Are you an impact player? And, how do you know? Our guest today is Elliot Kallen, and he shares with us his story about making a choice to be an impact player in all areas of his life and the results of doing so.
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- Website:
https://prosperityfinancialgroup.com/
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https://prosperityfinancialgroup.com/meet-the-investing-expert-with-elliot-kallen/
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https://www.facebook.com/ProsperityFinancialGroupInc/
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Elliot H Kallen is a leader who brings over 30 years of passion and robust entrepreneurial business ownership experience to his elite Financial Planning & Advising practice. He has built international organizations, been a CEO of two other companies before forming Prosperity Financial Group, Inc. and is a frequent keynote speaker to charities, podcasts and radio shows on motivation, leadership, charitable work, marketing, and various financial subjects.
Elliot holds a BA degree in both Accounting and Economics from Rutgers University in New Jersey and has served on various Boards, as an active member and/or President, including The Boys and Girls Clubs of the Diablo Valley, the American Cancer Society of Contra Costa County & Congregation B’nai Shalom, where he has been actively involved in raising millions of dollars for these organizations. As President of Prosperity Financial Group, a top-tier Financial Advisory Firm, and Partner in Prosperity Wealth Management, he has led his organizations to be actively involved with many charities as this has been a lifelong theme.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering if you are an impact player and you probably run into people who maybe think that they are, but are they really? How would you know? Well, our guest today is Elliot Kallen and he shares with us his story about making a choice as a young man to be an impact player in all areas of his life. And he shares with us some of the results that have happened since doing so. Elliot brings over 30 years of business ownership and executive leadership experience, and he is the founder of his financial planning and advising practice, the Prosperity Financial Group. He’s a frequent keynote speaker to charities, podcasts, and radio shows on leadership, charitable work, marketing, and a whole bunch of other topics as well. And he’s also the founder of A Brighter Day charity organization. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (01:11):
Well, thanks so much, Tom for having me on. I’m Elliot Kallen. Company’s Prosperity Financial Group. I’m the CEO.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:18):
Well, thanks so much for being here. You have a few businesses and one in particular talking about how Prosperity Financial and A Brighter Day and these organizations are kind of common linked together. So I’d love for you just to talk about what you’re doing at your core business and then what you’re doing with A Brighter Day.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (01:35):
Those are great questions, Tom, and thanks again. So right now I’ve started companies three, four, and five in my life. So I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t really like the term serial entrepreneur. It’s an entrepreneur. You’re an entrepreneur. So three and four are financial services companies. One is a state of California Prosperity Financial Group. One is a national Prosperity Wealth Management. Between the two of those, we’re knocking on just shy of a billion dollars. Giving advice to companies and individuals on how to manage money and everything that goes along with that. And then nine years ago I started, or eight years ago I started another business which was a nonprofit charity called A Brighter Day, and that helps teens and their families with resources on stress and depression with the goal of stopping teen suicide. So it’s very much entrepreneurial, building businesses, building people and making things happen.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (02:25):
I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you so much. And I understand with Prosperity Financial, you’re in the business of helping people manage their investments and how to get a return on their investments and money in that regard. So when I think of with A Brighter Day and starting more of a philanthropic approach to business, what led you to want to also invest some time and resources into giving back?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (02:50):
Well, another really good question, Tom. I’ve always given back. That was just the family I was raised in, always gave back. I’ve been president of the Boys & Girls Club, president of the local synagogue. I’ve always been heavily involved in a leadership position, but nine years ago, my son, a sophomore at the University of Montana, walked up to the highway and jumped in front of a truck and took his life. And so in his suicide note to us, Tom, he wrote, “Mom and dad, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I never would’ve told you how I felt. I never would’ve asked for your help and I never would’ve taken your help.” And based on that, I decided that I wanted to create a charity to help families not have to go through the devastation and destruction that we were about to go through, which we’ve gone through, still going through it. We always go through it.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (03:36):
And so we started this charity with the idea of creating resources for teens. And so eight years later we’ve now got this incredible website with resources for teens and parents. We’ve got teen crisis texting hotline. It works 24/7 in all 50 states. That works a lot. That gets 50 new teens a month that get on there. We’ve got a Zoom counseling program that works in all 50 states because if you need to get your teen counseling, that could take six to 10 weeks if it’s local. And that’s a long time. So we get them counseling.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (04:12):
And then on top of that we do meetings that are locally and college scholarships and we go into high schools as well to talk. So there’s just a lot happening with that. Very exciting on that. All those requires, and you’re talking to entrepreneurs, all those require a time commitment and time is the one precious commodity that I always seem to have the least of. So I am constantly balancing, which means I’m out of balance every single day. And that’s the hardest thing I do, is to remain in balance and to make sure that each entity is getting the fair amount of time that they require. Not to mention that I need to be a dad and stay married at the same time too.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (04:51):
Certainly. Well, one thing I was curious about, and I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of your son and why you started the organization, but I’m curious, how has giving back, you’ve been doing this for a long time, but this is a really focused effort with what you’re doing here with A Brighter Day. How would you say that’s changed or impacted your business?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (05:11):
Well, everybody in my core business knows that I’m charitably inclined. I’m publicly speaking on a regular basis about leaving a legacy and in a world of money, that’s a big thing. So I’ve become an expert in the money side of how to leave a legacy, five different ways, 10 different ways that you could structure a legacy, whether that legacy is for your family, a church, a nonprofit organization like the American Cancer Society or ours, whatever that is, we talk about that. And people like that about me because I can ask the question, what’s the purpose of your money? I mean, if you died with your money, did you accomplish your purpose? And that’s only works if you had a goal for your money other than to travel around the world or spend it on golf courses or see your grandchildren. Is there another purpose of your money? And so it’s made a very big impact. So when I do dinner seminars and dinner programs, we always talk about how to leave a legacy.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (06:06):
As you’re thinking about that, and certainly I would imagine you and your staff are talking with that, with clients and organizations you’re working with. In terms of leaving that legacy or making an impact, why do you think that’s important in maybe giving back? Or how do you see it maybe change the lives or the organizations of companies or clients you work with?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (06:27):
Tom, not everybody is a give back kind of person, so we need to recognize that for some people it’s all about them. I’m making money for me. I’m making money for my kids. My legacy is I’m going to just die with some money or I want to die balancing my last paycheck kind of thing. That’s okay. So legacy is not for everybody. Foundation money, charity money, it’s not for everybody. I have some family members who love this political season but donate no money to it. Or they give $25 to five charities and they say, see, I’m a really charitable person. They making 100,000 a year and giving away $150 a year to charity.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (07:05):
And so for them, they’re not going to be engaged in that conversation. But for other people that are a little bit more purpose-based and they want to have an impact, they want their name on a building for the Boys & Girls Club on the gym, they want their name on a hospital wing or on something special or they just want to leave the world a better place in some form because that’s important to them. I’m not qualifying that. If they think this is important or that’s important, great, that’s what we care about. Then we talk about how we can structure that in the very best way if that’s really important to them. And we spend a lot of time with people talking just about that.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (07:42):
One of the things you mentioned a moment ago is this idea of balance and finding balance. Right. We have limited time and trying to balance between several companies you run plus being a husband, a father, and giving back your time in addition to other resources. It reminded me of your book DRIVEN, one of the chapters in there where you say, “Balance in business is an illusion.” I didn’t intend for all the conversation to tie so well together with some of my pre-show question planning, but I’d love for you to dive into that, give an intro on the book and then talk a little bit more about this idea of balance being an illusion.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (08:21):
Tom, thanks for the book plug. It’s DRIVEN by Elliot Kallen and Adam Torres. I couldn’t trademark the word driven. There are too many drivens out there. It’s on Amazon. It’s an Amazon bestseller and you could buy it even on audiobooks for practically nothing. So everybody can order it up and if you want me to sign it, you just give me a call and we’ll take care of that too. So as an entrepreneur and as someone who was married and now I’m on my second marriage, both of them were long-term, we’re all trying to balance every day. The 1970s, the Virginia Slim 70s came out and said, baby, you can have it all. And that created an illusion that I could have a great job, great career, and that was designed for women. But it’s no different for men. I could have a great career, I could be a great mom or great dad.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (09:06):
I could be a wonderful grandparent and I could have it all in business and be an entrepreneur every single day of the week. And you absolutely cannot because then every day they’re all out of whack. So today when I’m at work and I’m doing this with you, this is my focus. I am 100% into my job right now. I’m not playing dad, I’m not playing grandpa, and I’m not playing husband. When I come home at night, my focus is better be a husband or I’m going to be distant with my wife because I can’t think about anything but my job. And then you’re not going to be married very long. If I’m with my children or grandchildren, I need to be present because they deserve that.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (09:43):
So my friend who used to work for IBM told a story that his boss was just a obsessive compulsive boss and demanded that everybody who worked for him, worked seven days a week. So he would take his kids to the park one day a week on Sunday, but he would have to bring his laptop with him. And so he’d be doing work while pushing the swing. That’s terrible. You’re out of balance completely on that. And when his boss finally retired, he was like, thankfully, I can get back to normal work week. Let’s just go 100 hours a week instead of 120 hours a week. And so it’s very important that you get it right. So in my book that I wrote, balance is a scam or sham, it’s because you cannot be everything at the same time, but you can be present and in a moment of what you’re doing and that’s the best thing to do. And if you’re a good businessman, you’re planning for tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow and you can’t be doing that when you’re trying to play t-ball with your kid.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (10:45):
One of the other things that I think ties back to the earlier part of our conversation as well is this idea of community. And you write a phrase in there that just stuck out to me and it’s the title of one of your chapters, but it resonated with me so well, is just where you said, “Community doesn’t just happen.” I really like that phrase. So I’d love for you just to talk about that, what you meant by that and describe that a little bit for us.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (11:12):
So let me define community in a few ways. Community first of all is your own personal organization, your business. So what are your communication skills with your business community? Because you have to be a leader. You’re an entrepreneur, you have to be a leader. If you’re not a leader, then you’ll be being led by the nose in your own company and you don’t want that. And then the community is how am I going to develop, create this team around me that wants to be here? There’s culture, there’s humor, there’s poor taste, there’s good taste, there’s lunch, there’s breakfast. How are we all going to be growing in the same direction? That’s my community at work. My community of my charity is how am I going to touch people around me? How do I have an impact of people around me? And that’s probably my pride and joy, is I touch so many people every day in a positive message at work, at charity, at home.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (12:06):
People who know me know the guys an impact player. And that was the word I started to call myself in my 20s is when I came in every day be an impact player. That’s in my life. You could put that all through the thread of my life, is being an impact player and then in my own marriage and my children, that’s another community. How am I the community-based guy there? So community is just not one thing that’s charity based. I talk a lot about charity, community, Chamber of Commerce, talk about that in the book, but you have so many communities in your life that you are touching and people are talking about you when you’re not around. And they’re going to say, Tom, well, he’s a great guy. Just got together with him for lunch last week. Or Tom, can you believe it? Yeah, why not?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (12:48):
So are you going to have the reputation to be the gossiper in the community, which is not a good reputation to have, but so many people do that. Are you going to have the reputation to be the cheerleader of your community? Lots of love on that one. Are you going to be the person that says, I’m willing to try new things. Come to me. I’ll see if I can give you good advice on it too. That’s another part of community. So how you touch community is so important, but community is more than one thing.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:13):
That word impact is really standing out just from what you’ve described. Impact with the work that you do through your financial management business with Prosperity, impact through your charitable organization with A Brighter Day and in day-to-day connection with the folks you work with, live with and so on. So I think it’s really, really impressive with what you’re doing there. This is a great time Elliot, where we like to make a transition in the show and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we like to ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (13:49):
The book talks a lot about the journey. I’ve got a good friend of mine who has kind of a straight line in life, but he’s an exception to the rule. Most people don’t have that. Most people are not Mark Zuckerberg that started a company in college and they’re worth $30 billion or trillion dollars by the time they’re 40. But unfortunately, that was the motivation for me writing the book because I wanted people to know most people don’t have a straight line in life and I’m one of them that doesn’t have a straight line. Mine looks like this. I’m amazed by how crooked I am. I’m going backwards. I mean not just losing a son or a divorce. Thankfully I haven’t had cancer or heart disease on that. Knock on wood, I haven’t had that. But I’ve had setbacks and in my first company we were growing a clip in my 20s, which was an industrial packaging company at 20 to 30% a year.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (14:36):
But I was burning through cash of the company with receivables and payables. I was just burning up and I was too young to understand that if you grow at 30%, you better be putting in a lot of cash inflow to keep it going or get it more manageable. I didn’t understand that at all. So at some point I literally rather than have to get more money, I had to sell the company. I sold the assets of the company, kept the liabilities because I just would’ve had to borrow too much money to do that. And that’s one of my setbacks and one of my big learning lessons was from that one is do what you do really well and hire people to do what you don’t do well. And I didn’t do well the managing the cash of the company, kind of a CFO job is managing cash. All right. But I did really well sales, but in my mind I thought, well, I’ll hire a sales manager and I’ll handle the rest. And it was exactly the opposite of what I needed to do.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (15:36):
Well, let’s talk about a make or two, a highlight.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (15:41):
I would say moving to California in 1993 with no contacts and having a couple of companies here touching a billion dollars or getting close to it, I would say is a pretty big highlight of anybody’s life. There’s a pretty good remuneration from that. I’ve got a pretty good life. I travel a lot. My wife loves to travel. We just came back from three weeks in Europe. We talked about moving there for a month, maybe in a year or two. That’s pretty good highlight right there. And because you’re affecting people’s retirement, you’re giving them a better life in retirement because you ask the right questions to help them create a better life because the majority of seniors in retirement in the United States watch six hours of TV a day. I don’t think that’s a good retirement plan. So we talk about that with people.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (16:27):
Let’s not be the people that watch Dr. Phil followed by this show, followed by that show with binge-watching for the weekend. So we do talk about your life and how to live a better life. On the charity side, because I don’t want to knock that, we are touching four to 8,000 families every single month with some form of our resources touching them. We are keeping teens from taking their own lives because we’re getting them some counseling. Now we don’t really, depression doesn’t really have a cure. It’s an insidious disease without necessarily a cure on that. So it becomes a manageable thing, whether it be pills or finding out why you’re depressed and getting beyond it. Or at 30 you took your life because you never got what was going on at 21 under control. We’re trying to help those teens or young adults get their lives under control.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (17:23):
That’s pretty rewarding. I’ll never see that reward. I’m not told about it. Every now and then I get a parent that sends me a note or a teen that’s now 25 that sends me a note saying, thank you for saving my life or my child’s life. Thank you. That’s pretty rewarding. I have three of them out here. So how do you argue that? So which is more important, giving you a great retirement or helping your teens save their life? Saving a life is pretty amazing, right? We work on both just doing the right thing. When I was president of the Boys & Girls Club, the joy was creating an organization that every day teens have a place to go that they feel really good about that’s positive and that would create a positive experience for them. So there’s a journey that we all take in life. Some of us take it by accident, some of us can plan it better and it’s on purpose, but let’s not kid ourselves. Every day we are pounded with things that change our lives for the better and the worse. And then we make decisions and choose roads.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (18:20):
Elliot, the name of the show is Multiply Your Success. And we ask, have you used a multiplier to help you grow personally, professionally, or some of the organizations you’ve been leading?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (18:32):
So a multiplier for me, I’m like a franchise and I know it’s kind of what you do for a living, is franchises and good for you and good for the people listening to that because that’s amazing. And I wish I got into that world. I’m sorry I didn’t buy McDonald’s when I was 25. I did try to buy White Castle by the way. They wouldn’t sell it to me to bring to California. I did that and I tried to buy Carvel ice cream and they wouldn’t do that either.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (18:52):
Yeah.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (18:54):
So I had the right idea, but I have to tell you, I could never be a good McDonald’s owner because I can make a better hamburger. But that’s not the concept of McDonald’s.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:02):
If you like to tinker with things and constantly change the systems to make it better, franchising is probably not the direction for you to go in terms of buying a franchise. Most of the folks we work with are those entrepreneurs like yourself. We’re helping them multiply their business and growth through franchising their business. So absolutely spot on there.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (19:23):
So when I was in my 20s, I want to tell you an impact. So I was very fortunate that I had a father that was very entrepreneurial who taught me a valuable lesson about charity and about hard work. He was the greatest generation, World War II generation, and he always used to say, “You cannot make up for hard work.” You can’t. I call my schizophrenic voices on my shoulder. One of them says, you can’t make up for hard work for my father and my mother and their parents that are long gone 30, 35 years already. Wow. I lost my parents when they were pretty young. And my mother, who was an Auschwitz survivor in Europe, World War II, her thing was, you could do better today than you did yesterday and you could do better tomorrow than today. So when I come to work, I always think, what can I do better today than I did yesterday?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (20:08):
Those are little voices that talk to me, kind of like devil and angel voices on your shoulder. But when I was in my 20s as I was trying to get better and I was trying to, not really understanding the need to be grounded, which I definitely understand that today, the need to be grounded and reground yourself on a regular basis is I used to follow Anthony Robbins. So Tony Robbins. Amazingly successful. You could love him or hate him. It really doesn’t matter what you think of him from this conversation, but he had a weekend of destiny in which you, at the end of the weekend or Saturday night of that weekend, you walked on 40 feet of hot coals and came up with something, a phrase so you wouldn’t burn your feet. Amazing. Just a beautiful weekend of just walking on fire. 10 people from my office went to it all together so we could all motivate each other and not scare each other out.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (20:56):
If you came by yourself, maybe just say, I’m not doing this. I’m going to burn my feet. But with 10 of us there, we would just embarrass each other into doing it. And so one of the exercises he did, or he had everybody do, was to meet with somebody that you’ve never met before. This was before you walked on the coals. Meet with somebody you’ve never met before and find out what that fire represented to them that if they could walk on 40 feet of coals, what can they accomplish? And so the woman who I, was from Boston, and I met with her and she said, “My big thing is as I move up the corporate ladder, I’m losing my friends because I’m so driven, personally driven that I’m chasing my friends that I grew up with away. And so if I can walk on fire, than I can find a way to balance my life off with past friendships without ruining them to get new friendships.” That was important to her.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (21:48):
But for me, it was something very different because I was already in an entrepreneurial world, so moving up a corporate ladder was not an issue. For me, it was don’t let me be in the middle of the pack. Don’t let me be mediocre. Either I don’t do it at all or let me do it very well. Let me be the best that I could be at what I do. I can’t necessarily be excellent at it. I’m never going to play for the New York Jets, which was my high school dream. That just wasn’t going to happen. I could have been a quarterback if I had six more inches and a stronger arm, but that didn’t happen. All right. So you have to do some things within reason that are excellent and learn how to be excellent at them.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (22:28):
So what that taught me is become a student of your own excellence. Become a student of your business, a student of the charity, a student of other people. Learn how to be empathetic in ways that you’ve never thought of so you can understand how to be a critical thinker instead of a dictatorial manager. They’re all so different. So the pointing the fingers and saying, Tom, you need to do it because I sign your paycheck and that’s the way it is. That is one way of being a leader. I don’t think it’s a good way. Sometimes it’s the only way, and you don’t necessarily have to be 100% consensus builder, so you’re 100% pleurocracy instead democracy. But somewhere in between there, you have to motivate people to listen to you. And that’s not going to happen unless what I learned is I have to be a better listener and thinker. And so it taught me how to be a better listener and thinker. So that’s my grounding to do that.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (23:20):
I also have one more type of grounding, and that is that I go to the cemetery to see where my son is buried. And I have conversations. And by the way, these conversations are all the same. They don’t change. The scenery doesn’t change, the cemetery doesn’t change. They kind of the same conversation, but it lets me at that moment get grounded, cathartic and grounded. So I can walk away saying, okay, what now? I’ve done that, what now? And also lets me be gracious and grateful to those around me because I want to be grateful. And even with my son, when I’m up there and I have two other children, I want to be grateful for my two other kids and my grandchildren and my step grandchildren. I mean. My step-children and so forth.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (24:05):
And I want to be grateful for what I had because I always say I had Jake for 19 years, too short by many and not long enough, but I want to be grateful for what I have or what I had. And that’s part of life. Are you gracious and grateful for what you have? And are you good enough listener to want people to be a magnet for people in life? And that’s a good place to be.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:28):
Absolutely. Very, very well said. Thank you for sharing that. And the final question, Elliot, we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (24:37):
So I could see answering that in multiple ways. I could see saying, well, success allows me to travel anywhere I want in the world anytime. And that would be true. Some people would view that as very successful. I think my wife would view that as successful. Or my bills, I’m a 100% up on bills or I’ve got little to no mortgage or whatever. Those are monetary and materialistic ways of measuring success. There’s no doubt about that. Or even in a charity, we’re saving lives. How do you monetize that, materialize that, quantify that? You come up with these. But I think success for me is a little bit different. And that is that when I look back, I’ve gone through life or this period of life where I am today and said, I’ve done a lot of things in a really positive way that have had a positive impact on so many people around me.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (25:35):
So I don’t want this measure of my own personal success to be just about me. I want it to be as a touch and impact on others. So maybe when I’m dead and they’re at my funeral or they’re talking for the next five nights about me and they’re saying that there’s somebody that stands up and said, I just want [inaudible 00:25:58]. He changed my life. I met him for two hours and the guy did five hours of work for me to help me out and for no money. If that’s what people say about me, at some point I think I’ve had a successful life because you got to remember two generations, nobody will talk about you. Nobody will visit you in a cemetery at all or cremate or remains. It’s over. But the immediate people can turn around and say, he had an impact on me.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (26:26):
So my grandparents had no impact on me. Two of them were dead. One died shortly when I was very young. One died in eighth grade. I have nothing good to say about them. That’s not what I want to happen to me. I want them to say grandpa or my dad, one thing he did is he was strong enough to never give up. Or as my sister-in, my brother’s wife says all the time to me because she runs things by me. She said, “You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met in my life. Because you bounce back with adversity over and over in a positive way without letting it ruin your life.” Those are really good things, and I hope they’re said about me one day. Maybe I’ll be alive when they’re said about me still.
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (27:09):
But you know something. At the end of the day, if I’ve touched people in the right way, I think that’s how you measure my success. The money I leave for charity, the money I leave in the bank. Yes, I like my charity, my national charity and self-sustaining. Yes, I want somebody to buy my company out and give me a lifetime’s worth of retirement income through the purchase of my companies. All that’s true and it’s very materialistic and very, you can monetize that. All that is very true. But that’s not who I am. At the end of days, what I am and who I am are not the same thing. And you’ll measure me by how I touched other people.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (27:43):
This has been inspiring and impactful. I appreciate it. And as we bring this to a close Elliot, is there anything you’re hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Elliott Kallen, Prosperity Financial Group (27:54):
I’d love people to go to our website and download resources for my company. It’s prosperityfinancialgroup.com. And you could send me a message at Elliot@prosperity, E-L-L-I-O-T@prosperityfinancialgroup.com. For the charity it’s abrighterday.info, abrighterday.info. Or Elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T@abrighterday.info. And I give out my cell phone to everybody. If you want to have a conversation about this, I’m at (510) 206-1103 California time, so don’t call me at seven in the morning your time in New York, although I do get those from time to time. But if you ever want to have a conversation, I’m the kind of person that listens, talks, and shares. So very open.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (28:39):
Elliot, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when Elliot talked about what is the purpose of your money? And I thought that was a great line to share and a great question for you to ask yourself, what is the purpose of your money? What are you planning to do with it? Because it doesn’t do anything until you tell it to do something. I thought that was great. With his company, he’s able to help others leave a legacy. Takeaway number two is from his book where he talked about balance is an illusion. His way to combat that is to be present in the moment, be present in the moment of what you’re doing at that moment. I thought that was great. Takeaway number three are the three quotes that he said right at the tail end of the interview.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (29:37):
I love these quotes. One was from his father. He said, “You cannot make up for hard work.” The second quote was from his mother, who is an Auschwitz survivor. And she used to say to him, “You can do better today than yesterday and you can do better tomorrow than today.” I thought that was a great reminder. And the third quote was from Elliot when he realized early on in his life and his career that he said, “Don’t let me be mediocre.” And he said, “I don’t want to be in the middle of the pack.” And so that led him to pursuing how to study to be excellent in whatever he was doing. And now it’s time for today’s win-win.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (30:22):
So today’s win-win is when Elliot said he wants to be an impact player. And I think the win back to you is how are you being an impact player? What does being an impact player look like? And one way to know if you are or if you aren’t, is what is your reputation with your friends, family, employees, coworkers, people around you? What is your reputation with them? Is it the reputation of an impact player? And I think if you can understand that, that’s going to be a great win for you and those around you. If you’re an impact player, it’s really going to help you lead a better life. And it’s also going to really help those around you be better as well.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (31:10):
And so that’s the episode today folks. Please make sure you subscribe to our podcast here on your favorite podcast channel and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please make sure you give us a rating or review. We love five-star reviews. We really appreciate that. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at our website, bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
