September 25, 2026 – The Perfect Portfolio Mark Quann and Gift of Reinvention Jay Sargeant

00:00 Into 1: In the AM, broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, while 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.

00:20 Jim Beach: Hello, everyone, welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. So, you know, we have people who help me, and we have a system where the publicist of the world send in their guest, and we say, yes, we would love to interview this guest. So I want to make sure that I’m not taking any credit for the most amazing show ever. The credit goes to these guests that we just happen to be able to bring to you. Two amazing guests in one show. It’s so worth your money. First, we have Mark Quann of the perfect portfolio. This is one of the most challenging interviews I’ve ever done. I had to listen to it 3 times. I have read it. I bought the book. It is amazing and blew my mind. It’s going to be, if you haven’t heard from Mark and what he is doing. It is revolutionary. Then we have Jay Sargeant 80 years old and still out there working. He is a franchise expert and we have some great fun, great stories from coach Jay. I took 2.5 pages of notes from that interview. So I’ve done my part today to fantastic guest for you. Do your part. Listen and enjoy and learn and tell a friend or two, and thanks for being with us. We’ll get started in just a second. Oh, go buy my book, The Real Environmentalist, finalist for one kind of the book of the year thing. All right. We are backing again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce a lot of money to you right now. Here is a great guest who’s going to teach you how to be smart, pay 0 taxes and die rich. Please welcome Mark Quann. He is the CEO of the perfect portfolio, an author of a book with 800 5 star reviews on Amazon. The book is called Be Smart, Pay Zero Taxes. Use the buy, borrow, die, strategy to get rich, and stay rich. Mark, welcome to the show. How you doing?

02:23 Mark Quann: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

02:26 Jim Beach: This should be a lot of fun today.

02:28 Mark Quann: I hope so.

02:29 Jim Beach: Yes, 800 reviews puts you in the top one% of books, I think. So that is incredibly impressive. Walk us through the strategy. All right. So does it start with kill rich ant.

02:41 Mark Quann: No, it doesn’t. Doesn’t start that. You don’t, I didn’t have a rich aunt. I was grew up in extreme poverty. I had that on both sides of my family. So there was no rich ants to, you know, take out to get to wealthy. So I had to figure out how to do it myself. I was a financial advisor for 15 years in California. I did that. Um, I realized the entire financial system is pretty much is fraudulent uh, by nature. Um, so I resigned from the financial industry in 2018 and I started building my own company and re-educating myself about how money and taxes work. So the strategy that I found was during coronavirus. And it’s, good.

03:24 Jim Beach: Before you go into that. Can you go back and defend isn’t the right word? Elucinated us more on the market as fraud, fraudulent, I think is.

03:33 Mark Quann: Well, it’s not it’s not the market that’s fraud, it’s fraud. The market is amazing. It’s very efficient. It’s capitalism, right? It’s, you know, but the financial service industry itself and how it’s built. So the people that educate the financial advisors and the CPAs are basically Wall Street and big government. So if you, when’s the last time that government and Wall Street got together to help everyone pay no taxes and and make their families wealthy, right? It’s probably going to be the opposite. So I found that to be true. So I resigned as a financial advisor, uh, gave up a huge amount of money and uh, left the industry in 2018.

04:14 Jim Beach: All right. Now we’re ready to talk about that and what happened in the lockdown. So continue with that part of the story.

04:22 Mark Quann: Okay, so coronavirus was happening. I resigned in 2018 and I started a consulting company in Los Angeles. I used to go to wealthy neighborhoods like Beverly Hills, Malibu, La Jolla, and I was teaching, you know, wealthy families about real estate tax codes. And then, uh, coronavirus happened and all my seminars canceled. So I was like, what am I going to do? So I know how to invest. So I had what’s called a triple short on the stock market. I was betting down 3 times on the stock market during coronavirus. I was making money on the way down. And then when it hit the bottom, I reversed it and I bet up times 3 and I started making a lot of money and fortunately that day, I started posting all my trades on Instagram. So all my trades during coronavirus are still on Instagram. I was making a lot of money. I was my followers were making lots of money. All my friends and family were making lots of money, and they told me, Mark, you need to start a financial education company, and that’s when the perfect portfolio was born.

05:30 Jim Beach: Okay, fantastic. And let’s just keep going with the book. I don’t really feel like, Mark, I need to ask you questions. I just hit play and you go. So what are what’s the thesis of the the system, the pandemic epiphany that you had?

05:46 Mark Quann: You know what? It was, it was, it was interesting because I came across this investment company called M1 Finance and I’d never seen anything of it before. I was kind of skeptical, but people said some big good things about it. And it was the only investment account where you can invest, and then there was a Boro button. Okay? I was like, that’s really interesting. There’s a borrow button so I could literally invest. I could borrow money and I could send it to my bank account as a low interest loan. At that time during coronavirus, you could take loans at 2% interest. And it was interesting. I was investing what’s called a covered call ETF. It’s an ETF you can buy in your account, and it pays a 12% dividend. So it was investing in a 12% dividend.

06:36 Jim Beach: Find an ETF for our listeners.

06:38 Mark Quann: Exchange traded fund. It’s like a bucket. It’s like a, it’s like a bucket. It’s like a stock, except within that stock, within that ETF. They could trade stock options. They could put gold, a silver. They could put Bitcoin in that. And then you just basically trade it like a stock. So just think of it like a stock and you could put stocks inside of it, but they can also do complex, like trade options, generate income inside of it. So that’s what an ETF is.

07:09 Jim Beach: Okay, keep going then.

07:10 Mark Quann: Okay, so I could buy an ETF that they did a complex options trade called a covered call, and I could generate a 12% dividend, but I could borrow money at 2% interest and send it to my bank account. Now, if you’re borrowing, if you’re in earning 12. It’s a 10 point spread, and I was like, wait a second, this can’t be true. So I started doing it and I started teaching 100s of people how to do it. Okay? So I’ve been teaching it. I taught over a 1000 people, one on one. Not my team personally in the past 5.5 years. I’ve taught over a 1000 people, this system, one on one. And I made a lot of people financially free.

07:54 Jim Beach: Okay, so the system is investing in ETFs, is that the core system?

07:59 Mark Quann: There’s 5 pillars. So the overall strategy is called buy, borrow, die. Okay. My youngest student is 9 years old and they’re a pro addict. Okay So anybody can do it. You need $100 in a brokerage account to start it at $2000 in your brokerage account, you can have a borrow button. So if you buy stocks and ETFs.

08:20 Jim Beach: Is that on bank swim or something like that you’re talking about?

08:24 Mark Quann: No, it’s called it’s called M1 Finance. M1 Finance is the only place that really works for this. Okay. And you can borrow. You can invest and keep investing forever. Now, if you don’t sell it. You don’t pick taxes correct?

08:39 Jim Beach: Yeah.

08:40 Mark Quann: No capital gains. Well, if you borrowed, let’s say you add $5000 in the account of great stocks, right? And then you, let’s say you wanted a silver ETF. Okay? You could borrow a $500 and go buy a silver ETF and now you own the silver ETF and all the stocks. You didn’t pay taxes on the $500, right?

09:00 Jim Beach: Yeah.

09:01 Mark Quann: You avoided income taxes. Okay. So you didn’t pay capital gains. You didn’t pay income taxes to build your wealth. And then if you die under current tax code, you can transfer up to $30000000 to your family, totally a tax free with a step up in basis. So it just means that the assets that you bought. They may have been worth a dollar. If they’re worth a 100, you die. The new basis is a 100. Your family doesn’t pay taxes, and then you teach your family the buy, borrow, die strategy.

09:33 Jim Beach: Okay. So you’re on this one platform and you’re buying or borrowing. What happens if the market goes the other way? Isn’t this a big opportunity? Obviously there’s a way to lose a lot of money here, right?

09:47 Mark Quann: Yes, over leveraging would be if you get greedy. Okay. If you borrow for tax code, it’s a guaranteed rate of return. So, uh, for example, I’ll give you a really try and keep it really, really simple. Let’s say I have $10,000 in my brokerage account. I bought Google Nvidia, Amazon, Costco, a bunch of stocks that are, that are really good, and maybe some index funds, index funds that tend to be much more stable, much less ups and downs, because they build a portfolio. Now, I need a computer for my business. Okay? I need a $2000 high-end computer for my business. I can either work hard, pay taxes and fight inflation, or I could press the borrow button. I could borrow $2000, send it to my bank account. I go buy a computer for my business. Well, that’s a tax deduction on money that didn’t exist. The government owes me money now. Makes sense?

10:42 Jim Beach: So that’s a guaranteed rate. Borrow, right?

10:45 Mark Quann: You actually don’t. You actually don’t. When you die, there’s a step up in basis, and then the loans are paid off secured by the brokerage account.

10:54 Jim Beach: Okay. Okay.

10:55 Mark Quann: So yeah. It’s it’s just it’s that simple. From let’s take it to a high end level. Elon Musk, how did he buy Twitter?

11:03 Jim Beach: Uh, from other investors and borrowed money.

11:06 Mark Quann: Yeah, he basically said, hey, I’ve got $50000000000 of stock. Uh, calls the bank and says, you want to own me 44 billion? They go, sure, they transfer 44000000000 to his account and he owns Twitter. He didn’t work or pay taxes on it. Now he owes an entirely new company, and he literally just took a loan. He, he borrowed, he bought it with digital entries on a computer screen. Yes, and the bank’s not calling them and asking for the loan back because they don’t care. Now his stock’s worth a trillion. They don’t really care if they ever get the loan because eventually he’s going to die and they’ll get their loan paid back.

11:47 Jim Beach: Okay, so you think that that loan will go all the way until Elon dies?

11:52 Mark Quann: I would assume so. I mean, I’m not trying to pay back debt. I’m trying to take on more debt. I borrow. I buy more assets, right? If I buy silver and gold ETFs. Well, the silver and gold go up as the dollar goes down. So my debt disappears. Even if I don’t pay it off. Because the dollar goes down, my gold and silver go up. Over time, the more they print money, the higher in the valuation rate, the faster I get wealthy, and I do it with money that’s never been taxed. Inflation makes me wealthy, and I build my wealth without having to work.

12:30 Jim Beach: All right, I’m going to have to see this visually. Are there some good charts and pictures in the book?

12:37 Mark Quann: I could, I could, I could send you, There’s there’s lots, there’s lots, so I, what happens is I wrote, I, I, I caught, I taught the course for 4 years and then Newsmax, uh, from the Newsmax. They reached out to me and said, hey, would you like to partner up on a book? I said, I was thinking about doing it anyways. So I wrote a book. I partnered with Newsmax. It hit number one on all of Amazon. So not just in category, the number one book on all of Amazon when it came out, so it was, um, kind of did really well there. And, um, I basically wrote the book based on the course. And all the people that I had taught. Um, so, yeah, now we have, we we teach homeschool students. I mean, I have kids 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 and 10 years old, learning how you use the buy, borrow, die strategy and they’re doing very well with it.

13:37 Jim Beach: All right. What happens if you need to pull money out?

13:41 Mark Quann: You just press the borrow button and send it to your bank account? You wouldn’t want to liquidate it, right? You’d trigger capital gains taxes. So why would you ever liquidate? Why wouldn’t you just take a no interest loan? Create money up. You could just borrow like that forever, are they? Well, currently I owe I owe M1 $800,000. I’m not going to pay it back. I’m going to keep growing my investments and when I die, It’ll pay back. Pay back my emerging when I’m dead. Because the bank, the bank. My brokerage account, my brokerage account’s about $2 million. I borrowed $800,000. I bought additional assets, though. I bought real estate. I bought precious medals. I bought all these assets. Remember, your debt is priced in US dollar, so it’s going down as my assets are going up. My real estate, my precious metals, my bitcoin, my stocks and each chests are going up. The debts going down because it’s priced in fake money called fiat currency. It’s not real money. So this works as long as the government keeps crunching money and devaluing the dollar.

14:48 Jim Beach: Well, we love people who do that. That’s, you know, they’d give us a tax rebate we didn’t earn. Um, Mark, what happens if the economy crashes and all of the asset classes go down 45%.

15:00 Mark Quann: Okay, so gold wouldn’t do that probably. It would probably go the opposite direction. If you know what, there’s 5 pillars we use. There’s stocks and ETFs. There’s life insurance. There’s real estate, there’s precious metals, and there’s Bitcoin. So I buy them. I never sell them. I borrow from them to buy additional assets. So, um, uh, insurance policies, there’s investment accounts that have been around since 1997. They can only go up and they can never go down. And they’re wrapped inside an insurance policy. So they’re 100% tax-free for the rest of your life. They go up with the stock market, they walk in, and they can never go down ever, regardless of what the performance of the stock market.

15:43 Jim Beach: So, do you have to have whole life insurance to do this?

15:48 Mark Quann: Whole life is a term for a policy that is not very good. Okay? It’s typically a 5% rate of return fixed, and then you’re borrowing at 5%. So I’m not a fan of whole life insurance policies. I’m not a fan of universal life policies. There’s a variable life with policies which can crash. Something called Index Universal Life was created in 1997. It’s called a market linked CD. So it’s a pretty simple thing. Rich people would go to their banks. Very wealthy families and say, hey, invest my money, but don’t lose any of it. The banks would go, all right, we’ll put your money into bonds. And then we’ll buy a stock option that’s up on the market. It’s impossible to lose money because your money’s not in the market. It’s in bonds. So these taste, they took that market link CD. They put it inside an insurance policy. So you can invest with no risk, exempt from all taxes for the rest of your life. It could earn 10, 20, 30% return in a nut market in the stock market. If the market crashes, you can never go below 08 locks in once year.

16:57 Jim Beach: Okay, so let’s say I have $5000 to start with, okay? Walk me through the 1st $5000 in the 1st week month, something like that. Okay.

17:07 Mark Quann: First of all, we don’t start you with 5,000. We start you with 100 bucks on your brokerage count. Okay? Say, learn this. Take baby steps. Okay? So let’s say you put your 100 bucks in there. I would walk you through. Hey, there’s a portfolio I have on my YouTube channel. My, all my, my portfolios are on YouTube. You can just mirror that portfolio. Okay? You’re going to buy some Nvidia, a little bit of, uh, you know, Google or whatever, some stocks. You’re going to buy some index funds. You’re going to buy some income positions. It’s all on my YouTube channel and it’s on our website too. And you could start with a 100 bucks. Maybe you want to invest $25 a week. You automate it. You just set it up, and then you learn. You don’t start with 5000 Start with a little bit and learn. Okay. At 2000 bucks, you get the borrow button. So let’s, let’s say you’re now at uh, $3000 in your, your brokerage account and you say, man, I need, I need like uh, 500 bucks for my business. You press the borrow button. You send $500 to your bank account that didn’t exist. You never pay taxes on it. That’s new currency you created, and you buy something for your business. Now if that’s a tax deduction. To your business, you got a $500 tax deduction, a money that didn’t exist, the government owes you money.

18:34 Jim Beach: Right, I see that part, yes.

18:36 Mark Quann: Yeah.

18:37 Jim Beach: All right.

18:38 Mark Quann: So it’s a guaranteed return. Usually you’ll pay 5 bucks and get 25 to 30 back from the government. So you make 5 to 6 times your money, guaranteed just based on the taxes. That’s a pretty good, that’s a pretty good return on your money right there. Now you could borrow to buy silver if you said, wow, the market’s gold dropped. I’m going to borrow 500 bucks and buy gold ETFs. Borrow 500 bucks. Just tell the computer, buy gold ETFs. Now you own the stocks and you own a gold ETF.

19:10 Jim Beach: And are there monthly payments, weekly payments, hourly payments on this?

19:14 Mark Quann: No payments are required on the loans? Um, I defer my interest until I die and per IRS tax codes. As long as I use the money for investing, I get to write off the interest that I never paid on my brokerage account. So that’s about $40,000 this year. I didn’t pay it, but per IRS tax codes, I get to write the $40,000 off on my taxes.

19:38 Jim Beach: Okay. I just. That’s, I, I, again, I’m going to have to see this visually because I’m a visual learner. What’s the M1 Finance? How are they making their money? It sounds like this is it’s just all too good to be true. And it all comes down to the fact that the fiat money is… You know, fake money ever since Nixon got us off the gold standard. Is that correct?

20:04 Mark Quann: Correct. Cor correct. Yes. You buy assets with limited supply? You’re guaranteed to win because the assets go up as the dollar goes down, and here’s the other catch. People think inflation’s 2.3%, right? Because that’s what the government says, but there’s 7 different ways the government manipulates the inflation rate. Just have a challenge, everybody. Take your AI and say, what are the 7 different ways that the government manipulates the inflation rate, and it’ll spit them out for you. They’ll never teach you this in school. They’ll never teach you this at Yale, Harvard. The strategy was coined at USC in the 1990s. I borrow die. They don’t even teach it at USC to the students. Even though Edward McCaffrey, The professor there coined the phrase, but you’ll never learn it at USC. You don’t learn it at Pepperdine. You’ll learn it at, you know, UCLA anywhere. They don’t teach this to any financial advisors or any CPAs anywhere in the United States. Kind of interesting, isn’t that? It’s so simple.

21:05 Jim Beach: It is. So, maybe I’ve already asked this question. I feel like I have, but I don’t know the answer yet because my mind is blowing. I’m having trouble with my synapses. Okay. So is there a limit on how much I can borrow from M1 Finance?

21:21 Mark Quann: Well, the federal laws. You can do this on Fidelity. You can do it on Schwab. You can do it on Robin Hood. You can do it on any broker, but the problem is the brokers are publicly traded. So they’re going to try and charge you 13% interest because they’re just used to doing that. They’re used to screwing their customers. Well, there’s no risk on the loan. Why are they charging you 13%? So, M1 Finance was built. If you go to YouTube, and you put Mark Quann, and then Brian Barnes into YouTube. So Mark Quann and then Brian Barnes. NN, everybody. Q-U-A-N-N, and then the name Brian Barnes into YouTube. You’re going to find my interview with the founder and creator of M1 Finance. You’ll see why he created that as the best investment platform ever created. It’s far superior to any of the brokers you’re probably using right now.

22:15 Jim Beach: Right. Well, I’ve never said this as much as I mean it right now, I’ve got to get this book and read it. I’m uh, as soon as uh, I’m going to go ahead and, oh, I’m buying it right now. Okay.

22:30 Mark Quann: It’s 12 bucks, by the way. Drive the 12 bucks. I don’t even make much money on it. My publisher takes most of the cash. So I’m going to make a whole dollar here on this one. This is pretty fun.

22:44 Jim Beach: Well, I’m getting rich. But now I can, you can borrow more. I’m going to go borrow. So does M1 Finance have a minimum that wealth or any kind of test like that? Qualified investor category or anything?

22:58 Mark Quann: Anybody can join. Like I said, I’ve got I’ve got a nine-year-old doing this. I got a 10 year old doing this. I’ve probably got a bunch of homeschool students. You got to have 100 bucks in your in your brokerage account. You can put it in there. Um, the computer is really interesting because it buys more of what’s going down in price automatically for free. You don’t need financial advisor anymore. Financializers are kind of useless at this point. It’s a far superior platform. Imagine you own gold, Bitcoin, silver, and Google and Nvidia. Well, if gold was going down, you would want to buy more of it, correct? The computer does that automatically for you for free. It’ll buy more of the assets that are going down in price. It’s just a computer. It can do it. Why would you? I mean, anybody could do that. But you’d have to manually do it. So the computer just does it for free.

23:55 Jim Beach: I, Spoke with someone and watched a couple of videos on this. It seems like the AI industry is overivested at this point. For example, uh, open AI just or their last valuation was 845 billion. And they raised, I don’t know. 100000000000 or something at that valuation, which they have now spent. And so now they’re out of money again and need to go back to the market, but I don’t think the market per these experts that I’m quoting is going to give them the $100000000 valuation that they need. And it’s a race to see who can IPO 1st anthropic and open AI. And only one of them, from what I’ve heard, is going to make it and go public. And the other one’s going to run out of cash. What are you doing with this, Mark?

24:44 Mark Quann: It’s very likely. Like in the 1990s, there was like 100s and 100s of companies that were going to be huge valuations. A lot of them went out of business. That’s where we kind of are, right? You’re looking at these companies, but if I only own 2% of that company, maximum loss is 2%, right? I can buy a 100 different stocks. I can put Costco in there and, and, uh, you know, NVIDIA in there and, and maybe some, some Google. I can put really established companies in my portfolio. So, uh, yeah, I mean, and your question was how much can you borrow? Federal regulations say you can’t borrow more than 50% to your portfolio, right? So if you have $5000, you can’t borrow borrow more than $2500. So I’m not saying you don’t want to do that. Um, we suggest only borrow from conservative portfolios and only borrow up to 30%. That way you’re not going to get yourself into trouble. And there was one other question you asked, which was what happens if there’s a big crash? Okay? Well, there’s institution. I’m good friends with an institutional money manager. He would man, he used to manage 1000000000s for institutions. So he, uh, we work with him closely. He can buy a bunch of stocks in a portfolio for you. And he basically buys what’s called a put, a put down under the portfolio. So if it’s under the portfolio, if the stocks crash, the put go up in price and it stops you from losing money. So it’s just that the, normally you would need $25000000 to have a money manager do that for you. Uh, my friend Mike does that for 250 grand. So if you want 250 grand, you want the same strategies that like, you know, $1000000000 institutions, we’re bringing that down to that level too. So we can start people who new investors with a 100 bucks. We can take investors, we have larger portfolios. We can invest it aggressively, hedge it with puts, and it’s just impossible to lose a lot of money. Because the put goes up as the portfolio goes down. You’d have to know a little bit about stock options, and I don’t want to go into that much detail on that. They’re pretty confusing for most people.

27:02 Jim Beach: Mark, how do we get a copy of the book? Find out more about you. Watch the videos, go to heaven. I mean, rich. Rich. Okay, good.

27:11 Mark Quann: So, um, our website, the perfectportfolio.com. So theperfectportfolio.com. Go to Amazon, put BSmart pay 0 taxes. The book’s 12 bucks. It could make you 1000000s of dollars and save you 1000000s of dollars in taxes. Um, if somebody reaches out to us at the perfect portfolio and says, hey, can you send me the 1st 3 classes? We’ll send you the 1st 3 classes just for free. You can watch 3 classes, about 6 hours of content. Um, I have Instagram, X, all those things, and we’ll just send that out here for read. Now, I am doing a live class tonight. But again, this will be recording later, but I run a, I run a course every, every, I 4 times a year. I run 9 classes and we teach you everything about the buy, borrow, die strategy, where it came from, the history, how it works. The success stories, 100s of our students who’d been using it. And we run that class. So but we can send you the 1st 3 classes recorded. Won’t charge you anything and you can just learn about it. So the bucks, 12 bucks. We’ll send you 3 classes for free.

28:22 Jim Beach: Mark Quann, the perfect portfolio. Thank you so much for being with us and go Tennessee.

28:27 Mark Quann: Yes, go Vols.

28:29 Jim Beach: And we will be right back.

28:31 Mark Quann: Great.

28:32 Jim Beach: We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I am very excited to introduce another great guest. I think this is going to be a fun conversation. Please welcome Jay Sargeant to the show. He is a keynote speaker, a reinvention coach, and author of a new book called Shift, the gift of reinvention. During his life. He has been a professional tennis player, an entrepreneur, a software retailer, a corporate trainer, a speaker, an author, a coach. And all around swell guy. He has been the founder of the Swift project, which is also from the name of the book. Tons of accolades, we could spend the rest of the hour on that, but we need to introduce. Jay, welcome to the show how you doing, sir?

29:18 Jay Sargeant: I am doing great this morning. We’re having a heat wave here in Los Angeles, but I’ve got air conditioning. Thank God we live in a modern world.

29:28 Jim Beach: Yes. Oh, it seems it’s so sad we can’t rebuild the areas of our modern world that we’re scarred. What are your thoughts on that?

29:37 Jay Sargeant: Well, I’m I’m endlessly optimistic. I am not glass half bull. I am I’m a glass 99% full. I was taught by my parents to always expect a miracle and no matter how many times you fall down, you just get up. I’m the child of serial entrepreneurs and what valuable lessons I learned from my folks.

29:57 Jim Beach: Excellent. I love, just love the attitude, Jay. Let’s go back in time. I’d love to hear some of the stories from the Is it 8 decades now? 7 decades?

30:07 Jay Sargeant: Yeah, 79 years old. That’s what I am, but I’m, you know, there’s an old 79 and a young 79 and I prefer to be the young 79. I’m calling myself Jim, the Pablo Picasso of communication. I’m going to have my most fruitful experience 80 to 90.

30:24 Jim Beach: Excellent. I love the attitude again. Walk us through some of the professions. Professional tennis player in particular. I want to hear about that. My son is 15 and obsessed with tennis. He’s probably ranked 30 or something in his league age group right now.

30:40 Jay Sargeant: Wow.

30:41 Jim Beach: How do we raise a tennis kid and tell me some of your tennis stories? Who are some of the people you played with?

30:49 Jay Sargeant: Well, here’s the deal. I want to be really clear with our audience. I came to tennis very late in life. Unlike your son, I grew up at a period where I played football, basketball, hockey, and baseball. Nobody in my neighborhood in downtown Boston played tennis. I eventually found tennis because I needed something to do to use a fair amount of athletic background. So I didn’t become a great tennis player late in life. I became, if I may say so myself, Jim. I became a great tennis professional. I taught all kinds of rank kids and owned my own academy. But the part I’m going to shift with. And by the way, I’ll, you call me up and I’ll tell you exactly what to do with that 15 year old because I still love tennis. I’m watching the US Open right now. I interrupted a very powerful match to be on this radio show. But there came a day, Jim where I didn’t want to hit tennis balls for the rest of my life. I had an existential in-between trapeze moment and I said, what do I do next? And someone, a wealthy family, got me a meeting with the king of franchising in the United States, the great George NAF. And I went for a big position as a franchise marketing person with no business background, no franchise background and no resume. And when I sat in front of Georgia because he asked for the resume, and I said, I don’t have it, and he said, you mean you left it in the car? And I said, no, I don’t have a resume. I have no experience in franchising or business, but I tell you what, if that’s your brochure on your desk, give me 15 minutes in the lobby, bring everybody back into this huge office, and I will give a 10 minute extemporaneous presentation because they sold franchises in fancy hotels in front of qualified buyers in a 45 minute speech. And I came back in and of course, Jim, I didn’t throw up on my shoes. I wouldn’t be sharing the story and I gave a presentation. Not one word of it later on, George Toby was correct, but when I was done through everyone. He sat down and he said, kid, there wasn’t one detail you got right, but damn, you can speak the English language. I want you in a blue suit in front of my populations and my audience is all over the U.S. And so what I want people to know because this is important to me is credentials are very often overrated. Know who you are, value yourself, and find a place that you’re interested in, and put what you know in front of the world, and openings can happen that you can’t even imagine. I developed a whole life of French. I don’t know, franchise, development company from all that experience, but I knew that day, Jim that I could speak. I’d been given speeches my whole life. I just didn’t know the content and it was not relevant because I knew who I was in that moment. I hope that comes through loud and clear, Jim.

33:59 Jim Beach: It does because you’re so good at extemporaneous speaking, I think that that’s one of the number one skills that every person should work on, the ability to stand up and just talk. I did some debate in high school and then there was extemporaneous speaking as part of that. And one of the topics I remember was is bald, beautiful. And just to be, you know, the idea of being able to talk on that for 10 minutes, you know, uh, you know, it gives you the ability to sell anything, you know, so I love that story. So, does I have found in my life, I’ve been all over the world in terms of careers. I’ve everything I’ve done was unplanned and nothing that I would have ever perceived that I would have ended up in. I’m a huge, huge introvert day. And so the last thing I want to do is being people in front of people and now I speak and do radio and stuff for a living. And so I certainly believe in the shift idea. Never have I planned what would have happened. Is that good, bad? We’re supposed to play in our lives, right? We’re supposed to have a life of intent.

35:12 Jay Sargeant: Yeah, you know, as you talk, I got about 4 hours of conversation with you because we are definitely brothers by another mother because I am selectively gregarious. I’m truly an invert, yet I’ve got chops. I’ve got skills. When I’m engaged, I’m good. And I just love hearing you say that. The answer to your question is it is all play. What you need to be able to do in my opinion, after 79 years and all of these reinventions, is recognize that there are no small moments. You got to get in action. And I only shared with you that I’m selectively gregarious because one of the great moments of my life came on a Friday evening. All day long I worked. I had a failing little franchise development business. I had moved away from the mothership and opened up my own. I wasn’t doing that well. And I was looking forward to a Friday night where I had a beer, ESPN, and filthy clothes on on a comfortable chair. And I looked over at my desk and I realized, 0 my god, there’s an invitation on that desk. I’m invited to a fancy party in a wealthy neighborhood and I don’t want to go. I don’t want to clean up. I don’t want to take a shower. I don’t want to leave ESPN and the sports I love, and I don’t want to engage, but I knew that I had to shake it up. I knew that there was intuitively no small moments. So I got my act together and I got all gussied up and I walked into this beautiful home on 171 Heath Street in South Brooklyn, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the entire United States. And as God appointed it, I sat down at this huge Italian marble table 5 times more value than my life at that moment. And I turned to the guy next to me and I said, who are you and what do you do? And he said, I’m Mitch K4, and I develop software. I said, I don’t understand this. Yeah, this, um, it’s K4 and I developed software. And this is 1981. So I did not know what he was talking about. I got intrigued with him, not me, him, not me. And I kept asking him a series of questions, and it became really clear that there were only 3 pieces of software. He developed one of them. There were only 3 categories, the only one category. He had gone from Visiplot to Visikal to the famous Lotus 123. I heard the entire story. I got blown away. I knew that we were at the beginning of some kind of a wave that I didn’t truly understand. And I turned to him, and this is like a moment in a movie, uh, you know, plastics, uh, with uh, uh, Dustin Hoffman. I turned to Mitch and I said, I own a phenomenal franchise development company, not true, but it was had potential. If you were me, what entity would you be picking up? I’m always looking for new things. And he said, Jay, software retailing. Computerland has a couple 1000 hardware stores. They only want to sell the box, put software retail stores across the street as close as you can to computer land, and you will make a fortune. And that was it. The next morning I had no dough. I want everyone to realize, I was broke. I got tickets all over the United States. Mitch told me there was one in Boston. One store in Washington, DC, one in Chicago, and one in LA, and the next day I went to the Boston store immediately, because we’re in Boston, and I went to DC, store was terrible. Washington, Chicago’s store was mediocre. When I got to LA, I had never been to LA, took a cab to the store and it blew me away, a bunch of copter heads from Caltech standing around with Ataris, trash 80s, Commodore 64s, Apple 2 Es, playing pong, but the energy was amazing. And I, and so I go over to this kid and he’s got this floppy blonde here. He looks like a skateboarder to me and I say, I’m looking for the owner because I can anoint one of these entities and make it to King. And the kid says, well, I’m a small owner, but the decision maker is now I want a drone roll.

39:36 Jim Beach: But, okay. The owner was who? So give us that. Owner was, okay.

39:40 Jay Sargeant: So I asked the skateboarder, kid. Who’s the principal owner and decision maker? And he tells me it’s George Tate. George Tate, it blew my mind. It was like the, my head exploded because the only other company next to Mitch K horse company was Ashton Tate with a database management program called D-base 2 and I realized all at once that this dinky little store on Pico Boulevard is owned by one of the principal titans and movers and shakers in the beginning of this software revolution. That day. So the kid gives me the address. I get in the cab, and I show up at George Tate’s apartment, and I tell him my wonderful story about how I’m going to make one of these retail stores, the principal store, and that afternoon on a yellow pad of paper, We made a contract. I gained the exclusive rights to develop software center, international stores into a franchise system. And in the next 18 months, I traveled all over the US with my team and we sold 154 software center international stores, retail stores, franchises in every major market in the US. And here’s the point. It’s not about me who cares? It’s about you out there. If I didn’t get off the barking lounger. If I didn’t clean up, if I didn’t go to that dinner party, if I didn’t turn to that stranger and say, what do you do, none of that would have happened. That all happened. I made money. I help people. I improve the quality of the world by getting something important in the world. I ended up with a new wife and a whole new family. I relocated from Boston to LA. Everything happened. There are no small moments. You just got to be active and you have to have faith. That there’s going to be a light and you run to the light. You run to the light.

41:34 Jim Beach: What a great set of stories, Jay. I love the attitude. It’s just like Mama said, you know, you accept every invitation that you get, you know, because you don’t know what’s going to happen there. That is great advice. I love the next 2 model as well. You’re going to be next to the big hardware center. My very 1st business that I ran in the 90s. I was in my 20s. We had a, uh, looking for locations strategy that was basically look for Rolls-Royce Lamborghini car dealerships, and we wanted to be within a mile of that. And so we used that very successfully. I know that you had a significant summer on Cape Cod. I also had a Cape Cod summer where I had my 1st piss, wink, wink, and I was at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute for the summer. Tell me about your summer on Cape Cod, Jay.

42:28 Jay Sargeant: Well, my summer on Cape Cod sort of set up the rest of my life. It’s why I started the book with that wonderful chapter. I hitchhiked to the cake in 1965. The summer I graduated high school. I was going into college and I think I had had a few kisses before that, but I did end up with an incredibly important romantic relationship with a gal from the University of West Virginia, Fran. God bless her. Um, but what was really important about that Cape Cod experience is I got in front of a diner and in the window, it said short order cook needed. I reached in just like in a movie and I grabbed the sign and I said, where’s the owner and I announced myself as a short order cook. This was within the 1st 12 hours of getting to Hyannis. And I interviewed well because I’ve always interviewed well, even as a youngster, and I convinced him that I was a short order clerk, because I had fried hamburgers and hot dogs at Revere Beach when I was a boy. In my mind, that more than qualified me to be a shorter cook. I got that job. I got a big monthly paycheck. Uh, you know, way more than I ever expected and I went in the next morning and I sailed. I think I lasted less than 45 minutes. But what happened was.. Very hard job. Yeah, yeah, I had all these construction workers at 7 in the morning standing watching me cook and and I think the fatal flaw was when I dropped a piece of toast and I and I used the 32nd rule and I put the toast back on the plate. I think that was the last moment of my life as a shorter cook. But what I’m telling everyone, it was the impulse to know that I could do it. It was possible in my mind, and I didn’t care, and I took the risk, and I had, oh, God knows. And I went from being a shorter cook to a bus boy, to eventually a lifeguard, uh, at a fan at the beach club in Centerville, very trendy club. And I didn’t have any credentials for that either. Basically, I had a flying fish from YMCA camp on my bathing suit, which meant I could hold my breath for 10 seconds, and the flying fish got me the job, and eventually when I went out on the beach, I told the lifeguards, don’t ever leave me alone. I can barely swim, I look cute. But at the end of the day, what that’s set up for me, Jim, is anything is possible. You’ve got to know who you are, you’ve got to be brave and you’ve got to move in the direction of what you truly want. Don’t be defined by anybody else’s expectations. So that, and I fell in love with a lovely girl and had my heart broken because she went home to her fiance, but I had one evening on a musty coach listening to Paul Simon sing the sounds of silence all night long as we, very appropriately, hands in all the right places, held hands and kissed, and then she went home and got married. But uh, uh, lots of uh, very rich experience. And you know, our life is a treasure chest. We just need to be able to open up the drawers and reach for the right ones. We teach in neurolinguistic programming that the person with the cleanest hard disk drive, the person who rearranges their memories and puts a folder, right in front and center of the highlight films of your life, if you can go access those moments and put them into possibility and opportunity, there’s no there’s no limits. That’s my opinion.

46:15 Jim Beach: So, Jay. Love the attitude. How do we, the listeners, execute on this? It sounds like you’ve lived a life of serendipity and uh, a little bit of luck, a little bit of hard work, you know, uh, a little bit of crazy decision making. How do we learn from that? What are the lessons that you want us to take that are going to make a difference in our lives? Especially as a fit, I mean, we’re 50 now. We can’t go off and be a short order cook.

46:47 Jay Sargeant: For sure, for sure. Yeah, I my 3 principles are, and I’ll tell you exactly where to go. To find more of me. Credentials are overrated. There are no small moments and it’s never too late to change. I have so many moments and so many wonderful stories about never too late to change. I know that we’ve got to wrap it up. I have developed quite yet.

47:10 Jim Beach: We not there yet. We can still get the 3 points out.

47:15 Jay Sargeant: Okay, well, listen, my grandmother. Who raised me the 1st 5 years of my life because my folks didn’t have enough money for an apartment in Brighton. So I lived in my grandmother’s apartment, and my folks went off to work downtown in retail and left me with my grandmother, and her name was Nana Lil, and she was the strength of our family. But when she finally reached 91 in the same apartment, she raised me, she started to fall and fail, and I had the inglorious task of going with my mom to Nana Lil and telling her she had to go to a rehab center. And she, she was mad at us, but she went because she had to. She was in danger. And when I went and saw her one week later, because I was on the road for a week, I went to go visit her, I thought she’d going to carve me up. I saw her. She had a big smile. I couldn’t even understand. I sat down in front of her and she said, Jay, you’re an idiot. I said, why? She said, why didn’t you get me in here years ago? The food is great. Three square meals a day, treats in the evening, we’ve got bingo, we’ve got Mahjong, we’ve got movie night, and Jay. I found a little boy named Louis, who I was in love with in the 2nd grade. My family married, my family moved from Dorchester to Brighton, and I lost Louis, but I found him here at the rehab center, and Jay, we are madly in love. I found my Romeo. I loved your grandfather, but this is my Romeo. They had the most intense romantic relationship for 5 years. She said, Jay, he brings me a muffin wrapped in a napkin in the middle of the afternoon and hands it to me like he’s sharing the hope diamond. The last time I saw them. I want everyone to catch this. The last time I saw them, they were in the courtyard with their walkers in front of them, holding hands, beaming love back and forth to one another. I spent 2 hours with them, and I had a lead, and I went and I got to sneak a peek. I was above them looking through a window at them with their walkers in front of them. They stood up, holding their walkers. They would waddle, waddle, and then so in passion. They would churn and kiss, waddle, waddle, kiss. This is a 95 years of age. So no one, no one can tell me. It is never too late to change. I am 79 and because I’m on your show. I want people to know I’m creating the 8th new business of my life at 79. And here’s the bottom line. This is where I want. I want people to go to Coach Jay’s Corner. Anyway, you spell it, well, it’s on YouTube. Coach Jay’s Corner, because I figured out the best way for me to proceed. People don’t read that many books. I don’t care about the book if people love it. It’s a fun read. I’ve read it, just wrote another one, but it’s a whole long story. But I’ve created a wonderful little sequence. Tuesdays, I tell a story. And Friday I analyzed the story, the secrets, the lessons inside the story, and I go Tuesday, Friday. They’re about 5 to 7 minutes apiece and I’ve got about a 100 stories to tell. I’ve got the rest of my life to share. So it’s Coach Jay’s corner on YouTube and you can have some fun with me and hopefully learn some lessons and have a laugh because I think we need a laugh of this lifetime. What about you, Jim?

50:59 Jim Beach: Oh, I could double down on the laughs. Jay, what do we do when our life is in the dumpster and uh, we have to reinvent because there’s a burning bridge behind us with napalm in every direction that we look. What do we do to reinvent ourselves when we have no choice, when it’s not a, oh, look, with this cool opportunity. It’s like, 0 my gosh, I have to run from my past and clean up. And what do we do then?

51:28 Jay Sargeant: You know, half the time of the 7 and reinventions that I’ve shared in the book, half of them came because I was unhappy, and half of them came because I got thrown out. Either an entity failed or it just didn’t work. And here’s the key. The key is you have to be patient. In this lifetime, if I’ve learnt any lesson, you got to find out what you really truly want to do. What would you do if money wasn’t an object and keep asking yourself that? Keep asking everyone around you to give you mentorship and advice, but be patient enough to endure the pain of any loss of any temporary failure? And here’s the key. Here’s what I teach all the time and taught my 3 kids, to anyone I’ve taught, 100s of 1000s of people all over the world. The major ingredient for failure is short timelines and over expectations. I’m telling stories that are snapshots, but even in the franchise story that I led with. Once I got that gig, it took me 6 months of brutally hard work to catch up because the day after I got the gig, I was terrible and I had to learn and I had to fail and make errors and corrections. So from my standpoint is, you know, I hope and pray everyone had my parents. I know everyone doesn’t have models where people can continue to fail, get up, fail, get up, but you’ve got to be persistent, you’ve got to figure out what you really care about, and you got to give yourself the time and the patience to move towards what you want next. And it’ll come, it’ll come. That’s when my experience over and over again. You’ll find it.

53:12 Jim Beach: Now, Jay, we’re out of time. How do we find out more? Get in touch with you, get a copy of the book.

53:20 Jay Sargeant: Coach Jay’s Corner on YouTube and all the links, the links to the book, the fabulous stories, a great experience coach, Jay’s Corner. Any way you spell it, no apostrophe, Coach Jay’s Corner on YouTube, brings you into my life.

53:34 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Coach today, thank you so much for being with us. Fantastic story and we’d like to have you back in the next decade as well.

53:43 Jay Sargeant: I would love to come back. I got more to share.

53:47 Jim Beach: I’m sure you do. We are out of time for today, but you know what we do. That’s right. We come back. Take care. Make a million dollars. And thanks for being with us. Bye now.