[00: 00: 00 – 00: 00: 30]

The learning process is scary, right? And the more you learn, the more scared you’re gonna get, the more afraid you’re gonna be, and you’re never gonna do it. So step one is do, and then as you’re doing learn, because doing is gonna give you the confidence to say, right, selling those first 500 units gave us the confidence to say, we can order 2000. So the learning comes next, and then as you learn, you’ll know where to go. It’s really two steps. It’s do. and then learn.

[00: 00: 31 – 00: 01: 03]

Welcome to the Share the Wealth Show, where minority professionals can learn to escape the racial wealth gap and catapult themselves into abundance. Your host, Nicole Pendergrass, grew her net worth from being negative to multiple six figures. Join her on her investigative mission to expose secret strategies of the wealthy so we can all have the tools needed to build the life and legacy we were created to possess. Now it’s time for the show.

[00: 01: 04 – 00: 02: 34]

Hey guys, so we’re back again. Go back to the previous episode and listen to that first and then come back and join us here today. Well, you need to hear the whole conversation. There’s so many nuggets, it’s so juicy. Go back and listen to the first. Coming into year two, it was like, what is our goal? Right, how do we scale? That’s my thing, right? Eventually I said, okay guys, we don’t have titles but we need some titles, right? We need people to take certain roles to command certain things. And I’m a self-appointed CEO, right? And I did, I was voted, I should say self-nominated. And then we took a vote and the team agreed. But you know, part of my job is taking that, we all set goals collectively, and then it’s for me to steer the ship, right? Tiff is gonna do this, Nikki’s gonna do this, Jules is gonna do this. And I’m looking at the whole picture. And one of the goals was scaling, right? How do we scale this business? And wholesale accounts was a major part. And one of the wholesale accounts that we have now that does amazing, and that’s gonna lead me to the question you asked about me speaking, was Amazon. But for a while, I was anti-Amazon. I wanted to keep all of my margins, right? I wanted, and I think it happened for a reason. I wanted to protect our brand, right? My wife, again, I said she had a branding consultant.

[00: 02: 35 – 00: 03: 53]

Tiff is very big on customer service, on our brand. She’s the one that’s telling us, no, God, we’re gonna issue a full refund. No, we’re gonna do this. We had some screw ups where we shipped the wrong thing. We had like two, 300 people that post office, not even us, the post office lost their games. And we emailed them like, look, do y’all want a full refund or do y’all want us to send you some new games? And people love that, right? That’s the integrity. Yo, I’m so happy. that you guys reached out, that’s so dope. Now, we support black business. When y’all get some inventory, just send it to us. So a part of that brand building, I wanted to maintain that. And Amazon doesn’t do that. Amazon goes send you in a brown Amazon bag, they’re building their brand and not ours. So eventually, speaking of which, I spoke to J. Bobo from Black Heart Revoke. Again, not being afraid to reach out to somebody like, yo, I want to be like you when I grow up. You mind talking to me? I straight up just DMed him and he was very receptive to speaking to me. And I picked his brain. He was like, oh, nah, you gotta be on. There’s no reason why you’re not on Amazon. And I reached out to a couple of other people I knew that were on Amazon and they gave me their experience. So I came back to the team and I was like, yo, let’s do it.

[00: 03: 54 – 00: 05: 36]

And We got on Amazon and excuse me, that’s a transparency. That’s the birth control alarm. My wife asked me to turn it off because two kids is enough, right? That’s the- Two kids is enough. She’s like, but you have to help me. Like you have to do your part. So I said a reminder to remind her. Amazon, we launched on Amazon in June of 2022. And then we closed the year as one of their top new sellers. So yes, they invited us to their headquarters in Seattle to speak on a panel as a new seller success story. Nice, I love that. So to date, how many units have lyrically correct sold? You know, from the time you started? My wife would better. She would know the numbers better than I do. But we have a huge wholesale business now. I can tell you, man, I can’t, right? Our business is split. We have wholesale partners. We also have companies. If we partner with companies, Lincoln Motor Company, TikTok, Twitter, Vivo, right? The company where you go to- So you partner with them, how does that work? They purchase decks from us. A wholesale for their employees or for promotional reasons. Oh, nice. So what do you call them? BRGs, ERG, employee resource groups.

[00: 05: 37 – 00: 06: 27]

So I know your followers are vast and diverse. So if you’re the HR person or if you’re a corporate exec and you want to do something for your Black employees or for your young millennial employees, we’ve had companies, Lincoln Motor Company, out in Detroit, they purchased a few hundred decks just for their, for their black employee resource group, uh, Twitter, when Twitter reached out to us, the old Twitter, not Elon Musk Twitter, you know, Twitter, Twitter. They reached out to us, black birds reach out to us and they were the first, one of my home girls, she was there and that’s about, that’s that network again. So was that a reach out, they reached out to you guys or did you guys find someone to show your product to there. Both. Okay.

[00: 06: 28 – 00: 08: 03]

So Twitter was my home girl being, and I love her for life because it’s a lot to gamble with your friends, right? We were a new company. She didn’t know what our inventory was like, but she knew my name and my reputation, right? And she said, she was in a meeting and said, Oh, I know a black owned business we can support. And she spent Twitter money and said, okay, Dee, send me an invoice. and we gonna pay it. And they did do some debt. Then Lincoln, and this is why I love black people. And I wanna fight that narrative that black people don’t support black people. One of the people, black people at Lincoln played the game. Who knows how she saw it? And she was like, this’ll be dope, right? Went back, talked to the people. They wound up purchasing like 500, 600 decks. Twitter. Twitter, and that’s what a TikTok, TikTok bought like 600 decks and 600 t-shirts or something. Wow. So this is all just for their employees. For their employees. And then, you know, us recognizing that, right? And that’s one of our future initiatives. And if there’s other people going, I believe there’s enough money for everybody to make. I believe it, you know, I’m from Harlem, right? We got good dope, right? Good dope go sell itself. All right, so it’s enough for everyone. Right? So we began reaching out to these employee resource groups. Right? Hey, listen, this is a great time to do something for your Black employees.

[00: 08: 04 – 00: 09: 32]

At my law firm, they sent us bottles of Uncle Neris for Christmas. We have a Black affinity group. And they sent each of us lawyers a bottle of Uncle Neris. immediately I sent the president of the affinity group an email, yo, you know, I have a black owned business too. So next year, if you want to say black owned business, right. And so I came back to the team like, yo, let’s put together a list. So we had our assistant do the research and we start hitting up people. And then other people just hit us up, right. We get so many I want to do that. Can we do it? And you know, the business grows that way. So wholesale accounts, right? I’m learning and watching blogs like this and podcasts like this. I wanted to increase our revenue per customer. How do we increase our cart course? So when you come to the website, you’re not just buying a game while you’re shopping instead of just paying 25 for the, let me get you. So we, we drop merch, right? We, we, we sell t-shirts now. Then how do we get you to buy two, three decks? We created bundles so you can buy two decks at one time. And that’s so we can increase our revenue per customer, our cost per, our average cart and things like that. These are all these acronyms.

[00: 09: 33 – 00: 09: 56]

And so, and this is all you’re learning from just like doing self-research on marketing and sales and how to like grow and expand. We’re friends on Facebook. You see me all the time. Hey, I’m looking for my first, one of my first posts was, I’m looking for an e-commerce mentor. All right, at this point, I’m a lawyer, I’m a retired banker, I’m a father, I’m 35 years old, multiple degrees, but I’m humble enough to say, look, I’m doing something, I don’t know how to do it. Anybody know how to do it, please help me.

[00: 09: 57 – 00: 11: 12]

Listen, I know you’ve been digging in studying everything you can listening to all the podcasts, reading all the books, even going to meetups. You basically have a degree from YouTube University, right? But you still feel stuck. You don’t know how to actually implement what you’ve learned. You’re nervous about taking the next step. So I’ve decided to start the Micro Family Investing Accelerator. This is a mentorship program where I personally guide you through my five proprietary pillars so you can learn how to buy your first commercial multifamily property and scale while not biting off more than you can chew by focusing on five to 20 units. That’s what I call micro family. And so you can also get hands on guidance from an experienced micro family investor who’s been right where you are. And so you can also create the cash flow needed. to give you freedom and options to build the abundant life that you were destined to live. So I’ll be limiting the first cohort because they’ll have direct access to me and I will be heavily invested in their success. If you’re ready to grab 2023 by the horns, schedule a free discovery call with me today. The link is in the show notes. And now let’s get back to the show.

[00: 11: 13 – 00: 12: 16]

Yes, and that’s what it is. There’s no shame in like, mentorship is huge in- you know, real estate and business growth and everything that in the communities that I’m part of, like everyone has a mentor. And if you don’t have a mentor, then it’s kind of like, well, are you really trying to grow? What you trying to do? Cause you know, you need somebody to guide you. Yeah, you can figure out on your own. But like I said, how long is that going to take you? Like how fast are you going to get there? What mistakes are you going to make that you could circumvent if you go with somebody who has knowledge and experience in the area that you’re trying to, you know, get knowledge and experience in? Like, and so it goes to the same thing how you said, if you have the idea, you don’t actually need the expertise, you can partner with the expertise. And so people who have, if they wanna be the fashion designer, yeah, work on your fashion, work on the fashion, but also expand and think about your network and who in your network has the business side of it and maybe partner with them. Imagine if my cousin would have never said, wow, who can help us make this a business? Exactly. And he never did that, right? Exactly.

[00: 12: 17 – 00: 13: 31]

They could have just took that idea and just like, Oh, that’d be a good idea. And just never did anything with it. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Okay. This might be three episodes. But anyway, okay. So now I want to wrap this right now. Like, I’ve still got to ask you the final questions that I ask every guest, but just as a takeaway for the listeners because you guys have a fantastic story. We know that you and your wife, you took your background and experiences from your W-2s and the things that you had already been doing and your entrepreneurial spirit and kind of combine that and join forces with your cousins and ideas and created this and now digging in deeper to really make it grow and reaching out into your network and all those things, but. What are maybe a few steps that someone should take if they’re looking to take an idea, even if it’s not like this, but some type of idea, like what do they need to do first to kind of get the steps to make it a reality?

[00: 13: 32 – 00: 14: 31]

Yeah, yeah. I think everybody, different generations had different things, right? You had, yeah, we sit here, especially in real estate, right? I’m from Harlem. Right. My mom and dad, like that era, they were lotterying off ground stones for a dollar. Right. Like nobody wanted these buildings, right. These multimillion dollar ground stones now. Right. So I sit back like, damn, they had the opportunity of real estate. New York real estate in our era, right. You get in an apartment, right, for a million dollars. Right. Yeah. So we missed that. Right. Then we’re a little bit young for the dot com. Boom, right? We had that then, I think this e-commerce era, social media is our, give me one second, I’m sorry. I keep snoozing instead of stopping. That the social media e-commerce direct to consumer era, it’s anything you want, if you have a product or even a service, whatever you wanna do, just start doing it. That’s step one is do it.

[00: 14: 32 – 00: 15: 41]

There’s nothing, if I wanted to do t-shirts, if I wanted to… If I wanted to have a tutoring service, I’m just gonna start tutoring you. Just put something out on your social media, tell people you do it, walk up to somebody say, hey, I’ll tutor your son for free, but in exchange, I just wanna maybe record a couple videos and be able to use your name. That’s it. And that’s step one. Step one is do it. And then step two is to learn how to grow, right? People try to learn before they do because that’s what we’re taught, right? We’re taught. to learn before you do. School teaches you, you read the instructions, you do this and do that, right? But business, you just do. Because you will come up, the learning process is scary, right? And the more you learn, the more scared you’re gonna get, the more afraid you’re gonna be, and you’re never gonna do. So step one is do, and then as you’re doing, learn. Because doing is gonna give you the confidence to say, Right.

[00: 15: 42 – 00: 16: 33]

Selling those first 500 units gave us the confidence to say we can order 2000. Selling 2000 gave us the confidence to say we can order 10,000. Selling 10,000 said, yeah, we can order 25,000. And now we ordered 20, 30, 40,000 units like clockwork. Right. Because we just did. And we learned e-commerce as we go. My cousin is sitting there. He’s learning about reaching out to influence and influence of marketing. My wife is learning about shipping and receiving. My wife is learning about building a Shopify website. I’m learning about the marketing. I’m learning about how to scale businesses. I’m learning about e-commerce. So the learning comes next. And then as you learn, you’ll know where to go. It’s really two steps. It’s do and then learn.

[00: 16: 34 – 00: 17: 42]

I love that order too, because… Like you said, the more you learn, the scarier it gets because you get more information and you realize how much you think you don’t know yet because you really don’t know. But doing all the learning gives you analysis paralysis and people are education junkies and they will be, they’ll listen to all the books, all the podcasts, they’ll go to YouTube University, do all the stuff to like learn and don’t do anything with that knowledge. And I had another guest who’s an old high school friend. She said, the doing education is much, you learn much more from the doing education than you do from book education. Which is exactly what you’re saying. That’s why you doing something first, and even if you’re creating your own way, maybe it’s not optimized, it’s not the best way to do it. And as you start learning that, you’re like, oh, that makes sense why I’m supposed to do this wide first. Cause you have the experience to lean and couple with the knowledge that you’re getting. So I love the do then learn. It’s basically like that whole thing of, jump out the window and build a plane on the way down. That’s exactly what we were doing, right? We were building a plane as we were flying it. Yes, oh, I like that. Instead of while you’re on your way down, while you’re flying it, I like that. It’s the coast. While you’re blowing it, okay.

[00: 17: 43 – 00: 18: 40]

Oh my God, this is just so crazy. I can’t wait to see what you guys end up. This is gonna be insane. It’s already insane. Like, it’s the biggest kind of like. Cause I’ve seen the process and I’ve seen like, and I just know you guys personally. So me seeing you growing this company from in just a few short years is really, really inspirational. And I had hats off to you guys cause y’all are doing it. And thank you also for sharing this whole story with, you know, the listeners, because I just know someone’s gonna take this and like just run, just do it. Dante said it, do it. Just start doing it. All right, final questions that I ask every guest. First one, Warren Buffett said diversification is a protection against ignorance. What do you think that means? Is that good or is it bad? What do you mean by that?

[00: 18: 41 – 00: 20: 24]  

So I’m a finance major, right? So I kind of studied the oracle a little bit, right? But I think it’s amazing. And it applies to more than just stocks, right? So I get what he means. but I don’t have to know which company is the best if I’m invested in a bunch of them, right? I think that’s the protection that you get through diversification and then there’s industry risks. No need to go on a finance lesson, but that’s what he meant. But I think that it applies to everything and we all do it already, right? It’s like, right? I think you go to Thanksgiving When you’re dating, right? You date a few different people, right? You’re not exclusive yet, right? Because you don’t know, you’re ignorant as to who’s the best. So you’re just dating. And then once, right, the best person shows themselves, okay, you know, now I have the winner, right? It’s the same thing with, we do it when we pick our food, you go to a buffet. I’m gonna take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, right? I don’t have to know what’s the best if I can just get a little bit. And we did it all the time with classes. You do it in classes. And people do this without recognizing. Your freshman year, right? Some people are blessed to not be ignorant and they know what they wanna do with their life from the beginning. I’m pretty mad I’m going in and I’m doing this. And most of us, we take a little bit of class here, class there, class there, right? We diversify because we’re ignorant and then something hits, hopefully.

[00: 20: 25 – 00: 22: 09]

But see, and that’s the thing that I like, because the way you’re explaining it is like, you diversify first to kind of see what you like, and then you can dive deep and go back for more of that thing. Especially like the buffets. Like you take a little bit of everything and like, oh, this is mad good. I’m going to go get more of that. And then you just dive deep. It’s like who made the potato salad, right? Like we don’t know. Yeah. So you take a little bit of diversification. Okay. All right. In the game of Monopoly, you played Monopoly before. My favorite game. Okay, perfect. Next to your favorite old school game. This is a board game. It’s a board game. It’s my favorite board game. Yes, board game. Yes. Baltic or boardwalk, which one is your first choice to purchase to win the game in your strategy and why? So I’m a boardwalk guy, right? I think, you know, going back to that Harlem real estate, right, that’s prime real estate, right? But there’s value in Baltic as well. If I get Baltic, I’m trying to get Baltic as well, right? And it’s a volume game. Baltic is a volume game, right? And, you know, the boardwalk, that’s my moneymaker, right? That’s my… rent earner, right? That’s the, for your real estate people, from my knowledge, that’s the one that’s going to appreciate more in value, right? I can get more if I mortgage it, right? I have more equity there than Baltic, right? But Baltic, that rent, that’s Section 8 income. That’s just going to keep coming. They’re going to land on it. Nice. Okay. Like that.

[00: 22: 10 – 00: 23: 57]

Another question, what does wealth mean to you? Wealth means freedom. I think I grew up really, really poor and we’re captive to poverty a lot of time. It limits your ability to do certain things. You know, poverty in most circumstances, it places you and it, you know, it’s, it induces trauma, it’s traumatic itself. You can’t see what’s next because you’re just worried about, you can’t see the future because you’re just worried about what’s next. Um, you don’t have the freedom to try things, right? I sometimes poverty doesn’t allow you to diversify. So you’re stuck in ignorance. You would just bring everything together. I like that though. That was, that was really, that was the hot, that was a tweetable. Yeah. So, so, so wealth means freedom. It means I can do what I want. It means that my children’s children can go and be painters if they want. I don’t think that I had the freedom to go be a painter. Because I had to, if money didn’t exist, I would be a seventh grade math teacher. And that’s no disrespect to teachers. But this country just don’t pay teachers well enough. Yeah. No, they don’t. No, you’re right. If money didn’t exist, what I’d be? Be like an interior decorator. I love it. Yeah. You know, something artsy. Yeah. Anyway, that’s why it didn’t end up doing that. Cause it didn’t pay. Yeah. After all college.

[00: 23: 58 – 00: 25: 33]

Now what was, oh, last thing. I started something a few episodes ago where I asked the previous guests to come up with a question for the next guest. So the previous guest’s question for you is what is your biggest motivation? That’s so funny. That’s my question. As soon as you said that. I said, my question is, what is your why? That’s I ask people all the time. What is your why? My why is all my life, my why has always been wealth. I want to be wealthy. Like some people don’t want money. I want to be the 1% of 1%. I want Jeff Bezos to get mad at me because it’s my spaceship that’s taken off right now. So he has to wait. Right, that’s what I would, that’s always been my why. right, but you get married and you have children and your wife changes. All right. My motivation changes. My motivation now is to be the best husband and the best father I can be. And to me, a part of that means giving my children freedom. So my wife in there, right? My wealth is still, the way I’m going to be honest, the way I’m putting this all together, it’s, it’s fire. I was already thinking that. I was like, yo. It is fire. Your why is wealth, but the real behind it, the wealth is for the freedom. So your why is really freedom.

[00: 25: 34 – 00: 26: 50]

It’s freedom. And now it’s for the freedom for my family. It’s not even about me anymore. It’s for Dante Jones V. Right? That’s who it’s for. OK. Love that. Now you have to come up with a different question. You got to come up with a different question for the next guest. OK. So if money didn’t exist, what would you be doing? I like that. Okay. And now is just, how can listeners connect with you? And I know Tiffany is doing some consulting stuff as well, like to help people with this process, from idea to creation. So everyone, if this is very overwhelming for you, if you don’t know how to put the pieces together and you have an idea, reach out to Dante and Tiffany and- It’s like getting a mentor, but they put time and energy and experience, years of experience that you’re getting bottled into a short, accelerated timeframe to get to where you wanna go. So if you gotta invest in yourself to work with them, to have them help you through their success and all the stuff that they’ve been doing, then that’s just what you gotta do. Do you believe in your idea? Do you believe in yourself or not, right? So let’s get this. Perfect. Yeah. So freedom.

[00: 26: 51 – 00: 27: 50]

Yeah. Nicole. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I’m glad that I was able to do this anytime you guys want us to come back on. So let me know. Maybe Tiff and I could do it together the next time. She’s real. She’s the real brains behind the operation. I’m just a pretty face. So, but not so reach out to check us out at lyricallycorrect.com. I’m quite sure Nicole’s gonna put it in the notes, put it on the graphics, but lyricallycorrect.com follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok is Lyrically Correct game. Hit us up. Feel free to email us. I’m D Jones at lyrically correct. My wife is T Jones at lyricallycorrect.com. Hit us up. You know, if we don’t mind saying, we’re gonna charge you for that. But most of the time it’s free, right? But we know our worth, we know our value. So if it’s gonna cost you, it’s gonna cost you. But if it’s free, it’s free. There is a such thing as free games. And we don’t mind sharing it if we can, but you know, we do have miles to feed.

[00: 27: 51 – 00: 28: 55]

Yeah. And you gave a ton of free game just now, like the past hour and a half we’ve been talking for just, you just drop it free game this whole time. And so, and it don’t cost nothing to find out what their program costs are for them to mentor you. Like, so you can at least ask the question. Don’t be scared of that. Cause that’s going to hinder your next step. Right. People don’t want to reach out and ask how much something is. because they don’t want to look dumb or stupid if they say, oh, no, I can’t do that. It’s not about that. My favorite thing is to look dumb. But I’m confident enough to look dumb. I don’t know. I’ll stop a meeting in a second. We have these calls with distributors or with marketing people, stuff like that. I’ll pause the meeting. I’m sorry. I’m dumb. I don’t know this. It works. But I think that comes with confidence, right? And I had to build up to that, right? I wasn’t always quick to raise my hand and say I’m dumb. But I know, I built the confidence to that.  

[00: 28: 56 – 00: 30: 01]

And I’m smart in some way. And intelligence comes in many forms, right? You ask me to spell some or do some science, well, I can’t help you to save my life. But I’m good with numbers and dates and things like that. Nice, nice. Yeah. At least you got to know your strengths, doing the SWOT analysis on yourself. Figure it out. Nicole, I appreciate you having me for real. Yeah. No, thank you for coming on. I’m glad we were able to coordinate and get this done. This is a fire episode. This is honestly, this is the longest episode I’ve ever done, but it went by so smoothly. Like the conversation was just like seamless. There was so much information. I really just couldn’t even, this might be a three-parter or I might just, I’ll just figure out what I’m going to do. Let me know. Anyway, anyway, I’ll send you all the links. I’ll put all those links in the show notes and thank you again, everyone. If this was helpful for you, don’t forget, please like and share this, leave a comment rating review. We need to get this kind of information out to more of our people. So that helps when you like or comment, especially in, um, Apple podcasts. And then we get pushed so more people can hear the message that was shared today. All right. See you all next time.

[00: 30: 02 – 00: 30: 30]

Did you love this episode of Share the Wealth Show? Be sure to connect with Nicole by following her on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. If you picked up any of the gems that were dropped by today’s guests, make sure you not only put them in your bag, but if you know of someone who would benefit from this information, don’t keep it to yourself. Share the wealth, and make sure to leave us a rating and review. We’ll see you for next week’s episode. Subscribe so you’ll be notified.