BEST OF 2024: Memorable Money Moments #1

Published Dec 19, 2024, 11:00 AM

As 2024 draws to a close, we look back on some of the memorable moments from the last year of Black Tech Green Money!

This week's compilation features wisdom from Lanny Smith, Nicky Saunders, and John Hope Bryant.

Speaks to the plan in Charlamagne to God.

Here and as we come close to closing out this year, I just want to say thank you for tuning it into the Black Effect podcast network. There have been so many great moments over the past year. Take a listen to some of those captivating moments in this special best of episode.

Landy Smith is founder and CEO at Actively Black in Active Faith, both wildly successful athletes and brands doing numbers and unlikely fashion mogul. Landy is a former college star basketball player and pro athlete. But this wasn't the road he chose, but he found his path. In his first year in businesses brands earned one hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Now he's doing seven million. He talks about how that's a void of representation and investment, specifically the gap in the market that Actively Black aims to address.

Yeah, I think, you know, first and foremost, this at leisure segment of apparel has been the fastest growing segment of all apparel for the last seven years. There was a huge spike during you know, during COVID, and people thought that it would slow down afterwards, but it hasn't.

I mean, I think.

Because of the nature of this industry where it's you know, people are not just wearing this apparel to work out anymore, you know, I mean, at leisure is now something that people are wearing to travel to work, and it's even become like a fashion thing as well.

So I think because of that, there's.

So much room in space in this particular segment. I think the last numbers I saw was that by twenty thirty, at leisure is going to be a four hundred billion dollar.

Market itself.

And then, you know, when you think about the black audience, Mackenzie actually just released a report that showed that by twenty thirty, Blacks in the United States alone we'll be spending seventy billion annually on apparel and footwear. So, you know, in a space that seems like it's oversaturated and crowded, there's so many brands that are doing some real numbers, that are doing some real things. I think the differentiating factor for actively Black is I saw a voids specifically in this sports apparel at leisure wear space. So we're not a streetwear brand, We're not a fashion brand. We are a true at leisure sports apparel brand. And you know, when you think about some of the legacy companies that have existed in this space. You know, these brands have profited billions of dollars off of Black talent, black consumerism, black culture, and I feel like they hadn't adequately reinvested back into the Black community in a meaningful way.

And so, you know, it's time.

It's like, you know, why not have have the black version of Nike, the black owned version of of of.

Nike and Lulu limit? Why not?

You know?

And so I think our level of quality and the way that we've built the brand has positioned us to be in a place where, you know, a lot of our customers we get comments from them where they're like, hey, I don't have to buy Nike or Lululemon again. I can replace all of those types of items in my closet with actively black And so I.

Think that's the void that we're feeling.

And because we are unapologetically and boldly black and celebrating black culture and centering Black culture in everything that we do, it stands out it makes us different from what exists in the market.

Yeah, I love that, And I want to talk about that market segmentation that you know, being by black people, and you know, you've got active faith and actively black, and I think about you know, these are both in many ways sub categories of you know, populations of people. And so when you think about segmentation in that way, often entrepreneurs, erroneously or correctly, depending on the effort, you know, miscalculate the size of the market and or try to go after a market that's wildly inappropriate for what they're trying to do. And so how do you how do you think about what is the big opportunity for a black owned you know, athletes, your brand when you think about those two categories, like is it big enough? Talk about the size and you know, you know, obviously yes, yes it's going to be big enough, but talk about how you got there?

Yeah yeah, yeah.

So you know, first, I think in general with entrepreneurs, one of the things that a lot of us will do is we'll have an idea for something and we'll put all of our energy and resources into building that product and building that service or whatever it is, and then we go and try to find an audience to.

Sell it to or to serve it to.

Where for both active faith and actively black, I feel like where I've kind of reversed engineered some of this. And I learned this from Greta. I can't remember Greta's last name, but she's built six or seven different e commerce direct to consumer brands, and one of the pieces of advice that she gave was find and build an audience first, and then build product that serves that audience, right, And so that kind of gives you a better chance at success and a better chance at succeeding because now you're creating product that super serves an audience that you or that you found, instead of the other way around where you're building it and like, Okay, now let me go find somebody who wants.

This for the black audience specifically.

It's been interesting when I first was launching Actively Black, I had black people tell me that if I named it Actively Black and if I focused on the black audience, that it was going to prevent this brand from being successful, that we wouldn't have the TAM right, the total addressable market wouldn't be big enough for us to be successful.

I was hoping, you go here.

I'm glad you're going here.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, And it was it was.

It was disheartening and disappointing at times to hear that, because this wasn't just other people telling me this. This is black people telling me this too. Like Noah, I don't name it Actively Black, it's going to limit its chances of success.

And I have seen I see that more.

As a sign of.

The effects of oppression and the systemic discrimination and all the things that black people have had to deal with, especially in corporate America, where black culture and you authentically showing up as yourself is something that it's kind of frowned upon, you know what I mean.

So so when you start to in turn that, you think, okay.

Well, anything that is so boldly and unapologetically black is a negative. And so even the mission and purpose of what I'm doing with Actively Black is to reclaim and redefine what it means to be black. We've unfortunately listened to.

What oppressors have told us.

What black means instead of us actually owning what it means to be black. And I think that's why it shows up in that way.

And so you know, my response to many of them is one.

When you think about the size of the diaspora, because that's one thing that I need people to understand we're not building this for Black Americans. This is Actively Black. To me, is a global brand that will galvanize the entire diaspora around the globe under this brand that represents all of us.

The tagline for Actively Black is.

There's greatness in our DNA, you know, So whether you are you know, from Houston, Texas like myself, Brooklyn, London, Jamaica, Legos, Nigeria, wherever, there's a part of our DNA that ties us together.

And I don't think that there's been a brand so far.

That has existed that has chosen to put all of us under the same umbrella as one tribe.

And that's what we're trying to do Actively Black. And when you think.

About the size of the diaspora, then you start to realize we're actually not the minority, you know what I mean. I think there's this misconception that we are the minority in the world. So if we're only speaking to the black audience, it's too small of an audience to speak to or to sell to, right And the crazy part about that is every corporation, every multi billion dollar brand, either has a department or they're having meetings to figure out how to sell to the black consumer.

That's right, right, that's right.

So if the.

Black consumer is big enough for Nike to be figured out how do we sell to the black audience, for Coca Cola to figure out how do we sell to the black audience. If our audience is big enough for these multi billion dollar brands to focus on how they sell to us, then why would it not be big.

Enough for a black on brand to sell to us? You know what I mean?

Like, that's that's the part that has never made sense to me. But I know part of it is just because some of this hasn't been done before.

And so.

You you know, I'm a believer that you can't be what you can't see, you know what I mean. And so if we've never seen a black Nike before, then maybe it's just it hasn't existed before in our minds, so it can't be done.

That's what I'm fighting against.

Nicki Sondis is a powerhouse in the world of content strategy and personal branding. She's the content strategist and founder of Deeper Than the Brand, where she helps entrepreneurs, speakers, and creatives grow their digital footprint authentically. She's best known for her work with motivational speaker Eric Thomas, better known as ET what she helps scale his online community exponentially. She's passionate about helping others turn their social media presence into a vehicle for success using the power of storytelling, AI and impactful strategy. So what goes wrong when I believe I have a post that's fire and I post it and it goes flat and nothing happens, nobody likes it? Like what happens?

Nikki?

Help me out?

I mean, it could be a few things like that. That's such a broad question. It's like, it could be the timing, it could be anything from you didn't have to write hook, it could be the algorithm. There's a lot of things like it's I always look at when I post and it goes flat. I look at me first. Yeah, right, I think it's easier to control what I post than what I put out and what I create instead of going ah, the algorithm is doing what it does. I was like, because I can't. I feel like that's a cop out when other people numbers are clearly are doing Okay. I'm just feeling a certain kind of way because no one's listening to me at this moment. But then I have, like I look at it from a standpoint of all right, visually, how does it look? You know, what was the first three seconds? Did I? Uh? Did I keep their attention? Because depending on the platforms, if you get them to listen through the whole way through, like that could be a thing. So it's it's just it's a lot of things. It's a lot of things.

Our pictures on Instagram.

Dad, No, No, it's just you feel me like you got to put it extra loving it, So you may have to put like some music, you feel me. You may have to make it into a carousel, so you may have to say extra stories. You may have to be a little bit more intentionals with the captions and make it a little bit longer. What happens is what the days of I post a picture and I say one sentence. Now that's dead, let's just stop it. It doesn't even work. But the more that they add features, we have to pay attention to it. So they're allowing you to add text to it, They're allowing you to add extra pictures on top of your pictures. So you look at let's say, the different features that are inside of Instagram, and you use them it probably better you reach for your post.

And so what I learned, and this is a year ago more, what Instagram does is they count swipes through your photo gallery as engagement. And so what I wonder if because I actually enjoyed these particular types of posts where there it's a gallery and like none of the photos match, like they just you know, maybe one is a quote, the one is me eating, the next one is you know, something random. I actually enjoy though, so tell like, what is that about? Why are people doing that?

I enjoy it? But where did it come from? What happened?

So sometimes they follow a theme, right, Sometimes they could be super just randomness, but it really gives you a sense of personality of the person who's posting it or the brand who's posting it, right, And so that's not necessarily normal in the way that we normally post that. Now it's starting to be attractive. So when we're seeing, Okay, I have a picture of me at the park, but then I have a funny meme on the next one, and then I have a deep quote, it's like I'm fully truly understanding who you are as a person, rather than the thirty second sixty second videos ninety second videos that can be kind of like staged and scripted, So sometimes we don't necessarily get your full personality unless it's those types of posts or even lives. That's why lives still kind of have a little bit of energy to it because we get to know who you are because you can't really lie on a live. It's just impossible, as truly as possible.

So I'm going to ask a question. I'm going to go the long way around to ask this question because I think this is important context. So we talk a lot about how educational institutions don't teach financial literacy, and a lot of them do now they're increasingly teaching financial literacy. And I say that, you say this when we talk about entrepreneurs and people who are trying to build businesses. Don't post the struggle, but they post the highlights, so you only see the highlight reel. But when you do post the struggle, or we find it difficult to post the struggle, I'll say that, So how do we all for that? So when we talk about the academic and they trying to fix that, how do we fix you know, the entrepreneur who's trying to show you that he's winning or she's winning, and they're finding success and therefore follow me. I'm on a row somewhere, but that struggle, like, I don't want to sound like I'm on here doing the Tyree's cry. You know what I mean, right, But.

The Tyres's cry worked good or bad? It worked, you feel mean? So But I say that because I think now in the season that we're in, the day in the life is starting to get more play. Then I fully got it together, right, And those people who are actually taking advantage of that is like gen Z and Jena, like Alpha, like they're they're really going into day one of trying to create a billion dollar brand, right, and they show everything about it, good or bad. The those people who can't do that, it's a self issue. It has nothing to do with the algorithms the platforms. Does the content work or not? Because society culture is over the highlight reils. We want the actual things that work or that doesn't work, or I want to feel like I'm not alone anymore, right, And so those people who are showing, hey, this is how I do this, I don't know if it's right. I don't know if it's like, but I'm going to do it anyways. It builds community, and so those brands are starting to get more and more traction because it's community centered. It's for the people. Whereas, yes, the ones that only show the highlights are great cool. You could look at it more like as these are goals. I want to get there, but I feel disconnected because you're already there and I'm not. So I could look at you kind of like I look at it more of like we do the vision boards, so I could post your brand, your content on my vision board, but I don't, like, I don't truly feel connected until I am there. Where people who are posting about Okay, I made ten dollars today, Okay, I made three thousand dollars today. Okay it went back to like four. Like, those are starting to get a little bit more attraction. It's still not of the masses just yet, but you start if you pay attention. It's definitely more popular on TikTok at this moment, but it's starting to make waves on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook as well because people are just starting to like, are just over the highlight reel.

I Hope Brian is chairman and CEO at John Hope Bryant Holdings, Brian Group Ventures, Brian Group Advisors, and executive chairman of the Promise Homes Company, which is the largest for profit, minority controlled owner of institutional quality, single family residential homes in the United States. And he's founded chairman and CEO at Operation Hope, the nation's largest on the ground nonprofit provider of financial literacy. He's been an advisor to presidents the largest corporations in the world, and he's responsible for financial literacy becoming the official policy of the United States federal government under Presidents George Bush and Obama. And it's the only American citizen to ever inspire the renaming of a building on the White House campus from the US Treasury Annex Building to the Freeman's Bank Building in honor of Lincoln's unfinished work to teach free slaves about money.

In eighteen sixty five.

He that conversation, and for your listeners, I want them to hear this and again I go all this, over all this in financial Literacy for All, and also my own podcast, Money and Wealth, and I talk about this my pullpit of finance. You have a table, and on the one side of the table is a capitalist and they have a product and they want to extract money from you. And on the other side of the table is you, and you want that product and you don't want to give them any money. And their job. People listen to this now, don't get emotional. Whenever you make an emotional decision, it's a bad one. The capitalist job is to extract as much money as they can from you while giving you the least amount of value. And your job is to extract the most amount of value while delivering the least amount of cash. And that dynamic tension is natural negotiation. Now somebody says, well, how does that apply to capitalism? Where you're a little village. You don't think you're a capitalists, Go to a little village in Africa, Go to little village in Latin America. Think about when you're a last in Jamaica or wherever, and you trying to buy them little chotsky or something somebody and how much is this, Well it's two dollars. How about a buck fifty? No, one ninety, Well how about a buck sixty? Wow, I'll take it one seventy five. I think it's gonna be worsehip. That's the negotiation and you're you're in the midst of a capitalis transaction. You go to the store, you go to CBS today where the price has been predetermined because they've done market research. And you want to buy a comb, and the comb is nine bucks, and and they've pretty much, you know, done the research approves that this comb. You pay nine bucks for it, and you pick it up, and you go to the register, and without any complaints at all, you buy it. Why because you know that solving the naps that autio hair and and the kinks in my hair are worth at least twenty bucks, maybe a hundred bucks. Maybe it's invaluable to you at that moment you want to sew at least worth nine bucks. There you go, right there. We do that all day every day and don't think about it. We're all engaged in this system of free enterprise and capitalism, but we don't understand it. And is what we don't know that we don't know this killing us. But we think we know. Some brothers like I don't want to buy a house, buy buy a house. The bank owns the house. I don't know. If you don't pay, the bank will own your house. But by the way, if I give you a loan and you don't pay, I will own your house. Right, So what you need to do is pay, and then you get the a beit of it of appreciation, the value above the debt, and you get the benefit that's called equity, and you get the benefit of depreciation, which is a tax strategy, and you get to write off twenty years of a thirty year mortgage pavements against your income on your tax bill, and you get to live in it. Wealthy people want to save time and poor people want to save money. Right, they try. We spend all this time, you know, messing around trying to make some money or save some money, or not pay that rent, that light bill even though there's a rent notice on it, and trying to wait till the last minute. You got to pay the light bill. Whether it's Tuesday or Thursday, you're gonna have to pay the light bill. Right. So, so, but you're wasting time on this activity. I'd rather you waste a little bit of my money, would waste a minute of my time. I could give you more time. I'll make more money. So you build wealth in your sleep. You want to take that money and put it to work, compounding, right, home ownership. We just talked about that, starting a business, putting in money to work, starting a business. The easiest example the stock market. There are three things that have never gone down in American history American GDP Gross Domestic product, the income of this country, the stock market in real estate values. Now, somebody watching this will say, ah, I got him, he's wrong. Doesn't he even know there was a real estate recession. There was a recession in two thousand and eight. Yeah, I know that, I know that. I know that real estate went up, it dipped, it's called a recession, and then it corrected above the line. And real estate I bought for eighty eight thousand dollars is now worth three hundred thousand dollars. Really, the home, the townhouse I bought for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in LA with a little bit of money, of my money and a lot of bit of the bank's money. So here you go, twenty percent cash down from me, eighty percent finands by the bank, good debt, a little bit of my money from the bank account into the transaction compound it. And then when the real estate recession happened, the value went down to one something one point eighty. All my friends at sale John sale sales sale, That's why they broke. I'm like, why would I sell? I got I got to live someplace. H No, I think I'll just hold on. I moved to Atlanta, rented that place out to a police officer who didn't pay his bill on time. I might add and uh bud. He finally paid, and I forgot about it. Will five years eight years later forget it was twenty sixteen. I go to check on the property, called my broker out there, my brother hey man, trying to sell his property. And then I'm gonna buying something in Atlanta? What can I get for it? Now? Mind? You bought it for two something, so when I last I checked on, it was one hundred and something of value. So I was underwater. He said, well, I think you can get it. You can get seven to fifty. I said, you don't mean seven to fifty dollars, do you? What did did la just fall apart? No, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars almost passed out? It hit It had literally triple in value from where more than triple to value of what I paid for it. That's what people with wealthy people do. Wealthy people use money to make more money or use money to build wealth. So so real estate has never gone down the stock market, So go buy. Listen to this. I'm not telling you what to buy. Whatever you're wearing, whatever you use, wherever you go. And that's a publicly traded company. Go buy an index or a stock with those in it, a basket in it, and you don't have a lot of money, do do do fractional ship. But if you're part of the of the of the of the blue chip stock index, those are the best performing companies in America. And they are global companies. And if you lose, a billionaires losing by the way, So it's a good bet. And and and buy and don't sell. Just forget about it and watch it compound over time. If you have a twenty year window on your investment horizon and when you want to retire or whatever, you're gonna have zero losses. It's gonna go up, it's gonna go down, but over twenty years, it's just gonna do this right on balance. And if you like a company Walmart, Tarja, Target, if you like a company, there's a good chance other people like it too. And by the way, once you own one stock, you get a right to the to the to get all the financials. Yeah. All you imagine somebody bought one pencil in your house and now they can go through every room, in every drawer in your house. That's what When you have one stock of Target or Walmart or Delta Airlines, whatever, you now can go through every inch and cranny of that company. You have a right to all their financials. You are an owner and that powerful. That's sexy.

There was a study done by the SBAF. It's back in twenty twelve, I believe it was the last time they did it, and they said, eighty percent of our businesses are in the bottom twenty percent of categories for sales revenue. So we over index on barber shops, long care companies, dry cleaners, et cetera. And so I wonder, like, what does it take to get that black barber to say, you know, instead of starting to shop on the corner, I'm going to start thirty of these shops and do it across the country. Like what does it take to get us to think that way?

The Bible says, The Bible says, where there's no vision that people perish. All right, so we needed again, we need to go from civil rights in the street to silver rights in the business suites. Look, this makes perfect sense while we are where we are. Will why do kids want to be rap stars, athletes and drug dealers from our neighborhood.

That's what they see.

They're not dumb and they're not stupid. They're brilliant. They're modeling what they see. They don't no one's talk to them about why education matters to them. K through twelve, they're like, why do I go do both of all this when I can just go sell some drugs? Well, selling drugs is prison, probation, parole, and death. But that's a different conversation. They're seeing a media gratification. They're seeing a connection to their aspirations. But no one's taking taking education and plugging it into a socket called aspiration and saying, if you do this, you can become an engineer. If you do this, you can go into AI. If you do this, you can become a gamer. If you do this, you become a coder. If you do this, you can become a real estate mate. We a real estate magnet. We have a farm club for professional sports. There used to be a farm club for the arts, used to be art class, a lot of stuff. But there's still an informal farm club for that, but certainly professional sports from middle school. But there's no farm club for business and the things that's driving the economy. And so you look at the role models a jay Z or whoever people admire, they have a staff of thirty people. The biggest celebrities that you want to admire, they have a staff of five people, four people, ten people, maybe thirty people that's running their brand. You can't scale the brand. This is only one jay Z. Maybe I'm not picking on jay Z. There's only one Ti or Killer Mike who I know, and you can't. And there's only so many employees that are able to sit in their balance sheet given that is one the product is an individual. Right. So the things that we've tried to get forty million people into to an economic model designed for three thousand people, right, and even those jobs last three to five years on average. Celebrity three to five years, a ball player three to five years, drug dealer probably less than that. Right. And look at Jews, just the opposite, seven and a half million Jews, but they're pursuing forty million occupations, and they've understand that you need to write the check, not just cash it, be the owner. So when you discriminate against me, you just discriminate against the guy who owns the building that you're actually talking crap in. So what we need is a long answer to your question. What we need is a business plan. What we need is a business plan, and we need role models who start with what you just said. Why am I just why don't I have too much month of the end in my money? Why? No matter how hard I work, I'm broke because you've got one operation and you're trying to make money and not trying to build wealth. You need to you build wealth in your sleep. Compounding. Compounding can mean different additional locations. So maybe I need to model success. Maybe I need twenty locations, maybe I need ten. I can't. And by the way, what's the strategy. It's gonna blow your your viewer's mind when I say, listeners, listeners mind? When I say this, why do I want to have three locations, ten twenty to sell it?

That's right, that's absolutely correct to sell it.

Oh but John, then it's not a black business. No, it's a successful one. It's called an exit strategy, right, right, right, So percent of black businesses don't have an employee because we're emotional about it, because we're there're self employment projects. Because we have to understand that this is about growing something you can sell, that you can merge, that you can that you know, it's not a black business, it's a green one. You don't see Jewish people and white people have said white owned business. You know, you don't see Jews, Latino people, Latino own business, big sign in the one in the wall. Let's you know, you know Asian own business. Right, it's only black people your own business. I know it's black. I see you. Right. You want every person who with a dollar bill, a legit one to be your customer. Right, And so we got to take the emotion out of it. We need different kind of role models. Look, why am I doing what I'm doing to create plumbing? There is no there is no one of the videos has got four million, five million views that I did. Somebody just put up this little clip. I dide able to speak of the Milking conference where I said I want to be the Federal Reserve of the hood. Yeah, And to me it was common sense. I wasn't. I wasn't trying to get attention. I was I just thought it was common sense. I want to become the federal Reserve of the hood. I want to create an economic infrastructure, a financial access point nationwide where we can come in operationalize our untapped human potential at scale. Get our credit score up thirty to fifty to one hundred points, get our debt. You know, black people have the largest, sorry of the lowest credit score on average in the nation. The average credit score for black people is less than six twenty. Not poor people, all of us. And so when we get up in the morning, will and we think that the bank is discriminating against us, and they might be. It might be a racist person at the bank who don't like you, who discriminated against you. That might be the case. But if your credit score is five fifty, they don't want to work very hard at it. The answer is just no, right, you're just a bad credit risk. You don't pay your bills. So we get the credits grow up fifty to one hundred points, so you're in the high sixes. God forbid, you get the seven. That's the Nirvana seven hundred. Get your debt down thirty eight hundred dollars for somebody making forty eight thousand dollars. These store our Hope and side models at open site locations and operation Ope three hundred dollars across the country. We get your savings up two thousand dollars on average. And when we do that, we make you bank qualified. So the bank just wants to say yes. And if you want to test my theory, go to the computer at midnight when the bank's not even open and you have a seven to twenty credit score and type in an application for a credit card or a mortgage or cardinals and watch that approval.

Get it quick.

Quick, change the game, change the business plan, change your minds, change your model, become bilingual, learn financial literacy for all. It's the new civil rights issue of this generation. We have got to be as obsessed with this as we were the right to Volks.

Once again, thank you for tuning into the Blackfect Podcast Network. Seeing you in twenty twenty five for more great moments from your favorite podcast