Lessons - 10x Your Sales | Grant Cardone - CEO of Cardone Capital

I like to dive into what brought you here. What's your story? How did you get to where you are today? You don't wake up when you have 1.5 billion assets under management. That's not how you start. That doesn't happen by accident. That's the good news, because if I can do this, anybody can do it. I probably should be where I am today, maybe a decade ago, but I didn't know. I've been stumbling along for 30 years, trying to figure out how to put myself in a little better position than I grew up in. I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, middle-class family, single mother, my dad died when I was 10. We were brought up in a kind of a scarcity environment, because my mom didn't know how to go get new. She didn't know how to bring new opportunities to the household. It wasn't her fault. She wasn't educated on how to do that, like so many of us. She then put me on a path to do what society knows to be the traditional things, which is go to high school, go to college, get a job, and try to figure it out. What they don't tell you through the process is opportunities change, certain parts of the country do well for a decade, then they don't do well. Jobs come and jobs go. Add all that to what do I want to do? What am I passionate about? What am I here to do? Like so many of your viewers, you got to figure out the influence of your upbringing, combine with what is the marketplace going to reward today, and then add to what is it you are meant to do? What is your unique proposition to this planet? Everybody's got one. I've spent, I started my first business when I was 29 years old, 30 years old. Before that, I was preparing myself to start a business and I didn't know it. When I was a kid, I wasn't like, I'm going to own my own business. I never had that. Even when I was 25, 26, 27, 28 years old, I was learning how to be a little bit more successful than when I was 24. I didn't have some, oh, I have to be the boss. It's really important for people to understand the person you see today, you're getting in on the ride, 30 years into a ride. For the most part, I didn't even know where the ride was going to go the whole time, including up to 10 years ago. What did you do when you were younger? Was it a career sales guy, marketer? You know all this really, really well. You know the shit inside and out, but was it just like odd jobs, like traditional type jobs that eventually were like, I'm done with this. I want to move in. What sort of led to you breaking away? Yeah, so look, I worked at McDonald's. I got fired. I worked at a furniture store. I got fired. I worked in a car dealership. I was fired six times from the same guy. I just quit leaving. I've been fired so many times. I finally figured out how to get fired and keep my job. I mean, really. I'm a sales guy because not because I wanted to. That was not something I wanted to do. My dad was a sales guy. My dad told my mom before he died, tell those boys to learn how to sell. He knew he was going to die. He's like, tell those boys to learn how to sell and they can go anywhere. I didn't know that. My mom didn't tell me that until I was like 25, 26 years old. And I had to take a sales job. She wanted me to be a more of a professional. So I went and got an accounting degree, got out of college. There was 25% unemployment. I didn't know it. You know, I didn't know anything about sales. I didn't go to college to become a salesman. But it was the only job I could get when I was 25 years old. It was be unemployed or take this job selling Toyota's. I didn't know what a Toyota was. This is years ago. Toyota wasn't even a thing yet. And so I took this job that I did. I thought it was just going to be a temporary job. I said, okay, I'm going to do this for until I can get a real job. And that ended up becoming my career. I actually hated sales because all the jobs I had outside of McDonald's were part-time sales. I sold clothes. I remember selling clothes. I'd sell an outfit. I'd make six bucks on it. So kind of hard to get excited about six dollars. But it was six dollars more than I had. And I was trying to put myself through college and pay for all kind of ridiculous things I was doing at the time. And I leaned into the sales thing and started learning it. I was just shooting some material today for Carton University. We have probably without me over promoting my own product. We probably have the most viewed sales training system in the world today. And I'm saying that not to brag, but to tell the viewer, this came out of a job I didn't want and didn't like. But when I leaned into it and said, hey, I need to commit to this thing because I'm just going to, I have to learn how to do this. I have to learn how to bring revenue in. And whether I like it or not, I need to learn, I need to learn the money game. The money game starts with it in accounting. And it might have been the thing I learned in accounting as I said here and tell you this story because in accounting, the top, I remember studying financial statements in accounting classes. It was accounting the principles of accounting. I thought I was going to learn how to make money. That's not what they're teaching there. But I remember there was on a page in the accounting book, the blue accounting book that I tested and hated. There was a page about an income statement. And then they would compare income statements in these companies. Well, the top thing of every page was income, revenue, or gross sales. And later, looking back, didn't know it then, but looking back later, I'm like, oh, that's the most important part of a company. If it wasn't the most important part of a company, they wouldn't put it at the top of the income statement. When every income statement everywhere in the world, it doesn't matter whether you're in China or Chicago. The top three lines, they might be different words there. It is all describing gross sales, revenue, revenue by department, gross domestic product. How much revenue is coming through a country? That is what determines whether or not a household, a department, or a company is viable. And I had been fighting the top three lines of my personal financial statement, which everybody has one. And it's called sales. So once I leaned into it, boom, I started making money, man. It was literally that simple. I'm going to learn how to bring revenue into my household. I was 25 years old, had no money, lived in an apartment. My rent was $275 a month. I was late on it four times a year. Every three months, I was late because I'd go up and down. And when I leaned into it, I was saying, hey, I made an extra $1,000 when I was 25 years old. I'm like, wow, that was the most important money I've ever made in my whole life. Because it gave me an idea that I could control my income, which my mom never knew. See, my mom was scared because she couldn't control income. She could control expenses, but you can only control expenses so far, and then you need money. And this is the same problem the whole world is facing right now with this epidemic that we're going through right now is your income literally got halted. Then people, then people will confront a pure simplicity of accounting. Okay, I can only get rid of so many expenses. And now the whole world is like, I need to go make money again and I can't because I'm quarantined. So you got to get really creative. And yeah, so once I started taking responsibility for that, I started, didn't know it when I was 25, 26, 27, but I was preparing myself to be in business later and and to build out these companies you talked about. I like, I like that sentiment a lot because it leads into what a lot of people are struggling with. And I actually didn't meet even me to go down that road. But the, the way you're positioning it, like, yeah, I think people are, you know, shit sitting the fan for lack of a better term right now. And you can't go out and get another job. Like if I'm, I'm in Toronto. So I'm looking at Toronto. I don't think it's half as bad as it is in the States, but I know at West, we have oil issues and we have unemployment. I think there's some problems, 25% unemployment last time I checked. That's mind-blowing stats. If you're 25%, you can't get a job anywhere. So, Well, I would tell, I would say this to you. Okay, the Court of the University that I just referred to, that's free to the public right now, by the way. When this thing hit, I'm like, hey, make it free. Let everybody have it. We're going to have massive unemployment in this country. Make it free. People are not going to have money. They need to get a job. The first modules in Cardinal University, there's, I don't know, just shot 2,000 video segments. Everything from how to get a job to how to run a company, everything in between. The first 13 segments is a course on how to get a, your dream job in 72 hours. I just shot the content four days ago. We already have people getting jobs with that content today in this market and the date on this. So, if people see this later, we're April, what April, what is it? Don't we're running together now? Whatever. So, we had a guy, we dropped the content on April 20th. This is shot right now for right this time. This is information that's relevant to what's going on right now with 25% unemployment with 25, 26 million people unemployed in the last four weeks. And we had a gentleman watch the content, got a job 12 hours later, replaced a bad job he had because he was fired. He was let go with a job this better in this job market. So, if you know how to present yourself, if you're truly committed, see when you run out, when you lose a job, I've lost a bunch of jobs, when you lose a job, the truth is people need to confront, get to full acceptance and understand that once you lose a job, you might not be an engineer or an accountant anymore, but you have a new job immediately. And the new job is to get a job, right? And when that guy heard those videos, he watched three of the 12 videos and he basically, I showed him, hey, look, you're not out of work. Your new work is to get a job and you need to go get a job now. You can go get it on an employment check if you want to. But sooner or later, you're going to have to confront the beast. And the beast is, I have this grillo into my back wall. It reminds me, confront the beast, bro. Okay, you got to confront the biggest beast in the jungle. And I'm the enemy. In my life, I am the biggest problem I have. And so when you lose a job, first thing you got to confront is you and say, wait a minute, am I out of work? Oh no, I just lost my title as engineer. My new job is to get a job and commit to going to get that job. And because people, it's going to be easier to get a job this week than it will be 26 weeks from now. I promise you, because 26 weeks from now, you're going to have 25 million people running back to the job market. You want to go look when they're not looking.