Brad Weimert 0:00
What do you think the dumbest thing is that people do with their credit card points instead of leveraging them appropriately easy, Amazon? Oh, using them on Amazon is the dumbest thing. What is the most extravagant thing that you’ve been able to do with your points? The

Eli Facenda 0:12
craziest thing I’ve actually done with points was we end up finding a deal where 25 of us booked on points in business class on Emirates. Emirates took a loss on that one that day, because it was, collectively, it was like hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of travel, and we probably paid like six grand total in taxes and fees.

Brad Weimert 0:29
But you said could be 1.5 million points to get $15,000 flight on Emirates, yep, but you got it for 136,000 points Correct. How does that work? All you have to do is Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. E life send a It is awesome to get you in the studio. Man, good to be here. Man, thanks for having me. Yeah, for sure. So Eli, the travel guy, your moniker is built around luxury travel at no cost. Basically, you’re spending functionally 100 grand a year on travel, but not actually spending it exactly. So I want to get into a lot of things, but first and foremost, what do you think the dumbest thing is that people do with their credit card points instead of leveraging them appropriately

Eli Facenda 1:48
easy Amazon, oh shit, using them on Amazon is the dumbest thing. Why do you do that? A lot? No, no, okay, never. Usually I say that, and people are like, oh shit. So you know, the different ways that you can use your points will have a kind of a different value on them. And so one of the things that you really want to do is multiply the value of the points. And if you go to Amazon, it’s one of the least valuable ways to use your points, so you’ll get around six tenths of a cent. Oh shit. If you go to like Amazon or Amex directly, or one of the banks, you’re at one cent. If you do like transferring points and leverage them for international business class luxury hotels, you can get five cents per point, 10 cents per point, 10 cents per point, so literally, it could be almost 1/20 of the way that you could use it. So, you know, a million points is $6,000 through Amazon, but a million points for me with travel is like $50,000 I always tell people like, Do you want a fancy vacuum, or do you want, like, a luxury suit with a shower in the sky and stuff like that. So it’s really easy though. You know, Amex makes it or Amazon makes it extremely easy. You just go right to their site and they’re like, and they’re like, you have $3,000 worth of Amex points. It’s so, you know, so easy to do, but it is a terrible easier points that

Brad Weimert 2:48
I think, setting the frame here with any credit card points, you just said it, but I’ll say it another way, which is like, there is some exchange rate of your points to real dollars, yes. And if you’re using frequent flyer points versus, you know, Amex multiplier multiplied points, how you spend them, actually comes down to $1 amount. If you don’t know that you’re just fucking wasting money

Eli Facenda 3:09
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’d be like, if you didn’t know the difference between US dollars and pesos, and someone was like, I have, I want to give you $100 or 100 pesos, you’d be like, Well, I don’t care. I’ll take either. It’s pretty bad decision if you don’t know the value the currency, right? So I will say there’s one actually dumber way than using Amazon, which is to let your points expire, let your miles expire, which happens to more people than you think, pretty easily avoidable, and, like a lot of programs change, where these expirations don’t happen as much. But like, I’ve talked to people, they’re like, I had a million points here and I didn’t use them in another gone. That that is the worst,

Brad Weimert 3:39
brutal, yeah, what are the worst credit cards you could have as a business? So I like

Eli Facenda 3:43
to break this down into kind of segments of credit cards. You mentioned the different types. So if we talk about these different points currencies, there’s what we call transferable bank points. So there’s gonna be AmEx, Chase city, Capital One now built, has it Wells Fargo just integrated that. And those are, those are great because you can convert the points, which means they have a lot more value. Okay, then you’ve got airline or hotel co branded cards. So that’s a card issued by AmEx, but you earn Delta miles, you know, the AMEX Delta, or you’re gonna get the chase Marriott card, for example. So those are co branded cards, the worst cards. I mean debit cards, like, there’s really, I can’t even think of a reason to use a debit card. So that would be number one, but number two is going to be non transferable bank cards. So think of like Bank of America or PNC or TD Bank. You might earn points with them, but you can’t transfer them, so it’s essentially cash back. So that that and cash back are basically the same, because there’s a fixed value on what you’re going to get, and so there’s really no upside if you have the bank points, or even the airline co branded card points, like the, you know, again, Marriott points, or Hyatt points, or whatever airline, then you can multiply the value of the points, and that gives you upside. So I always like to stay to those, and I always recommend the transferable bank points first. So the worst ones, though, are just like, you don’t have any options with it, so you might as well just get cash back at that point. It’s kind of silly, in my opinion. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it makes sense to start there. But once you figure this out, it’s like that. That’s a waste of a waste of your opportunity on spend back

Brad Weimert 5:02
to the exchange rate. Thing. Is there a world in which the bank specific ones that are doing points that aren’t transferable, which means you can only spend them internally, which means, really, it’s cash back, exactly. Are there any of those that the multiple on points you get is enough, where the cash back is going to outweigh any of the transferable stuff, or are the transferable ones always better? Yeah. So

Eli Facenda 5:21
there’s a lot of stuff in in this world where it’s very conditional, because it kind of depends on your situation. So it’s like, if you travel, then no, but if you don’t travel, then cash back. In certain cases can make sense, or like, these points get So Chase just came out, the new card called the chase Inc premiere, and you can earn 2.5 points per dollar on everything, which is pretty significant. That’s like a really high value on your points, but you can’t transfer them. So essentially, it’s a flat two and a half percent cash back, which is still pretty good from a cash back standpoint perspective, we like to so we calculate something called Return on spend, which is, for every dollar you spend, how much you’re getting back. 2.5% cash back is pretty simple. It’s two and a half percent. But if you use points, and let’s say, you get a card that earned two points per dollar, and then you use those points effectively, you might get 678, percent back on your spending, right? So it’s a much higher multiple, but that’s if you travel, in particularly if you’re doing more international travel or, like luxury travel, that’s where you’re gonna get the best value. So if you don’t travel, or you really just do super budget travel, then the Cash Back Cards, or the cards that earn those kind of fixed value points could make sense in that case. So I’m still an advocate. Obviously, my brand, my values, are about having awesome experiences in life and using these points for travel. So I’m always saying, like, don’t do that. But for certain people, it could make sense.

Brad Weimert 6:34
Got it. So the biggest lever is around travel. Yes, by far, love that also downside to the chase card is that you have to work with Chase, which is the worst fucking bank.

Eli Facenda 6:46
I dude, I actually think Bank of America is the absolute worst. The interface. Have you used the Bank of America before?

Brad Weimert 6:51
I have it in the past, in some ways pretty bad. It’s like a built in 98 or 90 Oh, like a corporate

Eli Facenda 6:55
account and then a sub account. And it’s like, if you pay one, it didn’t pay the other. And it’s like, you need to click. It’s just, it’s just, it’s horrible. So Bank of America is my least

Brad Weimert 7:02
favorite. Oh, Chase is by far my least favorite. I think that they’re just a terrible bank in general. I’ve got a bone to pick with them, but any chance I get to talk to chase and deter people from working with them, I will,

Eli Facenda 7:12
well, similar to your industry, we have people. We talk to clients, and we’re doing, like, our onboarding, we’re talking then we’re like, but cool. So any banks that like you just need to stay away from and they’ll just be like, I hate Amex. And we’re like, whoa, like, but there was some serious bad blood in the past there. So I get it. It happens that was me with Chase. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 7:29
exactly, yeah. So, okay, so you just said this, but I want to double click on it. When you have a business, or I guess you’re an individual that spends a lot of money, but specifically when you have a business and you spend tons of money on a card, you rack up a shitload of points. And so, yeah, you get tons of benefit as somebody that makes a lot of money. It’s the perk of making a lot of money, spending a lot of money, you also get a bunch of points. Is there a game to be played for sort of new entrepreneurs that aren’t spending a ton on their card every year? Yeah, on an ongoing basis?

Eli Facenda 8:00
Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, there’s a spectrum, right? So like, the less you spend, the more strategic you have to be, the more you spend, like we have some, you know, a lot of affiliate marketers, people are spending millions and millions a month. They have more points than what to do with so, like, maximizing the value out of those points to them is kind of a irrelevant thing, right? So I started doing this, though, when I was 23 years old, and I was spending 1500 bucks a month. So I didn’t even really have a bit. I mean, I was building a business. I was I had equity in this company, but it wasn’t my spend. So I was spending a really low amount, but I was still getting, you know, 15, $20,000 worth of travel a year, and that was really, I mean, at that point in my life, and that’s still meaningful to me. Now, it was a game changer then. So, like, it’s actually more meaningful for the early stage entrepreneur, because it probably will unlock something that they really wouldn’t be able to have, whereas, like a more seasoned eight figure entrepreneur could probably just pay for vacations. It’s more of a strategy game at that level, like you really need to have the right cards and you really need to use your points effectively. The leverage isn’t as high, but the impact to your life will actually probably be more meaningful to the individual.

Brad Weimert 8:59
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think about it today, the most important thing to me in my life is focus at the moment, and that’s because the opportunity cost of time is so high, yeah, that if I misuse my focus, I’m blowing a lot of opportunity. And you could look at that as financially expensive or just cost quality of life? Yeah, totally. So I would rather pay for something than deal with a bunch of shit totally to save $2 exactly,

Eli Facenda 9:29
or some other larger amount, right? And that’s that’s why a lot of business owners miss on this, because they see a lot of information or content or influencers out there that are targeting a different demographic than them. So, like, we’re one of the few companies that does this for business owners and understands like that psychology. I saw a post the other day, and I know the people that run this account, it’s great, but they were like, don’t miss out on the $200 credit on your Amex card. You could be that’s $7 a month plus this. And I’m like, like, they’re like, all you should do is this and then. In this, in this, and you save 180 bucks a year. And I’m like, oh my god, like doing that. So Right? But it’s just a different a different avatar. And so for us, we calculate thing, we calculate the opportunity cost of not getting a couple of the right cards. And for a lot of people, it’s like 100 grand a year of easy money, similar what you guys are doing with merchant processing. It’s like, you’re already going to collect payments. You might as well do it efficiently. Yeah, you’re already gonna spend the money, so, like, you might as well optimize it if you’re spending 10s of 1000s of dollars a month. So that’s kind of the thinking. If it’s if the leverage is there, it makes sense, but if it requires a ton of time, you have an assistant that helps. Like, that’s a smart move. So

Brad Weimert 10:33
yeah, I love that. I’m gonna circle back to that in a second. But before I do what is the most extravagant thing that you’ve been able to do with your points.

Eli Facenda 10:43
So this was unbelievably amazing when this happened. So I was flying into New York City. I’m about two months into dating my girlfriend. So I’m like, I’m the man. I want to show her an awesome time, right? So I’m flying in from Colorado. I was on a ski trip. She’s meeting there from Austin. We’re going to New York for Christmas. I’m like, this will be beautiful, big city. The whole thing, I just booked the Park Hyatt in Manhattan, and it’s an awesome hotel, and it’s already a great deal. So this was the base room. Was like 1000 bucks a night, and I got it for about 40,000 points, which is solid value for most people. 40,000 points is 400 bucks, so I’m already winning at that level. I got status there, so I get breakfast and stuff like that. But I land at the airport and my girlfriend, at the time, was already at the hotel, and she calls me, and she’s like, Did you see what happened? And I started freaking out. I’m like, no, like, is everything okay? She’s like, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s okay. And I’m like, what that? She’s like, I’ll tell you, when you get here, I get there, she calls me. She’s like, Hey, you gotta come to the room, like, 2304 or whatever it was. She’s like, we gotta upgrade to the presidential suite. I’m like, No way. That’s super cool. And I go to the front desk, I’m like, Hey, I’m getting the keys to go up. And they’re like, Do you know how much that room costs per night? And I’m like, I was like, I have no idea. I didn’t know what to expect. They’re like, this goes for $30,000 a night. And they’re like, enjoy the upgrade we had. Like, a butler, you know? Like, like, two baths, like crazy fat room, the essential Park is just a ridiculous experience. And I mean, that was, you know, the quality of that upgrade, obviously, is meaningful, but just the more, like, the elation of like this cost 30 grand, and I did nothing for it like that was, that was really cool. So that was one of the most peak experiences we had in terms of, like, upgrades, and then best value out of like, using points is, before you get to how did that upgrade happen? Very interesting. I’m not entirely sure, because I have globalist status, which doesn’t entitle you to those kinds of levels of upgrades. It can, though, in rare instances. And some of these hotels will do research on who’s coming, like, you know, like, maybe they saw that I have a brand and travel and right partially did it because of that, but they didn’t mention anything about that. I don’t know how they would have pieced that together. I know hotel has really done that before, but I’ll tell you for sure what was a big factor. So we booked two nights there, but I had a change of plan, so we booked two separate reservations. So in their system, they saw one night. And so they would never upgrade you to that if you were there for like, two or three or four or five nights consecutively, because just too much to give away. So I think what happened is they saw one night, they saw the global status. Maybe they did the research in the brand. They saw that it was vacant, and we checked in pretty late that night. And I think they were just like, we might as well, you know, do something awesome here. Somehow they piece that together. But what’s funny is, the next morning, I woke up and we were supposed to change rooms, and it was like, 11am and I give them a call down at the front desk, and I’m like, desk, and I’m like, I’m like, Hey, amazing. Thank you so much. The upgrade. It was beautiful. We had such a great time, by the way. I’ll just keep it easy on both of us. I’ll just stay in this room, you know, then you don’t need to clean the room. We’ll save the the issue. And they were like, yeah, no, you need to get the hell out of there. And like, Alright, fair enough. Fair enough. So that was how that happened, yeah. Well,

Brad Weimert 13:39
I wonder, with those rooms in general, how often they actually get the rack rate for it, versus using it as a lever to

Eli Facenda 13:49
make other people have right? It’s highlighting the news. You know, I because after that, I started researching. It’s like dozens of articles. You know, Manhattan’s five most expensive luxury five star suites. It’s like in the top, you know, top ones. So it could be that, I imagine it would probably be something for events, if anything. I mean, the place was decked out, you know, you walk in, there’s a full kitchen with, like, glasses and tableware, like it was meant for hosting. It’s not really meant for just, like a, you know, for, like, a famous DJ to stay there for a night by himself, or something. That

Brad Weimert 14:16
makes sense. Okay, so that one’s sort of happenstance, unsure. Yeah, tell me about the strategic one. Yeah, where what’s, what’s the most strategic move you’ve made with points that has resulted in something ridiculous?

Eli Facenda 14:26
Yeah, I’ll tell you too. And they’re both Emirates. Have you flown Emirates? No, I haven’t yet. That’s my favorite airline. Literally, everybody says, Dude, it’s you just get treated so unbelievably well, like I

Brad Weimert 14:36
want to go, not because I want to go somewhere, but because I just want to fly. Emma, yeah, exactly I’ve done, I specifically in the ridiculous, in the ridiculously,

Eli Facenda 14:42
yeah, exactly. So they treat you unbelievably well. The a 380 aircraft is once a double decker, has the in flight bar and the shower for first class. You know, Dom Perry on you’ve got caviar, you’ve got, like, lobster mac and cheese. It’s like a It’s an insane menu. So that that experience is really good, which I’ll. Break down for you. But the craziest thing I’ve actually done with points was for groups. So you were talking about how you go on a ski trip every year with a bunch of entrepreneurs. I host my own mastermind every year. And two years ago, about 40 of us were going to chamini, France. And so Emirates actually operates a route between New York, JFK and Milan, so you don’t actually have to fly the way to Dubai. You can go to Italy, which is on the way. And so I’d done the points research. And the first time I flew Emirates on the A 380 with the inflate bar, I walked on, and I was like, I saw this kind of cocktail. It’s literally the size of this room. It’s like, on the plane. And I was like, I just saw all my friends there. And I was like, I have to find a way to get, like, a group on here. So we end up finding a deal where 25 of us booked on points in business class on Emirates. And so, you know, we’re taking off to go on the ski trip. And the trip really started in New York. We get on, we get on the plane. The seat belt sign comes off, you know, like, You’re, like, 15 minutes into the flight, like thing, 25 guys stand up, rush to the back of the plane to go to the bar. These like, little like European flight attendants are, you know, sitting there, and they’re like, their eyes are just filled with horror. Like, what are you guys doing? Usually, they’re used to, like, two or three people, right? It’s like a bum rush. And we’re like, get the champagne party. So, I mean, we had 25 of us Emirates took a loss on that one that day, because it was, you know, collectively, it was like hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of travel, and we probably paid like, six grand total in tax and fees. So there was that experience. And then multiple times I’ve booked Emirates first class. I just actually did a trip where I proposed to my fiance in Europe, and we flew Emirates first on the same route on the way over. So first class, bigger suite. It has the in flight shower too, which is just, it’s completely unnecessary and completely incredible at the same time. So that would have been a $15,000 ticket per person for that. If you go right to AmEx, that means it’s 1.5 million points. I’ve booked that for 136,000.0 shit, and 500 bucks.

Brad Weimert 16:52
So like nothing compared. Okay, first of all, I can think of many use cases for

Eli Facenda 16:56
the shower where you’re going with this you walk to the bathroom. It’s a huge bathroom, right? Big on the door. It says Max occupancy, too. Oh, nice, perfect. I’m like, well done. Emmett, you know exactly what you do? Perfect, yeah. So tell me

Brad Weimert 17:10
about the point structure here, because this, this is the crux of it, I think, for your brand and for people that really want to leverage all of the spending as a business that they do on a credit card, yeah, if they travel, yes. You know, most entrepreneurs do. So, you know, you said it could be 1.5 million points to get $15,000 flight on Emirates, yep, but you got it for 136,000

Eli Facenda 17:34
points, correct? How does that work? Yeah. So the way that it works is the banks and airlines have partnerships. And then another layer of that is that the airlines are in alliances, and they have partnerships. So you can leverage this game. Basically think of it like the tax code, like you’re finding loopholes that are legal, but like, if you figure it out, you can really just take advantage of the system. And so AmEx and Emirates have a partnership, and the way Amex prices is based off the cost of the ticket. It’s called a revenue based award chart. So you know basically what they do on the back end, Amex partners with online travel agencies. And so when you redeem your points through AmEx, you’re essentially just cashing them in. Amex is going to whatever it is and buying the ticket. So if the price of the ticket doubles, the number of points will double on Amex. If you convert them into airline miles, they’re on a different pricing chart. So these are called a war charts, and they base it off of the zone. So they say east coast to Dubai is this or this based off of off peak or peak pricing. So it might not always be available. It’s a different pool of inventory than what you’re going to see with cash. So if a plane has 500 seats, maybe 250 are available on Emirates, and 500 of them are available on AmEx, because if you could buy it with cash, it’ll be available on Amex site, okay, but if you convert the points from Amex into the airline, the seats available, you’re gonna be on that award based, like, zone based pricing, which is often way, way less than the revenue based pricing. So that’s called points arbitrage, and that’s really the sweet spot. Love it, of leveraging these points, where you’re gonna get that multiple so yeah, you can think of it on value, on your points, or you can think of it a percentage. Think of it a percentage off versus the bank. Either way is whatever makes sense to you. I

Brad Weimert 19:07
love it. So I know that a bunch of people listening just heard that, and they’re like, Oh, that’s interesting. And that sounds like a horrible pain in the ass to track down how to do the arbitrage. Yeah, let me plant a seed for you and say that that’s exactly what your company does. Just watch that stuff for entrepreneurs to be able to facilitate the best experiences and teach them how to do this and or do it for them, exactly. So we’ll get back to your business in a second. Cool What are give me, like the top three tips that you have for an entrepreneur that’s doing 5 million a year in terms of picking the right cards and leveraging them? Yeah.

Eli Facenda 19:38
So the first thing I’m gonna I’m going to share is you want to have a simple card setup that’s high leverage. A lot of people think I don’t want to have 20 credit cards. I do real estate investing and credit and 20 cards too much to manage three to five total between personal and business is solid. Okay? You want to have one to two. We call category bonus multiplier cards. So if you spend a lot on ads, get a card that earns three to four times as many points. Points on ads, right? That’s a common expense, so get that down. If you spend a lot on, let’s say, the sales team that travels at conferences, you probably want to have a card that earns five points per dollar on flights, because they’ll earn the miles on the like, but in seat miles, but you’re going to earn the credit card points on those purchases. And if you’re spending 100 grand a year to send people to trade shows or your own business travel, like, maximize that stuff. So that’s going to be, that’s going to be the first thing I do really recommend having an assistant, whether you were to work with us, do it on your own, whatever you want, having an assistant handle this for you is massive. Like, I haven’t booked an actual flight myself, and I know this stuff in a long time, because I’m like, I don’t want to do it right? So I have a team, and I have an assistant myself, because same problem, like, I want to run my business, even though I know this stuff, I don’t want to dive into the weeds. So those are a couple of things there. The last thing I’ll share is there’s, there tends to be a lot of expenses in businesses and in life that fall into what we call the non category bonus level. So that would be, you have a lot of contractors. You pay on a card, you have inventory you’re purchasing that’s not ad spend or software, dining or groceries, you know, these bonus categories. So what do you do there? Well, there’s cards like the capital and venture X for business that get unlimited two points per dollar on everything. So that’s really big, because, let’s say you spend half a million a year on that type of expense just one card. You put everything on that card for that expense, you just went from half a million points a year to a million, which, again, the way I’m showing you that could be worth 10s of 1000s of dollars from changing. How long does a credit card application take? Two minutes. You fill out an application for two minutes. You put all the expenses there. You just got 10s of 1000s of dollars of travel back every year. So that would be one high leverage change I would look at specifically for that card, for people that spend a lot on ads and software, which is a very common expense. The Amex business gold is definitely like the prime card for that to start with, and then, depending on how much they’re spending these different categories, and you could kind of like, tranche it out, if you want

Brad Weimert 21:47
to, yeah, I’m glad that you didn’t go down the chase path again, because we don’t,

Eli Facenda 21:50
we don’t say the C word here, yeah, we can say it just

Brad Weimert 21:53
not Yeah. Good light, yeah. I love it. That’s awesome. The is there. This is scratching my own itch, but Amex gold multipliers for spending on ads don’t have a cap.

Eli Facenda 22:05
They do. Okay, that’s why, saying tranche it out, because, like, depending on you can have multiple so, you know our heck, yep, I think he actually introduced us. One of the reasons he loved us so much was because he didn’t know you could have multiple Amex business goals on one business. Oh, interesting. So he’s, like, spending a lot on YouTube ads, right? And so we’re like, Hey, your first 150k What are you doing with the rest? He’s like, Well, I just put it on, I think the first gold, or whatever he had. And he’s like, earn 1x we’re like, Oh, get multiple. And he’s like, Wait, you’re saying so that was, like, millions of points for him, yeah, because he went from getting probably, you know, 150,000 of ad spend at 4x is 600,000 points. And then let’s say he was spending another 500k a year at 1x so he was before total, like 1.1 million points a year, and then now we got the whole thing at 4x so that puts him probably, like, two, 3 million points a year, and all of a sudden, that’s like, that’s a huge difference. And what he does actually, that’s cool, he’ll send an employee of the quarter or the year, or has used these points as an incentive and say, Hey, instead of sending you a $10,000 check as a bonus. I’m gonna give you a $40,000 trip with your wife or whoever, to the Maldives. You’re gonna fly first class. You’re gonna do an overwater villa. It would normally cost 50 grand. It cost him zero. And then he gives a bonus to his team that’s more meaningful than just it’s more memorable. It has more impact, creates more loyalty than just a cash check. So that’s a way to he leverages the points, because he has so much more from that, from the sick. Yeah, Hey,

Brad Weimert 23:24
Vince, you want to go on a trip? I love that. Yeah, it’s flying back to Michigan. It’s on a plane, and at some point we looked up and realized that we were a seat across the aisle from each other. Yeah, yeah. And so we’re walking through the Detroit airport, and you started telling me about not this business, but your last business. I think that’s probably a good starting point to walk into how we ended up here. But totally, what was that business? And, yeah, give me the basics. Yeah,

Eli Facenda 23:52
I’m still, I’m so lightly involved with it, but it’s a sports tour company, so I was seeing that the other day. I’m like, Damn, I’ve only done blue ocean things. Like, I’ve never been in a business where I’m competing for I was like, that’s kind of cool. But so what that company does is it’s basically youth sports tournaments, times international travel for like, families. So a 13 year baseball team will take them to Italy or Japan. They travel the country for 10 days. We play in the entire itinerary, bus, hotels, all that. But then they’re gonna play against local teams and have, like, meals after to interact with, with the local families. So all sports all over the world.

Brad Weimert 24:25
Hold on. What the fuck you talking about? That’s so strange. So yeah, hold on. So who break this down for me? Who are you targeting? Are you finding an existing team that does well and saying and soliciting the team and saying, Hey, we’re gonna create this crazy experience for your kids. Yeah, the families to experience a new country through the sports. Yeah, through the games.

Eli Facenda 24:50
Yeah. So the linpin is finding a really, like micro influencer coach in a pocket. So obviously, these are expensive trips, so you need, like, relatively wealthy areas. And then you find the coach who’s got like, two kids and a bunch of best friends, and their kids all play 12 you. And you’re like, Hey, you guys play in tournaments all over the US. Have you ever thought, like, what have you played in Italy before? And they’re like, you’re saying we could represent the USA on their sleeves. They’re going over abroad. They already want to take a family vacation. The kids need something to do that’s not just a trip to Italy. The mom wants to go drink wine in Rome. She doesn’t want to go to a baseball field. The dad doesn’t baseball field. The dad doesn’t care about that. He wants to play baseball. The kids get to have a cultural experience. We’re like, Hey, we’re going to handle the whole thing, and you get to do it with your friends. And so we find the coaches. They get to go for free as, like, trip leaders, and then we kind of support them in the sales process, if you will. But it’s like recruiting for a team, and then it’s tends to be an invite only thing. There’s a lot of challenges with that business. It’s, it’s totally a sole business. Like, in terms of, like, It’s so fulfilling, is so fun. And that was actually a challenge when I got into online, like, being disconnected from the people and seeing the impact in person was a challenge for me at first, because I was so used to like traveling the world and seeing, you know, you see a mom and a dad, and they take the grandparent and the kid, and they’re Catholic, and they’re going through the Vatican for the first time, and you’re seeing them be like, Oh my God. Like, it’s like, really cool stuff. And so that’s what that business is. But yeah, we’re still, we’re still rocking COVID. Smoked. Smoked us. We were doing 4 million a year. Went from 4 million to 150k overnight. Oh

Brad Weimert 26:17
yeah, damn, not good. Yeah. And COVID did that with lots of people. Yeah, exactly. But, but That’s bizarre. How did you, how did you even think about getting into that? And I can, I think I can see the elements, yeah, of the transition into the new Yeah, gig. But how did you come up with that business? Where did you start? That’s so strange, yeah. So I

Eli Facenda 26:37
was really an entrepreneur here. So what happened? I went to Lehigh University. It’s near New York City, pretty good school where pretty much everyone that’s a finance degree, which I was goes to Wall Street. So I had done a study abroad period. And basically my former high school baseball coach is like a national icon, like the best leader guy, like leadership team guy I’ve seen in business or sports, like, unbelievable. And he had taken a group overseas that I went on when I was in high school, and he loved the concept, but the company he went with kind of didn’t do a great job. And he was like, I want to do this on my own. So he started a business. And then he was like, hey, when you’re over abroad, can you help us plan a trip? So I’m like, sure. I go abroad. I started helping to plan I’m in this finance degree, and I’m like, I don’t want to go to Wall Street that sounds miserable, like, work your ass off. I was like, that’s just not me. And somehow things opened up where they’re like, do you want to be our first employee? We’re going to essentially give you all this opportunity, and you can just grow it. Your first assignment is to go to Europe for two weeks, make as many contacts as you can. It’s on our dime, and go travel. And I was like, travel, freedom, entrepreneurship, something I care about. I didn’t even ask how much I was going to get paid, which was a mistake. So I was like, I’m in. And so what happened is, we started building that company, but then I had a lot of wealthy friends, and I was traveling and I didn’t have any money, credit card points. How do I take trips and see my friends? How do I go to these, like weddings and bachelor parties and all that stuff, if I don’t have money, because I don’t want to go take like a nine to five? And so the points became the solution to my problem, and then it also helped the tour company. So that was kind of the you was kind of the segue, yeah,

Brad Weimert 28:03
that’s, that was the so hold on, that’s what I thought the transition. Yeah, exactly. But in terms of the tour company, yeah, you were, I didn’t, I didn’t get the dots there. So okay, how did the tour company start?

Eli Facenda 28:18
So my high school coach invited to lead a trip, a couple trips when he was, when I, when I was going through high school. So I attended as a player. Oh, got it. So I, you saw it happen? I Yeah, it was the first ever, actually, really, the reason I fell in love with travel is when I was 16, I got invited to go on one of these trips. And our family went to the Dominican, and I’m playing baseball down there, and I remember, like, you know, we’re playing on like, a field that’s literally sand, Lot Like, no fence, naked baby running around the dugout, a guy’s trying to sell corn to us in the middle of the game in the field. Like, it was, like, nuts, and we’re playing as these local kids. I had this really cool eye opening experience. And I was like, I want to go, like, this is so amazing. I’d never left the Northern Virginia. I mean, we traveled domestically, but I hadn’t traveled much, and not overseas. So that was eye opening. I was like, I want to go, like, I want to go, like, see the world. So that’s why I ended up studying abroad. And then when, when he decided to launch, launch his company and do that version of it, he needed help planning a trip in Spain, and I happened to be there when I was abroad. So that’s how I got in, and that’s how he started the company. And then they started, like, really be like, Hey, we’re gonna grow it. And then they hired me.

Brad Weimert 29:17
Oh, crazy, Yeah, crazy. How big do you think that market is? How big do you think you could have continued to make that if it wasn’t for COVID? So it’s

Eli Facenda 29:24
still going. It’s still going. There are some behemoths in the space, in other industries. There were some that do, like, 30 to 50 million top line a year, damn. The margins aren’t really high in that, though, right? It’s not a mass, a massive high margin company, but, but it’s fun. It’s fun, and it has its perks. I mean, for someone that’s like, doesn’t care about making multiple seven figures a year, and they just want, like, an awesome thing that they love that makes decent money, it’s a great business. Yeah, I still believe, like, we just partnered with perfect game, which is, like, a huge baseball company in the youth baseball world. It’s like, the is like the behemoth. It’s like, I can’t even explain how big they. They dominate the market. So it could still, still easily go 20, 30 million a year. No problem, just in baseball. And then you could add another sports and verticals

Brad Weimert 30:08
for sure, too. You sort of defined the transition for necessity, which was you found yourself in a position where you were now, you now had a job traveling internationally, but didn’t have any money, really. So you’re leveraging points. Correct, necessity, yep, you define this journey as moving from necessity to obsession to Hobby, yes, to business. Correct. Talk about the transition of moving from necessity to obsession to hobby to business. Yeah.

Eli Facenda 30:38
I mean, so solve the problem for myself first, and then next thing I know, I’m making 25 grand a year, and I’m walking into business class flights that cost $6,000 per ticket. I’m paying $6 for them. So you can imagine the doping hit that that is when I’m doing the math, and I’m like, This seat is 25% of my income, and I didn’t pay for it, and I’m traveling with, like, millionaires and I’m broke, but I’m, like, on my mission for business and like, around the people I want to be around. You know, I was very into personal development. So I’m like, that was the necessity to obsession. I was like, This is unbelievable. I started to go to personal development conferences and events around the world because I had points and opened the gateway from me to travel. So I got addicted fast in terms of, like, it’s opening doors I get to have. It also gave me a lot of significance. Of like, I’m the smart guy who figured this out, and then people are paying for stuff at dinner with the wrong card, and I’m like, don’t use that card. Use this card. So I just started, like, being the annoying friend that was, like, telling everyone how to do this. Yeah, so that happened, and years later, it was kind of something I just was casually helping a lot of people out with. And eventually I saw this, like thing called Online Business pop up. And quite honestly, I saw a lot of people online that I was like, that person’s an idiot, and they’re making a lot more money than I am, and working way less because the tour company was fulfilling, but it was a grind. It’s a hard business to scale, and there’s a lot of difficulty with it. And I wasn’t making that much. And I was like, I want to start this thing is a side hustle, because it could be like a passion business. It’ll be just my own, and I’ll just, like, make some side money, and it’ll be kind of like a nice hobby consulting thing, and I’ll run alongside the tour company. And so that was the intent in the beginning, and then it started to just take off. And then also that was, like, simultaneous to when COVID hit. So this business was growing a lot, and my existing business was just in a really, really tough time. And I was like, This just makes a lot of sense to double down on this. There’s a lot of opportunity. And no one’s doing what I’m doing in this space. No one was consulting business owners or doing service or business owners. Everyone was like, reaching mass market or doing stuff for individuals. And so I was like, here’s a blue ocean. It aligns with my passion, my values, my interest. I can add a lot of value. And that was kind of how it turned into a bigger business. Social media was kind of the gateway. Instagram reels exploded. I was getting reels that were getting millions and millions of views, picking up all sorts of new audience and eyeballs and clients from that, and starting to speak it on, you know, pretty big stages and stuff like that. And happen pretty quick, awesome.

Brad Weimert 32:57
So what exactly is the business? So, like you, and I think that, I mean, I know the basics of it, but you go from figuring out a way to the necessity, which is figuring out a way to pay for dope things with points, getting obsessed with it, from a dopamine hit, and then sort of playing with it and starting to talk to friends, which is the hobby component. And then it rolls into business. How did you formalize the structure as the business. What is the business now? Where does revenue come from?

Eli Facenda 33:24
Yeah, I shouldn’t be proud of this, but it took me about a year and a half to get my first client awesome. So I decided, and I have a lot of skills that I need. I love that. I love that. And she paid $300 and I immediately spent it on an upgrade on a United flight from DC to La the same day. So it’s like, I was like, This is great. So initially, when I started, I was doing, you know, a lot of the models I was learning were, like, I was learning from like, online business gurus. They were all talking about coaching. And I was like, I’ll coach people. Well, it turns out business owners didn’t want to spend eight one on one sessions learning this, and I couldn’t relate to that at the time. So eventually, like, oh, I’ll just do it as, like, a service. And then I kind of hybrided things where it was like, you know, traditional group coaching calls plus a little bit of service. It was kind of like a hybrid offer. And so we stuck with that for a few years, where basically what we we started doing was like a custom card plan, and then we would consult people on their trips, we train their assistant, they get access to our team. And then occasionally we would integrate, like a, what we call a done for you trip, where we just plan the whole thing. Okay, so that was how it worked. And then what we’ve done recently is we’ve kind of unbundled things, like we have this high ticket offer, or set of high ticket offers, and we still do them, but we’ve more extracted individual products out. So it’s like, you can just buy a card plan, if you just need help optimizing your cards, you can just get a trip, or you can access really, we have a killer community, and what we do there is now we’re selling basically access to our team and support there, but what we do is we send like custom trips. So when you come in, you’d say, Hey, I have half a million points. I’m interested in bucket list experiences, to Japan, Italy, Norway, Maldives, roughly, this is when I can travel. Our team monitors things and sends you entire packages of like. Hey, Brad, here’s a $40,000 trip to the Maldives works with your dates. Epic trip first class. Let us know if you want to book it. We’ll help you make it happen. So it’s like a proactive dream trip provider, essentially. Yeah, so there’s two types of people’s travel. There’s the travel you have already, and then there’s the travel that you want to do, the aspirational bucket list stuff. Most people never get to that. And so personally, for me, there’s probably more money in scale and just helping people with like, their existing trips and stuff like that. But the the more exciting kind of transformative piece is when you help someone take a bucket list trip that they probably wouldn’t have taken, especially if it’s like Hustler, entrepreneur, they don’t spend enough time with their family, and you help them get access to that that’s more like the meaningful

Brad Weimert 35:42
side. Yeah? So correct me, if I’m wrong too, but the so first of all, to recap, yeah, one of the product offerings is just create the card stack. Let a business owner know what credit cards they should be using based on their current spend, which is a huge asterisk that,

Eli Facenda 35:57
yeah, that’s why chatgpt does not work for this, right? Because there’s a lot of if then, kind of conditional, okay, if you spend over 150k then get this card. But if you try travel enough to get status on Delta, actually, that second tranche of spendies, you go on a Delta card. If you don’t, though you’re staying in hotels twice a month and you do this, then we need this card. Okay, if you don’t do either of those, then get this card. Yeah. So it’s like, it’s a lot of situational stuff, yeah.

Brad Weimert 36:19
So there and so to me, there are two elements, elements of this. One is having the right stack of cards based on your current spend and status, etc. The other is actually leveraging all the shit that you get from the cards the right way. And so both of those are super relevant. The first one is a no brainer, to pay for, pay for that service, because why would you not do that? You’ll make that back right away. That was, to me, that was the no brainer, yeah, in terms of leveraging the points you get, that’s the thing that I said earlier, like, I don’t fucking have time for this shit, yeah? So giving it to you and saying you take care of it, super valuable also. But there are two different types of travel that you pointed out. One is all this routine business travel that I’m doing anyway. So I’ve averaged, you know, 26 trips a year for the last 15 years. Wow, right. At this point, I find it annoying as fuck, but at one point it was exciting, yeah, and now I’m trying not to, but the other travel is the experiential bucket list stuff. The experiential bucket list stuff, for most people, can have more flexibility and timeline, date, location, etc, routine travel stuff has very concrete timelines that you have to stick to, usually correct. I would assume that the lever is bigger with experiential stuff. Is that accurate?

Eli Facenda 37:31
Yeah, these the opportunity to get outsized value on your points and, again, also quality. You talked earlier about, like opportunity cost of money. It’s kind of the same thing. There’s the cash savings, but there’s also the experiential benefits you’re unlocking that you probably wouldn’t unlock, like, you’re probably not gonna pay 15 grand to fly first class on Emirates with a shower, most likely, like you could, but you’d probably feel like that was a little bit of waste of money, right? But if you use the points, and you’re like, I can do that now, that unlocks that experience. So absolutely it, I don’t, I don’t want to overlook that you can use points for the existing travel that you have, and, you know, the perks and the status and the upgrades, even if it’s a business expense and you have status and you get free upgrades, that’s a nice, you know, additional perk, one of the biggest things that a lot of business owners, you know, I was just at four rooms mastermind with Amber spears. And love Amber awesome. She’s awesome. And I was talking to a lot of people there. I was like, What do you want? I just like, still continue to love getting kind of customer feedback and like, hotel suites, man, get me into suites for free. And like, okay, that’s really, really easy, actually. So whenever you’re traveling for work, that’s not like you’re using points and it takes no effort, but you’re getting sweet upgrades. So that’s a huge benefit. A lot of those are, you know, 1000 bucks a night, two grand a night. That’s, that’s meaningful in terms of, yeah, leverage the points for the most value, the most consistently, the bigger trips are where the sweet spot is, because that flexibility that you mentioned is a big piece of having a higher probability of finding a good deal if you’re not flexible at all, which I don’t recommend flexibility for small, domestic trips. If you’re going to LA for a conference, why don’t, don’t try to travel two days earlier to save 200 bucks, right? But you know, for that, just like if there’s a great deal and it happens on a perfect happens line up perfectly, take it if there’s not just pay for it, but for your big trip you want to go. You know, I just proposed my fiance was a $50,000 trip. We went to Europe. We were in Switzerland, France, England. The fact that I had three days of flexibility and was okay of flying out of New York instead of direct from Austin, is what made that trip $50,000 worth of savings. So that’s where you need to

Brad Weimert 39:21
be flexible. You made it this far, which probably means that you’re an entrepreneur, which probably means that you’re accepting credit cards and maybe ACH payments, beyond the fact that we can do a rate review to save you money, beyond the fact that we give you dedicated account reps, world class customer service, world class technology, and can actually optimize the way you accept payments online, our average client saves year by working with us. If you want to find out how and get a free rate review from us, check us [email protected] forward slash am we have some marketing around, you know, anti stripe campaign sort of and I. Stripe has 15,000 trust pilot reviews, which is a lot, and they have a 2.2 star rating, really? Yeah, I didn’t even know that. Yeah. And when you look at when you look at this, I know it’s wild. When you look at this, they all like if you can look at the first two pages and see the same two categories of complaints. One is they hold my money or close my account, and the other is customer service is terrible. I can’t get ahold anybody. I’ve got a problem. I can’t get ahold anybody, right? The thing is, Stripes a great product, but both of those are super predictable. It’s a giant entity that only does ticketing and email based support. Of course, you’re gonna have customer service problems. If you have an issue the holding money or closing accounts, they don’t underwrite anything, so they auto approve everybody. So that is their only mechanism to control risk is to close accounts and hold money. Not good or bad. It’s just how that business model,

Eli Facenda 40:55
right? They just chose. We’ll make the acquisition and onboarding so frictionless that we’ll get probably some shit in there, and then we’ll have to fix it later with a, yeah,

Brad Weimert 41:04
that’s a model. And so, like, we know that that’s the model. The problem is most business owners that aren’t an ideal fit don’t know that that’s the model. Yeah? So the coaches, consultants, etc, are like, oh, yeah, they’re great. We’ve never had a problem. It’s like, they haven’t seen you yet, you know, like, they don’t know yet, right? So, yeah, you know, it’s not a it for almost everybody, there will be a snag at some point in time. It’s just a question of how intense it’s going to be, and is it going to hit you in a minute

Eli Facenda 41:27
where you need cash flow? And yeah, you’re fucked, yeah. And

Brad Weimert 41:30
probably 10% of our incoming traffic is partnerships or referrals, okay, maybe a little more now, but that’s what the channel manages for, right? That will swing. You know, we’re probably 60% let’s call it 60% SEO, 30% paid 10% partnership, new traffic, yeah. And we want that to be, you know, 40% partnership or 30%

Eli Facenda 41:52
partnership. Wow. And is, Are most of your clients, US based? Are they all over

Brad Weimert 41:56
the world? Most of them are US based. We’re pretty heavy in Canada also. So it’s probably like, you know, 85 US, 10% Canada, 5% elsewhere, if that the elsewhere is such a pain in the ass. Like us is the easiest place for banking regulations. Canada is a distant second. And then everything else is

Eli Facenda 42:16
like all it’s, I mean, makes sense. You’re talking about banking, but like, with credit cards, the exact same US has, I think we have like, 600 credit cards you could get that are, like, even decent 1000s, if you count, like, all the small local banks Canada probably is like 60, and then you get to the UK and Europe, and it’s like five, yeah, and they’re like, hard to get and all this stuff. So people are we actually just did a live call the other day. I brought in, like, an international credit expert on helping people go from having European cards and stuff into the US, but really from anywhere in the world. Like, how do you set up a US LLC and get into here? Because so many people are just like, this fucking sucks if you’re born in another country. Like, yeah, less opportunity. So Well, you know,

Brad Weimert 42:54
what’s crazy is, I don’t know how much you know about this, but credit card processing inside of the the world of credit, there’s this huge element of that picture that is what’s called acquiring, which is our world credit card acquiring. And all the banks are acquiring banks, and then you have the card issuing banks, which is a totally, obviously we interact with it, but a totally different segment of the business. So I know a lot about this, because I know the origin of our industry and how it got structured, etc, when credit cards started. If you look at the trajectory of the launch of credit cards and the growth of the US economy, they’re directly tied and the spending on cards and the production in our economy is like, from the launch of credit cards until 2000 so until 60s, yeah, early 60s, late 50s, early 60s. MasterCard, wow, yeah, but the spending on cards is out of control. Like, I mean, out of control, yeah. It goes from like nothing to like just whom, through the 80s, 90s, right, right? And so all these banks got involved, and the banks that issued the cards are actually the members of visa MasterCards association. So direct correlation, like when they launched the cards, they were like, Oh, this is going to be our association for the card brand of visa, or our association for the card brand of MasterCard. So obviously, vested interest, yeah, but yeah, the rest of the country, or the rest of the world, just sort of followed suit. Did not do it the same way. Wow. And so our consumerism culture is all based on that, yeah,

Eli Facenda 44:30
totally, yeah. And we’re a country built on borrowing. I was thinking about that too, you know, to build on borrowing, but borrowing only works if there’s a lot of trust. So it’s really like, I mean, it truly is a country built on trust at the foundation, yeah. Because like, you know, I guess certain countries, they have different regulations around how difficult it is to borrow. And I don’t know why the US took such a different direction on that. But like, it’s way harder and pretty much everywhere else in the world to borrow than it is here. And I don’t know why, but Well, that’s exactly it. Because of growth. It stimulates you, if you do permit it, you got it. Yeah. So there’s risk, but then it’s like, Okay, we’re gonna offset the risk with the upside of what this produces. And, yeah, yeah, makes sense, yeah. And

Brad Weimert 45:07
I think that there’s a, you know, there’s a big macro conversation that I’d be, you know, out over my skis a bit on that’s such a funny term, because I hate skiing, but yeah, that I’d be out of my depths with a little bit from a macro perspective, but in terms of conspiracy theory, and you know, why the government does what they do, and is it, was it a deliberate plan that actually ultimately places a shitload of debt on consumers and on the American public? And you could look at the altruistic perspective there, or the, I think the Win Win perspective, which is like, well, people get to live a better lifestyle, right? And it stimulates the economy. The other side of that is they’re buying a bunch of shit they can’t afford, and then they’re trapped in a cycle of debt for their whole life Right? Right now, in payments today, and we can talk about this relative to cards, but in payments today, all younger generations are moving to buy now, pay later, instead of racking up credit card debt. So, you know, I’m 44 you know my era and my parents and the era immediately under me never do that. Oh well, no, we got, we still got pushed. We’re like, in the interim, right? It’s like, yeah, yeah. But like, at least for me, I got educated financially through the luck of being in organizations and sales that taught it to me and I personal development, reading, studying, tons of people my age still were blasted with credit card offers in college and just racked it up and did dumb shit. But the generations under you know, 30s, 20s in particular. Now BNPL is buy now, pay later is like a firm Klarna. We have a bunch of products that we sell specifically for high ticket coaches, right? Or e comm that allow you to offer that, yeah, that Klarna and a firm will not offer. All of those are, you don’t have to rack up down on the credit card, and you just split payments, right? And that’s the direction we’re going, Yeah. And I’m curious, and

Eli Facenda 46:57
how that, how does Klarna not get absolutely hosed on that? Because a lot of them are 0% like, a firm’s like, oftentimes 0%

Brad Weimert 47:03
it’s not 0% for the business. So okay, so the business takes a discount. Oh, got it, yeah. Okay. So there, there are a whole bunch of different financial models in the back end. Got it? That makes more sense. I was like, There’s got to be some. So, yeah, no, no, no charge for the consumer sometimes, but the business might only get 80% of the value of the payments got it so that 20% differential is how you cover risk for Klarna, right?

Eli Facenda 47:31
I mean, that’s Yeah, but like your business, you probably just mark up your product a little bit more and good. Yeah, you could. And

Brad Weimert 47:38
you also can run the math on how much higher was my conversion, conversion, because I had to be in real employees, right, right. So I sold more, even if we have a couple defaults, right? And Clara covers the defaults, but even if we only get 80% of the value, I still sold right? More. So yeah, you probably have a certain

Eli Facenda 47:53
threshold of defaults with CLARIN before they’re like, where you don’t like you anymore, yeah, like, in 50% your customers are defaulting. They’re gonna be like, Get off.

Brad Weimert 48:01
You got it. And that’s and that’s and that’s why they will only work with certain industries, right? And that’s why coaches, consultants, high ticket live events, travel, yeah, stuff that has a higher risk profile for default, right? Right? For chargebacks, they don’t want to work with them, and so they’re very particular about that, Yeah, makes sense. And but they’re kind of a similar model to, like, a stripe or a PayPal where, like, they’ll approve you, and then later they’ll just cut it off and they’re like, whoa, we didn’t realize that you were XYZ, right? Cool, yeah. So for us, we want to look at with our lending products like that, we want to look at the quality of the business itself, and does the business have chargebacks and refunds, right? Do they have big chargeback or refund issues? If they do, then we don’t want to finance out a product, right? Yeah. But if they don’t have chargebacks and refunds, it means that the consumers are generally happy, which has a direct correlation to if they split payments, they’re actually going to make all their payments, right, right? Yeah? Because they’re unhappy, they’re probably only going to make two payments and be like, Yeah, fuck this Exactly, yeah. So more than you ever wanted to know about payments.

Eli Facenda 49:00
No, I mean, it’s helpful of education as a business owner. And it’s the same kind of, you know, it’s the the other side of the industry to my side of the business. Yeah, right. I mean, people are spending money on cards, and then there’s businesses, you know, we’re also educating people on ways to leverage putting things on cards, even if there is the merchant processing fee, if they’re gonna pay. So it’s just an interesting thing to understand a little more. No, do you know about them? So Bill, Bill allows you to put rent on a card with no fee, no merchant processing, and you earn points on it for you can use for travel. And they’re integrating a mortgage option too.

Brad Weimert 49:34
Yeah, I think maybe I read an email yours or something. Yeah, I can’t remember. I sort of opened the door to this, and I can’t remember why I didn’t pursue what. I didn’t dig into it further. The biggest chunk of the fees that you pay in credit card processing are going directly to the bank that issued the Credit Card Capital, one Chase, you know, whatever, B of A, and paying for all of the perks, the cash back through the perks. So those perks, if. They’re if they exist right now, are all coming from that in terms of credit card perks, right? If somebody is doing it without, without processing fees, the question is, where are the perks coming from? Right? So, right,

Eli Facenda 50:13
yeah, yeah. I mean, because, like, eating my rent for millions of Americans, and then, like, whatever the average fee that they normally charges, like 2.9% and zero. I’m like, that seems like, oh, 00,

Brad Weimert 50:25
for somebody, but interchange is still being covered, so the cost of running the transactions is still being paid. It’s just who’s paying it, right, right, right? Absolutely. 100% Yeah. So if the in normally, that would just be the business, right? So the company that is charging rent is absorbing it, as opposed to consumer or the consumer. They can’t

Eli Facenda 50:43
think it’s the apartment, though, because they did such a large acquisition of like, all these buildings, and I don’t even know if they have to go directly to the building anymore to put them on the platform for you to use the perk. I think you can like do it directly to build and they like write a check to the department, something. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but anyways, yeah, there’s a huge there’s something interesting, yeah, check it out. Let me know. Very well,

Brad Weimert 51:06
yeah, well, at the end of the day, interchange never goes away. So like that, the cost to run transactions has to be there, yeah, cover the risk of chargebacks and pay out the perks is there. It’s somebody’s paying for it, right?

Eli Facenda 51:17
And that’s why Amex is usually higher, right? Like, oftentimes it’s like, four and a half percent, for certain,

Brad Weimert 51:21
it’s never that high. And, I mean, a processor could charge you that, yeah, but like, the cost of Amex is actually very close to the same as

Eli Facenda 51:29
what was the deal with. Like, you go overseas and be like, we don’t accept Amex here. Historically it

Brad Weimert 51:33
was more expensive. That’s, that’s, yeah. And today it’s not. And historically, it was more expensive because Amex gave better perks, and now tons of visa MasterCards are right up there. So the cost of Amex transactions, actual cost is the same as the most expensive Visa MasterCard stuff, gotcha. So, like, that’s a misnomer, because decades ago that was the case. But, like, decades ago, yeah, I guess some of the places in Europe haven’t figured that out yet. No,

Eli Facenda 51:59
they have not. Yeah. No, am actually, yeah.

Brad Weimert 52:05
Okay, so we opened with you spending, or getting $100,000 worth of value out of travel every year, meaning that had you paid for all these things, you would have spent 100 grand at least, yeah, at least every year you’ve built both of these companies have this huge travel lifestyle element to it. My question at this point is, and I think I know the answer this for you, but this is different for everybody. Is building the business or having a wild travel lifestyle more important to you

Eli Facenda 52:35
both? I’ve really been thinking a lot about, like, a life without trade offs, and to me, they’re they’re both non negotiable, like I have a higher priority, and I wouldn’t say it’s the travel lifestyle, but a life that I love is the higher priority than a successful business. But neither, to me, are negotiable. So that’s how I’m thinking about it, and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that. I actually, to me that, because this isn’t a business, I’m going to exit the metric that I kind of actually look at, that I’ve recently started calculating, is profit per hour. So I think that’s like the ultimate metric of a lifestyle business, which is, for every hour of input I put into the business, how much profit Am I getting back? And you could look over maybe a year, a yearly time horizon, but you know, my Wall Street friends probably make, I don’t know, 500k a year, but they’re working 100 hours a week, that is not a good trade, right? So if you get scale on that, and you can create a business where you make 500k a year, maybe you don’t take it to 2 million profit a year, but you’re working five hours a week. That’s really high profit per hour in terms of total take home for the unit of input. So that’s kind of how I’m thinking. That’s been my psychology lately. I don’t think this is a scale at all cost business like I have a great life. It’s fun, it has adventure, it’s meaningful to me. And so, like, that’s, that’s the vision for now. Yeah, love that.

Brad Weimert 53:48
So the follow up question to that is, I’m probably 40% as effective in terms of work when I’m on the road. Yeah, what do you do when you’re on the road to be effective with your business? It’s

Eli Facenda 53:59
tough. I tell people, first off, to set expectations properly, like, if you’re thinking you’re gonna be the same on the road when you’re at home, you’re there’s you’re just not. It’s a joke. Yeah, there’s no idea. So, so I usually say maybe 80% 40% so that’s, that’s, that’s a huge hit. Me, you must be dialed, really dialed. Here, what I tend to do is, it depends on where I am in the world. If I’m in Europe, I actually kind of like working from Europe, because I find it to be a good forcing mechanism where it’s like, hey, if I only have, you know, like Parkinson’s Law, right? If I only have three hours where I’m gonna overlap with my team, how do I maximize the shit of those three hours and then the morning is like six hours of undisturbed, deep work. So I actually find Europe to be like a really, like, for certain seasons of the business, I find to be actually better. Otherwise, though, to me, I get a lot of energy from, like, I’m very extroverted, so new stimulus, new people, new connections, tend to kind of kind of put me into like a, like, a higher energy state. So I feel really good from doing that. And I tend to use travel as a way to connect. The Network, do podcasts, go to mastermind stuff like that, so I try to tandem them, if I’m gonna be doing a lot, yeah, that makes it grow. On that side, I don’t have a great answer for like, how do you lock in better if you’re, like, super jet lagged? I think it’s more just like, whatever works for you. You know, there’s different ways to tap in and figure out the mindset stuff, or fast, or do things like that, or just stay at a hotel that has a sauna and cold plunge, or, like, stay near a place that has that when I was doing Nomad for a long time, that was, like, part of my checklist. How close is the whole foods? Is there a sauna and cold plunge nearby? Like, is there a gym in the property? Because if it’s more than, like, five minutes to do those things, that’s a that’s a big no no. So that was, that was part of my criteria for, like, when I was looking at hotels or Airbnbs where I was staying before

Brad Weimert 55:38
too. Yeah, that makes sense. I am, contrary to popular belief, not an extrovert, very much an extrovert. This shit drains me, but I do all of those things also, right? So I’m trying to stack when I’m traveling. How do I book podcasts and proximity to where I’m staying is tremendously important. Yeah, yeah, because I can get more out of I think I’m pretty sure I stole it from Tony Robbins, but

Eli Facenda 56:02
I’m looking at net time. Yeah, no extra Exactly. Which is, how do I make sure all these things can happen concurrently, right? I can be in alignment with my objectives and not looking at a trade off? Yeah, that’s where. That’s where I think the shift is big. Because if you’re like, that’s why the season of the business is so important. If you’re in a mode where it’s like, you’re building something like back end, and you don’t need more traffic, more partnerships, more eyeballs, and you’re on the road, it’s probably harder to, like, lock in and build something, but if you’re in a season where it’s like, hey, that’s what we’re doubling down on, I love the events around events model. There’s a conference or a seminar, and you just tack on your own dinner or your own workshop around that, and it’s like, and then there’s people that are going to the event, and there’s people, maybe in that city that you know, that aren’t there. You’re bringing them together at a dinner. There’s a lot of value exchange there those kinds of things, the ways that I try to like double or triple stack a weekend seminar that I’m going to or something like that. So that’s my that’s my approach on it. I love it,

Brad Weimert 56:51
man. Yeah, awesome. Well, I think we got lots of good tips and tricks for people on the card front. I love luxury travel. And I think that there’s, like, this allure to obviously doing it, but figuring out how to do it without paying, yeah, 15 grand a flight, whatever. I probably would, and probably will spend 15 grand for numbers. Well,

Eli Facenda 57:12
that was my help. I have anything to do. Even better. Yeah, even better. I love that man. Eli, where do you want to point people? Where should people go to find out about you? Best place is Instagram. Eli, travel guy, is the main place. I’m building up YouTube this year as a big focus too, but Instagram is definitely the spot. Do a lot of behind the scenes stuff, sharing how I’m booking things, what we’re doing, opportunities for upgrades and better experiences. And we have like, a playbook on there that people can grab if they want check that out. So that’s dope. That’s best spot. Eli, thanks so much. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 57:38
thank you. Ma’am. All right, the episode’s over. If you’re new here and you don’t know me, my name is Brad Weimer. I am also the founder of easy pay Direct, which is a payment processing company that serves a tremendous amount of our guests on the show and a ton of our audience, people like you. So if you’re accepting credit cards and you would like better service, better rates and a way to optimize the way that you’re accepting payments, you can check us [email protected] forward slash b, a, m, again, that’s e, p, d.com, forward slash am I.