Shahin's Corner - The Podcast That Bites
Shahin's Corner - The Podcast That Bites
Shahin's Corner with Special Guest Colin Yorkeson - Rising from Difficult Times to Entrepreneurial Success through Personal Branding and Leveraged Investments
Ever wondered how personal branding can transform your life and career? What if I told you that our guest for this episode, Colin Yorkeson, has done exactly that and much more! This young entrepreneur, influencer, and founder of Leverage Lifestyle and Leverage Investments, takes us on an exhilarating journey, from his humble beginnings as a creative kid enamoured by skateboarding, to the challenges he faced in college, and ultimately, his triumphant climb to success.
Colin's story is a dramatic saga of transformation - from hitting rock bottom to rising like a phoenix, armed with self-taught knowledge on credit repair and the power of social media. Through his journey, Colin emphasizes the importance of value provision and personal branding that have been pivotal in his success. He shares his insights into setting up a drop-shipping store on Walmart, managing teams 24/7 and creating a customer-centric franchise model, which is a testament to his entrepreneurial prowess.
Yet, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Delve into the world of personal branding with us, as we discuss the importance of staying tech-savvy, and creating a personal brand that shines in the digital era. Colin shares his secrets on optimizing travel and lifestyle with credit, providing valuable insights on how to live a glamorous life on your own terms. We also investigate the potential of the internet as a catalyst for success and discuss how to automate Walmart and Facebook for generating passive income. Don't hold back; immerse yourself in this riveting conversation and discover how you can carve your own path to success, just like Colin Yorkeson!
I am pumped to be introducing you my next guest, colin Yorkeson. What's?
Speaker 2:up. How are you doing, man? I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:There's so much, I want to talk about One. Maybe I should have chose your lifestyle instead of what I got into 25 years ago, but we're going to get into that. Hey, never too late, I could be the 25 year old. Hey, a lot of people in their fifties are living like they're there in their twenties, bro.
Speaker 2:Exactly, man Do a little biohacking, you're good to go.
Speaker 1:Listen. World traveler, influencer, the founder of Leverage Lifestyle, the founder of Leverage Investments, multi-million dollar earner annually at 25. What the hell, man? Come on, I was 25 years old playing pro soccer. I thought I was the shit. That's pretty cool Making a couple of grand. I thought I was on top of the world, yeah.
Speaker 2:I was playing the wrong game man. Hey, soccer is still pretty cool. You're a pro, so you got to give yourself something for that.
Speaker 1:I don't know, man. It's much better to have a few million dollars in the bank.
Speaker 2:I tell you that Right. It is pretty good. It's nice. I do like what I did with my life so far. I'm not going to lie.
Speaker 1:Well, before we get into that, Colin, what do you tell us a little bit about your background? I got so many questions to ask, but let's learn a little bit more about you, bud.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. First, I'll just appreciate you for bringing me on. I love these opportunities. Being able to tell my story is my passion because it impacts so many people. But yeah, my story is nothing too crazy.
Speaker 2:In the beginning I grew up with an amazing family. Mom and dad are still together. My dad loved sports when I was a kid. He used to play college football wrestling as well. Immediately when I was born, I was thrown on a Dallas Cowboys uniform. I had the hat on. I didn't even like sports as a kid. It's funny because my dad always dreamed of having a pro athlete son.
Speaker 2:But my mind was more artistic and creative. I like skateboarding. I like filming. I liked going on hikes and creating a YouTube back in 2011. I was just very out there doing all the opposite stuff that all the popular kids were doing. But really early on, my creative side got killed because I was getting bullied so much for being an outcast, for liking to skating. I was doing tech decks. I was just weird. I was just doing shit. That was not normal.
Speaker 2:My dad forced me into going hard with sports, even though I didn't like sports. I had to commit to them and do one every season. Early on that built up my work ethic, instantly enrolled into wrestling. I'm cutting weight 10 pounds I got to lose in two weeks. I'm going hard every single night doing runs, waking up at 4 am. This is at 16 years old 15, 16. I'm instantly thrown into work ethic.
Speaker 2:My family is so good and so loving. I always wanted to please my family. There was no hey dad, I'm not doing this, I'm not quitting. He taught me at a very early on stage that you never quit anything. You start in life. If it's not something you like to do, then you finish it out, you take the lesson and then you move on. My dad and my mom honestly I have to credit everything to them, just the way they raised me. We're not rich by any means. When I was born in my first neighborhood it was a bad town, a rough school. I went to a middle school right next to the projects in New Jersey. Then we moved to a town called Robinsville. My dad's always made six figures a year, like 100K, whatever. He's been in the corporate sales world his whole life. That's really what I wanted to do too.
Speaker 2:My dad inspired me so much from his traveling, from his freedom, with being his own boss on his team. He obviously worked for a company, but he basically made his own schedule, got to travel the world. I started traveling with him young and this is where my first seed was planted. He put me on a plane to Miami with him at like 13. I was staying in these amazing hotels. We went to Hawaii early on with my whole family. He got me very inspired with the traveling.
Speaker 2:Then college comes around. It's time to apply for college Because we traveled so much. My dad had so many points. He allowed me to pick a school wherever I wanted in the United States. This was my biggest turning point of learning who I was.
Speaker 2:When you venture out small town New Jersey where no one's ever left. No one ever went to a college anywhere unless it was Pennsylvania, new Jersey, maybe Florida if your parents allow you. But I got out. I went to University of Arizona and there I learned so much about myself. I majored in business. That was something I always knew I wanted to do because I wanted to make money.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize that the business school would not teach me how to create a business at all, which is kind of ironic. Why do they not teach us? They don't teach you how to make passive income. They don't teach you about taxes. They don't teach you about setting up the right bank accounts, building relationships with bankers, crypto nothing. You don't learn anything. You learn basically how to become an employee and ride the corporate ladder, and maybe a little team building skills. So I knew right away within college that it was bullshit and that I was going to get every little ounce of experience out of it in other ways. So, networking I joined in fraternity, I traveled a ton, I partied my ass off, I had the most fun ever and that was it. And I got everything out of me back in those four years.
Speaker 2:So then I graduated from my business school. I actually didn't get in the first time but because of what was instilled in me at a young age, never quit. I tried again and I eventually got in and everyone thought there was no way I was getting in. I was parting like crazy. I just I really didn't look like I had it in me, but I just kept driving. I got in. I got a business degree in management and I got a job. I landed a job back in like April, right before graduation, working at an outside sales job for ADP. So selling payroll. This is like 2019, really not long ago at all.
Speaker 2:So I get out of college and I realize, you know, within three weeks of this job, that I am screwed, I am miserable. I'm surrounded by people who are not motivated, not driven, have no purpose in life. Everyone wants to just take care on the weekends and go party and go eat dinners and grab happy hour and that's it. They're just on the hamster wheel. I have $50,000 of debt now because of college and a loan I took out. I have a car payment, I have an apartment and I am literally just thrown into a jail cell. Like in my own mind, in my own job, my restrictions. I was making $1,200 every two weeks. I can't even imagine now how I even did that.
Speaker 2:So that all happened and you know, I just went from four years of the funnest school of my life. I had, you know, a little money from my grandma. I got to really just live it up at college and then I just got put in you know the exact opposite. So I was like, how do I get out of this? I was, you know, still kind of struggling with with drugs and alcohol going out a lot, because I was just kind of lost. I was like, well, I guess I'm just gonna party, I don't know what else to do. So I was going out a ton and quickly just that spiral down a really dark slope and I'm not going to really get too in a detail.
Speaker 2:But my turning point was when I got drugged. And you know, I got home from that event and I looked in the mirror and I was like this is not me, this is not how my life is going to end up, and if I keep going down this path, I'm either going to die or I'm just going to live a super depressing life with zero impact at all. And I'm only. I'm only here once. So I just said I have nothing to lose. I got 50 grand in debt. My life's a joke right now. Why don't I just do the most absurd thing ever and just take a bet on myself and quit my job, put my back against the wall and burn the boats? And that's exactly what I did.
Speaker 2:I started during my job. During those like six months where I was depressed, I started doing some personal development. So I learned, you know, from Gary V Ed, my lead grant card, on all these big influencers out there nowadays that give kids a reason to get on social media and get positive impact. So I started basing everything in my life off of them. They became my mentors and, you know, quickly I quit my job and I started a personal brand. I knew that personal branding in the internet is where the education and the information lived and I knew if I need, if I wanted to be a part of this massive internet explosion with kids I saw that were 17 years old, making seven figures a month on drop shipping a product from China to people during the holidays. Like I was like I need to be a part of this somehow. I don't know what it's going to be, but I know I need to have a face on the internet because that is where the real world is now.
Speaker 2:So I created a personal brand and then I decided that I needed to try every single high income skill that was relevant at the time. So I did wholesale real estate. That failed. I knocked on like 300 doors in Arizona summer driving around with a hard hat on. It was ridiculous, horrible with that. Then I started a clothing company with a friend. We lost $10,000. That failed.
Speaker 2:Then I started an ATM business. I thought I could go broker ATMs and put ATMs inside. You know, barbershops, salons, generate cash flow. That failed. Then I invested, out of desperation, $20,000 into an automated business. That was a scam. So then I got scammed $20,000.
Speaker 2:So I tried entrepreneurship and I got slapped in the face by it. Immediately. All signs are saying run, go back to your job, go back to mom and dad, this is not for you. You are not having this right now. And whatever.
Speaker 2:What really made me keep going was the fact that my life couldn't get any worse. Like I was at rock bottom. You can't go below rock bottom. I had no money. I had nothing else to lose. I had really no friends. I stopped hanging out with all my loser friends were partying. So I was just. This was it for me.
Speaker 2:So I kept going and eventually I sat down and looked at my finances in the face because I literally couldn't afford anything. I had late payments, I had tons of interest and I sat there and I looked and I pulled up the FICO report, my credit report on Experiancom, and I scrolled down and I looked at everything on there and I saw obviously I had a collection from the debt that I couldn't pay. I had late payments on this and I started looking up how to remove collections Fair Credit Reporting Act what is that? And I started to piece together this puzzle of credit and I was like, wow, wait a second, this is big right here. Why do people not know about credit repair? At least I had no idea.
Speaker 2:So out of the people that were in my friend group in Scottsdale, I'm like I know there's got to be a ton of kids who are partying on the weekends that max out their credit cards, that have a ton of loans. Maybe they defaulted on something. They're not telling anyone. What if I, with my new personal brand I have no idea what to do with that had like 20,000 followers that I bought? I was like what if I start educating on this credit thing? And so I just went for it because I had nothing to lose. I was so embarrassed, I was so scared. I set up the camera on my desk and I filmed a five things to know when you get started with credit, three mistakes to not make in the beginning when you get started, how to read your FICO score. And every week I would post two to three of these videos on my Instagram page and quickly I realized that 2019, right 2019.
Speaker 2:This is like in September of 2019,. I quit my job August 22. So it's, you know, a little over two years now. So, and the craziest thing is like, this is right before COVID and we have no idea.
Speaker 2:I have no idea the timing of this. So you know I'm doing this and I'm posting the videos and I'm looking at my engagement and the shares on my Instagram videos. I'm guessing from my community around me who was first making fun of me. Look at Colin dude. He's posting all this value Like he thinks he can be an entrepreneur. What is this guy doing To then getting a hundred shares on a single video about credit? So no one really commenting but sharing to everyone. So I'm like All publicity is good publicity. Something's up here. So I just went extra on it.
Speaker 2:So I did that for about two, three months, just filming videos, giving content, giving value, nonstop. Had no idea what I was gonna do with it, didn't even come to my mind to make a course or monetize it. I was so new and so lost that I was just throwing stuff out and seeing what hit. So I do that for three months. I'm making money at this time by helping other people grow their Instagram accounts, because I had 20,000, 30,000 followers. I'm posting content.
Speaker 2:People are like okay, you know, I have a dog business that I want to help people walk their dogs. I have a cafe, so I'm meeting with people around Scottsdale growing their business and, surprisingly, I'm making like 10 grand a month right now. We're going from making like three grand a month at my corporate job that I had to pay $200,000 a year to go to University of Arizona get my degree and then I got locked into that. I was making 10 times more just literally working on my own schedule helping people grow Instagram. So life for me was like I already saw, there was some, there was some spunk in that Like I knew that I was on the something, I was on the right path. Hell, I didn't have to go work for someone I didn't like. Like this was great, even though I still have 50 grand a debt. I was seeing some income pile up. So the moment this all changed and I'm sorry if I'm talking too long, oh, you're good bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the moment everything kind of clicked is after three months of just providing straight value and then getting so many DM saying dude, can you help me personally with my file? Do you have credit? Or paired, you have this, do you have that? I'm like, okay, I need to monetize credit. Credit needs to be what my brand is about. Everyone knows me now as the credit guy either locally in Scottsdale. I even had people from all over the country starting to DM me and I was like how can I monetize this? Well, number one, I can do credit repair. I don't want to do.
Speaker 2:I learned how to repair my credit through my mistakes, so I knew how hard it was. I had to basically, you know, do the letters. I had to send them out in the mail, priority mail. You literally have to go there in person to hand them the letters, wait for the response. I'm like there's no way I'm doing this for 100 people. So how can I monetize that? Well, I reached out to a bunch of mentors, like in credit, and I found my friend, darryl Drake, who's still one of my best friends today, owned a credit repair business. I said hey, dude, if I pay you 500 bucks, can you take care of all my clients files and then I'll keep 500 from them and that's how we'll do it and that's that was one of my my income streams. The other one was okay. How do I monetize this information I'm giving for free? I had so much value around credit, travel and building income with 0% business credit and just leveraging the bank's money to make stuff happen in your life. How do I monetize it? Well, I can build a private group.
Speaker 2:So I sat down at a coffee shop this is right before black Friday, which is notoriously the best sales online day in history and I sit down for about three hours and I build out my first platform called credit class. I went on Instagram. I typed in a brand new name. Credit class came up. It was available surprisingly. That's like such a cool name. I don't know how anyone took that. It was meant to be a hit, let's go.
Speaker 2:And I sat there for three hours and I compiled all of my information into little posts and I put it on the page and I made it private. So I have my public Instagram and now I have credit class that I put in my bio. People click on it but they can't see anything because it's locked, it's private. So I get up and I'm like, okay, I need to make this scarce, I need to draw a lot of attention and I need them to want to buy this program. How do I do that? I took screenshots of all the value and I blurred out like the secrets basically, start posting that, promoting that.
Speaker 2:On my story I said on black Friday this is going to go live and it's a black Friday sale for $250. I usually sell for 550% off. Let's see what happens. Promoted it for a week, black Friday went live. I made $6,500 in a day and that changed my life forever. I knew I had something. I knew it was. I was at value to people and I knew that credit was one of the hottest things that you could be in right at this moment. So that's a day.
Speaker 2:Everything changed for me. I quickly started piling up cash. You know, long story short, I paid off my 50 grand of debt. I got off negative, I got on zero and then, from there, the momentum. From that I just exploded. I invested into courses, I invested into mentors. I started traveling all over the world. I set a goal for myself.
Speaker 2:This was back in August, when I quit my job. I said I'm going to move to Bali December 2020 or January 2020, right when 2020 hits, I'm out, I'm out of Scottsdale, I'm out of this environment. And I did it and I put it on my whiteboard. I bought my ticket. I got a villa with my best friend at the time, who also quit his job as a personal trainer for five years, and we both did the journey together. So we went to Bali. I started promoting content. My credit business keeps growing. Credit class now has like 200 members in it. I raised the price to $1,000. So everyone who signed up was giving me a thousand bucks and that grew to the $1,000 through the 350 members.
Speaker 2:Through that, I got introduced to e-commerce, because I had a ton of business credit now and I was teaching people how to leverage so much money. But what do you do with the credit when you get it? Well, there's another hot industry right now. That's e-commerce automation. I started brokering that for a few people and then I created my own company with my partner now Mike and that's Leverage Investments. We service over a hundred clients and my businesses go hand in hand.
Speaker 2:You learn how to create a personal brand, leverage your credit. So you build your personal credit first. Then you get 0% business credit once your personal file is good. Then you move into. Okay, what do I do with this money Now? You invest it into e-commerce, automation, real estate, other assets are going to produce you income to pay off your debts and you can buy luxuries with cash flow. Never want to buy that with your cash from your business. Always buy from passive income.
Speaker 2:Then I started getting into Bitcoin and then, yeah, everything just kind of took off over the last two years, yeah, so basically, my course really teaches people about credit. So I had so many people accessing so many lines of credit on the business side and then it was like, okay, colin, this is awesome. We got a hundred grand at 0%. Now what do I do with it? So it came to me like I need to help people figure out where to allocate money. So I started sending them to some automated e-commerce businesses. I was making a little referral money on the side, but I was like, wait a second, this might be even bigger than what I'm doing right now this whole industry. So I started up an e-commerce company with my partner, mike, who is now my partner in Leverage Investments, and, yeah, we have over a hundred clients now with Walmart, and now we're doing Facebook automation as well and we'll talk about that later on the call, and that's where both the businesses came from.
Speaker 1:That's an amazing story, man, but I think one of the key things that you've forgotten this whole process is you got to give yourself some credit, bro. I mean, it's not easy to being as young as you are and as mature as you are. Certainly sure you went party and had fun, did your thing, but you failed a few times, right? And failing a few times at that young of an age man it's like beats you up, beats you up, but you kept going. Man, I think that's one of the things you probably learned from your family is don't quit your dad, right 100%.
Speaker 2:I mean, I always was trained to do hard stuff all the time, like always stuff I didn't want to do, and you know it builds a calic. It's like your mind is a muscle and my muscle was strong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, I tell you, I can tell you for myself my personal experience. I was certainly not as mature as you. I didn't party, I wasn't, you know, that kind of a guy but I can tell you that it takes a mindset to continue to push. It takes a mindset as an entrepreneur. You fail and fail and fail and you find a way, right, I mean, you find a way and that's one of the things that I think you mentioned. Like, for three months, you're just giving value, giving value, but you don't really know what the hell is going on. Right, like you're like, why am I getting all this attention? Why is this all happening to me? And you couldn't really put it together in a formula for yourself to monetize? I think that's one component that also is very difficult is you have a lot of value, but how can you monetize on that value, right, yeah, and so?
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about the brand component. Let's talk about that a little bit, because I want to talk, touch on a few things here, because a lot of young people listening in here here right now and saying should I be a dentist like this old guy here, or should I just rock and roll like what Colin is doing. Man, it sounds a lot more fun being Colin and Bali at 23 Then sitting behind this thing right here. I would you know, in front of this thing, I should say right here. So tell me a little bit about the brand. What's? How did that? I mean? I know you got over 700,000 followers on Instagram. Talk to me about the difference between organic followers, inorganic followers. How can a doctor listening and build their brand?
Speaker 2:For sure. Yeah, I mean, branding is everything. Now, like your, your personal brand is now your business, and it was never like that before. You know, the internet just came out what 25 years ago? And now, look at it, runs the world.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people kind of just got, you know, they let it just brush right by them and never really looked up. And now they're looking up and they're realizing, oh shit, because I haven't adopted and I'm sticking with, you know, my old school methods of newspaper ads or whatever. You know, there's doctors out there and tons of people in in different industries that just chose not to side with technology and they're the ones losing. So it doesn't matter if you don't like it and you're stubborn about it, it doesn't care about you, it's gonna just keep going in your face and it's gonna get bigger and bigger. And now, with crypto, we're watching the second internet be born and people are gonna miss out again.
Speaker 2:So I mean, just before I talk about branding, just become a student of life. You have to learn every single day. If you're not learning, you're dying, you're not gonna grow and that's not fun. You want to keep up with the punches. You want to keep up with technology so you can last your entire life. You don't want to be the odd man out, so I learned that quickly on as a kid. I mean, I've always been just fascinated with technology. You know, I was born at the time when the dial-up was happening with the internet. That loud noise. I'll never forget it. So like I was literally born when the internet started 19.
Speaker 1:You don't want to know what. I was born dude 25 when the dial-up came up. What the hell man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but but anyway, I mean, it doesn't matter, you know your age, it doesn't matter where you're at, anyone can use the internet, you know it's, it's accessible to anyone pretty much. You just need a phone or a computer. So, yeah, let's talk about branding. So for me, I I just took a step back and I looked, you know, I zoomed out and I looked at who the people were success, what, which people in life that I want to be like that had the best lifestyles, that had the most success, that had the most impact. It was all people that had big personal brands. You know, tony Robbins, edmile leg, grant Cardone, gary V, any, any famous person that has a digital footprint is going to be able to put in Minimal work or as much work as you would if you didn't have any of that stuff. And the amount of impact you're getting out and the amount of reach is gonna hundred, x thousand X, ten thousand X. The person next to you does the same activities, does the same business, but has zero branding. So if you have money first off, if you're a dentist watching this and you got, you know, seven figures in the bank, save from all of your years of practice and you're just letting that money sit rot in the bank. You should probably focus on getting your platform set up your Instagram, your tiktok, your Twitter, your Facebook, your YouTube. Why are you not having a full-time camera guy next to you? That's your TV show. You have a full-time TV show on the internet for free. All you got to do is hire the content guy in the editor and have them Put it on a schedule. You don't need to do anything. So for me in the beginning I was broke. I was 50 grand in debt, but I'm tech savvy. I did it all myself. I started the videos, I did the the subtitles and my one-minute ones, and as I went, I Upgraded the camera, upgraded the mic, I upgraded the lighting and things got better over time. I didn't sit there and analyze my every little detail on all my videos I was posting. Instead, I just posted it.
Speaker 2:A great book to read on personal branding is called crush it by Gary Vaynerchuk. He predicted social media boom and personal brands back in 2008, so before Instagram was even created. He literally said there's going to be people who are obsessed with Smurfs and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, who decide to pick up an iPhone, create a brand around it and make 187 thousand dollars a year, freaking, talking about Yu-Gi-Oh, and it's happening. Every single person that decides to go all in with the brand builds a community, builds a product and gives value, gets to do whatever the hell they want in life and make Way more money than everyone else in the world. So the option is up to you you create a personal brand, you join, or you sit out on the sidelines and you watch it all happen. I want to make it happen. I want to be involved in it. So I chose.
Speaker 2:You know, at 23, when I was struggling, I had zero personal brand and I was watching all these people. I wanted to be like. I said I'm not gonna let this opportunity slide by me and I took advantage. There was no time to wait and, thank God, I took action when I did, because that's when the pandemic happened. When the pandemic happened, I had the opportunity to make the most money of my life and you know I'm gonna be completely honest. I think over these three years, four or five years, I'm gonna make all of my money right now, and it's what I do now. Right now, in this moment, in all of this collapse, with, you know, the liquidity crisis, kobe, this is when, billionaires and millionaires, an opportunity is created, and I'm taking full advantage of it. So you know, branding is one of the most important things ever. It's never too late to start. Pick a platform, get dedicated, post a schedule, set some goals for yourself how many times you want to post a week, and you know, start start branding whatever it is you love.
Speaker 1:Well, I tell you what Gary V was one of my biggest inspirations as well, when I first clicked go on March 2018 on on my phone.
Speaker 1:So he's he played a really large role and he deserves a lot of credit for me, you know, for really changing a lot of you know lives really from from that side. But he also talks about the hardship of entrepreneurship too. Oh yeah, we go through that as well. But you know you bring up such an important point and you know obviously being you know I'm old school, your young school, right like a new generation with being tech savvy and all that kind of stuff. I I grew up with education being so important and you know having a doctor degree being so important. But you know you also now come into the real world and see that really it's about money. A lot of it is just about money. The more money you have, the more access you have, the more you know access is so crucial, so important. People forget about that and so when you're growing up and you know I have a little bit of a different background and the typical dentist being a pro athlete, but when I was younger but I can tell you that Branding right now and this is one of the big issues right now in our profession, colin, is that you know, when you're 22 years old, you graduate college, is it worth going to dental school and being in debt four years later with four, five hundred thousand dollars in debt.
Speaker 1:And Then, if you go into a specialty, beyond that, some of the specialists are coming out with over a million dollars of debt out of after, after college and after eight years or 12 years of being in a specialty program and dental school, and I can tell you that the branding component can happen while you are in school. If you are, you know you can't retract. There was some social media posts is, or you know, oh shit, you know I'm five hundred thousand dollars in debt. Let me go in the corner and corner and cry Right, no, it's like now you're 500k in debt. How can I dominate my arena, my community, my career? How can I dominate? So one of the advices that I can give, maybe as we're kind of having this conversation, is if you're 25 years old or 24 years old and you're a third or fourth year in dental school, start branding yourself now. Start building that community now, because it will bring a lot of value to you three, four years later, five years later, kind of like what you've experienced.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It takes time too and, like you know, you can't, you might. I mean, I have a buddy who I just had on my live call last night. Dead broke same situation as me. Right before COVID started, stock started blowing up. Everyone got their stimulus check during COVID and he looked on TikTok and he said no one has a group teaching people how to do stocks. So he created one viral video, got 700,000 views on his first video on TikTok, traded a Discord charging $20 a month for people to sign up and learn how to trade stocks and get the right calls, and he became a millionaire overnight.
Speaker 2:And it's shit like that, like you can expedite your success and your monetary value of whatever your profession is in one second compared to the real world. If you're just gonna do it without the internet, you're literally gonna have to work for fricking 40 years to pay off that million dollars, whereas if you start up a brand in the background, like you said, when you're at school, you just pitch value for three years straight, grow your brand, give, give, give, give, give, give. And then when you start making money from your dentistry practice or whatever it is your specialty that you open, now you can start paying off your debt, but also you have a full brand around your subject, what you're an expert at, and you create a course you create. You know other, different ways to make money and now you have multiple income streams branching off of your online digital footprint.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know. Look, the key is to understand that you gotta build a community. That community does take time. There is a lot of noise on the internet. There's really just one timeline in all these social channels. So you know there is a lot of noise, so you have to have content that brings value. So you gotta make sure that those things are important. And then you know the perseverance of it. You know Gary talks about it, gary V talks about it all the time of being patient right, being patient about, you know, having that macro vision of where you're going.
Speaker 2:Microspeed macro patients.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's really intriguing that a lot of doctors and you know, as I go and publicly speak, a lot of doctors just don't wanna get in front of the camera. You know, they just feel shy or you know too much analysis, paralysis, kind of thing that you talked about. You know, is my content gonna be good? Am I gonna look good? You know, I mean just so many, so many issues that come into play when somebody doesn't wanna actually click, go.
Speaker 1:But certainly the internet, I think, is an amazing platform and look, I mean you know it's clear Now for me to be honest.
Speaker 1:You know, I have two young kids, a six-year-old and a four-year-old, and I'm just gonna be honest, colin, like I still want them to be highly educated. I think there's more risk in your way, in a sense, as far as just not having a stable life, but when you hit it like you hit it, I mean you hit it big bro, right, but education to me still has a lot of value. I certainly I'm not encouraging anybody to drop out of high school and, you know, drop out of college to get involved in their dream. I think you can still have your dream and in case that doesn't work out for you. You still have a little bit of a background as far as getting a job and you know doing the normal things, but and Gary V talks about this too there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are very depressed. They're, you know, they have some mental health issues, and you know, and the true fact is is that that perseverance is the challenge.
Speaker 2:But it's not easy, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know for you, like talking about credit repair, let's talk about this world traveler man. So what you know traveling with a laptop, what was that like? And I understand that you're kind of cutting back on that a little bit, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been trying, but it's funny, I bought a place in Miami back in mid-July and I think this is like my third week here, so I mean, it's still, I still can't go.
Speaker 2:It's, it's a dude for me, like that was my dream, like if I can go literally stay in hotels in luxury now I'm not talking backpacking, staying in city like I'm doing the thing five star resorts, staying in penthouses, staying in, you know, deluxe king suites Some places have butlers like I figured out a way to save all my money traveling in luxury, literally being able to market that, to get my clients to build out my brand, and do it mostly for free, and it was probably the best experience. I mean, if you're young and you know you're in your 20s and you have the means to go travel, go travel for a couple of years, like just go out there and see the world, go experience things. You learn so much just from putting yourself in a new environment. And for me, I literally, you know I had my backpack, I had my laptop, I had one suitcase with some clothes and you know I started my journey in Bali.
Speaker 2:Then I went to Dubai. I went skydiving in Dubai, solo, by myself. I went to London. I've always wanted to go to London. I stayed there for a week. Then I fly home first class for free because I have a companion pass. So do you want me to touch on a little bit of how I was traveling for free, of course.
Speaker 1:Cool. Everybody likes the word free right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, guys. So credit and travel go hand in hand. So as I started, you know, I got seven credit cards approved in two weeks. I did a sequence. So basically, when you get approved for multiple cards, I want some of your inquiries combined and let's say you only do three hard inquiries and you get like seven to 10 cards. I did that. I had a ton of sign up bonuses. I had cards that were getting three times points on food and travel, like the Chase Sapphire Reserve. So I was making about 50 to 100,000 points a month just through spending and sign up bonuses. So when I did go travel, finally I had a couple of hundred thousand points saved.
Speaker 2:And I also picked up a companion pass right before I moved to Bali, which is when you know, you know someone on an airline like a friend or family member, and they put you in the system as a companion so you could fly on standby.
Speaker 2:Then they gave me the backend login and I was able to basically go on American Airlines, go on the portal, see which flights I could fly on. That day First class was available and I would just pick the one the London or Barcelona that had, you know, an empty seat, and then I would eat steak up in the air, you know 20,000, 40,000 feet up, and that was it. And I did that for two years almost and my status has kept growing because at Marriott, you know I was using my free rewards, my points, to book hotel stays. Then they have another thing where if you know someone who works at Marriott, you can stay 50 to 80% off. So I was using that booking a standard room for 50% to 80% off at a Ritz Carlton, so maybe $100. And then I would get upgraded because I got Ambassador Elite, which is the highest status you can get at Marriott. You get free breakfast, you get extra points and you know you get free upgrades. So it was addicting, man, I mean.
Speaker 1:I did it, man, that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I teach all of that in Leverage Lifestyle. You guys, you know, want to stop blowing money on travel. You know, I teach you pretty much how to stay for free everywhere and fly for free everywhere and all your points. If you're redeeming your points in the AMEX portal, you know, the membership rewards portal or the Chase Ultimate Rewards Portal, you're doing it all wrong and you're getting screwed out of your points. You can actually be getting about seven times the value per point if you use transfer partners. So that's what I teach in Leverage Lifestyle too, and yeah, it goes hand in hand Build your credit, get the right cards, start learning how to, you know, gain a ton of points just through spending on what you would usually be spending on. You just have to use the right cards, save up your points. You can turn it into cash or you could, you know, fly for free, travel for free and have fun.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about Leverage Lifestyle a little bit more, because there's a lot of more pieces to Leverage Lifestyle than just what you just talked about, so you wanna touch on that a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So Leverage Lifestyle started, you know, about a month ago is when I released it. We have over 600 students in there right now and it's only been out for a month, and I told you earlier I'm transitioning it to a monthly payment, so it's $97 a month right now. It's $1,000 one time. I believe this payment switch is gonna enable a lot more people to join.
Speaker 2:But basically I created a credit class all around credit and travel. But then I started getting into Bitcoin, passive income, tax mitigation you know I was making some good money, so I was really venturing out into these really amazing industries e-commerce, you know everything with passive income. But I felt limited in credit class, like I felt like I needed to branch out more on the five things that I did the most. So I sat down one day and I said what does my life look like If I zoom out? What am I doing on a day to day basis, week to week basis, with my travel, my businesses? And I broke it down into five pillars and these five pillars are personal branding, credit, travel, credit, travel, credit, travel, passive income and Bitcoin. So those are literally that's what my life revolves around nonstop. So I was like, damn, I live a lifestyle. So many people wanna live at my age, and even older people wanna do this stuff too. And if they can just master a few of these things, and if they can get to all five like I have, then they're gonna live a leveraged lifestyle. They're leveraging the new world, the internet, personal branding and all the five things to live a lifestyle of their dreams. So I was like holy shit, this is it. So I built it out. It's an interactive training program, so each one is its own course. So you're gonna click personal branding. We're gonna teach you how to start from scratch and build your personal brand. You're gonna find what you like to talk about. We're gonna dig deep, we're gonna find your passion and you're gonna start posting about it. I give you my content creator. There's a full content team that will build out your entire system for you. So that's done.
Speaker 2:Then we go on to okay, now you have a personal brand. You got some freedom. You need money to do all this stuff and you don't wanna use your money. We wanna use credit, cause credit is free. Debt is free. It's not tax too. So I'm gonna teach you how to build out your credit files, so we teach you personal credit first, then we do business credit funding so we get your credit file to a good spot where you can then apply for business cards and get approved for $100, $200,000 on 0% credit cards for 12 months where you don't owe any interest. Then, with that credit, you're obviously gonna be spending all of those cards on your personal brand, on your expertise, on your expenses for your business, your course, all that and you're gonna be earning points to travel. I'm gonna teach you all the stuff we just talked about with traveling so you could go venture out in the world with your new business, your brand and your credit cards. Then I'm gonna teach you passive income, because now you're gonna start making cash flow from your business and we don't wanna just spend your cash flow. We wanna invest the cash flow into assets like real estate, bitcoin, which returns 200% annualized a year, and it's going to be the only money of all time that's had a cap supply of 21 million and it's exploding right now. And then I'm also gonna teach you everything there is to know about Bitcoin. So passive income and Bitcoin are the last ones, and that's it, man.
Speaker 2:Each one is a course within its own. There's multiple sections in the course. There's quizzes at the end. Interactivity, where you can literally say, hey, I wanna do a celebrity giveaway and grow my account to 10K, do you wanna do this? And I'll sit there and the thing and I'm waiting for you to hit an answer. You hit yes and I take you down that path and you could sign up for a celebrity giveaway. You could sign up for engagement. You could sign up for business coaching with me. I do a four week coaching program, so there's so many different ways to go in there and I have live calls every single week. Last night we had, like I said, the TikTok multi-millionaire blew up in two years. He came on, spoke to all of my students. Everyone got so much value. They're all learning, they're fired up, they're going back to the drawing board. They're using all the lessons and tools I teach them to create their own life of whatever that wants to be.
Speaker 1:You know, I tell you what. First of all, amazing for what you're doing. But one of the key reasons why I wanted you to come on, colin, is I truly believe that in our profession, dentistry self-development is a huge component. And thinking outside the box, right, we're dentists, we think about dentistry all the time the oral cavity of the mouth. You come on and I want people listening to this to think outside the box, right? I mean, there's so much in what you bring as value, but us dentists, man, we wanna go take those clinical courses on how to cut crowns and how to cut veneers and how to place implants and how to do orthodontics, and we never really focus on working on our self and self-develop, and so there's a whole aspect of our life that's kind of missing, and that is true potential of what we could accomplish based on our platforms that we have. So, yeah, very amazing. So tell me a little bit, within that passive income, you have Walmart automation. You wanna talk about that a little bit? I think that's really exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, am I able to screen share on here? Sure man, yeah. So if I can screen share, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think you see that middle Yup.
Speaker 2:I got it. Yeah, cool, all right. So I don't know if you can. Okay, cool, there we go. All right. So we got Walmart here. Let me just actually talk about it first and then I'll show you guys. Sure, okay.
Speaker 2:So basically what we did with e-commerce is e-commerce is blowing up right now. You know, there's never been more buyers. Online Retail is going out of business and no one wants to go out anymore, especially with COVID. You click a button on Amazon. The product's dropped off at your house in 24 hours. It's amazing. So how do we get a piece of the pie of Jeff Bezos $180 billion? Well, they allow third-party sellers on Walmart and Amazon.
Speaker 2:So we decided to first off, we just wanted to get a piece of the pie, so we would go on. You know, this was three years ago when I met my partner two years ago, and we created our own drop shipping stores. So we were finding products. Let's say we were using the platform on Amazon. We would go on walmartcom. We would find a bunch of products that cost lower price than they were on Amazon. We would select the products, list them on Amazon for a higher price and someone would buy it. We would ship it directly from our other supplier to the customer and we would keep the $10 in the middle. And that grew into one of the biggest industries today online for passive income.
Speaker 2:So Everyone wants this now, but no one knows how to do it. And if you know how to do it, you got a hire, you got a fire, you got to create a business. You know, you got VAs that are working eight hours a day and then they come on for another shift at night. You got people working around the clock that you have to manage. It's a lot of stuff. So we sat down you know me and my partner and we were like you know, why don't we go hard on this? Why don't we get a warehouse and let's build this thing out? And, you know, let's help people make passive income through this platform, and that's what we've done. We've transitioned to Walmart and Facebook automation, so one of the platforms. We're selling on Walmart as third party sellers and we are drop shipping and we are also doing our own fulfillment in our warehouse. So you know, we're picking the products, we are doing the listings, we're doing the customer service, we have teams working around the clock on your store and the model of this business is so cool because if you win, we win.
Speaker 2:What we do is we charge $35,000 to start. That's for your special deal, of course, that I'm offering on the podcast. It's usually a little more and what we do is we take that. You know, that's our service fee, so that's our franchise fee. It's like if you were buying a Starbucks or McDonald's. Everything's set up, all the systems are ready to go. You throw in capital and that's it, and then it runs on its own. This is what we do as well. So you pay us a service fee.
Speaker 2:You have an LLC, a DUNS number, a business bank account and your credit cards. That I also teach. So if you need help, you join credit class and leverage lifestyle, and that's you know. Step one build up enough credit, you get started with us. You have your credit cards. Your credit is the key to this business, because credit is gonna be what's buying the products.
Speaker 2:When a customer hits order, you do not receive their money until the product has been successfully delivered to them. So that makes sort of a problem, because who's gonna buy all of that? You're not gonna use all your cash for it. We're gonna use the bank's money, because banks, you know they give us at least 30 days, or maybe you have 12 months on a 0% card where you confront the money with the banks, deliver the products to the customer, the product gets or the customer gets the product, and then the money's released to your bank account. You pay up your credit cards and then this is where the partnership comes in, because we're managing everything, because our employees are in a performance model. They're gonna be getting paid 35% of your total profit. So at the end of every month we're gonna send you an invoice, you're gonna pay us and our team and then we're gonna keep running your store.
Speaker 2:So it's a beautiful partnership and I wanna give you guys an inside look, you know, on what it actually looks like. You know one on Walmart, because this is your business. We're just managing it. So you're gonna have your full Walmart Seller Center access on the website. You get to log in. You see all the products we're listing. Then we have a Google Sheet we share with every single client for transparency. You get to see all of the SKUs listed, the returns, any cancellations, what your profit margins are, and we give everything detailed.
Speaker 2:So let me hop in here real quick and I'll show you kind of what it looks like, you know, if you were to get your own automated store with us. So here's Walmart, right? So these are just some of the items we're selling for this client. You know we sell literally anything under the sun. You know we're selling hair extensions, we're selling rice, we're selling boots. You know, you name it. We're most likely selling it. So we have 5,500 items listed on this client store.
Speaker 2:Let's go take a look at. You know their performance. So this client got started with us in January of 2021, great time to get started because you know you're gonna be fully scaled up for Q4, which is the biggest holiday season of the year. That's where our clients make the most money. So this is, you know, the chart that we have laid out. You can go month by month and check in on all the orders. You know this is everything if it's delivered, if it's canceled, these are all the SKUs we're listing. You can see. You know how much we paid for the item, what the Walmart fee was, what the shipping was, the tax exemption and your net profit.
Speaker 2:We make it super easy to read. You obviously don't wanna read all the detail, you just want the juicy stuff, which is how much money did I make? So you can come right here. You'll see your total net profit for each month and you know obviously this client is doing pretty well right now, doing $49,000 for September so far, did $58,000 in August and in October, november, december. This is Q4, this client should hit anywhere from 80 to 100K.
Speaker 2:As you can see, they've already ROI'd on their investment. You know it costs 35,000. They've made $43,155 so far. So you know there are almost in the clear 10K in total profit. So once you make your ROI back, which typically takes about eight to 10 months sometimes can take a little longer this client obviously you know got in at around eight months, hit their ROI. You know it's all cash flow.
Speaker 2:So now you have your passive income stream that is generating you points on credit cards because you are using only credit. So you're spending. Here's their spend right here 36,000 a month, 42,000 a month. You are gonna generate about one and a half times point for that. This client here generated 60,000 points in August. That's about two round trip flights in a hotel If you use your points the right way. Plus, they made a nice chunk of change $7,000 in profit. After they pay us their split, our split of 35%, they still are well above 5K in total net profit.
Speaker 2:So this is just what we do. You know this is one of our clients. We have about 100 clients right now and you know we absolutely love giving people. You know the freedom and empowering them. You know, with a passive income stream so that they can get a little piece of. You know the lifestyle that I'm showing. You know, eventually, if you have one of these and maybe you start your personal brand, you create another business, you get to 10K a month from two streams of additional income. You could actually leave your job. So you know that is my main goal I wanna help people live a leveraged lifestyle.
Speaker 2:We also have Facebook automations a little different. So Facebook automation you don't need an EIN, you don't need a DUNS number, you don't even need an LLC. We literally go on Facebook Marketplace, on your Facebook account, and we start listing products and we drop ship them from different suppliers. Facebook is low cost for us, so we only charge 20,000. So it's almost half as cheap, but we are gonna take more on the back end.
Speaker 2:So it's a 55, 45 split you keeping 55% of your profits, us getting 45% and, as you can see, the margins are massive. I mean this average margin for the past 30 days, or not 30 days. This client's been going for a little bit longer than that is at 28% total. She made a total profit of $10,000, so she's about halfway to making her money back. And you know that's Facebook for you. The only thing with Facebook is we can't scale really passed around 36,000 because everything's listed manually. There's no software to integrate with. But the great thing about Facebook is you get paid out every day instead of every two weeks. So those are our two options. You know we have Facebook, we have Walmart. We do a package deal for $45,000, you get both running at the same time or you could pick either one individually. So that's how we're helping people make passive income with e-commerce automation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty amazing and you know we this thing. Just let me simplify what's going on here. If you don't have credit, you basically pay roughly a little over $1,000 and your credit can be improved. Once your credit is improved, you get financing through banks and credit cards at 0%. Once you get that, then you use that money to buy a store. Once you do that, then you start making money, Right, I mean, it's really just that simple. So if you're sitting on the sideline going, oh, I can't do it, I don't got any money, this is just too hard and you know I don't want to take any action. It's too much risk. There's too much of you know, all of this mindset that gets in your comfortable zone. I'm telling you, he's showing you something very straightforward and something very powerful. Credit repair is a big part of it, obviously, and then, obviously, having access to credit can create an avenue of you know, abundance, right?
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean?
Speaker 2:I mean leverage is everything Leveraging relationships, leveraging your credit, leveraging your travel, leveraging your knowledge, leveraging information. I mean it's a leverage lifestyle. You got to use your tools to your advantage.
Speaker 1:I talk about leverage a lot in my coaching and my public speaking. The leverage of being a dentist is very powerful, and I think one of the things that we don't realize is how to maximize our leverage, which is a lot of it. It comes with efficiency. Efficiency, in this case comes into passive income. Passive income being when you're asleep you're making money. Right, that could be a very efficient model for you. So pretty powerful stuff, man. Listen, colin, we're coming up on an hour here and listen, man, you didn't have to do this, you got so many followers. You're making it big, bro. You're already making it big. I mean multimillion dollar earner annually. So I want to thank you. He's going to join us with the program that I have that we're going kind of nationwide with, and I want him to share his knowledge and his passion with my community as we kind of expand and grow. So, colin, I want to thank you for your time today and I appreciate you for being here and taking the time. Thank you, bro.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, man, thanks for the opportunity I'm so glad to share. And if you watch this whole thing and you got some inspiration out of it, don't sit, don't just sit on the information. Take action, start writing it down, take notes, put the notes to work. Don't just let this energy, like this pumped up energy, and this inspiration, go to waste, because it only happens so much. Right, and you got to take action when you feel it, because I was in those same shoes when I used to just sit there and you're scared and you let it pass and then you get it the one time you actually take action on it, some magical things can happen. So, guys, I appreciate everything. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can find me at Colin Yerkeson, and then also I'm on Twitter, tiktok. I have YouTube as well. I try to be omnipresent on every platform. So, guys, thank you so much, doctor, I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to speak at more of your events and man this has been great, awesome, brother.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, man. Have a great day. You too, man, have a good one. Listen very wise words from a young man, but take action, implement, take action. Don't just let that opportunity go to waste. I'm Dr Shaheen Safarian. You can follow me at Dr Shaheen Safarian on Instagram and I appreciate you guys joining. I hope this inspired at least one of you to take action. Doctors, there's so much more out there for you, and until next time, dr Shaheen Safarian saying have a great day.