Elijah Brown on Athletics, Influence & Building Enterprise Value

Video Version: https://youtu.be/kbzOgWwTHac

Guest: Elijah Brown — Delaware State University Track & Field Athlete, Entrepreneur & Brand Builder

In this episode of The First Million is Always the Hardest, host Bo Kemp sits down with Elijah Brown, a Delaware State University track and field athlete, entrepreneur, and brand builder, for a conversation about discipline, ambition, ownership, and the difference between chasing income and building enterprise value.

Elijah’s story begins in West Orange, New Jersey — a place that shaped his grit, competitiveness, and self-starting mentality. As an 800-meter runner, he competes in one of the toughest events in track and field: a race that demands pain tolerance, pacing, strategy, and mental control. That same discipline now shows up in how he thinks about business.

But Elijah is not just an athlete building a personal brand. He is already experimenting with entrepreneurship through ventures connected to moving, club promotions, and Star City Management. In the conversation, Bo and Elijah explore what those early businesses taught him about operations, customer service, attention, influence, and the challenge of turning hustle into something scalable.

The heart of this episode is a bigger question: how does a young athlete move from being an influencer to becoming a true operator and future owner of a sellable company?

Bo and Elijah discuss the difference between making money online and building a business that could one day be worth millions — one with systems, recurring revenue, brand assets, a team, and value beyond one person’s name. They also unpack what athletes and creators often misunderstand about wealth, and why influence only becomes powerful when it is converted into ownership.

This episode is about New Jersey grit, athletic discipline, early entrepreneurship, and the leap from personal brand to real enterprise.

Because the first million is always the hardest — and for Elijah Brown, the race is just getting started. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, it's Bo Kemp inviting you to the Achieve Summit 2026, Chicagoland's number one business, entrepreneur, and real estate event. It's all happening June 4th through 6th at Win Creek Casino and Hotel. Join this three-day immersive event that will transform you from operator to owner. Whether you're looking to acquire a profitable business, develop a high-value real estate project, or scale an existing business, the Achieve Summit provides the live marketplace and technical tools to make it happen. And this year's keynote speaker is business leader and philanthropist Marcus Lamonas. For more information into secure your tickets or sponsorship, visit at Southlanddevelopment.org. See you there. What happens when a college athlete starts thinking beyond the track, beyond NIL, beyond content, and beyond quick money? Today I sit down with Elijah Brown, a Delaware State University 800-meter runner, entrepreneur, and brand builder who is working to turn influence into ownership. From West Orange, New Jersey to early ventures in moving, club promotions, star city management, Elijah is learning what it takes to build something that can scale. This episode is about discipline, ambition, and the difference between making money and building a business that could be worth millions one day. Well, welcome to the first million as always the hardest. I'm your host, Bo Kemp, and really excited today to be here with a young man who is actually the epitome of what we're looking for to promote in young people moving into a world of entrepreneurship. And just for everyone who's listening and watching, um, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Hi well, my name is Elijah Brown. I um from West Times New Jersey. I uh I kind of live in DC right now. Um I'm expanding to Miami. Uh I also live in Colorado as well, and I live in Philly. Um I used to run track at a First Nation in Belarus State and the uh Union Catholic alum. Uh I was stopped touring the country most of my life in uh in track since I was like about eight years old up until I was 21. Um and it's just a blessing to be able to be here. I'm an entrepreneur who has a moving company, I have a marketing company, and uh I'm into real estate. I have a whole bunch of different industries that I'm that I'm in as well. I'm also a concentrator myself, and uh I've been blessed enough to be able to travel all over the world and really just explore life and and uh I don't take anything for doing it. I'm just a hard worker and somebody who's always uh just pushing for greatness.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Well, it's uh it's great. You you uh and I share this um aspect that we've lived in a lot of places. I've lived in nine cities in the U.S. and three overseas, and just listening to your intro, you have been all over the country. There's a benefit sometimes of having lived in a lot of other places other than West Orange, um, and that you start to see both the differences in different parts of the country and the similarities. I wonder, based on your expectations and your past experience, how has being as mobile as you've been really been a benefit to you and has it influenced at all the sorts of opportunities that you started to pursue? I think it's a it's a huge blessing.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

Um I lived in Jersey most of my life, so when I was picking schools, I could have easily went to Rapids and State Home, but I decided to just I wanted to be close enough to my family, but not uh not too far to where I'm I'm not able to be able to branch on to different opportunities. So uh when I went to George Mason, I I found like a nice home of DC connections where um I'm just being able to build a different type of brand, a different type of identity as well, as far as just uh opening like my business mindset, not just like the track aspect of things. And I think that's what separated me from where I was in Jersey, where I was just very track oriented and trying to get a scholarship to college. That was so like you know, in like five or six years down the line where I'm able to have businesses right out right outside of uh out of college. So I think that was like the biggest busting and and uh key takeaway of like my college experience companies.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

When you described your background in track in particular, um, you know, being top 10 since you had been young actually sometimes can be stressful, right? There's an expectation for you not only to continue to be good at the sport, but to continue to sport. And sometimes people's interests changed over time. You've been able to actually go from junior high, high school, and college and play uh well, run track and to be top in your space for that entire time. Um, how do you attribute your capacity to do that discipline that it takes? What is it that really was the motivation that kept you going in the midst of what can sometimes be a lot of pressure?

SPEAKER_02 4:56

I thought the key takeaway is just having the discipline and patients like year after year was just seeing how my parents felt, they didn't have as much as what I had coming up, and they they really made the big foundation in give me certain principles that could not take anything for granted, and every somebody's always gonna try to take your place, and the world outside of just like your family is not gonna be nice to you, so you're just gonna always have to, you know, have that hard work and and uh that patience and discipline to be able to keep maximizing your potential year after year, just because somebody's always gonna want to like it's a blessing for somebody else to be in your position, so you gotta not take it for granted and you just gotta keep pushing forward when you're tired and when you have bad days because a bad day to use might be an amazing day to somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

So one of the things that's interesting is that when you get to the level of college sports, um, you still have the love of what it is that you do, but it becomes a little bit of a job. And a lot of people who've never had the chance to play college sports may not really appreciate that. Even a sport like track and field is a 50, 60, 70-hour job week where you're required to be in certain places, you got to go to, you know, eat at certain places, you got to practice at certain times, you've you've got travel schedules because you're traveling all over to compete. Um, the discipline that it takes to run track, I'm sure, helped in that respect. But as you already mentioned, it was important to you that you were more than just a track star, right? You were a student athlete, so you cared about your schoolwork, you cared about being an athlete, but you had other aspirations. How did you manage that? And you've mentioned that you've transitioned from George Mason to Delaware State in part because of that. But just walk us through what that experience was for you.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

So the whole college experience for me, as far as uh being an entrepreneur and a pod athlete was a lot different just because uh like COVID really changed a lot of different um things for me. So like my mental health was a lot different than if I was like we didn't have a crowd in uh the first two years, pretty much, when you're running track in college. Like the the way you have to move as far as uh how you have to even go into cafeteria, you gotta come up with a mask. It was a lot of different transitions that you know uh I think people don't really see because they weren't experiencing that like a lot of people were either in their senior year or junior year, but like the freshman and uh the freshman class really had the biggest hit on as far as like getting like a true college experience. So that just extended my mind to you know adjusting to what real life like what reality was. And that was like me marketing myself as a content creator and and um getting into different lanes that I might not have gotten into if it wasn't for like uh COVID happening. I end up starting a moving company and I I just my mind was was in a position where it was like how can I uh help people without like a job getting taken away, for example. So there's a lot of different jobs in this world that people can easily get replaced at, but there's something that is is always needed, and but the first thought of uh that I had was everybody's always gonna need some um uh a moving team to take care of it because there's just so much work to do by yourself. That's what what uh got me into moving. And then marketing came later on when uh I had over a hundred different brands that I worked with uh as far as like transitioning from uh PWI to HPC. Um as soon as I turned it as soon as I I went to HPC and my like my life changed where I got verified uh in 2022 on Instagram, and then uh I had a bunch of different brands reaching out to me, and I did some outreach myself, and that led to me starting my own company uh because I turned into clients at the uh at the end of it when I finished school.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

So I want to come back to the marketing aspect. You as a content creator and some of the work that you're doing on marketing, but I want to go first to the concept and the idea that you wanted to start a moving company, right? So you're at George Mason, there's a lot of things that you could do. You're interested in entrepreneurship and you decide to start a moving company. Now, I heard you say you did this because you wanted to create the sort of business that didn't displace other people's jobs but created new jobs. But walk me through kind of how you narrowed the window down to moving company and how did you get started? Did you start with a partner? Did you go raise money? Did you just gut it out? Walk us through what the early stages of your moving company were. And by the way, what's the name of your moving company? The name of the moving company is affordable movers.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Uh we're on this app called Dum Talk. I originally started um my my I have like my my best friend Matthew, uh, one of my close friends Tyre. We uh we used to work for this pastor from Jersey uh like 16 or 17. So I was still in like the town of my track community as well during the summer, and we were making like $15 an hour, and we were like, we can start our own company. Like once we um once we got into college, we were like realizing like there's a lot of money in the DC market. I was in the DC market, my best friend was in Philly, and then uh my other friend was in Jersey. So we all started our own moving companies, and I had my track teammates uh who stayed over the summer at George Mason uh working for me, and then I ended building uh my empire in DC where I was able to uh use my my social media platform to get different um people to work for my company. And then um from there I started like at like 80 an hour, for example, and I built I built my clientele, and we've been the top pro um on the app for about three or four years now, straight.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

So that's great. And and how large is your business now in terms of either employees or how many people do you serve, just to give us some sense of how it's grown. We have uh six different states that we're in.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

So we're in DC, now Virginia, uh Miami, uh New Jersey, and Philly. So um we've expanded to six states now. Uh where it says uh we I can either um set up an account for like one of my my friends to start their own business and then I just do a little bit of funding for them, or I could uh I can just really I could work from anywhere with the uh with the app that I use or like with the presence I have on social media to be able to get get clients.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

And so the application is what you use to kind of help deal with all the operations of scheduling and paying people and that thing. How did you think about the marketing of this? Now you'd said you already had a base, you'd been doing some marketing already in the Washington, DC area, but walk us through what you did specifically that helped to kind of jumpstart the uh affordable moving company in the DC area, leveraging your marketing experience. We were just like having like the influence I already have.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Like my family's uh I come from a very big sports family, so like just a little bit of my my family, like my dad was a uh he was a golden glove winner um in New York, and then my cousin Maya Moore, she's a uh WNBA Hall of Famer. Um, and then my brother who's a project pioneer, I'm on man try. And uh just like our whole family, like there's a lot of different um people in my ear that you know they said like you know, after college, like you're gonna have to transition into either. Because realistically for me, I knew I didn't want to go pro and track just because of the simple fact that you know you don't make a lot of money unless you're like a Sydney McGrawkin that went to my school or uh one of the the bigger premiere athletes. So um I really just when I I took that mindset like right out of freshman year because you know you don't you only get a certain amount of prime years when you're in track too, and it's a very like demanding sport on your body, so um and mentally too as well. So I knew after those four years I wanted to build my company up, and I ended up uh using some of my resources on top of uh my marketing just like as like on my personal platform. I had over about a hundred thousand dollars at the time. People a lot of people wanted to work for my company just based off my influence. I had other people who uh were recommending my company to other people in the DC market, and like Jersey is is close to like uh Philly, DC, um Boston. So they were able to, I was able to get clients just based off of that alone. And and the app just just amplified me getting more reviews and giving me one of the to get more clients.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

There's an interesting story to be told here because you already had leveraged the work that you put in as an athlete to develop a hundred thousand-person following. And there's a story behind that. Um, but you were able to take that and transition it to developing not just a moving company, but a moving company as you describe it that allows you to set up almost franchises in different states with your friends, as I hear you say. You know, I've started businesses with my friends when I was in college as well. They did not always work out so well, right? Not everyone is as focused and dedicated to the work that you are. How have you gone through the process of figuring out who should you do business with and who should you not do business with, even though they're your friends, um, as part of the franchising, so to speak, of what you've done with your moving company?

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Also, just the mindset of type of uh friends that I have around me too. Like everybody's very level-headed. So, like, you know, every month is not going to be a a very big month as far as like um money-wise. Um, so it's just having like the patience and and discipline that we all have. Um, that's what separates people from being a business owner compared to being an employee. The way we map it out, we already knew like exactly the type of mindset and and group that we had around us to make sure that everybody was gonna play their part. And the only way we're gonna grow is by having similar mindsets, but being able to to like be in different areas and and be able to control, like, say, like, for example, one of my friends is in Philly, one is in Jersey, one is in DC. We all have to play our role and make sure that we're being a leader and we're we're leading the right way. And how we how we hire different um employees, we just gotta make sure that they have like a a similar space, but they know like their role too, as far as far as like um the customer service side of things. I feel like we're moving customer service is bigger than the actual moving itself. So if you can make a customer stay just by talking to them a little bit longer than you might be working for, that that can make the difference between having a great company and a small company.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

There's a risk associated with a little bit of what you did because separate from your moving company, you had established a reputation, which is why you had 100,000 followers and you were certified, right? Um, how did you consider the risk of your reputation that already was established and lending it to the moving company as part of the effort to build that entity? Was there ever a moment that you had some questions about how these two things will work together or some concerns about one bad experience that a mover, uh a company, someone who hired you as a mover had, how it might reflect on other parts of your brand?

SPEAKER_02 16:11

That I didn't really I knew there was going to be risks that I knew uh that was being taken by, you know, even having a bad experience with a a client compared to even like because I mean I mean school, so like I'm I'm running track, that's a that's one job alone, and then school is another job, and then have the conclusion company another job. But um just being able to, you know, not having a bad reputation as far as like even the the employees that we have, we know that they're not gonna talk back to a a client and you know disrespect anybody of that magnitude. We we'll figure it out as far as like trying to keep that uh reputation and and that uh relationship you know hold wholesome and and really um just make sure that the the client doesn't feel like they they're gonna like throw us under the bus and and and like go public with uh with a bad review or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

There's this book, it's called the Herb uh the emith by a guy named Michael Gober. If you've never read it, it's definitely worth a read. But in it, one of the things that he talks about is that anybody who starts a company starts as three people all at once. You're the worker bee, you're the manager, and you're the architect or kind of the visionary of this whole project. I imagine that when you launched your moving company, you were out there moving furniture and stuff yourself, packing up things yourself. Um, how did you transition from the person who was directly responsible for moving a client, the person who was managing the process, making sure that the app worked, getting other people to work with you, recruiting that client to come, making sure the client paid for you? Um, how did you manage not doing the workable stuff and just becoming the manager? And have you gotten to the point now where you are really just the architect, where you're no longer even managing hiring the staff, recruiting clients, but you're now just kind of overseeing the structure of the business? So I I do a mixture of both.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Um, we've we've had a lot of clients for about we've been in business for about five years now. So I send clients who request for me to come. Like I get a lot of different requests, like can Elizabeth specifically come for me, and that's when I'll go to the jobs and stuff and make sure that the client has that amazing experience with me. When I started out in the beginning, they they knew they already had an establishment with me. So I I'm able to trust my team to be able to help manage all different types of uh areas to this day. And I I really just sit back and and uh just kind of let them do their thing. And I I oversee just the my marketing company at the moment and just just work on my body and training because it's a lot, it's it's I've had a heavy workload on top of like Shaq and the moving, so like my body's still recovering to the day, so like I can't train as much as I want to just based off of that experience I had in college.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Yeah. Well, you know, I want to move to talk more about the marketing, but one more question on the moving side. Have you considered the possibility of ever selling your moving company? And if so, um what are your thoughts about how you would do that? If you haven't thought about it, is it because you think you're gonna keep this forever? Or kind of what's the future of the moving company?

SPEAKER_02 19:34

I've had thoughts of of uh of selling the company, but at the same time, the community that I've built um where I'm able to help friends from all over the country that I uh that I truly believe are my friends. I I like to you know keep jobs to people that have always been loyal to me and who have stood by my side and supported me through so many different things. The beauty behind having a business, a movie company like like uh the company that we have, I'm able to be able to always have uh a job for any one of my uh family members or or friends. So I it's something that I thought about, but it's it's not something that I want it to be currently right now just because of that.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Yeah. You know, there's um when you start a business from scratch like you did with your moving company, one of the benefits of that is because you don't have outside capital from other investors, they're not influencing the decisions about whether you sell and how do you do you grow and move to LA or open in New Orleans or what have you. Um, but it also means you typically have to take a slower route to grow your business. Um, but you get to be king. You get to be, like you said, you you mentioned earlier, you get to build your empire and you get to build it in the in the vision that you see for it. Um but often to scale and get to a much higher level, you have to take in outside capital. And once you take in outside capital, that gives you the money that you need to kind of fuel your growth, but it also means you're obligated to work with other people. And the business that you've now started, um I want you to talk a little bit about what was the inspiration to start uh Star City management and um whether or not you've decided to take any outside capital, are you still self-funding? And what do you see as the future of this? And maybe you can also walk us through how you building a base of your own supporters and now leveraging the base to do the marketing and the moving company rather, became a part of the story of you moving towards Star City.

SPEAKER_02 21:41

There was a lot of different things. So I um I always wanted to be a sports agent like back in the day. I was like in my dream general. So if I was gonna do something one day, I would I would be a sports agent. And once I got in in college, I was like, hmm.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

I don't know if I want to be a sports agent. Once you realize that it spent you spending a lot of time in a car. Waiting for somebody's mom to come home so you can pop out and talk to them. That didn't sound as exciting anymore.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

I'm gonna manage myself pretty well. I've been able to work with a lot of different brands that I was dreamed of working with. And I um something that's not physical labor too, because like you know, uh moving is very uh physically demanding. Um the marketing style was like I could I could manage one of my favorite athletes. Uh so like Curry, for example, we we manage him. Um so that that's just the person I've always grew up watching, and then uh we started getting into working with concentrators, but that that came off of like a lot of my friends were were influencing me to like say like getting a brand deal, for example. So when I got a few people to brand deals, I was like, hmm, I should just start my own my own brand, uh marketing company. So I uh I came up with Star City, and the the meaning behind it is like everybody was a star once upon a time in their in their uh in their city. So if you bring all the stars together, you're gonna create a star city. So um, yeah, that's it's just like I I want to bring every star out of out of like different states, countries, and um different brands as well, and um bring them into one big city where we uh we take over each city that we we go into.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

So and is there something that you are doing in the management and the promotion socially um or in social media, I should say, with folks that you would say is very different than they could get from a competitor? Well, I should actually start. Who are your competitors, right? And what do you do that really distinguishes our city from the work that they do?

SPEAKER_02 23:45

I mean, we have a lot of different um different competitors. We have NIO agencies, we have sports agencies. We're not an agency, we're a social media management company. But the difference is we have uh the founder is uh a content creator who knows the business already. I've worked with all these different brands. I know I know what they're looking for, I know what type of um influencers are looking for, I know what type of athletes are looking for, I know what the athletes should should um implement in their content if they want to work with this, that, and the third brand. And um we also just I just have like I've I've grown thousands of connections myself, uh just as a as a business owner and also as an athlete. So I have the the luxury to be able to have both of those type of connections on top of the concentration side. And then I also know how to uh just walk into a room and get what you want. I'm always in the right place at the right time where God leads me to. I just know how to get get stuff done. So um I know with the marketing business, like everything is always uh social media is always changing. So if you're able to adjust to the uh social media changing, you're you're gonna be you're gonna you're gonna have a good uh good company. And um, what makes a good company is having a person that knows how to step in and um and take control of the room and and also just influencing like the type of roster. So like I'm I'm blessed to have a big um platform on a personal standpoint to be able to leverage my clients to be able to work for me and and believe in what they what they what they get because they see it on my personal page alone. If I could do it on a personal level, it'll help with uh a business level too as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Now, your moving company you've had for five years. How many years have you had star city? Just a year and a half. And and in that year and a half, um what have you seen about the growth? How have you grown? I can see online that you've gotten some clients um that are leveraging your social media company for their benefit. How do you measure growth for Star City and where do you see the future taking star city?

SPEAKER_02 25:53

Uh so I originally when I first started, I thought uh I was really gonna be working with many businesses. I started working with our first streamer, uh her name is Samaya Murray, but it's uh gonna be blow up overnight when we when we worked with her like the past four months. She's been literally working with different types of brands, she's been working with different instances. And I started to realize that the content uh the concentrators and streamers are taking over the industry. Me just being able to adapt to that, it brings a different level of marketing. And I have the clients to be able to literally walk up to any brand and tell them, like, hey, this is the group that I have, and this is what we can do for you. And we can travel all over the world and do it. And we can literally go state by state, country by country, and what I see for it in the next like not even, I don't even have to say you in the next three or four months, uh being one of the it's like when you sign some record label, for example, as an artist, like this is the type of company you're gonna want to be with as a content creator, just because you have you have uh it's a it's a one-stop shop. You have businesses that are connected to other companies, you have athletes and you have uh streamers and content creators. You literally can work with anybody in that network on top of the outsource of what we have and the connections that we have on top of that.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

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SPEAKER_00 27:48

Your listening to the first million is always the hardest. We are now returning to the show.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

You know, your analogy to a record company is interesting. You know, record companies right now are really struggling in a lot of respects because it's hard for them to distinguish what they bring to the table that people can't do on their own. Um, and one of the challenges they have is people don't make money off of spends anymore, right? So most of the money people make actually is in the event, right? Actually doing shows on how do rest companies really have value in that scenario. Now, your model is a little bit different because there's something very tangible that you are selling to people, which is I'm gonna actually grow your base, and you're gonna see it in terms of the actual numbers that translates into your ability to then secure opportunities for promotion and deals and other things. But what are some of the other things that you think about in the future are gonna particularly influence your capacity to distinguish what Star City does? And I'm really thinking about how um NIL has changed everything. Um they did not have any IL when I play football, unfortunately. AI is changing how social media is actually being executed. How are you thinking about not just those two things, but those and other aspects that are going to influence your capacity to really add value to people going forward?

SPEAKER_02 29:19

There's a lot of different things that are that are moving and that I'm seeing, especially like particularly even with athletes, for example. Like a lot of athletes, since they don't have a lot of time to be able to travel, for example, when they're in college, a lot of different everything is about like social media nowadays, but the athletes they want to build the bigger they build their brand, the more marketable they are to get into brand bills in uh in college or outside the college. So they uh getting to the streaming department, so the concentrators that we have on our team, for example, a lot of athletes love working with us just based on some of the amount of concentrators that we have that they people watch every day and like the influence that these streamers and concentrators are having on just the world period. Um a lot of people are changing, they're changing like what they're doing. Like, for example, the club, the club industry, right? They used to a lot of clubs used to book artists for like sixty-seventy thousand dollars, for example. They're changing that now, or they're bringing streamers for maybe a little bit less, like maybe seven or eight thousand instead of sixty thousand on the artist. A lot of things are just changing as far as the marketing department and how restaurants are even seeing like uh streamers, you know, doing like a live experience. It's just so different things, and I feel like um like the market industry is changing a lot just based off of you know, they people need to see different things, and our younger generation is taking over a bit, in my opinion, as far as like um just seeing how a lot of a lot of different moving pieces it's hard to explain, but it's it's it's a lot of great things happening.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

Yeah, you know, um I think that you're in a really interesting space right now, and particularly as being a student athlete who started the business, um, it helps you really be very well-rounded. You know, I similar to you, when I was in school, um, I also played football and I started the company, um, which was the mail order business, uh, where I sold fraternities to already paraphernalia, as well as like the warmups. So, like for your track team, I would sell warm-up, you could get your name branded on it, that sort of thing. And that's how I made money when I was in school. But one of the things it does for you is it keeps you very well-rounded, right? So you can't be characterized as just an athlete, just assume you're also an entrepreneur, and all of that I think keeps you in a well-rounded place. One of the things about this show is that although it's called the first moment is always the hardest, and um, that's a technical aspect, right? There are four technical reasons why making your first moments difficult. There are several psychological reasons also. The show isn't just about money, it's also about personal fulfillment. And so when I describe you as being well-rounded, you know, there's a part of you uh based on what you said that says, hey, I have a family history to uphold of people who've been successful. Um, I have known since I was young that I need to prepare for a life after sports, and so I'm gonna be focused on those opportunities. And you've done all of that very well, particularly at your age, and needs to be commended. You're a real example for other people, as I said in the very beginning of the show. But I I want to transition and take a few minutes in this conversation to talk about um Eliza and what your hopes and dreams are, right? Kind of starting from when you were even a little kid. When you were young, less than eighth grade, because by then you were starting to run track and everybody knew you were super fast, and that sits you on a different track. But when you were younger than that, what did you want to be when you were a child? And what about that dream is there an underlying desire that you've been able to maintain throughout the course of your career? I've always been a visionary at such a young age.

SPEAKER_02 32:59

So just like whenever I see something like I whenever I whatever I I like desire to do, I I've always been able to do it by the grace of God. And we like my mindset has just always been for fun. I feel like since I was a young age, so my brother is like my brother and I are about eight years, so like I'm always being around like an older individual. So when I was 12, that's when I really see that I wanted to, you know, go in the footsteps of building an empire and building a legacy for my family and my friends and also just myself. So like um my my dreams and goals now are just really to just expand, just expand my business. I feel like um like in this moment in time, I still don't I still haven't had like a true mentor to where I um I've always been at the top, honestly. So I've um I've always been on the top of my friend group or the top of uh just the people I've I surround myself with, but I I want to be able to to expand to where there's people that are doing twice as much as me or uh or better better than uh better than me, honestly, just to um just to really spill that motivation because sometimes like I have to I always been having to motivate myself my whole life just based off of like um like I said, just having that discipline and patience and and deliver delivery to be able to you know be top ten in the country. And um I feel like in like the the real life scheme of things now outside of track has been like the biggest challenge is finding a group of individuals who are like I said at the top already and and people that I look up to and like I want to be able to you know um have that to be at the same level as then because I've like I said I've always been at the at the top of of my peers and I'm trying for people to explain that and see a different you might see it on Instagram and TikTok of other people doing everything, but like as far as like surrounding like a fengy around me like that, I've always wanted that. So that's that's a big thing of mine. Just being able to grow a legacy um for my family.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

What's next for you now with Star City? What's next for Elijah Brown? What's the next step in your mind of where you're gonna be going over the next few years?

SPEAKER_02 35:20

Uh the next step now is um well, I'm I'm gonna transition to moving to my after like the marketing uh department is is huge over there as far as like bringing in different towns and um different brands that I want to work with because I realize on the DC market side of things, they don't really have it's more corporate space over here. So retransitioning from outside the music company don't need the market anymore um on a different level. But that's a next stuff where there's a lot of different dogs that are really like there's a lot of big dogs in in this in in Miami, so it's gonna it's gonna uh have me gravitate toward the greatness that I'm surrounding myself around and it's gonna push me to be on a different uh level. And it's gonna be a little bit more demanding mentally, but you know, that's what it what it was what it was physically in the chat scheme of things. So I'm excited for uh just just growing, honestly, and just having the patience to be able to grow on a on a larger scale. I see uh Fire City being one of the biggest marketing companies in the world because I I know we we have the talent, and I I have the talent to be able to leverage fans to work with dozen uh different clients. So I'm just excited to see where uh where that goes in the next year.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

I'm gonna take a second to both uh market to you, but also to everyone who's listening. We hold a conference called the Achieve Summit that happens every year. Last year we had Damon John as our keynote, the founder of Fubu and Shark Tank. Um we um are announcing shortly our next keynote for this year, but it's gonna be June 4th through 6th. Um, here in the Chicago area. I'd love to invite you to come because the work that you're doing with Star City and your next moves around thinking about social media marketing and promotion are right in line with a whole segment that we've actually got planned for this. And the conference itself is actually about helping people buy and sell businesses and buy and sell real estate. And I know you're both a business owner and operator as well as a real estate investor. And so it's right in line. One of the things that we're doing this year in particular is we're focusing on three populations of people that we think have often been overlooked as a group that are perfect for buying businesses and buying real estate. And one of them is young people, people who just graduated from college, people who just graduated from grad school, often of my generation and older, um, are always having negative things to say about what's possible. But these folks like you are well positioned to buy a lot of the businesses baby boomers are right now in the process of potentially um selling. So I'd love to invite you and your team to come to share the work that you've been doing with Star City and also potentially find some mentors who might be able to help put you in a space to take it to the next level. But with that, Elijah, I just want to say thank you for your time and effort. Um, really impressive uh individual. The work that you're doing as a student, as an athlete, and uh now as a business owner is impressive and an example for other people. And we look forward to uh talking to you later and getting an update on your success.

SPEAKER_02 38:36

Thank you, man. I appreciate you guys having me. And um, I'm blessed to even be on this podcast with you guys. So uh I appreciate your time and um I look forward to doing this. I'll do this for sure. Absolutely. Thank you.