← The Money Mondays
The Money Mondays
What Does It Take to Reach a Billion-Dollar Valuation? w/ Albert Preciado 🏘️ EP111
00:27:27
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- [00:00]
Albert Preciado
So if you can learn one skill, like just one skill, the first skill you want to learn is how to sell. Just to give you an example, we spend 80 for $80,000. We spend on ad spend, we make a million. Yeah. And we have 40, 40 salespeople in our office. Each dials 100 times. So it's 4,000 dials a day. And right now we're averaging 50,000 plus a day.
- [00:23]
Dan
What's the goal?
- [00:24]
Albert Preciado
I want to get to a billion doll.
- [00:32]
Dan
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays. We are here inside of the RV motorhome parked in front of Tai Lopez's mansion because we're throwing a multi day event. So I decided to convince Trevor to bring the motorhome out here into the freaking front gate, front parking area of Ty's house and just knock out back to back to back podcasts with friends that are living local like Neil Patel, NFL players like Larry English. We had a lot of great guests today. And right down the street in his fancy penthouse is Mr. Albert Preciado. Literally right down the street, you can throw a rock at it. He's got, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 sales reps up there cranking away, doing six figures a week on one business, doing millions of dollars in the mortgage industry, millions of dollars in the real estate space. He has three or four different businesses, probably more than that, but three or four main category companies doing millions of millions of dollars per month. And so we're going to ask him about how does he manage all this craziness and how does he manage mortgage guy, the real estate side of things, sales training, about to throw his huge event coming up this month. There's a lot going on, Albert Preciado's life. So we're going to get into all of that. As you guys know, we cover three core topics. How to make money and invest money, how to give it away to charity. Recently, Albert was on the podcast, but because the huge Driven 9 event is coming up, I wanted to bring him back on, which I never bring someone on back to back that fast. Wanted him back on, especially with the convenience of being right down the street. So without further ado, Albert Preciado, give us the quick 2 minute bio so we can get straight to the money.
- [01:58]
Albert Preciado
Yeah. So, you know, I, I just, I want to say first, thank you for having me here. And, and then you've been around since my beginnings. And what I want to say is like I started from zero so anybody can create something and it's just been really, really hard. It's really, really hard. I make it look easy, but. But. And I say life is easy, but I say it because I'm trying to convince myself that it's easy because it's super hard. I see you working really hard, but I. I dropped out of college, I got into real estate, and I started selling. So if you can learn one skill, like just one skill, the first skill you want to learn is how to sell. If you know how to sell, you'll sell yourself. Like, I, I've sold myself, I've sold the irs, I've sold the department of real estate. I've sold my wife, I've sold my kids, and I've sold my employees and my salespeople from whether it's leaving me, quitting, anything. And so if you learn how to sell and you have the courage to take risks and then also, never, ever quit, then, then you could make it far in life. And it's just been the whole. I mean, people don't realize that. I'm 41, so I've been doing this since I was like 19, 20 years old. It's when I started working self employed, dropped out. I, like, quit my job as a teacher assistant because I was making nine bucks an hour. And so I started in mortgage real estate. And then that's how I made my first million in 2016.
- [03:33]
Dan
So let's fast forward to now. You get this big penthouse there. Fun fact. Tai Lopez had that office for years, also that penthouse, which is super cool that when Ty transitioned and started moving to Sweden and to his ranch in Virginia, he was leaving that office. And then Albert stepped into this big, cool penthouse. Why decide to get this big, fancy penthouse when you could rent a normal office or. No, I don't call it a boring office, but a normal office compared to being in a penthouse on Sunset Boulevard.
- [04:01]
Albert Preciado
Because if you're not growing, you're dying. And. And Ty. Ty had half of my office. I have the whole floor. So I have the whole floor. And what I did is when I. When I got that office three years ago, like three and a half years ago, we gutted it out. So we spent about a million and a half just remodeling the whole floor. So we put a gym, a bar. You've seen it. Locker room showers. We have our studio, and it's like a cool, fun place. But I got it before we needed it. So, like, the mistake I made is I got it just when Covid happened. So I get this whole office and they're like, hey, you can't work from the office.
- [04:30]
Dan
Oh my God.
- [04:30]
Albert Preciado
And it's like, it's like nearly 20,000 square feet. The whole floor.
- [04:33]
Dan
20,000 square feet on Sunset Boulevard.
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Albert Preciado
100 grand a month.
- [04:36]
Dan
You guys can do the math. Exactly. 100,000amonth.
- [04:38]
Albert Preciado
And, and so, like, it's Covid time. So I'm like, what am I going to do? And, and so still say, she's getting stressed out. So is my wife. So what I've learned through all my experience is that I always put. Put ourselves in like something that I take a big risk that has a big payout if I win, but if I fail, I'm gonna go out of business. So like every year I kind of put us out of business and then it just forces me to like, not sleep. Figure it out, find other resources. You talked about Neil Patel. He's like my best friend. Like, you ask him who's his best friend, he'll tell you it's Albert.
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Dan
That's a good best friend to have.
- [05:25]
Albert Preciado
And he's really wealthy, he's really successful, super smart, really smart. Probably the smartest person I know for sure. And he always gives me advice. We get together every week, we go to lunch, dinner, and I talked to him before coming here. But when you grow, you have like a millionaire mentor, then as you grow more, you have a $10 million mentor, then you have a $100 million mentor, then you start getting billionaire mentors. So the level of advice they give you, it's just, you can't compare it. So when these people tell me, do this, do that, like, I listen. But I think the, the thing that has helped me the most lately has just been getting advice from higher level individuals, net worth wise, where they have more experience and more success. Because I'm gonna obviously listen to them more than anybody else.
- [06:16]
Dan
Sure. So speaking of taking a big chance on a big, big, big, big project, you have driven number nine coming up.
- [06:23]
Albert Preciado
Yeah.
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Dan
Now you've thrown this eight times. I've spoken at like five or six of them, maybe more. Maybe seven of the driven conferences where you're getting 2000, 20, 8002-200300-01800 year after year after year. That is really difficult. This year you've grown your social media tremendously. You've gotten hundreds of millions of views across your podcast and viral videos. What is in store for driven number nine?
- [06:45]
Albert Preciado
So driven number nine, I'm gonna make a huge announcement. It's March 29th, it's my birthday, so is coming up and I'm just going to announce that Driven is becoming the next Virgin. So we're going to be driven. Everything we offer is going to be driven. So it's going to be driven. Mortgage driven, real estate driven, escrow driven, solar driven, financial services. It's the ninth year of the Driven event. And then we also have sales training, we have the info products, but it's going to be like Virgin, but better. So like, like I'm, I'm not, I'm thinking like the next, the next immediate goal is obviously to get to a billion, but I'm already thinking trillion. How do we get AI involved? Software, tech. I'm talking to Neil Patel about that, that stuff. And, and if you, I mean, you know me well, you know that I'm gonna take another huge risk and I'm gonna put us nearly out of business again. But I'm gonna go all in and I'm gonna do whatever it takes. I'm gonna borrow money, borrow more money, use everything I have and just go for it. Because I just like, I'm a really big thinker and since I was a little kid, I just wanted something big. And, and what, what we, what do we want to do? Like our, our goal is to change a billion lives. If we change a billion lives, we'll become a trillion dollar company. And people will laugh at me. But people have been laughing at me since I said I'm going to be a millionaire.
- [08:08]
Dan
Sure.
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Albert Preciado
And then I said, oh, well, I'm gonna get a Ferrari. And they got it. They left at me. Oh, we're gonna get Sunset Towers, the whole floor. They laughed at me. Oh, we're gonna make 30 million-plus in a year. Got it. They laughed at me. So like, to me, it doesn't really affect me at all. And people say things on my social media, they criticize me. And people have to understand is that, that when, like for me right now, it's the first time that I've been really spending ad spend, but I never really ran any ads at all. Now we're running about a hundred thousand dollars a month in ad spend. So I'm gonna be in front of a lot of people, of course, and people are gonna see me and they're gonna be like, they're gonna not like me because I'm brown or because I'm Mexican or because I have an accent or because whatever, you know, they, they don't like my, my shirt that I don't button the second button because it just, it'll rip. But they're gonna hate me for some reason. But I'm Forcing myself in front of so many eyeballs that it's normal. So some people, friends, they tell me, hey, they're saying this about you. I don't feel comfortable they're saying this. And I'm like, cool. Like, I would be worried if nobody was talking.
- [09:09]
Dan
Exactly.
- [09:10]
Albert Preciado
Yeah. But, yeah, it's good. But once you get the sales part in, how good is a sales. The top sales closer if you don't have anybody to close. So that's why marketing is very important. And, you know, Neil talks a lot to me about that.
- [09:24]
Dan
So how important is it to have a personal brand in the business space?
- [09:30]
Albert Preciado
So, for example, I built a big brand over the years. Like we're going on driven event nine. And so it's, it's, it's a decade that I've been working on my brand. And it takes time. And people want everything so fast. Like they want to do it in one year and, and when you've done it for 10 years, it's, it's gonna be, it's going to be good. And I told Neil, hey, Neil, man, you're a year younger than me and you have more money than me. Like, what's going on here? And he's like, albert, I've been doing it for 10 years more than you. I started my first business when I was 17. And I'm like. And he's. And he said, yeah, you need 10 more years. And I'm like, shit, okay, so I get it. But, but then if you look at five years back and you look at where you were five years back, you'll realize, damn, I've grown a lot in five years. And you look 10 years back, you're like, I've grown a lot in 10 years. But the thing is that we're such driven individuals that we want to get results so fast. And you got, you have to be patiently aggressive, so you have to be aggressively like you, like you are. You work a lot, but you have to be patient enough to understand that it's gonna take 10 years, 20 years, maybe 50 years. Because some of these big huge companies, they've been around for 50 years. Like a Rocket Mortgage, they've been around for 50 years.
- [10:41]
Dan
You know, when I went public 20 years ago. Yeah, April 1, 2005.
- [10:46]
Albert Preciado
Yeah.
- [10:47]
Dan
This is our 20 year anniversary. You know, weird that is to say out loud, it's been 20 years since I went public, started my company. Six years before that.
- [10:53]
Albert Preciado
Mm. Like, it takes time.
- [10:56]
Dan
Takes time. Math. And time compounds, though. People are like, oh, how do you get all these Interactions and social media followers. Because I posted 7,000 times. Yeah, I didn't post 7,000 times in one day. I posted once or twice a day for the last 15 years in a row. And just math and time compounds. And when you're in the game and you're just doing it over and over and over and over and over, you're going to win.
- [11:16]
Albert Preciado
How many mentors have you had?
- [11:17]
Dan
Well, I have main characters in my life along the journey. When I first started the clothing brand, I was 17 years old. We did a million dollars in sales, then $9.5 million. And I found this guy named Christopher Wicks. He owned Fender Guitars, Ocean Pacific Body Glove, LA Gear, all these brands that were doing tens of millions of dollars. So he was the person helping guide us in the clothing space. Later, I had my best friend who's actually the godfather of my baby. He was the founder of Marvel Studios named David Meisel. So he built the Avengers and Iron man, all these. All these movies. And you've met him before. He's talked me through a lot of the major junctures in my life. And in between there, I've had certain characters that are big in a certain category, like really big in restaurants or really big in investing or really big at going public. And I would ask them for advice. There's certain guys like David, where I just. I've kept them by my side for 15, 16 years now. And when you find those people and you latch onto them because they're just farther ahead in the journey.
- [12:16]
Albert Preciado
Yeah.
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Dan
And they've gone through different things. He sold his company for $4.1 billion to Disney. He sold Marvel. And so he's very different in his journey. Now. It's not that I'm going to ever sell a movie company, but I get to learn from him on what happened before, during, and after. And so you've worked with a lot of the household names in the business game, especially guys that have big followings, and they're just part of your journey. At one point, Grant Cardone fit for you. And later he doesn't. At one point, Patrick bed David fit for you. And then you want to get someone else. Like, you get different characters that fit for you along the path of your journey. And then sometimes you find a friend, like, I've been close to you for many, many years, not as like a mentor, but as a friend. But like, you stay close for a decade. Right. And so people that are listening, like finding someone that you look up to and respect, and especially if they're in A category they're in, it's priceless because they can pave the way for you.
- [13:06]
Albert Preciado
Yeah. And to answer your question on the, on the final part is because of the brand, like I had, I brought a, like a sales leader. You know, he leads my sales team. Head of sales. His name is Casey and Casey Cox. And, and so he brought the blueprint and he knew a lot of sales guys and when he brought those people in and the blueprint combined with the brand, we just took off like, like IT companies that it took him 10 years to build. We, we already surpassed them by double in three months. Like this month we'll make 2 million in just sales training. Sales easily like 2 million. We're shooting for 3 million. But last, last month we did a million for the first time. The month before that we did a 550,000. And then the first November it was only like two weeks we did a one. Was it 150 something thousand. But it's been just growing more. And then our sales people are growing. They're getting better then, we're getting now better leads. We have, we have a really good ads team that runs our ads. So we're running ads on Facebook, on, on Instagram, on TikTok and on YouTube. And then we're running a. But they're scripted ads. So no ma. No matter how, how, how much I like just winging, just talking, just kind of freelancing the ads teams. Like, no, you got to read from the teleprompter because there's certain words. And then Neil's involved too. So Neil has told us like what to do, how to do it. You know, he's a genius marketer. So he's like, you can't say certain words because meta, tick tock. They could block you, they could ban you and then if you do it too many times, they could just ban you from their platform. So, so he's like, you gotta have it scripted no matter how much you hate it. So then now we're scripting them. So I'm just reading it, but I'm saying the hooks in order and I'm saying the words you can and I'm avoiding the words you can't. And we're getting like really good roi. So just to give you an example, we spend the 80 for $80,000 we spend on ad spend. We make a million. Yeah. And we have 40 salespeople in our office. Each dials 100 times. So it's 4,000 dials a day. And right now we're averaging 50,000 plus a day in sales. We did 72K yesterday.
- [15:31]
Dan
What's the goal of it? As you build this sales revenue up and you're doing this training, what's the goal?
- [15:36]
Albert Preciado
I want to get to a billion dollar valuation and I want to add the tech and the software, the AI and it's going to be driven everything. So it's not going to be just driven event or driven sales training or driven masterminds. It's going to be driven mortgage driven, real estate driven, solar driven, financial services driven escrow. So we're just gonna offer every single thing. I'm even thinking as big as driven airlines. And, and I'm crazy. Like I'm. Something's off with me and I, and people think I'm crazy. People think they think a lot of things, but. But I go for it. And I like having people doubt me. I love it.
- [16:15]
Dan
So I'm going to give you guys a quick example of what Albert's talking about when he mentions Virgin. Now, if you're listening out there, whether you're watching on the YouTube or you're listening in a podcast, can you name, without searching online, can you name the CEO of American Airlines? No. Can you name the CEO of Southwest Airlines? You have no idea. How about Delta? Nope. Frontier? Nope. You don't know the name of any of these CEOs of any of the major airlines. And they actually walked in right now, slap you in the face. You wouldn't know who they were, even though they're running 10 billion, 50 billion, $100 billion type airlines. But if I said Virgin Airlines, all of you know Richard Branson, and Richard Branson is the only one that's a multi billionaire, owns a private island, has his own companies, casinos, everything, vodkas, record labels, and Virgin Airlines. And it's because of a personal brand. And so what Albert's doing is transitioning and taking what's working for him in the driven space and then making it to his version of Virginia by building up his personal brand and tagging that name across all these companies. I did that with Elevator Studio. I have Elevator Ventures, Elevator Nights, my events. I've done 56 times. Elevator mortgage, Elevator funding, Elevator Syndicate, my investor group. Everything's branded under the same name because it makes it easier for me to be building all these things and then putting my name on it. Not a white label, but as the brand that people trust. They know whether they've gone to Elevator Night, they can, they'll feel comfortable with elevator funding. They know if they've gone through Elevator Syndicate they feel comfortable with Elevator Studio. All those different moving parts are based on one core brand that people can know and attach to me. And I'll never sell Elevator because it's my brand. The same way he wouldn't sell Driven, he's building up his brand, his personal brand and finally realize, well, I have the mortgage guys here, I have the real estate name here, I have the sales training name here, I have the Driven name here. And finally combining all together to make one super brand. So as you scale this and you go through, what do you want to happen at Driven9? What are some of the speakers that are coming? Who's any surprise guests?
- [18:10]
Albert Preciado
We have a lot of surprises. We have a lot of surprises. But what I like to do with, I mean this Driven event, we're going to announce the whole merging of the companies. And the main thing though is it's also going to be my birthday weekend. So it's going to be good celebration. But, but my whole point of Driven is I want to do for people what Grant Cardone, Patrick, but David and people like that did for me. And, and I, I want to give them the, all the experience, all the mistakes that I've made so that they don't make those mistakes. And the thing about Driven is we bring experts in different fields. So we'll bring a tax expert, we'll, we'll bring a real estate expert, we'll bring a mindset expert, mindset coach, we'll bring people that are, that are marketing experts. So we'll bring experts in every field and then we'll have operation systems, processes, information sales, all of that. But one of the main things that, that I see lacking in seminars in general is operations systems and processes. So I don't like doing anything that's not worth my hour. So like if you're worth, if you make X amount of money a month, a year, you divide that by 2080, that's going to give you what your hour is worth. So if your hour is worth $1,000 then you shouldn't be doing anything less than $1,000 an hour. Some people are worth $15,000 an hour. So you should just value your time because you can't get it back and you want to focus on the big roi, whatever returns you the most. So what I've learned, making a lot of mistakes is hiring a lot of people. Grant Cardone, my mentor, he was my one on one mentor. I was his best student. And he'll tell you that if you ask him, he'll probably grin a little Bit. But I love Grant Cardone. I have nothing bad to say about Grant Cardone. And 11 years ago I went to his first seminar, 30 people, and he told me, you got to grow your army, but it's risky growing an army because you got to pay them and, and you got to pay people, right? It's salaries and all that stuff. So now like we have over 500 people that work for us and I have like four assistants. I have a sick, I have a driver now security. We have five full time videographers in house. Everybody's in house. We have 40 salespeople on the floor. We have a full time, a full time accounting team, processing team. SEAL runs operations. I get to do the cool stuff. I shouldn't do that. I get to do the cool stuff. So I'm doing podcasts with Dan. I'm doing, I'm going to parties, drinking nice champagne. I'm doing events, I'm doing, I'm recording stuff. So it's like the fun stuff. But what I do mostly is the vision part. So I'm a huge visionary, but a huge visionary compared, I mean a huge visionary working along a strong operator and having strong team employees and salesforce and running the right ads and all of that stuff. You create like an engine that runs without you and you step away and it's still printing money and you don't have to be there all the time. And that's the best feeling and that's when you can exit. That's one of the things that Patrick Bedavid, also a mentor of mine, one on one, 11 years ago I, I, him and Grant were my mentors 11 years ago and he told me, build your operation. So, so now I understand it. So he told me one thing that makes a lot of sense. If your business needs you 80% of the time, it's worth nothing. But if your business runs 80% without you, then you built a business that one day you can sell. So right now that's what I'm working on and that's what I, that's one of the big things that we're going to teach at Driven9, how to create a business that runs on autopilot. And it's some, it's a business that you can eventually sell. And that's what I want to do because that's what my mentors have told me. Build a business to sell.
- [22:15]
Dan
If your business cannot run without you, you don't have a business. You have a job. You're not an entrepreneur at that point. You have a job. That's okay. But you have to understand that part when going into it. Until you build SOPs, which systems and processes, you're going to get stuck. You're going to get stuck dealing with all the nitty gritty, all the little headaches and all the little moving parts until you find people that can be strong operators like Albert mentioned, people that can run the show, whether it's from the secretary to the sales to the manager to the CFO or everybody in between. If you have to be there for every part of it, you have a job. And a lot of times we can't just admit that to ourselves. We think that we've built this big business that's sellable. How can you sell it if you've got to be there to run it every single day? Yeah, if you have to be there to run every single day, it's not a sellable thing. Because why would someone else buy it if they got to keep you forever? Typically, if someone acquires your company, there's two options. They either get rid of you or they do what's called golden handcuffs. Golden handcuffs is that they keep you for one to three years, base minimum, and they pay you to stay on. And they pay to stay on because they need you for the transition process or to run the business. If you are in instrumental in running the business, you are not appealing to be acquired because if you get sick or you get bored or you get, you know, shiny object syndrome and want to leave, you can jeopardize their acquisition. And so you want to make yourself not needed at your business. I know it's hard to say or it's hard to grasp the concept of it, but if your business can't run without you, you have a job. All right, last question for our special episode, I need you to do me one favor. I want you to look at this camera and tell the audience why they should go to Driven Nine.
- [23:54]
Albert Preciado
Well, you should go to Driven nine because it's going to change your life. And there's a lot of new events, there's a lot of new coaches, influencers. However, there's not a lot of mentors, speakers, or events that the leader has been tested. And what I mean by that is I hired Glenn John Maxwell, paid him $400,000 to mentor me one on one. And. And that included his private jet flying him. And he told me one thing that I'll never forget. A. A leader that has not been tested cannot be trusted. So you know me for a long time. Decades. So I've been around for 20 years and I haven't gone anywhere. So I've been through the 2008 recession. You know, then, then 2020 Covid 2023 was the worst year ever in my life. Most challenging, especially for real estate because rates went up to like 9, 10. This year is even more complicated than last year. But I figured it out. So when in business, you always have to figure it out. Every year, every year you, you have like a test. And when somebody gets through those tests over and over and over again, then that's somebody you should listen and learn from. So Driven9 is going to be filled with experts that have a lot of experience, have been tested. They know how to get through big struggles, big things when they get complex and, and you have to fight, figure things out. You don't, you're running out of money and, and all of that stuff that they need to figure things out in business. That, that's what we're going to focus on 2009. And it's going to teach you every single thing from marketing to sales to building your personal brand, operation, systems, process training, how to hire, how to fire the good, the bad and the ugly about business.
- [25:55]
Dan
All right, guys, I want you to make sure to check out Albert Preciado across all so many social media platforms. Check out driven event.com to go to driven9. If you have any friends in the LA area or you want to fly in yourself, go to driven event.com it's coming up March 29th for Albert Preado's birthday weekend. It's going to be an amazing lineup. You can check out some of the speakers that are on there now. And there's more surprises coming. So Albert Pre social media driven event.com visit us at the money Mondays.com and make sure to have important discussions with your friends, family and followers about money.
- [26:26]
Albert Preciado
And then Dan whoever, whoever just sends a message and. Or comments back. DMS on Instagram, whatever Dan. Or comments on the podcast Dan. Then I'm going to give him 50% off because they do. Dan. So we'll put like some call to action and I'll send it to you and then they could just click on the link and then they get 50% off.
- [26:46]
Dan
Well, you heard it here first. So make sure to check out driven event.com. you'll be able to use the code DAN for 50% off. But it's very important. Have discussions with your friends, family and followers. You got to talk about money, Got to talk about salaries, accounting, taxes, credit, understanding your scores, understanding how to set up your bank account properly understanding budgets. You've got to have these discussions because it's real life. Money is part of your daily life. And it's not rude to talk about money, it's rude to not talk about it.
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Albert Preciado
But money, money is very important.
- [27:15]
Dan
It's super critical.
- [27:16]
Albert Preciado
Yeah, we're. We're going to talk a lot about money.
- [27:17]
Dan
Exactly.
- [27:18]
Albert Preciado
Yeah.
- [27:18]
Dan
So see you guys next Monday here at the money Mondays.com.