunately with social media nowadays, right? And I've said this before is, you know, usually back in the day, you know, let's say you and me Scott lived in the same neighborhood. I got, oh, sorry, I got, oh, let me put it back on for you. No, no, it's not. Give me one second. Stupid camera. See, I should even have the U.S. So let's say you and me live in the same neighborhood, right? Back in the day, there wasn't social media. And I got a nicer car than you, right? And I just saw you and I'm like, yeah, screw you Scott. I just crushed you, right? That's all I know. That's my environment. Now every single day we wake up, whether they're richer or better looking or more successful, you see it online, right? So when you're starting out, whether you're older, young, like you need to not worry about what anybody else is doing. I always tell people when they're building their payments, they'll be like, Dave, just see what squares do in straight for PayPal or anything. I'm like, I'm gonna give a shit. I don't own their companies. I'm like, if you have enough time to worry about what they're doing, you're not spend enough time on your company. And if no one and the other thing is, if nobody's talking about you, you're not making enough noise online. I don't care if it's good or bad. 10 people a day should know about your product. You should be posting every single day and re and screaming every single day, networking everywhere about your product or service. Like we said before, are you prepared if it actually works? What are you gonna do if it actually works? Number three, do you have cash flow setup for this company for six months, a year, whatever it may be? And lastly, why are you doing this? Well, Dan didn't, he's successful. Hey, but are you, if you're doing this because you just want the money, just say it that there's no problem whatsoever. But what is the plan of why you're doing this and how are you going to be different? Or if you're like, Dave, I don't like give a shit about being different. I just want to make money to better myself. I know, yeah, I know what you're doing, right? But find somebody else who, it's hard to say this because I'm different when we mentor people. People pass, we, we, we truly helped it. But try to find someone maybe, who you can find from a friend of a friend who's maybe been in that business before to get some insights because why should you have to learn by either taking longer or spending more or making mistakes, right? Watch podcasts like Scott, like, like, that's free, right? 100% free. Just learn from the best. Just watch podcasts from all different people. Like, maybe you're going to watch just be like, I'm glad I watched Dave. Like, now I know I never want to do what he does. Like, now I feel like, damn, I thought my life was crazy. I feel good about myself. Like, if that's what I did for you, I love that. Like, I love that that's what inspired you, right? So watching podcasts would probably be the biggest thing I would say to learn about different businesses so that you shouldn't have to learn. And then when you think you should launch, maybe launch months later, right? We don't want that instant gratification. Again, it goes back to that Rolls Royce. When you see that post, I said, I wanted this 10 year, I wanted this my whole entire life. But I waited till it was 38 to finally buy it. I could have bought it probably 10 plus years ago, but I wait. Well, they didn't have a car that but I waited because I wanted to make sure that my family, myself and everything else taken care of. And also, let me, let me say this. Everyone talks about wanting to be successful. Make sure your family is successful as well. Well, that's why I'm still going. My whole entire family on both sides is going to be taking care of when I'm done. I'm not going to be the rich person sitting up here and they're also working. Everybody in my family is going to be taking care of. So find something bigger than yourself that can also drive you. I love that. I love that, man. Okay. Most importantly, where do people go find more about your socials, websites, everything you want to, all the links want to drop? Why need comments online? My numbers have gone down. Well, let me say this really quick. I used to do all those stupid Instagram things where you join the, you join the giveaways and my Instagram blew up. I don't ever do that. We have 180,000, probably 90,000 people actually follow us. They're 90,000 are real people, but it didn't work, right? And I'm being, I don't give a shit what people say. So if you're going to, if you're going to go online and you're going to follow Meet the Carlins, Meet the Carlins on TikTok, Meet the Carlins on Instagram, it's just free business advice. We give out daily for you guys. You don't have to join residual payments. But if you want to join residual payments, you're like, Hey, this sounds kind of interesting. I want to make residual income of credit cards. Do not join if you're willing, not willing to work your ass off. If you're not coming to work your ass off, you mean nothing to me, right? I am not going to give you mindset. I don't give a crap about your mind. I keep, I care about making money. I will help you and I, I don't mean that in that sense. But I'm not looking for people to join to drag along and be a part of something where you see a lot of other programs where they don't give a crap if you're successful or not. I do. Our program is building, it's a Costco model where everyone working together by all of us working together, we all make more money. So it's strictly about closing accounts. So residual payments.com, residual payments on Instagram. You can look up our names, David, Patricia Carlin, CS on podcast, newsletters, all that stuff. And then lastly, if you guys have never been featured on somewhere, or you paid to get, if you're whatever, take those off of your website. No one believes those anymore, right? So you say as featured on, like, no, like just, just be yourself. You know what I'm saying? Like, stop following all the trends. Be as comfortable as I am to say this stuff on camera that may be good or bad and enjoy the process of building a company. And I wish everyone who is going to build their company, whether it's whether it's well as residual payments or not, or following us on Meet the Carlins, I wish everybody and yourself as well, Scott, you're much success in your journey. Thank you, man. Can we do rapid fire to do some last insights out of you? Fuck no. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Of course. All right. All right. What keeps you up at night? What keeps you up at night? Every single, you know what keeps you up at night? Sometimes when I take those weed gummies, don't let me sleep, man. That's the opposite. Oh, opposite effect. Freaking hate him. And I so eat for a long time. I was kid. And then I wake up at the mill night thinking, oh my god, thousands of people know me online. I just put a video. What are they thinking? People are judging me. I should leave. I should leave. I should leave. I should cancel it. That's probably the most random answer you've ever heard. But it's just business, man. I'm I'm a million miles per hour as you can probably tell and just constantly innovating and think of new ideas keeps me up at night and the excitement of the next day of what's going to happen. Keeps me up. Biggest challenge you've overcome in your personal life. What was it? Finding the right people to hang around. When I was younger, like I said, I was at DJ for a long time and, you know, drinking and all that stuff. Never like hardcore drug stuff. But drinking and stuff like that and parting and hanging with the wrong people that when you're the one making the money and you have all the people around you that maybe don't have as much money and you're trying to help people, not that they're bad, but paying for everything or doing everything. It's not helping you. You need to surround yourself with people that either better than you or on the same wave length of you. Not saying get rid of your friends, but when it comes to building a business, you need people who can challenge you every single day, not bring you down. If you had to pick one person in your life that's been a mentor or just an incredible person, who was that person? What did they teach you? My wife. She didn't hear that, but she's not a mentor to me, but she taught me how to grow up. She taught me how to really, you know, because the one thing is with a lot of people when I hear it's like, I love the art of stuff. Like, if you asked me to open up my books and tell them how much we made this month, I don't know. The bank accounts are still growing. I'm really horrible with that, because I enjoy the art of building stuff. I don't really care about them and not in this day to day stuff. So she taught me how to grow up and really, you know, even though you're becoming successful, not to spend every single dollar and how to save, how to really hang with the right people and to have a long term success, because I always as a young person found myself scaling companies. And then once they scaled, I was like, I should rejoice my success. I am God. And then literally goes down and you start another company, right? A lot of people can probably relate to that. So it took growing up, but it took finding the right partner, which we teach a lot of couples as well, the right partner to balance me. And she's not perfect, but to balance me to make me the best version of myself. I love that. A book or podcast, you'd recommend. I've never read a book in my life, but I do have this book next to me. I read one page. I just wear it. People like, you're lying. I never have. It's called fuck being humble. My wife bought it for me because she's like, you would actually read this. I've been planning on it. It's been sitting here. I'm going to read one. I've never, I've never heard of it before. So I'll check it out. I'll check it. It sounds like a good book, to be honest. Yeah. And I watched some of your podcasts. I think your podcast is amazing. I think people should definitely follow up your podcast. So I'll give you a selfless plug. Thank you. You didn't tell me to say that. I did not tell you to say that. I always give people shit when they plug my show. Thank you. I think you're doing a great job. We have our podcast, the launch that's called betting on us. It's a strictly couple podcast where we're reading couples on and talking about how they've been on each other to build up their company. So I think your podcast is something everyone should listen to who wants to be an entrepreneur. Thank you, man. If you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing, what would it be? Stop caring about what everyone else thinks. I worked so hard at trying to show people I was rich when I wasn't and still do it a little bit but not as much as I just, you know, just, you know, you know, back in the day where like the coach loafers were like, you know, he just all that, you're driving around dad's car to try, you know, all the stuff that you do. Just dumb stuff, which that I wouldn't change anything I've done for anything because I take everything good or bad as an experience. But really, you know, I'm not taking everything for granted and just being comfortable in my own skin. I probably haven't been comfortable with myself. It probably even till I was like mid 30s, I was still very uncomfortable. I still am uncomfortable. I finally, like I you probably see on this podcast, you know, just be yourself. If you know I can do this, you guys can do it. So, you know, enjoy what you're doing, you know, and we see on social media, some people that you're like, how the hell would people love this person because they are who they are, right? So, whatever you do as long, whatever your life is going to be about, do what you love, do it from the heart. And if you make money while you're doing it, you'll want twice. I love that. And then last question, what is success mean to you? It's like I said, you know, it's just, success means to me when I'm finally done that all of my families, no one has a mortgage, no one has a car payment. If they want to start a company like I've been telling our family members, well, invest in your companies, but just more longer term, every single person on both sides of our family taking care of. And then next year, my goal is to buy a plane. I always want to buy a Rolex, got a Rolex, always want to buy a Rolls, got a Rolls, always want a fancy house, got that. My next thing is a plane. After that, I am done. I'll probably always still be working, but like that's my, that's what, you know, I finally got fake teeth, my, my veneers, which I don't really care. I always wanted them, once I smoked too much, and the kid I'll still do, I don't really care, but when I was younger, I always saw the guy, the older white guys, which is random scenario, at the country club. And there's all different other races there, but just this scenario for whatever, please don't anyone racing or anything. I've all different friends and family members, but I always the old like the movies, the old rich white guys with the big white teeth, right? I'm like, that's what it looks like when you're rich. I'm like, I always want that. So so now I got that. So, you know, being able to tip people and take care of people, we do so many fund foundations, we tip people, I'll be out to dinner, a hundred dollar bill, boom, here's a hundred for you. Yeah, there's no video behind it. I walk out before they get it, just taking care of people and seeing the look on their faces or not seeing it and knowing you're helping people, that's kind of the coolest thing. And that's why I love residual payments is I finally have a platform where I don't have kids with my wife, we have three dogs, but I built something that essentially is changing, not essentially it is, there's hundreds and hundreds of people making residual income. I'm changing their lives that essentially is going to be the catalyst for changing their kids lives. So, I mean, you're paying me to do it, but you know, it is what it is, but at the same time, we give last a freeway, but how cool is that that, you know, they're also instilling this. A lot of people as well who are joining our program are bringing their kids on as partners who are working them as a team, a whole family is working together. So, there's no legacy, there's no anything, just be a good person when you're here, enjoy the process of what you're doing, and hopefully you find success in the