March 3, 2026 – Super Connector Steve Ramona and Passive Investing Patrick Grimes

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:25 Jim Beach : hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups. Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there, minimizing your risk, copy, borrowing or stealing business ideas from other people. We’re not going to steal any trademarks or patents or copyrights. It’ll go out there and find a business model to just innovate on, make it better than the current guy, and you’ll be incredibly successful. Oh, and we also reserve passion for the church, the synagogue, the mosque and the bedroom and the living room every once in a while. But that’s not part of the formula either. You don’t have to have passion for the business. You just have to like it more than working for me. So great show today. First up, we have Steve Ramona. He is a super connector, and has an amazing podcast on serving from the heart. And so those are the two major topics. We talk about, serving from your heart in a honest, fulfilling way that both people benefit, and then also how to become a super connector, and how he did great, great information. You will really enjoy this. Then we have Patrick Grimes. He is got some passive investment opportunities that I just never heard of, investing in the legal system in upcoming lawsuits. It is fascinating and a great, great information. I was just blown away. I’m going to invest some money with Patrick. I promise you. Bad news, the interview went a little long. We spent the first five or six minutes talking about some silly stuff in Hawaii, and I ran ashore on Gilligan’s Island one day. True Story with Professor Mary Ann, The Millionaire everybody in Hawaii. Patrick lives in Hawaii now, and so I had to make a cut. And so I took the first like seven minutes of Patrick’s interview out so that the show would work. And so what we’ve done is I have posted the entire interview with Patrick, if you want to hear our banter, or silly little banter, and my Gilligan story on the website. So you go to the website, to today’s show page, and you will find the entire show and Patrick’s longer interview as well. So we didn’t want to lose that great stuff. Thanks for being with us. We’ll get started in just about five seconds.

2:45 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I’m very excited to welcome another great guest. Please welcome Steve Ramona to the show. He is the host of the doing business with a servant’s heart, a great podcast that I think I was on last week or so. He has had incredible success as a human Rolodex, a human SEO helping be a super connector. He has put together deals and portfolios that have included a billion dollars in projects and 125 million in partner deals. He also has a TV show called together we serve. Pretty impressive. Steve, welcome. How are you doing?

3:26 Steve Ramona : Thank you, Jim, thank you having me on. I’m doing absolutely incredible, fantastic,

3:31 Jim Beach : super connector. How do you become a super connector? What does

3:35 Unknown Speaker : that mean to you? Mindset?

3:37 Jim Beach : It’s got

3:38 Steve Ramona : to come from your mind. You got to step into every interaction that you have in our business. For your personal life, really doesn’t matter how you go really uplift them. What value can you bring to somebody? It could be small, medium or large, but

3:52 Jim Beach : just from value, okay, to every single person. How do you figure out what would be valuable to someone?

4:02 Steve Ramona : That’s a great question. I love answering this. I have a principle called the astral principle a SLA. It’s ask, shut up, listen and ask in those books and ask some questions. You ask a question. What’s your challenge for your business? You shut up. You actively listen. And what I mean by areas? If you go to a Zoom Room, you see all those black screens. People are not on their video, and maybe they’re there, maybe they’re not, but they’re truly listening, probably not, and there’s no judgment here, because I’ve had to run to the bathroom. We never answer the door. But are you truly actively listening? Because then that second ask leads to connecting, because we’re building relationships. I think in business, that’s a missing arc. These days, everyone wants to sell, sell, sell, and pitch, pitch, pitch.

4:49 Jim Beach : Very true. I don’t know, you know, I’ve had people ask me this question before, how can I help you? And I have a hard time answering that question. I don’t know how. You could help me? I don’t know how to find out how you could help.

5:07 Steve Ramona : Great, great question. I’ve never been asked that before. I’ve probably done 300 shows. Thank you, Jim. And here’s one tip, if you don’t have something for them, when they ask how they can help, say, hey, you know my friend Joe. He’s got this coaching program He’s launching. Can you help get it out to your network? Or, Hey, I just learned this from this multi billionaire. Here’s a tip that I learned. Let me share that with you. It doesn’t always have to be transactional. When people ask, How can I help you? You could go and have healthy other people. That’s that servant’s heart. It’s just not tied to you. You put the highlight of other people, make them shy, and the universe pays back.

5:45 Jim Beach : I definitely believe in that. All right. I don’t know how to ask this question, but this is a little bit touchy. I think that it became trendy two or three years ago to ask that from people who, number one couldn’t help, and number two didn’t really have the intention of helping, but sort of got in the habit of asking that because they thought it was what they were supposed to do. Does that make sense?

6:12 Steve Ramona : It does. And it’s, it’s, it’s a good question. And you know, it’s changed a lot. Covid came and networking was much different, because everybody went virtual. Everybody like all these networking groups. And I did, I ran five networking groups, but what I learned was people were not growing in those groups. They’re just meeting people like they went to a birthday party or to a basketball game or to anniversary and just meeting new people. The big step with this is when you meet new people and they fit what you’re doing, and there’s a resident there that you can work with them, and they can work with you. You do the follow up, you do the ask, you do these types of things to keep that going. It’s not going to be everybody, and that’s the problem with some people. I call them shotgun connectors. They just throw the shotgun out there. Take a million people going, Oh, things are going to change, Jim, it’s gonna be intentional. You gotta go, Hey, Jim, does this? You know what? I’ve got this person. I think you help you, or partner with you, or may have a resource for you, or whatever it may be. And when you give introductions and connections with intention, it’s off the charts.

7:16 Jim Beach : All right, how do you then become, do you be? Deserve to become part of the deal, then

7:26 Steve Ramona : you don’t have to be. I’ve done many, many deals. Well, I’ve received nothing great. Story, two ladies I had met within a few months. They do something similar. I put them together and said, You guys could be do something great, so there’s a lot of collaboration. Well, three months later, they reached out to me via email, both of them thanking me, and they launched a retreat Hawaii for their business. And they did multiple ones, and they made a lot of money. I didn’t ask for money. I think you could ask. I think a lot of people are missing the boat to ask, because what’s the worst thing to tell you is, no, I just don’t do that. I’ve had people tell me, I said, Hey, you do a full fee or a success fee, or do you take on affiliates, whatever verbiage you use. And I’ve had people honestly say, No, I’m not interested. That’s fine, too.

8:16 Jim Beach : All right, so if you just introduce someone, I don’t know that you really deserve much, but a lot of times you do much, much more than that, and actually get involved in helping and putting the deal together, right, correct?

8:30 Steve Ramona : That’s where it’s it’s really needed. Here’s the thing, general people, you started building a network. Your networks, your net worth. Well, I say now your Quality Network is a large network. Meaning, are you working with people super successful? Are you connecting with those people, people struggling? I love to help, but they can really grow your business. Probably not because they’re trying to grow as well. So the goal here is to connect people. And when you’ve got this large I have people come to me all the time. I just had an email five minutes before you called me. So hey, I’ve got this program. Can you show $2,000 and that’s where I’ve made a lot of my money, is people knowing my network, because that’s who I am. Anybody can do this, but the key is to take action and build that network.

9:18 Jim Beach : So how would you disseminate the word in that kind of a situation, would you just put out a newsletter or a tweet? How would you

9:29 Steve Ramona : Yeah, so two things that I do is one, social media, but when I ask a great lesson for you listening, if you’ve got a program or something you want people to promote or highlight for you, is you need a graphic for that event, whatever it is, of course, the link where people can go and learn more and sign up and only two or three sentences of what this is about, people do not want to read three paragraphs of the event. They will stop, and they’ll never jump on because where we are a microwave society. So that’s a great way of doing that. And then Jim, the best way is, as you build your network, and I’m meeting people in the back of my mind, although somebody’s talking asking their challenges, I’m doing that asshole principle. I’ll go, hey, you need to check this workshop out. I think this would fit you. Let me connect you with the guy running the workshop or the woman running the workshop. And 25% of time people sign up because it’s such a warm referral,

10:25 Jim Beach : it sounds What are you doing in the energy space?

10:31 Steve Ramona : So, you know, I love podcasting. I love interviewing, like you do. Jimmy, hundreds and 1000s these. When you get to interview people, you get to learn about them. But then this connecting starts happening. And I connect with a business partner. Max did my podcast a couple times. He came to me and goes, Steve, I’ve got to build this smart city in Nevada. We want to put renewable energy in there. I don’t know anybody in that space. So Jim, I reached out to my network, and within a month, I had four or five contacts, funding groups, real energy companies, partners that want to work with us. And now we’re building the city. It’s, you know, it’s going to be a 60 year project. It’s a $200 million project right now. It probably will hit 500 million if this is the power of this power of connecting with as a podcast, a radio show, or going out to networking groups, if you do it correctly,

11:21 Jim Beach : Jim, they can stop. All right, see the guy that you just mentioned, the first thought that came to my mind is, if he doesn’t have any connections in that industry, he shouldn’t be doing that project. I mean, he seems like at some point we need to say, you know, maybe you should do that after you’ve developed a couple of energy or renewability connections. It seems like he’s too much of a neophyte, and so I kind of wonder, do I want to waste my cred to promote this guy? He’s not ready yet. You ever had that thought? I really well,

12:03 Steve Ramona : I’ve had that thought, and I wouldn’t promote them. If I do some due diligence and I reach out to some people, especially very successful people, so awesome due diligence, and that’s what I did. I reached a couple, here’s the project, and they were like, off the charts, like, this is an incredible project, but there’s a lot of people like that out there, Jim, that need people like me, and that puts me in a workforce or an industry that everybody needs people. I don’t care who you are. You need people in your business called people asset, and what I do is help you bring that asset to your business, to help you grow so I don’t really come to mind because I can help so many people, it’s wonderful I get to serve them as well.

12:44 Jim Beach : So you said you did due diligence by asking if it was a good idea to energy people. Do you investigate the person himself and find out what his track record has been and whether he’s honest and has good friends or reputation.

12:59 Steve Ramona : I do, but Max, I know, for a year and a half, we partner up with other businesses, so I should probably back up. And that’s a great point. Jim, yeah, you got to do your due diligence. People are getting scanned left and right everywhere, and you got to be careful of that. And I’ll tell you a great, not a great story, but it’s a story of resilience. Me and Max had a great deal going. We lost a $20 million deal in our company’s pocket in October, because it wasn’t what the guy, I don’t say he scanned that they didn’t tell us the truth about the project. Only found out was too late, and things happened, and that’s going to happen. How you get past that is you just be a human for 16 hours, 12 hours. Have a pity party, but the next thing you get back around the treadmill, and you start looking for other projects, and that’s when we die. And we found multiple projects like the one I mentioned,

13:49 Jim Beach : where does that resilience come from? I’ll tell you mine, Steve, I, you know, have been single on and off, and so I asked a lot of girls out, and I get a lot of rejections, but I’ve learned that I only need one to say, yes, you know here,

14:07 Steve Ramona : here gets you past that. I don’t want to be broke. I want to be able to help my family. I want to be able to serve other people. And if I don’t meet somebody or have opportunities like this, I mean, I get them every week, Jim, I am so busy. I shouldn’t say it that way, but I get busy with some of these opportunities. I really have to say no to people, especially as guests in my podcast. I’ve been over nine five shows now in three years, and people want to come on because we’re growing very fast. That’s great, because that’s a tool for

14:37 Jim Beach : my business, but also to kind of get you busy. What’s your number one revenue stream

14:46 Steve Ramona : would be ramex development. My part my business was with Max.

14:51 Jim Beach : Oh, is that where the max comes from? Ramona, yeah, yeah. Now it makes sense, yeah.

14:58 Steve Ramona : It’s, and it’s, you know. REMAX. People think about that. You know, we’re not REMAX, but we do real estate. Part of our development is real estate, and what we’ve developed, and here’s the power of partnering up. Is the ying and the yang, the connection. Max has been a CEO eight times manufacturing companies, very large. He’s an expert at business. I’m an expert at networking, putting people together, bringing partners, and we’ve worked beautifully together, because we just synergy is just amazing. So we’ve started a consulting firm. So some of the companies, we also do funding. When we fund them, we also consult with them to scale their business. So we kind of have three prongs to our business.

15:40 Jim Beach : How did all of this start? You say that you’ve been connector for 40 years in your LinkedIn bio, but you’re not that old. You’re only 31 so yeah, how did you get started being a super connector 40 years ago?

15:55 Steve Ramona : Well, it’s executive, because I was probably connecting my mom’s room. I think that’s why it’s nine years on math. Kitty, it started 18. I’m 64 and 18 years old. I just got done with high school to go play community college football. In the interim, I had summertime. I had to work, or, you know, my dad was making easy. You gotta work making money. We were well off. My dad always taught me work, work, work. And so I worked at the house club my family launched. And what was very interesting, at 18, I’m checking in 4056, year olds are driving Mercedes, you know, he’s 100, $200,000 cars, doing quite well in their business. Well, they started out with Tony. Have a great workout. Tony, have a great day. Jim. Have a great workout. You know, just very basic. And then in a month, it’s like, Tony, how was your your trip to the Baja? Oh, and he would tell me five minutes about his trip, and they leave. I go, Hey, Tony, have a great dinner with your wife tonight. You know, the conversation changed very surface level to very deep. And what happened? And Jim, I didn’t like this would happen, but they’d asked me out to lunch and teach me things about business. They’d asked me out to dinner. They’d give me resources. Hey, you know, Steve, I was thinking about you. Here’s a book to read, and when you read it, tell me what it’s about. And the book was basically, take 10% of your income and put it away. It’ll touch you. Well, when Tony showed me that, and I read the book, I started doing it or a couple times. I was not going to do that. I was gonna take the money out, and I didn’t. And 10 years later, I looked at the amount, and $68,000 in the account. I’m 28 years old. I thought I won the lottery, so I called Tony. Said, Hey, I need to pay you something. This is your business. He goes, No, I’m not gonna take any money what? I’m retired. But two, because I served you, I gave you that tip. I know my business grew because of you, indirectly. And Jim, my light bulb normally off and went. I took off from there, launching businesses and launching a restaurant, helping the guy launch a restaurant, doing the same thing, connecting people and asking them, hey, come to the restaurant.

17:58 Jim Beach : And we were packed all the time. I have to throw this out from Stanley and Danko. I was writing about this today, so it’s on the forefront of my mind. Two thirds of people that drive luxury automobiles lease and could not afford to buy the car outright.

18:14 Steve Ramona : That’s very true. A lot of a lot of thinking out, but Pretenders, I guess is the word, and that’s unfortunate, because people don’t care about that. They care about how you make them feel. And that’s why I love serving and love learning. Because every time I learn something, Jim, I could share with other people, I’ve launched my own community. I’m almost at 100 people, and every day I give them some tips, some help. I’ll be quick, I’ll jump on a webinar and give them tips, things I’ve learned. I’m always helping people, and my universe pays me every every week, something

18:47 Jim Beach : let’s talk about that the universe pays you. Is that karma? Is that vision boarding? You know, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about this idea, is it Christian God repaying you? What do you think is the actual mechanism for being repaid?

19:12 Steve Ramona : Really good question, universal faith. I’m a faith criminal, so I believe it’s God. But I’ll tell you a quick story, as on my chiropractor’s office, and he’s not building 15 years I’ve helped him with his business. Never charged him a cent. You know, he’d ask me questions. I’d give him tools. And he was talking to a gentleman, and the gentleman was talking about his son lost his job. He’s worried about him because he just laying around the house, which will not be good. And he turned to me, and he goes, Hey, Steve, meet so and so. Would you like to talk to his son, help him start a business? I said, Absolutely. About two weeks later, I got called. Remember vividly on a Monday night was this gentleman last year, and kind of went over some things, and, you know, at the end he goes, Steve, I didn’t have hope at all. I know my dad’s trying to help me, but you’ve given me hope. I said, Hey, I’m here. Reach out anytime or answer any questions you need. Well, next morning, I woke up and $500 was sent to me via PayPal. I had no idea. Nice research books. I had some time to found out I had referred to a coaching program to somebody, and somebody signed up that I referred three months ago to me. That’s not always going to happen so direct like that, but I know that happened because I’ve been serving people and serving people. The other part of this is door opportunities. In business with opportunity, doors open. It’s powerful if you take care of it, do action, do all that stuff. I’ve had so many doors open, Jim, I can’t believe

20:39 Jim Beach : I’m blessed. What about that guy who’s living at home with his parents in the basement still? Maybe you know one of these Gen Z’s or something like that, who can’t figure out what they want out of life and are playing video games and masturbating and smoking pot for a life they don’t have a clue what they want to do. But how do you respond to that? You know, you woke up and have 48 things you want to do today. What is your response to someone who says, I don’t know,

21:13 Steve Ramona : take a piece of paper here. Take action. Me and Jim can’t do it for you know, we shouldn’t. We don’t enable you. But take a piece of paper out and write down what you’re passionate about. Your purpose will come here. I don’t know video games, if that’s what they are. It’s gonna take something that me and you are wave on our heads to do that. It’s just not I was there, Jim. I we sold the health club in 2000 Well, my resume was 20 years at health club. I could get on there. Could get jobs, but, you know, I wasn’t going to tech. I’m in the Bay Area. There’s technically tech, you know, resume. So I don’t even around the house watching Oprah. I remember I could put image on the floor, in a pillow, watching Oprah one o’clock in the afternoon. But what shifted was, again, somebody in my network from the health club that built a relationship reached out to me. I remember sitting on the on the floor to get the phone call from Jim saying, hey, come meet me at the restaurant. I got an opportunity for you, and it was helped his restaurant. I told him, I know nothing about restaurants. He goes, No, I’ll teach you all about the restaurant. And like I said, six months we’re one of the fastest growing restaurants in the world. So it’s going to take you sitting there. You’ve got to reach out. You got to take action. If you want to talk to me, I’ll talk to you. I can show how easy this is, because right now you lay it on the couch or playing video games. The opportunity to launch a business, even it’s 1000 a month, you’re doing something every day to keep you busy. It’s easier than to do it today than ever. And for very inexpensive you can start a podcast, and that’s a business for free right now, it’ll cost you nothing. Just jump on a zoom. Just reach out to people. Say, I want to interview. Just ask them questions like we’re doing today.

23:02 Jim Beach : Why aren’t there more women only gyms? It seems like the number one complaint women have is the men gawking, and they don’t like that. So why don’t we have a chain, a huge, national chain, of women only workout spaces?

23:19 Unknown Speaker : Well, they’re all well, they’re, well,

23:22 Jim Beach : I know my wife city because my friend runs it, yeah,

23:26 Steve Ramona : exclusive thing women. You know, the famous industry has changed dramatically. When we were in, you know, from 78 to 2000 it’s not how cheap can you be or how super expensive you can be. There’s no middle gym. We were a middle gym, like there was the gym worth $15 $20 a month. We were $50 a month, and there were gyms that were under 15 a month. We had that little sweet spot there where it was just enough, where people could afford it. We customer service was our top thing. I think what’s happening? You’re going to see more and more of it is women being recognized as business owners? I think women are incredible business owners. I’ve interviewed probably 100 rock star, multi billion, multi billionaires, or billionaire women business owners. Sarah blankly comes to my mind, powerful business woman that started from scratch to nothing.

24:20 Jim Beach : Yes, she’s here in Atlanta. Oh, we see her around all the time with her husband and her kids with their wacko names. She’s one of those who gives her kids the strangest names on Earth. I don’t remember now, I have to look it up. You mentioned podcast, starting a business with a podcast, it’s easy to record. How do you make money off of it? What would you guess?

24:42 Steve Ramona : Guests, all my success, so all the success you’ve heard these ceramics development came I do a podcast. I get done the

24:53 Jim Beach : guest is excited because I’m excited. You’re having

24:56 Steve Ramona : me on your podcast. You’re sharing my brand, what I be, how I. Can help people to a large world. So the whole essence of a podcast is very positive energy. When you get done, you go, Hey, Jim, you did this and this, and we just did that with our podcast. I noticed these couple things you did I said on the podcast. Man, Jim is brilliant, edifying them, building this high energy. So when you get done, they go, man, that’s a great podcast. It just had happened yesterday. And the gentleman goes, Man, this is great. How can I help you? You’ve been so great to me. I said I’m looking for landowners and real Energy Partners. Well, within an hour, an email connected to a guy that’s, you know, multi million dollars in renewable energy, looking for somebody like us, it could make us a million dollars. So you’ve got to ask. You’ve got to bring value. You’ve got to be uplifting energy as much as you can. You have to be like me on high energy. But just the victim is the ask, because the worst things that happens, I cannot help you. And I’ve heard that many times, and it’s in my head, I just say next not to them, because I’m going to stay connected to them. Because Jim, here’s the power of podcasting and developing this network, is they’re going to meet new people every month. I just got a referral last week from a podcast I did two years ago. I have not talked to the guest in two years, and gave me two incredible referral celebrities to be on my podcast. That’s the power of this. It just builds that network. It’s a tool.

26:30 Jim Beach : I started a podcast just to in the restaurant industry, and it didn’t work, but my methodology was I made a list of the 50 people I would like to sell to that year, those were the 50 people I invited on the podcast.

26:48 Steve Ramona : There you go. I’m here to borrow that Jim, that’s fantastic.

26:54 Jim Beach : Is Sarah blakely’s kid’s name, laser.

26:57 Unknown Speaker : Laser. Yeah, yeah, that’s right, yeah.

27:02 Jim Beach : No. But seriously, if you want to meet somebody, have them on a podcast, and then you are off and running, there’s a brand here in Atlanta called Business Radio X, and they take it a step further. They invite you on the podcast, but then you have to go to their studio, and they have a green room built out and everything. And the whole thing is a pitch. You don’t know that until you’re getting pitched, but it’s a great way to meet your organized group of the top 50 people you want to meet. So, yeah, it’s powerful. I tried that handheld payment systems for restaurants. Why did that never catch on?

27:50 Steve Ramona : I don’t know. Because every time I see them, I think they’re fantastic.

27:53 Jim Beach : Me too. Europe has them everywhere, Asia too, but here in the United States, it’s still like 4% penetration.

27:59 Steve Ramona : Well, that restaurant history is a whole different ball game. It’s, it’s, to me, I think it’s a wild wild west. You can have great ones, you can have terrible ones.

28:09 Jim Beach : Unfortunately, I live about a mile from, I don’t know what the name of it is now. It’s a building where nine or 10 different restaurants do take out only. It’s like a community of kitchens that makes it easier for the delivery people to pick up for multiple places at one time. Wow, have you heard of this? No, yeah, and it’s nine or 10 different restaurants that maybe have a location a mile or two or 10 away, but they all work in that one facility, and you see outside five or 10 people picking up for Uber Eats or whatever, continuously, non stop. That’s beautiful. I love that. Well, tell that to your restaurant friends, and they can do it out there in your new city. Yeah, I will definitely, I heard you were going to name the city after me. Is that true?

29:07 Steve Ramona : Yeah, the beach city of love

29:11 Jim Beach : for a city. I mean, there are a lot of

29:14 Steve Ramona : cities actually, is. It’s actually already named. It’s called McDermott, so we, I don’t think we can change the name. So it’s an, actually, it’s an existing city for just 200 people there. We need to bring 10,000 people are coming to work there and next two years. So we need to build complete infrastructure for 10,000 people. Imagine it’s not gonna be a small

29:35 Jim Beach : city. Well, you’re gonna need more than 500 million then.

29:39 Steve Ramona : Well, yeah, it’s, yeah. Well, this, you know, government’s coming in, because we’re next door to two lithium mines. They’re going to do over 1.6 trillion pounds of lithium, largest mines in the world. And we know the power of lithium, how much people need it right now. So yes,

29:54 Jim Beach : and that’s in Nevada.

29:56 Steve Ramona : Nevada, Nevada, Oregon, border. You.

30:00 Jim Beach : I didn’t know that’s here the United States.

30:03 Steve Ramona : Well, there’s other locations this. This just responds to so there’s two different companies found to the largest, I forget the word, they use areas where there’s lithium. They, you know, they do their research, and they still find more and more and more.

30:18 Jim Beach : I think the world is of abundance. You know, we’re still not running out of gas. We still have more reserves of petroleum than we did last year. And it’s never been that’s always the trend. It’s never gone down. Our proven reserves has never gone down. Just we keep using keep using it, but the reserves keep going up. And so this whole idea of running out of energy makes no sense today. I don’t understand that we run out of stones in the stone age.

30:44 Unknown Speaker : Yes, it’s true, Steve, we

30:47 Jim Beach : were out of time. We blew through that really fast. I am well, that was fast. How do we find out more? Get connected with you. Throw some money toward a

30:57 Steve Ramona : city reached out to me. Steve R 1960 one@gmail.com Steve R 1961 gmail.com if you like podcasts, reach out or take a peek at doing business with a servant’s heart. When you search it, you’ll be the first one pops up. Fantastic.

31:12 Jim Beach : Thank you so much for being with us. I would love to be connected with you and to maintain and grow our friendship and relationship, and I appreciate you being with us.

31:20 Unknown Speaker : Thank you very much. And that’s dark, and we will be right back.

31:35 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us today. Very excited to introduce another great guest, please welcome Patrick Grimes to the show. He started off in automation and robotics and was having very successful career there, but he decided that he wanted more and something different. We’ll ask him about that transition. And he moved into passive investing, and had some success and some failures, and now has sort of had a really good run. He has three or four websites that we want to talk about, passive investing mastery.com, and also invest on Main street.com he literally has other outside investments that you might not think of, for example, investing in medical litigation and stuff like that. He has written four books that we have run across, all relevant to our space. He has one called persistence, pivots and game changers, changers, Pivotal leadership, and then another one, persuasive leadership. And then, most recently, published a book called Lessons from thought leaders, which has got a whole bunch of other people in it, all rockets, rock stars, as well as a very impressive group of authors. Patrick, welcome to the show. How you doing?

32:54 Patrick Grimes : I’m doing well. Thanks for having me. I’m sure it’s going to be exciting conversation today.

32:58 Jim Beach : I hope so so other transitions you made as well. What was wrong with robotics? I mean, that’s the hottest space possible, tons of job opportunities, tons of opportunity for advancement. How did robots get hiring to you?

33:13 Patrick Grimes : Yeah, actually highly recommend it as a career path to somebody out there aspiring. Getting to the blend of AI and robotics is just an incredible opportunity right now. And I am a geek inside. I mean, I was a kid doing Legos, you know, and building alarm systems for my room and, you know, every and that turned into mechanical design engineering. And I was doing robotic stuff for the rotor assembly at Tesla for solar satellites at Lockheed and missiles for Raytheon and all kinds of stuff medical devices. And I loved it for many years, and it supported me well, and I was able to take the excess income and invest in in various projects, which ultimately took over and became what I do. But I highly recommend it, and I miss it. But what happened was I got married. When I was about to get married, I realized that between my day job, w2 and robotics, it was just all wholly consuming. I could my my investment was moonlighting my day job, and there wasn’t a lot of space, so I turned into a contractor simultaneously with getting married. And I got married in California and Beijing, and then when we went to have a kid, I then, you know, decided, look, maybe it’s time for me to leave the engineering stuff behind and focus purely on my investment career. And I when most people are craving security when they get married or having a kid, I was taking decisive steps in the opposite direction, and I was looking to take a risk that gave me more time and location, freedom and availability to be there for the family. And so I went the opposite direction. And then we. To entrepreneurial ship.

35:02 Jim Beach : Married a Chinese woman.

35:05 Patrick Grimes : I did. She was going to Cal Arts, the school Disney started, and she was working at the feature the animation studios, and I was there doing some robotic stuff. And we met, and it was a great time. And at the wedding, her dad was super clear and Mandarin with the translator, announced that the plan wasn’t for her to stay. But yet, here she is.

35:30 Jim Beach : Well, you’re the winner there. I think Chinese American children are just beautiful. That particular mix, I think, turns out really well.

35:39 Patrick Grimes : So he is completely stunning, and he turns eyes everywhere we go. It is just unbelievable. How cute this kid is. How old now

35:50 Jim Beach : he’s three. Ah, great age as well. That’s one of my favorite ages. So yeah, you transitioned into investment work. Tell us about passive investing, and start getting a little more professional here. Tell us about the business. Well, you know, I

36:08 Patrick Grimes : wasn’t all dazes and dandelions, you know, I, when I my first venture was back in 2009 and 10, and I lost everything. And then when I started, I got back into it, after the subprime mortgage collapsed, into investing, and I had a master’s in engineering MBA, but then I lost all my time, and then I traded into larger apartments, and I partnered up. Then I realized I’m just getting highly indexed into what was high tech and then real estate again, and I never forgot sort of that need to be balanced. Need to have allocations into resilient markets. And so then I set up a company called passive investing mastery. And it basically comes down to, like many of your listeners, I was just a hard working professional. I was doing, well, I was doing all the right things, Masters in Engineering, MBA, right? You know, moving companies, climbing the ladder, but all I knew about was the 50 stocks and startups and some cryptocurrencies nobody was telling me anything about. Here’s the 50 different ways you can invest into alternative investments that don’t have the same market fundamentals and aren’t driven by the same factors as real estate in the stock market and and by the way, they’ll build real stability, real security in your financial portfolio. And so I created a company because I was trading these alternative investment strategies. Was just a handful of dudes. It was like we were baseball card traders. Hey, have you seen this deal? What do you know about that? And I was, I’m so curious, and I’m just so interested all the time. Passive investing mastery does a combination of educating on all the different ways. We host webinar series, live panels with experts, two or three people that have been doing different strategies for decades, and including things like gold mining or Forex or timberland or cannabis or any kind of real estate you can think of, right or urban barrel task investing or pilot education, or we’re playing for cash flow, or just an immense amount of different things. Ai data centers, we educate on all of these different asset classes. We have just one on RV parks. I can’t list them all, because we’ve had over 50 of these. Now we also educate on strategies, how to do it safely, with asset protection, how to do it efficiently with tax strategies, how to build a state plant so the government doesn’t take your wealth when you pass how to do 1031, exchanges, all of these kinds of things we educate on, we’re there. This is what I think you should actually learn in high school and college. Nobody’s teaching this stuff. So that’s why we created a platform. And we not only have a platform where I educate on every way to invest, we also sponsor investments and ones that are true to our mission, building true financial security through non correlated alternatives. So we have real estate equity, debt, predictable cash flow and growth, and then we have medical investments and investments in legal industry, which what I’m most excited about, because those are the ones that are lesser known get a bit higher return for a lower risk profile than the more popular ones, and they simply don’t care what’s going on, stock market, real estate, interest rates, gold, oil and gas, they’re driven by completely different market fundamentals and the market trends, regardless of the volatility in the world. And legal and medical tend to go up into the right

39:39 Jim Beach : so explain litigation finance to me. I assume that a tobacco company is getting sued, and you help the plaintiff, the people suing the tobacco company, to pay for their lawyers, and hope that you get a victory. If you get a victory, they get a you get a chunk. Am I right?

39:59 Patrick Grimes : I. Pretty close. Yeah. In fact, the most notable, and one of the first big examples of third party funding of litigation proceedings was in 1920 when people were walking around with these horrific illnesses and dying, and they said, You know what? Maybe American Tobacco is lying to us. Maybe these cigarettes, maybe they’re actually not healthy. And it was, in fact, in order for the Goliath to be beaten, people had to prop up the Davids and third party funders came in and said, Look, attorneys, these harmed people don’t have the funds to represent themselves, but we’ll fund this. They’ll tell you what, and we’ll once you settle or come up with the judgment, we would like a share of the attorney’s proceeds, not the plaintiff’s proceeds, not the harm, but the attorney’s proceeds, and that contingency fee agreement that you have in place. And so litigation finance is just that. It’s modern day versions of the exact same thing, like, for example, Camp Lejeune, where, for 17 years, the Department of Defense fed contaminated water to our military civilians and their families at a marine base or sexual assault victims in the LA juvenile detention center, where, or again, decades, 1000s of our Children were harmed because they weren’t properly cared for an alley juvenile detention center, and that just settled for 4 billion last April, and Camp Lejeune now has a settlement grid providing relief to the soldiers or their next of kin in the range of 50 to $450,000 to help with Those and there’s many other different versions of those cases, but those are some of the cases that we’re helping fund. Attorneys through a secured interest and their assets and guarantees and a small percentage of what they’re intending to get back their estimated settlement amounts, and we diversify across hundreds of different individual lawsuits, many different types of cases, and lots of different attorneys, and we call it a diversified

42:09 Jim Beach : litigation portfolio. So how do you find out about the cases? How do you and the lawyers Connect? There’s not a marketplace for this online, like it, you know, stock.com, or something. You know, how do you find out about the cases and all of the various lawyers and stuff?

42:29 Patrick Grimes : That’s one of the reasons why it makes it so attractive, because it is many people consider a bit of a novel asset class, although it’s established and mass tort costs are, you know, large 500 billion. They’re actually on the 800 million globally, or something. I think they’re on the same size as the global airline industry, wildly enough, but it is a little bit of a lesser known, harder to access, and it tends to be through relationships. In fact, my partner in the business has been, has experienced in litigation for 15 years. He’s initiated efforts through spending over 500 million to collect over 20 billion through litigation funding. And that’s pretty incredible. There’s not a lot of individuals out there like that. The majority of his career was spent in private equity, where he was working with private equity firms, sovereign funds, hedge funds, and deploying 20, $50 million checks through the course of several years, me and him met on real estate deals, apartment investments, and we got to build a friendship. And through that, and when he hung up his hat, I was nagging and wanting to get involved in litigation investments for years when we hung up his hat and he moved from New York back to California, he called me up and said, Look, maybe we’ll do it. Let’s set up a fund for accredited investors and try and give investors access that otherwise wouldn’t have it to this very attractive asset that provides high growth potential

44:01 Jim Beach : and what kind of ROI Have you gotten historically on those

44:06 Patrick Grimes : well, so no litigation fund is the same. There are just like you would say in real estate. Well, what’s your ROI for a real estate investment? No. So every, every kind of, you know, people, if people are out there talking about legal funding, they could be doing really early on, speculative kind of coin flip, win, loss type investments, just like how there’s oil and cat so wild cat oil and gas drillers, right? Or there’s venture capital, seed funding, angel investing, right, where you’re hoping to get 100x returns that exists in real estate too, as well as I lost everything in 2009 doing pre development. But there’s also on the other end of the spectrum, investments in each industry which are kind of late stage or more predictable, rinse and repeat. And we call those in our fund. Are single event cases with established law. So you have attorneys out there running cases where they’ve just run a ton of them before, and they have pretty clear understanding of where they settle and what timelines, or they’re what we consider a mass tort case that’s late stage. And tort just means there was a harm or injustice done to somebody, and mass just means a mass number of people harmed, or there was an injustice done by a similar corporation or institution or government a defendant, right? And so in those particular cases, we tend to get involved in a very late stage something called causality is established and liability so that we know well, the defendant, did they cause this, that the product or service, or whatever it was, that they cause it this harm, how are they liable for it? And typically, when we’re involved, there’s usually not as more of a matter of how much and when versus will and settle and just like the cases that I mentioned previously, and so in those kinds of cases, you know you can do pretty well. There are 20 to 30% what we call internal rate of returns, that you can bag on, funds like this. And of course, there are targets and projections. There’s no guarantees, of course, but when you hyper, hyper, diversify it across lots of, you know, different cases, you start to build some downside protection, right? And you structure returns with the attorney so that you get the first dollars coming out, and they get the last and you start to build, you know, some upside. But limiting your upside to protect your downside, right? So that’s kind of how we’ve

46:47 Jim Beach : structured it. Tell me about the medical receivables section of the business,

43:37 Jim Beach : Well, even in this you know, here in Georgia, we make fun of Alabama, and you in New York make fun of Jersey all the time, so we even do that inside the states. All right, let’s go through some of the book. I will give you a topic, and you tell me the story. So managing the clock across cultures. Give me the story that is in chapter two and some of the learning points.

43:58 MichaelAaron Flicker : Yeah, well, you know, it was about a trip that I made to Havana, Cuba, seven years ago, and it wasn’t for business, obviously, because Americans have frequented from doing business there, but it was a fun trip. A friend that was able to arrange a New Year’s Eve celebration for us in Havana, and so we went and of course, the clocks don’t work, because time is secondary to everything else in Cuba, as is the case in much of Latin America, not all of Latin America, but much of Latin America. And so this chapter is really all about the lessons that are important to learn when working in cultures where time and time management and being having to make decisions according to the clock and the calendar and deadlines and things like that is really a secondary concern or a tertiary concern. It’s may not even be on the table. There are far more important things that affect decision making in these cultures and and one of the lessons that you need to. Know about that. What are the things that you can do to manage it? Should you be doing business in Latin America, in other parts of Latin America where you can do business as a US American? And so these lessons are again, based on the fact that you can’t change the culture that you’re choosing to work with. That’s not your job, and it’s a long process to try to do that, but you can manage it and manage it for success, and so that’s what we talk about in that chapter.

45:30 Jim Beach : I was in Nicaragua a couple of years ago visiting a roommate from my MBA. I did International MBA, and he ended up moving to Nicaragua, and I found it amazingly easy to do business there. The culture was very receptive, and as long as you don’t talk about the noriegas people love you there, and culturally, though, no business really happens until eight o’clock at night. You know, I thought that was when business started in Nicaragua. So very

46:06 Jim Beach : interesting, I think, business wise, yes,

46:54 Patrick Grimes : a bit easier to explain. I think people are familiar with going to doctors or healthcare providers, and as long as you have insurance, they’re going to jump right on it and provide it provide that care. But what a lot of people don’t realize is, turns out, maybe you pay your co pay. But where does the other piece come from? Well, it comes from an obligor, typically, some of the best payers in the country, their government, Medicare, medical Medicaid, I mean, or commercial insurance, Blue Cross, Blue Shield. So they pay right away. Actually they don’t. It’s called the timing gap. And depending upon the type of care that you get and how you were to have gotten injured, maybe it was just a normal, typical injury. It could be 30 days or 60 days before the insurance company pays, sometimes 90 or 80 Days. But what if you go in there and you check the box that it was a work related injury or an auto related injury? Well, now you have workman’s comp and auto insurance. Would you believe that those sometimes take one to two and sometimes three years to pay. Imagine if you’re a doctor, or you’re any kind of contractor, or you go to work and every so often the boss goes, Oh, today, the work you did will pay in two to three years from now, and you’re gonna have to fight us that long. It’s pretty extraordinary. So these medical practices, healthy medical practices with a great track record, lots of assets, great track record of collecting on Bill claims. They’re sitting with 510, 15 million and what we call accounts receivables, legal contracts from from the care that they provided to obligors insurance companies, and they may say, Look, man, I’m I’m a healthy practice, but I really want to buy a building. I want to buy some more equipment, I want to hire some people. I can’t do that just, you know, it’s just, if I’m not getting paid on some of this stuff, can you take a small percentage of this accounts receivable and

48:56 Jim Beach : provide some financing on it? And that’s what we’ll do.

49:01 Patrick Grimes : Won’t provide some advancement on their receivables. We’ll change the payment direction to us so those receivables, put it in a lockbox account, and when we get paid our principal and and our return, will then give them the upside beyond that, but then they have near term liquidity to be able to invest in their business, invest in growth. It’s a great alternative investment, just like in legal industry, the medical industry just doesn’t rise and fall with greater economic volatility. It’s just very stable. And we’re not necessarily financing practices. We’re actually buying obligations to some of the strongest payers in the country, which is means you have a lot of confidence in their ability to pay. So provides for really great, you know, low to middle team returns, and it can cash flow, which is exciting for most investors.

49:57 Jim Beach : And tell me about your edge. Educational Series, and how frequent is that? And how do we get to continue to learn from you?

50:06 Patrick Grimes : If you go to passive investing mastery, all spelled out. I know it’s long, but it says what I wanted to say, passive investing mastery.com. You’re going to see our investments to the top, and just below that, you’re going to see an opt in for our alternative investing mastery series, and that I highly recommend everybody dive in, because it is really challenging to even learn about the opportunities to invest in alternatives, and it’s our blue ocean approach to just get all the options out there, and financial planner and your financial advisor, you’re going to be pretty upset about this, because you’re their annuity, you’re their family’s annuity, and they’re clinging on, holding on to your 401, K, which can be self directed, or your if you’re a prior employer, or your IRA, or any or cash deposits that you have, and they do everything they can to make sure that you don’t know about these. So take an opportunity to educate yourself. Learn about them. There’s, I mean, it’s just, it’s just a bi weekly webinar. I think we do them almost every week now, but it’s a bi weekly webinar series. And in the meantime, set up a call. I’ll even shoot you a copy of our book. Go to passive investing mastery.com/book. That’s the secret link, slash book at the end of our website. Make sure you put in the name of this podcast in the form, or else we don’t send it out if you’re random. But we’ll send you a copy of the book. We sign it, send it out and lessons from thought leaders and set up a call. You know, if wherever you’re at in your journey, one of the things I love to do is just talk to people, learn where they’re at. And maybe we’re a stop along your journey, whether it be through education or some of our investments, but if not, man, I have a Rolodex of over 50 different alternative strategies that might be and we can help get you pointed in the right direction.

52:03 Jim Beach : Amazing, very, very cool. I’m going to sign up for some of these classes. The great thing, though, Patrick, is if I have to come visit my advisor every year, I get a tax write off trip to Hawaii every year, right?

52:21 Patrick Grimes : Well, we can join the tax strategy one, and we’ll give you about 10 other write offs that you’ve probably not taken advantage of too.

52:30 Jim Beach : But I get to write my trips off to Hawaii. If I talk to you, have breakfast one morning in our seven day trip, right? Doesn’t that become deductible? Then I

52:40 Patrick Grimes : can’t give tax advice, but I believe that if you’re engaging in, you know, real business for your investment business, that could be a potential write off for you.

52:49 Jim Beach : Yes, I remember the first time I went to Hawaii in 1975 or something. My dad was a doctor, and one morning he was like, Y’all go to the beach. And he had his class that morning, and we got the entire trip. I assume my dad wrote the entire trip off. You know, that’s the way doctors were back then, in the 70s and stuff. As a matter of fact, I think they even got paid to go on that trip during the 70s, which is illegal now, but I’m pretty sure I can write that off. I would try it and then fight the moment again.

53:21 Patrick Grimes : So Patrick, whatever your CPA says you can do, I recommend you take advantage of it.

53:26 Jim Beach : Yes, very, very cool, very, very impressive, and give us that URL one more time, please.

53:33 Patrick Grimes : Yeah, passive investing mastery.com, and if you want to email me, just put Patrick at in front of that, be happy to check

53:41 Jim Beach : fantastic Patrick, thank you so much for being with us. Great, great information, and we’d love to have you back. Thank you so much. Thank you. We are out of time, but back tomorrow. Be safe, take care and go make a million dollars by now you.