Ari Page Shares His Underdog Story of Hard work, Dedication, and Consistency to Success

Kevin Harrington
Hi, I’m Kevin Harrington, an original shark from the hit television show Shark Tank and you’re listening to the underdog podcast.

Pamela Bardhi
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the underdog Podcast. Today I have an incredible guest here with me. Ari, how are you, my friend?

Ari Page
I am great. Thank you so much for having me them.

Pamela Bardhi
Oh my god, it’s such an honor to have you already. So we connected at family mastermind. And I was just blown away at like your level of awesomeness and just all the work that you do. I was like, holy, and then we got into talking about law of attraction. I’m like, Dude, this is my people. This is my people. I’m beyond pumped to have you here today. And just to really hear your story and how you’ve built this multimillion-dollar empire of yours. How you’re helping people every single day, and kind of how you got there. So I’m going to start you off with one of my favorite questions. What inspired you on your journey to where you are today, my friend?

Ari Page
Wow. Well, that’s a great question. The thing that really inspired me because I was working in the shipyard 12 hours a day, and many times more if they needed you to. When you’re working in the shipyard, there’s 1000 guys outside the gate that they can hire. And they’ll remind you that so it’s either you work, what they’re asking you to work, you do what they’re asking you to do, or your gun. So kind of the pressure of life. I had two little kids at the time. And just working so hard in a blue-collar environment. It’s so difficult, you’re it’s just literally backbreaking, I actually physically had back problems from it still was literally backbreaking.

But while I was working so hard, I love to download movies. That was one of those pirate bay guys. And one of the movies that I saw was in 2000 or 2001. One of the movies that I downloaded just said secret dot, Avi, it was just the file name secret that Avi was like, Huh? The files a secret I guess it’s it looks like it’s a movie file dot Avi so I’m gonna download it right. So I downloaded this movie. And it turned out it was that documentary, The Secret by Rhonda burns introduced. Yeah, and introduced me to that idea of the law of attraction.

And so when I first saw that documentary, it was absolutely overwhelming. And of course, it was after working a 12-hour shift. I was at home, I was like, Oh, I finally finished downloading. So I was able to watch it. I was by myself, the kids were asleep, I was by myself watching the movie, and or the documentary. I just remember being so overwhelming, like so many realizations throughout. Of course, that documentary is rather actually a simple explanation of law of attraction, it doesn’t really dive that far into it. It’s kind of topical if you will. But what I did was I looked at a lot of the teachers that were on the secret. One of them being Abraham Hicks, or the teachings of Abraham.

I started watching more of Abraham’s videos and reading Abraham’s book, teachings of Abraham. And it absolutely changed my mindset to the point where I realized I did not need to keep up, I literally didn’t need to go back to work. That’s a little psycho thinking. So but in the secret Law of Attraction asks you, What do you want? What do you desire, without the contradictory thought, without the thought of I want this? But I can’t have it because of tha. I want this, but she won’t let me I want this, but my boss would never. Like, without the contradictory thought, What do I actually want, you seem to me that what I would want is to have lots of everything.

From family to friends, to money to happiness, to just lots of all the things that I desired, and to have them in abundance. And of course, everything that we’ve been taught growing up tells us teaches us the opposite of that. You know everything’s difficult to attain, you know, every, you know, things are costly, it’s hard. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it all these types of things. When in reality, all of it you know, when we think of the environment that we live in, we live in an atomic environment. Everything that we know of is made up of atoms, that’s all made up of energy. There’s nothing that we know of that is outside of that. Nothing that we know that’s outside of that, and yet, the energy that makes up the atomic world is timeless.

It doesn’t experience gravity, It doesn’t have a start-stop cycle. Everything that we know of in the third dimension starts and stops. There’s literally nothing that doesn’t, but yet the energy that makes up all of that that makes up our body in and of itself is time. Bliss doesn’t experience gravity doesn’t experience any of what the third dimension experiences. It just as recycled over and over and over and over and over.

And Law of Attraction states that energy along with consciousness is the God force process, the observation, the energy, the manifestation. So after seeing that documentary, I decided I wanted to quit my job. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know where I was gonna go. But I didn’t know that I wanted to move to Florida because I had family down here. And so I started looking on places to find a job. So at the time, I went on Craigslist, and I was like, what jobs are there in Florida?

Pamela Bardhi
Find me jobs in Florida.

Ari Page
So I’m looking and I’m like, Wait, there’s a lot of requests, like a lot of people are posting. A lot of businesses are posting for cable installers to install cable internet and cable TV. So I was like, maybe that’s what I’ll do, right? I don’t know, like law of attraction is telling me just to choose something, try something get outside. Don’t be a fool, and an idiot, you know, like, follow your heart. But take your brains with you. You mean, so at that point, I was like, Why can’t just look at my bank account, I can’t just leave that I’ve got nothing to leave with. My right, right, I should probably try and get one of those jobs up here. First, get some experience.

So that when I moved down there, I don’t come in as a helper, I come in as a journeyman. I applied. And I went and I got a job installing cable right there in Norfolk, Virginia, where I lived at the time because there’s a lot of shipyards in that area. And so the cable that I was installing was called IPTV Internet Protocol TV. It worked over phone line. It wasn’t even installed over cable, it was actually over a phone line. It was more of an expensive installation because it was way less common to be doing this DSL than just to be doing normal cable. But either way, this company Cavalier, they were hiring for that. So I hired into a contractor that was contracted to Cavalier to do these installations. I got hired there.

Within two weeks, the guy that hired me put me in charge of that office. And I’m thinking, this law of attraction stuff is amazing. But then two weeks of quitting my other job, I am literally in charge of this other office. I’m making more money than I did before, which wasn’t a huge amount. But I was working less hours, instead of working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, which is 84 hours a week. I was working less than 40 hours, bringing in more money than I was previously. And so to me, that was like this law of attraction stuff is amazing. Simply by focusing more on what I desire, and less on what I feared more of what I desired was coming into my manifestation coming into my experience.

Of course, the hard part is to not be fixated on what we’re afraid of. Because that causes so much energetics within our vortex that we ended up manifesting that. And so just to stay focused, but of course, that’s a hard thing to do. So as the cable thing was working so well. Suddenly, Cavalier stopped giving jobs to the contractor that I had hired. And so the whole thing started slowly going down. I’m like, is this law of attraction thing working out? Like why? How come this was working? Do I have to go back to the shipyard? You know, what are my kids gonna think? But all along, I had been getting this phone call from this weird dude that I knew.

In Pittsburgh for many years earlier. His name was Dave candle, I always thought he was really weird and out there. Like seriously, and he moved here from California, or he moved. So you know, you never know. So like Dave was just one of those types of guys. That was he was very eccentric. He was obviously very rich. He knew how to interact in the white-collar world very well. And so I knew there was something there. But at the same time, it just, I wasn’t in that world. I was in the blue-collar world, either way, because of the whole law of attraction thing. I was like, You know what, Dave candles calling me again today. You know what, maybe I’ll just pick up his call.

So I just, picked up the call. And usually, I would just ignore his call. And, you know, he called me like once every three or four months. Like just looking for people that would work from home, under his work-from-home thing that he was doing. But I tried to do it back in the day, and it just didn’t work wasn’t engaging. Because he was doing high-end loans in a few areas in California. Like in Laguna Niguel, and in just a couple specific zip codes, he had server processors that would go out and bring him the paperwork and very high-end mortgage service. But it was also complex for a young person for me to understand at the time coming from the blue-collar world.

So I tried to do it from home but I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t understand it. And I had a lot of lessons that I needed to learn first, so that’s why I kind of just ignored Dave of the guy. He wants me to do that mortgage thing again. And I don’t know how to do that. So eventually, one day I pick up his call. I’m like, You know what I’m just going to law of attraction is telling me try something new. If the universe keeps bringing this to me, stop pushing it away. Let me at least have a conversation. I talked to Dave and what he wanted me to do at that time was to take an audio file. Which was just a file on the computer and to convert it to a different format, so he could use it on his website.

So I was like, Okay, it’s a normal Dave request. Very strange and weird. So he emails me the file, I take it, I convert it from one. You know, audio format to another in this program I had, and I sent it back to him. But in the meantime, I also listened to it. And what it was, was it was this doctor, telling people giving his testimonial of what Dave had done for his business. It was that he had gotten all this business credit. And I was like, Oh, interesting. Business credit. You know, I thought Dave did mortgages. Okay, whatever. Either way, as long as he pays me to convert that file, I’m okay. That’s all I cared about. I just wanted him to pay pal me the $20.

So after that, Dave’s like, Hey, you did a really good job of converting that file for me. Why don’t you come and work for me? So this is the normal Dave tried to get me to go work for him. I was like, You know what, Dave, this whole cable thing is kind of crashing. I was like, Let me think about it. And I’ll call you back. So that same day, I get a call, telling me that we’re going to literally have to lay everyone off in the office to the Cavalier contract has come to an end. That’s that. And the guy who owned the contracting company, he was recommending that I go and apply for unemployment.

So I was like, dang, I gotta go apply for unemployment. Maybe I should call Dave. I mean, all this is literally happening. And that same time, so I called Dave. And Dave was like, Oh, you’re interested. All right. I’m gonna fax you over some lead sheets, some sheets of some leads of some people that might be interested in the service. I was like, Dave, what is the service? He’s like, go on the website. I was like, I already saw the website.

I’ve no idea what it is you I mean, it says, it’s talking about business credit and credit cards and stuff like that. Like, I don’t know anything about I don’t even have any credit cards. Dave, I have bad credit. And he’s like, just listen, okay, I’m gonna send you over the leads. Look at the website, call some of the leads. If you can’t get them to buy, then I guess we can’t work together. I’m like, how do all right?

Pamela Bardhi
Challenge accepted?

Ari Page
Sounds like normal, crazy Dave, right, where it’s like he wants something so bad. But then doesn’t ever put any energy into trying to make it come to fruition. Either way, he faxed me and so he faxed to me at the time, we had fax machines. And so with the Cavalier contract with doing like the DSL stuff, we had to have a, I had to have a fax machine. So I know it sounds weird. People are like, what is a fax machine, but I got a whole stack of leads in my fax machine. And I take him and I’m looking at them whose names numbers, I look at the website.

And I call the first one. I’m talking to them about business credit and credit cards. Interestingly enough, they actually were somewhat interested in it. I had no idea, This is my first white-collar work I’ve ever done in my entire life. My first work was not like picking up something heavy, you know, welding something, reading blueprints. Eventually, within that first week, I actually get someone to purchase the service. I was actually surprised that people were interested in and it made me excited. The more I call it, the more real. There was some people that were like, like, Nah, not interested, don’t call me back or got upset. Very few though.

Most of these leads were actually in synergy with wanting loans, he had got the leads from his mortgage business. And so you know what I mean, he was just kind of taking the mortgage business. And retooling it into this new thing that he was doing, which was business credit. Basically what happened was, as Dave was providing loans, the loan-to-value amount from the lenders was dropping and dropping and dropping. They’re like, You need to have 20% on hand, then it went up to 22%. They don’t have to 25% they don’t have to 30%. And so this was the cash that they had to put down.

So the loan-to-value amount was dropping, and the amount of cash that the borrower needed to bring to put down was going up. So what were a lot of these people that Dave worked with, they were small businesses, essentially. And they were they directly represented themselves. They were contractors, they were actors, they were, you know, they directly represented themselves. Essentially what we did was we went and got their business credit cards in their business’s name. That they then were able to use to help out with that stopgap money so that they had cash to put down. And so after we did, Dave was charging 1500 an hour to do that.

Then when he brought me on, he was selling the program directly for one cost. But he was still consulting for clients that were trying to transition their loans. And he was charging 50 You need 100 an hour for that. 1500 an hour for what we now charge just a flat $4,000 for. At that time, we could easily be charging a client 15 $20,000. In order to get them, you know, 300 400 $500,000 of this type of business credit card funding. So we then packaged it into a programme. David actually already created that package. And in that he just created a one price point.

From there, we’ve then put all of these other services under that price point. Of course, the price point is raised since that time. But that is pretty much how I got into doing funding growth. So at the time, it was called credit card builders. And I worked for Dave at the time. And of course and so, about two years later, after I moved down to Florida after I’d already purchased a house. I get a call from Dave Kandel, and Dave’s like Ari, he’s like, I need you to buy the company. I’m like, Alright, Dave, what happened? Are we under investigation?

Like, what’s going on? What do you mean, you’re gonna put you want me to, you’re gonna put the company in my name, you want me to buy the company? I was like, Why don’t you ask Dan. And because Dan is a guy that’s that he was working with for a long period of time, and I still work with them. Dan is our chief financial officer of funding group today. But Dan had worked with Dave, for many years, Dan, actually was the neighbor kid to Dave. And so he ended up working on mortgages with Dan’s actually smarter than I am. So, but he ended up working on mortgages and all kinds of stuff with Dave.

But David offered for Dan, to buy the company. And Dan said You know what, I think I think you should do it. Ari, Ari would probably be better because Daniel is more of chief financial officer material. He’s an accountant. And he’s, he excels at those types of things better, less so at public speaking and engaging and stuff like that. So Dan recommended to Dave, hey, talk to Ari, maybe Ari will buy it. Because it would start with RA. Then maybe I’ll think about it. So at this point, Daniel is now our CFO and works for me, and you know, the company. Dave actually passed away a number of years ago.

So hopefully, he’s looking down on us very happy. But at that time, when Dave sold the company, to me, the revenue we had done was around 200,000, in that in the entire year. And so my thinking was Dave just never really thought that the company would become what it is today. Mostly because he was short-sighted in the way that he worked with employees, trying to get people to work from home, not creating a real team. There’s a lot of commitment that you have to have to buy, the million-dollar building that we’re in to have 65 plus employees, you’re paying for a lot. And you know, what, not everybody produces every day all the time. It’s simply the way that it is, as your company gets bigger, and not that that’s of course, what you want.

But there are simply times where there’s redundancy, and that redundancy helps create a better customer service and programme in that the client is going to get a better service. Even though it costs you a lot more than what you would expect, you still end up making a lot more than what you’re expecting. Because from a marketing standpoint, you’re just bringing in so many units. So at that time, we had done like around 200, an entire year, and we were bringing in. Maybe even I can’t even guess but probably a couple of million in funding in the entire year. Not very much.

And today we are of course, as I was telling you when we were getting on Pam, we did 25 million in funding just last month alone. We’re about to hit 1.4 billion in total funded, that’s us being excited and putting our money where our mouth is because that’s what we tell clients we’re gonna do. We tell them, we’re gonna get them credit, we tell them we’re gonna give them access to funding at low interest that’s unsecured, so it’s safer for them. And that’s us putting our money where our mouth is to be able to brag about that. 1.4 billion.

Pamela Bardhi
Oh my god. Bees for billions. I love that already, I love everything about your story, man. I can’t wait to get into funding girl but I want to reel it back a little bit on you. So you mentioned that you’ve been blue-collar really your whole life. You went from working 12 hours seven day shifts at a shipyard to what did you want to be when you grew up. As a kid? Like what was your dream?

Ari Page
I was born into a family that was part of basically an Amish community. And so like we didn’t even have much technology and stuff. So it wasn’t until after I left the community that I even really started to think about what do I want to do. And I really didn’t, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. But before I knew I had two kids that I had to take care of. So that became my mission was to raise Kayla and Demetri and to give them what my parents had given me.

So that really had me focused, like a lot of people might see fun to grow now and think that like just overnight, they popped up. But they will forget, and they don’t know, the 16-hour days that I put in every single day, to get to where I could have an office. To where I could have other consultants come in and take care of these things. Then the whole process of letting go. Being able to let go of taking care of every single one of those clients has someone gonna mess up. They’re gonna mess up, someone’s gonna do something, you know what they are, then they’re gonna learn the lesson just like I did. Then we can move forward. And we can have a team of people that can all do that and we can all collaborate.

And at this point, they’ve taken what I taught them far beyond what I know, the sales team. They are vetting clients, far beyond what I did, the client relations team is vetting clients and working with them. Helping them on the credit, far beyond what I did, personally. The negotiations team has a much wider variety of banks to work with their negotiating ability, and their process is much sturdier. It’s much more compliant is much more powerful than when I was doing it. Every single thing. When you create a team, every single aspect of what the client has to go through, it’s just going to become better and better and better. And of course, if you have old team, then it’s going to become the customer service aspect of it becoming more rock solid.

Pamela Bardhi
Absolutely. Well, I mean, like, that was another question that I was gonna ask you was like, you know, it seems like you’re an overnight success. You’re talking about the 1.4 billion mark, but like you mentioned, like the 16-hour days, and all the things now. Once you got into this business, like how the hell did you grow it to this angle for all the entrepreneurs listening? They’re probably like, they might be in your shoes where you were years back. Where you started this and you were kind of on your own? And then it’s like, well, how do I scale? Scaling? Is the big, big question.

The big question mark, for a lot of entrepreneurs, as you mentioned, is some of the struggles that you had to build this foundation, all this stuff. So like, what were some things that helped you along the way to help you scale kind of your journey through that? And then we can get into kind of like funding grow? What is business credit? Coz some people really may not understand like, really what is that there could be entrepreneurs listening that have no idea that there’s this untapped market. That you could tap into for somebody like me, obviously, buy more real estate. I have more cash, I’m buying more real estate period. Like that’s what I’m doing. So would love to get into that?

Ari Page
Yes. So that’s a great question.

Pamela Bardhi
How did you scale to a $1.4 billion company from a two from 200k? You know, that’s pretty I mean, I know, it took time, obviously. But like, you know, the steps, you know, Dave approaches you and he’s like, Hey, by the company, man. And then you buy it. And then you’re like, what happens next?

Ari Page
Now, I had already been working with Dave for some time. And he’d already taught me quite a few things, just like when I met up him at the family mastermind with Matt Andrews. To even taught me about affiliate marketing and affiliate networking. And so he sent me to a bunch of different events. Of course, by myself, I had no idea what was going on. I was a blue-collar worker never publicly spoken in my entire life. Because it’s a good idea. But maybe he was onto something because I managed and I did a very, very good job. So at the time, we were working with some different affiliates, if I can recall, their names were Albert Aiello. Albert has also since passed on is probably drinking rum in heaven with Dave right now or in hell either way.

And then we also work with another affiliate called Mr. Landlord, Jeffrey Taylor, I haven’t seen him to do too much. I’m sure he’s still out there doing great things. But I haven’t seen him in terms of marketing, or his name out there. Like his website is actually pretty much the same, he might need to do an update on that. But either way, so the long the short of it was these were wonderful people to work with. And what they did was they showed us the ropes. So essentially, what owl did was, and this is just so that viewers can get a sense of how affiliate marketing works. And to get a synergy and cross promotion to what Al did was he was a tax accountant. And he was a asset protection specialist. So the asset protection was the largest part of what Al did.

So when people are at the point where they need to protect their assets, they have a tax burden that they would like to reduce. These are the true wealthy people that we want, that’s the demographic that we want to serve. Whether the markets are up or down, those guys always have money to spend. So people that are focused on asset protection, and tax reduction are our number one best demographic. There’ll be in a variety of different industries. Of course, you could have a real estate investor, you gotta have a solo entrepreneur. It doesn’t matter what the industry is. If they are showing those indications of protecting their assets and reducing their tax burden, then they are definitely the right client for us.

So what we found by working with our is that we were able to help so many of his clients that wanted to use other people’s money Instead of taking their own savings to help their business. And so I’ll teaching them how to save money and how to protect their assets, where teach them how to get funding. So out, sends an email to his email list telling them like listen to everybody, I know you’ve already bought my service. I know you’re already working on protecting your assets and saving money on taxes. But what you also need to do is you need to stop using your own money for investments.

You need to use other people’s money, you need to use funding, unsecured funding, safe funding, and funding that’s at a really low-interest rate. That’s what you need to be using. And so people will come and they watch our video, our presentation, call it a webinar. So they come and they watch our video. After watching the video, they’re like, Wow, I really do need this. And Al has even secured me a discount. I’m gonna go ahead and get started. So this affiliate promotion, and I know you’re very familiar with Pam, I’m just breaking it down for view.

Pamela Bardhi
No, I love it. This incredible because a lot of people don’t know when I mentioned anything about affiliates.

Ari Page
Yeah, right. No, it’s like, it makes sense for companies to affiliate together to work together. You’re gonna get far more from working together than you’re ever going to get from trying to work on your own. So in our instance, our ILO was teaching about taxes and asset protection, then Mr. Landlord, Jeffrey Taylor was teaching about real estate. And so these are some of the top industries that we work with people that are involved in real estate. They always need more money, they’re always buying more properties, the cost of the properties is always a lot. They always need money for rehab. They’re trying to do that while protecting their assets at the same time. And business credit cards are perfect for that.

For example, we had a client that was flipping a house, and they needed to put a new roof on. And so they went and they purchased the roof, the new roof, the shingles, and everything on a credit card. They paid the roofing company, with their credit card with their funding, grow business credit card. So the roofing company came, they put the roof on, however, it didn’t pass inspection. So the county was trying to hold our client, you know, the person who owned the property, they’re trying to hold it to them because they own the property. They don’t care which company you hired, all they’re saying is it did not pass inspection. The company that this gentleman had hired, they were kind of acting scammy. They didn’t want to come back and finish it.

They’re like, No, it’s your problem that it’s red-tagged, and it’s not passing. And as we know, that’s not the case. So what they did was, they called their credit card company on our this, we taught them to do this. They call the credit card company and they reversed the charge. Said, Listen, this company is actively scamming us, we can prove it. Here’s the paperwork from the county saying that it does not pass inspection. Here’s our contract saying that we will have a fully functional roof that has passed inspection. They sent it and you know what the credit card company did. Pulled that 15 grand out of that roofing company’s bank account. And put it back onto our clients’ credit card called a chargeback. Just like that.

So who do you think was calling them the next day ready to finish the roof? Ah, yeah. So what they did was they’re able by using a credit card, it’s a form of asset protection. If you’re working with a contractor that you’re not 100% sure about, this leaves you in charge, and sometimes it costs 1% or 2%. More, yes. But guess what costs 100% being scammed, or not having your roof finished not being able to sell the property having to hold on to it for three, four extra months. Having another roofing company come in to finish it to get past your red tag. And so the long and short of it is credit cards become an amazing form of asset protection when you’re doing business-to-business purchases.

Pamela Bardhi
Right? Absolutely. It’s so incredible that you’ve taken this concept of affiliate marketing and really implemented into your business. And you grew it so much further than you ever could have done yourself. Ari, I think that that’s a beautiful thing, because I always say, further faster together, period. One person versus 10 20 30. Like there’s just no way right? Like there’s and I think there’s this element to it too. Because Tony Robbins says this, that business is a spiritual game. And it’s my favorite quote of all time. favorite quote of all time business spiritual game, if you believe in that abundance.

This affiliate relationship type of style that you’ve done, will work extraordinarily well. Because the people that I know that won’t do affiliate stuff are the ones that are like, Oh, no, no, no, no, like, that’s just too much. I’m like, so you’re telling me he would rather invest marketing and just throw money out there. For people that may not even look at your ad may not care about it may do nothing. And it’s gonna completely cold lead, rather than tell somebody, hey, I’ll give you 20% of whatever after

Ari Page
The sale is made. How could you possibly go wrong? Yeah. Like, what I know you’re 50% upfront, instead of paying 20% After the sale is made. That’s crazy. Yeah.

Pamela Bardhi
Well, it’s been a formula to your success. So anybody who’s listening any entrepreneur. It’s like, how do you get people to pay attention to you and to your product and your business in your service? Money captures the attention if it’s worth their time, you know, you capture attention through money. And it’s like, if you’re gonna reward somebody for mentioning you, there’s plenty of money to be made. Because that person is going to do it once they’re gonna do it over and over and over. And you’ve kind of proved that the building blocks really helped you.

Because you use these, there’s in different spaces, and basically targeted an audience that way. Which is incredible and continue to do it kind of vice versa, because you’re both adding value. And I think that’s a really important part. You’re not just selling to your audience. You’re providing solutions to these people that you know, already having these problems. So it’s like, why not offer the solution through people that have trusted communities? Right, which I think absolutely brilliant.

Ari Page
And that’s the basis of affiliate marketing like I have a friend who owns a pressure washing business. And me being me, I’m trying to encourage him, I’m like, No, you have to get affiliates. He’s like, What do you mean affiliates? I do pressure washing Ra. I’m like, have you gone to any of the local schools and talk to them about getting a contract to pressure wash their sidewalks? Because that would be a big contract, go to the county, have you gone to any of the grocery stores, have you gone to local businesses? He starts to go out and look for affiliates look for other businesses that will spend on him. Sadly, isn’t tire pressure washing schedule filled up from a few phone calls, not from having a call house after house after residential person?

But from businesses, school districts, grocery stores from a business that will keep giving many customers so to speak, or contracts in the case of pressure washing. But in the case of normal affiliate relations, you want to find like, for example, for us, we’re getting funding. And Mr. Landlord, for example, teaches about real estate. So real estate, people need access to funding this is simple synergy. And many people that are getting access to funding, might even want to learn about real estate. So now we can teach our students about him. Of course, now we don’t even work with these particular fields I’m just talking about from back in the day.

You literally had me back, remembering so many years ago, now we’re working with much bigger names on a much larger level. But this whole process of affiliate marketing is our number one way of bringing in sales. And we do stuff through Pay Per Click, we do stuff through other forms of marketing. But 90% of all of our sales are coming from affiliate marketing. From working together with other companies that have a need for their customers to have, what it is that we’re doing. We have affiliates, that they’re not even able to sell something to their client unless their client has $100,000 of credit card available. We’re literally helping finance the Business in a Box program from other companies.

So some companies need their clients have access to 50,000 or 100,000. And so we become a tool for them to be able to help that business grow because that business doesn’t have the 50 or 100 to invest. But they can get that through credit. And so it’s just great Being able to help small businesses, we love helping small businesses. Our mission is to see people go from working in a corporate world working for other businesses to starting their own business. I remember talking at the mastermind with you. I was getting a little existential on the founding of America and stuff and saying back in the day. Everyone used to they were a farmer, a trader, they were a creator of some kind, a builder.

And they will directly represent their wares in the market. And in today’s world, 99% of the population works for a company. Whereas it used to be 99% of the population directly traded their wares. So they were in a sense, putting themselves in control of their own destiny, and control of their income became vertical, rather than taking forever. If you work for a business, you’re only going to slowly make more and more and more you know as the years go on. But you can really give your income a vertical boost by putting yourself in charge creating your own business. Even if you need to do it by starting it on the side.

Pamela Bardhi
Right? Well, the main thing is already to like a lot of people want to start their own businesses, they don’t know how to get access to the capital, which is where you come in. So say there’s an entrepreneur listening right now that’s like, Man, I need more cash to do this. This and this and this or to start or to continue to grow and scale my business. Now, what would you say to them with funding grow like some different solutions? And how you felt entrepreneurs kind of have access to all of that.

Ari Page
So there are so many forms of funding out there. I’ve seen people mortgage their houses. I’ve seen people give up 50% equity in their business, I’ve seen people give up. Absolutely, you know amazing things in their life. I was about to say Kid, but people literally cosign and do all kinds of crazy stuff to access as little as 25,000 to $50,000 of funding for their business. And everyone’s aware of the TV show Shark Tank TV show. Where you’ll literally have people going on to the show giving up 50% equity in their business, for as little as 50,000 or $100,000. And the same people have good credit.

The same people could be getting business credit cards that do not appear on their personal credit report, may report to the tax ID number of their business. And they can get 100 200 250,000. We have actually clients above that. But our most common target amount that we’re getting is around 250,000. Although again, we have clients, I’ve gotten 304 100,000. Of course, they’re more well endowed clients. They have better credit, they’ve had better credit for a longer period of time. But none of the credit appears on the clients credit report. Unless we’re trying to build personal credit, there are some cases where we need to help a client because they had bad credit. We need to help them build a robust personal profile.

But the majority of all the credit that we’re building is business credit. So it doesn’t appear on the clients profile, they’re able to use it instead of getting a home equity line of credit, putting their family home on the line. And a lot of another thing is a lot of people are selling the homes during the pandemic. A lot of people are selling the homes that their grandparents bought that their mom and dad bought that they grew up in. These are the family home, and I was just reading an article, how many families are selling the family home. And it’s really heartbreaking and sad because this is most of the time how generational wealth is built for families, owning their home.

Pamela Bardhi
Right? But having access to this type of debt is really incredible because it doesn’t show up on their personal report. And they’re able to have access to the capital, it’s unsecured. So say God forbid something goes sideways, you’re not on the hook for anything, you won’t lose your home. Yeah, not taking the family home, they’re not taking your car, they’re not you know what I mean? All these things. There’s no personal guarantees, which I think is really key for any entrepreneur who’s listening to expand their capital.

Or wanting to buy more real estate or whatever, just having some extra cash in the bank. Because you know, market the markets right now or just like left and right. So it’s like, how can you protect all of those assets? You know, I think this is a fabulous, fabulous way to do this. All right. And I mean, it’s incredible. It’s incredible.

Ari Page
I’m sure you’ve been on enough cruises and gone around the islands. The Caribbean islands, and maybe walked around with some of the islands. And have you ever seen any of the homes that are being built. That have it looks like the homes been there a while but they’re still rebar sticking out the top? And you see, it’s a common sight, you see all of these island nations. Homes that could have three stories, four stories, one story, there’s still rebar sticking out the top. You know why they’re waiting to build the next level? Hmm, mom and dad built the first home, then the kids, when they got married, they built the second level that rebar sticking up.

Because they don’t have the ability to get a bank loan to build the entire house. We have this amazing ability to use other people’s money based on a credit score. It’s crazy, people still think that they’re under attack in America. And these other nations, can’t even build their own home. They’re literally having to scramble just to build one level at a time. All of us, we’ve all seen it. We’ve all seen the houses that have the rebar sticking out to. If they could get a full loan, that’s what they would be doing. They would be building it, they would be building their entire home. And then I’ve heard some people say, Well, it’s because of the tax benefits of having a house that’s not finished. Okay? Remember, we’re talking about island nations, we’re not when you talk about tax benefits.

It’s such a first-world thing to think. Collecting money from other people to get that’s not happening in these other nations tonight. And those types of tax benefits from that, they have a completely different capitalist different structure going on. That’s based on tourism, the bringing people in, and so their banking system. The way that their property rights work, everything is slightly different. And so now, of course, many of the islands there, basically have a very western structure. But I’m not every single Island like you go to St. Thomas, Jamaica, or a lot of these places. You’re gonna see examples of what I’m talking about.

And here in America, we need to just be so thankful. And then take advantage of these different options that are available that you can use to build your business. Without even taking your own money out without even taking your savings without mortgaging your family home. You can take unsecured credit, and then what happens if you don’t pay it back? If you don’t pay it back, you now have a bad credit mark. So this is unsecured credit, meaning that they’re not going to let’s say that you buy another vehicle for your company fleet. And then you’re unable to make the payment on that credit card. Well, the bank cannot take that van away.

Whatever you bought with a credit card cannot be taken away. Because it’s unsecured, there’s no title. On an item like a house, for example, you buy the house, there’s a title, there’s one loan for that house. If you don’t pay it, they’re coming and taking that house away. In the case of a car, same thing, you have a car, you have a title, you have a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t pay it, they’re gonna get their asset back, nothing’s lost. But in the case of unsecured business credit, it’s not like that. They’re literally giving you money without securing it on an item is unsecured. It’s not secure, which is good for us.

A lot of people like wait, it’s unsecured? That’s bad, right? It’s like, no, no, it’s not secured on your car, it’s not secured on your house, it’s not secured on your kid. It’s not on anything, it means that if you don’t pay it, the bank. All they can do is just give you a bad mark on your credit report, which is bad. And we’re not advocating for anyone not to pay their credit. But we are advocating for people to use the safest form of funding available. And that is business credit cards provided by the banks, where they are not even able to take your asset. If you use a hard money loan, they’re going to take if you don’t pay it, they’re gonna take your asset.

If your mortgage you don’t pay, they’re gonna take your asset, use a car loan, you don’t pay it, they’re gonna take your asset. Most loans, you don’t pay it, they’re gonna take your asset on an unsecured credit card, that is not the case. A bank can always let’s say you happen to owe them a lot like 100,000 to one bank all on one credit card or something. They do have the opportunity to turn around you and sue you as a deficiency.

A deficiency judgment, but there’s so much work for them to go through most of the time, they just end up writing it off. But again, we are not advocating for our clients to do that. Our clients don’t do that our clients are not coming and paying us $4,000 Just to ruin their asset of their credit. They’re paying us $4,000 So that they can get access to hundreds of 1000s of dollars of funding on an ongoing basis at 0%. That’s unsecured,

What Would Ari Older Self Tell His Younger Self

Pamela Bardhi
Right, which is amazing. And for any entrepreneur, anyone who’s aspiring to grow their businesses, a side hustle, whatever, like, this is such an incredible tip. And such an incredible way for them to gain access to this capital. Which is the number one problem when it comes to anybody wanting to start anything. Or investing more or building their brand or whatever, like this is such a secret key to really all of it. Because if you have the resources to do so you’re going to expand out the hardest part is finding those resources.

So Ari, I think provided some incredible insight for any entrepreneur. Anyone really listening was looking to grow more and do their thing and funding grow is definitely an amazing tool to do that. Now, for you, this is my favorite question. So I gotta give it to you. What would your older self tell your younger self based on what you know now? And it could be business, it could be personal, it could be really anything,

Ari Page
What would my older self tell my younger self, I would say my older self would tell my younger self to stay encouraged. And to continue the course. Because for me, it was working 16-hour days. And it was difficult, I had a partner that was very upset about that. I had to keep working, I had to keep doing it, there was no one else that was going to do it. So I just what I would call stayed the course, I just continued to work. I guess a lot of people in their 20s and in their 30s aren’t really focusing as much on the business and as much on, you know, just working as I was.

But when you’re coming from a 12-hour workday environment could easily be 14 or 16. In the shipyard, depending on if they have a ship that needs to get out. And the Navy has a deadline. You don’t I mean, you’re just gonna keep working, they’re gonna keep working you. And if you don’t want to, then there’s plenty of other people that they can hire. It’s not a requirement. But if you want to keep your job, I mean, it’s unspoken rule. If you don’t want to get the pink slip and get laid off, then you’re going to do what they need to do to get that contract finish.

And then the bosses remember, who was the one that stayed who was the one that would work any hour. They didn’t complain and say, Oh, my wife or my kids or this or that. They just stayed, they just worked. So I put that same ethic into my business. And that was even before Dave wanted to sell the company. To me, that’s just simply when I worked, I was like, I have to work hard. This has to be something that I continue to just stay busy on the grind. Because otherwise how is it going to replace the money I was making from the shipyard?

But then after that when I got to a point where I was making more and I was making about 4500 to 5000 a month at the shipyard. When I got to the point where I was making that from home. I continued to only spend that amount so then I was able to hire more people. I still pay myself 5000 a month, I was able to hire more people, I was able to hire more people. It wasn’t until I was making it was on the third year that I had made multimillion like more than 2 million in one year that I even bought my first luxury car. Because it just To me, it was very important to make sure that this was something that could continue.

And so working hard was how it could continue being ethical was how it could continue. Making sure that clients got everything that they said they were going to get is how it could continue. It had to be something that was going to be ethical and loved and wanted. Because in my experience, I had always thought that scams came from the internet, especially loan-type things. Now, in today’s world, we’re way more online. But remember, we’re talking literally 1520 years ago. And so that’s when it was like, scam territory, people we’re you act like, well, let me come into your location.

I’ll come and talk to you, we’ll sit down, shake hands. And when you’re dealing in all 50 states, it’s a little bit hard to build a business like that. So my advice, for my older self, to my younger self, is to stay the course. To know that if you continue to build, even if it seems slow, even if it seems like you have to put all of your energy into it. Nothing good came easy, it’s not going to just come right away. You’re gonna have to keep building my brain from a law of attraction standpoint. I didn’t think from that perspective, there was a lot of neurology changing by doing all of that work.

Pamela Bardhi
Right. Absolutely. And I love that you integrate the Law of Attraction into this too, as well. Because a lot of people think that business success is just like you follow that hard work, and all of a sudden, it’s gonna make you millions of dollars, it’s gonna have to grow to 1.4 billion. But there’s also a huge element of mindset and mentality and spiritual work that has to go into the personal development of the leader that then trickles down to everybody else. If the leader is no good, like they say, one bad apple can ruin the whole bunch. So leadership starts at the very top, you got to be solid up here, so that it goes in trickles down and affects everybody in a positive way.

And that speaks to your leadership already, the fact that you’ve been able to build a $1.4 billion company. To do that level of production, takes some serious work, dedication, consistency, and really all of that, so kudos to you on that, my friend. And I’m so excited to see your continued growth and everything that’s going on in your world, and what you’re up to at funding grow. Like, tell me like, what’s up in your world in the next six to 12 months? What do you guys working on? Like, what’s what projects you up to? What’s going on?

Ari Page
Well, first, thank you. And I have to give the credit to my team. Because they’re the ones that are churning out the credit every single day. They’re the ones that are signing up the clients, they’re the ones that are getting the testimonials. If you look at our testimonials, our clients are literally naming the people that they work with, they’re so happy with them. So I want to give them thanks. But what we’re looking at in the future is, of course. We’re trying to just double-triple what we’re doing, we’re trying to help even more entrepreneurs. We would like to be a household name in helping people go from their white-collar job to being able to be an entrepreneur.

To go from their professional job to being an entrepreneur to go from representing someone else’s where it’s representing their own. And we would like to be a facilitator of that and to help this new American Renaissance in that people stop working for these massive corporations that, in my opinion, hate us anyway. And that we start to provide for ourselves, again, you know, as small businesses. I know that there is seems from if you’re a small business owner over the pandemic, it would really seem like the government was not in any way trying to help you.

Like they were trying to shut you down, in fact, and while they were doing that they were propping up the largest businesses. As somehow being like, healthier, or you can go in there. But you can’t go in there. Why? Oh, that was big, that was small. So they gave it away. The Elite gave it away. We all now know. And so now we know that we have to start our own businesses. We have to represent ourselves, we have to start to make that change. Because the people up there aren’t going to do it for us. So being an entrepreneur is about changing yourself. It’s about changing your family. It’s about changing your community in your town.

Pamela Bardhi
Amen. And I totally agree with you, you change the trajectory of your own life. And that’s where things are shifting to, you know what I mean, entrepreneurship is the backbone of America. Without a doubt, and you are helping them get there, which is so incredible. It’s now you gotta let everyone know where to find you more info on funding grow all the things.

Ari Page
People can come to a funding grow.com And that’s, that’s where we’re at fund and grow.com fully spelled out. And also and this is one of the things I was forgetting to mention before. Because you asked if I had advice for an entrepreneur and it was affiliate marketing. But my second piece is work on your social channels, regardless of whether or not they earn you anything. One thing they will do is give you social credibility, work on them, build them. Even if it’s just for the following, even if people aren’t good going on there and buying your service or buying your product.

They’re coming on there and verifying your service. They’re verifying your product, They’re verifying you. And so it’s really important because as entrepreneurs. For us, as funding grow, what we’re doing is when we sit in front of a lead, we’re actually applying for a job. We’re actually asking them to hire us to build them credit. And so it’s really important that we really let them know all the different things that we’ve done all of our accolades. All the places that we’ve been all the things that we’ve got done.

If we’re applying for a job, they need to know who’s the best person to hire. And so it’s definitely really, really advantageous to work on your social, all the different ones. Even tick tock and even if your demographic is included, it’s really important to include all of that. And that’s one of the things that we’re working on funding growth, too.

Pamela Bardhi
That’s awesome. And to see you dancing onTikTok Ari,

Ari Page
Maybe funding dance?

Pamela Bardhi
Absolutely. Well, I’m gonna definitely post the link on the show notes for people to access funding growth, for sure. So they can just click on your link directly, but the other place where they can find you

Ari Page
All of our social channels on YouTube, Facebook Instagram on tick tock. That’s most of but of course, you can also come to funding grow.com. And you’ll learn a lot about us there under the program tab.

Pamela Bardhi
You’re amazing. Alright, you are such an inspiration today was incredible. Thank you so much for sharing your story, your tips. I’m sure that has been the Golden Nugget spread throughout your entire interview. So I thank you so much for being here today. My friend. So that’s it for today’s episode of underdog. Catch us next week, always dropping on Thursdays. And remember, if you’re interested in real estate, or want to learn how to create more money and magic in your life. Check out meet with pamela.com and let’s chat. Sending you so so much love