Speaker 1: 00:00 Hey Pawn family, it’s you gall and welcome back to another episode of the pond leaders podcast. On this episode I have my good friend mastermind member and epic palm broker Stan Liquids. On the episode he’s going to talk to you guys about what he does to create such an incredible environment and he’s really built such an incredible culture. I admire him. Um, I’m honored to work with him in the mastermind and get ready for an incredible interview. But first I want to talk about something that happened yesterday. Yesterday was our first master class call. I opened the masterclass to 25 people and some incredible people really showed up and we had our first call yesterday and it was so much fun. It was just a great time. I’m honored to serve them and I’m looking forward to another 30 days of helping these palm brokers make more stress, less, and obviously have an epic life.

Speaker 1: 00:54 We go over a marketing, we go over leadership, we go over strategy and I know that you’re going to crush it in 2019 one of the things that we go over his reviews, and as you all know, podium is a sponsor of the podcast and they just, they never cease to amaze me really. There’s service, um, and their support is so incredible and they get people results. And whenever you want, whenever you invest in a software, whenever you invest in something, you want to make sure that you’re getting results and really hands down, podium is doing that work. So what does podium do? Podium helps you connect with your client who’s walking out to get another review and to get a more social proof that you are the best pawn shop in town. My dentist uses it, my chiropractor uses it. Uh, you know, podium is not just in the pawn industry.

Speaker 1: 01:47 They’re in so many industries and it’s incredible. So if you’re not using podium yet, make the investment become smart and get it done. Go to podium.com/palm liters and sign up today and you get 10% off of your, your monthly subscription rate. Really, these guys are incredible. Speak with Tom and um, just make it happen. Make the social proof possible so that more people walk into your store. Now back to my interview with Stan. Luke awaits. This is so incredible. He’s done such an incredible job with loyalty. Pon so here is my episode with stand firm loyalty bond.

Speaker 2: 02:28 Hey everyone, my name is EAGALA Datto and this is the pollinators podcast, a podcast to help you make more money, stress less, and live an epic life all while working at the pawn shop.

Speaker 1: 02:48 Stan, welcome to the show, brother. Thank you. Pleasure being on now, man. It’s a, I’ve, I’ve wanted to have you on for awhile. Obviously you’re, you’re in the mastermind group and you’re, uh, incredible palm broker who I known for how many years now? Like 15 plus years. We’ve known each other over 15. Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve known each other for 15 plus years. And I know that you do such incredible things in the pawn industry, not just supporting your local association, but in your business that I had to bring you on and have you share it with the rest of the pawn family. So thank you.

Speaker 3: 03:17 Great. Awesome. So what, so we’ll see if I can help out a little bit.

Speaker 1: 03:23 There you go. I’m sure you will shoot. Well, so can I talk about your history? How did you get into the pond business? Um, when did that all start?

Speaker 3: 03:29 So I graduated high school in 1992 my father comes to me, he says, what

do you want to do, son? Uh, open up a business, go to college. What, what is it? And my father and I were really close my whole childhood and my dream was always to do business with him. I said, Jesus, Dad, I want to open up a business with you. He’s into real estate. So I was thinking, shoot, I’m gonna be in a real estate guy. Like my dad’s going to be awesome. But a week later he comes back, he’s like, all right, I bought a buy sell jewelry store. We’re going to turn it into a pawn shop. I said, I’ve never been to a pawn shop before, but I know my dad was in that when he was in his late teens, early twenties in that business. Um, so I said, all right, great, let’s do it. So about a month later I was working in the, in the sell jewelry store and we immediately turned it into a pawn shop. Nice. And that’s how it works. I would say 1992.

Speaker 1: 04:25 Nice. So obviously you, you guys made mistakes. You guys were learning, your father knew the business and then kind of what did, what did it, what did it turn into? How many stores?

Speaker 3: 04:34 So in 1993, we started with one store, made a ton of mistakes, uh, which is really the best way to learn, in my opinion. That’s the type of pain. It’s financial pain. And uh, so we grew to nine locations over the next 25 years. And, uh, again made a lot of mistakes, opening up stores, being too fast, opening up stores, not having proper staffing for that. And uh, it ended up being doing very, very well for us. And we’re very fortunate with some of the team members we did get and we all put in a lot of hours and a lot of time and a lot of hard work.

Speaker 1: 05:12 Nice. So tell people so that you know where you’re from and what the interest rate is.

Speaker 3: 05:16 So I’m from Sacramento, California and like I said, we have nine locations in the Greater Sacramento area, maybe 20 mile a radius. So all pretty close. There was approximately 20 a pawn shops in the greater area and being in California, um, we’ve pretty low interest rate state where about 3% plus fees. Our company averages about five and a half percent a month, a return on our overall loan balance.

Speaker 1: 05:48 And I said, I’m, I’m sure there’s some people in their 25% states and 20% states are like, are you sure

Speaker 3: 05:53 you can all you, you’ve got to have volume. I wish I had volume and high interest.

Speaker 1: 05:58 All right. So be careful if you guys see your stand going into your state, be aware cause he’s a, he’s a kickass call bro. Go Man.

Speaker 3: 06:05 If there’s nothing more than I would love is to get out of this damn state.

Speaker 1: 06:09 I’m sure. I’m sure. So you guys did really well for yourselves and then obviously, um, uh, you kind of, uh, decided to go your own path

Speaker 3: 06:19 opened that years ago we started on a kind of figuring out what we wanted to do as a company. I wanted to be a little more progressive. Um, and my father is just a workaholic and he will not stop working and God bless him for that. But I want to retire one day, but my father will work at his desk mean he has multiple businesses, hotels, restaurants, real estate, pawn shops. Um, and I need to, uh, focus on what I could do for, for my retirement and for my kids and for my estate planning. Um, and we, my father, I just had a little different opinions. So a couple of years ago or just over a year ago, we split, but we worked on a transition for about a year and a half, about a year, uh, with, you know, family business consultants, different attorneys and things like that. And we ended up, uh, splitting our company, which was Capitol City jewelry and loan. Um, I took five of the locations, five of the nine and they kept, um, four meaning they meaning my, my brother and my father. So now we are local competitors and uh, I think competition’s a good thing, but I took five locations and rebranded them under loyalty pawn, um, which has its challenges as well. That’s a whole nother podcast

Speaker 1: 07:44 and I’m sure, I mean what will step into that? Obviously, you know, coming into an area with a new name, with a new brand, but you kind of like ran with it. You obviously have been to your locations. Um, we meet every single week. You are doing incredible things with culture. Um, what did you kind of see, you know, the mistakes that you guys were making before that you brought into loyalty upon? You said, I need to like smooth this out so that I can retire. So we really needed to um, create a new

Speaker 3: 08:14 visions, values, goals, uh, some people call them missions statements. We like the vision, values, goals. I got my leadership team together and said, hey, what are we going to live by? How are we going to operate our individual stores, our company, our lives, our families, everything. Um, under a short vision, values, goals. So we came with my leadership team together, came up with what, what we have for our mission, value goals. And so our goal is we’re going to read them. Yeah, go ahead. Or goals. Do you offer immediate relief for the short term loan to develop, recruit and it’s five, an elite workforce driven by loyal business practices to provide the highest standard of quality, commitment and value to every customer in our loyalty pond family. Our vision would be loyal people committed to everyday satisfaction. And our values is loyalty, dedication and creativity.

Speaker 3: 09:16 We like to say we are the leader at local lending. So those are, those is really the heartbeat of, of loyalty pond. And we, it’s a nonnegotiable for us too, to live under those goals. I mean, we want to have the best workforce. We want to have prosperous, persuade strategies. We want to have the best clients in the industry and treat them as best as we possibly can. Um, and it starts with every team member that we have. Love it. That’s obviously like a, once you instilled those vision values, goals, as you said, everyone starts running, you know, together on the same path as opposed to the ponder group coming in and not knowing what’s going on and just wanting more ponds. As for years we had visions, values, goals, and we were just, hey, we really liked them. We thought they were really good, but it wasn’t, we were so busy just no pulling our hair out in 27 directions that we couldn’t truly focus on them.

Speaker 3: 10:17 When I started with loyalty pawn, it was, it was the only thing we had to do it don’t write alone, don’t show anything, don’t live by these visions, values, goals. To me that was the most important thing. You know, build it and they will come. I say, build your vision, values, goals, and they will come. So what did you see from your staff? Obviously I know your staff and they have this incredible ownership mentality. They want everything to succeed for the business and for you. Like they love you and what you’ve given them. So what have you seen once you built the vision, values, goals, or your mission statement? What happened to the, to the team and moving forward? So they were, you know, there there’s been some changes there in our transition with our team. Um, and they really bought into it and they see and they saw that I was there, I was there holding myself accountable.

Speaker 3: 11:12 That’s, that’s a whole nother issue as well. Accountability. If you’re not holding yourself accountable, who’s to, who’s going to hold your team members accountable? Who’s gonna hold your clients accountable? And so I had to, and I was very fortunate with, with my, uh, family company, you know, we were very successful and you know, to be quite honestly, I was lazy. Um, and I needed to turn that around if I was going to go out on my own because I didn’t have my father’s financing. Um, and you know, so there was going to be struggles. So I had to sit there and say, Luke, what are we doing here? And we started with that and I was very fortunate with my team and I also explained to my team that, hey, we are here to train. Like, just as you know, our goals, we want to develop recruitment, inspire an elite workforce.

Speaker 3: 12:05 I send all my management and assistant managers did GIA training. At the moment. I bring in consultants, I have a, you know, I’m a member of the mastermind. I have, you know, my managers are on your alliance and um, you know, I bring in consultants all the time as much as possible. And we’ve worked a lot with Whitehead. We work a lot with, uh, you know, smart financial and the ICG group. We work, you know, weekly with you. Uh, I’ve part of focus groups. So it’s about training and training and training and then implementation. And that’s where the accountability comes in.

Speaker 1: 12:41 You mentioned the word Lazy. Let’s, let’s talk about that real quick. Um, you said that you were lazy. Does that mean that kind of, you guys became successful? Money was walking through the door, so you stopped learning, you stopped training, you stopped implementing. Is that, what was that, what happened?

Speaker 3: 12:56 It became difficult to properly lead, uh, the company, uh, because we just had different directions. Got It. Yeah. I stopped holding myself accountable and, um, you know, I also went through a terrible divorce, which I don’t necessarily want to get into either, but, uh, that’s, it’s really deflated me. And, uh, I got reinvigorated and I’ve, you know, tried to really make things work with, uh, my, my father and unfortunately it didn’t for that. But, uh, we are rebuilding relationships and you know, we will always be family so that, that I, I can do and yes, to your question, I just got, I got deflated. I wasn’t, I wasn’t into it. I didn’t care. My checks were coming in. Um, I got, I did that as little as possible, um, and I didn’t follow a vision.

Speaker 1: 14:02 Gotcha. So once you gave yourself that vision, you were able to ramp up your leadership. You got tons of training, which I love and I think that people should, you know, you gotta pay to learn, right? If you don’t know it, you got to get somebody on board to get you where you want to get to so you can grow. So I love, and I love the fact that you also take risks. You’re, you’re big on taking risks with marketing. You’re big on taking risks with bringing people on your, you don’t see it as risk. You see it as investment.

Speaker 3: 14:32 Yeah, no, definitely. Because the, that’s something I’ve definitely learned from my father. My father was willing to jump in, you know, headfirst in any deal. Hey, we’ll figure it out at the end. And I believe when you do take risks, whether it be with a team leader or a particular consulting group or a new software system or whatever the case may be, you need to be able to

Speaker 2: 15:01 [inaudible]

Speaker 3: 15:02 to see at the end of the tunnel what the rewards are going to be and not be afraid of the hard work to get there. Um, there’s, it’s easy. It’s not we’re doing and there are there, sorry, when you take who you have to take these risks.

Speaker 2: 15:21 Okay.

Speaker 3: 15:22 You know, I mean, I, last year when I didn’t have the financing that I had, you know what, I had to go out and do whatever I can to find it, you know, because I wasn’t going to stop lending out and I needed to pay my team. Um, their wages in my paychecks come last because that’s the owner’s problem. Um, but I also had my home bills and, and all of that. So you have to take the risks because you will see the reward. If, again, if you hold yourself accountable, if you’re living to your vision, values, goals, and uh, uh, just,

Speaker 2: 15:54 okay.

Speaker 3: 15:55 The rewards will follow.

Speaker 1: 15:56 Love that man. Um, let’s start, let’s talk about this real quick. You’ve been around a lot of pawn shops. Uh, you’ve, you’re on the board of directors for Kappa California pump workers association. You’ve been in the focus groups where you go and you visit other pawn shops. What are some of the mistakes that you see pawnbrokers are making today that if they were to change, uh, by making a small investment or just a small shift in the mindset that you feel that a, the pawn industry would do better? Because I know that’s one of your missions, right? One of your missions is to make the pollen industry, uh, come out in a better light. Um, and so yeah. What, what are some of those mistakes that you think that, or making that a small tweak would be able to help them out?

Speaker 3: 16:37 Say Hello, say hello to your customers clean, have her, have a clean store front, um, you know, a coat of paint, you know, and, and maybe wash the windows and you know, people and I go onto a lot of them and you know, my stores aren’t always this, uh, spotless clean and everything, but we try to stay on top of it, uh, as best we can. One of the things I see that, that my teams do in many shops is they’ll clean the product, but it’s sitting on a dusty show, dusk, the show, you’ll get the, get the, you know, little balls of dirt and dust in the corners of your, of your showroom floor. I think just really providing the best customer service in a clean environment, uh, goes a long, long way. Awesome. We control ingress and egress and we have bulletproof glass.

Speaker 3: 17:34 But I feel, and I’ve heard a lot of people say that that’s not very inviting. It’s not very friendly. We are in California, the banks have them, the gas stations have them, the, you know, so it’s I think a little bit more acceptable here in, in our area. But um, who our stores are playing, we win. When you hit the bell to come into our store, we have a speaker

that says, welcome to loyalty, Poland, please come in. It’s not a buzz or anything like that. So there, and we courage our team too to greet the customer immediately when they, when they’re entering and when they’re leaving.

Speaker 1: 18:13 What’s been the hardest thing for you in building up this loyalty? Pawn brand. Ah,

Speaker 3: 18:22 financing and finding staff. So we’ve got to find the right team members. Many, many times we have just hired somebody that breathes because we needed a body in that store. We, I can’t run a store with less than three people, less than five people. Just get somebody in there. Um, I was very fortunate enough to have my general manager just come on and say, Luke, we cannot do that anymore. Yeah, we have to. Even if we need somebody, let’s just take, take them another week or take two weeks and hire the right fit. Don’t hire just somebody because they’re breathing and we need them. So, and then financing, we’re very fortunate. I have no great relationships with local community banks. Um, but it was a struggle because they want a lot of data and I didn’t have the years and years and years of data. I mean I have a big loan book and I have a big inventory balance. So I have, you know, great few months of sales. But in order to get the line of credit that I needed, you know, I, I needed to show some, some history and I didn’t necessarily have that.

Speaker 1: 19:31 But I think one of the best things that you do, Luke, is that you are such a great networker. A lot of palm brokers just sit in their store, they opened their clothes, they go home and that’s done. And you network with the local police department, you network with the banks, people know who you guys are. And so I believe that upon brokers, success also is in their network. And you know, you even talk about the symptoms and the calls where you’ve written $100,000 loans because you’re out at the Chamber of Commerce. So tell us a little about that. Like how important is networking to have to grow your business?

Speaker 3: 20:03 Oh, it’s, it’s been phenomenal for me. I mean, it really has. I have, uh, I mean, like you all said, we do, we do large loans. Um, many, we all do small loans too, but, but I want to go out after the entire market, just not a small niche in the market. Uh, all of our managers are encouraged to be members of our chamber of commerce or their rotary loves Kowanas whatever local, um, organizations are out there, they’re all encouraged to, you know, stick around for the drinks after the meeting and community and communicate with other business leaders in town. Um, I am heavily involved with our local, um, law enforcement associates. Hey [inaudible]. Okay. It has created me great relationships. I sit on the board of both our sheriffs and our pds, a local kind of fallen officers and foundations. Um, and a beat cop comes in and wants to say, you know, when they really don’t understand our industry, I’ll go down and talk to them. Hey, I sit on the, uh, you know, the 1849 foundation or the star six foundation. Oh, really? You do? They immediately don’t think I’m that palm worker that’s trying to take advantage of them. So I highly suggested the one of the easiest ways they all have golf tournaments or anything, write a check to their golf tournament, play in their forces, get to meet them.

Speaker 1: 21:28 Yeah. It’s, it’s getting out into the community in order to have the community come into the store. I think that’s one of the best things. When I was at Cashco, I was a president of the business association, so I had 750 businesses, um, under me. I knew the police liaison, I knew the government officials, all those people a brought business in. But too, I remember when when stuff needed to be pushed through, right. Licensing or whatever, we just easier to pick up the phone and call somebody as opposed to go down to the local office and try to like knock on doors all day long. And you, you changed it into a different thing, which was I’m getting loans from this, I’m getting the big loans because I’m networking,

Speaker 3: 22:10 right? Yeah. I wanted to reach out to small business. I mean we, so we’re in Sacramento, which, you know, the government hub, capital California, they, um, you know, the government pays slow, so, and there’s a lot of government contracts out there via, you know, contractors or car services or what have you. And if the government’s taken 30, 60, 90 days to pay you, they still need payroll. So I encourage them to come in and, you know, get a small loan. I will loan it for cheap because the bank doesn’t pay anything for their money. Um, if it’s sitting in my bank account, I mean, I’ll do loans for two and a half, three, 4%, um, just, just to get them in my door. If I could get them at my door to do a five, 10 $50,000 loan, guess what? They’re coming around Christmas time.

Speaker 1: 23:01 Yup. Awesome. Now I want to get into some of that. I think, um, a lot of palm workers don’t do that. You do so incredibly well. You are a KPI monster like and KPIs, key performance indicators. Basically knowing your metrics, looking at your numbers and I, one of the calls last week, I think you said that at the end of the month you get like every single number that you need to see. You don’t let the manager go anywhere until you get those numbers and you’ve gone over them. How important has that been to growing your business? Seeing all the numbers from lonial’s inventory turn, I mean you have a list of tons

of them, but how important has that been to growing your business? So that’s a, I mean

Speaker 3: 23:40 is also something I have to, you know, hundred percent credit. My father for he is just a numbers genius and has been, and I’d sit in the office when I was younger, not really knowing what the hell he’s looking at, but he’s looking at all these numbers. And then as I became a little bit smarter and a little bit smarter, I started understanding the numbers more every single night. Um, we have locations that closed at six o’clock and some locations are closed at eight o’clock. I get the reports emailed to me, actually just put on our one drive, um, that I could look at by eight 30. I know how much money every store has. I know how much, how much we grew in lounge, shrunk and loud interest collected. Our layaway balance group or by balance grew. Uh, you know, and you look at those to ac presenting anomalies to see if your team is doing everything right.

Speaker 3: 24:32 And then, you know, B, you also, I feel it’s very important to know how much your, which store is growing, why are they growing? Go talk to them about that. Hey, why do you think you’re doing so successful? Or Hey, you need some help. And, you know, maybe put a little bit more of your energy into our layaway balance because we really want to grow that layaway balance. That’s kind of one of our, you know, keep KPIs that we want for the year. Um, numbers, if you don’t know your numbers, I don’t know what you’re doing in business in my opinion. And, and yeah, definitely at the end of every month, my management team, they get together, they run all the numbers. I have crazy reports that they have to fill out and no, they don’t leave until, until those reports are done and emailed to me or I don’t do email anymore.

Speaker 3: 25:18 They’re, I’ll go on my one drive to where we all have access to them. And one of the things that’s, you know, I didn’t do for awhile was share all these numbers. I share those numbers with my entire team. I share my expenses with them, you know, they want it, they see all this income, hey, you’re getting x amount of dollars in revenue, man, you must be killing it. Let me show you my payroll. Let me show you my rental expense. Let me show you how much my utility bills went up and I, you know, thank God that my father taught me to pay to answer those numbers because it is, you know, it is important. I mean I’m looking right now, when is my tax money going to start coming in? I got some bills I need to pay. So we haven’t seen tax tax return money come in yet.

Speaker 1: 26:09 I think that even if you’re a one store shop, I know a lot of people who are listening on one store operators and they’re like, well I’m in the store, I know what’s going on. I’ve been to a lot of shops where I’ll ask a question and they’ll give me an answer and I’m like, let me check your report. And they give me the report and they’re totally off. So if you’re a one shop operator, listen to Mr Stan liquids here and look at your numbers because I think all of us want to grow, right? Either you wanting to grow your business, you want to go into a second operation, but if you don’t know your numbers, you know what you’re doing. I always say like if you walk into shark tank and Mr Wonderful, he always asks, you know, what are the, what’s the ROI?

Speaker 3: 26:44 How much do you spend on this? You don’t know. If you don’t know them, they destroy you in there. So know your numbers. Take that from, yeah, no, definitely true. And and share them with your team and people ask me, well I just have one store. You have five stores you do, you know, 10,000 loans a month or whatever the number is. One story is the easiest time to get these, to start with. These numbers. Start with the culture with one story man. When I had to change the culture from the, when we had 80 90 employees to change it, people don’t like change even if it’s for the better and your team won’t like the change even if it’s for the better. But if you one store is the easiest time to implement these things and look at come up with new KPIs you want to look at, I have my team with them, a costly, hey, what number are you looking at?

Speaker 3: 27:41 How much you weigh? Weigh Balance Group. Uh, how about new customer? Now we have a number I guy, 5.4 new customers. Okay. At each of my locations for January. What was that? It was 5.4. That’s a, I thought that is crazy. High 0.4 per day. Per Location. Yeah. That’s amazing. And then they asked the night, you know, I have them watched the Google reviews. Since you got three reviews today, you had five new customers. What, why can’t you make you your reviews? So if you want your numbers, you have the ability to go to your team and say, hey team, I think we could do a little bit better job of this. Apart from visions, values and mission statement. What else can somebody do to help the culture? Because I know how important that is to you and how it’s grown. The business, uh, consistency, staying consistent.

Speaker 3: 28:37 And one of the little kind of simple things that I do, um, I call my staff. They’re my teammates. They’re my team members. They’re my leadership teams. They’re not, they’re not staff. They’re not employees. They’re not this. And it makes them feel part of a team. We’re going to create teams. I’m not building employees. I’m not building this. I am developing, recruiting and inspiring an elite workforce. I mean, that’s, that’s a team that’s not an employee or, or a staff member. And then also call your, your customers, their clients. They’re your guests. They’re not, I mean, we are in a retail business. We sell money, we sell jewelry, we sell tools, TVs, bikes, whatever it is. But these are guests just like they aren’t Nordstrom’s a little bit. Many times we have better customers in Nordstroms, I’m sure, because Nordstrom has a lot of people coming in and returning stuff and uh, it’s not fun. Um, so let me ask you this question. I asked the question in the podcast group.

Speaker 1: 29:42 I said, you know, I’ve got Stan liquids coming on. Um, what questions would you like to ask him? So these are a couple of questions that people asked that they would like for you to answer. Is that cool? Uh, sure. We’ll see. All right, so, so the first one is from set. It’s actually a really good question. I says running a family business has its ups and downs. What were some of your best memories that you’ve had?

Speaker 3: 30:06 Yeah, I mean, working with my father and my brother. I mean, it was just a dream that I’ve wanted, you know, my whole entire life. I mean, I have always respected my father so much. I mean, growing up and working with him almost every day, uh, and building something that really became, I mean, when we opened the stores, I made 25 bucks a day, work 10 hour days, work six days a week. I had no clue if it was going to be successful or not. And I remember my dad saying, Oh man, if we get 500,000 let out on the streets, we’ll be making a killer. We won’t ever beat, we’ll be able to retire. And none of the like, oh yeah. And then 500,000 comes and we got four more stores and that’s not enough. And then it’s a million and then it’s 2 million and that’ll, you know, whatever. But, uh, just seeing the growth and seeing it really with my dad. I mean, my dad gave me a lot of leeway at times and, um, seeing some of the things that I did and, and taking the stuff that he taught me, like the numbers. I mean, she’s, I’d be lost if I didn’t learn all of those, you know, watching those metrics and KPIs, uh, from him, uh, really working with my dad and my brother was, was just, it was great.

Speaker 1: 31:16 Awesome. I agree. I think one of the biggest things when I left cashco three years ago, I sat next to my brother for 16 years. Um, and I know that we, there was some, a little bit of anger after I left, but, uh, I think it’s, it’s fun. Uh, at other times you want to throw a chair at each other for sure. Right. A little tiny office. My Dad, we’re locked in. Yeah. It meets you. My brother and I were in the same office, like, we want to throw shit at each other. Um, but there’s a lot of love there. It’s family. So if you’re in a family business, um, know that it’s tough, know that you’re not alone. Like, you know, I got in fights with my brother, I’m sure you got into fights with your brother and your father, but it’s family and um, you have your differences and it’s okay to, uh, part ways like we both did on this podcast. And I think that’s, I’ll never forget my father said, I said, dad, I’m leaving the pond business and here I am back in the pawn business. But then he goes, this is the question he had. He asked me, he goes, how are you going to make money? And I asked him, I said, well, there’s other businesses that make money except for Pawnee goes not as good as this business. He said, you know, it’s gotta be,

Speaker 3: 32:25 well, my dad says the same thing. I mean, it’s like we’re even in this crappy interest state. Where are you going to get this kind of return on your investment? You can’t do it in real estate. You can do it in a hotel or business. Where are you going to get the kind of return on your investment as you do in the pond business here?

Speaker 1: 32:45 Yeah, so remember that if you’re in California or like in New York in a low interest state, I know a lot of people come up to me and say, hey gall, I’ve got this a real estate deal, it’ll make you 8% a year. And I’m just like, oh my God, you know, we were making 48% and that’s in California. So remember to be, to feel gratitude I think is one of the biggest things we forget to feel grateful right

Speaker 3: 33:08 to 100% I mean I’m so fortunate to be in this business and you know, clearly got to give my dad all the credit for it. I would never have thought that this is what I was going, I was going to be an international stockbroker going through high school, but I w I can’t see myself doing anything

Speaker 1: 33:27 awesome and you’re great at it, man. I have to say you are really, really great. I think if anybody’s in the Sacramento area, they should kind of reach out and give you a call. And because I know you’re gracious enough to,

Speaker 3: 33:36 I’ll give you the tour. I’ll show you my metrics. I’ll show you my numbers. I’m not afraid to show my numbers with any palm broker out there.

Speaker 1: 33:44 Awesome. One more question from Jamie Smith, and this is probably an inside joke, but I’m gonna ask it anyways. He says, how many houses can you hit on a golf course in average golf outing?

Speaker 3: 33:54 Well, I shoot about 107 hundred and 10 on average and that’s including my putts. So if you take the three 30 48 putts away that I do on an average hole, minus that from one 10, we’re looking at about 62.

Speaker 1: 34:13 Nice man. Just a quick question before we go. Um, because I love to ask your mastermind member, how’s it been being in the mastermind for you?

Speaker 3: 34:21 So I spoke earlier about accountability and you know, if I tell myself, hey, you know what, I need to get to work five, you know, five days of work, five days this week at nine o’clock in the morning and you know, really job out because I got my taxes coming up, I got this coming up, I, my inventory is too high, or whatever the case may be. I bring it, I bring it to the pod leaders, you know, that mastermind group and say, Hey, this is what I’m going to do. Um, and I feel accountable to that group because they tell me what they’re going to get done. And it really helps me hold myself accountable because they, they truly get it and they want to see me succeed. As much as I want to see me succeed and I want to see them succeed. And if we’re not doing what we say we’re going to do, it’s extremely hard to succeed. I mean, we’re in a business that has a tremendous return and it’s really hard to screw up. But if you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, you’ll make money, but you’re not going to make real money.

Speaker 1: 35:27 I love that. I’m going to use that as a quote, that’s for sure. Brother. You know, I love you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Um, for those of you who want to connect with Stan, look away. She’s in the podcast community.

Speaker 3: 35:38 So if you want to go on Facebook, I’ll call him just search pollinators, podcast, community, and um, and he’s a great guy. I love you. Thanks for being on and you were kind of worried if you’re gonna teach something, you killed it today, man. So thank you. I appreciate, uh, I appreciate the opportunity gall and everything you do for my team, for the industry and everything. And like you said earlier, my beehag big hairy audacious goal is to, you know, make the pawn industry in my community at least at first in a much better experience for people. I mean, I want to build career paths. I want to build relationships with clients, customers,

Speaker 2: 36:15 um, my team members in my community loved him. Love to be had.

Speaker 3: 36:22 Awesome, guys, thank you so much for listening and stay tuned

Speaker 2: 36:25 for another podcast coming.

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