203: Cultivating Success in Black Entrepreneurship Through Financial Literacy w/ John Hope Bryant

Monique:
John, welcome to the Black to Business podcast. I must say, it is an honor to have you here. So welcome to this show.

John Hope Bryant:
My pleasure. My pleasure.

Monique:
Yes. I am so excited about today’s topic, but before we dive in, we always like to introduce our guests. So for those few people who might not know who you are, if you could just share a little bit about your background and what really led you up to working in financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

John Hope Bryant:
Yes. I’m my mother and my father’s child. I’m the Lord’s son. I grew up in south central LA, in Compton, California. I grew up in south central LA, in Compton, California, and my mom and dad had a high school education. My grandfather on my father’s side, RB Smith, was born as a sharecropper in 1871. My second great grandfather, George Young, was born into slavery and was part of fought in the Union army, fought in the Civil War as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation that was issued by Abraham Lincoln. He was an officer of the US Colored troops in Memphis, Tennessee in 1863.

John Hope Bryant:
And so you go, that’s where my social justice bones come from, right? And my, as I said, my grandfather was a sharecropper. My dad was a businessman, and I’m an entrepreneur. On my mother’s side, my grandmother owned a shotgun shack. For those listening who don’t know what that is, you can take a shotgun, open the front door of the house, and shoot the shotgun from the front door through the center of the. Of the house, and never hit anything. There’s no walls, and it goes, and it’ll go out the back door without hitting anything. It was one room, and you had an outhouse in the back. So my mother owned, my grandmother owned a shotgun shack.

John Hope Bryant:
My mother bought and sold seven homes, and I own 700 through the Promise homes company I created in 2017. So I’m really role modeling, and that’s the positive side of my story, role modeling. My mother and my father, as all of us, model what we see. The other side of that story, because rainbows only follow storms. You cannot have a rainbow without a storm. First, is that my mom and dad had accumulated all this generational wealth together with a high school education, their own home, a cement contracting business, a nursery business, an eight unit apartment building that we own that we bought for $18,000 in south central Los Angeles. Wow. A gas station at Vernon and Normandy, southeast corner.

John Hope Bryant:
As I recall, they were mini moguls in south central LA in 1960s and early 1970s. But we lost it all because my dad could make the money but couldn’t keep it. My father confused making money with making a profit. He confused cash flow with wealth, and so he made a dollar and spent a dollar 50. The more money we made, the broker he got. And my mom was a financial genius. She knew how to save and how to grow a dollar into $5. But my dad wouldn’t listen to my mother, unfortunately, and they divorced over money.

John Hope Bryant:
And that’s when I was about four or five. And then when I was seven years old, my mother was staying with her. She called her my auntie, but I now know she was just a friend of my mother. She didn’t want to freak me out. Staying with this lady to feed our black family.

Monique:
Yes, that is a black family.

John Hope Bryant:
My mother was staying with this lady, who, again, she called my auntie, and the boyfriend of the lady who she told my call, my uncle, who, of course, was just a dude that was dating her girlfriend. My mother’s girlfriend. He saved my life. I was. I’d fallen on his porch while we were staying with him. My mother was staying with him after leaving my father to raise money to buy our first home. And she’s working an hourly job at McDonald’s aircraft in Copenhagen, California. And the guy that, you know, Ambassador Andrew Young, says that men and women are, you know, they fail for three reasons.

John Hope Bryant:
Arrogance, pride, and greed. And my dad was not greedy, but he was full of pride and didn’t ask my mother, you know, for guidance on money. And with this. This other guy who we lived with, OC, he didn’t say to my mother and to his girlfriend, hey, I don’t have enough money to take care of my family, our family and this one. So I need some help. That’s what he should have done. My mother would have been happy. So anyway, I fell on this guy’s porch when I was playing out front and swallowed my tongue.

John Hope Bryant:
Swallowing my tongue, he cleared my throat passage and saved my life. So I’m. I mean, like, idolizing this guy. He saved my life. Couldn’t wait for him to get home every day. And in order to make some extra money to take care of his family and ours, he was selling marijuana around the corner part time, in addition to his job. And anyway, make a long story short, he got murdered in front of me. Oh, yeah.

John Hope Bryant:
So he’s on his. He was on his way home one day from selling drugs, and. And the drug dealers, the real drug dealers, didn’t like what he was doing. They followed him home, and they wanted to send a message, so they waited for him. They waited for him. To get in front of his house, where I was sitting there on the porch, waiting for him to come home. And they hit him with a truck while he was riding a bicycle from behind and dragged him down the street until his body was lifeless and the bicycle was mangled. And I saw all that I witnessed.

Monique:
Mm hmm.

John Hope Bryant:
That. So what? My point here is that the divorce was about money. This murder in front of me was about money. And then my best friend George, who I. When my mother bought that house in south central LA, in Compton. I’m sorry. And we moved there in Compton. I was so proud of her to buy this house at 15502 South Fraley in Compton.

John Hope Bryant:
I made friends with this guy named George down the street. But George had bad parents. I had good parents, role models. As far as fellow being told that I was loved, and he had nobody to tell him he was loved. He was really super smart, much smarter than me, better grades. I wanted to be like George. Unfortunately, George had wanted to be like the drug dealer who was my next door neighbor named tweet. And to make that long story short, he got shot and killed with tweet selling drugs.

John Hope Bryant:
So when I was. By the time I was nine years old, I saw, you know, the death of. The death of generational wealth through divorce. I saw the murder of a guy who saved my life. And then I experienced the murder of my best friend. All of that about money. So I was really focused on how to get. How do I get out the hood? How do I get out of this inner city situation with a legal hustle? How do I not get dead? How do I not.

John Hope Bryant:
There’s got to be not just me, but how there’s got to be a legitimate way out of the despair I see all around me, you know, for people who are hardworking and want a hand up and not a handout. And that is really short version of how I got here and how I’m talking to you now, how I’ve written this book, which is now bestseller, national bestseller, called financial literacy for all, number one in the world of economics and business, and why I found an operation hope, and why I’m so passionate about this as a civil rights issue of this generation.

Monique:
Yes. And I’m so excited to talk about all these things. So perfect segue into the book, which is, like you mentioned, financial literacy for all. Can you share a little bit of the inspiration behind writing this book and your mission for promoting it? And what can some people take away from this book?

John Hope Bryant:
Sure. So almost everything that I learned, it seems the most fundamental lessons I got before I was, you know, ten years old. And when I was nine years old, right after the murder of my friend George, I went to school, and there was this home economics class that was being taught, which doesn’t exist anymore in most. Most places. And they had this banker, because most teachers are financially illiterate, too. They had this banker come in to talk about financial literacy, and he happened to be a banker from bank of America. He was six’two, had a red tie, a white shirt, and a blue suit. And he was caucasian, which is important for the part of the story, because my experience with a white man, unlike everybody else I grew up with, was not negative.

John Hope Bryant:
I mean, they. They had an experience with this police officer shoving them against a patrol car. And I had an experience of this white man coming, teaching me the language of money. Anyway, so he comes in the first week and came in once a week for six weeks. We didn’t want him there. He didn’t want to be there. We sort of. We sort of ignored each other.

John Hope Bryant:
The second week he came in, you know, the students were paying closer attention to what he had to say. And he says, you know, you kids aren’t so bad. You remind me of my kids. And I said, well. We said, well, you’re not so bad for a white dude. And so we start. We start making peace with each other. And the third week he came in, we were really intently learning and listening.

John Hope Bryant:
And by about the fourth week, he came in thereabouts, I started asking my mother if I could wear the suit, a suit to school, just like the banker. And my mother said, well, I don’t have money to buy you a suit. You can wear the Sunday suit I have for you, I made for you. Well, that was a crush. Velvet three piece suit with a ruffled shirt and a big, big, big bowtie. And I got beat up every time I wore that suit to school. Yeah, then I have a briefcase with nothing with my dreams in it, because I would sell. I’d sell mail order shoots, shoes and jewelry to my teachers.

John Hope Bryant:
Anyway, getting ahead of myself, I went to school and I raised my hand. I said, excuse me, sir, what do you. What. What do you do for a living? And how did you get rich legally? And I was dead serious, right? I mean, this guy was like a Martian in front of me. This is all about why I wrote this book. And he said, I’m a banker, and I finance entrepreneurs. And I said, sir, I don’t know what an entrepreneur is. I’ve never heard that phrase.

John Hope Bryant:
My entire life. But whatever it is, if it’s legal and you’re financing it, I’m going to be one. So the first thing that happened was I had this confidence now that I had a way out of the hood, a legitimate way. I said, so wait, your job was to lend me money? Your job is to lend poor people’s money. If all I got to do is prove to you I can pay it back. He says, yes. And I said, if I don’t pay you back, I don’t get dead. Like, no one’s going to kill me.

John Hope Bryant:
No, young man, this is the legitimate banking system. And I said, and this is the key to the operation hope now, so are there more than you in the, in the country? He said, yeah, there’s got to be hundreds of thousands of bankers in the country. There’s 10,000 banks. I was like, wait a minute. So your job, all these bankers job, is to loan poor people money? He said, yeah. I said, why don’t poor people know that? Yeah, why are we out here shooting each other and ganging and banging and slanging? So I went on to start my first business. They could call a neighbor at Candy house and made $300 over $40 investment and became a legitimate neighborhood capitalist when I was ten years old to put the liquor store out of the candy business.

Monique:
Wait, you made $300 advocate investment?

John Hope Bryant:
Yeah, I made $300 on a $40 investment. My mother, my mother loaned me the money, made me pay her back because she said, life is tough, and put the liquor store out of the candy business. So my mother had given me self esteem. But this experience of succeeding in the free enterprise system gave me confidence. If you look at what operation hope is doing now, it’s teaching the entire community, coaching them up, teaching them how to get bank qualified, just like I have become is teaching, getting credit scores up, getting debt down, getting savings up. So the banker will say yes, when you want to buy a home or you want to start a business or you have some dream, you can access the capital markets at prime rates to do it. But I realized I couldn’t reach. I couldn’t reach everybody.

John Hope Bryant:
And so one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I wanted every library and every public schoolhouse to have a manual. I wanted an instruction manual, curriculum. I wanted every family that’s starting out, people graduating from high school and college, people starting off on their first family, to be able to sit down every Thursday or every Tuesday and have a little family meeting with my book and open it up and read a little bit together and talk about that and have a little family meeting around the kitchen table and hopefully a meal together, as we used to do, talk about money and demystify it. But I also believe spiritually and socially, that this is the civil rights issue of this generation. Yes, this is what Doctor King would be doing if he was alive today. And Doctor King’s last book was, where do we go from here? Well, this is where we go from here. It’s financial literacy for all. It’s from civil rights in the streets to silver rights in the sweets.

John Hope Bryant:
S I L V E R, where the color is not black or white as in race, or red or blue as in politics, but it’s green as in economics. And this is something where if you get your credit score up, you know, the computer at midnight doesn’t care what color you are. If your credit score is 700 2758 hundred, the computer just says, yes, that’s empowering. And this book is an instruction manual for the prosperity and the economic inclusion, financial engagement and health of hopefully an entire generation. And it’s already a business bestseller, but I really want to make it a mainstream bestseller. I want to make it so that everybody has access to what I learned and what changed my life. So that’s why I wrote it, is that we’re already operational. Hope is the largest financial literacy coaching organization in America, but we can’t get to everybody directly, you know?

Monique:
Yeah, I love that. And jud, I’m so glad one you shared your story and also just the work that you were doing. And on the Black to Business podcast, we like to break it down. So this conversation is all about cultivating success in black entrepreneurship through financial literacy. So breaking it down for us means first understanding what financial literacy is. So what would you say to someone if they ask you, what is financial literacy? And why does it matter? For individuals, especially as entrepreneurs and black entrepreneurs, to understand this financial literacy is.

John Hope Bryant:
Dignity because we live in a free enterprise democracy. And the quote, Ambassador Andrew Young, who was on that balcony when Doctor King was assassinated in 1968. April 4, I believe it was, or April 8, I know April Lincoln and Doctor King both assassinated on the same, in the same month of April. To quoted Ambassador Andrew Young. To live in a system of free enterprise and not to understand the rules of free enterprise must be the very definition of slavery. And so if you don’t know better, you can’t do better. But when you wake up in the morning, if your days out about God or love, your day’s about money. I mean, what’s the number one cause of divorce? Money.

John Hope Bryant:
What’s the number one cause for domestic abuse? Money. What’s the number one reason for heart attacks? Stress. What’s the number one reason for stress? Money. Why is some woman at a strip club at three in the morning with some 300 pound dude throwing dollar bills at her? Because she’s there because she loves having some musty dude throwing money at her, or she’s there because she’s trying to carry her three children. It’s about money. So that your. Your entire interaction during your day is really, again, it’s largely about money. Why? Why? You think a drug dealer or a gangster gets up in the morning and says, ooh, let me be a horrible person.

John Hope Bryant:
Let me tell death to my own community. They’re trying to make some money legitimately, illegitimately. You know, they’re trying to figure out how to turn their hustle into a career until a pathway forward. And most people don’t know what they don’t know. You know, there’s an old southern saying, no matter how much I love you, my son or my daughter, if I don’t have wisdom, all I can give you is my own ignorance.

Monique:
That’s powerful.

John Hope Bryant:
So out of. So out of love, we pass down bad habits from generation to generation. Out of love, we pass down bad habits from generation generations. People will love you, but they don’t. If you hang around nine broke people, you’ll be the 10th.

Monique:
Yeah.

John Hope Bryant:
You can’t give what you can’t give what you don’t have. And we’ve been experts at civil rights in the black community. Not civil for rights. We are experts at what we’re against. We’re against racism, police brutality. We’re against oppression. There’s a lot of things. We know what we’re against, but we don’t need red lights right now.

John Hope Bryant:
We need more rooms in the country with green lights. Access to internships. Access to apprenticeships. Access to careers and opportunities, access to jobs, access to capital, access to business formation, access to venture capital. Access to c suites where the wealthy people live. Access to country clubs where they hang out. Access to private clubs where they cultivate relationships. We have got to cultivate a new type of relationship with money and each other because this country is the superpower in the world, but it’s also the largest economy in the world.

John Hope Bryant:
And black people, other than poor whites and native American Indians, out of hundreds of ethnic groups in America, black people, African Americans are the only group not to use, not have the ones not to use the free enterprise system to set them free. Everybody else has done it. Everybody else has used the free enterprise and capitalist system to set them free. We’ve tried to use government almost exclusively. Well, government can protect you, but government can’t make you rich, not legally. You go to jail for that. Yes. Try to use the government to make you rich, you go to jail.

John Hope Bryant:
So this is, I just think, the work that Doctor King would be doing if he was alive today. Andrew Young, Ambassador Andrew Young is my mentor, is our global spokesman, and used what he learned from Doctor King to build the 10th large economy in the American south, which is the city of Atlanta. The only international city in the south, really. The black mecca arguably in the world, is Atlanta, Georgia. Ambassador Young did that using these same philosophies. From that he learned from Doctor King and upgrading his software, then bridging it to really to what I’m trying to do in suites, he did it in the streets. Anyway. It’s part of a larger narrative that I think is critical to our today and or tomorrow, certainly.

Monique:
Yes. And so one of the things you also mentioned is capitalism. So some people view capitalism negatively, citing issues like wealth inequality and exploitation. So how do you respond to these criticisms? And why do you believe capitalism can be a force for a positive change?

John Hope Bryant:
I think that there’s good capitalism and bad capitalism. Bad capitalism was slavery. Bad capitalism is where I benefit and you pay a price for it. Good capitalism is where I benefit and you benefit more. So if you go and buy tonight, you leave this podcast and you go on the way home and you stop at a department store or convenience store or hair store, and you buy a hairbrush or a comb and you paid $10 for it. Well, you clearly thought that it was worth $10 to solve whatever challenge you were having with your hair or buy some conditioner, pay $5 for it, $10 for it. That was well worth it for you. Well, you just engaged in capitalism.

John Hope Bryant:
And all capitalism is, and entrepreneurship is, it’s solving a problem. It’s in exchange of goods and services and resources that’s tied to a value proposition where the people who say they don’t like capitalism are capitalists. So if somebody’s listening to this podcast, you’re listening to it on your iPhone or on your Android or on some recording device that you bought. The government didn’t issue it to you. You’re listening to it in your car, what you’re paying for. You’re listening to it in your house, what you are paying for. And you’re paying for it because you were compensated probably through a job, which means you use your human capital. Follow me now.

John Hope Bryant:
Use your capital as a human being, your talent, and you traded that talent in exchange for a paycheck. That was you. Using human capital and engaging in capitalism as an employee. So you can have a. You can be a. You can be an hourly worker. You can be a gig worker. Hourly worker.

John Hope Bryant:
You can be an hourly worker. You can be a structured employee, nine to five. You can be a salaried employee. You can be a career executive. You can be a C suite executive. You can be a business person. You can be an entrepreneur. All that’s capitalism.

John Hope Bryant:
It’s just that one has less risk, the gig worker, more flexibility. Less risk and less. And more flexibility. But you’re going to be paid the least. 36% of this country are gig workers. Probably a large percentage of people of color gig workers. But that’s like, there’s no career in that. But as you go farther up this ladder, is more risk.

John Hope Bryant:
What I do is entrepreneurship, probably the highest level of risk, highest level of return. So we’re all living in a capitalist system. So it’s sort of ridiculous. It’s like saying, I want to drive a car, but never bothered to get a driver’s license or take a driver’s test. We’re all engaging in this system 24 hours a day, but yet we’re arguing about whether we want to engage in this system. No, what you don’t want to. What you don’t want to do is to be broke. I’ll say this a different way, but I’m going to say it bluntly.

John Hope Bryant:
Even if you want to distribute money like a socialist, you must first collect it like a capitalist.

Monique:
Perspective.

John Hope Bryant:
So what black. So what black people. What black people need is a black jewish business plan.

Monique:
What is that? What is that? Tell me more.

John Hope Bryant:
Mean that the Jews were discriminated against since the beginning of time. I mean, you. You know, Jesus was jewish. That’s a whole other conversation. But, you know, blacks were discriminated. Jews were discriminated against Europe. They couldn’t. They couldn’t own land.

John Hope Bryant:
That’s why they became financiers, because they couldn’t actually own property. So they learned to lend against property and so on and so forth, and that allowed them to ultimately own the property they were financing and so on and so forth. But they had to learn these different trades because they were discriminated against. But they understood that the only way to carve around discrimination was ownership. So there’s only today 15 million jews in the world of 8 billion people. But look at the respect and credibility they have. Even while people might resist them, they have to respect them. I’d rather you respect me and learn to like me than like me, never respect me.

John Hope Bryant:
So, you know, we may be the talent on a record, but maybe my jewish brothers and sisters own the record company. I don’t want to bounce the basketball. I’m going to own the basketball production company. I want to own the basketball team. I want to own. I don’t. I want to rock a mic on the stage. I want to rent the mics on the stage.

John Hope Bryant:
I don’t want to. I don’t. I don’t want to hit the baseball. I want to own the baseball mat production company and I want to own the vending company that sells hot dogs and hamburgers inside of the stadium. I want to own the sanitation company and janitorial company that cleans the stadium. I want to, you know, it’s a mindset shift, right, from a surviving mindset and victimization, which means clearly we’ve been victimized. There’s no question about that. Clearly we’ve been targeted.

John Hope Bryant:
But you don’t have to be a victim, even though somebody is victimizing you. I’d much rather be the person writing the check than just simply cashing it. So the civil rights movement. First, reconstruction was about basic freedom. Civil war. Second, reconstruction was about access, access to jobs, access to a polling booth, access to public facilities. That’s the civil rights movement. We’ve already talked about that.

John Hope Bryant:
Doctor Dorothy Heidt, Ambassador Andrew Young, Doctor King, all these heroes. And she rose credit Scott King, who fought for that access. The third reconstruction post, George Floyd, is about opportunity for all ownership. So again, from cashing the check to writing it. So I just think this is a silly conversation for people to say they, they hate capitalism or don’t want to reject capitalism. I mean, you, you’re not, you’re not talking on a, you’re not talking on a government phone. You paid for it. You’re not sleeping on a government pillow.

John Hope Bryant:
You paid for it. Like, you know. And the government gets their money from us, by the way, this is the real irony is that the government has no resources unless people who earn money through free enterprise and pay, pay into the tax system, thus funding the government. Without us, the government has nothing. So we’re sort of trying to reject air. You’re trying to reject breathing. You know, you’re trying to reject, you know, the sidewalk you’re walking on, it’s sort of, you know, it’s a pointless conversation. You gotta master it.

Monique:
Yeah. And I think conversations like this, also that perspective and then breaking it down in education, because sometimes people pair what they’ve been told. So it’s about, what do you know? Educating yourselves. And then also, of course, listening to people like you who. Who do have that knowledge. And speaking of, like you mentioned, like, civil. We are talking about financial literacy being a civil rights issue. I want to talk about how Operation Hope is working towards leveling this playing field through inclusive capitalism.

Monique:
So what are some of the things that you all are doing?

John Hope Bryant:
Well? Inclusive capitalism, I think, is pretty much the entire ballgame that takes the good capitalist approach, where I do well and you do better, I succeed. I’m making a dollar, and you’re getting a real benefit to yourself. Inclusive capitalism is repairing the ladder of prosperity so that black people and others don’t resent the rich. You have a lot of people you hear today.

Monique:
Yes.

John Hope Bryant:
They say, I hate rich people.

Monique:
Yes, certainly.

John Hope Bryant:
No, you don’t. No, you don’t. They had reached. They hate rich people until they become rich. What they hate is a gamed system. They hate a system designed for them not to succeed. And so you start to feel that no matter how hard I work, I can’t get ahead. This guy over here is not as smart as me and not as wise as me, and not as hard working as me, but that person is filthy rich and I’m poor, so the system must be rigged, and thus I hate it.

John Hope Bryant:
Okay, you have a reason to hate that. I’m with you on that. So what operation hope is doing is reversing that. Where we’ve directed four and a half billion dollars of capital in the last 30 years, probably most of that in the last 15 years, to create homeowners, 41% to 43% of black people own a home today. The easiest way to build wealth in America is home ownership. So we’re providing access to homeownership with prime capital, prime rates, prime access to prime financing at the best banks in the country. We’re helping to raise your credit score 54 points in six months, 100 points in a hundred in twelve months to 24 months. We’re lowering your debt by $3,800 in six months.

John Hope Bryant:
We’re increasing your savings, $2,000. For somebody making $48,000 a year, that’s a transformational in their life. So now that helps get the bank out of the no business. I’m so sorry. We’re declining you for a loan. The answer to your application for homeownership, for small business, for consumer loan, for credit cards, a lot of credit. The answer is just no. I’m sorry, you don’t approve, you’re not approved.

John Hope Bryant:
Get the bank out of the no business and get them back into the yes business because the bank can’t profit unless they say yes to a loan, right? So people say, oh, the bank is racist. Well, in 1920, the bank was racist because the bank was owned by the Joseph family or whatever family in that little small town. And probably they weren’t racist. It was one shareholder. But today I own Wells Fargo. I mean, if you, if you have a mutual fund, you may owe bank of America and US bank and all these banks, we’re all shareholders in this public entity. There may be a racist person or racist people within that bank who work there, and they may be meaning you, harm, but that bank wants to make a profit, that they want to make a loan. Somebody’s going to pay them back, which means that you’re.

John Hope Bryant:
If we, if you come to operation open, we get your credit score right, your debt to income ratios right, your savings, your income rate sorted out for you, that we can get the bank to say yes. So much so that at hope inside model, we, we say, if the bank turns you down, we’ll fund the loan. Or put another way, we’ll guarantee, we guarantee your loan, subject to the resolution of your primary denial factors. As long as you do what we say, we’ll approve your loan. Even if the bank doesn’t approve it, we will fund it. But in four and a half billion dollars worth of approvals, we’ve never had to write a check because the bank always funds the loan. So that’s, that’s a big part of our portfolio. Then we have 1 million black business initiative one in BB, where, which is $130 million commitment from Shopify’s founder, Toby Lukey, a friend of mine.

John Hope Bryant:
After George Boyd’s murder, created million black businesses in America, where we’re already at 450,000 black businesses created, nurtured, supported, advanced since George Floyd’s murder. Because Tobi at Shopify want customers. They want more customers who happen to be black. And he’s also doing the right thing. Free website design, free domain name, free shopify license for four months, free business plan for my pre show, free financial coaching and counseling from operation, free consultation with a lawyer, an accountant, a business consulting firm. Yes. All this worth about $25,000 to get somebody into repayment systems, get you into your first e commerce business at scale. So these are just a couple examples of what we’re doing in a practical way to get somebody from the streets to the suites.

John Hope Bryant:
And why the book? Financial literacy for all is a critical part of your. Not your library. You breathe a book and you put it on the shelf. It’s part of your, your business plan for your life. You should be. Have it marked up, underlined, highlighted. You know all the things. Yeah.

John Hope Bryant:
So you should come back. Come back to it a half dozen times or a dozen times a year. Okay. We’re gonna hyper focus.

Monique:
Yeah, that’s, that’s good stuff. And also. So, John, what I’m hearing is, one of the things you mentioned is mindset. So the next question I was gonna ask you about some of these actionable steps that people can take. Because when you’re speaking about lending and just some of the things that people like, people are creating whole organizations regarding discrimination when it comes to lending and going into banks, and then also like, predatory leaning, all of these things. So what you’re saying is if you get your credit score, if you get these things right, and you come in with this perfect paper, everything in alignment, you’ll get what you need. However, at that establishment, what you might run into is a prejudiced individual, and that is who might stop you. Is that what you said?

John Hope Bryant:
Yes. I’m going one step further. You go, you go into that physical location in the afternoon, you call somebody and you guys get on the wrong side of each other in the conversation. Maybe that person has a bias. That’s racial. Yes, you may run into racism, but if you go to your computer at midnight and you fill an application for a credit card with pick the institution and you’ve got a credit score of 780 and you got your debt to income ratios, right. And all that stuff. We work with, Operation Hope, that computers just going to say, yes, I like math because it doesn’t have an opinion.

John Hope Bryant:
The computer. The computer is not looking at what race you are. They’re looking at what, what, whether you got the green, not whether you’re black, white, red, brown or yellow. Do you have the green? Can you pay us back? Right. And so, yes, I’m saying that, that 700 credit score neighborhoods don’t riot. They go shopping. All of our problems are in 500 credit score neighborhoods. All of them check cashier next to a payday loan lender, next to a rental owned store, next to a title lender, next to a liquor store, next to a pawn shop and a church down the street.

John Hope Bryant:
Trying to make you feel a little bit better once a week about your distressing situation. And most of us are in a surviving mindset because we’re three, four, five generations from slavery, and we’re, and we are. Our self esteem has been depressed. We have been isolated in these communities that people call ghettos, which are only, by the way, african American. You don’t see african Caribbeans in ghettos. You’ll see african Africans and ghettos. You don’t see Italian. You know, you see in neighborhoods where Italians live or neighborhoods where Jamaicans live.

John Hope Bryant:
It’s only. It’s only African Americans that are in these neighborhoods because they destroyed our self esteem, our spirit. And now people are preying on us with predatory businesses like these check cashing and payday loan lending companies that prey on a 500 credit score neighborhood. So if you raise the vibration, you raise the vibration, the economic vibration and economic intelligence in that neighborhood, from 580 credit score to 680 credit score to 700 credit score, you change the entire neighborhood. You change who’s serving that neighborhood. You change from single parent households to two parent households. You change from people who are hopeless to hopeful. You change from the dot, the lights are off to the lights are on, and people are starting businesses and creating families.

John Hope Bryant:
And you can now you have whole foods and all these grocery stores coming in and people who want to serve folks who are, you know, financially resilient and upwardly mobile, and. And you live longer. You live in a five, our, hopefully, our hope financial wellness index. Anybody listening this can type in either hope seven credit score index or Hope financial wellness index in their computer search engine. And you type in your zip code. And I’ll tell you what, your credit score is in that neighborhood. And if you’re living in a 580 credit score neighborhood, you lived at 61 years old.

Monique:
Mm hmm.

John Hope Bryant:
You live to us. You live in a 700 credit score neighborhood. You live to 81 years old, 20 year difference in length of life, 15 minutes apart. So this literally, like, I can’t get in somebody’s heart and change how they feel about you, but I can change your credit score.

Monique:
This is true. That’s if people are listening and they’re like, okay, well, you had this great experience, or you make it sound easy. And how do I actually do? Because I got that. No, exactly. It’s not easy. But like you mentioned, it’s mindset and it’s going to take work. So we are all about actionable steps. So if someone is in these situations where they want to do better and they do have, they’re learning the financial literacies, what would you say are some of the first steps that they could start to take?

John Hope Bryant:
Yeah. So don’t go to Starbucks today and buy your cappuccino or frappuccino. Go buy. Go online or go to a black bookstore and buy this book, financial literacy for all. Go to, go to, go to Black Bookstore, a local bookstore. Go to Amazon, go to Walmart, go to Barnes and Nobles, buy financial literacy for all for the same cost of going to get yourself a frappuccino. Then download on your phone the hope in hand app, it’s free. And go online and get.

John Hope Bryant:
And take advantage of a scholarship that I give every person because I’ve raised the money. We have raised the money to have a $72 million operating budget at Operation Hope, my philanthropy and to provide scholarships for coaching and counseling to the black and brown people listening to this podcast for free. Free to them. It’s valuable. It costs money to us. But, but you can get up to a $5,000 scholarship for coaching and counseling. And all you gotta do, invest your time and we will get your. We will, we will get your credit score up working with you.

John Hope Bryant:
We will get your debt levels down. We will negotiate with your credit. Your creditors will get your landlord off your back. We’ll get the credit card companies off your back, will begin to help you. We’ll help you start arguing with your mate, your partner, your friends about money. You have a dream for business. Go to one mbb.org or Operation hope.org and sign up to one MBB and get as much as a $25,000 in kind grant to start your business. It starts now.

John Hope Bryant:
Now, this is you to your point. Now, I’m not saying this is some panacea. Only in the dictionary does the word success come before the word work, because it’s alphabetical. You’re going to have to put in some work. You’re going to put in some energy, some time. It’s going to be frustrating. But nothing good comes easy. Nothing.

John Hope Bryant:
Rainbows only follow storms. You cannot have a rainbow without a storm first. Nothing good comes easy. All of this is work. But it’s work that pays you a dividend. It’s work for your own portfolio. Everybody listening to this should think about themselves. Somebody’s listening to this.

John Hope Bryant:
Her name is Jane Smith. Brother’s listening. His name is, you know, Dwayne Johnson. Think about Dwayne Johnson, LLC. Jane Smith, LLC. Think about yourself as a limited liability corporation, as a corporate entity, right? You are a brand. You are a corporation. You have a balance sheet, an income statement, an asset base and liability base.

John Hope Bryant:
And you’re going to grow generational wealth and a brand and a reputation and a legacy. I mean, why aren’t people excited about that? Everybody should be excited about that. And it can start with as simple as, let’s not do, let’s stop these GoFundMe campaigns to bury somebody. This is crazy. Like get, you know, most, if you work, if you listen to this and you work for a responsible company and they have given you health insurance, bury in your documentation for your health insurance. On most policies, there’s a death policy. So if you die on the job, I know, because Operation Hope provides this for my employees. If you die on the job, God forbid, in that health insurance policy plan, your health plan is as much as $25,000 to bury you.

John Hope Bryant:
Why are we doing GoFundMe campaigns? If you, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re able bodied listening to this, you can get a $25,000 health insurance policy for $4 a month. You can get a hundred thousand dollar health insurance, life insurance policy, a term life insurance policy for $20 a month, $25 a month. You get a million dollar policy. Talking about generational wealth. Now get a million dollar life insurance policy if you’re in good health for, you know, less than $100 a month. Why wouldn’t you do that? Because God forbid, when you, not if you die, when you die, if you have three children, two children, whatever, you just made them a millionaire. See, it’s little things. It’s life insurance.

John Hope Bryant:
It’s a will, right? To simply direct your assets. It’s becoming a homeowner. You got to live somewhere. Why would you want to rent when you can afford to own and don’t go buying some fans, don’t go renting uptown, some place that don’t want you with money that you don’t have, impress people you don’t know to talk about stuff that don’t matter. Go to your own neighborhood, go to a working class neighborhood and buy the worst house in the best block. Buy it, rehab it and own it. Then buy the next one. Buy it, rehab it, or rent it.

John Hope Bryant:
You do that, three months, you’ll be a millionaire. So I just, so listen, and you can get the down payment for this conversation. Somebody now saying, well, John’s saying all this stuff, where do I get the down payment? Well, the earned income tax credit. You make $60,000 a year or less. The federal government owes you a check for working. You make $38,000 a year. The government owes you $6,500 thereabouts. If you have never filed EITC, you get three years of that it’s retroactive for three years.

John Hope Bryant:
That’s almost $20,000. There’s your down payment for your $100,000 house. And then a bank we hook you up with may even give you a down payment assistance grant for $10,000. Now, listening to this podcast, somebody figured out how to die in dignity and live with respect. They learned how to plan for the future and create generational wealth. They learned how to become a millionaire two times over.

Monique:
Yes.

John Hope Bryant:
And they learned to walk with their backup. Nobody can walk, nobody can ride your back unless you bent over. Stand your back up. Stand straight up.

Monique:
This is true. These are all the great things. So I want to end off by talking about the work that you are doing and some of the supportive and resources because you kind of just went over them and all. Well, before that, because this is the black to business podcast. We’re talking to business owners. So in all of these conversations, this conversation about financial literacy, how can entrepreneurs start to integrate these principles into their daily business operations, such as pricing, cash flow, and management and all the things.

John Hope Bryant:
Yeah, well, you have to have a budget, right? You should have an accountant. You know, if you don’t have an accountant, go get one. If you can’t afford an accountant, then go get, you know, quicken or quickbooks or some business software that you’re comfortable with that you can do yourself. Even if you have an accountant, you should still be overseeing your own financial affairs. You need to get. Everybody should have a budget. Okay, how much money you have? I have a budget. Everybody should have a budget.

John Hope Bryant:
Put. Download my FiCO or a credit, a credit check app. Check your credit score. You know, you know, once or twice a week. I check mine briefly every day. And why should you do that? You may say, wait a minute, John, you’re mixing metaphors. You just ask somebody to pull their personal credit check. But we’re talking about a business.

John Hope Bryant:
Well, 96% of all black businesses don’t have any employees, their sole proprietorship. So you’re going to get credit based on your personal credit profile. That means that most businesses are actually really, you know, self employment projects until they grow their employee base and their infrastructure. So make sure your personal credit profile is spotless. And if you haven’t checked your credit in six months, I guarantee you, well, a year. If you never check your credit a year, I guarantee you there’s an error on your credit report. That’s. That’s.

John Hope Bryant:
That’s going to make your credit score go down. Right? So these are basic things. Have a budget, right? Have a financial plan. Have a financial advisor. You know, make sure you’re it. Reminds me, my dear friends who works at operation opens, guy named Sir James McKenna. Gotta be a little paranoid. He said.

John Hope Bryant:
He’s. I don’t. He’s. I don’t. I don’t trust nobody. I trust my mama and my sister. My mama’s dead. I keep one eye on my sister.

John Hope Bryant:
So you want to have a plan. You want. You want to have a financial planner, but you want to keep your eyes on them. You want to have an accountant, you want to keep your eyes on them. You want to have an accountant, a lawyer. My lawyer. One of my lawyers just showed up here, Steve Ryan. Great guy.

John Hope Bryant:
I don’t need to keep my eyes on him. But you keep your eyes on your lawyer. Keep your eyes on everybody. You got to be paranoid because nobody washes rental cars. And then you got to have books and records, right? We had this guy come into operation hope, former drug dealer. I guess he had some money. No. No way to explain it.

John Hope Bryant:
But fine, he want to start a restaurant. And he’d ordered all these restaurants, eat all these restaurant equipment, ordered, you know, the stoves and all that stuff, and hadn’t gotten around to a business plan. So we came in to see operation hope. We sat him down, said, look, it’s not busyness, it’s business. It’s not. Ready, fire. Aim is ready. Aim, fire.

John Hope Bryant:
Slow down. Let’s do a business plan together. Everybody needs a business plan. And so we’re doing this business plan. We said, where’s your balance sheet? He said, what’s a balance sheet? See, it’s really basic. Like he thought. He thought he had no idea we were talking about, you got to go back to basics, right? And again, I cover. I cover a lot of this in the book, financial literacy for all you need.

John Hope Bryant:
If you’re going to go to church, you need to read the Bible. You’re going to run in business, they’re going to run your life. You need a. You need a financial guidance, a book, something like the facial literacy for all that become. Again, I want. Again. I want it dog eared. When I see you in an airport, I want.

John Hope Bryant:
I don’t see my book looking pristine. I want it all beat up. I want there to be markings on it. I want your kids to put crayon marks on it. I want to see underlines and circles and scratches and pages torn out. I want people passing this around. I want somebody going into the copy of the store and try to breach my copyright laws and make 100 copies of it. Give it all your friends.

John Hope Bryant:
We got to make this movement sexy and cool. We’ve been making dumb sexy for way too long. We dumbed down and celebrated it. We gotta make smart sexy again. That’s what I want.

Monique:
Yes. And so how can those who are interested in connecting with organizations like Operation Hope for support and resources do so?

John Hope Bryant:
Go to operationhope.org one mbb.org, download the Hope in hand app, call our 1800 number, go to our social media accounts and followperationhope or onhope Bryant and or do both. And make, if you are financially literate volunteers, member of our Hope Corps, make a commitment, a hope commitment to start a program in your community to teach financial literacy in the local boys and girls club or the links chapter or the school or wherever you happen to put your bucket down, that you have a social, you know, you have an interest in what’s going on in your community. Teach financial literacy like you teach civil rights. Teach civil rights and just start. I don’t want people to over complicate this. I don’t want them to be overwhelmed. Just start. Don’t let the perfect become the death of the good.

John Hope Bryant:
Just start.

Monique:
Wise words and John, this is the year of our black men who lead initiative, which is focusing on the theme of work, life and balance. So what are some of the tools, exercises and or activities that you use to improve your workflow in your life?

John Hope Bryant:
I sleep.

Monique:
8 hours, 9 hours.

John Hope Bryant:
No, no. I sleep about 6 hours a night. But I love sleep. I love sleep, but I don’t get any. No. I work out every day. I get up in the morning. I take my ag one, which is the essential 75 essential vitamins and nutrients and probiotics that your body needs.

John Hope Bryant:
I drink that as a shake every morning. I take my the only medicine I take is a half a blood pressure pill. And as I’ve gotten healthier, my hypertension has gone. My blood pressure has gone down closer to normal, thank God. As I worked out, it’s gotten closer to normal. I work out every morning, 15 minutes, push ups, sit ups and stretches. You’ve got to stretch. I use, I travel with a knobby foam roller and I roll out the fascia tissue, which is what’s closest to your bones.

John Hope Bryant:
And so that you don’t get arthritis, you don’t get started looking like hunchback of notre dame walking sideways. You got to keep your body limber and loose and then watch what you eat. My wife, Shatra, is a wellness expert, and she said staying healthy and in shape, it’s 75% what you put in your mouth and 25% working out. And I absolutely agree with her. She looks timeless because, not because she works out all the time, but because she eats really well. And I’ve gotten a point now where if somebody comes and brings me, Janae Roscoe, who works for me, brought me some sugary candy and brought me some cookies or whatever, I was giving a speech earlier today. I put it in my mouth because he was hungry, and I instantly felt bad because my system is so clean now, or what it used to be, that it now detects processed foods and all that stuff instantly. So I’ve had a cleaner system.

John Hope Bryant:
I’m happy. You need a cleanse. Do a cleanse once or twice a year. Exercise a little bit every day. There’s nothing other than walking 10,000 steps. These are simple things you need to do to integrate wellness into your life, because your body plant and your mental plant is the true and your spiritual plant are the best plants. The most important planting you do, other than the mate you’re going to pick for your life, the most important decisions you’ll make in your life. Which goes back to your point about mindset, right? And it is entirely possible that the majority of African Americans are clinically undiagnosed depressed because of our experience in this country and because people have been told that, told us that we’re not valuable and have done things that sort of batter our self esteem.

John Hope Bryant:
So I really think talking to somebody, I don’t care whether it’s your pastor, a shrink, a psychologist, girlfriend, your boyfriend, talk to yourself. I don’t care. But you need to talk to somebody and get this frustration out of your system and go from surviving to striving to winning, to go from a surviving mindset, which is what you’re against, to a thriving mindset, which is what you’re for. You’ve got to see the glasses half full, not half empty, because whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can’t, you’re right.

Monique:
Yes. That’s wise words. And my final question is, what does it mean to you to be black in business?

John Hope Bryant:
What does it mean to be black in business? Well, I’m not black in business. I hope people say I’m a smart, sharp, successful businessman and an entrepreneur who happens to be black, not a black businessman. I don’t want anybody to put me into a box. My customers are everybody. My partners are everybody. My playing field is everywhere. I can compete anywhere in the world. So no one says, you know, that’s a white businessman.

John Hope Bryant:
Or that’s a jewish or Latino. People succeed. Oh, my God, there’s Steve Jobs. Nobody says, he’s jordanian. He’s from Jordan. His father was from Jordan, the Middle east. And the way there’s a jordanian guy. Oh, my God, there’s Steve Jobs.

John Hope Bryant:
So you want somebody who’s just successful and you want them to sort of reflect the culture in a way that makes you and the culture proud and everybody’s your customer. Stop putting up signs. You don’t have to advertise. Say, I’m a black owned business in your window. I mean, what, that sends a message. Are you saying you only want black customers? You say, I’m a successful business. They know you black, they can see you. You want everybody to come in and do business with you.

John Hope Bryant:
And then if you want to support black charities and black philanthropy, knock yourself out. Great, do that. But take the money from everybody and then target how you distribute it as a philanthropist. And I think that this obsession with excellence, not perfection, is what I want. I want you to. Don’t let the perfect be the death of the good. Don’t stress yourself out about things you can’t control. Get up every day and try to do the best you can.

John Hope Bryant:
Be a little bit better tomorrow than you were yesterday. And never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. The one thing I love about being black is I know nobody’s gonna cut me a break. So I get up early, I work longer and harder and stay up later than everybody else. And that hustle, I was homeless six months of my life when I was 18, we didn’t cover that, but that hustle and that paranoia that I’m gonna be broke again, I’m gonna be homeless again, I’m so thankful for that because I really feel sorry for people who don’t have any hustle in their life. I feel sorry for people who don’t have any sense of striving. They’re going to fail, and they don’t know why they’re failing. They don’t know how to get themselves out of it.

John Hope Bryant:
But I know, because I have been broke, I know what that feels like, and I never want to be there again. And so that insecurity, that paranoia will make sure that I avoid that at all costs. So I think it’s a bit of a blessing to be born black in America, because if you get to, you can get to a point where you can compete with anybody and win. No one. No one can compete with you.

Monique:
John, this has been amazing. Again, it has been such a pleasure to have you on the show and just the work that you’re doing. And thank you again. Thank you so much.

John Hope Bryant:
It’s my pleasure. And I want everybody to listen to this, to go get financial literacy for all and give it to somebody your love after you read it.

Monique:
Yes, certainly. And we’ll definitely promote it and put it in the show notes as well. But yes, and to everyone listening.