Welcome to the Six Figure Business Mastery Podcast, where every week

Kirsten and Jeannie dive into the essential topics to fuel your business

growth, from copywriting to course creation, mindset to video marketing.

Hey everyone, welcome to our newest episode.

We're excited to have you here.

We're very excited to have Joseph Lombardi.

From Ironhawk Financial.

He is an incredibly successful businessman and helps business owners build a

solid foundation for their business.

He has a really passionate story on why he does so.

We're thrilled to have you today, Joe, and welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Gia.

And Joseph, I'm excited to hear about your story.

I feel like most business owners have a story as to why they do what they do.

And when I heard part of your story, I was like, oh my gosh, you think financial

planning, I don't know if any little kid goes around thinking I want to get

into financial planning and helping businesses build a solid foundation.

What really led you down this path?

Yeah, so I mean, I was supposed to be in construction.

My dad owned a J. V. Lombardi Builders out of Connecticut and he was very

successful making millions and millions of dollars a year, working

with very high net worth clients.

Some of his clients were like the CEO of Coca Cola, CEO of

NFL in Greenwich, Connecticut.

And I remember like one day when I was 12 years old, I was going down to check

a job with my dad because only me and him, my mom left at four years old to,

you know, Drink and live her best life.

So it was just me and my dad.

He's like, go play with the son.

So I go down to an elevator to the basement elevator opens up and

there's a baseball field in there.

I was like, the amount of money in Greenwich is just insane.

I had a really fun time and get back in the car.

And I'm like, dad, what does that guy do?

He said, he works on wall street.

So when I was like 11 or 12, I was like, I want to work on Wall Street.

I didn't really know what that meant.

Fast forward four years, I'm doing construction with my dad.

I was a demo guy, 13, 14, 15.

And he's again, doing a huge addition in Greenwich.

And he ended up falling three stories off a ladder, bone in his foot,

disintegrated into a hundred pieces.

He was in the hospital for 23 months with reconstructive surgery and rehab.

During that time, my.

Ex step mom had a child, my sister, and she was born 2 pounds,

7 ounces, with alcohol syndrome.

And I lettered varsity football, basketball, track,

in Fairfield, where I grew up.

Uh, I had to drop out of all those things because I was 15, my sister was just

about turning 2, and my dad's in the hospital and my ex step mom's in rehab.

So, it really affected me that my dad was worth, at the time, 25 million.

And he had no disability.

He had no life insurance.

He had no long term care.

Fast forward 25 years, now he's in a nursing home, broke with

Parkinson's disease, my father, after I tried taking care of him.

But I have three kids.

I have a wife.

I have a business.

I have employees.

So I couldn't dedicate my time to do that, knowing I have three other children

and a wife that depends on me as well.

So it put me in a really difficult situation.

Fast forward about three years later, I get a phone call that my mom's sick.

I didn't have a good relationship with her.

She was very selfish and wanted to party, live in Boca Raton, Florida,

and have one boyfriend, buy a Mercedes, another boyfriend, buy her a condo.

It really affected me because within not even a month, she was dead.

I was her only kin.

So, I had to clean up the mess, and it was very difficult.

Fast forward another two years, my grandmother lost my uncle,

her son, and her husband.

She fell into a deep depression, which caused her to have a stroke.

And when my grandfather died, all of his money went to my grandmother, 4.

2 million, and when she had the stroke, you know, she

didn't have any long term care.

So she went to Ludlow Nursing Home in Fairfield, Connecticut across

from Sacred Heart University.

And within seven and a half years, she lost 4.

2 million of my grandfather's entire estate that took him 40

something years doing masonry work.

So, it really showed me that God is creating this path for me where I've

seen horrific things happen in my life, out of my control, while my family was

going through an immense emotional and physical And mental on top of it, there

was financial burden to be added to it.

So I realized a lot of people don't do the planning.

And if you fail to plan your plans to fail.

And that's crazy because they were also successful.

And I think sometimes what happens with business owners is they are just

so busy trying to get the business off the ground that they don't ever stop

to think, okay, well, now that it's doing well and I'm moving forward,

how do I actually protect my money?

How do I put things in place that will protect my family if these things happen?

So for you, that's a lot of trauma to go through.

You know, as a young man, and so that really shaped, I'm sure it

shaped more than just your career.

Uh, a lot of therapy, having your own mom want to abort you

before you're born and then not even want nothing to do with you at four years old.

She'd rather do drugs and drink than be a mom.

It was hard, but, you know, there's a saying that whatever doesn't

kill you makes you stronger.

In order to build a muscle, you have to rip the muscle to have it regrow.

better.

I look at it as my cocoon stage, every caterpillar in order to get to the next

level has to go through cocoon to fly.

Sometimes pain as it hurts is not necessarily long term bad,

even though short term it is.

Yeah.

And it sounds like to me that both your grandfather and your dad were

really hardworking and very successful.

So you also got to see that growing up, how hard work, you know,

building your, your business with employees and how all of that.

Could financially change your life and then you've had to watch it

go away because of poor planning.

How do you like to help business owners plan so that they're more secure if

they get injured and their family's taken care of if they need to go to

a nursing home or they pass away?

When you first meet with someone, what's the first conversation you have with them?

Number one is I try to help them alleviate taxes.

When my grandfather's estate was being depleted, long term care at that time

was probably around 20, 000 a month.

But it was actually costing my grandmother about 34, 000 a month because

most of my grandfather's assets were real estate, IRAs, 401ks, um, SEPs.

Brokerage accounts, every dollar that my grandmother needed almost

cost her 2 because the government was taking half of it because that

puts her put you in a super high tax bracket when you have to net 2.

50, so she was pulling 3.

80, 4. 20. What people don't understand is they see this net worth on paper.

And they think, Oh, I have a million dollars in my 401k.

I'm a millionaire.

And it's like, no, you're not cash it out tomorrow.

You're worth five 40.

You have a partner inside all your retirement accounts.

And that partner is called uncle Sam.

He, if you lose all your money, he doesn't care.

He doesn't lose anything.

If you have a crazy great run in your retirement, he's taken

half and he brought in no value.

So it's really important to know that to alleviate taxes, in my opinion,

is number one, cause that's going to take your estate and double it.

Right?

Number two is you have to make sure that knowing there's four things

that are guaranteed to happen to you.

One is, and sometimes three happen.

You're either gonna live long, and then die.

That's the one we all want.

Assuming we can stay healthy.

You can die early.

You can get disabled when you can't work anymore, but you're still alive.

And then you can need care.

When you're older, we come into this world in diapers and go

out of this world in diapers.

You want to be able to control where you are.

You don't want to go to jail.

Also known as a nursing home, jail and a nursing home comparison is very similar.

10 by 10 room stranger.

You have no say you can't leave.

The neighbor wants to blast the TV on the Mets game till 3 a. m. You're stuck.

Nobody wants to visit you.

It's a. That energy place.

So, you know, what, knowing that one of those has to happen and most likely to,

and, and 30 percent chance, three of those things are going to happen in your life.

If you don't have a plan to combat that, what do you think's going to happen?

If you God forbid die early and you are the breadwinner, what's

going to happen to your business?

It's going to dissolve because you are the business.

Most businesses aren't a business.

It's a DBA as somebody's equity.

Right.

So like me, I didn't have a business for 20 of my 22 years

because I didn't have employees.

I didn't have agents.

I wasn't in all 50 states.

I wasn't growing.

I wasn't educating.

I wasn't duplicating myself in the market.

I wasn't building my brand.

The painting company down the street isn't a company.

It's a painter owning an LLC.

If you don't have a plan in place to protect you, to diversify your

taxes, to build wealth, that's liquid.

It doesn't have a 59 and a half year rule or 10 percent penalty.

That can't lose.

That's been averaging 15 percent tax free compounding over

the last 20 years documented.

If you don't have something like that in place and you're just doing like a IRA,

a 529 for your son, you got to maybe a rental property, you're not doing yourself

any justice because most of that profit and net worth doesn't belong to you.

So it sounds like when you sit down with people, you

really look at what they have and help them make decisions to protect those

assets and then guide them as to how to invest their money differently.

To ensure less taxes, higher return, and more security.

Was that accurate?

Yeah, I mean, it's so important, right?

When you think of a 401k or an IRA, a SEP Simple Pension, Deferred Comp, 457 529,

all these type of qualified government accounts, government's a monopoly,

government's not your friend, government has no competition, government's going

to take half your stuff, they're going to penalize you, and they're in bed with

Wall Street, which, by the way, I worked in Wall Street for years, it's a really

demonic place, So if you take a look at it, knowing that Wall Street's taken

half your money with 12b1 fees, class A share fund fee, money manager fee,

annual account fee, mutual fund expense fee, and AUM fee, and then the government

takes half your money when you pull it out in federal tax, state tax, FICA,

Medicare, unemployment, or social security tax, you're really playing a game.

You're getting a quarter of your money.

The flip side is you do what all the super wealthy people do, right?

Think of a trillion dollar industry that the average

American doesn't even know exists.

Then who's funding it?

It's all the top 0.

1 percenters.

So it's this strategy that's now becoming popular.

We know I've been doing it for 22 years.

The infinite banking, be your own bank.

Rich person's Roth.

Forbes has two really good articles on it.

If you type in Forbes, rich person's Roth.

When you talk about building a foundation, you need to have life

insurance, disability, long term care, retirement income, college

savings, and a savings account.

And this strategy covers all of those.

The fees that you're paying are actually giving you something.

They're giving you the ability where you can't lose.

If the market goes down 10, 20, 50%, you don't lose anything.

Those fees are covering your ability to have life, disability, long term

care, critical illness, critical ailment, terminal illness, because as

business owners, we're fearless, right?

We're taking high risk for high reward.

How many careers can I make seven figures in?

And I made that last year.

So I had to take the risk and put the bet on myself, which is sleepless

nights, 14 hour days, grinding, building, making great decisions, but

most of the time failing and learning.

When you go through that, you think I'm invincible.

There's no way a drunk driver is going to hit me.

There's no way I'm going to get a diagnosis of XYZ.

There's no way something's going to happen to my spouse, or God forbid, my children.

I'm safe.

I don't have to worry about that.

I'll put all my time in my business, like my father did and my grandfather did.

Then when something happens out of your control, it derails everything.

I'm not saying put 100 percent of your money in this strategy.

What I'm saying is five or 10 percent of your money should go here, and then if you

need the money, you can pull it back out.

So it's not like you're handcuffing your money for decades, because

what is the bloodline to a business?

It's liquidity.

And if you are handcuffing your money to your 59 and a half.

Or you're putting it all in real estate during a down market, banks

aren't lending, so you can't access any of your capital if you need it.

And you're not diversifying your taxation, your market exposure, or your liquidity.

And you're putting all your eggs in one basket.

What's going to happen when something happens out of your control and a

big down market or correction comes?

You're not going to be prepared.

And that's why tens of thousands of businesses closed or COVID and

not bragging here, but my business exploded because zoom was introduced.

And now I'm national by sitting in my pajama pants and a suit top.

I'm closing million dollar deals every day.

A lot of businesses weren't as fortunate because they didn't have a plan.

It's not just what if I get hurt, what if I get sick, what if I get injured,

it's what if the market turns, what if there's a government law that changes my

industry which forces me out, do I have a plan B, do I have a nest egg, do I have a

lump sum, and 99 percent of people don't.

Wow, and I think you probably spoke to most business owners

when you were talking about the fact that First of all, congratulations

on seven figures last year.

That's amazing.

You spoke to those 14 hour days, working hard, making good choices, making lots

of bad choices and learning from them.

I feel like that is a truck of most business owners, right?

You get knocked down, you pick yourself up, learn something and you move on.

One of the things we believe in is reaching out to experts, right?

So having someone on your team and in your corner, like you, who can help

with the things that, you know, a lot of times we don't want to learn about.

You know, IRAs and 401ks or the stock market.

We want to do what we love doing, what we're passionate

about, what we're good at.

So I think it's so important for business owners to have

someone like you in their corner.

To help them understand what they can do with their money and how to do that.

And to kind of coach them, do you meet with your clients

a couple of times a year?

How do you do that when you're working with someone?

So I have A, B and C clients.

My A clients, we do a lot of business together.

Maybe I have a relationship with their state attorney

relationship with their accountant.

And we do real deep financial planning.

We're talking super complex planning.

Those people I meet with almost every quarter, maybe every six months.

Then I have B clients.

B clients are, are, you know, business owners that maybe

need three or four things.

They have no real retirement account.

They have no real estate plan.

They don't know about business continuation.

They don't have any tax strategies in place.

So we set up a few different strategies.

I roll over their existing IRAs or 401ks and accounts that they

can't lose, averaging almost double digits historically.

Most of my clients, or almost technically all of my clients,

have access to my Calendly, which they can just book a meeting.

Thanks Uh, whenever they want.

Uh, and then a lot of my clients have access to my personal cell phone.

So they can text me.

I'm sitting in my chair for 12 hours a day, meeting 12 different clients a day.

So it's being accessible, being quick.

I almost get anxiety when a business thing comes through and I can't get to it.

I'm like, I gotta get to this when I can't go to sleep.

They say that if you're married, don't go to sleep mad.

I don't go to sleep without.

Answering my clients.

So I'll be up sometimes till 11, 12 o'clock sending

illustrations, answering questions.

Hey, I'm exhausted.

I'll get to this tomorrow at 8 AM.

Um, but it's so vital, the communication.

So I meet them as much as they need.

The good news for me having thousands of clients is that most

of my strategies, you can't lose.

They're guaranteed.

They have some sort of a historical growth that is easily, you know,

looked at my clients have 24 seven access to their accounts.

So the only time they reach out is like a change of beneficiary, a change of owner.

Maybe they want to buy more for a child that's now older.

Maybe daycare just got due.

They freed up 2, 000 a month.

They want to do something with those dollars.

So it really just has to do most of the time, which is, I guess,

good for me as clients call say, Hey, things are going good.

I have more money.

What should I do?

And then we come up with a strategy.

Are your C clients, maybe smaller businesses that are really

just at the point where they can finally think about having a conversation?

And maybe they don't have a lot of money.

So you're really helping them understand the foundation that

they need to build as they grow.

I turned away probably about 30 percent of people that want.

To invest with me or have a plan or get some sort of permanent

longterm insurance strategy.

If you have credit cards at 29.

99 and you have 50, 000, I can't guarantee you 29.

99 tax free on your money.

So I advise those clients to pay off debt, get a budget, make a plan.

And the ones that are unwilling to, they're never going to be my clients.

The ones that have very poor ethics and morals when it comes to money, they'll be

trapped in that consumerism loop forever.

And there's, and if I try to help them, all they're going to do is lapse or cancel

all the different plans we set up and they're going to end up losing money.

So I make sure that when I meet with a client, I don't want to meet

just for commission or for a fee.

I want to meet to make sure that what I'm offering is something

I would offer to my own family.

I would not invest in my retirement if I'm full of debt because debt is cancer

to your long term financial health.

And a lot of people, what they do is, you know, they say,

Oh, OPM other people's money.

Absolutely.

I have a few million dollars out on OPM, but they're all under 5%.

You don't do OPM through credit cards.

You don't do OPM through high interest debt or 17 percent through

lending club or lending tree.

That's not a long term or these day loans.

I met a few business owners that are doing day loans and I'm like, are you nuts?

Well, yeah, my business is 1.

8 million.

I'm like, are you that poor with money that you can't figure

out how to float 10 grand?

Unfortunately, it takes a lot to actually work with somebody like me.

Because when you think of like the lottery, these guys hit the lottery

for a hundred million dollars.

And not only are they broke two years later, they're bankrupt.

So they lost a hundred million plus another five million.

So it really comes down to appreciating the dollar, having a plan for the dollar,

knowing that it's a gift from God and I try to make sure I handle it correctly.

If you understand, it's so important to know that if you don't have a

plan in place, things will not go a hundred percent your way in life.

I'm not God, I'm not perfect.

And I don't think any of your listeners are.

So you have to make sure that you have some foundation set

aside and most people don't.

Yeah, we would say people need to be coachable because if they're

not going to listen to you and not going to understand the value, then they're not

going to do the work and it's not going to turn out the way they want it to.

I love the budgeting part.

I think that's really important because once you get yourself.

Straight and get rid of your debt.

If you can spend less than you earn, which I know sounds just fundamental

and silly, but it's really, you know, for some people, it's really hard when

they make some more money, they're spending, they're spending, and

that's when they get in real trouble.

Everybody wants to upgrade to keep up with the

Joneses until they realize the Joneses don't care about you.

Who cares about you as your family, your children, your friends.

And unfortunately to be real.

A lot of people don't care about themselves.

A lot of people have self hatred, childhood trauma.

They have these holes in them that they try and fill with.

Money and stuff, gambling, drugs, alcohol, it goes deep, which it

doesn't seem like it should, right?

Like we're talking about money, what are you talking about?

But you have to understand it's a mindset to say, because we have a past

self, a future self, and a present self.

And what people want to do is they want to stay in their present self

for instant gratification, or they go to their past self, which if you

live in the past, it's depression.

And if you live in the future, it's anxiety, right?

Because you're scared for what's coming next, or you're sad

for what happened in the past.

So you have to understand you want to live in the present, but you also

want to build a, you want to be the one to protect your future self and

be your savior of your future self because nobody else can but you.

And if you don't do it, who will?

I'm loving this.

First of all, you know.

If your honesty and your ethics that you bring to people, I think it's

amazing and the fact that you do talk about the emotional side of how we deal

with money and why we deal with it.

Sometimes I think you have the emotional mindset people and then you

have, like, your financial planners and your financial gurus over here.

It sounds like again, probably because of the trauma you went through as a

child that you get both sides of that.

And I'm, I'm guessing that you didn't make 7 million last year without

working through a lot of those things.

Yeah, if I told you for years after my mom died, not having a

relationship with her, I was depressed, I was anxious on the medication, I

wasn't myself, you know, affected my relationship with my spouse, I

wasn't fully present for my children.

I'd be lying.

I had to go through a lot of stuff in order to realize that it's okay.

I'm not that seven year old boy who misses his mommy anymore.

I'm now a 40 year old man.

I was a 30 year old man when I was hearing it, but it takes a lot because

we carry all this baggages around and unfortunately your financial

life is a collateral damage to it.

So you have to fix a lot of the things wrong.

In your life and not think money is the only thing that's going to fix

it because unfortunately it's not I'm on all the DraftKings commercials

nationwide because I was their number one sucker in 2022 where I

gambled 13 million dollars in a year.

So we all have these things that we try to run from instead

of turning around facing it.

And saying, I need to fix whatever this issue is, not distract myself or

bury myself in the sand, which only hurts you and the people you love

long term, especially financially.

Joe, this has been awesome.

How can people who are debt free and are really ready to build a foundation.

Reach out to you and connect with you.

So you can go to my website, www.

ironhawkfinancial.

com.

There's a contact us button.

You can fill out your name, email, and phone number.

Most likely myself or somebody on my team will reach out to

you to set up a consultation.

If you aren't ready to meet with somebody yet, I'm willing to offer all your

listeners, all of my books, all three of them absolutely free of charge.

I will send them via email.

Wow.

All the articles I'm in, the Forbes articles on my strategy,

my YouTube video, everything for free.

Just write an email to joe, J O E at ironhawkfinancial.

com, just for free books.

You won't be put on any type of email list.

And my Cali link is on all of my email signatures.

If you want to meet at some point, you just save the email

and then you can reach out to me.

I want to work with people that want to work with me.

I don't chase anybody.

If people aren't ready, you can't force them to be ready.

So it's just important to make sure that when you're ready, you have

access to somebody like me, that's going to do the right thing, not be.

Uh, fee hungry or commission hungry.

That was how I was able to keep my five star rating on Google and my A

plus rating on the Better Business Bureau for the last 20 years.

Wow.

That is so generous that you're offering all of your books.

I'm definitely going to sign up for them because I feel like I've already

learned so much from you today.

And it's funny.

I have, I have a gentleman had been coaching him for a while now and his

son has joined the business and he's 24.

And so now I'm coaching him.

And a lot of what we've been talking about are finances.

So I'm definitely going to get him to sign up for your books as well,

because I think that would be amazing.

Great timing for him to start learning more about money.

I think you have some really awesome concepts and things to say.

So thank you.

I appreciate that.

I appreciate you, Kirsten, for giving me the

opportunity to talk to your audience.

I look forward to seeing you soon.

Thanks for listening to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you are ready to leverage video

marketing on all online platforms, or maybe even start your own video

podcast, then you need to check out the Done for You and Done with You program

at the marketing va advantage.com and take your business to the next level.