If you could have a conversation with Tyler Perry, what do you think the self-made billionaire would tell you?
That’s what Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings revealed during a fireside chat at the 2024 ESSENCE Festival Of Culture about shifting money mindsets. The founders of wildly popular personal finance podcast Earn Your Leisure got candid about a question Perry asked that made reevaluate everything.
“Shout out to Tyler,” Bilal said. “It was funny how he phrased that question. He asked us what we had in plan, and we told him, and then he responded back, ‘That’s it?’ That forced us to think bigger. And he didn’t even have to really say anything after that.”
The longtime friends created the podcast in 2019 to help transform complicated financial topics into digestible enjoyable conversations, often humanized by some of their celebrity guests who offer an added layer of candor to the show. It has since grown into an international brand that includes an annual conference, Invest Fest, that’s attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees in just a few years. With that, it’s safe to say that the two have their foothold on the podcasting industry. Luckily, they were generous with their advice.
“I would encourage the people to, number one, keep your overhead low,” Millings shared. “Most people think, I’m going to start a podcast. I’m going to make millions of dollars, and then they get into the space and they’re thinking, I paid $6,000 to rent a studio, but I haven’t made a dollar for my actual show. We’ve actually documented this journey. We started out with iPhones. That was very intentional. We didn’t have cameras. We didn’t even know what it was to even produce a podcast. When we started, we just figured this thing out. We didn’t have a studio. We were doing it in my house. But also take imperfect actions. I think that’s one of the most important things. Rather than saying, I need the $2,000 camera, what do you have in your pocket right now? You got a phone? All right, cool.”
Millings went on to implore people to push past fear and actively pursue their aspirations no matter what.
“All that time that you wait, somebody’s perfecting their craft because you’re not competing against your neighborhood,” he said. “You’re competing against the world in this space. You’ve got to go get it.”