John Paul DeJoria- From Homeless to Billionaire

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1:08This is the Ed Myron Show. Welcome back to the show. So I've wanted to talk to this man for so long because obviously his story is crazy. Imagine going from living in your car and being homeless to becoming a billionaire. It doesn't even sound real when you say it out loud, but it's actually his story. and he's founded a couple different brands, whether it's John Paul Mitchell Systems or Patron Tequila. You're talking about two multi-billion dollar brands and companies that he's co-founded or founded, and it's an incredible story, but that's actually not what I've admired the most about him. What I've admired the most about him is how he handles the success.

1:42He's always appeared to me to have such great humility and to be such a generous soul for the success that he's had, and so I've just wanted to meet him, and so I'm using the show today to get to know somebody I've admired from a distance and you're going to get to share this time up close and learn from him. So John Paul DeGiorgio, welcome to the show. Finally, great to have you. Yeah, Ed, thank you very, very much. And you got a great show here and I'm really happy to be on it. Thank you. Well, I'm so thrilled you're here. Like I said, everybody, two different gigantic pieces of success. And that's just the beginning of the resume and the list.

2:13Can we do something first? Because I think a lot of people listen or watch my show and they probably find themselves at a stage of their life where they may not be homeless or living in their car, but they thought they'd be further ahead than they are. You know what I mean? They had a dream. I know exactly what you mean. Exactly what you mean. What would you say to them based on your experience? What was it like for you, and what would you say to somebody who feels behind? Well, you've got to look at it in a little different way. Let's say, for example, my own experience, this is a good way to say it instead of what I think will happen, my own experience, is when I started John Paul Mitchell Systems and our backer pulled out, we never got a dime from it, and we started it on a shoestring of$700, even lived in my car for the first several weeks just to be able to make it.

3:02So what had happened? All of a sudden, I was in a beautiful situation where I thought I'd be doing really good. We had a backer to start our company with. The guy pulled out. I left the relationship I was in at the time because it wasn't working out. I took the older of the two cars down the hill, the couple hundred bucks in my pocket, turned out to have nothing. So all of a sudden, I thought I'd be doing really good. But what happened? All of a sudden, something happened in my life where everything I thought would happen isn't happening. Not as good as I thought, period. But I knew that what I had was really, really great.

3:34So there's two things I love to share with everybody. entrepreneurs, either in your personal life or in your business life, an entrepreneur. And there's the two things to success. One of them is this, be prepared in life. And all of you get to that point for rejection. If things aren't going as well as they're going, then something was rejected. That success was rejected or somebody told you you can't do it. There's rejection somehow along the way. If you know along the way you're going to rejection and you're going going to get it, it's not going to affect you as much, opposed to, oh my God, I got rejected.

4:06I never expected that, okay? That's one thing. Number two, make sure the quality of your product or your own personality in your personal life or your business life is not in the selling business. You want to go into the reorder business. What does that mean? It means that, for example, in business, your product or service is so good, people will want to reorder it again. Don't work on a product or a service and how to sell the darn thing. It's how good can I make this? So if somebody actually has it, they could buy it again and again or tell other people about it. Those are the two things. In your own personal life, it's the same thing.

4:47What you present to your partner in life or your friends should be something that wants them to be around you for a long time. For example, if you in front of your friends always talk about what you have and how great life is going for you, and maybe it's not going that good for them, they're going to listen to you as a courtesy. But if you keep on bragging on what you're all about, you're going to start losing friends along the way. Keep some of it to yourself, okay? That's one thing. Also, today is the first day of the rest of your life. We would say that in the 60s. In fact, a fellow named Bobby Ram Dass wrote a book about it called Be Here Now.

5:22In other words, you're here now. You cannot change yesterday's newspapers. It already happened. And that's the other big thing. You got to get it off your shoulders. If only I would have done that differently. If only I would have said that differently. If only this, I mean, if you could change it. When people ask me, JP, what would you change in your life? I mean, my God, you were homeless. You and your mom and brother struggled. You created a business out of nothing. And all of a sudden you got money. You know, oh my God, JP, what is the secret? What would you change if you wanted to, especially the hard times you had in your life, which were a lot of them being fired, having no money, more than one occasion, right?

6:00I can't change it. And if it wasn't for all those steps, I wouldn't be who I am today. So my answer is quite clear. I wouldn't change a thing. I forgive myself for anything I did in the past. I wish I didn't do it the same way, but I can't change it, but I can forgive myself, meaning that I will never think again. Oh, if only I did something different with Susie, if only I would have done this different in my life, if only I had invested in this, things would have been different. You cannot change yesterday's newspaper. Just know that. So when it comes on your shoulder or you start thinking about it, you should switch a little bit to maybe moving more towards, well, that happened, but I can't do anything about it.

6:39I forgive it. And then when it comes in your mind, say, well, wait a minute, That's yesterday. Why is that still in my mind? I can't change that. Why am I even thinking about that, okay? That's the past. It cannot be changed. Why are we on the planet Earth? One of the reasons we're here is to learn. If everything was peachy keen and you were cool and you had all the money you wanted and everything else, and I'll tell you a little story about J. Paul Getty Jr. before we get off this podcast, what's really important in life, okay? You can't change that. So what you do is you leave the garbage behind you.

7:13There's nothing I can do about it, right? That's the past. You cannot change the past. Oh my God, I'm still in love with her. Look what she did to me. Or I'm still in love with him. Look what he did to me. You can't change that. It lets you move on to what you're destined to have. A lot of things in life happen because of fate. Why? Because your purpose here was something else. So some maybe things happen to you that aren't that bad, but it's to get you the next step. When you look at the book I brought out, that's why I brought out this book, okay, Success and Shared is Failure. People ask me all the time, JP, can you do what you did with no money and all of a sudden build$2 billion corporations?

7:53Can you do that still today? Yes, you can. JP, how did you get money out of a distributor? How did you even sell them when you had no money? How did you make an office up? How did you do all that when you had dollars to work with. How the hell can you do it today? You can. That's the reason I wrote the book. It took me two and a half years, Ed. Have you ever written a book? I have, and I'm a terrible writer. It took me a long time, too. It took me two and a half years to write this book. I'd read I Want to Change, but the whole concept was, how can I tell others in the world how they could still do it today for little to nothing, but with kindness involved?

8:30How you could grow companies with kindness. too often you get someone that's unruly okay and they're they're not kind well let me give you a little phrase kindness works even for jerks when i went into libya to convince omar qaddafi and by the way it's in the book okay yep i'm the guy that went in to convince omar qaddafi to release a two suspected terrorist a panam flight 103 to go on trial right there's a lot of things i do because of me. I'm not an agent of the CIA. I'm not an agent of the FBI of nobody, right? I did because I wanted to be an American and to help out. But all the things you could do and expand on, no matter where your life is.

9:08Where did I start? Living in my car with a few hundred bucks in my pocket, needing a few more to borrow from my mom. Too proud to tell my mom I'm down and out. Too proud. So I could have stayed in my old room. She could have fed me. Too proud. But how do you go about these things? How do you get the worst things in the world being fired? Sometimes the best thing for you, especially when you don't deserve to be fired. But maybe it's because you're not moving on. Fate is going to move you on to what you're set for. And I didn't know this till after I started Paul Mitchell. Two years later, it was, my God, if it wasn't for all those lessons learned and being fired, but being through these three different companies, each one taught me something different.

9:47I could have never started my first company, Paul Mitchell, with$10 million, let alone with$700 between me and my partner. So a lot of things in life are meant to be, but you treat them with kindness. There's been situations where with Gaddafi, he wanted to kill me. And I came up with something out of kindness and made him laugh his head off, right? And then he took a picture with me and they went into the talks. I helped out with that in a big way. So there's various things you can do. I was just thinking, listening to you, by the way, I didn't mean to jump in. I just want to say this. I'm looking at you.

10:18No, please do. It's your show. No, no, no, no. This show's about you. and I'm getting out of the way today. That's obvious. This is going to be a banger, everybody. You can tell, obviously, in the first 10 minutes. But I'm looking at you, and then I'm thinking about your life story. You're kind of like the Dos Equis guy. You're like the most interesting man in the world. You've had this very diverse experience. And by the way, guys, on books, I have a lot of people on here who write books. Let me tell you what's rare in this day and age. I'd like to think this of myself as well. Someone teaching you lessons who's actually done it.

10:47In other words this book and and and J.P.'s this isn't theory This is stuff that he's practiced in his life and the book is called success unshared as failure That's unique in the world guys that someone who's done it Shares exactly what they did and if we could just before we keep moving on I want to unpack something because I forget the name of the book But we had a guy come in to speak to my group. I think it's called unreasonable hospitality Maybe i've got the book name wrong, but his philosophy is very similar to what you started to. And I want to unpack it because you are a genius in so many different things as an entrepreneur.

11:19But this one area about referral business that you said, return business, that makes me believe that you believed the experience has to be so pleasing, so pleasant, so wonderful, so incredible that they want to come back. Tactically, strategically, how did you do that? What were your thoughts? Was there something specific you would do in a client encounter or when you'd go into a salon to get the account? How did you, what were you thinking and doing? That's a very good question, by the way, an excellent question indeed. What we're thinking about doing is this, is we have no money, we have no anything.

11:55Why did I even go into this industry after working for others, okay? I knew the industry and I knew that you could make things a little bit better. Like my dear partner at the time, Paul, wonderful human being, he died unfortunately quite a few years ago through pancreatic cancer. But Paul was a great guy. Tried to come out of the product line, but it just didn't work. But I had the knowledge from working for all these three companies who I would go to to make it better. How do you make a shampoo better or maybe use it one time instead of twice? How do you make a conditioner that you could leave in your hair and is good for your hair and your skin and a pomade and it gets wrinkled, I mean, snags out of your hair easily.

12:34You could blow dry it with less damage. Let's create products like that, not knowing I wouldn't have any money to promote it. So when we had no money, we had to promote it on its merit, knowing darn well that when a hairdresser used it, they could go ahead and run a recommender to use it again. Also, salon retailing was not a big deal at all when I started Paul Mitchell. Some salons would sell a few products, some didn't. We introduced success to salons through recommendation. People aren't a salon's chair. And the salon knows your hair better than anybody else, better than any drugstore ad will ever know it.

13:09But they could use some of our Paul Mitchell products that worked exceptionally well, still do today, by the way. They could use those products and say, by the way, I use shampoo one on your hair. You only need one shampoo. You don't need two with this one. Your ears are that thick and dirty, right? And by the way, here's how much of the conditioner we use. Here's how much of this. And by the way, with this new freeze and shine spray, I'm holding your hair up with a brush. I'm spraying it. I'm just counting to three and then I let it go. So it holds it, but yet the back part falls. Show them how to use it and what you use in salon and saying, these are the products that I use on you.

13:43You may want to pick up a few before you leave. And then they would all of a sudden retailing started in salons. Salons could actually do that. At the same time, I made a promise to all salons that I will somehow always stay in the professional beauty industry with you and not do what all the other companies do. It's only going to be in salons, but when I go retail, you're not going to benefit by it, but thank you for helping me build. I would never do that. And even when distribution changed, an example, during COVID, a lot of salons were closed for weeks and months. They were closed. Their customers could not get it.

14:15Instead of having to switch them, we made a really good deal with Amazon where they would order straight through Amazon. It would be delivered. We would get obviously our share of the money back, but we would take a portion of it. This is being true to your word, a portion of it, and give it back to salons that were really into Paul Mitchell. It's kind of like when salons started opening up, a lot of salons were out of business for several weeks and months, had no product left, no money to buy it with. We gave the salons that supported us a whole bunch, like several million dollars worth of product free.

14:48Here's back bar, here's color, here's shampoos. Let's put you back in business again. You care about your customer and what their needs are. And by the way, I don't want to forget to say this. For a lot of people today, well, my God, I have very little money. I started a business. got a hell of a good product, but I don't have a distribution network set up. And how do I get money right away? Okay. It's in the book. Okay. How do you go into Patron? JP, what did you know about alcohol or tequila other than drinking it before you started Patron? Absolutely nothing, nothing, nada. Well, how did you learn the industry that quick and build it to one of the biggest companies ever in the liquor business?

15:25Part of it is learning their vocabulary first. so people have to go and find these things that still work so now let me go with patrone another example to answer your question when i entered patrone in the marketplace the average tequila was about five dollars a bottle nothing was anywhere near the 37.95 we had to charge for a bottle it was too expensive when we launched patrone nobody would take us nobody ed would take us on not one distributor said guys you have a great tequila it's the best in the world but man, it's just, no one's going to pay that kind of money for it, right? So we had to go with someone that only sold wine and nothing else.

16:04That's all they sold. We talked them into it, saying, hey, if we could get Spago's, which was the number one restaurant in 1989 when we launched it in anywhere, and Baja Cantina Marina del Rey. Well, Wolfgang Puck was a friend of mine, already drank and said, this is the best stuff I want to carry it. Baja Cantina did the same for my friend Martin. Okay, we'll carry it. They said, you can get those accounts. We said, sure, we'll take it. After one year, they were only selling about a thousand cases for the year. That's nothing in the industry, right? That's nothing. So we dropped them. We took on a big giant.

16:38This is a real good lesson to learn. A giant. Jim Beam, great guys, by the way, okay? After about a year and a half or so, they were only selling 12 ,000 cases a year. That's 12 ,000 of 12, you know, 12 in a case, 12 ,000. We went and met with them and said, you know, guys, we think we could do a lot better than this. And they were really smart and knew their business. They said, guys, let me show you the tequila business. You're going at$37.95 up against$5 and$6 bottles, okay? The most expensive thing I think at that time that they could find was maybe$14,$15. That was it. JP, guys, we love you.

17:15You have the best there is, but we'll tell you the truth. You'll never do more than 20 ,000 cases a year, which is a lot. You'll still make some money. We didn't believe it. Okay. We dropped them and took on Seagram's. This is a giant company. Okay. Seagram's got it up to about 50 ,000, right? And we knew we could do so much better. We were learning now. We were learning. We dropped them and took it over ourselves. Now here's the lesson to be learned here. Very important lesson. Okay. What was our deal? We had the best there was, and we're going to stick it out until enough people know about it.

17:46Whether it's having a seminar at Paul Mitchell where people are given Patron free to treat themselves, or whether it's changing one word in marketing. I did it with Paul Mitchell and it worked. And the word was this. You want to treat yourself today? Treat yourself to the best there is. Patron, simply perfect. Okay. We took on the promotion advertising ourself. We took all the pretty girls out of it. And the bottle, the ad was all about the bottle. Simply perfect. We concentrated something different on the bottle. And then we told people in restaurants, please, when you serve somebody, you want to make a couple extra dollars?

18:25Tell them that you want a margarita. We make a good margarita. But for$2 more, you can treat yourself today to Patron, the best akela in the world. What does this all amount to? When I sold Patron, which was about eight years ago, that brand that was never supposed to do more than 20 ,000 cases a year, we were doing, and that alone, about 3 ,500 ,000 cases a year. Broke all records for the selling price for everything. In other words, there's always something in there you could do differently, and you can learn in the industry immediately and find a little... So I know I'm not the only one who hates long holds when needing to call customer service.

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20:53That's butcherbox.com slash my let and that's butcherbox.com slash my let. Be sure to use our link so they know we sent you. Thanks. I'm listening to you. Let's just be real for a minute. By the way, this is a master class. Like that's why I just want you to keep going. But I want to, I'm listening to you and I've been fortunate that I've interviewed some of the top entrepreneurs on the planet. I've done okay myself, but I've been around Phil Knight. I've been around Tim cook i've watched videos of steve jobs i'm listening to you you're a promoter and i don't know that enough entrepreneurs become the i remember thinking back in the day remember don king the boxing promoter i know you do oh yeah i remember thinking even in his case if you if you had a big fight back in those days and you you'd want the best promoter to promote it and i often i look at entrepreneurs and i think so many of them they don't utilize their social media that way, they're not over the top, dramatic, deep believers in their mission, their cause or their product.

21:49Like I see in you it like it's in your pores, it's coming out of you. And I think a lot of people are, what's my strategy? What's my social media picture going to look like? You know, what's our tagline going to be? And all of that stuff matters. But at the end of the day, you got to be a true believer in what you do and constantly feed that belief because is you can't transfer to somebody that which you're not really feeling and experiencing. Is that accurate read of you? Ed, it's beyond accurate. Beyond accurate. An example, I sold encyclopedias door-to-door for three and a half years for colliers.

22:24No appointments, no salary, commission sales only. And it wasn't a real known encyclopedia set. But I believed that every house needed encyclopedia. I never had an encyclopedia. It'd be so much help. I might not even do my homework at home. I might even do my homework, period. I believed in it. What you said is one of the greatest things that, Ed, you know that. And hopefully all your listeners know it also. You must believe what you have is the best. That's what keeps you going. Like one of the things I talk about in the book that I learned selling encyclopedias is if you knock on 50 doors and they're all either politely or maybe not so politely closing your face, right?

23:02You must be just as enthusiastic on door number 51. For me, it was door number 100 and something, right? But I believe what they said. The average life of an encyclopedia salesman for colliers, door-to-door commission only, three and a half days. I was going to say three days, yeah. I believe it's been the last several years with them, and I made pretty good money. But you're right. You've got to believe what you have, or make sure what you have is so believable that, hey, if 50 people don't know it, 51 is going to know it. And this is the same thing we did with Paul Mitchell. We had no money, no advertising, but we knew the product was so good if they used it.

23:36All of a sudden, we'd be getting some reorders out of it without any advertising, no promotion. I just think one thing you said is so profound. I want to dig on that a little bit, and then I want to ask you about being worth it. What happens in life and business, especially if you're in some type of sales, is you start getting this rejection, and then you shift to where you almost expect it. And so now it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And to your point of maybe 0 for 50, You've got to go to 51 like it's the first one, and you know you're going to get it, and you believe it. What happens is the failure and the rejection begins to morph into someone's mind, where they almost start to say things that create it because they're expecting the rejection to happen again.