HUSTLE INSPIRES HUSTLE PODCAST WITH ALEX QUIN

FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS MENTORS PART 1

This episode is part one of a two-part series with the co-founder of mph club Lee Sustiel.

Alex talks to Liram Sustiel, Co-Founder of mph club. Liram shares how he went from renting three cars to have one of the most popular exotic and luxury car rentals in the country.

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Alex: What’s going on everyone this is Alex Quinn and you’re listening to the hustle inspires hustle podcast. In today’s episode we have Lee from mph club. What’s going on Lee?

Lee: Good man, how are you?

Alex: Lee, I, bro I’ve been wanting to have you on the podcast for a hot minute because you were you’re one of the key factors to the development of my marketing career, I think we met when I was 18 and I officially started working for you when I was 19 years old. I was a little shit and I was young and I knew what I was doing. I guess like I knew I wanted to do business but I never really had a direction and when i first started working here at mph I really had a lot of opportunities. So I really wanted to bring you on here bro, but, before we do… Why don’t you break down for everyone what mph club is and what you guys are doing right now.

Lee: Of course, first of all, appreciate you even coming here and being on the broadcast as well. Listen it’s an honor to be involved. A little bit about mph club, so, we started the company about almost 10 years ago now approaching our 10th year. We are a luxury exotic car rental company at the end of the day. Our inventory sustains only high and exotic cars and you can rent them on a daily rental weekly rental monthly rental or whatever the case may be. That being said we’re located in South Florida. We service all the South Florida area. You helped us to get to this point so we’ll touch on that a little more in sure…

Alex: Yeah man, so guys just some context, we’re sitting at the Opa-Locka executive airport in Miami where all the private planes land, where all the celebrities land and you guys had a big vision for the business 10 years ago when we first met. I remember how we met, it was funny because at the time i was doing car shows, I was doing car events and…

Lee: What was the vintage video…Yes I remember, That event that we did was insane we got shut down…

Okay so we started, we had a vision when we first started and we didn’t really know where to go, what to do. So we wanted to get our name out there and you came up with the idea of putting a car event.

I’m like alright, I guess that makes sense you know a lot of people show up and we could talk about it. We were with a goal of I think 100 people, maybe like you know 50 cars like… yeah we can make that happen cool. We went around a couple of different locations to look for a location where you brought up the attention of the marlin stadium when it was brand new. It just opened up recently, right? And you made it happen to get that location. We made the event happen, we started promoting. I think it was like literally two posts on Instagram and we had roughly about what three-four hundred cars that show up.

Alex: It was really crazy, yeah, so we were not you guys just so you could get a visual aspect we’re in a parking garage and we pretty much filled up like the whole top half of the parking garage with exotics, with you know some people had classics, and people had tuners, dupont registry was out there, Lamborghini Miami, uh there were vendors, and it was just a family environment it was a really good way for us to get the name out there. And I think that was one of the first times where i really was able to put something massive together with connections that I would have never been able to have before. Because at the time the company was really young but you guys knew a lot of people and you guys were already business owners, yeah you were you had already been running businesses and you already know what you were doing with mph club so it was very easy for me to come in and analyze who you had around you. What you had and able to create something around it and I’ve always been very grateful and I talk about you all the time with so many people. I travel the world speaking on different stages and I always talk about mph club because you guys gave me an opportunity. You guys made me marketing director at 19 years old. Nobody would have ever allowed me to do that but more than that it was a matter of trust because you guys have tens of millions of dollars in cars like how do you trust somebody to…

You get what I’m saying, but it was just we knew from the beginning that we all had a vision to really take the company somewhere and we were just on the same frequency so I want this to be the moment for you to know that I’m extremely grateful for everything you’ve done for me and I wouldn’t be able to be doing a lot of the things right now if it wasn’t for me being at mph club. All the time that I was here you’re making.

Lee: I appreciate that. Listen I saw the hunger in you, I saw the drive-in you, and you need to be pointing the right direction because you were going all over the place so I helped you make that happen. I love that man. I love you, you’re an amazing guy, yeah, great job, appreciate you.

Alex: I really appreciate that, I was talking to my parents about you today because they were like, man you guys did so many cool things together, like we did events we did photoshoots, we lined up cars, and from dead hangers…

Lee: We got fined left and right because of the event, we had the police department shut us down, we were limited to 50 cars we ended up with 350 cars, um yeah the fire department shut us down and that was fun. It was a cool experience. I’m not gonna lie.

Alex: So let me put you guys into a perspective. So the first time I was doing an event it was called it was the vintage works. It was my first company, I had a business partner at the time we really were really trying to get a lot of work done so we decided to do a promotional video and we reached out to a ton of car companies locally and you guys were one of them at that time. you guys I believe you had two cars?

Lee: Yeah we said we started with three cars.

Alex: You started with three cars right? So you came to the event and we shot the promotional video and then i remember at the event you told me, you were like, hey why don’t you swing by the office this week or one of these days and we’ll chat. I remember you guys were still in the jet in the first jet hanger. Orion Jet Center, that was a massive office. Yeah I remember walking in. I thought you guys were just moving in. I think there were like three or four deaths and the couches in the back.

Lee: 2800 square feet with literally two desks

Alex: That’s it, overlooking a bunch of airplanes like private jets and then we hit it off. You’re like hey man, like we’re trying to do this and trying to do that and that’s where I really started to learn from you and everybody in the company and everything that was going on. I want to talk to you about something very specific that stayed with me because after a while of working here I had many opportunities. I was doing marketing, I was doing anything that we could do to grow the business and one of those things was driving. You know doing driving and doing proms or driving to.

Lee: God yeah, chauffeur gigs.

Alex: Yes, driving certain people around and that was a great opportunity for me because a lot of these people are people that have been able to stay in my business network to this day. And I would have never been able to do that if you didn’t give me that opportunity and that’s something I want people to learn from because my listeners on this podcast a lot of times are people who are trying to start a business and are trying to get into bigger networks but really don’t know how to do it. And at the time I was the marketing director here but there were side gigs for me to make extra money and I did it. But if I would have never accepted that I would have never met a lot of people that I was able to meet. I wouldn’t have an advertising agency right now because the reason I started an advertising agency and why this podcast exists is because the advertising agency got popular. And people wanted to hear about it and that was inspiration from Jordan Zimmerman. And because of you I met Jordan Zimmerman and I was blown away by everything that he was doing. I mean I was driving him to close massive deals into his building and to his private jet and all these things and it really lit a fire under my ass. I’m like, I like marketing, I’ve been doing this, I’ve been doing all these things I want to make a name for myself in marketing. And just like Jordan there were many other people that I’ve been able to do amazing things with right now like we. We sat down like Michelle and I sat down like two weeks ago and we went back and we tied you and mph club to all the amazing things that have happened to me in the last 10 years.

Lee: That’s awesome.

Alex: And if it wasn’t for me working here I wouldn’t be a public speaker globally because I met Gil from Luxury World Traveler through you. You introduced them to me and I met Anish with you. I met a bunch of great people with you, Billionaires Club, and I’ve been able to make great money with a lot of those guys, and had you never given me that opportunity I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Right, so, I’ve always told you it speaks a lot to people to trust people who maybe are younger than them and are not ready because when I got here I maybe wasn’t ready. I maybe didn’t have any idea what I was doing but you saw something in me. And maybe I didn’t have the skill but you hired culture and trained skills which is very important for people who are just starting a business. For people that already have a business, it’s very important to surround yourself with great people and you’ve always been about the collaboration you’ve always been about being creative with the company. How many followers does mph club have now on Instagram?

Lee: I think we reached like 300 and something thousand followers.

Alex: Right, verified too. Did you get verified?

Lee: Yeah we actually recently got verified that was pretty cool.

Alex: Youtube has been killing it you guys.

Lee: Yeah. Now we’ve been focusing a lot on YouTube lately

Alex: Yeah you guys have been interviewing celebrities, right?

Lee: Yeah it’s a new show that we started, Starlight Spotlight, we got Robert actually interviewing a lot of cool celebrities that land here and we service them and we ask them. You know sometimes they don’t want to be in front of the camera sometimes they actually are cool with it, like yeah listen we’re going to drive you anyways, is it cool if we just ask a couple of cool questions? And they’re like yeah, just let me know what the questions are and we make it happen.

Alex: Yeah you guys have some pretty crazy people like if you’re not watching right now you’ll see I’m sitting next to a Ferrari hood okay there’s a hood on the wall of a blue Ferrari. What Ferrari is that?

Lee: This is from a 458 spider now let me do a little background before you go into the story, if we had this hood from the first day we opened up i would have filled up probably three or four hoods of signatures from all the celebrities across the world but unfortunately we only took this hood in about a year ago so there’s uh maybe enough room for like five more signatures and it’s completely filled.

Alex: Yeah.

Lee: Just to name a few you could go see if you could read some of them.

Alex: Oh I’m seeing here for sure is that Romero Britto, Steve Aoki, um Ozuna is he on there, yep annual, yep uh Marshmallow?

Lee: Marshmallow, Dan Bilzerian, Floyd Mayweather,

Alex: Floyd Mayweather, TMT, right there yeah

Lee: 50-0, there’s a lot more but like I said if I had a couple of hoods earlier I couldn’t afford them in the beginning when we first started the company but eventually like a year ago we decided to get one because honestly like dude i’m not keeping nothing from all these amazing people I’m meeting and the hood just came out of a conversation I had at the time and it just popped up and we finally got one we start filling it up and now I’m actually in process of talking about a second hood

Alex: Nice!

Alex: Do you remember when we went to that airplane like scrap yard and we bought like a bunch of shit to make like furniture for the office

Lee: That was a waste of money, but yeah I remember that. There was a junkyard at the airport here in Opa Locka and it was pretty cool because we can make friends everywhere we go so we met the guy who runs the junkyard and we…our vision was like a wing but we realized how big of a…

Alex: for a conference table right?

Lee: Yeah, we want to make a conference table and we chopped off a small piece of a wing. It wasn’t even the whole wing and it was like I think 38 feet long. We had to get an 18 wheeler to move it. We chopped it off, we took the 18-wheeler we found a guy who can actually make this happen then long story short we realized we’re moving so it doesn’t it’s not going to fit in our new office. So we just let it go we let the guy have it never turned out but luckily I found aviation furniture on restoration hardware yes and they have some sick furniture so we have a bunch of furniture that looks like it but it’s not the actual wings that we wanted to build but that was a fun experience guys and a waste of money.

Alex: A lot of these things that I’m talking about I’m actually going to link them in the show notes like the videos and the pictures and the different things that we’re seeing so if you’re listening go to the show notes go to the go to the website go on our social media and you’ll be able to see everything that I’m talking about so you could get an idea. Another thing that’s sitting right in front of me is a big ass picture of lee driving a Bugatti which leads us to an interesting story because

Lee: Shout out to bankrupt he made that happen bankruptcy he also made that huge piece behind you as well yeah the globe the continents yeah.

Alex: Yeah he did a great job, and shout out to Mr debonair too, there’s a few grenades and a few rifles on the wall of art these are people that we’ve come across during our entrepreneurial journey who are creatives who have contributed different things to the mph club organization and it allows for the company to thrive and always be creative. So, we just talked about the hood we just talked about the Bugatti and the Bugatti is special to me because I remember, I think I mean it was probably like a year end of me being here i was probably like 20 years old and we were like you imagine like mph club having a Bugatti one day and we would be like oh imagine when we get an Aventador right

Lee: Oh my god.

Alex: Yeah and man like we’re here 10 years later and you guys have been moving Bugattis, Aventadors like everything like you got your hands on everything you made it happen and it’s crazy because there’s a lot of car rental businesses in the united states but not everybody has the reach that you guys have and the cars that you guys have and I think that’s why you guys attract a lot of the people that you attract to come shop here because it’s an affinity, right? You could get cars anywhere but you can’t get that experience that you get here just anywhere. You guys do amazing collabs. You guys did a collab with Jake Paul, was it?

Lee: Yeah.

Alex: That was pretty cool, like his whole team was wearing your logo your shirts.

Lee: Yeah we sponsored the whole fight that last fight he did and he’s got another fight right now actually very soon coming up

Alex: Yeah that was cool, I remember watching I was watching tiger king during the quarantine

Lee: Oh my god.

Alex: And doc, you guys did a video with Doc Antel yeah we went to his place and played with all the animals. What a phenomenal establishment he’s got over there, it’s insane. I’ve got a lifetime experience, to hang out with tigers and monkeys all over the place bro, okay so there’s one scene that I will never forget. I’m in the yellow Lamborghini Urus in the back of his house and he’s like I’m gonna bring the tiger out and want to take a picture with it. I’m like alright cool, and he’s telling me it’s a baby tiger. I’m like you know that’s not a big deal, I have a little dog so I can. I’m just comparing the two. He pulls up with this 250-pound tiger, I’m like, that’s not a baby tiger bro. And the tiger opens the passenger door, I’m in the driver’s seat, the tiger jumps inside like a normal procedure and he walks right on top of me. He sticks his head out the window while he puts his paw, again he weighs 250 pounds, puts his paw right on my nuts. I’m screaming but at the same time when I made it when I flinched he stared right at me, we made eye contact, and I almost pee’d my pants a little bit. And immediately the trainer just grabs him and sticks his head out the window and we took a cool picture, and I gotta show this picture. It’s just insane. But that way there was just a life experience just have you ever had a tiger stare at you when he’s literally an inch away when he’s breathing you feel the hot air from his mouth on your face, it was insane.

Alex: That’s a great experience, we had a crazy experience. What was it, with lemurs with a little pump, we went, we went with Juan.

Lee: I remember seeing that!

Alex: We went with Juan and Lil pump and his manager and a bunch of people to Jungle Island and they brought out a bunch of lemurs and baby monkeys and animals are just great, animals are really cool, I love that you have Blu here. If you guys aren’t following Blu by the way it’s @mr.bludog on Instagram it’s lee’s dog, he’s famous, he gets off private jets he hangs out with Mayweather and whoever you may think of he became a little mascot for the company.

Lee: He became a mascot.

Alex: But guys outside of the celebrities and outside of the cars and outside of all that stuff that you may see online and you might find cool the purpose of the podcast is to talk about work ethic, the purpose of the podcast is to talk about great relationships and being able to build long-term relationships a lot of the time right now people want instant gratification and we’ve talked about that on the podcast before. I’ve known Lee for a greater part of probably 10 years and we’ve always found a way to help each other out. You’ve connected me to so many people I already lost track. I’ve done the same in exchange that I’ve already lost track I remember last year we were in Bali speaking at a conference Michelle and I and some other people from the team we went out there and i had a presentation up and people wanted to know what projects I’ve worked on or what companies I’ve worked with and I remember bringing up metro group Miami and mph club because I was Marketing director here and I was chief marketing officer at metro group Miami a few years after that and you guys were you and Bruno I love both of you guys, you guys are like family and it always makes me so happy to see the shit that you guys do together because you guys are both crazy.

Lee: They’re amazing designers.

Alex: Bruno is out here designing for the Miami Heat, Bruno’s had stuff in the White House Bruno hangs out with Dwayne like Lebron and Dwyane Wade and you’re on that same vibe. You guys designed some crazy-ass cars. You guys designed some cars for Steve Aoki, Marshmallow, and I forgot who else.

Lee: We’ve done so many, but Steve Aoki was the biggest one we’ve done a couple of wraps for his new albums that he dropped.

Alex: Or for ultra when he comes for ultra and stuff, I think it’s, I always talk about relationships right, in partnerships, because you felt like so, you have your cars, you have your clientele, you saw the potential in metro, metro’s able to wrap cars, you guys are able to advertise, Steve Aoki’s able to you know get his hype and advertise his album, like all of these partnerships are totally doable for people. You just have to find the opportunities right? Maybe you don’t have the car, maybe you’re not Steve Aoki, maybe you’re not this famous person but what if you’re the person that found a way to connect the dots, right? What if you were able to put out a proposal or connect two people or connect three people that then flourish into something beautiful and I think that’s one of been one of the key successes of mph club is being able to do that being able to give people the opportunities like before we started recording this you reminded me of a project we did with Juan where we wrapped the front of a Lamborghini Gallardo in like like clear coats

Lee: Yeah clear coat, 3M clear coat, and then he’s an amazing artist and he just went ham all over.

Alex: With sharpies yeah?

Lee: Yeah like a whole bunch of sharpie, and it was cool at the time but today I will never do that.

Alex: Yeah I mean at that time we were just trying to think outside of the box but I think you created a standard in the car industry, right? Because I remember when we first teamed up we teamed up with crm jewelers back in the day when crm jewelers was like three months into business now they are huge. And we were shooting like watches on trays, on steering wheels on.

Lee: We had a viral picture. We bought like six-seven watches. We put them on the steering wheel and took a picture and just like a regular picture just post on Instagram next you know that thing went viral.

Alex: That thing is still going around bro, I’m still getting tagged, right? On some of those pictures to this day. I know and I laugh about it with my friends and the team because to think that something that we did 10 years ago is still being impacted and it’s still relevant it just shows how ahead of our time we were and we created a trend, we created a trend that people like people on billionaires club and watch watching niche and lifestyle magazines and bro we had DJ Khaled like looking at our stuff.

Lee: Our picture was his profile picture for like a couple of months, DJ Khaled. Also, Tyrese. Yeah, remember that? Yeah, Puff Daddy had that too. Yeah, that was pretty funny.

Alex: Yeah no there were so many people I lost track of the magazine articles and I think it was funny because you know there’s a lot of exotic car rental businesses in Miami at the time and you guys swept everyone out. Like, it is what it is, you guys came and you redefined the business, you made it cool to rent a car, right? you made it cool to rent a car and have an experience because the cars were always clean you guys always had a great experience there’s always cool content there is um there’s mascots around. It just didn’t have to be the usual business so if you have a business right now and it’s 2020 and you’re really trying to think of what to do don’t be so serious don’t be afraid to know really get funky and collaborate with artists or collaborate with the creator.

Lee: Funny you mentioned that, I actually have a good friend of mine who started a blinds company. You know, he put blinds on windows. He’s like I can’t make blinds look cool, I can’t make you know, I’m like you, you sell cars, you can make them cool on Instagram. Like no bro, you could do the same. I could give you some examples, there’s a crazy mansion out there that you can take some sick content with, with the blinds. You can make a lifestyle video of somebody waking up getting out of bed opening the blinds. You can get creative with these things. And he didn’t really think of those concepts so that’s what I try to bring to the table. It’s not just the cars that sell themselves, it’s bringing the lifestyle, It’s showing people this is what you could look like, this is what you could do, this is the fun part.

Alex: This is how you could feel.

Lee: It you know it doesn’t have to be necessarily something that you want to just show off with no there’s something that you could actually take for your birthday, a birthday weekend, spice it up a little bit. Yeah. Take, you know, take a fun car and that’s something you could tick off a bucket list

HUSTLE INSPIRES HUSTLE PODCAST WITH ALEX QUIN

FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS MENTORS PART 1

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