Ep. 10 | Be a leader, not a boss - Allen Awali

We're excited to chat with Allen Awali, the founder at Cedar Gold Group, a player in precious metal IRAs. With over six years of hands-on experience, Allen's been rocking it in the industry, making a name for himself. He credits his family for igniting his entrepreneurial fire early on, teaching him the ropes of hustle and innovation. Allen's all about teamwork, not just bossing people around but lifting them up. He's proof that anyone can crush it in entrepreneurship with some grit and the right crew. Tune in for some real talk and solid insights!

Allen Awali
Cedar Gold Group 

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Host: Jack Moran
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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode ten of Shakin’ Hands. I'm your host, Jack Moran. You can find me on Instagram at Blue Collar Kid that is blue collar KEHD Today on the episode, we have Alan Awali, the founder of Cedar Gold Group. Yep. How are we doing today? We're doing good. How are you doing, Jack? Doing well. So the point of this podcast that I describe to you before is kind of here are the stories of successful entrepreneurs who are out there doing a hopefully inspire other people to take the leap into entrepreneurship. So give us a little background on, like where you're at right now, like, what are you doing, where your business ventures at right now? Yeah, Sierra Gold Group, fairly new. I built the company. I started building it in October of 2023. Really got it to a point where it's running, you know, CRM is built back ends, built websites, built. We really launched and I'd say January. and then since then, I mean, the trajectory has just been moving up, you know, every month, increasing revenue, growing the team. we're about six months old now. But the good part about it is I've been in the industry for quite some time, so, I'm not a beginner. So, in terms of structure in the company, it's just like probably any other gold and silver company right now. So our operations are are great. Running smoothly. What do you guys offer? Like what are the services that you guys are so, primarily gold IRAs. So we help people convert their retirement funds for one case IRAs. four three. TSP is, into self-directed precious metals. IRAs. it's a tax free penalty. Free rollover gets people off the the dollar, out of the stock market if they don't like the stock market, into hard physical funds. Or alternatively, if you want to buy gold with cash, people do that, with us too, of all the time. So, you know, anybody that's interested in gold, silver, platinum, palladium, that's we help them, you know, facilitate their orders. What are the advantages to gold as opposed to the dollar? Well, it has an inverse relationship with the dollar. so as more money gets printed, the price of gold goes up inherently. Right? I mean, if you just look, even during Covid, right? In 2020, when the government passed us stimulus packages, and added however many trillion they did, to the economy, you saw gold instantly. Boom, spiked up, you know what I mean? And so it quite literally has an inverse relationship to the buying power of the dollar. What do you think about the dollar? Do you think it's, Oh, man. I mean, listen, when you have Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen going out on TV and telling the American public, unprepared to take America to 50 trillion in debt, people should start, you know, biting their nails a little bit and getting worried. that's all good. She'll just redefine recession. Yeah, yeah. You know. Yeah, exactly. The the the the politicians in the white House have proved time and time again they really don't care about, us common folk, well, they live in an alternate universe, you know? so, yeah. So was this your first business? Was this your intro into entrepreneurship? So it's not my first business. It's my first business. I've taken a seriously, as in, like, building, you know, a team. You know, we're, about 11 people now. before that, I would say we have a apparel line called Bender. Bender, more focused for electronic music artists. you know that scene? It taught me the fundamentals of business, you know, how do I get an LLC? How do I, you know, create a website? How do I do everything? it taught me how to be a self-starter. so, I mean, I've taken the experience from that business using what I knew from that, you know, bring it on to Cedar. by the time I wanted to start Cedar, you know, I knew everything I had to know about, you know, starting a business, getting a bank account, you know, operating an agreement, so on and so forth. So what was the story or why did you become an entrepreneur? Why are you working a 9 to 5 like most people? Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think it stems from my family. growing up, my dad was always, entrepreneur. Right. you know, from, I mean, he, he worked in the car dealership, you know, when I was younger. After that, he ventured out, opened up a restaurant. He had an auto body repair shop. He had a used car lot. always like, throughout growing up, I saw my dad, hustle and hustling, you know what I mean? I mean, there is one point in our lives where we had two Porsches and a Mercedes-Benz in the driveway, and I was like, whoa. I would say good times. Did it lasts forever? Yeah. UPS and downs, ups and downs. but, you know, I took that as, you know, being a kid. And I saw that, and I was like, well, I want that, you know what I mean? So, I figured, you know what? Why not give it a shot? And, you know, my parents will will vouch for me, like, I've, you know, I, I don't like listening to, like, people, you know what I mean? I really rather just not have a boss, because I do it better myself, you know what I mean? We're unemployable. Yeah, I thought I'm unemployable. I literally, you know, it's hard. Every job that I've had, I mean, I've probably been there for two years, Max, done great at the job. It's not that I was doing bad. It just gets mundane. It's just. You know what I mean? it's not that I was lazy. I was a hustler. My last job, I was driving an hour and a half each way to work and back. no conflict, no complaining either. Like I was happy to do it, you know, just to make money. But, you're just gonna get more return if you're doing the work anyway. You're doing it for yourself. Well, yeah. I mean, imagine this. You're, you know, you see, you see the situation, you realize that you can do it better and more efficiently and cheaper. You know what I mean? then you think to yourself, like, what's what's the you have to break it down in your head what's really holding you back? and then when I broke it down, I realized, nothing really about myself. You know, any human can go and learn anything if they want to, you know, if they have the will to learn. so, yeah, that's, you know what made me want to become an entrepreneur? I really just get out there and do it. So then what's the story of how you got involved in the gold and silver business? Yeah. So interesting story. I, you know, I went to school for music, actually, I was, went to school for producing music and wanted to be a DJ. I still dabble around and make music. Excuse me. and it's really fun for pastime, but it came a certain point where my parents came up to me and they're like, you know, you have to make money, kid. You know what I mean? You have to earn a living. The classic game. I mean, I was like, you know, 2021 at that point, making no money, no, no real job. and I saw all my friends leveling up, and I was like, oh, you know, crap. Like, you know, my friends making a hunt, okay, you're dumb. And I'm sitting here like, living with my parents, like, you know, just being a schmuck. so I got a job washing cars for one of the dealerships that my dad worked at. from there, became a salesman at the car dealership after that, you know, did that for a while. I hate car salesman. I'll never go back. I was like, all right, I like sales. I like the idea of sales, but I don't one working cars anymore. so I applied to a place on. Indeed. you know, precious metal sales. I was like, all right, cool. Was an office job. Monday through Friday, I was like, awesome. Yeah, I can go party on the weekends, you know what I mean? I, I did really good. I excelled my first year. I mean, I made six figures in the industry. I realized that there was something there, first place I was, you know, they kind of held me back. They don't want you to learn more to progress into a senior position. So I was like, all right, I want you to become a competitor. Exactly. So, I was like, that's fine. I'd made a ton of money there. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to go, you know, venture off. I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks. I went to Europe for like three weeks, you know, got my mind straight. I quit that place, and, I went to a different firm, and that's when I, you know, they gave me the opportunity to actually become a closer, actually become a senior position. and that's when I really, you know, learned the, the ins and out of the industry. that place, I mean, if it was ran correctly and ran properly, I probably would have still been working there, unfortunately, you know, sometimes the good times don't last as long as you want them to. but it gave me, you know, the opportunity, and it pushed me to just be like, you know what? You know, I know, I know how to do it. You know, there is nothing holding me back. And essentially, I'm a broker. so I don't really need that much startup cost. just go out and do it. You know what I mean? So I did it. And so you talked about before, when you were doing the parallel parallel company, you learned the fundamentals of business that you've brought into this business. Like what are those fundamentals? Yeah. First thing is, you know, finding someone good that you want to work with. Now I'm a firm believer in building a team. I think having a team is super valuable. it's really, really rare that you'll find someone crushing it 100% by themself. You know what I mean? You need a good team. We need multiple brands. So God bless the soul. My first partner, Dean, you know, taught me. I mean, he he's an already this this was it his first business? He has a sneaker store. He has a bunch of other businesses. So he helped me a lot, actually, just learning the basics of, you know, how to do all the back end licensing legal stuff, with everything. and then from there on, it kind of just propelled me, you know, I just became a Reddit nerd, you know, going through Reddit, learning everything I can learn about business. you know, what's what is QuickBooks? You know, building CRMs, learning how to use Shopify. so now it's like, just just from that little apparel brand. It kind of like catapulted me into wanting to learn about a million different things. I mean, now, if you know someone, ask me, hey, Alan, can you set up a dialing system for my telemarketing company with a landing page and X, Y, and Z? I'll be like, yeah, sure. I mean, you know, it'll be done. So how do you bring together a good team? That's like, one of the hardest things that I've dealt with is like finding good talent, inspiring people to jump on to, you know, jump on board with your vision. Yeah. It's it's not easy. It's hard. and, one thing that I'm still learning myself is how to become a leader and not a boss. because nobody wants to be bossed around and everybody wants to be led. you know what I mean? so changing your approach from being more bossy to more friendly, if someone's messing up, you know, just yell at them and take your anger out on them. Right. There is a way to say it. There's a way to do it, and there's a way to make someone better instead of, you know, essentially just making them starting to hate you. you know what I mean? You're essentially, like, rehabbing their brain into thinking the way you want them to think. It's all. I mean, listen, sales doesn't just apply to you. Selling product sales is how you present a solution to someone's problem. You know what I mean? if someone's problem is they keep, you know, messing up on the phone, you have to sell them the solution and make them believe that your solution is going to fix their problem. So they start fixing their own problem, you know what I mean? And then that's what being a cult leader is about. You know what I mean? so, yeah. What's the biggest that you've taken away in your journey as an entrepreneur? Like, the biggest I would say is nobody is coming to save you. you know what I mean? Third, that brother is no one coming to save you. If you decide that you, you know, you decide the W-2 is not for you no more. Well, buddy, you better start hustle and bustle and because, buckle up, there is no paycheck coming the next week. If you're not working, you make your own paychecks. You know, when you're when you're an entrepreneur. I've gone, you know, two months without getting paid. when I first started the business, like, I quit my old job in October. Started working on this one. I mean, yeah, it was literally. It was October, November, January, February, you know, again, finally this morning. Essentially. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, you know what I mean? I was down to my last, 20 bucks walking to the store. I was like, all right, I can get some turkey, some bread, some cheese, a refresh, refresh my bank account. I'm like, oh, all right, nice. I'm getting us up. Well, how do you how do you get through those, like, moments of adversity when it's, you know, everything's working against you. You know, your your mind's starting to tell you to go back to the comfort makes you want to turn back to the comfortable 9 to 5. How do you get through those? Like, it's hard, man. it's not for it's not for the weak, the weak minded or, you know, somebody with. No. Well, I mean, a lot of the time, I mean, you're going to fail. There is no question about it. If you just go out the gates and you're successful, congratulations. You're. Yeah, you're you're the lucky sperm. So yeah, I mean, you're 1 in 1,000,000, my friend. you're going to fail and you just have to keep on pushing forward. I mean, I've had many people tell me, like, what the hell are you doing? I've had family members look at me like I'm the the fucking black sheep loser of the family. Like, what is he doing? Like, you know, he has no idea what he's doing. look at me. No. Yeah, look at me now. Exactly. and, you know, it's just like you just have to, like, you know, race horses, they have blinders on, right? So they can only see straight. Right? Straight metaphor. You know what I mean? You can't look left and right, because then you're going to start getting distracted. So you have to keep the blinders on and you have to just keep looking forward to that end goal. I mean, and that that's what I did. I mean, I screwed up, I moved out to Miami with, $100 left to my name. I was living at my, my buddy's apartment and the air mattress for a couple months. when we started the company, I was we still had it out and paid, my family. And you got to. They're like, dude, you're crazy. I had to borrow money from my dad. at one point. And then, all of a sudden, you know, a couple weeks later, I'm, you know, refreshing the bank account, and I'm sending screenshots to my dad. I'm like, look, look, look. Immediately when I first got money, I paid my dad back. I got an apartment. He had it in. Yeah. you know, the essentials to cover the essentials. And then after that, you know, really just honing in and mastering the craft as an entrepreneur, bettering myself every day. I mean, you'll see right there there are some sales books right there that I try to read, some pages a night and really just build on top of that. Now I have this foundation where I can just build, build, build. Now, what do you do? Like what's your routine to develop yourself as an entrepreneur and support that? productivity, you know, learn as much as you humanly possibly can. I'm not the world's biggest. Like, I'm, you know, I'm not reading. I'm not like, you know, Tai Lopez read a book a day, you know what I mean? but what I do like doing is, you know, I'll read maybe a couple of pages. I love watching entrepreneurial videos. I love read it. Read. It's a great asset for, you know, a lot of young entrepreneurs. are there any specific forums or threads that are just I honestly know because of what I do is I'll type in, you know, x, y, z how to do x, y, z. I read it, you know what I mean? I'll put that in Google. Yeah. And they'll just go down to the Google search results. Results. And then I'll, I'll enter the Reddit vortex for like a couple hours. You know what I mean? you can't have any ego, at the minute. You have an ego. I think you know at all about anything in business or life. if you've shot yourself in the foot, you've already. You fucked up right there. Because at that point in time, you just limit yourself from learning something. Yeah. I mean, the minute you think you know it all. So I, I think taking ego out of the equation, and realizing that nobody's the best at anything, is just gonna it's going to help you propel up. You know what I mean? So where do you focus, like, the majority of your time within the business? What do you think gets you the best, biggest return? It's tough. I mean, we're not huge yet where I can focus completely on just the growing aspect of the business. I'm kind of, I'm like, like an octopus, you know, may have like, eight heads and doing eight different things. ideally, in Alan's perfect world, I have a sales team crushing the sales. I'm focused on growing the business, and that's either hiring people, marketing movies, content free. So you're more operational? Yeah. I mean, well, I'm up, I'm operational. I'm also. You know, probably one of the highest closing ratios, if not the highest closing ratio in the company. So I'm closing all the deals, doing operations, back end accounting. I'm doing as of now. but we're talking to an accounting firm so that they'll be taking care of soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. so I'm doing everything. All of my hands everywhere. Ideally, I'd like to focus on the growth growing aspect of the company. How do I, you know, get us to the next level? but that will come soon. and I have no problem doing what I do right now. It's fun to me. I mean, it's like my baby. It's like my little project. Yeah. If you if you had $1 million right now, guilt free capital, what would you do with it? Guilt free capital, $1 million. Oh, man. scatological. I would get an office, get a, you know, get a sales team in office. I'm a firm believer in the office. Yeah, I love the office. Office is where everyone shoots to shit. But you get your work done, and you can train people the way you want to train them. Because if they're not in office with you, they'll start to veer off into the unknown and you don't know what they're doing. so in office, you know, you can build a killer sales team. so I would do that, pump marketing dollars not to buy Lambo. No, I'm just kidding. no. You know, put pump marketing dollars. and that's pretty much it. I mean, our industry that we're in, it's sales is every sales, sales, marketing, marketing, sales, you know what I mean? and that's pretty much it just grow from there. yeah. Not reinventing the wheel. A lot of, a lot of similar companies doing what we're doing. and I guess. Nope, nobody's doing it. I guess nobody in my age is really taking the, you know, the leap to do it. So I was like, screw it. Why not? How do you stand out in a competitive market? Are pricing, super transparent? we're probably, if not the cheapest, one of the cheapest. a lot of places do, you know, they, charge, like, hidden markups and fees and whatever the heck. Maybe, you know, their backend or, another thing that we don't do, which a lot of companies do is with retirement accounts, they have a holding period, 3 to 5 years. But the other company, we were like, screw that. you know, we we don't need that at all completely. another thing that we're doing is we're building, an e-commerce, an e-commerce section to the to the, to the, to the company. It's not going to be called Cedar Grove Group. It'll be called something differently. but it'll, Cedar goal will be the parent company. so essentially it's just going to become an e-commerce website where you can decide, hey, I want to invest 100 bucks a month in gold or silver, when you can either a get that shipped to your doorstep as soon as you hit, you know, a certain threshold or beat. We'll we'll start with one of our saves for you. and then that's that's how it will operate. and eventually something that we're going to work on, too, is having some sort of a precious metals, spell card so you can have your money tied to the value of, you know, to silver, and then you can share the act with it. So it's a protection against inflation, while still having the spending power, you're not going to have to chip off a piece of, breaking it to someone, you know what I mean? What are you chasing after? How do you define success? What is your definition of success? Yeah. You know, just hanging out and not doing anything. It gets pretty boring after a while. So for me to say, I want to just be retired, on a beach somewhere and a pizza and drinking margaritas all day. a lot of people will say that. That's like what they want to do, but it doesn't sound like it's fun. It sounds. It sounds cool. But how? It's repetitive. How how much you can do that. So, for me, it's I don't want to just stop at precious metals. I want to really, you know, get this up and running, build it, make it something successful. Boom. What's the next project? You know, it's like. It's honestly like it's a game. Almost. Right? Life. Life is like kind of a game. Like how. How can you be? How can you beat life? You know what I mean? Like, you do one thing, you crush it. Successful. Boom. Either exit or keep the cash flow. All right. What's not? No. What's my passion project? How can I make my passion project turn into something for me? so. So, yeah, it's it's just like Legos. Almost. You just finish building something. All right. Great. Also, the next thing. You know what I mean? So you love the process. Oh, I love it, I love it. I'm not externally motivated. More like intrinsically motivated. Sounds like. Yeah, totally. I mean, obviously everybody wants, the web, everybody wants the Ferrari. I mean, honestly, I don't need much. I don't require much to live. I'm a pretty simple person. As long as I can eat and sleep somewhere and get around and go to the beach, I'm happy not, you know, not materialistic really at all. Although I do want a Porsche with the Porsche 311 that's in the books. It's going to happen soon. I mean, yeah, that's pretty much it. I mean, that's how I define success. Just like being able to accomplish something and successfully do it, execute it, and what's one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you embarked on this journey? That's a good question. What's one thing and you know, probably understanding like taxes a little bit better. Me too. I got I went through the ringer. accountants. Yeah. yeah, that's that's probably because in the beginning, I mean, the last couple of years, when you have W-2 income in 1099, income makes it easy. No, man. Well, yeah, it's easy if it's your straight W-2. Yeah, but then you throw in that 1099 in there and you're like, oh, you know. Oh crap. Yeah. No I oh you know 20 k that I didn't know about. Yeah yeah yeah I didn't know. Yeah. Especially if you're not earning your 1099 through LLC or something. You know, you're just like you're claiming it yourself. then you can get into a whole roll into problems. Oops. Good advice. I've been there for sure. I learned the hard way. what are where can people, like, find you if they. They, are interested in buying gold? Like, is there anything you want to plug and don't limit it to just the gold company? Throw in whatever you want. Yeah. Cedar gold Broadcom we have forums on there. Just sign up hit us up give us a call. free consultation. and yeah you can email us here at gold group.com. feel free to reach out whenever you want. We're here for you. What about your Instagram? You want to throw that? Yeah. Instagram at our little wallet? Twitter. Same thing. although I should probably let Twitter, still got those high school Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The underground. Yeah. yeah, it's a good amount of. Well, if I be there, hit me up. yeah. What are some last comments that you got for entrepreneurs? If it gets hard and it gets tough and you're getting hungry, just keep pushing. I mean, sometimes you're gonna have to drive Uber Eats, for, you know, a month or two to just make some way to put it on the side. But if you if you stay focused and you, you know, stay on the path and you know, you keep the blinders on, you know, you'll end up making it fantastic. All right. Well, that concludes episode ten of Shaken Hands. I'm your host, Jack Bauer, and you can find me on Instagram at Blue Collar Kid that is Blue Collar KEHD. If you have any recommendations for guests or questions you want to ask, please don't hesitate to reach out. But anyway, stay tuned for some more interesting conversations with us.