Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Entrepreneurship is more so like a mindset. I don't really think that entrepreneurship, because there's a lot of different avenues that you can take within entrepreneurship. Like my journey of entrepreneurship isn't really going to be the same as yours or the same as his or the same as hers. But we all share like a common mindset between everybody, which is I want to make money on my own terms when I want to, how I want to, and I'm not going to let somebody put a number or a cap on how much I can make.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Welcome to skin brief. I'm Dr. Ana Chacon. And today we have a very special guest joining us. Get ready for some expert insights you won't want to miss.
So first I'm going to have you take me a little bit through little Shang Phimpang. Where your family's from, where you grew up. You know, how you got to where you are today.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: 2015, we moved from London, England.
We moved to Baltimore, Maryland. And it was just me, my sister and my brother.
I wouldn't say that we lived like a terrible life. It was just more of like a struggle. You know, if you know anything about Baltimore, Maryland, it's, it's hard to make it out of that specific demographic because of the type of, the way that it, the way that it's set up out there. So I graduated high school, ended up going to college, ended up dropping out of college my second semester. And I also had a daughter when I was 17 years old.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Yeah. I took on the responsibility of becoming a father. And of course it's hard to be a father.
Yeah, yeah, it's hard to be a father and being school at the same time, it's just, it's just hard. So I dropped out and kind of became like a full time father because my baby mother was working late night jobs, late shifts. So I took on that responsibility and I found myself in a position where I wasn't able to provide for my daughter in the way that I wanted to provide.
And what I mean by that is more so financially. Of course I was there to give her all the love and the care in the world, but I wasn't there to even just a lot of the times buy the simple things. You know, I was, A lot of times I wasn't able to pay for the things that I wanted to, you know, get her for Christmas and, and those beautiful gifts that I'm, that I have more access to now. So I found myself in a, in a, in a way just kind of looking to make income. So I tried a lot of different things. I started off with vending machines. I. I didn't own any vending machines, but I would.
I would just pretty much just go to different establishments and broker vending machines. And then once they gave me capital, I would go buy the vending machine and then place it in there. And then we'll do something. What? Something of like a profit share between the vending machine. I. And then we got to a place where we had almost 13 vending machines producing us a little over $2,500 a month. It wasn't anything crazy, but it was enough for me to, number one, provide more. And number two is also enough for me to have a little bit of money, enough so that I can also invest into other streams of income that could produce me more capital.
So from there, I went on and bought a car. I didn't drive this car everywhere. I didn't even have a car at this point. But everywhere I went, I would walk there or take Ubers. And then I bought a car, and then I sold the car. I made like maybe 700 bucks from that, but. But it opened my eyes to something that was another stream of income that could potentially work, which was buying and reselling cars. Used car.
So I would buy cars, and I would get them, you know, a thousand bucks off Facebook Marketplace, and I'll sell them for 1500 bucks, or I'd get them from those.
Back in the day, everybody used to buy cars off of something called offer up. So I go and offer up, and I'd buy a car, $2,000. Nice. Maybe a BMW or something, older version, and I'll get it, and I'll sell it for three thousand, make a thousand. You know, by the time, you know it, I had maybe 15,000 saved, saved up, 10,000 saved up. And at that point, for me, that was a lot of money because I came from absolutely nothing without having any two cents to rub together. So it was a lot for me. It was enough for me to get into what I do now and what I've been doing for the past five years, which is e commerce with basically just finding products, bulking bulk inventory, buying bulk inventory to a third party 3 PL, and then reselling that. So I started my first brand, which was a clothing brand, and I pretty much took like half of that money, and I bulked the inventory over to A3PL, and then I started leveraging dropshipping, which is not fronting any of my own money. But anytime somebody would place an order, the order would get fulfilled to the 3 PL. And then the 3 PL would ship out the product directly to the consumer. And then I would use my capital for marketing. So instead of fronting my capital for the inventory, I'll front my capital for the marketing. And then all the money that would come back in, I was just saving, saving savings, stacking up. And then by the age of 19, I had saved up my first million dollars. That's when I had seven figures in the bank account.
And that's kind of like the story from there on. You know, I'm 23 years old right now. That's kind of like the origin story of, you know, how we got into this position now.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Awesome. How old is your daughter?
[00:05:00] Speaker A: She's five. She's five years old.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: And we talked a little bit before about entrepreneurship. And specifically I am familiar with Baltimore. I actually went to school there temporarily. And there's a big disparity. I noticed demographic wise. You know, the whole Freddie Gray thing happened.
Very, very scary. I was there when that happened. Where did you learn about entrepreneurship? And what would you tell somebody who's struggling to. To learn this and master this? Not having come from that background?
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Entrepreneurship is more so like a mindset. I don't really think that entrepreneurship, because there's a lot of different avenues that you can take within entrepreneurship. Like, my journey of entrepreneurship isn't really going to be the same as yours or the same as his or the same as hers. But we all share, like, a common mindset between everybody, which is, I want to make money on my own terms when I want to, how I want to, and I'm not going to let somebody put a number or a cap on how much I can make.
The only difference between you and I is that I know a different skill set that could potentially make me more income than you or that certain party.
And that mindset was installed in me from my father and also by reading a lot of books. So I wasn't one of those people who had a lot of money to invest into different streams of income. But A book is 13 bucks, right? But a book is 10 bucks. You can get a book 15 bucks. So what I would do is I'd buy these different books and I would educate myself.
Because reading a book, you have to think of it like you are taking somebody's full experience and digesting it. Like, these people don't hold out in their books. It's just that people don't, like, take. Take the time to read because it's not the most, you know, anticipating task. You know, nobody really wants to sit. Sit down and read. But if you actually sit down and read some of these books from these different philosophers who are at the top of their class, you find yourself learning exactly what they did and how you can pretty much replicate their process.
That's the reason why I wrote a book. When I was 19 and I made my first seven figures, I wrote a book explaining exactly how I made it. And a lot of people were able to make money from that book because these people, when they write books, they don't hold back.
So it was reading books and it was also having a mindset that was installed for me from my father. But the thing is, my father wasn't rich, but he knew how rich people thought.
So just knowing how rich people think can leave your seed in a much better position than you were. So although you may not be in the best financial position right now, as long as you think in the way that rich people think, then it's a matter of time. But majority of people can't see it all the way through, so they give up half of the way there. Maybe they're one step away, one skill set away, one opportunity away. And they never quite reach that end goal because they give up too soon.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: And then. Is it the Million Dollar Mindset or what is the name of the first book that you wrote?
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Yeah, is this the name? Is the Million Dollar Mindset? Yeah.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Oh, excellent. Yeah. And you have two books, right? That's one of them.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Yes, one of them is the Million Dollar Mindset, and the Other one is 510 keys to financial Freedom.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Okay, awesome. And where can we find those books if we're looking at reading them? Where can. Where can our viewers find them?
[00:08:16] Speaker A: Yeah, so you can find it online, you can find it on Amazon, in stores. You can find it at your local Target, Walmart, Barnes and Nobles, and a few different other small bookstores around the east coast.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: And where is your family from? You talk a lot about your father. Are your parents immigrants? Where did they come from? And what was their story on how they got to the U.S.
we are immigrants.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: I pretty much lived in England my entire life. My dad and so forth also lived in England. My sister recently just moved from England to the US but we were originally from England and then we moved to America in 2015.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: And their background? Fring Pong. What is the cultural origin of that name?
[00:09:00] Speaker A: That is Ghanaian. So my grandparents are also. Well, two of my. Yeah, my, my, not my. Just my granddad still lives in Ghana.
So that's a Ghanaian orange origin. I still haven't been to Ghana, but I plan to go. But yes, it's, it's Ghanaian. My dad is also. My dad's side is Ghanaian and then my mother's side is Lebanese.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Regarding family, I know you have a brother. Is he intertwined with your entrepreneurial activities at all? Does he do the same thing? Do you guys work together or what is the relationship?
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Me and my brother, we do work together on a lot of different projects. We have a lot of different softwares that we've developed together.
We have a lot of different businesses that are separate. Also. My brother pretty much caught on to what was going on pretty early on. So back in, I think he caught on maybe very, very early 2020 he caught on and he also was able to, you know, become very successful. He became a millionaire from doing that also.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: And then we talked a little bit about E commerce and how malls are dying pretty much, you know, what are your thoughts with the online. Online sales and online advertising, online healthcare versus you know, it saves people time, but it's also, you have more opportunities for growth versus, you know, driving everywhere and doing stuff. How have you influenced that? What are your thoughts on that, on those markets?
[00:10:31] Speaker A: I have my own like personal beliefs and philosophies and then I also like combat that with statistics, kind of basing it on the statistics and then my own personal beliefs.
Statistically there's been more bankrupt shops. I'm talking about more brick and mortar bankrupt shots over the past three years than there has been over the past two decades. So over the past 20 years, since 2020. So it all really started going exponentially downhill in 2020. And that's because people simply couldn't leave their house. And then the thing is, is that although that there was a decline in brick and mortar shops, there wasn't a decline in how much money was being.
The economic didn't shift. The only thing that shifted is that E commerce sales just shot up because people weren't able to leave their homes. So that pretty much opened a massive opportunity and made people realize that, well, you know, let me just go ahead and migrate all of my business opportunity towards online.
And the reason why that is is because even if you look at the biggest company in the world and you ask yourself, well, what is the biggest company in the world? It's a $2 trillion company, Amazon.
They don't have a storefront. They've done trillions of dollars in sales through E commerce. And then you also look at Walmart, although Walmart has storefronts, they do three times the revenue from their e commerce platform than they do from their storefronts. Matter of fact, if you read Sam Walton's book, they started off as a drop shipping store. So Walmart was actually the original dropshippers.
If you were to go on Walmart right now and type in any product in the world, you'd be able to find any product in the world, but they wouldn't have it in their storefront. But it might take them a week to get it to your doorstep. And the reason why that is because all they're doing is leveraging China. And if you've ever been to China, and I do advise people to go to China so that you can, your mind will just be completely open when you go to these different supplier conventions and you see the type of products that they have that you've never seen before in your entire life. And these products aren't set to come out until 2027. Right. And these products are so just completely dynamic and just life changing products that you don't even know are about to come out and you can only get them online.
So traditional retail has been dying and it has been declining over the past five years now. But my personal beliefs is that even from somebody like me, I don't want to go and leave my house to buy something. It's much easier for me to just go click two buttons on the side of my phone and use Apple Pay to pay for it.
So when you, when you just like kind of like look at all the different e commerce platforms that have even been opened in the past two years, such as TikTok, Shop, Shopify, dropshipping, Amazon, FBA and all these different things and these platforms that allow you to use their platform to make more money.
When you look at it, and I use this example a lot, I can show you one of my stores and it'll tell you in the last 30 days there's been 30 million visitors to my store.
In order for you to get 30 million visitors to your brick and mortar store, it would take you close to 50 years.
I can get that in 30 days because of the power of organic marketing. The same organic marketing that you can't get from foot traffic, right?
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So it just opens the doors for just almost infinite opportunities.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Yeah. 100%.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Stop. Can only fit so many people, you know.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Exactly. 100%.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Even my clinic in Coral Gables, we can only fit it, you know, fit so many patients in there at a time, you know.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: 100%.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Yeah. That's a good way to look at it. Tell me A little bit about taxes, why you decided to move, or what your next move is. You can grow, but depending on where you live, you're going to have to give a lot of that back to the government.
How keep track of that, that and, and what are you doing to preserve your wealth once you have it?
[00:14:30] Speaker A: First of all, like, a lot of people think that, like, inventory and this and that is going to be your biggest expense in business. Once you lit, once you reach a certain threshold, once you reach a certain, like, income bracket, your biggest expense, 100% will always be taxes. It's not going to be your wife or your girlfriend or however much you're going to be thinking on spending on that house or whatever the case may be. A thousand percent, one thousand percent is always going to be taxes.
What you can do to preserve your wealth, of course, is you can open things such as trusts that protect your wealth. You can take a more harsher approach, and you can move to a tax haven such as the Bahamas, Dubai, you have Puerto rico, it has 4% income tax.
And of course, a lot of people think that it's patriotic to, you know, give up 40% of your wealth to the government. I'll let them think with whatever they want to believe. I'm not here to change anybody's idea of, you know, what's patriotic and what's not patriotic. But for me, I'm the one who generated the income. And there are ways to protect your income. So that, because the thing is, is that there's no true way to build. Like if we're talking generational wealth in, in regards of billions, billions and billions of dollars, if you're not protecting your wealth, because imagine you're giving 40 of a billion dollars, you're no longer a billionaire because you're giving up all of that income to, you know, Uncle Sam. There are different ways. You know, again, tax haven countries that you can, that you can relocate to or just simply buying up real estate. All right, Real estate can help you in a certain regard. Say you're doing 50 to 75.
You know, acquiring a large amount of real estate is going to be able to help your, you know, you know, decrease your taxable income and you're going to be able to save more on taxes because you're able to depreciate more, you're able to write off more, and you're also able to write off for the long term. Right? But not just doing, you know, single family homes and talking about more. So like commercial real estate, multifamily properties, apartment Complexes, stuff like that, where you can depreciate up to 31 years of that taxable income. And then you end up saying, hey, you know, my tax bill is a lot lower. I don't want to be the guy who tells you how to pay no taxes, but I can tell you how to, you know, preserve your wealth so that you can decrease your, you know, how much, how much it says you make on paper because you're investing it, you know, opening up a nonprofit and then donating to that nonprofit, you know, donating to charity, just being just genuinely a good person. The government also rewards those to who invest because you have to understand that the government was created for the rich. So in order for you to get these different tax havens and, you know, these different tax savings, you have to be able to, you know, first of all, acquire a certain level of wealth, which is, you know, if you can, you can do your own research on that. But the government tracks every dollar that you send. You know what I mean? There's no getting away from it. If you try and not pay your taxes, you end up in federal jail. So pay your taxes or find a way to pay less legally. That's the thing that I'm saying here. You gotta do it legally. That's the most important part of everything, doing it legally. Buying up real estate, opening up some trust, protecting, preserving your wealth, opening up an IUL, donating to that IUL, not so much a Roth or a 401k, but IUL life insurance policy, and yeah, pretty much making yourself the beneficiary of that trust, which also protects you from a lot of other different things too, but more importantly, taxes.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: And are you thinking about moving, giving up your citizenship, going to the Bahamas? Dubai?
[00:18:16] Speaker A: No, with Dubai.
What is it is. It's called a golden visa. So if you spend up to $10 million in real estate, you automatically get your visa. So as for now, you can essentially with like a business is that if you're, if you lease a place in say, like a tax haven country, the Bahamas, Dubai, Puerto Rico, and let's just say you're leasing out a unit there for $10,000 a month, you can expense the $10,000 a month off of your taxes for the entire year. So let's just say I'm spending $10,000 a month in Dubai. I can expense $120,000 off of my taxes as long as I'm using that particular residence for tax reasons. I mean, for tax reasons, for business reasons.
So for me, it falls directly under business reasons. Because I'm working there, I'm creat and have employees in Dubai. Like, I'm meeting up with employees. I get to expense that, that which is the, the rent. And I also get to expense the flight because it's considered a business flight. So I can fly first class, which is a $20,000 ticket, and I get to expense that off of the taxes, which would be $20,000 off of your taxes. So it's not you indirectly, like saving money, like, hey, I'm getting this money, but it's you expensing it off your taxes, which of course you have to make a certain amount to be able to expense a certain amount. But if you're making $100 million a year and your tax bill comes up to, you know, 4 million, 3 million, then those type of, you know, tax havens are going to help a lot.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: When would you consider financial freedom or achieving financial freedom? You know, I read about this a lot regarding doctors and medicine, but when do you say, okay, I've reached it, I've been working for it, I'm now financially free.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: I think everybody has their own idea of financial freedom.
A lot of people would think the position I am in right now is financial freedom. I think that financial freedom is, you know, subject to each his own. Like, some people just want enough money to pay off their house and just to be able to travel. Some people want enough to drive a Bugatti and drive every luxury car in the world. Some people want enough to, you know, live in a car for the rest. You know what I mean? Like, but for me, my idea of financial freedom is enough to the point where your generations are set. That's financial freedom to me, because I've already experienced financial freedom for myself, which is you can buy whatever you want to, whatever car you want to buy. You don't have to look at the price for anything. You know, literally anything that is in your window to buy, you can buy.
And that becomes to a point where it becomes kind of boring. So it's like, why do you continue to work? Well, I continue to work because maybe I enjoy the work that I do.
But what does it mean to you?
Well, you know, there's going to be a time where I leave this earth and I have to be able to give something to my heirs, to my beneficiaries. And I want to make sure that I leave them something that resembles the type of person that I was, which was hard working. And I wanted them to be able to know that they're taken care of, even My sister, my brother, my dad, my family. I do pretty much everything that I do not for myself, but I do it for them and for their kids and for my kids and my kids. Kids, kids, kids, kids. You know, it's more of a generational thing to me. I think that financial freedom is, in my opinion, is when you have enough to take care of the generations that live after you. That's when you've truly broken the chain of generational poverty.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: And then how did you end up in Miami?
[00:21:47] Speaker A: I love the water. It was a few different places, and Miami was just the one that stuck out the most to me.
It was the most motivating. There's a lot of young entrepreneurs that I was able to connect with and network with. I also have a boat, and, yeah, it was. It was a good place to take my boat out on the water. It was great views. Honestly, I think that Miami is probably one of the best places to live in the world, other than Dubai and the Bahamas. I think that Miami's, like, top three.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: All right, thank you, Sean. Thank you for coming. I know you're super busy and so glad that I know you. And thanks for sharing this with my audience 100%.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: Well, hopefully maybe we can do a follow up sometime. And I appreciate you for having me. Thank you.
