067: From Grant Cardone’s Drug Addiction to $4 Billion + How He Uses AI

Grant Cardone is a sales expert, author, producer, and CEO of Cardone Capital, overseeing a $4B+ real estate portfolio he built from scratch.

At 16 years old, Grant stumbled down a path of drug issues, eventually entering a treatment center at age 25. After completing his treatment, Grant channeled his addictive personality into business and sales, making his first $1M at 31.

Today, Grant discusses his life story and career paths with me while sharing his high-volume approach to selling online, his philosophy around investing money, and how he creates a high-performing sales culture in his companies.

You’ll also hear the number one skill Grant suggests that young entrepreneurs should develop, how AI will mesh with sales careers, and the 80/20 principle he used to build a 16M person online following.

Grant Cardone Inspiring Quotes

• “Never take advice from millionaires. Millionaires don’t know sh*t about money. Nothing. And that’s why they save it because they’re scared they can’t get it again.” – Grant Cardone

• “Show up, move to the target and don’t quit until you get it.” – Grant Cardone

• “The next two or three years is going to be the best asset purchase time in history, at least in my lifetime.” – Grant Cardone

• “AI cannot be your confidence builder. It could give you a little juice but sooner or later, you got to learn your own pitch, stand on your own feet, make your own presentation — AI is not going to do that.” – Grant Cardone

• “I know when I’m happiest is when I’m busy. Moving from activity to challenge, possibility, potential failure, I don’t quit. I will try again until I win. That’s when I’m happiest.” – Grant Cardone

• “Too many founders and owners and CEOs forget that you need money and you need lots of money and you need to not lose money.” – Grant Cardone

• “You should have multiple banking relationships. You should not be saving money. Money needs to get invested.” – Grant Cardone

• “Success in business is not a popularity contest.” – Grant Cardone

• “As a salesperson, you cannot assume what somebody’s concerns or problems are.” – Grant Cardone

✔️ How Grant turned his addictive personality into a $4 billion real estate portfolio.

✔️ The danger of complacency after hitting a 7-figure net worth for the first time.

✔️ Taking a brute-force, volume-heavy approach to Internet sales and marketing.

✔️ The one thing Grant needs to build a business.

✔️ Why it’s dangerous to take advice from millionaires.

✔️ How will AI impact the careers of sales professionals?

✔️ How do you cultivate a high-performing sales culture in your company?

✔️ What to look for when evaluating potential partners.

✔️ How Grant looks at control vs. delegation when overseeing 650+ employees.

✔️ What can entrepreneurs learn from the recent banking collapses?

✔️ How Grant built an audience of 16 million people with free content and the 80/20 principle.

✔️ Why Grant doesn’t invest in the stock or bond market — and what he does instead.

✔️ What is one of the most essential skills for a 20-year-old today?

[INTRODUCTION]

Brad Weimert: Man, Grant Cardone has been a client of Easy Pay Direct for years but this is the first time that I’ve had a long-form conversation with him. And I can tell you this, it’s a conversation that you have not heard anywhere else. We go from AI and how it’s going to impact sales and marketing to what it’s like to run a six-person company and grow it to 650 people to managing $4 billion in real estate and everywhere in between. Things that I didn’t think I could get out of Grant Cardone, we got out of Grant Cardone. So, check this one out. Grab a pen. This is definitely noteworthy and add some comments because I want your feedback on this one. Let me know what we could have done better and what other questions I could ask him maybe on round two. So, if ever there were a time to share the Beyond A Million podcast with somebody, this is it. Share the episode. Subscribe if you’re not already. This is a badass conversation. Without further ado, Grant Cardone. 

[INTERVIEW]

Brad Weimert: Grant Cardon, I appreciate you carving out time. Thanks for showing up. 

Grant Cardone: Hey, I wish my backdrop was as good as yours. It’s colorful but mine’s a little bland back here. So, appreciate you having me. 

Brad Weimert: We can’t all be this pretty, man. We can’t all be this pretty. 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. 

Brad Weimert: I’ve got like a thousand questions for you but I want to kick things off because I got introduced to you in kind of a crazy way. And one of the things that people know you for is being like a brilliant killer salesperson. So, I’ve got to get some advice from you on this. I got introduced to Jarrod Glandt years ago, who is your President of Operations, right? Great guy. 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. 

Brad Weimert: And Pete Vargas introduced me, and he introduced me because you were about to do your second 10X conference. And so, he connected me with Jarrod, and Jarrod said, “Hey, we’re having some challenges with payments. Specifically, how do we get these terminals across the whole thing?” Do you know how many people you had for your second 10X? 

Grant Cardone: The second one, which would have been our third one but you would know as the second one was probably 2,200 people. 

Brad Weimert: I think this one was probably about 10,000 or you were aiming for 10,000. 

Grant Cardone: Oh, yeah. Yeah. This was Mandalay Bay. Okay. Yeah, there was 12,800 people there. 

Brad Weimert: So, I’m talking to Jarrod and he said, “Hey, we’re expecting this crazy amount of people, killer event, and we need help with payments.” And I said, “Okay.” And I gave him this layout of how we might be able to step in and Easy Pay Direct might be able to help. And I said, “One of the concerns, when you had this huge spike, is the likelihood of your payment processor holding money from you.” And he says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We use Stripe last year. They held like a $1.5 million for like six months.” And I thought, “This is great. I’ve found pain. I’m closing the deal. We’ve got the sale.” And Jarrod goes, “But you know what, we’ve got so much cash, it just doesn’t matter.” And as a sales guy, I thought what do I do with that? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. You assumed that my pain was and this happens a lot, right? Because the guy hit me from Facebook the other day and said, “I can save you a bunch of money on Facebook ads.” I’m like, “Yeah, but that’s not my dying need today.” Some people don’t mind wasting money, as hard as that is to believe. As a salesperson, you cannot assume what somebody’s concerns or problems are. You know, your problems doesn’t mean it’s my problems. Yeah, that’s a good point. I think people need to be reminded of some of those basic things. You know, you got to ask people what. If you’re a real estate agent, you think the view’s great, it doesn’t mean the guy wants to look at the view first. He might be into living rooms, bedrooms, or kitchens. 

Brad Weimert: So, your answer with that one would have been to get more info to Jarrod and try to figure out what the pain was there. 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. Like, in addition to other than saving you money or getting you not having $1 million sitting in Stripe for six months, what else would be important to you? How long did it take you to close the deal? 

Brad Weimert: Bro, it took me years after that. It took me another probably a year-and-a-half, two years. 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. So, well, good for you that you got it. You got banks failing this weekend, three banks failed in America. The government is bailing those banks out. Call it whatever you want. Those are bailouts. I don’t worry about it too much because I know I’m going to outproduce the situation. Same thing I did in Undercover Billionaire when Discovery Channel asked me to go to Pueblo and take away my money and my hair and my name. And I couldn’t use my credit card to call my buddies. Could I build a business? I said, “Yeah, absolutely, 100%.” And they thought I was being arrogant about it. I’m like, “No, I know I don’t need money to build a business.” I do need human contact. I don’t need AI. I don’t need Facebook, I don’t need Instagram, I don’t need social media, I don’t need a video camera. I need human contact. The one thing I can’t build a business if I can’t make contact with people. So, to the degree that people have confidence in doing that hand-to-hand, looking somebody in the, you know, gaining somebody’s confidence, and it doesn’t mean, Brad, that I’m going to do it with everybody or that I’ll do it now. I’m happy with turning people off. I’m not trying to get everybody to like me because if I’m trying to get everybody like me, I can’t. I’m not in high school anymore. Success in business is not a popularity contest. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I want to talk about that because that’s definitely a big part of growing your operation right now is the traffic that you get from your public persona, right, is the attention.

Grant Cardone: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: But before we get there, there are a couple of things along the way that I think are pretty crazy. Here’s what I know. I know that you grew up in kind of a rough childhood. You had a lot of struggles there, and at some point, you hit the threshold and decided to go to rehab. Can you give me some context for that and kind of what that experience was like? Because there are a ton of entrepreneurs that I think have some challenges, never make it to rehab but are struggling with some form of addiction. What was it for you and what was the breaking point? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. So, I started smoking weed when I was 16 years old. You know, my friends introduced me to it, Brian, Russell, and Gary, and I knew the night I did it. Dude, I still remember where I was right now, the room that I was in. I didn’t feel good about it. I know there’s a lot of people that, anyway, I don’t even need to go on my soapbox about that. It just wasn’t good for me because literally within a year, I would be using all kinds of crazy drugs and for the next, it’s not like it was a bad summer. It was a bad ten years. And so, I went from being a good kid with a middle-class family to being on the streets. I use this term, I don’t know, in an interview maybe six weeks ago, I got all this sh*t about like some group of people owns the streets. I’m like, “I lived on the streets. Sorry, guys.” You know, you live on the streets and you’re dealing with drugs every day and you don’t have any money and you’re trying to figure out how to get by, you learn a lot about life and get around and moving and dodging. And so, unfortunately, I’m not proud to say this but I spent a lot of time compromising my ethics and my potential and damaging myself and my name.

So, when I was 25, I went to a treatment center. My mom said, “Enough. I’m done. Don’t come back here.” I had basically become the black sheep of my family. I lost all my own personal self-respect. I had lost the respect of anybody that knew who I was. I was no longer a trusted person or particle of the community. I finally hit bottom. But it was tough getting there. And it could have gone a lot of other directions. And so, I went to treatment for 28 days. My insurance kicked in for part of it. I think I paid $14,000, borrowed the money, and turned my life around. The treatment didn’t turn my life around. The solution they offered me is not what helped me. It was just getting out of the group and away from the influence and just realizing that, okay, I don’t have to use drugs. I had ten years where I had lost complete confidence that I could go 24 hours without consuming drugs. Came back. Basically, took my addiction. I didn’t try to get rid of this addictive personality that I have. I didn’t try to get rid of it. That’s what they wanted me to do. At the treatment center, they’re like, “Oh, you’re sick. You’re ill.” I’m like, “I ain’t f*cking ill. Bro, I’m misdirected.”

So, I just got all this energy, just misdirected. And I don’t think that’s a disease. I think that’s a gift because I think a lot of people would benefit from my ability to turn on an obsession. It’d be cool if it was all just light and crystals and everything, all decisions are made perfectly, but I use this very young energy. I hadn’t developed any ethics, personal ethics in my own life, and my energy and obsessions kind of went off the rails. It found where it could go play, basically. I was a bored kid, 16, 17, 18 years old. I was bored and it found drugs, just bored and found drugs. And this energy and this creativity found this drug lane and I went down it too long. And then when I got off of that, I took that and converted it to and at that time I was a salesman. My only job I could get was a salesman. I hated being a salesman, and I decided to convert all that negative destructive energy into learning how to become a good salesperson. 

Brad Weimert: I love that. I frequently refer to myself as somebody with an addictive personality, and if I’m going to do something, I’m going to f*cking do it. And it doesn’t matter what that thing is but it’s what you’re talking about, right? You use the term obsessive and you get obsessive about something and that’s what allows you to drive. But you also said you got bored at 16, 17, and you filled the space with this. Dude, I know a lot of people that get their business to a certain point. You know, they get it to eight figures or they get at 20 million. They start pulling in a couple million, a few million bucks a year, and the same happens. They get bored and they don’t have the drive anymore. You see the same thing happen. They slip into that pattern. What do you do with that and how did you keep that from happening later? 

Grant Cardone: Again, I just want to apologize to everybody in advance of any suggestions or advice I give anybody here. I am known for offending people, so I apologize in advance of what I’m about to say. When I hit my first million dollars, I was 31 years old and then I had 1 million. I went to about $10 million and I got very complacent. I started giving people advice. I started saving money. I started worrying about retirement. I started thinking about golf. And that’s why I say today, never take advice from millionaires. Millionaires don’t know sh*t about money. Nothing. And that’s why they save it because they’re scared they can’t get it again. So, if you’ve ever watched the guy’s trajectory, not everybody. And, look, this either fits you or doesn’t fit you, whatever, but I got enough advice from millionaires to know that you don’t take advice from them because they don’t know how to go to 100 million and they don’t know how to go to a billion. So, what they do is they start saving money, they start conserving what they did.

That’s not how they got there, by the way. The way they got there was hustling and by grinding and pushing and shoving and taking risks, and then all of a sudden they get a million or 5 million, whatever their little comfort number is. It’s a selfish thing, by the way. It’s a very selfish mechanism that goes on. Once you get yours, you’re like. “Okay. I’m paying off all my sh*t. I’m paying off my cars. I’m paying off my house. I’m getting rid of my debt. I’m going to start saving for retirement.” Why? You weren’t thinking about any of that stuff when you got your 10 million. Now, you’re thinking about all that. So, that’s why I say never take advice from a millionaire because what happens and I think it’s really important when you’re studying other people like I’ve studied a lot of people. I need to look at where they’re at in their trajectory, where they’re at in their advice-giving. Where’s that? Steve Jobs said, “Money won’t make you happy and no one should work hard. People should not simply work for money.” He was rich when he said that. Okay.

Now, if you talk to him when he was 19 years old, him and Bill Gates, guarantee they were chasing dollars. They were grinders, pounders, pirates, like these guys are some of the most ruthless freakin gangsters on planet Earth. And you could say that about almost all the guys, JP Morgans and the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers. These guys were grinders, eighth-grade educations, pounding out, hunting money down. So, I think it’s very important that people watch that curve. Is the guy on his way up? Like, I’m worth more money today than I ever imagined I’d be worth. I got more grind today. Despite my age, my trajectory is still my interest, and growth is still on the way up, not on the way up trying to flatten out or hold on. 

Brad Weimert: What shifted there for you when you got complacent when you were at 10 million or whatever it was? 

Grant Cardone: I got busted. I got cracked.

Brad Weimert: What do you mean?

Grant Cardone: Well, what happened was I had accumulated a bunch of money and I was starting to save money in all these accounts. And then 2008 came along and my 10 million or 12 million, whatever I had at the time, a little bit of my little net worth that I was so happy with, God freakin, evaporated over a period of about seven months to $1 million. I think I was worth $1,000,009 or something in 2010 or 2011. 

Brad Weimert: Was that just leverage on real estate or how did that happen? 

Grant Cardone: Well, it happened because two of my businesses got slaughtered. They got cut to nothing. I was dependent upon the automobile industry one vertical. In 2012, I had no access to – we don’t even know how many followers we have online. We know how many hit the follow button, 60 million, but we think that that number is probably more like 150 million people that know my name, see my videos somewhere on YouTube or Instagram. But we had none. I had no followers. I was working for a handful of companies in the auto industry. I had big contracts. We did no business to consumers. It was all business to business, mostly Fortune 500 companies, big contracts, and those guys got slaughtered. I had 200 units in 2012. I had 200 apartment units that basically got me through the contraction. It was my income property that got me to contraction and not my businesses. So, my savings account didn’t give me anything because the banks grabbed it all. And so, that’s when I learned, “Oh sh*t, man, you don’t want to save money.” The banks that were saved in 2012 were broken banks then. You guys that were saving money in the banks right now, you got a reminder this weekend. Your money ain’t safe. You just think it’s safe. You want to believe it’s safe. That money’s not safe over there. 

Brad Weimert: No. 

Grant Cardone: They don’t even keep your money at the bank. So, we’re told all these things we’re indoctrinated to believe all this bullsh*t. Save your money, pay off your house, get rid of your debt, plan for retirement. All that sh*t benefits Wall Street. It doesn’t benefit you and your family. We’re not encouraged to take risk. Imagine if America was encouraged in school at eighth grade, “Take risk. Don’t save money. Invest it. Buy real estate that appreciates over ten-year periods. Stay broke. Do not keep money at your bank. Do not fund future emergencies. They may never happen.” But what do they tell us? “You need 90-day reserve for your personal life, 90-day reserve for your wife, 90-day reserve for your parents, 90-day reserve for your business.” And then people start saving money, planning on emergencies that typically never happen. And who benefits? The banks benefit. First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, they’re all in trouble today. What I would tell people to do is stay broke. That’s what I do. So, I had $50 million worth of debt in 2012 and a couple of million dollars’ worth of assets.

Today, I have $2 billion worth of debt and $4 billion worth of assets because I quit saving money and I quit playing the retirement game and quit playing the real estate or the stock market game and I quit gambling. I started build my business, number one. First of all, take care of me. Two, take care of my businesses. I think I had six employees in 2012. I have closer to 650 today. 

Brad Weimert: Wild. Okay. So, I’ve got a couple of things. One, a big takeaway there is that the one thing that was constant that protected you was a real estate investment probably that was cash flowing. And as the businesses tanked, people still had to live somewhere and pay rent. And I think that’s just in general a good stable and it also explains a f*cking lot about you and your approach right now, right?

Grant Cardone: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: But, two, you said 650 employees, 4 billion in real estate value, 2 billion in debt. What can you give me metrics on? What are the 650 employees do? I think from the outside, I know you’ve got a real estate fund which explains the real estate, and then you clearly have real estate education and sales training, right? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. So, there’s 260 employees in Miami. There’s another almost 200, and it’ll get bigger to Miami. In Scottsdale, we just started office there. I think we have 100, maybe 100 employees there but that’ll grow to 200. We have probably another 400 around the country at 40 properties, 40 different apartment complexes into our office buildings. 

Brad Weimert: Got it. So, you’re managing the real estate as well? 

Grant Cardone: Well, we have a third party but we’re managing the management company, so I’m pretty much a control freak, which I think everybody should be a control freak, by the way. I delegate things that I don’t know but I’m still touching things I don’t know. So, if I want somebody else, if there’s an area that I have concern about, I’m going to learn about it. Like, nobody manages my money better than I do. I manage my money and then I hire people to manage the money but I’m holding them accountable. I can’t hold them accountable if I don’t understand money because, hell, then I don’t even know what they don’t know. So, that’s the real estate. That’s the business, right? What I learned in 2012 was my real estate got me through. Even when the real estate values were collapsing in 2008, my real estate was still cash-flowing. And I’m like, “Sh*t, dude, I need cash flow.” I had 200 units there. I have 12,400 units with an average rent of $2,000 a month now. So, clearly, I made a pivot and I’m like, “Oh, I need more real estate.” So, how did I get the real estate? I didn’t have any money. I just told you I had some debt that was going bad at the banks in 2010. So, how did I get the money?

I pounded my businesses out for dough. I went to audiences across the world like we built a big, massive audience and then I started figuring out how I could offer those people services. 80% of what I do is free. Nobody ever has to pay me a penny. And 20% of the millions of people that know me online give me some money once, twice, three times, or a bunch of times. But 80% of everybody that knows me online has never paid me a penny. Some of my best customers do not follow me on social media. It doesn’t mean they don’t follow me. I have people that are all part of our email list that don’t follow me, don’t even want emails from me that are still great customers of mine. I saw some guy did a video the other day said, “Grant Cardone’s going bankrupt,” you know, one of these clickbait guys. I don’t know what it is, Sam or Sash or some guy.

Brad Weimert: No reason to plug him.

Grant Cardone: No, I’m not. I’m not. Trust me, I never use the right name. And some kid they’re click-baiting. What they’re doing is click-baiting to get Google pennies. Well, I’m not looking for pennies. I don’t want ad dollars. I think in my entire YouTube 12,000 videos, 12 years I’ve been on YouTube with 2 million subscribers, billions of views, I think my total ad revenue over 12 years is $12,000. It could have been a couple of million bucks a year. I don’t want the ad dollars from YouTube. I want the viewer audience without an ad. Now, they’re forcing ads to guys like me. They’re like, “Hey, either we’re going to pay you or we’re not going to pay you but we’re going to advertise on top of you anyway.” But the point of that is when you guys see people doing these click bait videos, they’re just trying to grab audience with drama. So, when somebody tells you Grant Cardone has got too much debt, I have $2 billion worth of debt, $4 billion worth of assets. We have 40 properties. 35 of them have fixed debt for 10 years, 7 to 10 years. Five of them have adjustable money and then I have two other businesses that produce $150 million a year that have zero debt and no shareholders. So, if I go upside down, the entire world is Titanic. 

Brad Weimert: Well, I think that I wanted to get specifics on that because I think that the context for that, look, yeah, of course, there’s always people talking sh*t specifically when you’ve got a personality and you’ve got strong opinions. But a philosophy you said earlier don’t listen to millionaires and one of the things that we make a point of doing on Beyond A Million is trying to get the numbers to the top so that you know who you’re listening to, actually. And if you have that data and people that are doing well tend to be visible with it when asked because they’re okay with it. They don’t have anything to hide but it’s important to me because I want to know who I’m listening to. 

Grant Cardone: Let me say this because you made a really important point. The guy that won’t tell you what he has won’t tell you what his debt is, won’t tell you what his assets are, I would be more concerned about that than the guy that’s willing to tell you and show you. Like, there’s this old idea that wealthy people won’t talk about what they have like they don’t talk about what they have. They don’t show their homes. They don’t show their jets. They do If you’re in their circle. They’re not going to show it to just anybody. Why? Because people start hating on them. Now, I have chosen to take a different path, which is I’m going to show people what I’m doing because that’s what I wanted. If somebody would have been showing me this sh*t when I was 16, bro, I wouldn’t have been using drugs. If I had got addicted to success at 16 rather than at 26, and I wouldn’t have wasted ten years of my life. And so, one of the reasons I do this is to show people, “Hey, bro, you’re not ready to buy a jet, okay? Just because it looks cool on Instagram doesn’t mean you’re ready to buy one.” Now, I’ll show you when it was time for me to buy one and why. I do want to teach people that because most guys are not going to do it. Mark Zuckerberg’s not going to show you. Right? He just can’t do it. So, who’s going to teach us? The teacher making $70,000 a year? 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I agree. There’s also a fundamental difference between a heavily funded VC-backed Silicon Valley-based company and somebody that bootstrapped and had to grind to make it happen. One is not better than the other but different lessons, right? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. All he’s going to tell you is, yeah, you’ve got to move from your college town. You got to go to Silicon Valley. You’re going to have to hobnob. You’re going to get a bunch of dough. You hadn’t sold anything. There’s no products or services. There’s no transactions. Like, they don’t even want to let you know that games going on. You got to get in a club to get that to happen. I’ve never been in any club. 

Brad Weimert: Very, very, very different approach. 

Grant Cardone: It is completely different. So, I envy those guys. I wish I had the manner, the proper protocols, if I knew how to take a knee and do whatever I got to do to get my money but I don’t know how to do that. I don’t even know if I could make the pitch that I want to take somebody’s money and my company probably will never, ever have any revenue. 

Brad Weimert: Okay. Yet, you still did grow from six people on the team to 650. So, what changed in your approach as the CEO and leader of the company and what’s the difference in day-to-day for you now in your role versus then? And you don’t have to go all the way back to six but let’s say when you had 20 or 30 employees, how is your role different than it is today when you have 600 employees? 

Grant Cardone: Well, when you have 20 or 30, now you’re having to measure people, grade people, worry about people, train people. When you have 600, you don’t need to do any of that. The more the better. I want 6,000. I’d love to have 60,000 employees one day. So, the more employees, the bigger the problems but the less the David. I mean, I don’t have David a problem anymore. I got 6,000 David problems but they’re at a different level. It’s like, “Okay. Am I going to be able to make payroll this week?” Not, “Oh, David’s a d*ckhead because he showed up late.” The CEO should not. Like, if you’re a true founder and a real CEO, which I had to, like he goes like this: a student, worker, commission, manager, manager of many, maybe a partner or CEO, and then CEO of a bunch of companies, and then at some point probably investor, not boss. So, I want to move away, right? I’m trying to move away from the day-to-day activities and problems that happen in any business and then start kind of pulling, kind of being a promoter of bets and activities and possibilities as opposed to pulling every string, every day. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that makes sense. So, what are the core things that how do you think about delegation to that end? Like, what are the things that you think, “No, no, I have to own this,” versus what you can delegate? 

Grant Cardone: Well, there are certain things that I just, you know, somebody else is going to collect the data but they’re definitely going to report it to me. So, I mentioned the control thing earlier, like targets. The closer I get to an event, whatever the event is, the event could be Mandalay Bay that you discussed earlier with 12,000 people, it could be in two nights I’m going to be doing an emergency call for Cardone Capital investors, the closer we get to an event that’s important to me, the more often I’m going to get reports. So, when I get down to the last seven days of something, I’m going to continue to validate or clarify the target and then ask for a report on that target. So, as I get seven days or two days out from something, I’m going to start compressing the report time. So, like that, that emergency thing I’m going to do in two days for Cardone Capital investors because of what’s going on with the banks, I’ll get a report every 15 minutes how many people have signed up for it. And every 15 minutes somebody has to give me a report and I want to see how much that report changes every 15 minutes and everybody will understand how important that is to Grant. So, I would be heavily, heavily in control on short-term events that are vitally important to what I believe grows the company. 

Brad Weimert: Interesting. You mentioned some of these things that you don’t know how to do but you still want to have an understanding of. What are the things that are definitely not in your wheelhouse, that you’re like, “No f*cking way am I spending time on those. 100% I have to hire other people to do this.”?

Grant Cardone: Yeah. You see, like let me just show you this real quick. This is yesterday at 4:48. A guy is giving me a report on this Arizona event we’re doing. 4:48, a report comes in every seat, every upgrade, everything, and then at 8:01 that night, he sent me another one. So, right now, there are 4 hours. When we get closer, what I’ll do is I’ll cut it back and say, “I need something every hour or every 30 minutes.” So, everybody’s like, “Sh*t, man.” It’s a trick that works, by the way, but the important part of that is the target, man. You got to remember what the target is for the company because if you forget what those vital targets are, so will they. Now, referring to the things I’m not good at and I’m not good at like 90% of the things of a company. And there are so many things I don’t understand. H.R., I don’t know how to hire anybody. I don’t know what makes a good hire or a bad one. I know there was ten years of my life where I was worthless to any company. And then one day something changed, and then I wasn’t worthless anymore. I was extremely valuable. I went from being worthless to like most valuable player on the team and somebody just… 

Brad Weimert: So, the hiring piece is a super common problem, especially for salespeople but it’s a super common issue for entrepreneurs. So, do you remember what size you were when you got somebody to do the hiring and had it be effective because you can’t hire 650 people without somebody running point on it that’s actually working, right? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. I’ll tell you when I quit doing it. When I hired a guy named Steve Spray that Jarrod brought to the team and I told Jarrod, Jarrod was starting to step into a management position now. I’m like every three days, “Get rid of that Steve Spray, guy. He’s an idiot. He’ll never make it. He’s a waste of time and energy.” And then Jarrod would kind of give me the, “Yeah, yeah. Sure, Grant. I got it.” And then he’d hold on to Steve. Steve is a superstar today. He’s been with me ten years. He’s got millions of dollars invested with me on Cardone Capital. He probably makes $400,000 or $500,000 or $600,000 a year for himself. Super dependable. I just realized one day, I don’t know who’s good and who’s bad. People need to be brought in. They need to be nurtured. They need to be trained. And I’m not the guy to do that. 

Brad Weimert: Got it. So, ultimately is that you hired Jarrod. And Jarrod, by the way, did he start just entry-level sales with you? 

Grant Cardone: He was an entry-level $2,500-a-month salesperson, commission only. He moved across the country to work there. I hired three managers on top of him and he kept not taking the job. I’m like, “Bro, I keep hiring these losers. Why don’t you just take the job? What are you doing that you don’t feel strong enough or confident enough to do this? You could do this.” He walked away from a book of residual business, stepped into a manager role, took a pay cut. You know, now Jarrod probably makes, I don’t know, $2 million or $3 million a year now. 

Brad Weimert: And so, when he stepped into that role, you think that is he the one in the company that ultimately got good at hiring? 

Grant Cardone: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s good. I don’t know that any of us are good at it. I mean, I’m serious. I don’t know that any of us are good at it. What we’re good at is creating a culture, okay? Like, I’m good at getting rid of people. Jarrod’s not. I don’t think it’s about what anybody’s good or bad at. You just got to get a whole bunch of people that know how to play different roles together. Like, I would give up on people a lot sooner than Jarrod would. Jarrod, on the other hand, has a lot of people quit on him that he should have quit on first. But I’m at a point now where I’m like, “I don’t care, guys. Like, I know where I’m going.” Again, I’m going to go back to the target. Screw all that. Have a target that’s so significant and you can manage these losses along the way and you don’t care if David quit or stole from because David’s going to quit no matter what you did, no matter how good you are to him, no matter how many days you give him off, no matter how many times you lend him money, no matter how many times you help him, train him, support him, cuddle him, coddle him, pray for him, and my brother is still going to quit, and it’s got nothing to do with you because he’s a quitter. 

Brad Weimert: Yes. And so, the answer is, A, I’ll produce the product. Just keep f*cking producing things. 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. Building. 

Brad Weimert: And, B, you said create the culture. 

Grant Cardone: Build a bigger team. 

Brad Weimert: I love it. So, what’s the glue of the culture for you? I mean, clearly, motivation-driven intensity has to be a part of it, especially in the sales culture but what are the values that keep the culture together and build the culture? 

Grant Cardone: Well, Sherry, not Jarrod, not me, holds a meeting every day with the entire team, starts at 9:06 every morning. Every person has to be there. Can’t be late for it. You’re late three times you’re done. No exceptions. It didn’t matter who you are. We do training every day on Cardone University. Every one of our people are required to train. If you don’t train, you don’t work there, period. Your activity is measured. You don’t want anybody to measure your activity, you don’t work at my company. We pay people more money than most people do and we expect people to do more than most people will ever expect of them. We know that probably 50% of the people that come to work at our place are going to be like, “Dude, I can’t do this long term.” That’s fine. We just hope that people that leave us, when they leave us, they look back and say, “God dang, I miss that place. A lot of energy there,” because I know what they’re going to go to. They’re going to go to a company that has no mission, no targets, no leadership. Number one biggest complaint people have in the workforce today is not that they don’t make enough money. It’s like I don’t have any leadership around me to keep me inspired. And it’s not just a sales organization.

We have a big customer service. Do you know how many complaints I get? I got 4 million people on an email list. Half of them complain that I send them too many emails. I’m like, “Okay. Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging that you saw my email today.” And we sent out almost a half a billion emails last year, in one year. My people want me to send less emails out. I’m like, “You go work for yourself, go work for somebody else, and you can send less emails out.” I got an email. I’m going to send the mail. Otherwise, it’s not email. 

Brad Weimert: So, that’s a good question. I’ve got a couple of quick questions I want to ask you that are, I think, relevant to today but that hits directly on marketing and bringing leads in which you clearly do a very good job of by getting attention through social, through email, through functionally PR in different capacities. Where do you go for guidance on that? What’s the approach there? How do you learn that? 

Grant Cardone: Well, I’m all over the Internet like everybody else. Like, I’m trying to learn about what’s going on with these banks right now. This weekend, I’m just talking about something I don’t really know everything about. What is inflation or what are we doing in Ukraine? What I do is I go listen to rooms where there’s intelligent debate and then I listen to, “Okay. That’s bullsh*t and that’s bullsh*t and that’s bullsh*t. I don’t know anything about that. I don’t understand that. I need to learn about that.” And then I have to decide, though, for myself what’s true. I collect data and then I decide for myself. For instance, Lewis Howes taught me how to do webinars. Lewis told me there were certain things that were true about webinars, some of which made no sense to me. I did it with Lewis his way, and then I went and tried it my way to see if some of what the traditional marketing group agreement might be incorrect. You know, I made a couple of little things, changes, that I thought would be beneficial to me with my style and my personality and my products and just my belief. It’s made me one of the most successful webinar hosts in the world.

Social media, for instance, back when social media came out and people started talking about it, I was at a Google event and they were talking about social media. I went there to learn. They asked me to speak there. The guy that spoke before me had me in his PowerPoint as someone not to be. They’re like, “This is an example of people that are making mistakes on social media,” and because they said I sold too much, I promoted too much on social media. You know, I have 16X bigger audience than he does today. And since that meeting, I’ve done $1.2 billion in sales over the Internet and raised another billion dollars. So, if I’m doing it wrong, bro, I want to keep doing it more wrong like that. That doesn’t always mean I’m right though but it just means that I don’t know how to get more out of less. I looked at Mark Wahlberg. I was talking to an actor yesterday. I’m in Clearwater right now and we were talking about social media and he’s just like, “I don’t feel good about I’m on TV and I’m doing movies and then I’m on social,” and I’m like, “Bro, who told you that you can’t be a movie star and be on social media?” And then he told me about this celebrity that did one infomercial and never worked again.

And I said, “You need to go look at Mark Wahlberg, The Rock, and go look at Kevin Hart. Go look at their social media platforms. Mark Wahlberg yesterday in one day had five different pitches on his Instagram and he’s a major movie star.” So, I just think that a lot of people have this group idea like Hollywood believes social media is a contradiction. Business owners think they can’t use social because they look like sluts selling their products on the Internet. Influencers don’t want to promote because they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to lose my influence.” I’m like, “Okay. Whatever you guys think then think that but it doesn’t mean it’s true for me.” And I just got to figure out my little way to navigate through all that. I don’t know if that answers that but I’m going to keep promoting on the Internet. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, it’s helpful. And I think that one of the big takeaways is listen to people that are good at it and then you have to make your own call and put volume into it, put activity into it. Because if you don’t have a big enough data set, you’re not going to f*cking know anyone. Yeah. 

Grant Cardone: And then the other thing is rubbing and taking an opinion. When somebody gives you an opinion, ask them, well, how much you got? How much you bag? What did you make last year? So, like guys wanted to give me crypto advice. Okay. Everybody wants to give me crypto advice. I’m like, “Okay. How much bitcoin you got? You want to tell me about BTC? Tell me how much you got. You want to tell me about NFTs? Okay. Tell me about your biggest project.” “Well, I don’t want to discuss that.” Then if you don’t discuss that, bro, you’re not real to me. Show me the money. Show me the results. Show me the success. If you want to teach me how to lose weight, show me how much you got rid of. And if you can’t show me that, I’m moving on. 

Brad Weimert: I love it. All right. Well, I know that you’re coming up on time here but I want to ask you a couple of rapid-fire things here. So, we’ve got two significant things. You brought up SVB several times. What do you think is the big takeaway? What can the world learn from? Because a lot of entrepreneurs they see SVB collapse and they’re like, “I wasn’t using SVB. Doesn’t matter to me.” But I don’t think that’s the point. What was the takeaway for you and what do you think entrepreneurs should take from it? 

Grant Cardone: You guys should have multiple banking relationships. You should not be saving money. Money needs to get invested and needs to get invested in something because that’s what the bank was doing. But basically, what happened was the bank was taking deposits and putting it in ten-year Treasury bills. And when the ten-year Treasury bill collapsed, the value of that ten-year Treasury unless it’s kept until duration, cannot deliver on a withdrawal. Look, the reason to start a business for most people is some passion that people have to like I want to help. I want to change the world. But you need money. If the business can’t stay in business, they can’t fulfill whatever the mission is. And I think too many founders and owners and CEOs forget that you need money and you need lots of money and you need to not lose money. So, that’s why I would just suggest to everybody and I’ve been saying this for years before these bank collapses, this will not be the last, by the way. There’s going to be many, many more bank collapses. Many banks are in trouble. We cannot possibly fund all the money that we have.

The FDIC, for instance, the Federal Deposits Insurance Corp, it can only cover 1.3% of all the deposits in America. And then you’re like, “Oh, it’s the good faith of the US government.” Okay, great. Well, we all know what that means. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, right. I was talking to my wealth team yesterday and we were talking about this issue specifically, and I said, “Well, look, I don’t know about you guys but they’re not high on my list of people that trust the federal government, in general, with my money.” 

Grant Cardone: Except that they can print money again. So, what does that mean? They will print money again. 

Brad Weimert: And how’s that working out? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. They’re going to have to print money again. Okay. So, you guys that are like we’re all hearing about inflation. You start to hear about inflation when the COVID story ended. It went like this: Afghanistan, COVID, Ukraine, Ukraine, and that story is wearing off. Nobody wants to hear it. So, they move to inflation. Now, the inflation story is wearing off and now you’re going to hear about a bank. Like, they’re just moving your attention units. Get money. You got to keep your eye on the ball. What is the target for you and your company while everybody else gets distracted? What’s the target? They’ll get the target. In 2010, when I got hammered, I’m like, “This is never going to happen to me again. I am going to be a big player. They don’t jack with big players. They jack with everybody else. They leave big guys alone.” I’m not a big guy yet but I can get there. I know I can get there. You can’t get there if you keep thinking small. You could pay off your cars and you could pay off your house and your bicycle and your kids are going to get a good education. But trust me, you guys are still going to be worried when you retire.

We have been indoctrinated to feed the beast. I wrote about this in the 10X Rule. Feed the beast, not their beast, your beast. And so, what I do is I go hustle, Brad. I go hustle the marketplace for money. You got to see me hustling every day, hit the link, come to this, go to that, buy this, get this. Every dollar that comes in, I pay my bills, and anything left over, I dump it into a real estate deal and I go hustle again. I’m always broke. I never have any dough on me. If I have dough, I’m trying to get it in a real estate deal where I’m illiquid, nobody can get the money from me and I go bounce back into the marketplace, make contact with people, try to get some more money buried in a real estate deal, and cross my fingers and hope that ten years from now the rents go up on that bill. 

Brad Weimert: I love that approach. Huge proponent of real estate in general. How does it change for you during a recession? What is the advice for an entrepreneur moving into the recession versus another time if anything? 

Grant Cardone: Well, the rent gets more secure. You got to live someplace. Now, what you want to do, though, is you want to be, you know, Jarrod and I’ve had this conversation. If you ever interview Jarrod, ask him, “How many times has Grant asked, ‘Are we ready?’” I’ll bet you a thousand times in the last ten years. And the goal in 2012 was in 2020 to be the lowest-cost provider of education of anybody in the world. We’re there today like we have millions of bets on Cardone U for free. We’re about to release kids that are in high-risk situations, 10X Kids University for free. So, as long as I can keep providing free content to people, I can build a list of people where 20% of those people want to do something else because they resonate with my whole vibe or whatever I’m teaching or doing. And then we’ll just keep feeding the 80%, building a massive audience. We’re at 16 million. I know I can build that to 100 million over some period of time or maybe bigger. And then I need a bunch of different places to put people in where we service them. So, whether it’s $1 or $10, $100, $1,000 are free. Keep servicing people. They’re not going away until Bill Gates figures out how to fumigate 4 billion people service to people. 

Brad Weimert: What do you think the best skills are for a 20-year-old to learn today? 

Grant Cardone: Confidence. Got to have confidence, man. You got to have target attainment. You got to know, hey, this is my target. I’m going to get it. I’m not going home until I get my damn target. So, you guys you got to get like that drug addict. They don’t come home without that drug. No money, no credit. Everybody hates their guts, skanky, 74 pounds, needle tracks, and the guy still scores a bag. Clip that. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, right? Well, the other thing is I was interviewing somebody who runs an enterprise sales team in Silicon Valley, and he said one of the most impactful moments in his life was a mentor very early on, said, “Sit your ass down with your list of names. Don’t f*cking get up to eat, don’t get up to pee, don’t get up to sh*t until you’ve called all of these people three times.” And that little thing of don’t get up to pee, eat, sh*t was so significant for him but it’s exactly what you’re saying. When you’ve got this obsession towards the goal, those things don’t get in the way. 

Grant Cardone: Dude, when you got to, you got to. And most people don’t have a necessity value. Today, a congressman is promoting a four-day workweek. I hope your audience goes for it. Okay. I hope you guys go for it. I hope as many people go for this bullsh*t as possible. He’s saying it’s a way to make people happy. People are never happy when they’re not working. Never in the history of the world. Okay? People are most unhappy when they’re not working. It’s when you’re playing games all day that you become unhappy. It’s when you’re watching too many games in a row that you become unhappy. Game after game after game, sooner or later like, “I hate doing this, man,” but you keep doing it, right? So, I know when I’m happy, happiest is when I’m busiest. Moving from activity, challenge, possibility, potential, failure. I don’t quit. I go try again until I win. That’s when I’m happiest. So, if you guys want to go for the four-day workweek, let’s just make it three days. How about two days? How about f*ck it? Don’t ever go back to work again. Because what I’m going to do and people like me, we are freaking killers. And when you step on the sidelines, I’m going to get you your share of the market.

I know this sounds vicious and terrible but at least I’m being honest with people. I’m going to go get yours. You guys that are medicated, keep smoking that weed. I’m going to kick your ass. Okay. You got to go get some poontang this weekend, I’m going to kick your ass. You guys that take off Saturdays and Sundays, good for you. You got religious people that won’t work Sundays, good for you. I’m going to go work. I’m going to go steal market from you on Sundays. And I’ll make it up to God later. 

Brad Weimert: Love that. All right. Last question I got for you here is you’re big on sales, clearly. I could ask you a million questions about that but one of the things that’s happening right now is AI is coming in with copy, with chatbots, etcetera. How do you see AI impacting the sales career for an individual? 

Grant Cardone: Good, man. You know, let me give you some ideas. Let AI let you cheat. Cheat the pitch. If you’re calling somebody in the furniture business, I can go to AI and say, “Hey, what our CEO is most worried about? Write a short article about what CEOs are most worried about with talking with furniture?” I don’t know a thing about furniture. I can’t know everything about everything. But just give me a couple of things to talk about so I have some confidence going in. You said, “Hey, what does a 20-year-old need? Confidence. AI cannot be your confidence builder. It could give you a little juice but sooner or later, you got to learn your own pitch, stand on your own feet, make your own presentation. AI is not going to do that. If it does for you, good. If you can figure out how to do that and produce another $10 million a month for me, come over to my place, I’ll give you 10% of it. We’ll make $12 million next year. Let’s roll. And let me just say this on the sales team. Man, the marketing piece is a senior to the sales piece. It goes like this, the marketing, the senior, then the sales, okay, then I got some money. What do I do with it?

Because you guys that are marketing and getting money and then you blow the money, you’re going to go back and do the cycle again. And sooner or later, three or four times through this cycle, if you end up broke every time, you’re going to quit doing any of it. So, it goes marketing, sales, collect money, park that money in a deal in an asset, push it up into an asset, and go repeat the cycle from broke. So, one day you’re going to look up and you’ll be like, “Sh*t, I got a bunch of assets. When the world goes to hell, the banks are going to sh*t, I don’t have any money in the bank but I got these assets, and these assets over time are going to go up in value.” And then I’m a go back in the marketplace and keep pitching whatever my little soap or dishwater or whatever my facemask or whatever the hell you’re selling, solar, plumbing, or fixing somebody’s table, whatever it is you’re pitching or selling to the world, sooner or later somebody is going to replace that pitch. Every piece of inventory or talent has a lifecycle. Those assets over there are going to take care of you when your pitch falls on deaf ears. 

Brad Weimert: I love that. And that’s actually where I was going is I think that specifically as people drive, as entrepreneurs go into bigger and bigger businesses, if they don’t work themselves out of the company, their time is crunched, right? So, you have to get yourself out of your core business if you want to be an investor, to be able to allocate the time to assess deals, if that’s a big part of your life. So, the question was GP or LP? Do you run projects or do you invest in other people’s projects? And what’s your opinion for that stage of investment for that person? Should they go out and find the real estate deal or should they find the person that they trust to do it for them and just look for a return?  

Grant Cardone: Yeah. So, let’s take Annie, my assistant who’s texting me right now. Annie makes $70,000 a year being my assistant. When we hired Annie I said, “Annie, look, you’re never going to make more than $70,000 a year. I’m already overpaying you. If you want to make more than that, then bring me more than a cup of coffee.” She’s like, “What’s that?” “I have all these people hit me all day long, DMs, chats, emailing me. Handle all that. Turn all those leads into money. I’ll pay you on it. She made $225,000 last year. She made three times more money on the hustle than she did on the job. She didn’t have to take another job. Now, number one, get a good job, get good at the job, be great at the job. Second thing is tie into the revenue of the guy or the company you’re working with. Produce more revenue and get a piece of that without taking or selling more hours. Third thing is, and this is what she hadn’t done, she needs to convert that 145. She should be investing the 145 in my deal. She cannot find deals, buy deals, fund deals. She can’t do it. It’s impossible.

And she can’t find the kind of assets that I buy so she should be a limited partner with me, park her 145 in the deal. She hadn’t done that. That’s what she should be doing. And then next year, park another 145, and then the third year, another 145. She’ll always be broke until one day she’s rich in assets and she’s got cash flow coming in from $400,000 or $500,000 worth of investments, paying her another $25,000 or $30,000 a year, but the asset values going up. That’s what Annie should do. Now, if there’s one of your listeners out there and he’s got $10 million and he wants to go buy his own assets, the next two or three years is going to be the best asset purchase time in the history at least in my lifetime. But you’re still not going to build it by the asset quality that I buy because I’m buying every one of my deals is worth the eighth of $1 billion. So, every eighth deal should put $1 billion on my books. Most guys are out there buying ten units. How much money can you make out of a ten-unit deal? You can make some but you can’t make a massive score. 

Brad Weimert: That’s kind of the question, right? 

Grant Cardone: I’m just saying, a limited partner would make more money. 

Brad Weimert: Right. And so, I think what I heard there was… 

Grant Cardone: A limited partner would make more money. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Keep going. That’s exactly where I was going. I just want to clarify that. 

Grant Cardone: A limited partner would make more money with me taking a piece than they would on their own deal. Now, I know some of you guys that have to do your own deals, I understand. I’m that guy. I got to do my own deals. I trust me more than any other human being on planet Earth, which is a good place to be at because when I was 25, I did not trust myself at all. Now, I trust myself more than anyone. And I strongly advise you guys to trust yourself. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be the guy. You need to trust yourself with picking the right partner, too. So, I don’t have 50 banks. I have a couple of banks. I trust them. I know where my money is at. I know what they’re invested in. When I buy a real estate deal, I know I’m going to make money. It’s not if I’m going to make money. It’s when I’m going to make money. I’m as close to guarantee on a deal as a guarantee can be. I don’t invest any money in the stock market. None in the bond market, no BTC. I was given a couple of thousand BTC for some speaking but I didn’t go out and buy any. I invest in one asset, Grant Cardone.

Number two, in my businesses, take the money out of the business because I don’t trust my businesses completely. I know they’re going to expire one day but I trust those assets. So, anybody out there who’s got $1 million, $500,000, $300,000, we created Cardone Capital, we’ve raised $1 billion crowdfunding. We pay people every month. $4.2 million is being sent out this month. We sent out $52 million last year to our investors and we just wait for the asset class to go up in value. You could find the same asset that I could buy and I’ll still make more money on the same asset that you would if you paid the same price, which you won’t, by the way. I’ll get it cheaper than you. The debt will be cheaper. I’ll manage it better and I’ll put the 10X name on it and keep it more full. 

Brad Weimert: Don’t talk sh*t to me. You don’t know what I could do. 

Grant Cardone: I got to believe I’m the best. 

Brad Weimert: I love it. I love it. So, what’s the minimum on the fund in like that actually plays to another relevant question because like the $10 million guy or girl, which is kind of our audience is eight, nine, ten-figure entrepreneurs or that’s who we interview but there are also tons of people that listen that are smaller than that, right, that are coming up in business. So, the question is, if you’re smaller than that, like what do you suggest to be the minimum threshold before you start dumping it into investments? 

Grant Cardone: If you’re under $100,000, you can come into our fund as a non-accredited investor. There’s distributions every quarter for people that put in under 100, accredited. They put in over 100, get distributions every month. We do an 80/20 split on the money. I do a 1% fee to manage the property, which is less than BlackRock. You get direct access to me and my team. You can ask us anything like we’re doing a call two nights from now with all our investors. I have 11,000 investors. I probably have more investors than 99% of all the syndicators in America today. We spend almost no money on advertising. We spent $14,000 last year on advertising. So, it’s impossible to do what I’ve done. We do not take money from big equity funders, pension funds. I don’t take money from super-rich people. I take it from everyday people. So, a guy could get started with literally with $5,000. It’s CardoneCapital.com. Go press the Non-Accredited button, fill in the paperwork, and wait for me to buy a piece of real estate. We’ve oversubscribed, meaning overfunded 23 projects in a row. We did one two months ago.

I kept telling people, “Come in this deal. Come in this deal. I’m working on a deal.” We bought a deal that was $76 million for $52 million closed. Offered the fund on a Monday. It was closed Wednesday morning and we had to send $40 million. We funded $70 million like in 25 hours. 

Brad Weimert: That’s amazing. That’s our audience, man. 

Grant Cardone: It’s phenomenal what we’re doing. Like, we’re helping people. And these are institutional quality assets. These assets are in the best locations, best cities. They’re phenomenal. We took a building that was 77% occupied, closed on a Friday. By Monday morning, we had contracts for 95% of the building. In three days, we did more with that building in three days than Goldman Sachs had done with it in seven years. 

Brad Weimert: So, throughout the conversation you kept talking about the target, the target, the target, staying focused on the target. As you get closer to the target, ramp up the reports. What’s your target now? What’s the end goal, man? Where’s the finish line? Are you going to retire? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. No, of course not. 

Brad Weimert: When is enough enough? 

Grant Cardone: I mean I’m going to keep going as long as I can keep going but, I mean, the goal right now is to build a 100,000-unit apartment portfolio and become one of the biggest apartment owners in the country and do it with people, with everyday people, do it with the people and families that need the investment, not the pension funds and the sovereign funds and the Saudi funds and the CalPERS credit union and the freakin MetLifes. These people, these are trillion-dollar companies already. BlackRock doesn’t need any more money. I want to do this with the Morgans down the street, him and his wife and his two kids that need distributions every month. So, I want to build a 100,000-unit portfolio, $40 billion, $50 billion. It’ll be one of the biggest privately held real estate portfolios in the country and I want to distribute to everyday people. That’s one of the targets. Our 10X growth conferences will probably be events where we don’t sell tickets in the future and just for investors and partners and it will be open to the public. I want to do something publicly on Wall Street, take in some of our Cardone Ventures business and taking them public possibly in the future or offering that also to the public. And rather than selling the stock on Wall Street, keep it in our ecosystem and then take it to Wall Street later. And who knows? Maybe become a bank one day. 

Brad Weimert: Well, we can talk about that, man. That’s my wheelhouse right there. 

Grant Cardone: Oh yeah? Well, dude, I’d love to figure out how to do that because clearly these f*cking bankers don’t know how to even manage money. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, no joke. I’m well down that path. That’s a whole another conversation but well down that path. 

Grant Cardone: Let’s figure it out. 

Brad Weimert: You know, credit card processing, yeah, moving electronic payments is day-to-day for me but the other layers are fascinating, interesting, full of red tape and, yeah, let’s talk more on that. 

Grant Cardone: Yeah. Well, if you have good management skills like I know how to manage money. In fact, most people that get money do not know how to manage it. So, I don’t know how I got the gift of knowing how to keep money. I lost a quarter when I was eight years old. It fell in a manhole in the street and my dad said to me, he’s like, “Never lose money.” Bro, I don’t think I’ve lost any money since then. 

Brad Weimert: So, hold on. I have to know about the 10X partners because you mentioned the fund and bringing people in to help them through the fund but I also know that you have these other 10X branches where you’ve brought in a partner to run it. How do you structure that stuff and how do you think about it now that we’ve brought up the idea of a bank and making that happen? 

Grant Cardone: First, they come into our ecosystem then I get our training. We don’t just go out and just do deals with people but you got to be in the ecosystem. So, you guys that want me to fund your business or market it or put my name on or endorse it, you got to come into the ecosystem. People that want to do business with me, it’s not hard. Do business with… We do 150 events a year. Come to the events. Put a face like there’s a lot of people in my world. Put a face in front of me, and then a second time, and a third time and show me that you want to learn about how to grow and scale your business. You want to go to Tony’s events? Good. Go to Tony’s events. I don’t know you. I’m not at Tony’s events. I’m not interested in hype and motivation. I don’t care about people that want to talk about their daddy touching them in the wrong place when they were six. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t care. I just care about your business is growing fast and you’re servicing your customers and you know how to manage money and you want to make more money. That’s what we do at my place. We don’t coach people in their feelings or their past. Or you’re like, “Grant, I need some motivation.” “All right. Well, get it some other place because I’m not here for that. I’m here to get you the bag. And you got psychological problems. I’m not your guy but I will make you the richest guy with psychological problems that you’ve ever met.” 

Brad Weimert: I love that, dude. When I was probably 19, I grew up in you know Cutco knives? 

Grant Cardone: Yeah, sure. Great company. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Grew up selling Cutco. I was the number one sales rep in Cutco in 2001. And while I was trying to learn sales, I went to a Brian Tracy conference. And Brian Tracy was talking sales on stage and he said, “Listen.” He explained this conversation where some guy came up to him and said, “Look, Brian, your stuff is great. I’ve learned so much about sales. I have a problem, though. I’m just not that motivated.” And Brian said, “Sorry man, can’t help you. So sad. Too bad. Not my problem. Come back when you’re motivated.” 

Grant Cardone: The whole thing’s overrated though. It’s overrated. Nobody’s motivated all the time. It’s bullsh*t. You guys, you all have your little what are they called? The things that you won’t not do every day. People ask me this all the time. What are your non…

Brad Weimert: Negotiables.

Grant Cardone: Negotiable. My bro, what does that even mean? I wake up. That’s my non-negotiable. I wake up and I run at the target. There’s no tricks here. There’s no cold bass hit myself in the face, walk on fire, beat my chest, scream a word. You’ve got to show menace. There’s no tricks here. Show up, move to the target, and don’t quit until you get it. And if you don’t quit, you’re going to win. Everybody, it didn’t matter who you are. I believe that like 100%. I believe anybody could be rich. I think anybody can be successful. I know it’s hard to believe. I think I did this video about people that don’t make at least $400,000 a year should be ashamed of themselves. You should be. That damn money’s everywhere. And I don’t know how you feel good about making less, worried about money, and worried about your family all the time. I don’t know how people feel alright with that. If you know how to feel good about it, well, good. Good for you. And if you’re fighting in Afghanistan and your family’s over here, you’re making 70,000 or 60,000 or 50,000 with the government, figure out how to make another 320 while you’re over there fighting. That technology exists today that you don’t have to be in the game to produce the revenue. So, I don’t know why everybody’s hating on me for telling them what’s possible. I’m just like, “Bro, I don’t want to tell you. Get the bag. You need it.” 

Brad Weimert: Well, because everybody is a snowflake, Grant, and we don’t want to damage the snowflake. 

Grant Cardone: Yeah, maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I grew up in Louisiana, so we rarely saw any snowflakes except on TV. 

Brad Weimert: Fair enough. 

Grant Cardone: Brad, hey, man. Push this out. Let everybody hear it. Okay. I think it was a great interview. 

[END]