Robert Croak - Silly Bandz Creator | What It Really Takes to Build an Empire

My father left when I was 6 years old, mother left when I was 10 years old. I was living in this difficult situation for many many years, then I took over the family restaurant and that was the start of all of this. He turned a simple rubber band into a global phenomenon. Robert Croke, the entrepreneur behind silly bands, transformed whimsical silicone shapes into one of the most viral toy creases of the early 2000s. I went to a triathlon, they were giving out Armstrong the Livestrong bracelets back then. Everyone was asking me, what's that yellow bracelet? I was like, man, there's got to be something here. Cole called the Livestrong Foundation and I launched literally five or eight days later, custom silicone bracelets.com. That is what led me down the path of silicone world and then led to silly bands. After discovering animal-shaped rubber bands on a trip to Asia, launching silly bands in 2008, the product quickly became a cultural sensation. But Robert's story isn't just about a fad. It's about spotting overlooked ideas and scaling them into cultural moments. I just was scared to death at that early age of being a loser. Whenever anyone says work-life balance is important, they've never built a really successful business. He built a brand that resonated with millions. In this episode, we unpack how Robert Croke turned a novelty item into a household name and what it takes to engineer virality in the modern age. It took me till probably 43 years old to learn this fully, so if you're under 43, learn it ahead of time from this talk is... Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Now HubSpot doesn't just have great podcasts. They also have great tools for entrepreneurs. Let me tell you a story. I'm sure you've all heard of the Angel City Football Club. Well, you don't just become the world's most valuable women sports franchise by accident. Angel City Football Club did it the little help from HubSpot. When they started, data was housed across multiple systems. And HubSpot unified their website, their email marketing, and fan experience in one platform. This allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days. The result were nearly 350 new fan signups a week and a 300% database growth in just two years. Sure, you can be a great team in the arena, but if you truly want to build a legacy of franchise and a dynasty, you have to build a community outside of the arena. And HubSpot helped Angel City Football Club do just that. If you want to learn about how HubSpot can help your business, visit HubSpot.com, visit some other great case studies, and you'll learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better. And one quick ask. Before we dive into today's episode, I need your help with something important. I've just launched a quick survey to better understand what you guys want from the show. And your feedback is going to directly shape our upcoming content. It's only going to take a few minutes of your time, and I made it super easy to find. Just head over to scottdeclary.com slash survey. And as a thank you for helping me out, I'm giving away a free gift card to one lucky respondent chosen at random, once we hit 100 responses. So not only will your feedback help make this show even better, you might score something cool just for sharing your thought. I really appreciate your help with this one. First of all, thank you for coming down to Miami. It's going to be a lot of fun. So I think we can just start it with this, because we were talking before we pressed record, and you are a very inspiring speaker. So I'll just ask you this. What's your mission? Yeah, I would say my mission now is completely different than 10, 15, 20 years ago. You know, when I came up and we didn't have podcasts and we didn't have social media and all this stuff, you had to learn the old fashioned way, and that was by experience. And so for me, I'm very blessed now to be able to help so many people, you know, the one to many strategy. And so I've been able to really kind of cultivate this message of my 20, 30 years of entrepreneurship, making tens of millions of dollars, losing millions of dollars, and being able to put that together in a way that really helps educate the little guy. Because when I started out, raising capital was very, very difficult. Getting out there and scaling was very difficult because we didn't have all of the incredible tools we have now. So for me, it's really all about seeing how many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people that I can help in some way, either in their mindset, their business, or their personal finances, to help them lead a better life. That's my mission. It was harder when you were coming up because there was less access to information. But at the same time, more access to information creates confusion and a lot of noise. So now people, the barrier to entry to entrepreneurship has never been lower, but it's still very confusing to figure out who to follow, who to listen to. So I'm sure that, I mean, this is what you do with Retabits and all the content you put out. You're just a very good signal of quality information and how to do entrepreneurship, right? Not just entrepreneurship, life investing finance. That's what I, when I look at your content, it's refreshing because you're not selling anything, really at the end of the day. And I think that that's something that people should look for when they're figuring out and navigating all these people on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, because I also didn't come up with all these thought leaders. But there's so much noise now. How do you navigate? How do you navigate someone who's done it? What's your barometer for BS or authenticity in the online guru thought leaders face? Yeah, I really enjoy this question because there is so much noise and so much confusion and so many people utilize their platform and their audience for clickbait and these really, they're trying to go viral for the vanity metrics that they forget that building the audience should be about value and building trust with the audience so they know what your message is. What hill do you stand on? And so for me, I can't stand all these charlatans and fake gurus that all they're trying to do is put out clickbait information to scare people into buying their high ticket course. And so it's very frustrating for me because you also want to look at the backstory and for anyone watching or listening, understand, do your research because you need to be very selective of who you follow and whose message you believe in because a lot of them don't have the experience or the chops to really put out a message that is flushed out that can help people in bring value and I think for me, I'm uniquely qualified because I've had decades of experience building big businesses, silly bands was incredible. Now we have the Rich Habits podcast which has gone on to be one of the biggest financial and business podcasts in America on Spotify. I've actually built stuff just like you have and when someone has this track record not a little success 20 years ago or they had an e-com store at the height of the e-com boom for every wave ever. Yeah, and now they've rode every wave ever. For me, it's who is consistent, who is putting out real content with authority but also being genuine to their audience, that's what I look for. Yeah, I think that people that lean into their failures and talk about experience through the lens of, hey, this is why I believe what I believe because I've done all the wrong things and this is what has led me to understand as opposed to somebody who's parroting. Parading like the latest trend or the latest idea. 100% of content I see is just copying what someone else said and then that turns into their own content strategy versus you, you're talking about when you've made money, when you've lost money, I mean, those are hard things to talk about but that shows you've actually sort of been in the arena. Now you didn't start building a $200 million or plus company so you started way, way, way back running your grandparents restaurant and then you turned it into a rock club and then became a music promoter. So this is a fast life. So tell me about your life, your household growing up was entrepreneurship always in your family or was it something that you accidentally stumbled into? This is incredible. Everyone should ask me this question because when I was in my 20s and I was crushing it in the nightclub scene in the restaurant scene, everyone was like, oh, he was a spoiled rich kid but the real story is there was no entrepreneurship in my family. My father left when I was six years old. My mother left when I was 10 years old. So I was literally in this household that they owned with two half brothers and they were both drug addicts and drug dealers so that is what I went through all through the end of grade school and into high school. So I was living in this very violent, difficult situation for many, many years and but I was always built to be special and I was always meant to be a top level entrepreneur. And so earlier on, even as early as high school, I told everyone I believe I was switched at birth because there was no way I belong or deserve to be in this family situation. So that's it and when the start happened with the family restaurant, my grandmother had passed away. The will was not in order and I had an opportunity to buy the building and the business, which is Frankie's, it's still open to date so almost a hundred years old. Yeah, we just renovated it a couple of years ago. It's still a famous rock club. It's no longer an Italian restaurant but I was able to buy it and at that time, I was doing finance at car dealership. So I was 23 years old, fresh out of college. I was taking my series, what was it back then? Series seven license and I was doing finance at car dealerships. So my career back then was finance at car dealerships. I had a quadplex so I do practice what I preach and I was house hacking. 23. 23. We were already house hacking in there. I was house hacking at 23 and then I took over the family restaurant and did the full renovation and that was the start of all of this. If you didn't have entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship sort of inputs around you, what made you think differently? What made you think I have to start investing? I want to take over this restaurant and turn it into something. Like what is the thing that turns somebody from non entrepreneur and that was a pretty tough upbringing. It's not like an easy upbringing when your dad leaves at six, your mom leaves at 10. That's difficult. So what was the thing? Was it grandparents? Was it need to survive? Was it, what was it? It's a great question and I think it is probably the number one biggest hurdle that most people suffer with when trying to build financial freedom and I don't even want to say try to build wealth because there's a big gap between being wealthy and being financially free in my opinion because so many people out there and we won't name names in the Charlotteson world, they say if you don't make $400,000 a year, you're a loser or if you're not making a million dollars a year, you should be ashamed yourself. That's ridiculous. Some of the happiest, greatest people I know on earth right now make $70,000, $100,000 in $120,000 a year and they are ultimately happy. So for me, I just was scared to death at that early age of being a loser. I didn't want to grow up and not become something. And one of the things and this was going way back, this was a commercial that I don't know why but it struck me to my core and I've never lost the thought of that commercial and that is I think it was a Navy commercial or a Marines commercial way back when 40 years ago and it said if someone wrote a book about your life would anyone read it. And I have lived by that my entire life. I don't ever want to leave this planet not helping other people as many as I can so now it's great because I have millions of followers and I can really make a difference for people. Share my story, share my insights about finance and business and mindset and help them figure it out because nobody has it figured out. You see all these people and we live in a comparison based lifestyle because of Instagram, because of TikTok. So everyone is trying to compare to others but they don't see the real humanity behind it. And that's why a lot of my content is so raw. I want people to see me to job site dirty, you know, working on a house flip or at the restaurant repairing something because the replete paragraph I didn't show up. I don't care because I don't want to paint a picture that it's all rainbows and unicorns. I want people to realize what is the reality behind the curtain and that's why I share it all. Yeah, I think that one thing that I noticed with your content and your message and even sort of like your origin story is nothing came quick and easy. Like I know that you're talking about, oh, I was 23 and I was house hacking and I turned this restaurant around and then we'll talk about the silly band story. But you have to help people understand how much time and energy went into each one of those things which is now, I mean, fast forward, 40, whatever years, I don't know how old you are, you look for whatever. But if fast forward, now it just seems like a blip in time but at the moment like there was a lot of stress and anxiety and effort put into all those things and what people chase after in 2025 and beyond, they look for these quick wins all the time and that's what Instagram gurus sell them. And I think that will create so much stress and anxiety because you have all these ambitious people that do want to make money and do want to support their life and their family. And when something doesn't work after a month or two months or I invested and I hate that this exists but I've taken my last dollar and put it into a coaching program and my business didn't succeed immediately. Well then it starts to become a question of what's wrong with me? Like why am I not successful when this person shows all these great Instagram pictures of cars and penthouses in Miami, what's wrong with me? And it's just because the expectations aren't aligned properly. And that's something that you speak about because I know that you've gone through and actually done the thing for an extended period of time and that's what leads to success. And I don't see enough people sort of giving over that message that it's always gonna take longer than you expect it to. Yeah, you're spot on so many people out there, we talk about it when they can't do they coach is they get into the next shiny ball syndrome and I think shiny ball syndrome is real. People talk about it and I'm not saying entrepreneurs should always go all in on one thing because I do think diversity lends to success in many ways. But I see so many entrepreneurs that one year they're talking about crypto, the next year they're talking about Forex trading, the next year they're talking about ECOM, whatever is the hot ticket item of the day, they're selling that item. To me, that is a huge red flag. If someone doesn't have a sustainable business model and they're an expert in every new category like AI is today. Now all of a sudden you have all these charlatans that are AI's experts. And so for me, I just try to really stay in my lane. Am I and do I feel I'm ahead of the curve investing lies on AI and humanoid robotics and right now nuclear and all of these emerging sectors absolutely because one of my big messages to my audience is to get them to understand to be really successful as an investor. You don't have to be first to an investment or a stock or a crypto. You just have to be ahead of the masses. And generally you've got the thought leaders and the people that really know the space there first. You have the founders and all the developers right in that category. Then after that, you'll get the people like you and I that really understand where things are going from a macroeconomic level. And then after that you have Wall Street, then you have retail. As long as you're ahead of those last two sectors, you're going to make a lot of money in investing. And I think that's one of the things I'm really good at that I can help my audience with is to get them to understand that diversity is important, but too many entrepreneurs right now, they I feel bounced from thing to thing the thing and they never really built anything that's of scale. And so that's why they coach because it's easier to just keep building out these coaching programs and selling them for five, 10, $20,000 a piece. One thing that you mentioned that I think you'll have an interesting perspective on is you mentioned in terms of, because if we look at investing and entrepreneurship, I think we can sort of separate those because when it comes to investing, if you do understand a new emerging technology and you're not the technical person, but you're sort of like first wave, you're just curious, you're ahead of institution, you're definitely ahead of retail, you can make some good money there if you're careful, but of course you don't want to put all your eggs in one sort of new technology basket. Correct. In entrepreneurship, I always hesitate to tell people to chase trends because if you even look at that restaurant that's 100 years old, it's not chasing a trend, it's solving this forever human problem, right? And I don't know if, when you think about building businesses, you think about them differently than investing, but I would hesitate to tell somebody to build a business in a vanity industry. I would say build something that is solving a forever human problem, like entertainment, status, real estate, these are things that will always be around. So what is your opinion if you're gonna talk to a young entrepreneur, should they focus on building in a vanity business, should they start an AI company or do you recommend they start a business in something that's gonna be around, that was around for the past 100 years and it's gonna be around for 100 years in the future. That's a really great question. I think it depends on the person. So many people go to where they're told to go or where they believe they're supposed to go based on their peer group and their family. And unfortunately, that does not sustain itself and it doesn't work, that's why you see so many people go through med school or they become a lawyer and they quit two years later because it was what their parents wanted or their peer group wanted. And I think for me, it's important for people to understand just like Austin and I say all the time on the podcast, personal finances, personal, it's the same thing with your daily life. Do what works for you, not everyone is a morning person and some people like to sleep in. I like to stay up late. I do a lot of research in the evenings. I like the downtime. So for me, so for me, I haven't set an alarm clock unless I have a flight or I have to come to a podcast like this, I have not set an alarm in 30 years because I don't wanna live that way. I'm structured, but I wanna live of how my body and how my brain works for the lifestyle I wanna lead. That's why I would never be able to have a job because I would not be able to sit at a desk for 12 hours a day, hammering away on a task. I like to do what I wanna do in my creative space but then in my business space the same way. So I think everyone should build their life around what it is that inspires them to wanna do it because otherwise you're a drone. When you think about just driving here to meet you, seeing all these people walking with their backpack with their coffee cup, going to their job, they have no emotions on their face. To me, that's being a drone. You're a humanoid robotic, but you're actually a human because you didn't select a lifestyle that resonates with you to be able to do exactly what you wanna do. And I think everyone needs to find what works for them and it might take decades. So everyone listening, it might take you decades to figure it out and along the way you're gonna have all those learning lessons to figure out what does work for you. And some people figured out very early on because everything should be about setting yourself up for the future so you can retire gracefully at the end of the day. So, you know, that's simply, it doesn't matter so much as if it's your own, it's your own thought and it's your own passion versus someone else's. When you think about, I mean, we can talk about silly bands and how that came to be. And I have a little story here about a live strong bracelet that sort of led you to think about silicone bracelets and that became the foundation for silly bands to a degree. You talk about passion, but I'll challenge you because I know that you have an answer to this, but how do you find out that you're passionate about something like silicone bands? That is a, so I agree with you completely, but somebody outside looking in, understanding your story is like, well, I would never know that I had a passion for silicone bands. I have no idea anything about it. How would I ever figure out if that's something that I actually want to pursue? Because you did and you did it successfully. So, I want somebody to understand through your story how to find what your passion is when it's such a weird, strange business concept. And I mean, tell us how you figured out that this is where you want to spend like a significant amount of your life and energy in time. Well, I think it's important for everyone to understand that a really good entrepreneur might not even know what their passion is and doesn't need to really know what their passion is because I think a lot of it comes from seeing opportunity. For me, every single day, I have to corral myself in because something will annoy me or I'll see a huge opportunity and I will act on it immediately. So, for the silicone bracelet thing, I was doing triathlons at the time. I went to a triathlon, they were giving out Lance Armstrong the Livestrong bracelets back then. And so, that night when I went to my bars after the race, I'm feeling accomplished. Everyone was asking me, what's that yellow bracelet? What's that yellow bracelet? And this went on for months. So, finally, I was like, man, there's got to be something here. And we were already dabbling in Ecom and doing all that online. And so, I literally cold called Livestrong Foundation and the girl that answered the phone, whoever you are, if you remember this call, please reach out to me because you changed my life. Cold called the Livestrong Foundation, said, hey, I've been wearing one of your bracelets for a few months. Everyone is asking me about them. I think I should make them for other companies and this girl that answered the phone said, oh my God, please do. We get 100 calls a week from other companies wanting us to make bracelets for them. We're a foundation. We have a factory that makes them for us. We're not interested in making them for other people. We are here for the foundation for Lance Armstrong. She gave me their factory information on a cold call. So, literally three days later, I had already spoken to the factory. This was back when Skype was popular. This was before anyone knew what Alibaba was. This was a long, long time ago. And call the factory got set up as an agent to be able to import product from them. And I launched literally, I think eight days later, five or eight days later, custom silicon bracelets.com. And it went on to be a multi-million dollar company and we sold millions and millions of cause bracelets for other charities and foundations and schools and sports teams. And that is what led me down the path of the silicon world and then led to silly bands. So, it's creating space to be curious about opportunity. And then when something presents itself, that's when you dive into it. So, that's what happened with you. Yeah, it's creating. So, let's look today, 2025. I now have eyeballs infrastructure, contacts, experience and the team that you could tell me an idea today that you think would go viral. And if I agreed, we could be live tomorrow. That is what I have. When you build that opportunity of scale within your framework of your own life, then you can kind of go after those shiny balls a little bit, but in a way that actually makes sense because you know how to scale. You're not coming from a place of zero experience to try and chase the shiny balls syndrome like a lot of people do now. Yeah, I think that that's, so people, again, just bringing it back. A lot of entrepreneurs that ideal with, they're always chasing, again, what's new and hot right now, not thinking if that's even a good idea for them. And they're distracting themselves with these irrelevant shiny balls that society or Twitter or YouTube is saying that they should chase after dropshipping AI crypto. And then they're not leaving enough time in their day for all the other opportunities that could be passing them by. If you were only obsessed with the latest trends back when silly bands started, you would have never thought to start a company on Silicon. 100%. Yeah, and I think the biggest issue with most entrepreneurs, they might have a successful business. We see it every day in our world where let's say they started in the mortgage industry or they started in the real estate industry or maybe they were a used car sales manager, whatever it is, and they get an idea. They build a company and then the problem is, is as soon as they start making real money, they get distracted. Then they go chase the shiny ball and then another chest to shiny ball and another shiny ball. Meanwhile, the company that got them there is failing because they're no longer giving it the attention it needs. I'm all about diversity, but I'm also all about not changing the game too much if you already have built success. Diversify with others not on your own. So many people I think they try to go out and build it on their own. I'm more about, and it took me till probably 43 years old to learn this fully. So if you're under 43, learn it ahead of time from this talk is I would rather take my money now and bet on other jockeys, other winners, other quarterbacks that I believe in because then that way I can keep my eye on the prize. Because you think about silly bands. When silly bands first hit really huge, that was 15 years ago. 2010 was the biggest financial year for silly bands 15 years ago, yet silly bands is still a viable company that does meaningful revenue. Today as we speak, it is not the big worldwide phenomenon back then, but it's still very popular and gaining popularity again like a lot of these brands do. So very fortunate for us shout out silly bands. But it's just all about I didn't take my eye off the prize. You know, I could have many times sold the brand. I could have many times sold the inventory in the IP, but I always felt it would come back like Crocs came back and other brands. So I kept it and I still own 100% of it today. You still own 100% of it today. Yeah, 100%. So yeah, it's very cool. Lingoa is a partner of success story. Look, I'll be real with you. My French used to be solid. I learned it in school. I even had decent pronunciation. But when I booked trip to France last year, it was a total blank. I could barely order a croissant without sounding like a tourist. So I jumped into the Lingoa sprint challenge and man, it changed everything. I'd take live classes late at night after podcasting, only five students max, real teachers, real conversations. And in just two months, I went from a bonjour to holding full conversations at a Paris cafe. Confidence unlocked. Now here's the play. 30 or 60 classes in 60 days. And if you finish them all, you get 50% cash back. That's basically four euros or $5 per class. That's insane value. Go to try.lingota.com slash success underscore sprint. And then use my code Scott Sprint for an extra 20 euro off on top of their current deal. Registration closes May 5th. Classes start May 12th. 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So you're gonna join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Korra and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. And don't miss this for a limited time only. My listeners can get $1,000 off Vanta. That's real money backing your pocket. Visit vanta.com slash Scott right now before the software expires. That is vant.com slash Scott. I think that the lesson there is, first of all, everything is gonna take longer than you think it will. And cost more. And cost more. And what happened to entrepreneurs you mentioned when they're successful, sometimes they start to diversify. Taking it back a step. I think the bigger issue, forget when they're successful, when they're just starting out and it's hard and they're not successful yet. And then they diversify because they're like, well, I put so much of my life into this thing but it's not working the way that I wanted it to. So what about this next thing? And then they're stuck in this cycle. This hamster wheel of starting, it getting hard quitting moving on to something else. And Hermosi talks about this a lot. And entrepreneurs can be stuck in this cycle their entire life. Yes. Because they never actually get past this point of I've gone through all the hardship and all the success and the bell curve and the hockey stick growth is on the other side of that. I mean, even if you think about silly bands, yes, there was a great opportunity with Livestron giving you the factory, but when you first started it, it was not selling. No, I don't know. It was a shelf and there was a period of time where it was hard. And at any point you could have given up and you're like, you know what, I don't need this. I can go do something else. But you are one of the stories that I found out about you which reminds me of actually Elon Musk because the story is during the peak sort of silly bands crazed. You built an apartment above the office and you were basically living there. So when somebody hears that story, they're thinking, oh my God, is this what it takes to be successful? Is that, and Elon does this with his companies. He's infamous for like sleeping on the floor of PayPal and then Tesla and now I think like at the White House. Yeah, for sure. So is that level of commitment required to be successful? I think so. You have to be a little bit of a psycho to really pull it off. So let's go back and this is gonna be a two-part answer. The silly bands stage. I had a beautiful house. I was renovating this house. Silly bands really took off. And in mind, you let me paint the picture for everyone. It started to move, started to sell, started to become popular. This was during the Facebook era and then it went ballistic. So then all of a sudden we went from selling, let's say, let's say two cases of silly bands a week to 200 cases of silly bands a week, to 2,000 cases of silly bands a week, to 5,000 cases of silly bands a week, to 3,000 cases a day. So we scaled from at that time when I launched silly bands, I had around 17, I think it was 17 full-time employees. And we went from 17 employees to 3,300 employees in the course of 10 months. And this is insane. That is insane scale. So for me to even think it made sense to drive home every night and get in my nice car and drive home, go to sleep and come back made no sense. So I'm gonna paint a picture for you. Katie Kirk wanted to interview me because of the massive success of silly bands. And they were like, yeah, we'll have you come to our New York studios, we'll do this. I'm like, I'm not leaving my office, you're crazy. So all these people that want to interview me, I'm like, if you want to interview me, come to Toledo, Ohio, this is my address, we can interview. At that time, silly bands was so crazy, they had to hire extra security at malls for stores for the UPS drop-offs because people would be waiting for the trucks. We would have, when we would open our doors, physically open the warehouse and unlock the office door in Toledo, Ohio, we would have to have 20 people there in the morning because there would be trucks lined up everywhere. So UPS would come every day with all the trucks. And because we had so much inventory coming in, we couldn't do the traditional vessel shipments, we literally joked because we had planes going back and forth every single day, dropping off inventory. And so when we would wake up in the morning and go downstairs to the office and the warehouse and turn the lights on, there would be trucks lined up down the alley because there were so many stores and retailers and distributors that would just send drivers and say, do whatever it takes to get inventory. They'd have an order in the system, but we'd say, okay, man, that order will be shipped out in four to seven days because you just place the order. They would have people bribing us in the alleys trying to get inventory. It was that crazy worldwide for 18 months during the main piece of the craze. And so whenever anyone says work-life balance is important, they've never built a really successful business because as much as I'd like to agree with them, I can't. So I got rid of my house on a Thursday afternoon, I had a meeting with my construction team because at the time I owned a construction company, I said, all right, let's go upstairs and we just had this big upstairs that was basically at a pool table, ping pong table. And I said, this has to be an apartment in 10 days. So they built a bathroom, they built a kitchen, and literally I stayed at one end and curtained off the bed. There were no walls. And then I had all of my managers, I had two or three of my managers living up there with me because it was literally get downstairs by seven a.m. Work from seven to 10 p.m. Eat, maybe watch a little TV for a while, go back to that. And we did that every single day for 18 months. It was that insane. Then we built more scale, we built more processes, but every time we got it under control, five new countries wanted the product. So then we had to take on these new countries and figure out all the logistics, who's the sales rep for that, who's going to handle it, what distributor. It was crazy. And so I totally understand the aspect of Elon Musk and what he does for these companies because you want to have all hands on deck. So then conversely about entrepreneurs quitting too soon, which I think is the biggest plague of entrepreneurship. They always say, and I always say it as well, you're one meeting, you're one email, you're one connection away from a totally different life and it is absolutely true. And I think most people quit too soon because they want the immediate return. They don't understand delayed gratification. So how is that relevant to my life now? The rich habits podcast. Austin DM me, he was like, I love your message. I love what you do. This is what I do. I'd never heard of Austin before and I didn't follow him. And he said, I want to do a podcast with you. I think it would be amazing. I'm like, great. So over the course of a month, we negotiate what we're going to do, what our message is, how we're going to do it. And after one year of episodes, my income from that one year, a year and a half of work because it took some preliminary time to get figured out, I made $583 in one year for the work, hundreds of hours of work. But now the rich habits podcast is one of the top podcasts on Spotify. And that is a lesson in tenacity. And for me, when I'm hiring people, when I want to work with people, I want people that don't have quit in their game. That's it. If you're tenacious and you're willing to see your craft through, everything takes longer and costs more to make it happen and too many people quit too soon. That's one of the most important lessons. I'm a full believer that if you can commit a ridiculously long amount of time to something, if you are a semi-smart person, you'll find a way to figure it out. 100% I think that that's really the seat. I mean, even my first sort of exposure to that lesson was back in Toronto, back in Canada. And I saw like friends, dads that had very boring companies. One of them, two actually that really stand out, one of the guys had a company that installed glass for new home development. And the second guy had a company that produced paper and they'd just been doing it for like 30 years. Manchains, mansions, like just insane homes. I don't even think that in Miami, the lots are not so big, even if you spend like a lot of money. So we're talking like a home that you'd see on Golden Beach in Miami with like acres of land, like just enormous, like the type that I'm sure Ohio has homes like this, right? Definitely, I had one of those homes. Yeah, exactly. And I was just like, you know, what makes somebody successful? And the dad was, well, I've just been figuring out the paper game for the past 30 years. And this is the result of figuring it out. It's unsex, you know what else wants to do it? And I probably have, I don't know the market share, but a significant percentage of paper comes through my company. And it's just insane, but he's just been doing it for a long enough period of time. And I think that if you do anything for a long enough period of time, you start to see these people become exceptionally successful at all these boring, boring businesses. But again, it's instant gratification culture that we live in with everything, with forget about entrepreneurship with Netflix. You don't have to drive to blockbuster anyway. Right. The Amazon, the Uber, the Uber eats the door dash, we don't have to wait for anything. And I think it hijacks our psychology. And it makes it think that everything in life should be instant. And that's actually why I think that, I think that it's easier to be an entrepreneur now than ever before because of access to information. But also, because if you can just have a little bit of delayed gratification, that is such, it's a skill that's disappearing faster and faster every single day. So if you can apply a little bit of that to whatever you're building, you have such a competitive advantage. Well, we live in an era, this is the greatest moment in time to become an entrepreneur and a business owner. Because let's look at this. When I wanted to build the silicone bracelet website, for instance, custom silicone bracelets, this would have been 2003. So not that long ago, theoretically. Back then, to build a shopping cart for the back end of your website, how much do you think that cost? Oh, let me tell you, I want to get 50,000? Not quite that. But to build the back end back then was $15,000 to $20,000. A lot of money. You had a lot of money to take that bet that you were right on that product. Now today, someone can find an idea through the best sellers on Amazon or on TikTok and just look at best sellers, what's trending. They can open a Shopify store, they can get social media set up for free, they can have TikTok shop set up for free, and they can be up and running with an idea and a concept in a business for $100. So we live in an era right now where no one should have the excuse that there's not enough time in the day or they don't have enough time because they have to work their nine to five job or whatever it is, that is absolute bullshit. Because all the tools are there, all the resources are there for anyone to be able to express whatever it is they want to do to become successful and financially free, whatever that means for each person. And so for me, that is why I talk about mindset so much because I think so many people still suffer from the lack mindset in the victim mindset as to why they're not successful. They're not successful because they're not trying. There is so much out there to make it easier for people to succeed, they just have to want it bad enough. So when I look at your resume, silly bands, it was like a cultural phenomenon and Rich Habits as well grew very quickly. Now, I know that when I look at the resume, there's probably a million failures that you don't talk about as much. But focusing on the wins, how do you know when something is gonna be so culturally relevant that it's not just gonna be a little bit successful but it's gonna have this, like again, this hockey stick growth curve over, not overnight, but overnight rapid scale after you get to a certain point. What's the thing that allowed silly bands to take off the way it did? What's the thing that allowed Rich Habits? Is there like a through line between those two things? I think there is a through line and that is experience and fortitude to stay with it. Because like you said, so many people when silly bands became a worldwide phenomenon, they were like, oh my God, it happened overnight. They didn't see, it was like a cultural. Yeah, it took 18 months, literally the four cases of original silly bands sat on the shelves for 18 months where they would sell a couple packs here, a couple packs there. And then literally then it started to grow a little bit and a little bit and a little bit and the same thing happened with the Rich Habits podcast. We made episode after episode where we'd get 200 views, 300 views, 500 views, and I'm like keeping it in perspective because a lot of people when they're on TikTok and Instagram, they will see a post that they did and it'll get 300 views and they'll think it's a failure. But if you put 300 people in a room to watch you, that is a huge accomplishment. I would scare the shit out of most people. And so with Rich Habits, we had so many episodes which were 200, 300, 400 views and for people to keep that in perspective, if you put 300 people in a room, that would be incredible as a creator or someone that has a message. And so I think it really just comes down to keeping everything in perspective. And for me, I just don't have any quit in my game and I believe now there's gonna be failures. I've had way more failures than I've had successes. But from those failures, I think that is what has made me as an entrepreneur and as a business owner and investor so good at what I do because you have the real experience. A lot of entrepreneurs now, they fail once, they become a coach and then they chase the shiny ball syndrome but they don't have any real backstory to what makes them who they are and why people should listen to their message. For me, I have an endless backstory and that's what makes it easier for me to feel confident in sharing my message because it is authentic and it is from experience, not from chatGPT. So when silly bands was scaling like crazy, obviously you had acquisition offers. You never entertain them because you're still 100% of it. You dealt with knockoffs, I know that there was an issue with Walmart at some point that you had to deal with. So out of all the crazy stories that you dealt with while scaling silly bands, what was the one story that you learned, the one experience that you learnt a lot from but you wouldn't wish on anyone else? I would say the Walmart story. So Walmart went through two months of negotiations with us to roll out silly bands worldwide for Walmart. And people warned me about Walmart and their tactics but I went ahead with it anyway, I was proud like my company is so big, Walmart wants us, Target wants us, everyone wants us. So then Walmart went dark on me and I couldn't figure it out. So then a couple of weeks go by, I don't hear anything from them, like this is weird, they toured our factory everything and then all of a sudden I see they're carrying another brand. I think it was crazy bands or zany bands and knockoff. So when things slowed down, we sued them for what they did for the infringement. And one of the greatest moments of my life happened in the mediation with Walmart. They brought in five Ivy League lawyers, I had my one Ohio lawyer, we went there, we had a strong case. And for hours, these lawyers chewed my lawyer up like eight of them alive. So we take a little break, I go outside, I talk to him, we go back in, I go, I'm taking over the meeting. So I go back in and sit down and I'm looking at the lawyer right across me, she's the main lawyer and she's telling her story about why there's no infringement and they're not going to settle with me and everything. And I said, let me ask you a question. I looked her dead in the eye. So let me ask you a question. We're talking about the rainforest pack right now. Do you know how many animals are indigenous to the rainforest currently? She goes, no, Mr. Croke, I have no idea. I said over 42,000 species of animals are indigenous to the rainforests of America or the world. Right now, she's like, wow, that's fascinating. And why does that matter? I go, why did you choose the same seven shapes we did in the silly bands pack for your pack if you're not knocking us off? Dead silence in the room. Dead absolute frickin silence. I look over at the judge, the mediator, and they were like, holy crap. I go, I'll be in the lobby. Let me know if you want a settle or not. And I walked out. They caught me in the lobby and like, we'll work this out. We'll settle. And that was it. It changed my life because it made me never accept what was presented to me and make sure that I always speak up and shoot my shot. So afterwards, my lawyer was like, that was incredible. How did you know that? I go, I didn't, I made it up. I have no idea how many animals are indigenous to the rainforests. I was just so pissed off because I know that they're knocking me off because they use the same shapes as I did. And so it was game changing. And for now on every day after that, I've just always realized that I'm going to fight for what's mine and I'm always going to shoot my shot. I think that's the most important thing. I love that. That's a crazy story. It's a crazy story and we did settle. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I mean, like listen, I guess most entrepreneurs hope to have those kinds of problems at some point. That means that you're doing something big. But that's, I hear a lot about Amazon ripping off products. I guess Walmart does it too. I mean, I don't think that you can ever prepare for that, really prepare for it. I think you have to be, I think that you have to understand that as you scale more and as you grow more, you're going to have more problems. You're going to have more money, more problems. Biggest said it best. I have a friend who runs a publicly traded holding company and he does acquisitions under this pub co. And he's like, Scott, every day, I have a problem or a lawsuit or something that would just shake an early stage new entrepreneur to their core. But just understand that this is part of the game. Like everything is part of the game. Like having to fire people, getting sued, dealing with all of it is just part of the game. So I think that I don't want to throw, I don't want to throw people off. I just want them to know that what they're setting themselves up for when they're actually thinking about starting a company because it's not all, it's not all like overnight, it's never overnight success and it's a lot of stress and anxiety. I think you have to know like why you're doing it. Like why are you putting yourself through this? What's it for? And should you? And should you? And I also don't think that entrepreneurship is for everybody. And I also don't think that hyper scaling a hundred million dollar company is for everybody. I think there's many ways to play this game and I think that too many people bringing it back to one of the first things we spoke about. They are following someone else's version of success and they don't understand what their own north starts. Yeah, 100%. I agree with that. That is what creates anxiety and depression and stress and like what game are you even playing and why are you playing it? And I just wish more people sort of understood what they want to achieve in life with their business, with finances, with investing, all of it. Yeah, I think finding your north star and understanding what makes you tick is so, so important. Austin and I have a big message that personal finance is personal because so many people thinks what works for somebody else is gonna work for them. And there are some tried and true things in life that you should follow to make sure that you give yourself the best chance for success. But what works for someone over here is not gonna work for you because life gets in the way, things happen, family happens. But I think it's important for everyone to understand. Figure out the information and who you wanna follow and learn from and be cautious. You know, read the books, think and grow rich. Richest man in Babylon, the millionaire next door, there's some tried and true books out there that I think everyone should read. Follow the right podcast. So you're really learning from people that have done it and built it and that have a genuine message. And I think as long as you're continually learning, you'll find your way over time, especially if you do what I say all the time and that is take notes and take action is so important. One thing that I look for in who I like to listen to and follow are people that sort of give you agency to pursue a variety of different paths. They're gonna help you understand what they know and what they've experienced in their life, but they're not saying like, hey, you have to invest in crypto or you have to build a business of this size. Or that's the people that are almost like absolute in their advice, that's a red flag for me. I agree with that. Not every single person is the exact same and I have opinions about business and I have an opinion about how much money I wanna make and how I wanna live my life. But I also know, I know my life right now and now the podcast is kind of relaxed compared to what I've done in the past and I don't think that many people need to live that life to be happy. I don't think many people need to sleep on the floor of their office to be happy, but you're gonna have some people tell you that's the only way to live and you're a pussy if you don't do that and that's the wrong information. That's the wrong information and that's toxic information and I think that that's actually what creates a whole bunch of anxiety and depression with young ambitious people who can't figure out their life. Well, and most people think that they need more money than they do. A thousand percent. We have this message, we have this culture, this bro culture of all the guys online right now and you know who you are that scream at everybody and you're constantly building fear and uncertainty because they have this culture that you need to be a multi-multimillionaire to be successful and that's just bullshit. It's the wrong message. There are a lot of people that all they wanna do is have a nice house with a nice garden, a reasonable car so they can spend time with their children and go to soccer practice. That's an incredible life. Everyone is different and you should build the financial life and the structure of your life around that. I don't have aspirations to be a multi-billionaire. I don't have aspirations to own a private jet. I don't care. I love my life and I love having the downtime where I can do whatever I want whenever I want. You know, I think one of the greatest wealth attributes to a person's life is time freedom. I don't have to go eat at a restaurant at 12 noon. I don't have to drive and rush our traffic because I can schedule my days around what works for me to live the best life that I lead. People are always asking me like, man, you have such an incredible schedule. I see you on a beach, I see you here, I see you there. I still work my ass off, but I work around what is important to me. Yeah, and like listen, with success that you've had, you could keep pushing and you could put 100% of your life into I want to find a way to become a billionaire. And I'm going to work nonstop and I'm going to bust my ass. I mean, I think that I think that again, what's the priority? And I think that a lot of people don't think about, it sounds callous, but I truly believe that most people are so focused on money that they don't think, hey, is my wife or my husband a priority or my kids a priority is my health, a priority until it's way too late. I know, because I see it, I see people with, forget, forget a $10 million, $20 million exit, I see people with $100 million plus exits that their entire life outside of their business success has gone down the shitter. Yep, because they have not focused on anything for the past like 20 years of their life, except how do I make more money? Right. And then they wake up, because they have a big exit and they're like, shit, everything else is gone. Yep, so they have all this money in the bank account, but they don't have anything else. And I suffered from that a little bit. During the silly bands era, I didn't work out every day, I stopped doing triathlon, I wasn't running. You were athletic, that's right. I wasn't playing basketball, I wasn't doing any of that because I was working around the clock, but now I never put myself in that situation anymore. I always make sure that I leave time for health and wellness because it's so important to have that balance for me now. And I think everyone should understand that, is figure out the life that you wanna lead now and for retirement and then reverse engineer how to have it. A big thank you to indeed for supporting success story because hiring people is one of the hardest things you're ever gonna have to do as an entrepreneur as a founder, as somebody who's trying to build a business. It's important to hire well and find the right person, but it takes so much time and it's so labor intensive because like most entrepreneurs, you have a thousand things going on and there's a good chance that you just realized your business needed to hire somebody yesterday. So how can you find that great, amazing, right fit candidate fast? It's easy, just use indeed because you don't have to waste time struggling to get your job post seen on all these other job sites. If you're using indeed, you can just use their sponsored jobs to help you stand out and hire fast. Your post jumps right to the top of the page for relevant candidates so you can reach out to exactly who you're looking for faster and the results really speak for themselves. According to indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. And you know what I love most about indeed? It really just makes hiring so fast because everything is streamlined in one place. No more juggling multiple platforms or waiting weeks for the right candidate and how fast is indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on indeed, according to indeed data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of success story will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash clary in terms of it should do apply. Just go to indeed.com slash clary. A huge thank you to Netsuite for supporting today's episode. Now, what does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're gonna get 10 answers, bull market, bear market, inflation up and flation down. Honestly, at this point, you just need a crystal ball. 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This is the playbook for understanding how to use AI for your business. The guide is free. That is Netsuite.com slash Scott Clary. I just wanna take a quick second to thank HubSpot for supporting today's episode. Now, success story is one of the many podcasts in the HubSpot podcast network, which is the audio destination for business professionals. If you like success story, you're also gonna like billion dollar moves, another incredible podcast hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is an incredible interviewer. She asks the hard questions on her show. You're gonna learn about the triumphs, failures of all her guests, the hard lessons of the best and brightest in business. So that you too can make billion dollar moves, in venture, in investing, in business, and in life. I want you to go listen to billion dollar moves wherever you get your podcasts. It is one of my favorites. Sarah is one of my favorite hosts. If you like success story, you're gonna love this show. And a quick pause. If you haven't had a chance yet, I'd love your input on our listener survey at ScottDeclary.com slash survey. It takes just a few minutes and one lucky respondent when a gift card wants to hit 100 responses. Your feedback directly impacts what we cover on the show. I really appreciate it. I love that. One last thought or question with silly bands because obviously it's you've massive scale. How do you decide as an entrepreneur when you wanna hold on to something versus when you want to sell it? Because I know that when you have that kind of scale, you're getting offers from private equity or strategic buyers. So what's the words of wisdom based on your experiences to what you should do? Should you start with the exit in mind? Should you hold on to the business long term? Should you sell it at the right time? This is a very personal answer because everybody has different opinions about this. How do you think through these ideas? I don't think anyone should buy or acquire a business solely with the exit in mind. But I do believe once you scale a business and it's life changing money for your family and your future, you should always take the burden hand. So let's talk silly bands. When it was at the height and I was getting all these offers that you talk about, they were pretty substantial, $35, $50, $60 million. And I said no to all of them because I felt I could take it from 100 million to 200 million, to who knows what? When you were making, when you, 60, 30, 50, 60 million, was it like a 1x revenue that you were getting offers at or was it like multiple? It was like a two or a three out. Oh, that's not bad. Okay, so I thought you were like a 65 million revenue, 65 million dollar op. Okay, so you were getting multiple? No, it was like a two, three, x, multiple, it's not bad. So for me, now it's different. I think if you're starting out and you build something meaningful, you should stay the course long enough that where the exit is life changing money and burden hand. One thing that I learned was silly bands and thereafter is that I invested too freely after silly bands into too many startups and I went backwards financially for a little while and that was something that I learned and would never do again. So I think it's important for people to understand. If you build a cool company and you can sell it for a real dollar amount and move on and really figure out the next phase of your life, whether it's retirement, getting in shape or whatever it may be, you should do it because you're not always going to be able to sustain growth no matter what your business model is and what type of business. So if you can sell it for a meaningful dollar amount, I would sell it. The peak was 200 million, right? Was that over a period of time? Over a period of time. That was over a period of time. So you rejected, are you upset? Are you rejected offers? I'm not upset that I rejected some of these offers because it got me here. I wouldn't be in this seat if I sold silly bands for 65 million or 55 million or $100 million because I wouldn't have went on to continue to build more and more companies. I probably would have bought a beach house, bought a couple more cars and then just retired and it did angel investing and never built anything. So for me, I really enjoy the building process. I like taking the idea from napkin to being online, to being in retail stores and to seeing that success, especially when I can bring others along the way. Like recently, we just launched a puzzle company, Paragon Puzzles. And I did that with Elizabeth and she really wanted to do something in the puzzle space, she's a big puzzler. So I did that and I love seeing that process from her brain to my brain, from napkin to in stores and now it's starting to grow and get popular and that is the coolest thing that I get to do every single day, other than educating people. I love that. I absolutely love that. I mean, you have such a good mindset around like sort of your life story and I think it's important because a lot of people, they don't realize that everything happens for a reason and even not selling happens for a reason. And ultimately, not selling could be more, help you be more financially successful in the long term because now you made some investments and we can talk about why a good business operator doesn't always mean they're a good investor. That's also a thing that I, that could be a whole episode for sure. But that forced you to figure out, okay, what's next in life? And you've done that like very, very well. Like I don't think that if you had a $65 million exit, would you be on TikTok? I have no idea. Probably not. Probably not. You never saw Tom from MySpace again. He's gone. He's gone. He's literally filming birds in the Yucatan somewhere and nobody's ever seen him again because he has all this money. So yeah, I think me not exiting silly bands, me going through all the trial and error and failure since silly bands has made me what I am today and I think it has helped me craft being such a good educator because I've done it all and I'm able to then extract all the good points and bad points from all of that experience to be able to help others because I have people right now that have $10,000 to their name and I have people that have 10 million, 20 million to their name, but everyone needs help along the way. Yeah, and using that, that, you know, that point is a segue just because you're good at building a business doesn't mean you're good at investing. So all your, most of your content right now is around investing and finance. So what happened when you made some money? And this happens to, it happened to me, happened to a lot of my friends as well. They start, they make a little bit of money and you start to go into angel investing and you have no idea what you're doing and then you lose most of it. And what has actually happened in my case and a lot of my friends as well, we just stay away from angel investing and now we're just going to real estate and stocks and maybe a little bit of stock picking because I'm not good at betting on the jockey and figuring out like pre-revenue if a company is going to hit. And I think that when you have a little bit of money, it's exciting to try all these new ways to invest, but I have one friend who is actually an angel investor, probably does 50, 60 angel investments a year. Outside of that, I know people that are worth hundreds and millions of dollars that suck at it and they've stayed pretty much away from it. And I won't name names of one guy in particular who's worth several hundred million dollars and he will not write a check more than $50,000 because every time he does, he loses his money. So he's just like, what's the point? And then he just started going to section eight real estate because it was just like, it was an easier, it was an easier investment opportunity that didn't blow up every single time I tried to do it. Well, that's one of the biggest parts of my message when it comes to investing in general, build your base, then start diversifying because a lot of people want to start out, they get their first $20,000, they want to go buy a house. They want to go buy a duplex and flip it. You have no idea how to do it. If you don't have a partner that knows how to do it, don't do it because it is not the right strategy. For me, I think people generally should build their base, whether their base is $100,000, $200,000, $500,000. So that way they have compound interest doing its job in building wealth while you sleep. After that, then start diversifying, maybe get into real estate, try house hacking, get a couple duplexes, build that up, start building a portfolio there. But when you get to the phase of wanting to angel invest, whether it's through big platforms and startups or Uncle Bill's restaurant, you have to understand that in many instances like your very wealthy friend, money has a way of making people think they're smart. And it's really funny to me because we talk about people that are very wealthy with their boring businesses. And I think it is one of the greatest ways to build wealth is through boring businesses. And right now, there's so many businesses and these boomer owners that don't have exit strategies. So for them, they're willing to just lock the doors and walk away, they've got their millions of dollars, they've got their house paid off. And that is the biggest opportunity, I think, in entrepreneurship right now, is buying these established businesses. You can get owner financing. There's a lot of different ways, creatively, to take over these businesses, add in modern technology, modern sales strategies and really make a lot of money. But I think the main thing with venture investing and I do it now too, keep your check sizes small. Like you said, 50,000. My check size is used to range between 250,000 and 500,000. Now I'm 25 to 50,000 on my checks. I'm actually gonna leave here and go do a wire for a very important company in the human robotic space. And but I think that is the key. Take more shots in your investing like that because you're gonna have, I have this thesis that if you're gonna invest in 10 venture deals, five or six of them are gonna go to zero. Two of them are gonna do okay. You just need one that gets you that 50 or 100 or more X and that's where all the money and wealth is built. But don't start out doing that kind of investing. I think too many people start too early in that type of investing. And a lot of them are gonna go to zero because like you said, they don't know how to bet on the jockey, they don't know what's gonna scale. And a lot of these high-flying companies take years and years to become liquid and become profitable. And a lot of people don't understand that when they're investing in these types of deals. We introduce these deals in the rich habits network in our private community all the time. And I always reiterate to people, do not invest this money if you expect it to be liquid anytime soon. Because some people think they can invest in a startup or invest in an apartment building and they're gonna be able to get their money back or see a return any year. It doesn't work that way. So I just always make sure that I share the good side of everything we do, but also the downsides, but also just give people a proper understanding because everyone wants to build financial freedom, but they don't know how to do it. And you're gonna make mistakes along the way. So I think it's important to not go too fast in things you don't know. Is it figure AI? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of my friends, I can name him because I'm sure he's very proud of it. So Shane Neiman, do you know him? Okay, so he put in money at like a $300 million valuation. He's been on the figure AI and for a long time. Yeah, and now the valuation, well, I can't say anything. No, no, no, with the Brett Adcock's a very impressive guy. Very, very impressive guy. Yeah, he's great, but I mean, he has a track record. So this is his third, I think if I'm not mistaken. Second or third? Second or third, one of the companies he took public, which is like a, anyway, it's a point. The aviation company, archery aviation. Very, very impressive guy. Now, that company's blowing up, but I don't think, I don't think many people have that luck when they're putting their check it. And the bigger issue is not, in my opinion at least, the bigger issue is not the person that has the ability to write $250 or $500,000 checks. It's the person who is pulling in a $200 to $300,000 per year salary, and they, and they're, you know, they're, maybe they're in tech, maybe they're, but they're like, oh, angel investing is sexy. Let me start writing $25,000, but that, then it's a significant amount of their money that they're putting in. And they're putting in money into this pre-revenue on, you know, pre-revenue, early stage startup. Nothing's proven out. First time founder, because they don't, they've never done it before, as opposed to putting money into something a little bit more secure. And I think that that's the biggest issue that I have with angel investing, because just because you're pulling in a good salary, even if you had a, say, you had a $10 million exit in, you know, a state with high taxes. Well, you have like what, $5 million after that? Right. $10 million on paper? Great, great exit, amazing, amazing exit. But you can, you can burn through that money very quickly if you think that you're a good investor, just because you were a good upbuilding a business. Well, a lot of people in most entrepreneurs, especially male entrepreneurs, they all think that they're a lot better at it than they are. And it takes many, many years to learn it. I mean, even you admit that you made some mistakes in angel investing. I've had a lot of zeros in angel investing. But now I've learned, rather than getting in, you know, day one, where it's the idea and the concept and I'm one of the first five investors, I'm much more happy getting in at $100, $200, $300 million on a company that's having a meteoric rise because then I am not betting on a concept. I'm betting on a product that has already tried and true and usually built out. And so I think that's an important aspect of understanding where you're getting into the company as a process and understanding where that company can go from a market cap in the future. And that's why I'm betting big right now on humanoid robotics, nuclear, and still kind of the second phase of AI, which to me I believe is the software side of AI and the application side of AI. And that's where most of my money is going to go in the next three to five years. For somebody who does have, you know, some sort of windfall, some decent financial success and they're just trying to figure out where to start, this is you after learning how to invest properly. What's the best advice that you give somebody to start investing? Is it real estate? Is it a certain asset class? Is it just tea bills? Where do you go? I think the most important strategy for someone that's just getting started, build the base. So every person out there listening that's over 18 years old that does not have a Roth IRA, go do it as soon as you're done watching this episode. Get the Roth IRA, get it maxed out, get a basket of index funds, and build the base of $100 to $200,000. Once that is built, then I would say the next iteration would be then either start venturing into single stocks where you're learning some of the stocks in the companies. But by what you know, I think one of the best strategies ever, and this came from Peter Lynch back in the 80s, a very prolific investor, by what you know. And I always offer a challenge to people that really strikes a chord, and I think it makes sense, is if you're gonna go out and buy a $200 pair of Nike's, put $200 in the stock at the same time, and if you can't do both, don't buy the Nike's. But if you love Starbucks, check out the stock, buy the stock. So buy what you know, because then you can be proud of it, and you're already supporting the company, and it'll help you become a better investor. And then I would say thirdly, or in line with that second stage, would be looking at real estate. But I think everyone, I don't think anyone should buy their first piece of property as a primary home. I think everyone should do what I did, and what is taught today, and that is house hack their first property. Buy a duplex, buy a triplex, buy a quadplex. There's a lot of great loan programs out there that you can go out Fannie Mae as a 5% down mortgage program right now for up to four doors and $1.3 million. A great way to get your feet wet in the real estate industry. I would say that would be next. And then if you're younger, and you wanna explore into cryptocurrency, I think if you buy the tried and true projects in cryptocurrency with 5% of your net investable capital, I think that's a great way to add diversification, and then keep going from there. When you think about asset allocation at different stages of life, what's the general, and by the way, just the disclaimer is none of this is investment advice, but what's the general sort of recommendation how you think through asset allocation when you're 18, 19 versus 30, 40 versus 60, 70? That's a great question. And I think too many people play it too safe for too long. You know, when you're younger, you should take more risks. You can be more risk on with your asset allocation. But I think the main objective for me is just getting people to think like investors and not think like consumers. That is the number one message that I have. Yeah, is to get people, so many people never start investing because they don't know where to start. And they think like a consumer. And this isn't just poor people or people that are just getting by. This is the general public a lot of times, they just don't think like an investor. So when they get their paycheck and they have that 600, that 800, that $2,000 sitting in their checking account, to me, parked money is dead money because you're going backwards. So I never leave money just sitting. And I think the number one message that I hope I get to millions and millions of people is to stop thinking like a consumer because let's face it. The average American and people are living paycheck to paycheck more and more right now when they shouldn't be. The average American, when they wake up on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning, they're not thinking of the opportunity to make their life better, make their investments better. And how do I build financial freedom? They're thinking about what farmers market are we going to go to, what mall are we going to go to because that $800, that $1200 is burning a hole in their pocket because it's just sitting there. So I think the number one key is for people to think more like an investor and less like a consumer. My issue with sort of traditional consumer, consumers, someone acting like a consumer as opposed to an investor is they default to trusting someone else managing their money. And I think that that is, I think that lack of self-education it hurts more people than it helps, obviously. And I see even with my own parents, with my mom in particular, she was going to like a financial advisor from a bank. And I wish that she would do a little bit of her own research and do a little bit of, you know, do a little bit of due diligence and understand like which stocks that you can pick and is there a real estate purchase that you can buy? And I feel like people just want to outsource their thinking. And I don't know, I just think that, I think that with a little bit of knowledge, you can set yourself up financially quite comfortably as opposed to paying somebody from a bank, a percentage of your total net worth to give you what like three, four percent per year. Like to me, it doesn't make any sense but this is what a lot of people default to. Even very wealthy, successful, smart people default to this. Yeah, let me break it down because I think it's important for your audience to really dig in deep on this particular topic. And that is, you know, one of the things I talk about a lot is make your money work as hard for you as you work to get it. And most people don't do that. They're good at making the money and getting it in their bank but they're not good at growing it and it's two different things. And when it comes to financial advisors, I think the right financial advisor, if you have a fiduciary and someone, so my family has croak capital, you know that. And I think they do an incredible job. They're really, really good because they are not just helping you multiply your money but they're helping you strategize, making sure you have the best tax strategies. You have the right implementation of LLCs and holding companies and revocable trusts. And this is where a lot of people really, really lack. And the worst part is, you know, you have these financial advisors on every single corner, the Edward Jones of the world and the Morgan stands as the world. And people will go in to a stranger or someone that they heard about from Betty Sue or Billy Bob or whoever and give them their life savings without even doing the due diligence to understand what is the fee structure? What is their performance been over the last five to 10 years with the portfolios they're putting forth for their money? And they just don't do this. And I think it is one of the biggest thieves of wealth in modern society in the United States because you're right, I deal with people every single day in my consulting, the one-on-one calls I do with people, is they go to an agent and they don't know what are the fee structure. And but then the flip side, and that's a big problem, but the flip side is then you have people out there that say you should never use a financial advisor, you should self-manage. And I think that's horrible advice as well. Remete does that a lot. And I think Remete has a good message but one of the worst parts of his message is telling people you should never pay a financial advisor 1% of your assets under management. And I think that's a mistake because I guarantee you, if you have the right advisors that are helping you with all of your strategies in building wealth and keeping it, that 1%, it's normally gonna be less than 1%, but that 1% is worth every penny of it because they're gonna guide you with more than just how to pick a mutual fund or an ETF. But the other part of the world where a 401K is a retirement strategy and getting any old financial advisor and turning your money over to them that is a problem is exactly what you alluded to. A lot of these financial advisors will immediately put people into target date funds, mutual funds with high fees and low performance because their job, they wanna keep their job, they wanna stay at the country club, they wanna work on their whiskey collection. So they are not as concerned with building your wealth, they're concerned with preserving it. And so there's a big difference between growing wealth and preserving it. So that is why you see so many of these financial advisors where in a market where we're making 25%, 30%, they're making six because they don't take any risk at all. They wanna stay very risk off in bonds, target date funds, mutual funds because they wanna make sure they don't lose the person's money. And that is also detrimental to someone's future financial health as well. You I'll tell you a horrible story and this is what happened to my mom and it killed me. So we talk about just people not trying to preserve wealth, not grow wealth. You have to be so careful who you pick and to your point you have to do the same amount of due diligence and vetting and effort and work towards how you're gonna invest your money or who's gonna invest your money as you did making it. The first guy, my mom's retired now but she was stressed about this for a while and the first guy that she worked with, he was working for a bank in Canada and he kept making a plan but he wasn't investing. He wasn't investing, he was sitting on it. It was like two years of sitting on the money. Turns out he was sitting on the money for two years because he wanted to quit the bank and go start his own firm but he knew that if the money was invested in the bank then he wouldn't be able to take her as a client with him. So he leaves after two years of her saying, why haven't you like done the shit that we've spoken about? Right. And then he's like, oh, actually, I quit. I started my own firm, do you wanna come with me? And she's like, no, fuck you, no, definitely not. So two years, there's a dollar value attached to that. It happens all the time. And so in the crazy part for me, people, the crazy part for me and what I do every day in this process is people will spend more time researching what use car they wanna buy than they will selecting a financial advisor. Isn't that crazy? If you're going to have a surgery you're gonna get two, three, four opinions from different doctors, different centers to make sure you're gonna do endless research online of what process is best for you to fix whatever the health issue is. But you'll literally hear from a friend of yours that you don't know much about their financial situation of who they use financially and you'll just go hand them the keys to the castle. I think it is a very, very huge problem in the United States and more people should take the time because you have to look at it this way. If you don't use help, that is why so many people join the Rich Habits Network because they're getting the education firsthand in a way that's digestible so they can understand it. But if you don't learn some of it and you just hand it all over to a stranger, that's a huge mistake. But I think it's also a mistake as you're building well to try and do it all on your own because if your goal and your focus is to retire successfully and with dignity, you're gonna need help along the way. Otherwise you're gonna have to be the financial expert, the tax expert, the real estate expert and everything else and that's gonna distract you from actually making the money to be able to invest. And so that's where it gets tricky is I want people to have a base knowledge to know what to do but ask the hard questions and more people need to do that. How do you set your kids up for success, financial success? Start very early. If you own a company, get them on payroll when you can, whether it's sweeping, being in your pictures for your social media. So then that way you can set up a 529 plan or a custodial Roth IRA and start paying them as long as they have earned income and really just set them up for life. I grew up in a situation and most people do where the parents don't really do anything for you before you're 18 years old. And again, it comes down to compound interest. If you get your kids started, let's say you own a company and you have an office every Saturday or whatever day it is, they come in and sweep or open mail or take pictures in your social media, whatever they do. And you put them on payroll and do it all legitimately, think about what that does when they turn 18 and you've got XYZ dollars put away. And another hack you can do for kids to really set them up and help them really understand money early on is make them a signer on a credit card as soon as they can be because some credit cards will let a minor be on the credit card as a signer and build their credit. So when they're 18, they already have an established credit score. I think that's important, but there are a lot of ways that are very effective and don't cost a lot to set your children up for success early on, especially just the art of having conversations with them about money. When you have them do chores, pay them for the chores because it teaches them that if they do something, they get something for it and teach them how to build that understanding. So they don't go through life being financially a literate because I deal with it every single day where there's people in their 30s and 40s that really don't understand finances at all. There's people out there right now that make $150,000 a year, but live with $50,000 in credit card debt. Meanwhile, they're investing in cryptocurrency and not paying off the credit card debt that's 30% interest. You can't out invest high interest debt and it's so important for people to understand all of these pieces of the puzzle to help them build wealth. What would be out of all the different sort of strategies that you've understood and you've used in your own life? What would be the most underrated tactical strategy for wealth building? It could be an investment tool, it could be a tax strategy. What is the one thing that really stands out that more people should know about? I would say the Roth IRA is probably the most important thing. So many people I think less than 40% of US adults over 18 have a Roth IRA. That is tragic because in my opinion, the best way to build wealth and we talked about this in one of the rich habits podcast episodes that did really well, there's a lot of what we call net worth millionaires out there in their broke. Because of the fact that they have all their money in a 401k or they have all their money in their property and you can't get to any of it without penalty because you have it in those two vehicles. So for me, I think all people should really understand have the Roth IRA so you have that tax free growth and you have autonomy and then have the bridge account. The bridge account is the success. It is the most important factor in building wealth to me because it is the money that is growing towards your future because you're investing it but you have autonomy and there's no penalties to remove that money. A lot of people borrow from their future to live today and so they never put aside the money for their future and they kick the can down the road for years and years and years and then wonder why at 55 years old, they only have $87,000 saved for retirement and they're gonna be a Walmart greeter till they're 75 years old. It's sad. It's really sad. People put money in it 401k and not a Roth IRA. Because so many people believe, again, this comes to financial literacy. They check out when it comes to making their money grow. I don't understand it. It is one of the biggest things that I work on with the most amount of people in my message is getting people to understand, make your money work as hard for you as you work to get it. People slave away 40, 50, 60 hours a week to get their money and then it just goes into the 401k and into their checking account and maybe a high yield savings account and they don't work any harder at it. And that bothers me because most 401k's underperform the general market. You could literally in most instances over a 10, 20, 30 year period, you could own VOO, for the S&P 500, QQQ and maybe VGT or VTI and nothing else and you'd outperform 90% of the people out there because you just leave the money, do its job. Compound interest is the most important thing you need to have working for you every day and that is why I beg and plead with the younger audiences, the longer you can allow your money to compound, the more wealthy you're gonna become and it's much easier when you give yourself a long time horizon to let your money work for you. That's great advice. I wanna pull out a couple last sort of questions from your experience just to really give some context as to what it takes just to wrap this up for young entrepreneurs and investors in the audience. So you experienced a roller coaster with silly bands, you've reinvented yourself to a degree multiple times. What's been the most surprising change that you've seen in yourself across your whole career? Giving instead of taking, when I was younger, I came up in an era where you wanted to own, own, own, buy, buy, buy, take, take, take and when I used to go into a negotiation, I wanted to negotiate to the end degree to win. And I've learned now in the last 15 years that the more people like you that I align myself with and the more I give back to the audience and the more I share my story, the wins and the losses, the more I receive. So I really do believe in so many people still look at mindset and a positive mindset and gratitude and authenticity. They look at it as this woo, woo thing that doesn't work. I am absolute proof that a positive mindset, authenticity and giving back works. So that is probably the biggest thing I've learned and I've changed. So I no longer, I really love having partners. I love building businesses with other people that are like-minded. And so for me, I'm always seeking out or they're seeking me out, people that I can align with, that I can go have drinks with, that I can go on the boat with, that I can go wherever with in doing those deals with people that I know want to build as much as I do, but in a way that is meaningful and helpful. The lowest point in your entrepreneurial journey, there was one point when shit was hitting the fan, probably multiple, but think of one many times. Many times, think of one, what was it and what was the strategy that you used to push through a persevere? Wow, the lowest point in my entrepreneurial journey was probably when I was going through my divorce and I had a couple of difficult years. A lot of deals didn't work, a lot of venture capital investments I made went bad, I had some bad partners and I just was like, luckily I was in a good place still financially, but I felt that people gave up on me. They didn't believe in me to the level they once did and I felt that that was probably the lowest point for me, but it was also the highest point because I felt free to start over and really rebuild myself in a way and that even happened even three years ago. I was building a project in Denver with some dear people that I loved and friends of mine and that was when I really started building my personal brand. I had done some speaking with a friend at JP Morgan Chase at this roundtable event and after the event, he's like, why don't you do more with your personal brand? Your brain is 600 miles ahead of everyone else online and that really shook me. I was like, wow, thank you, that is so amazing. And so he's like, you should really share your insights and story more, you're very gifted when it comes to investing in business and mindset. So I literally walked away, took some buyouts, I exited some companies and just walked away from a bunch of stuff and really invented myself over again three, three and a half years ago and it was the best move I ever made because now I'm in a place with millions of followers, the podcasts and all that stuff where I can really, truly change people's lives in a meaningful way by sharing my stories and that is the best it's ever been for me in my career. I love that. When you think about the myths around success, financial freedom, entrepreneurship, things that people don't realize it takes this to achieve who you are today. What would be the biggest myth that you wanna quash? I think the biggest myth and Alex Ramozy does a lot on this as well and I love it is you don't have to get out of bed at four in the morning. You don't have to meditate, you don't have to cold plunge, you don't have to read three books on five X speed. That's all bullshit. You do what works for you. Find the information and the strategies that resonate with you and do that. Every person is different. What works for every person is different and I'm not saying you can't learn from it. I'm sure they're cold plunge benefits. I do cold plunge. I'm sure there's red light therapy benefits. I do that occasionally but don't live your life around all of these massive trends that these charlatans and these grifters tell you because trust me at the end of their conversation to you, they're gonna sell you one of these things. So for me, I think the biggest myth is whatever you see online is not necessarily what's gonna get you where you need to be financially and in your life because there's more to wealth in my opinion than money. There is quality of life. There is where you live. What do you eat? What do you read? All of that to me, all is a blended average of the quality of your life and I think it's so important because there are so many myths out there about financial stability and building wealth and being successful and I think it's all about what works for you and not falling victim to always chasing every trend that you see from the fake gurus online. I love it. What would be after all the success you've had? What would be one surprising thing that's still on your bucket list that you wanna see? Ooh, surprising thing on my bucket list. One of the things other than what we've talked about a lot recently and that is me helping one million people become millionaires in the next five years. That is my main main goal in life because if I can have a million people within my stratosphere, in my matrix, all reach a million dollar net worth value because a lot of what I have educated them on, that is one of the biggest bucket list goals for me. And then secondarily, and this is quite simple, is finding the right property on the right lake so I can have Adirondack chairs on the lake and have a boat dock with my cute little boat so I can write and think freely without all the distractions of city living. That is the next big play for me when it comes to real estate. I love it. Where can people connect with you? Socials, website, podcasts. I mean, rich habits, you can get that wherever you download your podcast, but where else should they go? Yeah, at Robert Croak on Instagram, at Robert Croak official, all of my accounts on TikTok are verified so don't fall for the fake accounts. Obviously follow the rich habits podcast for anyone listening. You just did an episode, it was phenomenal with us. That was awesome. We can't wait to have you back on. And that's really it. YouTube, I'm starting to do more with YouTube, which is exciting and that's it. Last question, out of all the wisdom that you've gained over your years, say you can only pick one lesson that you have to pass on to your kids, which lesson is that and why? Whew, what lesson would I pass along to my kids and anyone else that would listen? Don't talk about it, be about it. Because so many people talk about things, but they don't act. And they live in this comfort zone. They don't ever execute. I have so many people in my stratosphere, friends, family members, that they have a new idea every single month. I have the next silly bands, I have the next this, I have the next Instagram, I have this, but they don't ever do anything with it. And everything is beyond your comfort zone. And if you don't get out of the comfort zone, you're never gonna execute on any of it. So that's for me, don't talk about it, be about it.