The Everyday Millionaire Show
The Everyday Millionaire Show
Unlocking Wealth Management Secrets with Elliot Kallen (Full Podcast)
Unlock expert insights on wealth management from Elliot Kallen, CEO of Prosperity Financial Group. On this episode of the Everyday Millionaire Show, Elliot shares his inspiring journey, detailing how he transitioned from being an accountant to a renowned financial advisor. Discover the secrets behind his firm’s success in managing nearly a billion dollars in assets, all while navigating the high cost of living in one of the most expensive states.
Dive deep into strategic investment approaches, including the importance of diversified portfolios and the balance between ETFs, mutual funds, and individual stocks. Tune in for actionable advice on maintaining strong client relationships and achieving financial stability in today’s volatile economic landscape.
Welcome to the Everyday Millionaire Show with Ryan Greenberg and Nick Kalkas. Welcome back everybody to the Everyday Millionaire Show. We are here with Elliot Kallen. It's Alan, with a K in front of it. That's how we describe it to us. Welcome, elliot. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Great, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me, ryan.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely so. Elliot, where are you coming from?
Speaker 2:I'm in Northern California called the East Bay. I live in Lafayette, I work in San Ramon. I moved out here in 1993, married a Californian, had three kids, got divorced, stayed out here because I have a business, and so I hate to think of myself as a Californian. I'm from North Jersey. I still say coffee talk in the office. You're in Maryland, which is great. I'm a Long Island guy actually.
Speaker 1:So originally from Long Island.
Speaker 2:We all talk too fast.
Speaker 1:Well, nice. So Northern California awesome. That's a tough place financially to live. It's expensive up there, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It's stupidly expensive. And I have to tell you that if my dad, who was a World War II depression dad, if he knew what I made to what I saved that ratio versus what he made in those days to what he saved he'd probably hit me in the side of the head.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, it's hard to save money in California. I was just with a buddy of mine who moved back from California and he said he's like I couldn't take it anymore. It was just every day. He had a regular job and worked in kind of the industry and he just had to give it up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's hard. I think it makes sense more if you live in california and you own your own business, because I do know a couple, uh, people who live in california, or my buddies, and they have businesses and they don't seem to have an issue. But like you said, ryan, if you're working like a nine to five, it may be more difficult with the living expenses out there yeah, so um.
Speaker 1:So, elliot, you own Prosperity Financial Group, so you are a licensed financial advisor, you own an advisory, so that means just like, I guess, in real estate, where you have multiple advisors that work underneath you to manage assets for clients. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Right, I have two companies one company in California that has five advisors, and then I have one company with 55 advisors outside of California. They're two separate companies. Put them together. We're just knocking on the door of a billion dollars.
Speaker 1:And that's in assets under management for clients that use you guys as advisors, correct?
Speaker 2:Correct, very correct.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So if a person that had a high net worth, individual or not, do you have a limit of how much they have to be accredited investors or do you just take anybody on?
Speaker 2:So as CEO, I have the least amount of time in the office and so I've got to be careful who I take on as a new client. I only have about 110 clients with about $280 million $300 million in assets, just those between those three. So my average client is $1 to $15 million in assets.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we'll call them semi-high worth, high worth individuals. So if they come to you, what is the pitch like? How do you tell them that you're better than the next financial advisor?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, Ryan, every person in every industry, including your own the hardest thing to do is to differentiate yourself. There are some very, very competent financial advisors, financial planners, people in every state, Maryland and California. There are lots of very competent people. We're not running. There's no dearth of good people out there. The hard part is how to differentiate yourself. So for us, it's all about the white glove very hands-on service with incredible communication. So we're over-the-top communicators with emails, with video marketing, with constant meetings. We're very over-the-top, so people almost never leave us because we work on a relationship so hard. And then we build our own portfolios. We don't go to a third party to do it, we build our own. So they know whatever we want to do, we could do it.
Speaker 3:So, as a lot of your business is it referral, do you get a lot of referrals in from other individuals who are investing with you?
Speaker 2:I'd say, 80% of our business are referrals, 20% are social media marketing and are your clients in all different states, or are they?
Speaker 2:I have a lot of clients in different states because they move. They move to texas and idaho and all these you know places that everybody moves, starting with covet. I have places that not everybody has that here. But I've been doing this long, as I've been doing this 30 years. So I'm going to grab clients from different states and I get clients who call me from different states, including Maryland. I'm licensed in all 50 states.
Speaker 1:I was just going to ask you that. So you have to have a license to advise in each state, correct?
Speaker 2:You have a national license. I have a national license. Some states require some continuing ed. I have an insurance license, probably in half the states where we're needed, but it's pretty easy to get if you need it.
Speaker 1:So how did you get from? Where did you start? Like, did you go to college to be a financial advisor? I assume Like, how did it start? Versus where are you at now with a billion dollars under management?
Speaker 2:You know. I'd like to tell you that, ryan, that I had a really straight line to success, but that that wouldn't be the truth. I have some friends who've had that, but I'm not one of those people. My life is kind of zigzagging a little bit on that. So when I graduated Rutgers up in New Jersey, I went into the accounting business. That's what I was. I did that and I hated it. It was a bad fit for me. You can always see from my personality I'm not an accountant. There's no way I'm going to be an accountant. So I started an industrial packaging business. I did that for about seven years out of college after accounting and I sold that business in 1987, looked for something else to do, started business number two which was an environmental cleanup business. Did that until 1993, end of 92.
Speaker 2:Then my wife in New Jersey got pregnant with our twins. She was a California lady. We came to California. I had already been investigating as the Superfund money was drying up so I knew I needed to change businesses. I was already investigating financial services. I met with some of the big brand names out there the Merrills, the Lincolns of the world. I met in Florida with them, shearson, and I knew this was a business I wanted to get into, primarily starting as B2B, which is not what most people do. They mostly do C2C. I wanted to be B2B, business to business. I couldn't find it where I was in New Jersey. I came to California, met a guy from the Bronx that was helping me at Lincoln Financials, joined them, worked with them for six years and took my entire business team and we became Prosperity Financial Group.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So when you left that other group I guess they didn't have a non-compete or anything like that you could just start your own shop right next door, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So I left. Unusually, I left on good terms. I had a very good relationship with Lincoln, the guy's there, the chairman has since died and the CEO is still there. We just had a really good working relationship.
Speaker 2:I tend to be very straightforward and very honest, very direct, sometimes out of ethnicity or sex or race and not based on volume things that you should never do. And so when I called them on that in 99, and I said listen, my entire team wants to leave because we're underpaid and you've got a team here that's making more money than us and we do the same volume. So what I want you to do is to keep us. I want you to create parity. And they said we can't do that because they're going to want more money if we do that and we're going to have to give it to them because we can't afford to lose them.
Speaker 2:And I said OK, you're putting me in a position that if I stay, I lose face with my team and if I leave, I lose face with you. I said we said, well, we can't change that. I said, well, I could do the industry way and just tell you the day we're leaving, or I could be honest and upfront and give you 90 days notice and we can work it out. And he said well, you've always been honest and upfront. If you need 90 days notice, take it, bring a copier in here. Copier clients, accounts, do everything right, just don't steal our people. And I said okay, now we left on great terms and I continued to this business to do some business with them.
Speaker 3:I got a question New clients that come to you. Do they come from a different financial advisor or is that their first step into hiring a financial advisor?
Speaker 2:We do get some people that are at Schwab or some Fidelity Direct that come to us and say, ok, I've been doing it myself, I'm not really doing an effective job or I'm worried about this, I need to get advice. We get those people. I get a few of those a year. Majority of people who come to us are unhappy with their current advisory relationship.
Speaker 3:Do they explain what makes them unhappy where they are before they switch to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could tell you all day it's performance, it's a lot of performance, but nine times out of 10, really, it's a breakdown in communication. You know, like in so many other industries, trust is the five-letter keyword in our industry. If I make you 5%, if I make you 40% this year and you don't trust me, you'll still leave me. But if you trust me, you're going to hang there with me. We're going to talk through it, we're going to find out what we need to do a little bit better with you. So trust and that's what we try to do Trust is the key element to success in our industry.
Speaker 1:So how often are you repositioning clients portfolios, and is that something that you make those decisions on? Or do you call them and say hey, I think the move is to go into solar or into this or into that. Do you do that or do you have control of their, their accounts or equities, or do all my clients.
Speaker 2:I do that. I spend about 30 of my time being kind of a what I call a wonk my clients I do that. I spend about 30 of my time being kind of a what I call a wonk, you know, reviewing portfolios, looking at stuff. So I am tweaking every month. We're fee only so we don't make money on trades, but I'm tweaking every month. Maybe go from five percent on this holding to three and this holding subtract that we're. We are strategic and extremely tactical in what we do okay, so and and how are you getting the data?
Speaker 1:How are you collecting enough data and stuff? Obviously you're a busy guy. You're running these companies. Do you have people that are pulling data from somewhere to learn where you can make those tweaks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I get a lot of this data. I get 150 emails a day on economic reports and where the market's going. Most of them say the same thing and I've got a three-person marketing team that helps me also.
Speaker 1:And are you mainly because we're both real estate guys. We're heavy on real estate. Obviously we have some stocks I'm heavy in NVIDIA and a couple other big stocks but are you trading mostly individual stocks? Are you doing a mixture of bonds and what does that kind of look like?
Speaker 2:We have a big mixture, ryan. There's no one solution that fits everybody. There's no one set of shoes that fits everybody here. Majority of our business are definitely ETFs, exchange-traded funds right now, or electronic-traded funds. That's the majority of our business. We do a lot of no load, low fee mutual funds where we need to, but there's no commission involved in there. And if somebody wants stocks, we do that. But we don't pretend and we don't pretend to be stock market jockeys. We don't think that's a winning way for most clients. You know you get. Nvidia is a phenomenon. You own it. Good for you. It's a phenomenon, I mean it is, there's nothing like it. And we've got a lot of tech portfolios that include NVIDIA but I don't usually go single. I have some, but I don't go usually single stock exposure for a client because for most of them they want the results of NVIDIA up but they don't want the down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, down, yeah, okay, that makes sense. So the ETFs and everything, obviously, because it's spread out over more companies, it's just a little bit safer it is.
Speaker 2:It's not one stock exposure. I like particularly sector ETFs. I don't buy the S&P ETF. That's not one of them. I buy sectors. I might buy defense contractors right now as an example. I just added that maybe six months ago, because you've got a war in the Middle East, you've got a war in Eastern Europe, the US defense industry is going to have to rebuild. That's going to be very profitable over the next three to five years for that industry. That's an ETF I would own.
Speaker 3:So what would you invest in when we're in a recession?
Speaker 2:So right now typical in recessions the value side of business does very well versus the growth side. So you end up going from where we've been in GAGA growth for basically the last four years. You go to things that pay dividends, lots of things that pay dividends, things that pay dividends lots of things that pay dividends. For instance, I would not buy a REIT today because I think REITs are a little bit early in the REIT business, especially with what's going on in the office industry. But in six months from now that's probably a place I would buy into.
Speaker 2:As an example, I like the defense industry. Like I just said, they make money on that. I like tech companies that pay dividends, especially small ones, because they're sitting on a lot of cash. So companies that have a lot of cash in different sectors tend to do better in a recession. And, of course, we've got interest rates that are about to come slipping down, which makes the bond market an improving market. And then you've got the options market. That does well in all markets, including down markets. So you may want to do something in the options market. That does well in all markets, including down markets. So you may want to do something in the options market where you can make 7%, 8%, 9% in that world too nice.
Speaker 1:So when? What? When you're taking your fees, you said it's a fee base. How does that work? Is it just a set number, like we're taking one percent of whatever you make them, or is it whatever their total assets is?
Speaker 2:so the financial advisory business there, ryan, is not allowed by law to take a piece of the profits. Okay, edge industry is, but not the financial advisory industry, not the RIA registered investment advisor world. You have to take it on a whole portfolio. You can exclude holdings because maybe somebody has something that got grandfathered in that they never want you to sell so they don't want you to bill on it. You can do that, but we charge. The most popular fee out there and across the country is 1%, which is 0.25% per quarter. That's the most popular fee out there. In the United States we have things higher. We have stuff that's lower than that too, depending on volume.
Speaker 1:So it's 1% annually.
Speaker 2:Annually, yes, of the amount that they have in there with you yeah, not counting that we might exclude a holding that they're never going to sell. And let's say you say look, I own 1,000 shares of NVIDIA or Microsoft. I'm never going to sell it. I don't want to be charged on it either. That's fine, you can exclude that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay, interesting. And with that 1%, how many meetings do you get? Do you get face-to-faces with your advisory team, whoever their account manager is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I try to meet with my clients from one to four times a year. I meet with my advisors here in the office. It's almost daily of what we're doing. There's just a lot of communication that we work on and situations that you don't want to get out of hand or out of control of, so you want to stay in front of them.
Speaker 3:How many accounts can one advisor handle at once?
Speaker 2:Well, if you're Merrill Lynch, you're about 1,000 to 1,500. If you're us, it's between one and well, I would say, at 200, you're really getting a lot of accounts. You're not going to be very good at what you do. I know people in our industry that are 400, depending on average size, but I don't think you can do a great job over 150 or 200.
Speaker 3:So you mentioned that you had 100 and some accounts.
Speaker 2:I have about 110, 120. I just gave away 40 of them to. I had 150, I gave 40 of them away to one of my advisors so I could bring down the amount of people I'm dealing with.
Speaker 3:So are the remaining of those split between the other five that you have there locally with you, yeah, and then the other 55 in the other states? Are they handling different accounts?
Speaker 2:They all handle their own accounts. Some of these things we split, some of the things they handle their own with, depending on what's working well for them.
Speaker 1:Nice. So when you are telling people to I don't know if you answered this are you telling people to make the trades or you actually hold the assets and you're making the trades?
Speaker 2:On my 110 clients. I have an assistant that makes all the trades for me.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. And when? I guess what do you get? Monthly reports from? The owners will get monthly reports from you to say how much they're making.
Speaker 2:Of course you have to do it. We have Schwab reports, we clear through Schwab institutional, and then we have a third-party software too.
Speaker 1:And what's your average return for your clients, would you say?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really depends on the year. I mean, if I take my tech, my sector-select portfolio, which is my tech-heavy portfolio, that's up 26%, I think, for the last 12 months. If I take my growth portfolio, that's probably up close to 18% 19% for the last 12 months. If I take my income portfolio just the extreme other side of it that's up about 8% for the last 12 months and that's producing probably 7% in income.
Speaker 1:So they say you know, if you go S&P you can basically count on, over long term, 10% returns over time. Right, Would you say that you are beating that with your clients?
Speaker 2:The goal of my growth portfolio and my aggressive growth portfolio is to beat the S&P consistently, and we've been doing that. Everything else is not competing with the S&P 500 because they're producing income or they're minimizing risk. They're going to be heavy in other places, but I think that's something that I guess a client would ask you to.
Speaker 1:you know they would say I'm risk adverse, maybe I'm older or you know, if I'm a young guy and I could be more aggressive? Is that what they basically tell you?
Speaker 2:It depends on you. It's not always age-based, ryan. Sometimes, nick, it's going to be who your personality is. I have two little old ladies, 83 years old. They come in here and they yell at me that I'm not being aggressive enough. So it's not always age-based. Some people are young and they're risk-averse, and some people are older and are very into risk when you mentioned the income-based account at 8%.
Speaker 3:So they're receiving 8%. Is that what you mean by income account?
Speaker 2:Yes, they're getting 8% in income. What kind of investment? By dividends, okay. Well, dividends, interest and sometimes money coming off of option income, too Nice.
Speaker 1:So I had another question about the assets that you're purchasing. So is it all strictly like equities, etfs, bonds, stuff like that, or do you guys do any card asset like real estate or gold or anything like that?
Speaker 2:We do hard assets if it has a QSIP number, which means it has to be like liquid real estate, like a wheat. It can be private stuff where it can't sell for seven years, it can be stuff that only comes up at a quarter interval stuff, but it's still going to be in there. Hard assets. I'm not going out and buying gold on a gold exchange, but I might buy GLD, which is an ETF, or SLV if it's silver, if they want to For real estate. I'm not going out and buying that building.
Speaker 3:There are people far better at buying an income building than I am we're just keeping aware, being aware of it, but you didn't mention, like, if they want to, a couple times so are the clients coming at you and saying, hey, look, I want to invest in this etf or this you know bond or whatnot? Wouldn't they come to you and just say, hey, what do you suggest? And then you can just give them your recommendation?
Speaker 2:they're paying me me for advice If they say to me I'll give you a good example. They said to me gold is $2,500 an ounce. It's up 20% plus this year. I think I should put some of my assets in the gold. I'm going to say if your intent on a hard asset is to buy it gold and ingots or coins and then sell it, you're never going to sell it because no one in ingots has a sell discipline. All they do is have a buy discipline. They're just going to buy, never sell it. So if you want to sell it, then let's buy gld, which at least I could sell in a split second. I could sell that. It doesn't work perfectly with gold, the actual hard asset, but it's not far off, but it's not perfect either. Reits are the same thing. I can get a 7% return, income return on a REIT, but I'm not going to go and buy the building. But if they want to buy the building, I'll advise them on whether I think the numbers add up on that building or not.
Speaker 3:Can you talk a little bit about what the portfolios looked like around COVID when things were hitting the fan?
Speaker 2:COVID was great for us. I have to tell you that. So, covid, when COVID first hit, we looked at that as an opportunity to reposition all of our clients. The market collapsed and I said, you know, I think we're going to come out of this really heavy. And I said, you know, I think we're going to come out of this really heavy. And the industries that are going to turn out really heavy are companies that deal with home businesses and people not going to work. I don't think we're going to work for a year. This was in 2021.
Speaker 2:So we got heavy on Visa, mastercard, costco and tech companies. That's where we went really heavy. And so you can imagine, that year our portfolios went up 40. I mean they tanked in the first quarter and they finished up the year 44, 45% the big portfolios. Because we went heavy into that. We saw an opportunity out there. There's always an opportunity in investing. So COVID was good for us, even though it was bad for a lot of things. It was good for us when I went into Costco and I saw that there were lines out the door for toilet paper. Guess which companies I wanted to buy? Paper companies, that's who I was buying and Costco, because nobody was buying more Costco or Walmart in those days, and so I thought that's what we're going to buy.
Speaker 2:Yeah that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:So during COVID, would you say the first initial drop, did a lot of people get scared and like start pulling out of the markets, or do you think that most of your clients hang in there?
Speaker 2:Well, I would say two or three people pulled out, but the majority of them because, again, we over communicate. We were sending emails out and we were calling them to tell them this is an opportunity. I'm going to send you a list of opportunities that we're looking at, so be patient and we'll get that. We send things like Costco and the tech industry out to them. The problem with the big broker dealers like Merrill and Morgan and so forth is those guys got scared. They couldn't come to the office anymore, so they stopped calling everybody because they didn't want to deliver bad news that your portfolio is down by 30%. We were telling them look, you're off by a third, but we think there's an amazing opportunity here, and maybe all but two of them did it. We had a few of them that went to gold real gold and I said it's a bad idea. We had a few of them that went to bonds. I said that's a bad idea. Right now, Bonds are too low, the interest rates are too low.
Speaker 1:They can only go up, but you know, at the end of the day, it is the client's money and when you are advising people, what do you tell them typically to keep as a cash reserve so they can get into buying opportunities. You know if something does take a dip.
Speaker 2:We don't keep a lot of money in cash because we're staying liquid quite a bit, but we keep 2% to 5% of cash.
Speaker 1:That's it, 2% to 5%.
Speaker 2:Unless we think something big is coming down the line, and then we might go as high as 10% or 20%. But there's got to be a reason for that. If I thought tomorrow the market's going to tank, then we'd probably be 30% or 40% cash. It's volatile, but I don't think it's tanking.
Speaker 1:So your vision for, let's just say, the next 12 months? In the markets, you think we have strong growth, and are you taking in consideration the election at all?
Speaker 2:I think we have, and I just put a newsletter yesterday. I think we are in a softening right now. A highly volatile market means this and we're softening right now. So I'm adding more value to my portfolios more companies that pay dividends, more companies that are stronger positions from their point of view in the market. That's what I'm doing right now for portfolios and definitely in the income portfolios more income-related products that have no correlation to the stock market to protect them, because those are kind of risk-adverse people. But no, we've taken a lot of risk off the table because we think that we're in a softening market.
Speaker 2:The next president, irrespective if it's a Democrat or Republican, is going to have to deal with a $36 trillion budget deficit, going to have to deal with Ukraine, going to have to deal with the Middle East, going to have to deal with a bloated defense budget and going to have to deal with the fact that we are way over the top on spending. That doesn't matter whether Democrat or Republican, so they have to deal with that. We want to be in a position to not blow up during those periods.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so does any of those things like the war in Ukraine and everything. Does that worry you? As far as the market goes, do you think that that can have a negative effect on our markets here, since we are sending a ridiculous amount of money there? It?
Speaker 2:does. It worries that we're overspending as a country. I'm worried what it does to the US dollar in the long run. I'll tell you what I'm worried about. The bigger worry, the macro worry that your children are going to be going to war with China. That's my big worry Because, as a US defense, we're depleting it. So, from a monetary standpoint, we're going to have to increase defense spending. The next president, unquestionably, is going to have to rebuild the USS defense industry with armaments. Well, we're investing in that in almost all of our portfolios. But on a personal level, I hate the way that looks. Business level, I'm doing it. I think there's a lot of volatility out there. I think the Middle East will settle down, but I think there's just too many factors, too many people that want to see us harmed and do bad, and I think that's going to change things.
Speaker 1:Yes, so does that. I guess obviously you would have different people that you advise, on different political spectrums, obviously, and do they ever, do you ever kind of advise them on what's going to happen, whether somebody gets in versus somebody else?
Speaker 2:Of course, just like I'm talking to you, what I don't want to do is I don't want to tell them who they're voting for is wrong.
Speaker 1:Right right right.
Speaker 2:We live in a polarized world. So when I try to explain it, I'm going to say, okay, this is what they're recommending, this is what the other party is recommending. The best government we've ever had for the stock market has always been divided government. I said I know if you're a Democrat, you want to have a Democratic sweep. I know if you're a Republican, you want a Republican sweep. I get that. But for the stock market and for your income, the best returns are divided government. So no matter who you're voting for, vote for divided government because you're going to make the most money doing that.
Speaker 1:Vote for a divided government because you're going to make the most money doing that, so that means that the House is Republican and whatever. Vice versa, there's different-.
Speaker 2:Whatever. But then you get into situations like today where you get the House is going to recommend something, the Senate's never going to agree to it. The Senate's going to recommend something, the House is never going to agree to it. Then you get stalemate. Now the stock market, the markets, love stalemate in Washington. What they hate is one-party rule. They hate it Because both parties do a crappy job of one-party rule. They do. That's interesting. It runs counterintuitive to the voter, but it works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Has there been any studies, or do you know of any studies that make it so they know? Okay, if this part of the government's Republican, we usually will do better than if this part's Democratic, we'll usually do better, and vice versa.
Speaker 2:I think, depending on which party you prefer whether you're a Harris person or you're a Trump person you want your person to be the president, no question about it. You can live with the other two part the Congress you can live with whatever way that goes, as long as your person becomes the president. I think that's how most people think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just didn't know for the financial market specifically if one was better than the other?
Speaker 2:No, because look, it went up under Trump and then it went down to COVID. It went up under Biden. Now we're softening at the end of Biden, I think it just is what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's one thing I know I've talked to, probably off air and stuff. I don't like to get too political in here, but I just feel, like everybody, you can make money in all different political environments and I think people that are listening, that are worried and kind of stepping back and waiting for the announcement of the next presidency to get into investing. I think that's a that's a mistake. I think any different president, different government, presents different opportunities. You know, under Trump we did really well with the mortgages. We had refinanced a ton of properties and made a bunch of money. You know, under Biden there could have been other things that you know people started investing in. That made them money. But you know, I guess my advice to people not as a financial advisor is that you don't want to wait for a certain political outcome to start investing in her. You know.
Speaker 2:I would think and you're right at what you just said there, ryan there's always money being made. Look, when the Great Depression hit completely hit the Great Depression the money was made in urban centers by the biggest millionaires in that country. They bought up urban centers Rockefeller, vanderbilt. They bought them up and they bought the best prime land out there when everybody was running away. That was their opportunity In World War II. Who made a lot of money in World War II? Excuse me, the US defense industry, the chocolate industry, the ketchup industry, the salami industry, everybody that was helping the defense department and helping the troops in Europe and the Far East. They made a ton of money. So there's always money being made. Who didn't make money in World War II? The travel industry, as an example. In today's terms, that's not what you would have wanted.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, not a carnival cruise time of the year. Well, elliot, we definitely. Thank you, nick. Do you have any more questions for Elliot?
Speaker 3:I guess our last question I'd like to ask our guests is what are your goals with your company in the next maybe one year and then five-year goals?
Speaker 2:You know, at some point in the line I'm looking to transition this company over the next five years to the next generation. But our goal is to double between now and then. So our goal here is to double between now and then. So our goal here is to double the amount of assets. So all the marketing that we do is to find new clients with new dollars and do a better job with them, to make their assets stickier, that they want to stay with us.
Speaker 3:How much would you say you're spending on marketing to get to where you want to be?
Speaker 2:I can tell you what we spent last year. It's $350,000. It's a lot of money, yeah.
Speaker 1:It is a lot of money. All right, Elliot. Well, we appreciate you coming on the show. How can people find out? Where would they go to find you and get in contact with you for any financial advisory questions or stuff?
Speaker 2:like that and gentlemen, it's been my pleasure to be on your show. It's an exciting show. So I'm at Elliot E-L-L-I-O-T at ProsperityFinancialGroupcom. My cell is 510-206-1103. And my website is Prosperity206-1103. And my website is prosperityfinancialgroupcom.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, that's easy. All right guys. Well, you heard it here. Elliot, Thank you for coming on, and we'll hope to chat soon.
Speaker 2:My pleasure guys Look forward to hearing from you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you.
