What Does It Take to Reach a Billion-Dollar Valuation? w/ Albert Preciado 🏘️ EP111

0:00So 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, 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. What's the goal? I want to get to a billion-dollar valuation.

0:31ladies and gentlemen welcome to a special edition of the money mondays we are here inside of the rv motorhome parked in front of ty 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.

1:05He'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 and millions per month. And so we're going to ask him about how does he manage all this craziness? 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 in Albert Preciado's life.

1:35So 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 Nine 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 preciato give us the quick two minute bio so we get straight to the money yeah so you know i i just i want to say first uh 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 you know because it's super hard I see you working really hard but 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'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 and I've sold my employees and my salespeople from whether it's leaving me quitting anything and and so if you learn how to sell and you have the the courage to take risks and then that also never ever quit then you could make it far in life and it's just been a 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 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 Tai transition 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 yeah no i don't call it a boring office but a normal office compared to being in a penthouse on sunset boulevard because if you're not growing you're dying and and 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 you can't work from the office oh my god and it's like it's like nearly 20 000 square feet the whole floor 20 000 square feet on sunset boulevard 100 grand a month you guys can do the math exactly 100 000 a month and and so So like it's COVID time.

4:41So I'm like, shit, what am I going to do? And so she's getting stressed out. So what I've learned through all my experience is that I always 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 going to 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 you'll tell you it's Albert that's a good best friend and he's really wealthy he's really successful super really smart smart smartest person I know for sure yep 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 when you grow you have a like a millionaire mentor then then as you grow more you have a ten million dollar mentor then you have a 100 million dollar mentor then you start getting billionaire mentors so the level of advice they give you is just you can't compare it so when these people tell me do this do that like I listen but I I think 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.

6:12Because I'm going to obviously listen to them more than anybody else. Sure. So speaking of taking a big chance on a big, big, big, big project, you have Driven number nine coming up. Yeah. 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, 2800, 2200, 3000, 1800 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? So Driven number nine, I'm going to make a huge announcement.

6:48It's March 29th. It's my birthday. It's coming up and I'm just going to announce that Driven is becoming the next virgin. so so we're gonna be driven every every everything we offer is gonna be driven so it's gonna be driven mortgage driven real estate driven escrow driven solar driven financial services we have the it's a ninth year of the driven event and then we also have sales training we have the info products but it's gonna be vert like virgin but better so like like 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've what we want to do are like our our goal is to change a billion lives if we change a billion lives will become a trillion dollar company and people will laugh at me but people have been laughing at me since I said I'm gonna be a millionaire sure and then I said oh well I'm gonna get a Ferrari they got it they left them you know we're gonna get sunset towers the whole floor they laughed at me oh we're gonna make 30 million plus in a year they 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.

8:22And people have to understand that 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$100 ,000 a month in ad spend. So I'm going to be in front of a lot of people. Of course. And people are going to see me and they're going to be like, they're going to not like me because I'm brown or because I'm Mexican or because I have an accent or because whatever. You know, they don't like my shirt that I don't button the second button because it'll rip. But they're going to hate me for some reason. But I'm forcing myself in front of so many eyeballs that it's normal.

9:00So 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. I would be worried if nobody was talking. Exactly. 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 so how important is it to have a personal brand in the business space so for example i built a 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.

9:41And it takes time and people want everything so fast. They want to do it in one year. And when you've done it for 10 years, 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. What's going on here? And he's like, Albert, I've been doing that for 10 years more than you. I started my first business when I was 17. And he said, yeah, you need 10 more years. And I'm like, shit, okay. So I get it. But but then if I if you look at five years back and you look at where you were five years back You'll realize them. I've grown a lot in five years and you look ten years back You're like I've grown a lot in ten years a person But the thing is that we're such driven individuals that we want to get results so fast and you have you have to be patiently aggressive So you have to be aggressive 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.

10:38Like a rocket mortgage, they've been around for 50 years. You know when I went public? 20 years ago. April 1st, 2005. This is our 20 year anniversary. You know how weird that is to say out loud? It's been 20 years since I went public. Started my company six years before that. It takes time. It takes time. Math and time compounds though. People are like, how do you get all these interactions and social media followers? Because I posted 7 ,000 times. 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 how many mentors have you had 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 dollars 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.

11:36So 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 Mizell. He built The Avengers and Iron Man, 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 you know 15 16 years now and when you find those people and you latch on to them because they're just farther ahead in the journey yeah and they've gone through different things he sold his company for 4.1 billion dollars to disney he sold marvel and so he's very different in his journey now it's not that i'm gonna 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 yeah and and to answer your question 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.

13:24And when he brought those people in and the blueprint combined with the brand, we just took off. Like companies that it took him 10 years to build, we already surpassed them by double in three months. Like this month, we'll make$2 million in just sales training, sales.

13:51easily like two million we're shooting for three 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 uh 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 We have a really good ads team that runs our ads. So we're running ads on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, and on YouTube. And then we're running a – they're scripted ads. So no matter how much I like just talking, just kind of freelancing, the ads team's like, no, you got to read from the teleprompter because there's certain words.

14:36And then Neil's involved too. So Neil has told us what to do, how to do it. He's a genius marketer. so he's like you can't say certain words because meta uh tiktok 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 he's like you gotta have it scripted no matter how much 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 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 a hundred times so it's four thousand dials a day and right now we're averaging 50 ,000 plus a day in sales we did 72 Kla yesterday what's the goal of it as you build this sales revenue up and you're doing this training what's the goal I want to get to a billion dollar valuation and I want to add the tech and the software the AI and and it's it's gonna be driven everything so it's not gonna be just driven event or driven sales training or driven masterminds it's gonna 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 and I'm crazy Like, something's off with me.

16:04And people think I'm crazy. People think a lot of things. But I go for it. And I like having people doubt me. I love it. 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 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. If 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, a hundred billion dollar type airlines.

16:44But 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 is doing is transitioning and taking what's working for him in the driven space and then making it to his version of virgin 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.

17:32They know whether they've gone to elevator night, 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 realized, 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. Finally, combining it all together to make one super brand.

18:02So 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? 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 and and the the main thing though is it's also going to be my birthday weekend so it's going to be a good celebration but but my whole point of driven is i want to do for people what uh grant cardone patrick bit 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 And the thing about Driven is we bring experts in different fields.

18:50So we'll bring a tax expert. We'll bring a real estate expert. We'll bring a mindset expert, a mindset coach. We'll bring people that are marketing experts. So we'll bring experts in every field. And then we'll have operations, systems, processes, information, sales, all of that. But one of the main things 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 if you make X amount of money 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.

19:42Some 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 he 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 you got to pay people right salaries and all that stuff so now we have over 500 people that work for us and I have like 4 assistants I have a driver now security we have 5 full time videographers in house everybody's in house We have 40 salespeople on the floor.

20:40We have a full-time accounting team, processing team, sale runs operations. I get to do the cool stuff. I shouldn't do that now. I get to do the cool stuff, so I'm doing podcasts with Dan. I'm going to parties, drinking nice champagne. I'm doing events. 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.

21:31And that's the best feeling and that's when you can exit. that's one of the things that Patrick David also a mentor of mine one-on-one 11 years ago 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 gonna teach at driven nine how to create a business that runs an 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 uh my mentors have told me build a business to sell 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 is systems and processes you you're going to 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 and so 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 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 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 well you should go to driven nine because it's going to change your life and there's a lot of new events.

24:02There'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 John Maxwell, paid him$400 ,000 to mentor me one-on-one. 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 uh in my life most challenging especially for real estate because rates went up to like 9, 10.

24:56This year is even more complicated than last year, but I figured it out. So in business, you always have to figure it out every year. Every year 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 Driven 9 is gonna 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 you have to fight, figure things out. You're running out of money. And all of that stuff that they need to figure things out in business, that's what we're going to focus on 2009.

25:42And it's going to teach you every single thing from marketing to sales to building your personal brand, operation system process, training, how to hire, how to fire, the good, the bad, and the ugly about business. all right guys i want you to make sure to check out albert presciato across all so many social media platforms check out driven event.com to go to driven 9 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 presciato'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 presciato across social media driven event.com visit us at themoneymondays.com and make sure to have important discussions with your friends family and followers about money and then dan whoever whoever uh just uh sends a message and or or uh comments back dms on instagram whatever dan or comments on the podcast dan then i'm going to give them 50 off oh perfect because they do down 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 yeah and then they get 50 off well you heard it here first so make sure to check out DrivenEvent.com, you'll be able to use the code Dan for 50 % off.

26:52But it's very important. Have discussions with your friends, family, and followers. You've got to talk about money. You've 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 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. Money is very important. It's super critical. Yeah, we're going to talk a lot about money. Exactly. Yeah. So see you guys next Monday here at themoneymondays.com.