HUSTLE INSPIRES HUSTLE PODCAST WITH ALEX QUIN

FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS MENTORS PART 2

Welcome back to the hustle inspires hustle podcast series with lee sustiel, co-founder of mph club. This is part two if you haven’t heard the first episode make sure to start there and then come back to this one.

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Alex: So okay so we’re talking about mph club and a lot of people might say all right well he has a bunch of cars like he has he’s set like obviously people are going to pay attention to him or come see him or whatever but it wasn’t always mph club. This is not your first business. Why don’t you talk to me about a little bit of your journey like being a young guy starting your business, having a vision and then ultimately ending up with this company that everyone knows.

Lee: Yeah so and it started with this kid named Alan, okay Alan I was in third grade and he taps my shoulder and we’re in the classroom and he tells me to show that I turn around like, what’s up man? He goes yo you want to buy this lollipop. I’m like, no i’m good. He goes “come on man buy a lollipop man”, all right, how much is it? “It’s 50 cents” I’m like why? It’s 25 cents in the store. He looks and he goes “I got to make a profit bro!” And it just sparked the light bulb in my head.

Alex: Allen, yeah thank you Allan.

Lee: I sparked a light bulb and I said ah that’s how you do it, okay. Next day I came to school with like three dollars and I went to the store across the street picked up as much candy as I can with two dollars. Put in my book bag by first period I ended up selling everything and doubled my money. My three dollars turned to six dollars and as a kid in third or fourth grade at the time that I was that was a lot of money.

Lee: Oh yeah, so imagine me doing that almost every day, that worked out a while. I was able to save enough money to buy a Dj set.

Alex: Okay.

Lee: And that’s where that nickname DJ lee came from.

Alex: Okay.

Lee: But I used to DJ and this went into middle school a little bit of high school. I used to DJ and I made some money djing. My first DJ set was like about $800. I saved up 800 dollars that took me a while, almost a year to save up 800. I finally did that and uh the 800 I did one gig and I got literally 400 bucks to DJ. So I was blown away. I’m like all right, that’s pretty cool, so I did my cousin’s mom’s birthday party, and my sisters, I did random stuff. I did weddings, bar mitzvahs, whatever I came across and I started making a little money here and there. I ended up buying a car, technically that was my first big transaction, and from there I worked for a moving company over the summer. I was still DJing on the weekends but I worked for a moving company. My father had a moving company at the time so I worked for his company and I learned the industry. literally over the summer I learned the whole industry and I didn’t just go there really early every single day like at six o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night. I had nothing going on that was my life. I just wanted to learn the industry and my dad’s employees told me to slow down. I’m making them look bad. Yeah i didn’t understand at the time I actually did slow down because that’s what they were telling me. They were older, I was younger, I thought that’s what I needed to do. But I realized okay maybe I am doing a better job that’s why they’re telling me. Eventually I learned the whole industry literally after three months of learning the industry coincidentally the next year my dad retired. So after his retirement I didn’t know nothing else to do. I only knew moving yeah so that was when I was in 10th grade at the time when this happened. 10th grade summer school, 10th grade finished.

I went into summer and I decided to open up my own company. So I started a moving company over the weekend. Bought a domain, the company started a corporation, and luckily I knew these types of things because of my father who pointed me in the right direction. Now when I opened the movie company, school started the next month and I kind of didn’t want to go back to school. Luckily my parents were very strict and they did not let me drop out. I was going to drop out of high school honestly but they wouldn’t let that happen. Once I learned the whole industry and opened the company I was still working but going to school at the same time. I was almost skipping every single day to be honest. So I was barely going to school but I made my attendance, I barely graduated but I graduated. I got my diploma. But at the end I was working and my work ethics were there.

I was waking up really early, I was not going on partying my friends were going out partying. I did not care about flashy clothes or anything in nature to to show off with, I was hustling. I was trying to build a name trying to build an establishment. I wanted to have an income so I could move out, so I could have my own apartment, so I can own my own house. And my work ethics were just unparalleled. I didn’t see my friends acting as well, my friends were calling me yeah we’re going out we’re partying we’re drinking, it was tempting but I had to wake up at six o’clock in the morning I had responsibilities, I had a couple of employees, I had to put I have to make sure they’re getting paid every week, I have to make sure they’re putting food on their table with their family. So I had responsibilities and I really enjoyed it because I bonded with every single employer that I had at the time and I’m talking about this is 10th grade now going to 11th grade. In 11th grade I had a um 3000 square foot warehouse, two trucks and about 15 employees. I was barely going to school. I was working at the moving company and that was what I wanted to do. I was going to go to the office at 6 o’clock in the morning, open up the office, let the employees go to work and then go to school to get my attendance. Leave the second period and go to my office to continue working. That’s what I really wanted to do and I had the movie company for about five to six years or so, I ended up selling the company.

I took a little break because it did put a lot of pressure on my health and my time and after I sold the company I opened up a moving directory. I ran that for a couple years because again I only knew about moving so I opened it directly online where I can work in my underwear from home. So I built a directory I started learning how to optimize a website how to build websites I became very passionate about it and became like a little geek I wanted to build a website and start optimizing it and start generating leads for the moving industry because that’s all I knew at the time and it worked very well I did it for a couple years and I ended up selling that moving directory as well after I sold that moving directory I took a little bit of a break. With that break my dad needed help with his website for his business. so he came out of retirement, he teamed up with his own brother to open up a wood flooring company.

Alex: I remember that, that’s right.

Lee: Yes, so the wood flooring company was pretty big, it was pretty fun because um we met a lot of cool people. You know like that’s what I like to do. I like to meet people I like to network. So um he turned to me and said hey I need you to build me a website I’m like alright no problem give me 30 days. So I built him a website a couple months later. He calls me complaining the phone is ringing off the hook what the hell did you do? I’m ranked number one everywhere, I’m getting leads every single day, what the hell did you do, this is amazing. That’s his complaint, so I’m like well good, let me see how else I can help you. So I end up getting out of my retirement because, I was working from home in my underwear so I came out of retirement, I went to my dad’s office and we dissected the whole business and put a whole game plan together to present to him to open up five locations and to expand the fleet and build the business. Because he was just it was him and his brother a small one location and they were just selling the actual flooring. I wanted to actually have installation, I wanted to install, I wanted to have um you know availability to install anywhere in the tri-county area. I wanted to grow that business and I did that for a couple years luckily we did that and we ended up selling business and my dad actually did finally retire okay I said you’re done so in the end of me finishing up with the wolf floating company with my father that’s where I um wanted to get into my real passion and that’s the exotic cars. I met Brett David at an early age, Brett David is the owner of Prestige Imports and Lamborghini Miami. He is killing it to be the best lamborghini dealership in america if not the world. He has a phenomenal used dealership Prestige Imports where I definitely highly recommend if you have a passion for exotic cars you gotta go check it out. There’s a couple paganis, a couple of bugattis, and a couple koenigseggs, any car you could think of on a regular Tuesday just sitting there. So his inventory is insane. I met him at a really young age, my younger sister at the time went to school with Brett and that’s how I met him. There was a show what, is it called when you do a show, like my sister was singing and he did breakdancing.

Alex: Like b-boy, like you got served?

Lee: They’re right in front of the whole school where they’re presenting their talents.

Alex: Okay, talent show.

Lee: Yeah a talent show. That was exactly it. The talent show. My sister was singing all cute, no problem. Brett did a little break dancing but the funny part about Brett at the time, he had a cast from his wrist up to his shoulder. He had a broken arm, he was like 11 years old at the time, breakdancing with a broken arm and that’s how I met him because I was big into breakdancing at the time. It’s pretty cool we just clicked right there on the spot but the coolest part was his dad picked up in a purple diablo and I thought that was a spaceship. I was blown away like what the hell is that? That’s where I had a passion for cars before but that was my first time actually seeing a diablo with my own eyes. I was blown away and his dad picked him up and left.

A week later I ran into him again and then we exchanged contact and we became good friends after that and next thing you know I’m just hanging out with Brett and all these amazing crazy cars that his dad drives. Brett was never allowed to touch the cars he was never allowed to touch them um up until a certain age obviously. But uh that’s where I really got my passion from and over time I never let go of that passion. I wanted to somehow get into that industry. I wanted to not be in competition with Brett but somehow compliment brett. Yeah you know he sells cars so I didn’t know how I could somehow get involved with that without being in competition because that’s my boy. I’m not going to be in competition, that’s not how it is so. I went back to my genes where I’m a little geek inside and I did some research on my laptop and for months I’ve been researching how to get into this and I finally found that there is a demand for exotic car rentals.

Lee: I didn’t even think it was a thing at the time like that’s insane how can you rent a half a million dollar car that doesn’t sound normal it’s not not normal nobody does that. There wasn’t too many companies at the time doing it and um I said oh it I’m going to build a directory and let’s see what happens after a couple of months of building directly with a fake facade pictures and videos just random and people started coming in with leads and phone calls and I’m like alright this is actually happening. People are actually really interested in this so I at the time I got together with my partner at the time I pitched in the idea of hey what is this what do you think we should do with this and we came up with the idea of opening up a car rental company which is only dedicated to high and exotic cars and um between me and him brainstorm back to fourth we came up with the name mph club we were bouncing some other real names we’re thinking of garage toys and some other stupid names thank god we only picked mph club and we grew some balls and went to brent and bought our first lamborghini.

Alex: Okay is that the one we painted on that’s the one

Lee: That was the Giardo the first but we started the right before that with a Lexus gs f-type and he added a C Class 63 yeah those are cool cars but yeah but we needed an exotic so we went to Brett finally bought our first Lamborghini. We rented a couple times smooth transactions and we did well and uh up to this day believe it or not I still service the first client Joshua I’ll never forget him nice recently a couple months ago he just remembered from us that’s amazing so 10 years that right there taught me something big every time I meet somebody make a connection save their number communicate with them wish them happy birthday I wish I had new years you connect them because at the end day I will do business with somebody I’m familiar with more than I would do some business that I’m not familiar with yeah so with joshua he actually rents from us every once in a while two or three times a year and he was our first client rented out I rented the Giardo a couple times and eventually one client took the car for a month and that was the biggest transaction for us.

That was huge and with that money that we got for that 30-day rental we actually took it and doubled down and said let’s go buy another car. So we bought Ferrari we bought a 458 Italia and that was our technically fourth car at the time and next thing you know man every other month or so we were getting another car and another car and a car another car 10 years later we got over 40 cars in our fleet and um over time we did evolve to another concept of the business and I’ll get to that in a minute but the the point of this story is like you mentioned earlier you met a couple of amazing people the people that put you in front of right so same thing with me I always land in front of people or someone they get brought into my attention and I like to make a connection make a relationship because you never know whatever they can bring to my table in the future or even now yeah so that’s a really good lesson that I learned

Alex: Bro first of all that’s great that you share that with me because I didn’t know a lot of those things about you and I spent a lot of time with you. Second of all my love for cars has a connection with Brett I grew up in bay harbor uh my mom and we always went to costco across the street yeah every time my mom drove to Costco I would be glued to the window looking at Prestige Imports like glued and looking at it and then what I would do is when I would get to Costco or Walgreens or Target when we would go I would buy Dupont Registry and I would just like circle the cars or cut out the cars that I loved. And then that was just the thing of me being a kid I did the same thing. I sold candy in school, I did all these things I didn’t have a crazy ass business in high school, you were crazy you’re an alien from another planet. But to get to the point, my love for cars started with Prestige Imports and it’s funny because it’s with you, you knew Brett’s dad.

Fast forward a few years later you and me are doing an event and Brett and Dupont Registry are supporting the event which is the event that we did in the parking garage right now at around that time about a year before we started working together I was working at pizza hut right and I was the manager at the Pizza Hut in Hollywood and I was doing my thing. I was there for a little bit and I had this guy Tony. Tony was about 70 years old when the driver retired, got bored at home and said I’m going to deliver pizzas. He didn’t need the money but I’m going to deliver pizzas. So whatever, one time I’m with Tony and he’s like oh what do you do and, I’m like oh I’m starting this company you know called Vintage Works and we’re going to do all these car events and this car meets and I’m really trying to get this guy Brett David to support my event and blah blah blah and I didn’t know brett back then you know we’re cool now and I met Brett through you and we’ve known each other for a minute but I didn’t know him and I was trying to find a way to get his attention. And he’s “like wait a second did you just say brett david?” and I was like yeah. “I knew his grandfather”. I’m in Pizza Hut and this is the driver that’s delivering pizzas and I’m trying, like you got me oh this guy’s full of because he was always saying things you know what I’m saying and I’m like I really listened to him but I was like what are the real odds that he worked with brett’s dad? The next day he shows up to work and he shows me a business card and he’s like look Brett’s grandfather designed this.

Lee: Grandfather, or father?

Alex: Was it grandfather, or father?

Lee: So Brett’s dad is Irv.

Alex: I don’t think it was Irv, bro. I think it was his grandpa, bro. This guy knew his grandpa. It wasn’t Irv. So he gives it he’s like me and Brett’s that designed this business card and he’s like I still have a box of them. No way and he’s showing me this and I’m like get out. I’m like can I have it he’s like yeah you could have it so what do I get in my hoopty no air conditioning in my paint peeling off and I drive my ugly ass car to prestige imports and I literally walk right in and I’m like, yo is Brett here? And Brett’s always been like the coolest guy, I’ve literally seen Brett talk to homeless people in there. He’s super nice to everyone. So I’m like, bro, listen I know this sounds crazy but this guy told me that he knew your grandpa and they designed this logo together in this business card or whatever he’s like oh for real I’m like dude I brought it so I give it to Brett and I was like he was like blown away and I was blown away because I’m trying to get connected with him and I have a piece of his of his history.

From a guy in Pizza Hut, that’s one of my employees and I work at Pizza Hut he’s like whatever from that day we connected and then a year and a half later two years later I find out that you and him are friends so then we start working together and he sees me so all of these things like it’s crazy because you never really know where you’re going to end up and a lot of people get really stressed out about things not panning out for them exactly how they’re going to be, but bro, you you did a moving company, you did a flooring company, and then like you hit the jackpot with this. You may have made money on the other ones but this is the jackpot because this is what you’re really passionate about, and you were able to make a business out of it but not only that you were able to do it without stepping on your boy’s toes, right? And I think that’s beautiful and that’s the purpose that I wanted to do this podcast because this podcast is all about nurturing your relationships. Who are you surrounding yourself with, how are you bringing them value, how are they bringing you value, are you expecting things immediately, are you really helping people out.

When I first got here like you said I was all over the place but you never limited me, right? Any crazy idea I had let’s do it, maybe you would refine it and polish it a little bit and be like let’s do it! And I think that you need to go look for people like that because it doesn’t need to be lonely and I talk about it a lot here how entrepreneurship can be lonely because sometimes like there’s things you can’t tell other people or or staff or or just things that you’re waiting on like big secrets of the company or certain accomplishments or certain setbacks and when you have a like a group of people who support you whether you’re business partners or not or people you could just rely on for advice I think that’s something that you need to drop your ego sometimes and stop being so prideful and allow people to help you correct because you helped me a lot but then again I helped you and I was just a little. Look at all the amazing things that that you’ve been able to do and look at all the amazing things I’ve been able to do, so guys if you’re listening to this right now and you could take one big takeaway is wake up tomorrow and go do right by people go find something that you love and something that you’re passionate about and just get your feet wet because I wasn’t always meant to be a Pizza Hut manager. Or maybe marketing director somewhere, but if I wouldn’t have been marketing director at mph club I wouldn’t have been maybe given the opportunity to be marketing director at hgreg.com. I was the national marketing director. if I wasn’t able to be national marketing director there I wouldn’t have been able to be the chief marketing officer of metro group, right? If I wouldn’t have been able to be the chief marketing officer of metro group I wouldn’t be a global consultant for doc.com, and you’ve met the guys from doc.com, I brought them here. So it’s all a chain of events and a chain reaction that you may not realize it because you’re so in your head but there’s something truly going on that as long as you follow a path that makes you happy and a path that you’re doing something that you love and you’re doing right by people eventually things are going to line up for you because there’s no such thing as luck.

Luck is only when hard work meets opportunity and if you’re putting in a lot of hard work it only takes one person to walk through that door to change your life. And that’s what it really was when you showed up to my car to film that video. That’s when really things took off and all of these things were able to happen. So Lee, bro, I wanna thank you for jumping on the podcast, people are gonna have a lot to listen. This is probably gonna be a two-parter the last two partners are Grant Cardone, Chris Foss and a few other people that we have on the podcast which were pretty cool but I felt like this this episode deserved the two um deserve the two-parter because we’ve talked about a lot of cool things and i don’t see a lot of people being grateful to people that have helped them out in the past. Everybody always wants to you know pretend that they’re self-made or nobody ever helped me, and I had to do this on my own, and yes, maybe I am self-made and you know I’ve done a lot of things on my own but just like you Lee and Stac of course, We didn’t mention Stac. You started mph club with Stac and Stac is also one of my mentors. So much love to Stac, much love to you and the rest of the team for helping me be who I am today bro. You guys grabbed me at 18 years old and had no idea what I was doing. I’m about to turn 27 years old and I’ve been able to do a lot of amazing things man. That’s the age you were when I started working with you. You were 27 years old, and now I’m 27.

Lee: Wow bro.

Alex: You old bastard.

Lee: I’m talking to you. I’m visualizing the old office that we had over there at Orion jet center. It was a sick office. A cool experience we had.

Alex: You made me do some crazy bro.

Lee: We did some crazy, I still do some crazy today, I just told you the story about a tiger sitting on my nuts.

Alex: Yeah you were caking people with steve aoki and…

Lee: Yes, we’ve done that we’ve done, uh bro, I’ve seen it all man. The crazy story I’ve done with Vitaly…

Alex: Well Vitaly was up with Doc Antle, right?

Lee: Yes that’s how he got connected actually. Yes, so when I saw him do that I told him, bro you got to get connected with this guy, it was crazy and between him trying to connect us I think I dropped the ball somewhere then Robert picked it back up, because robert…

Alex: Good job Robert!

Lee: Yeah, Shout out to Robert, So he actually made the connection with the photographer there and when he brought it to my attention I was blown away like, hell yeah, we’re gonna go visit them for sure. I had nothing, I didn’t know that they were doing anything with Netflix, so we did this whole thing, yeah the whole thing happened and then we started dropping a couple cool pictures and videos and then a week later Netflix dropped the series. Oh my god every minute I was like, what!? That was insane, that was pretty cool.

Alex: So Lee, where can we find you on social media people find you I don’t obviously mph club look it up anywhere you’ll find it but personal?

Lee: Yeah so everybody calls me Lee it’s much easier to pronounce my first name is Liram my last name is Sustiel, but everybody calls me Lee. My socials are Liram Sustiel.

Alex: Okay cool, guys make sure to check that out, if you didn’t catch that check the show notes for a history of mph club. You’ll see a bunch of videos of me like at 19 and 20 years old doing crazy with Lee. remember relationships are extremely important, be grateful to the people who have been good to you, and surround yourself with people who uplift you because hustle inspires. See you guys on the next episode

HUSTLE INSPIRES HUSTLE PODCAST WITH ALEX QUIN

FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS MENTORS PART 2

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