The Money Mondays
From Rock Bottom to $115 Million Dollar Exit: Eric Spofford's Journey to Entrepreneurial Success 💰 105
Tue, 21 Jan 2025
In this episode of The Money Mondays, Dan Fleyshman sits down with Eric Spofford, a trailblazing entrepreneur and recovery advocate, to discuss his journey from overcoming addiction to building multi-million-dollar businesses. Eric shares his raw, unfiltered story of resilience, transformation, and the mindset shifts that helped him turn adversity into an opportunity to thrive. Tune in to learn: How Eric scaled businesses with purpose and grit. The lessons he learned from hitting rock bottom and rising to the top. His approach to leadership, growth, and staying true to his values in the face of success. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or looking for inspiration to overcome life’s challenges, this episode delivers actionable insights and motivation to take your life and business to the next level.
If you understand addiction, it ends in only a couple different places. The person ends up in recovery or they end up in jails, institutions and death. And the thing you need to consider is what are you going to regret if the worst case situation happens?
And that is the tool, the mechanism that you need to overcome your anxiety and your fear on confronting your loved one that has alcoholism and has addiction
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the money Mondays. As you guys know, I've had a very strict rule. I only record podcasts inside of the RV motor home, but sometimes Got to break the rules for very special, special guests. So I'm here in Miami inside of Eric Spofford's mansion. This gentleman built up his career.
We're going to go through a bit of his story, but really focus on what is going on in the world today. It is the number one money Monday in the history of society. Today is the inauguration. Today, TikTok is back. Today, it's Martin Luther King Day. Today, cryptocurrency is through the roof. You've got meme coins worth billions of dollars. You've got Bitcoin breaking records.
Everything is very exciting about this Money Monday. And so what we're going to do is get a quick two-minute bio from Eric Spofford so we can get straight to the money.
Straight to the money. We're out here breaking rules. I like it. That's appropriate, right?
100%.
If anyone's going to break the rules, I'm honored.
It's me.
Quick bio, folks. Listen, grew up in the greater Boston area. Lived a very crazy life. Got involved in drugs and alcohol. Young age. state's youngest convicted drug dealer. I believe I still hold the record for that. Fifth grade, I believe I was 11 years old, selling weed. Yep, got a kid named Garrick Pelletier, ratted me out. I still fucking hate him. Just kidding.
And, you know, that led to, you know, the next 10 years of just an insane life. Got addicted to Oxycontin, which turned into heroin. You know, crime, violence, jail, streets, yada, yada, yada. And I got sober on December 7th of 2006, just before my 22nd birthday. Went on to find a passion in helping others recover from addiction and alcoholism. Did it at first on a volunteer basis.
That turned into an entrepreneurial idea. Started my home state's very first sober living home. Scaled that over 13 years, two months to the largest provider of addiction treatment services in New England. Sold it for $115 million to a private equity-backed strategic.
Alongside that, I've done a couple hundred million in real estate transactions, invested in many other opportunities, and built a little bit of a personal brand. I've been messing around here on social media for the last few years, having a good time. connecting with like-minded folks like Dan.
Now, today, back at it in the addiction treatment space, active day-to-day CEO of two explosively growing businesses. One, Treatment X, a national collective of treatment centers. We acquired two businesses in Q4 of last year. We're set to acquire four more this year. So we're currently operating facilities in California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and growing expeditiously.
And then a separate business, which is Turnkey Real Estate, where we are taking ordinary average Americans and giving them the opportunity to buy investment-grade single-family homes under $100,000 that are cash-flowing with low-income Section 8 tenants. So that's the majority of my day-to-day.
I also oversee a transportation chartering company consisting of a private jet, my Challenger 604, a 92-foot yacht, the bonus round. and many other things.
We could do a 17-minute bio. It was hard to condense it into two minutes. I get it. It's a fun journey. All right, so on the Money Mondays, as you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, and how to give it away to charity. But what I want to first ask is, once you sell a company for $115 million, what do you do the next day?
Like you get that wire, it comes in, it's Monday morning, it's Money Monday, like, whoo, 9 a.m., 9.01 a.m., You click refresh. Yeah. $150,000 shows up. It's funny.
It was December 21st was 2021 was my money day. I don't know if it was a Monday or not.
It's just called Money Monday.
Yeah, it was my Money Monday. And I sat, you know, for the closing call and they clear it and they say all the wires have been sent and then you sit around all day refreshing your online banking app.
it was like 5 35 that night and i was sitting in my kitchen with my feet on my table honestly getting frustrated because i'm like yo it's after banking hours where's my money and i refreshed it for the last time and boom all that money just showed up and uh it was that was the probably the craziest feeling uh that i it was a wild experience you know what i did next I went to fucking work, guys.
That's what I did. I got up the next day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I got up the next day. I drove with Lori, my right-hand chief operating officer, been rocking with me a long time. And the next morning, we were standing in front of some brick mill buildings that I was considering acquiring and renovating into apartment buildings.
like two hours away from home, outside of Boston on the South Shore, freezing cold, holding a hot Dunkin' Donuts coffee. It's like 9 o'clock in the morning. We've been up since 5, on the road since 7, and she whacks me in the arm and looks at me. I mean, we just cashed an enormous check. You'd think we'd go to an island and celebrate or something.
And she says, we're never fucking taking a day off, are we? I said, probably not. That was three years ago, and we haven't. We haven't taken five seconds off. Wow. I don't know anything about a vacation. I know more about changing scenery and working from remote locations.
Is there a number? If I was like, okay, Eric Spofford, here's $1 billion. No more work. There's no number. $2 billion. There's no more work.
No number.
No number. It's inside of you.
Because what people don't understand. frequently is that like they see these oh this guy's worth 1 billion or 200 billion or 50 whatever there's a certain threshold where life doesn't change right you run out of shit to buy right I have a ton of exotic cars there's not a car on the planet I couldn't make a call and have it dropped off right So it's like, all right, whatever.
I own a plane, a boat. We're sitting in a fucking $20.75 million home in the Venetian Islands of Miami right now. What else are you going to buy? And so it has to become for a love of the game. It has to become about the sport of business and entrepreneurship and the grind and the grit and the team and the camaraderie. And so when you love it as much as I love it, it's really not about the money.
It really isn't. Like, the money's the scoreboard, but you play the game because you love the fucking game. And you want to win, but you still love to play.
100%.
I just like it.
Winning's winning. Yeah. $41 came in. I'm like, oh, that's cool. $40,000 comes in. Oh, that's cool. I just like the action of it. Okay. So you've mentioned a couple different markets that you're into. Real estate, Section 8 housing, and then diving back into opening sober living places. Why go back into the treatment centers? Just because you know it inside out?
I know it inside and out. I understand the business intimately. It's, you know, for me, I had this conversation recently with the addiction treatment business. That is as much of an entrepreneurship and the sport of business journey as it is...
spiritual journey for me right like you go back into I come off of heroin and all these other drugs you know more than 18 years ago and I'm confronted with you know some guys in 12-step recovery Alcoholics Anonymous Narcotics Anonymous I get I get put into that process which changed my life Right?
And part of that process is you actually make a decision and it's a prayer that you turn your will and your life over to the God. It's the third step in the 12 steps. People obviously probably wouldn't know much about this, but it's a contractual process between you and God that says, left to my own devices, I have destroyed my life. This is my best thinking got me here.
Fucking, you know, not in a good spot. Right? And so... Um, I need some help. And so the deal you cut with God is that, you know, he's got a job for you and it's your job to do that job. And in turn, if you do the job and the work that he's assigned to you, that he'll take care of you. And so when I sold my company. The next day we were busy, but my phone was just silent.
And over the coming months, it left this like void of like, I'd spent 13 years every day doing something that had a meaningful impact on other people. And all of a sudden like real estate's cool and I've made a lot of money in real estate, but like you're not really helping anyone. You know what I mean? And it's not, and so it just, it felt like a labor of love and I kind of got called back to it
so there are a lot of reasons but are you looking for the same goal you want to run it back sell for 150 million do you want to get to 116 like what's the goal for the next run 500 million to a billion this next time three years five years ten years five to seven five to seven years on the outside five to seven years 500 million dollars at a minimum threshold correct
The target's a billion, but also understanding market cycles, the world changes. There's a lot of things that we know in 2025 that in 2027 are going to be different. Sure. You know, interest rates come down, the multiples go up. So there's a lot of things that you can't perfectly plan that process, but it's $500 million at a minimum.
It is a much different grind this time because it's much more about a roll-up strategy, acquiring businesses, not building them organically. It's much faster.
Explain the roll-up strategy. What do you mean by that?
We're buying businesses. We're buying existing addiction treatment facilities. Yeah, and so we bought two. I bought one in October of last year, 2024. I bought another one in November. And right now we are ramping up with the target of buying four additional businesses facilities this year. We'd like to close and integrate one per quarter. So every three months we'll be acquiring a new one.
So let's say it's 2030. You get another wire transfer, this time for $520 million. You hit your goal within five years. The day after that, you're getting back into the same game?
That's the other information that I have to consider when I think about selling the next time, right? It left me so fucking bored. And so it's like you give it like, okay, now you have an enormous pile of cash. But the day to day of what I'm doing right now is so fun. It's gonna be hard to let that go again, knowing that I've already had the experience of selling a business once.
I've already experienced the void. Like this is the stuff that they don't talk about in, everyone wants to talk about the exit and selling their company. And I mean, how common in the business world is that conversation? We don't talk about the void after. How close are you with the people that you work and grind and build with every day? Because you just divorced all of them. You left.
You packed. They're on another mission with another leader, with another group, and you're off on a fucking island alone with a bunch of money. You know? And so... What am I, I always have to do something, right? And so I don't know if it's back into this or too far to tell.
So you mentioned that here where we see on social media, a lot of people talk about the exit. How many people do you think actually have had an exit in the social media?
Very few, very few. That's one of the reasons why I got into social media was I looked out at the landscape and saw a bunch of people that I thought were fake. I looked at them and I was like, you're talking all this business and entrepreneurship, but you haven't actually built it. You're only good at making content and using buzzwords that sound good to get attention.
But in the world of Instagram and social media influencers, the amount of people that have actually built a real business is a small fraction. Kind of on our hands. And of that, the amount of people that have actually sold one to a successful exit is a fraction of that. So it's a small minority.
Okay. Other category dove into was Section 8 housing. Talk us through why put so much money and time and energy into it and why teach people how to do it.
I love Section 8 housing because, one, I love third-party payer reimbursement systems and understanding that the government, if you can cut through the red tape, will actually pay you significantly more to provide quality low-income housing to the people that are in their program over and above market rate tenants because they know that they need to incentivize landlords to overcome the stigma of Section 8.
and deal with their government bureaucracy, paperwork, and red tape. And so once you can kind of figure all of that out, the ability to make money in it is astronomical.
And it's the one thing that I've found in recent times that cash flows at such a rate that it overcomes the objection of the high interest rates and the cost of capital destroying cash on cash returns in traditional real estate investing.
Walk us through the general concept. So Section 8 House, you mentioned around $100,000. If someone's out there like, okay, I can come up with that or I can come up with the 20 or 30% I might need to get down. What's the general idea of what they should be looking for if they were trying to dive into the market?
Three-bedroom and higher homes because Section 8 doesn't reimburse on square footage. It reimburses on bedroom count. So the more bedrooms, the higher the rent you're going to get. It doesn't matter if it's a 10,000-square-foot mansion or an 1,800-square-foot four-bedroom home. And then just solid bones to the property. You want to get something that's in decent condition.
One of the main... There's a couple... There's a couple pain points within it. One is screening the tenants and making sure that you're bringing in quality tenants and that'll pay off in dividends over time. And the other is looking at properties and overcoming a lot of the deferred maintenance.
So you want to make sure you have something and try to, like when we come in and we rehab it, we try to make it so it's not going to need someone to come back for quite some time.
Got it. All right. We talked about your business stuff. Let's talk about the world's business stuff. Let's talk about the world's. Today's a big day. And this episode is literally, I've never done this before. We're filming it right now at 9 in the morning. And in an hour, this is going to be live. Because it's the biggest Money Monday of all time. I'm not just saying that.
It's literally at 12 o'clock. It's the inauguration. What do you think about the economic impact of just the energy that's happening with the new president stepping in today?
I think the entire world changes today. Yeah. I think that the economy is gonna be on a crazy run for the next four years because people's fear is subsided. They have a lot of faith and certainty in what the future looks like. Love Trump or hate Trump, you remember what that four years looked like. It was good four years, right?
And so I'm excited to see what happens in the markets when they open this week. I'm excited to see what happens in crypto. I'm excited to see what happens in real estate with interest rates.
um and just watch the i mean the energy of the country is like yeah like five and it's electric you know what i mean it's like everyone's like we're back baby we're back and it's really really really interesting to see how many people are more vocal this time than they were the last election cycle when he lost or during his first presidency like people are no longer like who'd you vote for?
Right. Trump. Oh, thank God. They're like, you know what I mean? They're loud and like, and aggressively no longer scared to, to come out and just say it how it is.
So what's interesting is I've always wanted, I think people have talked about before, like you want a business person in the White House, but also this time, unlike any other time, you have a bunch of billionaires and venture capitalists as the advisors. There's obviously Team Doge, but there's also like just legit billionaires like David Sachs that are just like,
wealthy beyond imagination that are there in the White House or next to the White House advising for our country. What are your thoughts about having strategic advisors over our actual country? Because I think our country, I don't think, I know it's an actual business. So what do you think about that?
I love it. I absolutely love the idea of having real operators operating the country, right? Politicians aren't meant to... I mean, politicians are politicians. Look at what they've done so far. So very excited to see people with operational experience running it.
I think the amount of money we're going to save alone is going to be so efficient. Absolutely. When you just hear about how many programs or employees or overhead, they have like entire massive buildings that no one goes to work at because they're working from home. So what are we paying? $800,000 a month for that rent, for example.
Don't leave that. Can we just talk about how Donald Trump and the supportive team's attitude around, you know, how much we give away to the world? Sure. Like, God, he's a funny dude, man. It's entertaining. At a bare minimum, love him, hate him, love something about him. Whatever your opinion is, you've got to give it to the dude. He's entertaining. He comes out and says...
this is now not the Gulf of Mexico. It's the Gulf of America. You know, that's what you're thinking about. You know, you're just sitting there on like a Wednesday morning and said, you know, it really pisses me off. They call that the Gulf of Mexico. We're going to rename it, you know, Greenland by Greenland.
You know, one of the things I'm excited just that he's thinking about and taking actionable steps towards is like, I'm sick of, listen, I'm a taxpayer, man. Like I have paid the government tens and tens of millions of dollars. So when I say this, I'm not coming off of like, You know, I have significant revenue that I've contributed to this.
And so to turn around and watch us provide assistance and aid to countries like Ukraine makes me fucking sick. Like, listen, I care about Ukraine as much as I care about fucking Uganda and South Africa and China and like generally everywhere else. It's not my country. It's not my problem. Like I live in America and this country has problems.
This country has homelessness, a drug epidemic that I personally watch on the front lines every day. 112,000 people died last year of fentanyl overdoses. We just had fires in California and they fucking send them $770 a piece after burning half the fucking city down. It's shameful, man. It's absolutely disgusting. And so, like, I don't mind paying taxes.
I pay them one way or the other because I like to sleep good at night. But I feel a lot better about seeing that money come out of my businesses and my ecosystem. Because, I mean, when you look at it, when you really understand tax, everything that fucking moves gets paid. For sure. Like seven or eight times.
And so, like, it feels a lot better to know that they're paying attention and then going to be making America about America. Right. And people like have been so scared to say that, but it's like, yo, there are no other countries that I'm aware of. And mind you, I'm not like this great, you know, geopolitical guy, but I don't see any other countries just fucking handing money out across the globe.
We didn't get a wire to Los Angeles from anybody, right?
Exactly. Yeah. Who sent us money? You know, who else is funny? And so to see us kind of repurpose and refocus on spending American tax dollars on American people and American problems and like, yo, Hakuna Matata, like best wishes to all these other countries. And like, but it's on, I don't go to bed sleep thinking about fucking Ukraine. Right. Or any of this other shit.
I do go to bed thinking about those parents that lost their kids to fucking fentanyl.
Sure.
I do go to bed thinking of like feeling terribly about these people that were displaced in Los Angeles or the hurricane that whacked North Carolina that was totally mismanaged. And no one's talking about that anymore. I mean, it's just like, yeah. So I'm excited to see the focus turn back to America with the external revenue team. Yeah, I like that. What is it, the IRS and the ERS? Yeah, exactly.
External Revenue Service.
So you see something like Los Angeles. Last week I had 19 in-person meetings. I don't know how many phone calls. Meeting with people in the construction space, which you understand construction and remodeling very well. My concern for Los Angeles, besides the $150 billion and growing number that's impacted, is there's no Calvary coming. And here's why.
If you have a construction company in Dallas, Arizona, Utah, Vegas, the surrounding areas, you're not coming because you're not going to get licensed. And you're going to have to go through a big headache to get licensed. And so like when I posted about it, I was getting a quarter million views, half a million views of posts. And all the comments were, I'm not going there.
I got 80 employees there. I'd love to go there, but I'm not going to get licensed. I got 400 employees, but I'm not coming and I can't deal with the headaches. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like. Well, who's going to build it then?
And these people are so fucking stupid that they won't give them reciprocity to their home state licensure.
100%.
Please bring the Calvary. Think about when the fire truck showed up from Oregon or something. They stopped them and made them go through a smog check. You stop smog check, there's 40,000 acres burning. What smog matters when the whole freaking city's on fire? I didn't know that. That's unbelievable. Literally, that's not a joke.
God, they're so fucking dumb. It's crazy.
It's hard to imagine what's happening. So another fun one real quick. I mean, when Trump, you mentioned about like, I'm going to change Gulf of Mexico or Greenland or buy that or whatever. He also did it with Canada and talking about making Canada another state, adding it as the 51st or 52nd state. And then a week later, the evil ruler of Canada resigned.
You know, like the guy that was holding Trudeau. Like, again, I don't even talk about politics very much. I talk about math and reality. I like to talk about money. That's what we're here for. He hurt them by hundreds of billions of dollars, Trudeau. And within a week of basically saying we're going to take over Canada, the guy's gone. He resigned. And we never hear from him again.
Like the impact of that for that entire country, whether we end up merging with them or not, is staggering that someone could literally do a couple of tweets and all of a sudden you take away an evil dictator. the guy that was literally like not letting people go outside their homes for a year or two during the shutdown.
Like anyways, I get too emotional about how frustrating he was to that society. I don't even like, again, like Canada is not our thing, but it is right next door. And every time I tried to fly in there, I go through like three hours of inspections at the border. And it's just like a hard, hard country to deal with. Hopefully we can work something out with them.
Cause that'd be a great add to our economy. Okay. Next topic. you saw all over social media last week was TikTok. Everyone was freaking out. Who's going to buy it? Who's going to figure it out? Is it bad for our society? Is it amazing? Here's the thing. 170 million Americans have a TikTok account. So people think like, oh, that's about half the people. Wait a minute.
Out of the 340-ish million people we have in our society... There's a lot of them that are babies. They don't have TikTok. There's a lot of them that are senior citizens. They don't have TikTok. So it's basically everybody else. It's like 170 out of like 250 or 220, whatever the number is. So it's a vast majority of society. And 2023, it was $1.5 billion on TikTok shop.
Last year, it was 1.4 billion a month. Think about the revenue of people that are just making money in the middle of Michigan out of their apartment. A 17-year-old girl or a 36-year-old guy or a single mom with three kids who's 52 and she's just making money as an affiliate on TikTok shop. People don't realize the economic impact. They think it's just like dancing around videos.
That's serious money that's being had there. What are your thoughts about the fun situation where everyone freaked out and cried on Saturday, TikTok's over, and then you wake up Sunday morning, TikTok's back.
literally trump went on in his speech yesterday and he said tick tocks back yeah i mean it's just too big to fail right right they couldn't let it stay down yeah And so I didn't have a lot of concern that it would be down for very long. I think TikTok had to do what they had to do to stay in compliance, protect themselves, but also kind of stand their ground.
And so the 12 hours that TikTok was down, I mean, God, how many people were complaining about that?
Mind-boggling.
You see how dependent people are on TikTok. you know, these platforms for a lot of reasons for the social greed, but also their own entertainment. Right. You know, so I didn't have a lot of concern that it was going to stay down for very long.
Okay. So on the money Mondays, we talked about the making money side. Let's talk about the investing side. Yeah. You get pitched a lot. And as your personal brand keeps growing and growing and growing and growing and everyone keeps sharing your videos and you keep growing and growing, bada bing, bada boom, you're going to get pitched even more.
Sorry to tell you, you're going to get pitched way more. How do you interact with people that are trying to pitch you? What do you want from them? What do you want to see to sift through it all?
Honestly, my answer to almost everything right now is no. And here's why. The cost of distraction is unbelievable, right? And so I'm tunnel vision on these couple initiatives, these operating companies that I have, they're explosively growing.
And if I take 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes away from my day-to-day to disengage from what I'm doing, pay attention to some pitch on some idea, and then potentially say yes, It takes time and energy even to just get that deal done and to get it over the finish line and to deploy capital.
Due diligence, reviewing attorneys.
And then review it. And all the while, you know, when you look at it, like if you say I'm three to five years away from $500 million valuation, right? I'll hit... This year, I'll hit $150 to $200 million enterprise valuation. Not liquidity, but just the business. This is what it's worth if I sold it. So take three years from now. I've been in for two. I'll be in for another three, right?
60 months. What's $500 million divided by 60? A lot. A lot. Divided by 4.3 weeks to the month.
That's $8 million a month.
$8 million a month. All right. So that's $2 million a week. $2.3. And so when you look at the value of time.
$2 million a week.
I will get it done, but for the sake of conversation, if I transact in three years or if the businesses, say even if just I grow the business valuation to $500 million in the next 36 months, that means that when you take that value that I've created and accredit it backwards, that my time right now is worth $2 million a week. Five days a week, I mean, I work seven, but we'll call it five.
That's $400,000 a day.
So this podcast is $50,000 an hour.
Yeah, the answer is fucking no. And so I acutely understand the value of my time in that context. And so when I look at it, I'm just like, I can't afford to even stop long enough to listen to what it is you have to say right now.
Even if a deal crushes it and someone pitches, you're like, hey, invest into this deal. You're like, okay, I'll throw in 250K. 250K becomes 450,000 or 600,000. It does really well. You were doing $400,000 a day in this theoretical number, right? Right, exactly. And that would take three to five years from you putting in 250 to wait for that compared to you doing it on your own. That's fascinating.
It's a really interesting way to think about time management and the value of time. Like when I look at my 13-year, two-month run, I had the math done, but it's been a while, so I forget what it was.
But it was like every dollar that I made from the beginning when I didn't make any money the first couple of years all the way through the end when the business was cash-flowing a million dollars a month, and then the equity proceeds at the transaction Of the 115 million. And then looked at that and credited that for the 13 years, two months.
And I had that boiled down to like what my hourly rate was. And that's where I first started to think of it like that. And so now I think of it like this. It's like, you know.
Similar, because it's 13 years at $115 million. It's a little less than $10 million a year. So that's like $800,000 a month, $200,000 a week. It's almost the same concept.
Exactly, but at a much faster rate this time.
Right. Well, yeah, now you have the game down. You've got the team, the lawyers, the accountants, the advisors, the understanding, the insides and outs.
Moving quick.
Okay. What do you see people doing wrong on social media? Yeah.
And here's the moment where he pissed the entire internet off, you know? I just fucking hate these people that are making money online with things that they have no business selling because they don't have the expertise or the experience to back it up. Right.
And so the space, it's the only reason I remained to stay in the space with my business coaching mastermind is because I'm an actual operator and we bring real value to people that own companies that want to take them to the next level. But seeing these people that you have business coaches that have never owned and operated a real business.
that have never hired or fired human beings, scaled, you know, headcounts, scaled sales, operations, seeing, you know, just all these coaching offers. And it just become this big, like, yuck. You know what I mean? And I really dislike it. And so I'm looking forward, I think this year, and I think right now,
the tide is, it has turned and is in the process of turning and more and more people will be aware of, of kind of consumer behavior of being like kind of weeding through what's fake and what's real and what's bullshit. Um, so that's one, like if you have coaches that are coaching coaches on how to coach other coaches, it's like, what the fuck are we talking about? Jesus Christ, go get a job. Um,
And then second, people are just not authentic. You know what I mean? When I watch people's content, the stuff that I see go wrong is that they create a stage character... that they think is the thing that people on social media want to see, and they try to placate absolute everybody. Like, they're scared of pissing people off.
And I guess what I'm saying is that the people that have the greatest personal brands are the people that have mastered being able to be authentically them and totally okay with creating a division. If you're authentically you, at some level, you're going to be polarizing to people. There are going to be people that don't fuck with you at all and people that love with you.
But people become so scared of what people think and the rejection of the people that don't fuck with you that they try to placate everybody in that nobody loves them.
So on the charity side of money, are there things that you care about or is like you helping get people back into reality and help them get off of drugs? Is that your form of charity or is there certain charities that you like?
My charity comes is my purpose, like my God-given mission here is to help people with addiction and alcoholism. That's very clear. And so everything I do in a charitable sense is around that. And so it's very frequently helping people get into treatment, finding resources for people that can't afford it, helping families, et cetera. That's my main area of focus.
I think all these other things are great, but this is my thing.
Yeah, because you care about it deeply. Totally. Okay. There's a question I ask on almost every episode, but I've never, ever, ever, ever gotten the same answer. I know I'm not going to get the same answer right now. Eric Spofford. You have a few children and one day you're going to sell for 500 million, probably in five years. Another time you'll probably sell for a billion or two billion.
And by the end of your journey, 100 years from now, maybe you're 136 years old one day, you finally pass away. But you've accumulated billions and billions of dollars. What percentage of billions and billions of dollars do you leave to those children?
I don't know if I've ever thought about it in the context of what percentage, right? I have thought about it in how is it managed. And so I have an estate plan that's set up for my kids that has taken the core issues that I think that my wealth could cause harm to them and tried to...
tried to deliver that and manage that from the grave after I'm gone the same way that I would here in real life while I'm still on planet Earth. And so some of those things are in my estate plan, my kids don't get a fucking dime. I mean, I will let them starve on the street if they can't pass a drug test. And so they're getting, I think it's like twice a year hair tests that go back six months.
Like if you're using drugs, you're on your fucking own, homie. They have to be full-time enrolled in school or employed full-time. And so there's no sitting around, you know, spending dad's money. Right. And they have to have, and that's at the discretion of, um, the person that'll be in charge of my estate. If they want to go out, pursue the entrepreneurial journey. Cool.
But you have to be doing it at a full time. You have to be productive. It can't be just a charade and smoke shirt. Like you have to be gainfully like doing something. Um, And even then, there were a lot of mechanisms where they never get access to all the money.
Like, one of the most underrated, I should say, one of the most underrated attributes of a human being that I have, to a painful extent, is hunger. And so I don't want to spoil them and give them everything. I don't do that now. I've never done that since they're children, and I'm not going to do it later in life from the grave.
So we've heard famous stories over the years about either child stars or people that have very wealthy parents go down the drug path. Why do you think that is that they, you know, they grew up in a rich household or they get tens of millions of dollars and they inherit a bunch of money or a rich kid, for example, why do you think they go down so heavily in the drug path sometimes?
I think it gets more attention because people can't make sense of it because they don't really understand addiction, right? If you come from a nice family and mom and dad are still together and there's lots of money and a nice home and fancy cars and all this stuff, people look at that and go, why would you ever do drugs? Why would you destroy this?
But when they look at different socioeconomic classes, they can reconcile it. They're like, oh, well, they're from a bad neighborhood. Their parents were divorced. It makes sense. The truth is this, is that addiction falls squarely across all people, regardless of economic status, race, neighborhood, et cetera. It's inexplainable.
And so it happens in the neighborhood like this one with $20 million homes, $50 million homes, and it happens in Section 8 housing projects and middle-class America and everything in between. And so addiction is just a disease that doesn't discriminate. It does not respect that you come from a good family. It doesn't respect that you come from a high net worth status.
It doesn't give a shit about any of that.
So last question I'm going to ask you. Stare right into that camera for someone watching. That is... impacted by someone in their life that has gone far down the drug path and they're too scared or nervous to have the conversation with them to try to help them what would you say to that person to give them confidence to talk to their friend that's going down the path of potentially dying
It's somewhat of a brutal conversation and a little bit morbid, but you have to think about it in the context of this because this is the reality. If you understand addiction, it ends in only a couple different places. The person ends up in recovery or they end up in jails, institutions, and death.
And the thing you need to consider is what are you going to regret if the worst case situation happens? And that is the tool, the mechanism that you need to overcome your anxiety and your fear on confronting your loved one that has alcoholism and has addiction.
Because let me tell you something, I have consoled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of grieving moms and dads and loved ones of people with addiction.
And the amount of regret of the, I wish I had, I wish I hadn't enabled them, I wish I'd said it, I wish I'd thrown them out of the house, I wish I'd had, that I've heard at funerals and in deep grief post losing their loved one, it is some of the most painful shit that I've ever seen anyone go through in my entire life.
You know, I nor any other person in recovery or the addiction treatment industry can guarantee that your loved one will find recovery. But what I can guarantee is that if you do the right things, no matter what the outcome, as painful as that might be, you will not have the excruciating pain of regret. And so it's something that you have to do.
A lot of people die and lose their life in vain, in addiction, and there are co-conspirators, there are co-defendants to that situation, and they are the loved ones of that person that love them to death, literally. You see that addiction lives off of codependency, right? If addiction is a fire, codependency and enablement is the oxygen that keeps it going.
Without enablement of some sort, addiction itself as a fire is arrested and extinguished. And so a lot of these lies and hiding between, well, I'm not the one doing the drugs and it's not me and it's their decision and they have to make their own decision.
And the fucking million things that I've heard from loved ones to excuse them not having to have these uncomfortable conversations and do very uncomfortable, painful things to do what's right for their loved one. I assure you that's not how you'll feel at their funeral.
And so you have to close your eyes and really envision that very painful moment and think about everything that you're going to regret and then use that information to dictate what you're going to do next.
All right, guys, you're listening to the most special edition of the Money Mondays because it is the biggest money Monday of all time. And we're not inside the RV motorhome for once because we're inside of Eric Spofford's home.
Check him out across social media if you want to learn about Section 8 housing, how to build real businesses, what he's up to in the real estate game, and just telling real things of what to do in business because he lives it. He shows it and he shows all aspects of it. I call it building in public and he's showcasing real time. Like, Hey, I just bought 70 units and here's why.
Hey, I'm doing this deal here. Hey, I'm rolling up these clinics to eventually sell for 500 million. He's showing you in real time and he has the receipts to back it up. Unlike a lot of people across social media. So check us out on the money Mondays. Make sure to have discussions with your friends, family, and followers about money because we know it, Growing up, it was rude to talk about money.
And finally, in our society, especially this last couple of years with this podcast, we've been able to change that narrative to have discussion with your friends, family, and followers about money because it is part of your daily life. It's not rude to talk about it. It's rude to not talk about it. People need to talk about loans, taxes, finances, accounting.
How much do they ask for their salary? What should they be doing with their money? Should they borrow money from their friend or how do they pay back? Or what if they're owed money? People feel scared to talk about money. You have to discuss it. It is part of your real life. So check us out on themoneymondays.com. Follow Eric Spofford and we'll see you guys next Monday.