Adam Torres and Philip Farinacci discuss the Grant Cardone Foundation Pitch Competition.
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Show Notes:
Listen to coverage of the Grant Cardone Foundation Pitch Competition in Miami, Florida. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Philip Farinacci, Director of Philanthropy at Grant Cardone Foundation, explore the Grant Cardone Foundation and entrepreneurship.
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About Grant Cardone Foundation
The Grant Cardone Foundation, Inc. is a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation organized and operated exclusively for charitable purposes, including providing mentoring and financial literacy education for young adults in to underserved and at-risk populations, especially those who have lost their father.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and today I am in Florida at Grant Cardone’s headquarters. Let me tell you, I watched a pitch competition today. I judged a pitch competition today and the contestants, the students were absolutely amazing and I was able to snag Phil for a quick interview.
Phil, welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show, man. You’ve been on the show. Returner. Yeah, I’m excited to do this in person though. All right. So first off. You obviously work on these, you go to these pitch competitions. How do you feel when you leave one of these? Motivated, excited, you know, the future is bright.
We see a lot of negative stuff in the press and, and, and online. And when you have these kids come in and they pitch these business ideas and then get to take cold hard cash with them to put towards those businesses. Yeah. Just a sense of excitement and motivation. It’s just amazing to see these kids come through and, and the confidence for them to get up in front of everyone, to talk about what they care about.
You saw it today, a lot of emotion that’s involved. These are kids that they don’t just want to start a business. They want to make change. Yeah. I know. And it’s really cool to see. Speaking of cold, hard cash, something happened. I saw you like increasing the amounts. Like, tell me more about that. So we had committed to the first through third, first place was going to be 3000, second place, 2000.
Third place, 1, 000. We actually ended up having a fourth winner, an additional award of 2, 000. And one of our specialties here is we always go and want to go above and beyond. So when they come up on stage, we cross out that number and we double it. So we ended up giving 6, and then two 2, 000 awards. Yeah.
When Trinity told me about that, first thing I did was say, Hey, so lunch on you. Well, once, once the check clears, then we’ll have lunch. That’s what I said. She says I said, don’t worry. Grant’s not going to be mad. It’s okay. It’s just lunch. Why is it business? I’m dying. Oh, so. Today’s competition. I want to give the audience at home just a little bit of a flavor of some of the things you saw.
Maybe just a pitch or two or something like talk a little bit about the businesses a little bit. So you spoke about Trinity and she has an e sports program and she’s trying to break down some barriers that exist in that community and. I’m someone who dabbles a little bit in video games, just as kind of a pressure valve release, when I just want to do something that is not high pressure.
And, you know, there are times where you hear things and you experience things that are just not appropriate for different communities, right? And she’s trying to remove that. And she wants it to be more accessible, more opportunity for all people, no matter their background, no matter what they look like or their financial standing or their physical ability or intellectual, whatever the situation is, she wants e sports to be open to everyone.
And I think it’s a really beautiful thing. And I think that, you know, you said it in the competition, e sports is one of the fastest growing. Industries in the world we have whole stadiums now for e sports, right? I think that not only does she doing something she loves, but she’s trying to make a change.
I really appreciated her pitch. I thought she was excellent. And then we had our, our second place winner. She had a hair salon style program and business, and she’s actually started making money, right? Like I love when the kids come up and they have great ideas, but I even, I love even more when they come up and they’ve actually started it.
You know, we had. Last competition not today a young girl She she won first place and she actually has a trash can cleaning company And she showed a video of herself going into the trash can scrubbing it out. Are you kidding? Yeah, and she explained she’s already made a thousand dollars Wow, and she you know her Students in her class have given her a name that they thought was going to be making fun of her called Trash Girl.
And she’s taken that name and she owns it. And she is proud of that and she cleans the trash cans and she’s building her business. She’s in her grandmother’s community and her parents community and she loves it. And she’s a hard worker and she’s a rock star. Wow. What an amazing story. How does this make you feel for like the future of young entrepreneurs out there?
Cause you get to, I see it the way I see it is you have like this pipeline of just these entrepreneurs, these ideas, like, what does that make you feel about entrepreneurship in general? Yeah. I mean, I think it’s the future, right? I think it’s, it’s what runs or makes the country run, right? Like, yeah, I think that’s what America was built on.
And, and I think that these kids are embodying that and they’re taking these things in and, and they’re, Presenting their ideas, which what I really appreciate is the social impact of these businesses, right? Cause you have for profit and nonprofit, and a lot of these business ideas are merging the two. So not only are they going to be looking to make profit because we have to pay bills and we have to, you know, do that kind of thing, but also they, they want to help people, right?
It’s not just a service, right? You know, painting a house or a plumber or whatever it is, but they want to help society as a whole for the better based on things they’ve experienced. Yeah. You’re the director here at the Grant Cardone Foundation, so you’re day to day in the foundation, in the trenches, in the work.
Maybe talk a little bit about the foundation overall. Yeah, so the mission of the foundation is to provide financial literacy, mentorship, and entrepreneurship programming to at risk youth. And we focus on at risk and underserved communities. And so we bring in Title I schools, or we support Title I schools, which means that they get government funding in some capacity.
Yeah. Yeah. And then we also work with other nonprofits that focus on at risk and underserved communities. So just as an example, we’ll bring in schools to do mentor workshops, which is similar to what we did today, but rather than the kids pitching business ideas, they’re learning about financial literacy.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. So, you know, they’ll learn about, you know, Goals or mindset or wealth creation or a variety of different topics. I actually have a lot of text messages right now from teachers. The school just came back yesterday here in Miami Dade and Broward counties. And a bunch of teachers have started reaching out.
Hey, Phil, can we get back on the schedule here? We want to come into your, come into your workshop program. We want to come into the office. We’re exploding with events. We have nine events already on the calendar just for September. Whoa. And that number is probably going to increase to 10, 11, 12. Who knows?
We’ll see. We’ve. Over the course of the Grant Cardone Foundation’s history, the first three years of, of, of events was 21, 22, 23. There were about 32 events. This year, we’re going to break 50 just in one year. Fifty? Yeah. And so, we’re going to impact Approximately how many people? Like, this is So, it’s, it varies, right?
So, sometimes it’ll be 20, but usually we want to do up to a hundred. And our classroom can hold about a hundred students. And we want to have that many every time. Because, we want We know the impact that these events make, and we want to make sure that there’s enough seats or that those seats are full of people who, and kids who can benefit from it.
So we’re going to actually impact more than 2, 500 students this year alone. Geez, that’s a, that’s amazing. And I was looking at the website and there’s a lot of different ways the foundation’s helping, whether it’s a pitch competition, this, the books donated as well. Like there was an insane number on that one too.
We just breached 20, 000 books donated. Wow. Yeah. That actually just happened. We committed 3, 200 books to a charity in L. A. I got the email today with the picture of the FedEx box going out. It’s two pallets. Yeah. This is a big operation that’s going on. Oh, for sure. We’re shipping them across the country for, it’s called the Local Hearts Foundation.
And what they do is a, like a back to school backpack drive. And so they’re stuffing these backpacks with a bunch of different materials, even as simple as socks. L. A. is, I mean, I believe that’s where you’re, you’re located, right? So L. A. is a community that suffers from, you know, really unfortunate circumstances.
And so this group of people, group, they do a backpack drive where they give away 3, 000 backpacks every year to local students. And so we were fortunate enough to come into contact with them and we’ve donated those 3, 200 books. They’ll get them early next week. And then the event is that following Saturday.
So last thing I want you to do, Phil, I want you to look into the camera and tell other business owners, entrepreneurs, investors, Corporations, philanthropists, how do others get involved with the Grant Cardone Foundation? Yeah, so you can go to the Grant Cardone Foundation on our website, grantcardonefoundation.
com. You can reach out to info at grantcardonefoundation. com. Just shoot an email. We want to partner and work with everyone. It’s international. Yeah. We’ve, we’ve made a lot of financial contributions to programs in South Africa. We’ve donated our books across the country. One of our Our biggest initiatives right now is to donate 1 million Cardone University accounts to kids across the country and across the world.
A million. And I will be honest with you, when we hit a million, because we’re going to hit a million, we’re going to do more than a million. So as an example, we have a school in LA that wants to get 8, 000 accounts. So all I need for that is an email address. And per user, and then that account goes right into their email and, and they can benefit from a service and software and platform that people pay thousands of dollars to access.
They can have it for free through the Grant Cardone Foundation. Absolutely amazing. That’s, that’s wonderful to hear. First off, Phil, thank you for all that you do here. A lot of hard work putting this together today was such a smooth operation and it would just, I went off without a hitch. I mean, it was just so much fun.
Top class and it was also a first class and it was also and it’s also for, you know, high school aged children, but I’ve been to no offense thing, but that any other conference organizers, I’ve been to adult pitch competitions that did run this. And I, so I was, I was thoroughly impressed. And so thank you for that.
And to the audience, thank you for tuning in. We’re going to put the links and everything for Grant Cardone Foundation in the show notes. So you can just click on the links and head right on over and support and figure out ways that may make sense for you to partner as well. And speaking of the audience, if you haven’t done it yet, hit the subscribe button.
That subscribe or that follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow, and you get your notification tomorrow because we got another episode for you, Phil, man, appreciate all you do.
Thank you so much