From Record-Breaking Founder To A Philanthropic Visionary | Dan Fleyshman

Dan: Obscene obsession, you have to be obsessed with work to be hyper focused. And you have to be relentless. And you can’t worry about people saying no, because a lot of people are gonna say no, you can’t worry about people like trying to stop you. Because a lot of people are going to try to stop you. You can’t get sad or mad when bad things happen. because every day bad things happen. (Justin: That’s right). You’re an entrepreneur, you have to be a firefighter. And so, it’s just, you know, you have to know that going in, bad things happen. You got to fix it. People are gonna doubt you, you got to keep going like as long as you know, go into the fire into the jungle. That’s what you have to go through. You’ll be fine.

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Justin: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the entrepreneur DNA. I have a good friend of mine, Dan Fleyshman is in the house. What’s up, brother?

Dan: That’s a really good name for podcast, by the way, entrepreneur DNA because it’s in your DNA.

Justin: That’s it. So I appreciate that. Well, listen, your resume is so expensive. I want to cut to the chase. I want everyone to know who you are. But I want you to give them your top two items that you think you’d want to share from your resume what you’ve accomplished in all these years.

Dan: Youngest founder of publicly traded company in history, and angel investor and 43 companies.

Justin: Let’s go, what does it take to get in there? How do you get those two resume bullet points,

Justin: I love that. So when you talk about being obsessed, I think is under spoken about inner space. Yeah, because it’s the got to be to the point and listen, I’m not near the levels you’ve been able to reach, and this is why I have you here I’m so honored to. By the way for all my listeners. This man literally, last night is texting me, I’ll fly into Miami to do a podcast with you, then I will fly the very next morning. So he is sacrificing but that is part of the assumption he is doing it because he’s a friend of mine. But also this is his DNA. This is the entrepreneur DNA he has meetings all day tomorrow in Jacksonville. So thank you, again, (Dan: My pleasure) for coming and making this sacrifice. But the obsession part, I want to I want to hone in on that. Because there’s a lot of sacrifices, we make that I think a lot of people, they either don’t value the sacrifice we make. I guess the best way I could say is don’t value but let’s talk about some of the things that you maybe sacrifice, not just TV, but like, did you maybe not have you know, young 20 (Dan: Absolutely) hardy phase, did you sacrifice these?

Dan: So, I went public when I was 23 years old. Right? So, all of a sudden, I’m rich. And like I got all this stuff going on. I’m traveling from 23 to 27, I got the product energy drink into 55,000 retail stores. I do not remember a birthday, a date or anything there. So, nothing like literally nothing. I only remember selling drinks for four years. Now, that’s not a good thing from like personal life. And like (Justin: For sure), like oh family, like I literally don’t remember it. But I don’t regret it. Whereas that’s part of the obsession. And also, you don’t know until you get into it, how much physical time you’re gonna be away from family, friends, old friends, and everybody in between. Because you are focused on work, you are focused on the goal. And by doing your work and the goal. Everyone around you wins and all the people in your friends and family win. That’s hard for everyone to understand.

Justin: Yeah. So let’s talk about the company. What can you mention of the company that you took public?

Dan: Yeah, so I trademark the catchphrase “Who’s your Daddy?” Yeah, so I had over 300 products, clothing, barbecue sets, but the energy drinks was the main thing. Once I went public before that, I did tens of million dollar in sales of apparel. And then the energy drink was my focus. It was the very first zero sugar, zero carb, zero calorie energy drink. And the first thing was like bright colored cans. We had the cranberry pineapple, we had the first green tea, like we were doing innovative things back then. And so I was obsessed with it. But one more thing about obsession. The reason you have to be obsessed to be an entrepreneur is in those hours when it’s 11pm. And it’s 1am. And it’s 2am or 6am. You got to get up early, you have to be obsessed to want to do that. (Justin:That’s it) When your dog wants to cuddle or your girlfriend or husband wants to cuddle like, you have to be obsessed to want to pick up and go to work and do your thing. And you have to push all these other things aside, which sounds mean, you have to do that you have to be obsessed actually become an entrepreneur.

Justin: Yeah. And listen, I’m a big fan of like I talked to a lot of people, I’m going to be a billionaire. My vertical is going to be through real estate. That is my specialty. But I own seven companies at this point. One of them has my intrigue is in technology. By the way, I know nothing about technology. But what would you advise someone who’s gonna go art in the paint? What level of obsession would you say is safe? Right? Where you’re not sacrificing your physical health.

Dan: It is not safe to be an entrepreneur. And it’s not okay, that people make it cool to be an entrepreneur. (Justin: Yeah) It is really hard. No matter what level you’re at, every step of the game is super, super hard. When you first try to raise money, when you first have an idea, when you first tried to get going, and you finally get some sales and you want to go to the next level, then you need more capital because you actually got sales. And then all of a sudden you got more capital, and you got all these people to answer to and there’s board of advisers. Now you got a bunch of sales and everything’s going great. But Then all your employees start to leave they got fire. There’s competition, and then you’ve got and there’s lawsuits because now you’ve got money, every step of the game is hard. There is no point ever it’s not hard. Even trying to sell your company takes a year or two. And you go through five different backstab offers, like, every single step of an entrepreneurship is hard. And we don’t talk about it enough because everyone just thinks it’s cooled an entrepreneur,

Justin: This could be my favorite podcast episode already, because it’s so damn real. I mean, it is not easy the amount of sacrifice and in for those that are married and have loved ones that have kids, I mean, it is on another level, like the love for kids and missing those things. That is incredibly difficult. So, let’s take it where you are now. You’ve done a lot in the last 12 months. Yeah, 18 months, I’ve been watching this journey. Tell me about what you’re most excited about right now.

Dan: So, the reason I’m going to hyperdrive is I feel like I’m in the matrix. I can see when I want to launch something I can scale it. Gary Vee named cards and coffee my sports car store chain. It was a fun idea. fun hobby. Eight weeks in 1 million sales. I self-funded with 1.65 million 8 months and 10 million sales. Nobody else in the sports cars business is doing that. I feel like I could just see because I had all the puzzle pieces. Yeah, ever. But we went from 17 locations to 30 locations. Now 81 locations, one new one every six days. Feel like I’m in the matrix, right? I’m gonna start a podcast finally for four years, like I’m not gonna do a podcast. I launched it exactly a year ago. We were number one entrepreneur category for 41 weeks out of the year.

Justin: By the way, everyone needs to go listen to that right now. If you’re watching this listening to the if you’re on my Youtube, wherever you’re at, go to the Money Mondays.

Dan: And so I just feel like I can see it now. And that’s why I’m going hyperdrive. Then last summer, I bought into the parent company of Aspire tour 19 companies within it but Aspire towards the one that people can see. Because we’re it’s a nationwide tour, double the size of the business, all of a sudden is the largest business tour where I have Kevin Hart and Two Chainz and Rick Ross and T Payne and Mark Cuban. I just feel like I can see it right now I can see how to scale things in each vertical each category. I’m gonna throw the world’s largest toy drive, and I’m gonna break my own record. And I’m gonna break my own record again. I feel like I’m in you know, I’m saying so that’s why you see like, the last 18 months in particular, I’m going to hyperdrive and charity podcasts, books speaking. Every category. Yeah, I just feel like I’m in it. And I can see, this is what we need. This is what we need. This is how we can do it.

Justin: Do you believe in seasons? Do you believe? Dan Fleyshman has his season right now I’m in until the seasons up. (Dan: I’m in it) Does it I mean the way I kind of bringing up is a season or like a wave like this wave runs. But at some point, the wave crashes, (Dan: Of course). So, you ride the damn wave as long as you can. And right now you’re in the middle of the tube almost. I guess it would be a great analogy.

Dan: When you see it happen in basketball games all the time, momentum. The team’s down 26 in the fourth quarter, like I would bet my kidney that’s over. And they win by four, right? How’d that happen? Yeah, they’re down by 32 at halftime, this is boring, change the channel and come back. They’re up by 12. Like, momentum happens in business and momentum happens in family and charity and life and friendship and everything between momentum happens. And during that time. It’s up to you to keep up the momentum or not.

Justin: I think people give up before they catch it. The challenge is not people getting excited about owning a business being an entrepreneur, the challenge is they’ll give up before they even have a chance to sniff momentum.

Dan: Well, that’s again, because we’re an add society that’s like they can be two months in or six months in or one year and they’re like, I’m not a bazillionaire yet. How? (Justin: Right?) Even if you crash let me give you a quick example. Let’s say you and I started green shirts.com together, and Justin goes and gets $4 million in sales of green shirts I put in 500k to start the company. Guess how much Justin’s gonna make in that year? It rhymes with zero. Because if he goes does & $4 million in sales off to 500k I gave him $2 million of that was hard cost the manufacturer of the green shirts. He spent $600,000 in paid ads and paid media. You got an office that cost 200 grand a year even hired seven staff that cost 400 grand a year. What money is left over for Justin? None. So people think that oh did $4 million in sales. That means you made zero. Your staff made money Justin the CEO made zero you’re always last to get paid.

Justin: Let’s talk about that. That is a very under talked about subject is people want to start a business, they want to start a new thing, they want to start a new vertical, they wanna start new, something even the experienced entrepreneurs even me like I just said I’m going to tech. I am not taking any income Okay, everyone is making money or except me the sales guys already selling, crushing it making multiple six figures that he’s bringing home zero.

Dan: and by the way, when rents due, when the credit card bills are due. When everything is due every invoice that comes in and guess who’s gonna pay it if there’s no money in the cup Every time absolutely nobody else not that sales rep that made 200 grand this year. He’s pitching in $0 and ₵0 and he’ll look at you sideways. If you ask them to put up 10 grand for one of those invoices.

Justin: 100%. But the second that he makes a sale he makes sure I know how much commission he’s going to make out there.

Dan: As he should by the way.

Justin: Oh, and I love it and I encourage it because I know my ROI I’ve done this a long enough Time. So you’ve been so how long have you been an entrepreneur? How old are you now?

Dan: I’m 42 Now, I started my company when I was 17 and a 1/2. I like to say that.

Justin: Bro I had an entrepreneur spirit. Right? So, I was like hustling sports cars by the way. Kudos to you and you got me back into sports cards legit. Dude, I was breaking packages. I didn’t know I was watching you. I’m like I’m breaking right. So super happy. I did. I definitely need one of those rookie cards from that new rookie can’t pronounce his name (Dan: His name is funky. He’s amazing). And then I’m a Niner fan Brock, Purdy rookie cards right now like eight-nine grand. Come on. I missed the vote already. Anyways, I had like the hustle where I’d open a box of baseball cards in the card store. Yeah, sell them the best cards back at wholesale price, essentially double my money. So at the time was 20 bucks, I would make 40 Give my mom the 20 bucks back. But you legit were starting businesses at 17 years old?

Dan: I trademarked the catchphrase when I was 17 and a half. My older brother had to help us do it because you have to be 18 to you know do all the work. At 18 We went to the clothing convention in Vegas called Magic. We wrote $1 million in orders. This is in 1999.

Justin: Were they the big white shirts or whatever it says who’s your dad?

Dan: That’s all it was? (Justin: Dude…). We’re in bourbons, Miller’s outpost, Anchor blue, like the stores. These are old school stores don’t even exist. Some of them don’t exist anymore. But your blue I love that the booth next to me was FUBU. And he had like a million that Damon had a million dollar booth. That brand new clothing line by some guy named Puff Daddy. It’s called Sean John was like, literally a castle right next to me. I had 20T . Yeah, that was my booth. Yeah, I had two high school girls in the frickin clothing rack. We read a million dollars in orders. The next year, we did a deal for $9.5 million was starter apparel in the UK. That changed everything. Because now we got 8% of gross sales is royalty money 3% for marketing money. They did all the manufacturing, like that set us up into the clothing space to go through.

How long do you stay in the game? To catch that momentum back to kind of this point of momentum? How long do you tell people like obviously you gotta be in the right vertical? You got to understand that there’s something there that there’s like, how long would you encourage people like even if you don’t feel like you’re winning right now, even if you got to keep pushing. What’s your thoughts on all that?

Dan: You’re going to know in the first year if you’re onto something, you’re gonna know the second year if you can actually do it. After that there’s decisions because it’s based on the category and vertical of what you’re doing or what you’re up to. The first year is set up shop and research. Like, if you want to do real estate, or tech or anything between like, immerse yourself, go to every convention, go to every event, be on Google all night, be on social media, like immerse yourself to learn everything and you might realize I don’t like tech, or I love tech. By immersing yourself in the space. The second year you realize, now I know how to raise capital. Now I know how to get sales. Now I met a bunch of people and I’ve connections relationships. Now if you can actually go get sales, then go for it. If you’re not doing it by a year or two, you might want to go look at working somewhere else.

Justin: Absolutely. So let’s talk about social media, you started a pretty powerful branding company. How much have you spent on ads.

Dan: Over $60 million with influencers for brands, products, mobile apps.

Justin: That is insane. So, let’s talk about branding. I just interviewed our mutual friend, Grant Cardone, and asked him about branding. I don’t know what he heard or didn’t heard when asked him the importance about branding. But he said it’s bull crap, said Grant. You are the guy who branded, especially what else in the category. And so I love them. Right. If you’re watching this, talk to me about branding, the power of branding, power of personal brand, power of everyone knowing Dan Fleyshman with all the companies, but it’s got to be Dan Fleischman. Let’s talk about branding.

Dan: I mean, Grant even spent six weeks with me to do branding. So he likes branding. Yeah, I think there he might not have heard the question. He is the one of the true icons of the branding, whether you love him or hate him or whatever it is, but they’re irrelevant. You think about him when he talk. (Justin: a 100%) Absolutely. And so he spends more on personal brands than literally who else besides like Tai Lopez back in the days like yeah, who spends more than grand now? Gary Vee Gary Vee doesn’t spend it. He does it through organic. Grant does organic also anyways, it is mission critical. Yeah, you you have a personal brand, whether you like it or not, it’s up to you to decide if you want to tell the story or let other people gossip about you. (Justin: Right). Your choice also is, if you know that your personal brand leads to sales, or investors or partnerships or deals or whatever then more. It is like if you know, I’m a real estate agent, if I had more clients, and I had more people see me, I would make more money. Okay, go get more famous. (Justin: That’s right.) Even if just in your niche or your category. When I say famous, I don’t mean TMZ I mean in your niche or in your category, you know, and too many people don’t do it, or they think they can only do organic or should only do organic, which is insane. You need to build your personal brand. If it relates to your business sales, charity, you have a book, you have an event, something in your world. You have to get more famous.

Justin: You’re hearing this from someone who spent over $60 million on influencers for brands. The man knows what he’s talking about. So you’ve heard it from me enough. Start branding yourself. Now, with that said, I’m watching you and hitting you up periodically but what is the movement for right now? What is this momentum? Where are you going? What are you trying to achieve? With all that you’ve already achieved. You’re 42, your same age as I am with everything that’s on your resume, what are you going for with the Aspire tour, which is front facing all the other things behind it.

Dan: So, my ultimate goal is to save the world. There’s only three main categories that humans need to survive, food, water, shelter. Obviously, they need love and other things and like, things that would matter to people, but to actual hardcore survival, especially in third world countries, they need food, water, shelter, charity, water does a great job. And what they’re doing for water, and I don’t want to replicate or compete with them either way, I wouldn’t mind competing, because it helps the world but meaning that they just do such a great job, I’d rather support them. (Justin: Sure.) On the food side, it’s so clear when you got tens of thousands of major food companies, hundreds of thousands of food companies, but 10s of 1000s of major ones, they have so much excess supply or product that’s very affordable, that we can be buying at a cheap wholesale, or they could be donating, we could be giving it out. I want to create a very efficient model to give out food to homeless to third world countries. And by the way, there’s a huge amount of people that are not homeless, but they’re not getting by. And that number is going to get worse because our inflation being at 9% a year, the lower income is not gonna become homeless that technically, but man, yeah, they have to choose between their insurance bill and food, or their rent and food, like it’s gonna get tough for milk and bread because it’s too expensive. Gonna get tough. So delivering food at affordable price, and then buying it at wholesale or getting it for free, then distributing it around the planet. That’s one part. And then the homelessness side, that part is completely clear. To me, I have a very clear vision of how to basically build small cities, for the homeless, next to major cities, to provide an environment for them to rehab get better, and some people will never get better. Some people won’t rehab because they want to be no sounds where they want to be homeless. Yeah, they did a study in San Diego, they built 114 unit put in 114 homeless people in it. Within one week, there was less than 20 of them living there.

Justin: Wow Dude, Wow.

Dan: And it was nice. (Justin: They just want to be homeless? And so, it’s part of their lifestyle. And so that part is hard because that’s not fixable. Yeah. Unless without extreme therapy, psychology, rehab, etc. So anyways, the point is my goal and all this of why I’m trying to get personal brand, wealthy, build a lot of friendships and make a lot of other people, the masses money and teach them about money, whether it’s podcasts speaking, etc. I need the masses and my friends to get really rich, so that I don’t ask them for anything. But one day, like, hey, I can solve food or I can solve homelessness in this area. I need money. I don’t want $1 from it. I don’t want to take like when I run this charity. (Justin: Yep). As you guys have seen for 12 years, I’m also publicly showing all my charity stuff. And I pay for all of it. Yeah. And I don’t want you to donate if you don’t have to go do it yourself. I’m showing in public how I do charity, I can throw the world’s largest toy drive, they see me food drives, 6 million items for the homeless, etc. So that people can see that one day, Dan’s gonna ask and say, Hey, let’s do this together.

Justin: That’s right. That’s right. Let’s talk about money real quick. I enjoy your podcast a lot. I enjoy your guests, obviously. I’m listening to the advice you give. A lot of people don’t they say they don’t care about money. So I don’t agree with it. Right? I’m hell bent on money. I’m hell bent on making as much damn money as I possibly can not to sacrifice my love for my family and any of that. But I think it is the most important thing barring the essentials, because it really provides the answer to a lot of the pain, hurt issues that we have normal people have every single day, right? You have a different mission. It sounds like for money. Right? You’re really out there to make as much as you can. Not for Dan, although Dan. But because you have a bigger mission in this talk, just I know, we just talked about that. But like, let’s talk about the money factor in in how it plays into all this.

Dan: So, society, we just grew up the hints route and talking about money. And that put us at a huge deficit because we couldn’t have discussions about salary, and rent and loans and all the situation that come up. What really at the core of it, if you think about it, money is not the root of all evil. It’s the root of all your solutions. If your mom gets sick, you need money, and you would do anything to pay for her to have an extra one month, one year, two years, five years. If your dog gets hurt, what would you do? If you had to spend five or $10,000 to fix the dog for another year or two? Would you do it? (Justin:Yeah) That decision changes. If you only have 2 grand in he bank (Justin: That’s right) you don’t have the option. When you have 20 grand you have a different decision. Fifty grand, 100 grand, 200 grand. People think it’s rude for me to say that (Justin:No) It is not rude. You’re making decisions for your mom or your dog or your child or yourself etc. You want to live somewhere, the difference between a two bedroom, a three bedroom, a four bedroom, a five bedroom is about 20% ,30%, 40% each time, that is part of money. You want to go to restaurants because you enjoy it or you want your kids to play sports. Sport is expensive. When we go to private school, private school is expensive. You want to fly, however you want to fly business class, regular. All these things cost money, and they’re part of your daily life. I didn’t say anything that’s I’m gonna say you got a boat, buy private jets and fancy watches. I’m talking about real life. Food, travel, sports for your kids, health for your family and your dog. There’s real life stuff that happens. You need to repair something that costs money. And so we need people to make more money. We need them to invest. I need people to understand, it is not cool, to not invest. It is not cool, to not save money, you have to save money, because life’s gonna get really expensive, and your kids are going till live over a hundred years old. Our parents passed away, 73 to 77 years old. (Justin: Yeah) We’re gonna pass away technically around 83 years old, but your kids are lived to a hundred. (Justin: Yeah) Because they grew up wherever they could be vegan, or they could work out or they can have mental health or they could research things. And there’s a gym on every corner, there’s a whole food in every corner. You and I there was no whole foods. There wasn’t a gym on every corner. And so, because of that, if you’re gonna live to 100 years old, if you retire at 65, you need 35 years of money.

Justin: How are you gonna do that?

Dan: If you’re gonna get by on 60 grand a year times that by 35? That’s still $2 million. What if you want a hundred grand a year lifestyle for 35 years? You need to have a $3.5 million saved up if you never have a medical expense or do anything different? (Justin: That’s right). You have to make more money.

Justin: How many you talk about investing? Two points, how many different companies’, ventures, maybe you can include stock market real estate? How much investing? Do you actively do?

Dan: Everything you said I do (Justin: Yeah). I’m an angel investor and 43 companies, I cherry pick one company every month or two to keep investing into through the elevator syndicate. Separate from that I invest into real estate alongside other people. So, I don’t do real estate, I say oh, here, Justin here’s 500,000 you do real estate.Oh here’s 20 grand you do real estate, oh, here’s 20 grand you do real estate. I buy pieces of other people that are experts to do real estate. The stock market, I have one main rule. I’ve only buy 10 stocks, and I buy them over and over and over and over and over. And I never sell them in any circumstance. Do you believe that Apple will be here in five years, why would you sell it? I believe that Google, Netflix, Facebook, Walmart are gonna be in five years, why would you sell it? They are going to keep growing. And so I just buy the same things boring over and over and over and over and over. And so investing is a part of my daily life, but doesn’t take as much time as people think. If you like stocks, or you like to shop at Walmart buy some. You watch Netflix every night, buy some Netflix stock. You have a Tesla, buy some Tesla stock. You have an iPhone, and you spend 1,500 bucks by 15 hours of Apple stock. If you would have just bought. This is one last thing I’ll say. If you would have bought the exact amount of Apple stock as you spent on the iPhone each year for the last 15 years, you would be a millionaire. There’s 15 iPhones and they’re only 1,000 bucks for 10 bucks each. That would make you a million.

Justin: We’re gonna end it on. Boom. Guys, I appreciate you listening and watching this episode, you need to follow Dan Fleyshman on every single platform period. Let him know exactly the handles you wanted to follow out and where they can best find you.

Dan: So it’s all at Dan Fleyshman. It’s also important for you guys, you should have the same screen name on every platform.

Justin: Amen. See, take it from 60 million worth of spend, dude I appreciate you. Thank you so much for what you do for the entrepreneur world. People, humanity, friends like myself, we appreciate you. (Dan: Let’s do it again). Let’s do it again peace.

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