SINGLE MOM BUYS WATER PLANT & TURNS DOWN $20 MILLION

my graduates from my school being forbes back drop back drop my drop back drop all right guys welcome back ey else and this is exciting this is going to be an exciting conversation um for a few different reasons the industry that we haven't covered yet um and also it kind of ties back to the early stages of ey before we had uil so we'll explain the story but first and foremost paula mccarthy i'm an entrepreneur out of queens queens get the money queens get the money well well brooklyn bqe correction i love queens however brooklyn keyboard has raised me okay okay bqe connection um so this is interesting because so paula owns a water plant is that yeah it's i'm i'm a water manufacturer a water a water manufacturer um we'll explain the whole story but she was teaching financial literacy originally yep before you did that yes and um it was crazy because you said like you know just going on instagram while financial literacy you saw me teaching financial literacy at the same time yes and i followed you then i unfollowed you we'll get into that um i was so engulfed in what you were doing okay um i couldn't i couldn't do what i needed to do because i was like comparing what i was doing so what you were doing blackout block out the noise yeah i appreciate that i am all right all those those hot summer days paid off i appreciate that so yeah so it's an interesting story where she she uh found a water plant in upstate new york and she purchased the water plant and now she has a water company um so it's an interesting dynamic because you're talking about like you know natural resources and um it's not something that people really think about a lot and even when they do think about natural resources most of the time it's like oil yeah or gold but it's not something like water which is the most essential part of life yeah we need every day yeah it's essential you need water you don't need gas to live right because you need water to live absolutely there's no life without water and there's a scarcity of it there's a scarcity of it which makes it so even better yeah it's a trillion dollar industry yes it is a trillion dollar industry oh let's not brush over that so it's crazy somebody in this space is an entrepreneur that's actually you know in that in that space this is rare like i mean we've done over 125 episodes and we've never even in my mind i've never even thought of this as an industry so to hear that there's somebody that looks like us is from neighborhoods that we come from and that's in a space this is a this is a pleasure in the honor i'll be honest with you yeah for sure without further ado thank you for joining us appreciate it nope thank you for having me um i'm excited to be on the platform i think what you guys are doing um it's just amazing you have provided a platform where and a seat at a table um where we would not ordinarily have and you are bringing information to not just young people because initially it was young people but to our community um and with that access we are think like we're doing amazing things right so people can now plan for gen and plan to build generational wealth through this platform i think you guys are um doing something extraordinary i appreciate it yeah so so let's let's get into it all right so let's start at the financial literacy stage and then we'll move to the water so how did you start in a career of teaching financial literacy all right uh so 2017 september my twin boys were going into high school with that um i went to the school and i was like you know i need to get them into a mentorship program the school told me they had no mentorship programs i went on a rant and i started to tell them you know about the prison to jail pipeline and i'm like this is why our kids can compete if they can't compete locally how are they going to compete globally and i just went on a rant the assistant principal was like look we don't have a program but if you want to volunteer to teach a program you may so i thought to myself absolutely not i cannot i do not have time for this i'm a single mother i work 12 hour shifts i have no time for this um i just finished reading the book uh a long walk to freedom nelson mandela's book and it was so annoying because in my head it was just like be the change you want to see and i was like so mad at myself and i'm like you know what give me a month i'm going to study and i'll come back i need to know what i'm going to teach so i went home and i started doing research and i just started finding i made like fun games on budgets and i did fun just just finding fun things to do and trying to make the class uh fun i go back a month later i stole someone's name offline it was like financial sense that was the name of my business initially i'm like okay we're gonna steal this um i went in there started speaking to the kids and we did the program we did the first workshop and they were so engaged at the end of this first workshop i left and the little girl was like miss mccarthy i wasn't going to sell candy but now i'm going to sell two boxes the school had a candy drive after that a little boy came up to me he was like miss mccarthy you changed my life you really inspired me and that changed the trajectory of my life it it impacted me more than it impacted them um because i saw how because i saw how much it changed them it changed me yeah at this time you were actually practicing you were a nurse i'm a nurse by profession so it was on my days off that i was doing these financial little literacy classes excuse me so i would do my three hours try to do my three hour shifts and then do my classes around my shift yeah and the reason i'm bringing it up is because i just had this conversation another day with a dear friend of mine and i'm like uh the next time i talk to you i want to hear about what you created yeah and even though you had a full-time career like you said you're a single mom you still find a time to create you saw that there was a need and he said i have to make the time to create and creating change your life i really want to you want to but i did it um again i fell into it right so i came back we did the workshops other schools found out about what i was doing in the building and what i thought was going to be a class about just financial literacy my first class actually was about um the transition um it was more about the power of thought i read think and grow rich and i started reading these books and i started bringing those elements into the classroom so my first class was about the power of thought and then i honestly started doing these other little things with budgeting and stuff like that but i had them thinking differently um and if you see like my whole entire tagline is transition begins with the renewing of your mind and i know that's pretty much what you guys believe as well because i um i know that to be true because i've heard you say something very similar you have to change the way they think right and for me it was how can i create a system within a system that's set up against us and that's what i was really trying to go in and do yeah i think uh we had the same that conversation was like we were working inside of a system that we knew didn't really help or prepare our kids for anything that we could see that was substantial long term and so are we complicit in the failure and so it was like all right well that's the reason we did the summer program it was because we know that the kids need this it's not being taught and so we'll build that from there the only problem was that we were in this one place and i knew that the kids in the inner city needed it too and so it was like how do we scale it yes and so when you started with one program how did it go from one school to the next it was that the vendor license piece so no uh other schools so you know how they're breaking up all the schools or like four and one so we had four schools in one building and it went from like one school to two thousand kids in this one school other schools heard about what we were doing and i went to this other school it was a private school and more affluent schools throughout the city and i went to this one school and their eighth graders were going to morocco for their senior trip and i'm like yeah they don't need me here if you're going to morocco for your senior trip this is not where i need to be right so i ended up sticking to underserved schools so i went to brooklyn and i was trying i'm literally knocking on doors trying to make appointment with the principals and no one wanted to really no one was really interested when i went to these schools they were telling me that they're tertiary tertiary schools and they can't afford it what is a tertiary school a tertiary school meaning like their tier three school so that their budgets are so small that they can't fit me into their budget right so i um i was like you know what i'm going to start a foundation that was like a wash so we do have the financial literacy and we also have a non-profit leg but i thought oh you know money's just going to come and funnel into this non-profit but that didn't happen either so once other schools heard about what we were doing we ended up in a school in harlem an elementary school a middle school in brooklyn and a high school with the 20 with the 2 000 kids in queens so that was pretty much our pilot program d.o.e reached out to me i did a lot of um workshops for their teachers and stuff like that so they were like come out show us what you're doing so i got a lot of interest in a lot of schools we're supposed to be in a good amount of schools in brooklyn queens and harlem in september january comes um our pilot program starts we're in all our schools and then covet hits well this is january 2020 2020. oh wow january 2020 in the middle of our uh pilot program covet hits and we have do you know our program stops it's at a halt so i'm home working as a case manager doing nursing from my kitchen table hating every minute of it um but making the most money i've made in nursing as well really yeah sitting at home i was not in the midst of everything else i was literally just hating my job all the same because i could not move from my table um at that point what happens next my boys again my boys my boys start new york water boys on march 31st which is their birthday they start a water distribution company my i think one of my sons was like going through depression at the time and i went to a church and so crazy i go to this church and this lady goes you know there's a prophet and he's prophesizing over all the kids you should go to this church i go to this church and i meet this guy and well he's a pastor not necessarily a guy so i meet this pastor who starts working with my kids and he started the largest um recycling plant in south africa and he leaves south africa to come to new york because god told him that he should do 24-hour worship centers so he come to new york i meet him in this church and he start he becomes my friend and he starts working with my son and he comes from this um water distribution background so he starts working with my son and he's like why don't we sell water they go out on the street i call everybody i know oh the boys are starting a water company everybody that i know buys and then after that um we kind of exhaust you know exhaust everyone we know they start selling to the local bodegas um and then 21 supermarkets they get a contract with 21 supermarkets once they get this contract with the 21 supermarkets i'm like this can fund my non-profit well how are they what water were they selling it was selling pull in spring but like to supermarkets though like where they're getting from we've got it from bj's i gave them sixteen hundred dollars okay i had access to a church van because now i'm friends with this pastor okay i paid a hundred dollars a week for the church van and they started selling pallets of water like bj's knew them as the new york water boys they would let them in lines were down the block people couldn't get water we would we're getting pallets and hundreds of people so they were so bj so uh the grocery stores couldn't get it cheaper than what bj's selling it for they couldn't get water right this was like this is like the first three weeks of colvin this is like coveted period because we did this well into may yeah so i so i i got you so they they start this business they come up with the idea they get the 1600 they to get the bj's order at this time they're making home delay so they're doing home deliveries local bodegas and then they get the contract how are they finding the people like pretty much word of mouth we did a couple of facebook ads i paid for that um and they that's how they initially started getting people and then people were just calling us for water but then as we got water in the trucks um i also rented a truck after they the van thing um we needed a bigger vehicle so i got a truck i rented a truck that was in the neighborhood and we would just stop at the local bodegas not we they would um because that wasn't my thing but they were doing it once i saw how much money they were making though i was like i can fund my non-for profit they were making like i don't even want to i want to tell you they were making a few thousand dollars a week selling water selling water but they were again 20 they were cases cases they were selling pallets um i want to say upwards of that because it was so scarce that people was paying people were paying higher so if we bought okay and then it was like sometimes it depends on who we sold it to right so if we sold it to you and we sold a case the profit margins were way smaller and it was sometimes like a dollar even right well not when we sold it to you though so if you want to if we went to bj's and bought a case for say what are they like six dollars and change or something like that and two dollars bottle deposit we'll sell it to you for twelve dollars yeah right that's a hundred percent yeah proper margin yeah so what why so that i guess the people how come the the store owners just didn't go to bj's themselves they just didn't have enough time time access they couldn't get in if you remember the line so they think everyone has to stand online they let your sons in like priority because that because we were buying so much water um i went in there spoke to the managers and worked out a deal yeah and i'm getting flashbangs i remember how it was it was a scarcity toilet paper that was the first thing exactly then you had to wait like i remember my mom wanted to go to sam's it was i told her like we you got to go at 6 00 yeah there's no other time and i don't know people if you didn't live in new york you might not fully appreciate how bad it was like at that time in march april like i remember going to the grocery store and it felt like doomsday 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it was yeah yeah it was bad yeah so that's crazy so you worked out a deal with the manager you got in probably like early like before the store open what we did we were there see now it makes sense you want this is brooklyn yeah it's not this is that you know what happened was um they were letting them wait online but we were purchasing that you know when you can buy it on on online and then just go and pick up so we were doing that so you didn't have to wait on the line if you were pre-ordering right so i would buy hundreds of cases from different uh phones and different accounts so we would set up a bunch of accounts and he would pick up a hundred pallets he would pick up a hundred pounds he would pick up a hundred pallets so we were getting hundreds of pallets of a day but they were making so much money how old are they yeah 20 20. now they're 20 at that time they was on their 2 18th birthday 19th birthday thanks their birthday's coming up they're twins they're going to be 21 on the 31st the new york quarterback a little different from the atlanta waterfalls yeah [Laughter] um so you're doing this and you're not doing this hand-in-hand like on fordham road like you actually got a system in place where you're selling cases of water you're like frank lucas like just on the bundle exactly what we did once they did that um when when they went to the supermarket association what they did was was like look um we have water you don't have water we can sell it to you at it like even a dollar marker but we can bring you hundreds of cases a day because we had those relationships right so we would go outside you said supermarket association i'm thinking the same so what was that what's that came i'm supporting everything that they're doing right so it's my money it's it's their they're doing the labor pretty much right but i'm helping them while they're doing it so i call the supermarket association i'm calling everybody um and trying to figure this out so once what is the supermarket association i even know that that existed yeah supermarket associations a couple things that i just learned too like supermarket association like they all belong to like you know a neighborhood watch or neighborhood association where you have all the supermarkets belonging to one even like a union right um so they belong to one association so all the supermarkets in our area uh belong to this like i belong to the um the national water association so all of the water companies subscribe to this one association and they'll give you like um the up-to-date regulations and stuff like that right so i subscribe to that so same thing okay so we called the supermarket association and they're like yeah we love this story well i told the supermarket association max once i saw how much money they were making would you carry a private label water to fund our nonprofit so they loved our story and they were like sure well but what i've learned since then that you actually have to pay for shelf um pay for space on the shelf when you interview masterpiece shout out to james and he told us that um shout out to rap snacks they told us and that's the first time i heard that well you have to actually pay to be in the grocery store i didn't know that yeah and the location inside of it right so you could be in the out 13 way in the back or you could have some of your snacks right at the register yep for 35 000 and upwards is that what it is at the register upwards wow if you want a space on a shelf is about like say if you go down like a water aisle it starts at about 35 000 wow right so and i had to learn that i had i learned that through water though so i didn't even know that when we first started they were like yeah they'll just carry it because it was more so they liked what the water would represent and do for the community right you had private you so you this is when you're starting the water company yourself when once they told me yes i was like all right let me start sourcing some water companies right to do a private label water brand i didn't have a water brand at that time i had nothing it was just like all right they'll do it right i had the i had the um the company before i had the product okay so i was like i'm not we're doing this for this company right let me try to do on my own because i mean even when you said the private label the last time we heard that was amazon shout out to josh chris charles christopher out to him i mean it was like we would they would find products whether it be a comb or a hair clip and that that was private label but never thought would you come up with the idea like water that was my friend my friend who was a pastor he used to do water distribution in south africa so this was him doing it with the boys and then in turn i'm like hmm can i do this like it's a way to get the private label it's just this company that just sell water so what we did was we found this we started calling we went on the department of health and we found companies based on their quality of water so we started calling people based on how great the water was right how do you know the quality reviews it tells you it tells you in the department of health and reviews right so it tells you what kind of water tells you what's in the water they all have um lab reporting that you have to do so you can see the content in water right which we don't really pay much attention to but i think new york has one it was like raider number three it's like the state no you're talking about tap water please don't ever drink tap water oh man um we're gonna get into tap water spring water distilled water and all these other waters yeah yes we shall so all right so this so let's bring this back a little bit for people uh private labeling like i said shout out to josh he's the first one to told us about this this is important for people to understand what you're talking about so there's companies that sell and his thing he does amazon yeah so he was saying like you know you just see random things like nail filers staplers um lint rollers it's good to sell on amazon because you can nobody nobody's looking for a gucci lint roller nope unless you're like a rapper that's a different it's a different story but you just buying a lint roller right so you could i could just put a shovel out rolling company but there's there's a company in china that just makes lint rollers in bulk yeah and then you private so you buy it and now you can just put your thing and now it's like nobody knows that you didn't make it yep it's just it's private label and when he said that it was so genius because it's like thousands of items like that where a label does not matter no so like we do we could do manufacturing right now our factory we can do private labeling so again we will kind of get into that too but we can do private label water so if you want or in your leisure water we can do i think i like the way that sounds yeah yeah derek great shout out to derek he got grace essential water you know you know him no essential water so all right all right so now how do you find the company that you can get the private label from what's the process for that so i literally just call these people up um we find their number and we're just randomly cold calling from the department of from healthy up department of health and i'm calling their numbers on there right so what's we're in the midst of it as well right so most of the water companies number one are owned by larger companies like coca-cola owns like design and aquafina right pepsi owns um smart water so a lot of these big companies own these smaller companies right so i found like some independent companies so they do about 86 000 gallons of i mean 80 yeah 86 000 gallons of water per hour who does pepsi oh coca-cola they're not going to take stop their uh production lines to do a hundred bottles for you right for earlier leisure water a thousand they're not doing that so um i called companies after companies that are like no thank you that's not what we do that those orders are way too small right um so i find this one company they're called moxie's llamas waterworks right i go out there and i'm like all right i call her and she's like i'm in el salvador she's stuck in el salvador she can't come back because there's no flights coming in out in and out in or out of the country so she's like call me back in may so i'm like all right i'm waiting but i'm thinking let's call other companies because i don't know if the water tastes anything like what i'm used to and you and i just spoke about what our um standard is right so i'm comparing it to this one water and i call her back in may and she's like you know i still can't come back but you could come if you want to my parents are at the factory you can go to the factory because my thing is i need to taste the water we're waiting on this water company and we don't know if we like the water um because i am a water snob like water tastes different true right that's true um so i go out there i pack my family in the car and i'm like let's go taste water we have nothing to do we're looking at each other let's go taste water we go out there and the company is being ran by a 79 year old and an 81 year old and i'm like look i want to do this um for my financial literacy course where where'd you go i went upstate new york okay robot about about 20. it's 20 minutes outside of old i want to say the town but i know i'm about to post skill right so we go out to post and kill um and we meet the 79 year old and 81 year old and they're like yeah we're in the mountains and they're like we would love to do this but we don't have the capacity they don't have they have one person who comes in who volunteers to help them and they don't have the capacity we needed two tractor trailers to support our order with the us with the supermarket association so i'm like okay fine we literally go back up there for weeks on end to help them um to start with my kids and i started going up there and helping them to bottle because they just had no help at this point we knew that they couldn't support our bottling we just knew that they they needed help right their business was suffering and they were having their own issues so we started helping them with that once we go up there they're like look we can't do it but we could sell it to you and i'm like the plan the plan i'm like i don't want to buy a water what's in the water plant so um they sold they were selling 50 acres of land um an aquifer is an underground lake so to speak right our water water that grows underground yeah it doesn't grow but this drive yeah water underground right [Laughter] water water that uh flows underground right that's the word yeah so what happens is we're in a valley so the water from the tops of the mountains come down and it goes under this you know just like these underground caves so to speak they're underground like you don't know they're there don't blame me blame the school system exactly i'm just a product of my environment so earth science i know i don't know i was really good at science but um more anatomies that's that's my thing oh body physical therapy major oh yeah yeah yeah so water grows they come it comes from the mountains yep and it comes not valley valley valleys but how does it go underground because it's going it goes down down the valley it goes through the soil through the interior it goes down and it's like a big reservoir it's just a natural reservoir underground yeah it's like when people swim in freshwater caves yep exactly i've been to mexico you know whole mexico the whole um chichanitsa right around those um those mayan ruins the whole entire city was built around the water sources and if you know anything like most civilizations were built around water sources right very important so very important so and you can tell a lot about uh the economies um usually flourish around places that have really um well-established water sources right so even america our water sources started out in new york and on on on the coast right in it right so in the past most of the cities yeah the coast yeah so you could tell a lot about a country based on its water source right it's essential to everything that we're doing right so if and and that's interesting in itself because as i got into this water space and i started to do research um that's when i found out about the scarcity of water because i knew nothing about water just like many of us we're not talking about water we drink it we use it and that's it right we actually abuse it and that's it we don't even understand that most of the planet is 97 water right but it's salt water right that's true most of the planet is i'm incorrect it's 70 water right 70 water but of that 97 of it is salt water right um two percent of it is in glaciers and ice caps so it's not usable for us but less than one percent of water is fresh drinkable attainable accessible water and that in itself is crazy because of that one percent seventy percent of that goes to agriculture twenty percent of that goes to industries and the rest is human consumption and this is why it's like um people in america have such a um disconnect with the rest of the world because it's like we just like having random water slides in our diagnosis bucket challenge you know what i'm saying reckless guys super soaker fights that's really like starving for water like six miles to get a bucket like it's different yeah two-thirds of the world don't have access to clean drinking water that's more than 1.2 billion people not having access to clean uh drinking water so when i got into the space again i didn't recognize how valuable what i had was i thought hey i'm going to taste water i keep saying this i did not go to buy anyone's water plant i went to taste water and when they told me about buying the plant i'm like look miss i am a nurse i have no money to first buy your plant like there's no way this is not it's nothing that i thought that i could even attain right and i've never even heard about anyone purchasing or buying or owning a water plant and nobody black to that right so i'm not think i'm not thinking anyone in our community could own something like this because we're known as consumers right so how long was that process from you helping to them offering you to buy was it a couple weeks i mean i'm thinking to myself i'm from queens i'm driving to albany that's like a three-hour drive three-hour drive every week almost i mean during corona so i mean there really wasn't much to do anyway but we're the only ones the only ones on the road but how long did the process take for the was there like a trust built with you now that you're helping and you're volunteering so you know what so when i went there they offered to sell it to me the first time they were like look if we love what you're doing if you want it we'll sell it to you um i'm like there's no way i could even afford this so it wasn't a thought so i was just going how much do they want to sell it for um it was a couple million okay all right yeah okay so that's right so it's coming with the plant and the land as well so again this is where it kind of got a so when i first went there was 50 acres of land an aquifer and this water plant the minute i agreed to purchase it and went from 50 to 15 acres of land the aquifer and um the water plant so they cut back when the acres of land they kept everything else but they cut back on the land okay they meaning the owners the owners so you agree to that i agreed to it because at that point so my kids and i uh we moved up there in july okay and i worked with them for five months for free i i we literally helped i would bottle um my kids would do all their deliveries and they they had no help so me thinking that i'm helping it's it's like what what's happening in queens are we still doing supermarket deliveries out there since we moved up no so no are you still being a nurse at this time no for okay we're full in so i'm fully in i've got a leave of absence don't tell them i don't think about that i took a medical video um uh so i'm doing that and i'm up here and i'm helping right so i'm i'm fully in i'm doing the administrative things my boys are doing the deliveries and my friend who's also a pastor moves up here with us and i brought them him and his family again his family i didn't i don't think i said his family was uh just got here like three days before they shut down um traveling corona so i got them apartment upstairs we got an apartment we started renting out there we all started going out there and helping right so the plan was at this point let us learn the business to see if we can do this while we're in the process i'm trying to get the money to start this business so eventually i use my house as collateral to put a down payment on this property so you refinanced your house um i've refinanced my house something like that something like that not really okay so i took um so what did what did you do that was my question how did like did you get a bank loan like nope i did all of this without a bank law okay so this is the dope part um i went to people and i'm like look i was able to raise 130 000 in two days from people from people friends friends and family what's up with our friends man every time somebody speaks they got friends buying this and no yeah we got good friends i'm saying like 10 years ago well it's not 10 years ago your friends got no friends that's true that's true no new friend sorry i um i literally went out and i i was able to raise a hundred and actually it was more like 150 because i tried to keep 20 for um working capital did they become owners of the company no just like a loan yep i got 130 000 in two days and i came back to them and i'm like look okay i'm gonna do this i'm gonna buy it from you but at that point um he changed the deal again no that's when he changed it to 50 when i got the money he thought she was playing he thought i was playing right so when i came back and i'm like okay i could do this right yeah um again it's really hard for me because i'm like they were really gracious and at the same time very i don't know they were very vicious business people i was i am always going in and thinking the best of people and these were shrewd business people um and because they were older i was pretty much like oh they're so nice i think everyone's so nice but they were shrewd business people and at the end when we got to the closing table october 1st we closed um they changed again what's going on earners welcome to eyl university the number one place for business education shall we tell them what we're bringing yes ewy university already has over 100 past webinars from all areas of business it includes weekly webinars from industry leaders it includes access to our investment facebook group movie club our book club it also includes access to monthly financial planning calls with yours truly but what has been added has access to mg the mortgage guys home buyers blueprint over 14 hours everything you need to know as far as the home buying process is concerned and also what has been added is access to our monthly group chat calls so once a month me troy and the whole team is gonna let you in on our personal plays our portfolio what we're doing and more so all of that we are running for a special promo code of 70 off for a limited time only so head to eyluniversity.com right now and take advantage you know this works don't wait don't hesitate we'll see you on the other side so couple things um i bought everything i bought the trademark i bought their licensing i bought everything i bought a two a 25 year old company i bought 250 customers and a truck right so that all came with 15 acres of land an aquifer and a factory right and you bought the company you didn't start a new company no i bought a 25 year old company what's the name of the company moxie llamas waterworks but when we got to the closing table um they told me that one i don't look like a ceo are they white yes okay and two i don't look like a good representation of the brand that their family has built for the past 50 years okay because you're black or okay did they say because you're black i would have actually they just said my children and i don't look like a good wrestler but did you ask them did you actually do that i did it um i was hurt because i rolled up my sleeves and i helped them so they flat out said like that's that's hard like that's that's kind of crazy if you think about it like they ain't even sugarcoat it you don't look like you don't look like it that's crazy like but at the it was their daughter more than them the daughter said it did she that she made it back from el salvador that's just something back so they did in june she came back in june so she came back on song nah so i think what are y'all doing they did not want to tell the daughter tell the family that they were selling the water plant to a black person so i don't even know if it had anything to do with black or white at that point i think the family wanted to keep the water plant um but they wanted to sell okay and i guess the relationship that them and i had foster and i was helping them they were trying to sell this company for 10 years and no one could see the value in what they had because on paper it didn't make sense on paper it looked like a 79 year old and an 81 year old were running a company they were self-employed they were not in business they were self-employed and i think people need to understand there's a big difference between being self-employed and running a business and many of us in our own in our communities we're self-employed even when you have a business we're self-employed when you train when you trade your time for money no systems in place that's a fact when you trade your time for money you're self-employed systems yes save your time save yourself time energy and money energy and money right what say it again save yourself time energy and money save yourself yourself is one word right yeah this is another school system this is a no this is the thing no but it's not correct i know but it's the way to remember bro you never heard that yes but it's saved it saves you stress time and energy he's a teacher quadrant that um robert kawasaki from rich dad poor dad so really good book i have my kids reading in our program like i think a cool thing to do is give them literature that they would not ordinarily read and that's what um i did in the financial literacy program it wasn't necessarily about teaching them about money it was about this very thing is teaching them how to manage their resources and that's that that was super important for me um so on long story short we closed finally on october 1st so how did all right so they said that they unit wasn't a good representation of that how did they get over that um they needed my money and they took it that's how my money was great so but i mean how would that come like when you say okay well i'm not buying and then okay we changed my mind like so when we're at the closing table it's a lot there's a lot that i don't want to like expose because it's their personal stuff so i don't really want to get too much into that i want to be respectful of that but they needed the money okay okay so it was just something so it wasn't everything when they thought about it it's like all right you know what it's not they took my money made the money they needed my money they took my money and then um after they gave me a very hard time after they took your money how did it why they didn't want to sign over the llc which i paid for would they say we're not giving to you they just drug their feet right they i have to wait on them so legally they held onto those documents and i just had to wait so you can even operate the business even though you have bought or what we were doing everything any which way right yeah so because technically in my closing um the minute that i asked for it they have to effectuate it and they're supposed to sign so um that was that was just very interesting and the hardest part of this whole thing because what i did was foster a relationship with them it wasn't even so much i didn't go there to buy a water plant right i didn't i didn't know that their water plant was for sale i didn't go there for those purposes um but i understand that the god that i serve is also a perp i'm i'm very much in this space where i understand that i was being positioned and it was for purpose much bigger than me yeah yeah so okay so all that's done you but so you put your house can you talk about that like what does that mean you put your house for collateral did they take your house or no i took a loan out again took a loan against your house and then you paid the loan back over the course of time okay yeah so you have you have the situation now you're up and running yep okay now what so we close october 1st 2020 and in the state of new york i'm the first black woman to own and run a spring water bottling plant so i'm thinking this is great this must be like you know um going to be easy he stays on contractually for six months um to help us through this transition and then he decides not even he um i go to the bank and try to get a loan um i purchased this company it's 25 years old and i'm thinking i should be able to get a loan it has been the hardest thing ever um number one it was in the mr corona when they if you didn't have a business prior to corona the banks were not loaning or lending money right so that became an issue secondly um they would not give me the llc so i had to i had to uh get a lawyer get a lawyer yeah that was that just do you have the llc now yeah okay did the bank ever give you a loan no we still haven't given you no so everything we've been doing we've been doing on my on my own wow yeah so all right so what's the day-to-day operations of running a water company so cool thing is so when they were in business they were only working at five percent capacity this business they were working on a monday for four hours 16 hours a month and they were grossing about 130 hours a month yes six but they were 79 and 81 but they were living off of the money that they were making what's five percent capacity what's that equivalent to like 100 bottles our factory is about 25 000 square feet yeah we have two production lines one production line does five gallon bottles four gallon bottles three gallon bottles it's adjustable right that's that one line there's another line that does one gallon bottles your one liters your 16 ounce bottles your eight ounce bottles so they're two production lines they were only utilizing the five gallon uh bottles so those are your five gallon reusable bottles you'll see them at your local doctor's office and you know like if you go to your range rover dealership it's where you go press your hot and cold get your coffee you know those big jugs they're in that business right okay so we were delivering and picking up those waters we recycle we rinse and we reuse those bottles it's a very lucrative business because you get to recycle the bottles you recycle used water bottles the water bottles what does that mean you recycle it to make new bottles no no no so our bottles go onto a conveyor belt they're washed and they're reused refilled so a lot of times when you drink water from those those big jugs they're five gallon jugs they go through our factories they go in through a machine and then uh they're sanitized and then there's those jugs yeah yeah so you you don't drink from those jobs so you you yeah so you no we should we should so when you when you get that so you're i'm thinking now since those people were already in existence those customers did you get all the customers that they're 150 customers we have some really big customers walmart's our customer uh toyota for ford um fish farm we have a fish farm so like a lot of the fish that we consume are in our supermarkets they're farm-raised so they're not unless you buy wild caught they're farm-raised so we have huge huge uh fish fish so so what does walmart buy from you the same tank the same same thing like what like what five gallon bottles five gallons it's not labeled with anything yeah they're moxie llama water well they buy your do you have can you like if we want to earn your leisure water can you give us absolutely could do earn your leisure water because what we are as a manufacturer right so i do have customers like throughway beverage is one of our customers we simply just fill their water bottles they come in they bring their water bottles they'll come with the tractor trailer drop their truck their um their bottles off we do the same thing they'll come up and pick up about i want to say about 10 pallets you slap the labels on yeah our machine not me amino machine yeah our machine so what happened well that's for if you come in with a five gallon bottle i would purchase the bottles for you and our uh bottling company will have them pre-labeled so they could be silk screen or we'll put them on so it depends on on what we're doing for you right so i have this one through through my beverages they do about 2 000 bottles a week so they'll bring 2 000 bottles drop them off on a monday we fill them they come back on a tuesday wednesday and they'll pick them back up so we have a lot of beverage warehouses that do just that so when you're at the closing table we'll come back to this for a second because this originally started with the new york water boys this originally started with the new york water boys at the table are they owners of this as well or is this mom and now my sons are working here with the potential to have equity down the road so this is me okay um i own the factory the water plant um and the land the business my uh partner and i went in 50 50 on uh the business but i've since bought him out and my boys are in charge of distribution but my boys are in charge of distribution so they're in charge of logistics and roots so every time water goes out um that's what they're in charge of so okay they're still new york water boys they're just their distribution lag of our company so now you're sitting on um water so the water keeps refurbishing itself right is that correct we have um and we had a hydrology report that was done about 25 years ago we're kind of due for a new one that gave us a 300 year lifespan and we get about 89 million gallons of water in this aquifer that passes through every year so we never deplete our aquifer which is pretty interesting because most aquifers um like again i was telling you about the different way that water is dispersed and access to water so we have about three percent of water that's underground 0.3 of water that's underground but with this aquifer ours are is always replenishing because of where we are a lot of places just have reservoir reservoirs and these aquifers and they dry up over time but ours because of where we are in new york where we get a lot of rainfall and where we are we get our water just continues to fall we also have an artesian well artesian stream i should say on our property what is our t insurance artesian water is um water that has minerals in it so it's just a regular stream water water mineral water so you know whether it's artesian water your fiji water is artesian water okay right um and what i have is spring water and in order for us to be spring water that this aquifer has to naturally spring up to the top and to the surface and that's what i have so these this couple had this land for 50 years they started hurting llamas the llama kept going to this one spot and he couldn't figure out why this llama kept going to this one spot and then he figured out that the water was springing to the surface so that's how he found out he had that spring so this is incredible what's the process of um all right you have the water in your spot and then it goes you have to clean the water to actually get no um it just goes straight into a bottle so the water does go through a ozonation process and it does go through what's the ozone oh is it you know like the ozone layer is it um so it does it kills 99 of bacteria and viruses it's not a chemical actually but there is an ozonation process that happens um it goes through so the water i i just did a video on this too yesterday i'm going to put it up so we have a well that pumps to the the actual spring what they did was cement it so it can be contaminated right so it's actually cemented but they ran a pipe and the pipe then pumps the water back to the factory and then we have a thousand gallon uh you know container that has the water uh once the water goes in there it's then filtered through a cold system um a charcoal system and then it goes through our ozonation process what what is the ozonation process is it um oh it's just the ozone is the chemical is oxygenated in ozone and it cleans it's like a gas put something inside of the tank to clean the water a little bit nothing inside the water so it's like a gas the water goes through um i don't know even how to know to explain it better so i'm trying to visualize it so it's going through a process we went through the cold now it's really just because it's a purify it's a purifying right but our water quality is a pie cream again i found them because of the premium the quality of the water was it rated you said that you were going to taste it yeah it was rated a five out of a five right okay so it's really high quality so it's what that it means is the tds level it has very low tds total dissolve uh solutes so there's a lot is there's not a much in the water naturally because of where it is it's naturally filtrated through a sand and gravel bed i also have a gravel pit too on my property so it is naturally filtrated through this sand and gravel so by the time it gets to this aquifer it's so refined right but it does go through a sanitation process very minimal right so we don't add any chemicals no chlorine oh so nothing because it's already so it's already so pure but we do like hit it with this gas to just um just to make sure there's no viruses or bacteria in there and so from that point does it go into the bottles and so they will run it at a five percent capacity yep what is it what's the number when it's at i guess are you running at 100 yet no not yet so where are we at so we're at we're not even nearly up to capacity um we've just been servicing our clients right so while we're in the position we're rebranding because i am not going out in the world as moxie so we're rebranding um we need to update our machinery there's a lot that needs this super antiquated right what's the new what's the new name so it's going to be yes water yes water yes yss so it's youth saving society okay okay so that was the original name for the financial financial literacy courses saving society so it'll be yes water okay uh-huh okay um how many people working yeah so this was a dope part so we need a daily birth and i went to a local church and i'm like hey i need some guys can you send me some guys i get two guys and um i never i didn't do a background check i'm just like you know we just need daily birth so they come in they actually end up being formally incarcerated guys and they started coming in to work with us i'm like i didn't know that even i asked them to pick up some furniture from new york city they couldn't go he kept giving me the run around then he comes and tells me that he has an ankle bracelet and he needs to get permission from his parole officer in order to go once he does this it opens up another can of worms so we have financial literacy on the first end the water's supposed to support our financial literacy and now i'm doing something else for programming with the department of corrections to create a system where they can actually work and um i don't have a living quarters so it can't be a halfway house but we're creating programming so they can have substantial amount of money to transition back into society so i'm in the process of working through do i see with that right now too that's good yeah so you got the d-o-e d-o-c a lot of deals i'm a doer though so even if i don't know how to do it i'm i'm that person who understands like i need to put the right people in place to do like that's just i'm i'm the door so you got two people that's working there that's actually following the water yep on our water days yes there's machines that's actually doing they're just like doing the leg work yeah yeah um i was just saying sort of the boys are distributing what's on the distribution what's the the radius of how far they're going so we're upstate new york and they go as far as uh lake george are you familiar with like georgia upstate new york part of it yeah it's the largest lake in the state right yeah so interestingly like we supply most of lake george like george we even have great adventures as one of our clients so lake georgia six flags great adventures own great escapes upstate new york so we don't come down to jersey they own uh great escapes upstate so they're also our clients so he had a really substantial business and our clientele was really great as well um it was just he was just not maximizing what he had and again for him it was maxed right so they only could do so much they did where we are it's very rural we're in the mountains so it's very hard to get people to come up and work and stay up there unless you live up there right so so okay so the natural resource play um all right let's talk about this water there's different types of water right distilled water spring water what's the science behind that just basically the source of it right so artesian water just mean it has minerals in it and that's usually from a lake it has to be spring in water for it to be spring water has to spring to the surface for it to be spring water distilled water is processed water that means it's just boiled and they use a process of osmosis to separate your solutes which are your solids from your water and then they take the solid so you would hear a lot of companies say and and again oh it's better because it's more refined um we would beg to differ right so our water should have some elements and some natural elements and and um in it because that's we're made of of those natural metals right so you do need some sorts of metals in your water so i would definitely look at that too you don't want water that is so refined that you take out all of the properties that your body actually needs and that's my nursing detail telling you that purified and distilled same thing different purified is pretty much the same so the best one is the best water is spring water there's no there's no best water right so best water uh natural spring water is natural natural water is better than distilled water right so again okay so it's like yeah like the periodic table all the stuff is coming back to school i remember yeah i don't remember i remember what you're talking about i should have paid more attention i tried so like in in texas when people like um strike oil and it's like they can get brought out by like exxon and get like hundreds of millions of dollars like can something like that happen in the water business as well i have been offered millions and millions of dollars for you from my factory already already but that was but how come the other people were they not offered that yes right so they were uh poland spring tried to buy them um and so just water tried to buy them so some companies did try to buy them but he didn't want to buy it out so i'm we're one of very few independent um water companies left we have these large conglomerates that are buying up water sources and they're bolting them so what does that look like december 7th uh 2020 water is a commodity and it's being so um traded on the nasdaq that's a fact that is a fact right yeah so that's something to look at um goldman sachs in 2000 i want to say 18 said that water will be the new petroleum that's very scary too right so there's obviously something that they see and they know and we're always the last to find out so this is a i mean it's a water story but this is like a gold mine yeah it's a yeah so you're opposed to selling i am not going to sell like we come from i want to move and change this narrative that we don't own anything um if there is going this so water so scarce we saw what happened in flint right we saw what happened in even new mexico we see what happened in africa in northern africa all parts of africa so again i was telling you before that the largest part of the clean water source goes to our agriculture seven percent so if we don't have clean water if we don't have clean water we can't sustain life without water it's very essential it's essential you know israel um you heard what they what they're doing what they're taking drinking water yep but um again that's an amazing amazing right but if you look at desalination it's super expensive takes a long time to do and the amount of energy that it costs to do that it doesn't make sense because they're taking their clean water to exhaust so industry is the second sector so the first sector most of our money goes i mean our water goes to is agriculture the second sector industry so your clothes your technology your computers your cameras um our self everything goes through this and we oil steel all of these things use clean water and and then what do they do they in turn then dump that pollution back into our clean water systems which even like so we have a real problem we only have how bad is the problem we have a real problem i think people need to know like how like if they can understand like okay in 100 years we're dead like all right so they're predicting wars are going i've heard and i'm bred and you guys can look at that look this up yourself the next war will be over water because if we cannot make food to sustain ourselves we're going to start fighting for survival right so these are the things that we need to really look at and really take really really serious very serious crisis yeah outside of america it's global israel palestine that's a major issue yeah that's why they're doing that with the um salt water but that's one of they have a lot of issues obviously but that's one of the main issues palestinians don't really have fresh water and uh that's an issue um africa for sure it's an issue um i watch these documentaries and i watch these things and it's like you know it's it's something that americans a lot of times get jaded because we don't have that issue that issue so it's like it's not happening to me it doesn't affect me there was at one point where they had the water for life campaign and we started we started to see it and paid more attention to it and it was like once we didn't hear about water for life anymore it was like people just kind of forgot about it but the crisis has only gotten worse yep look at california right with the drought so these are the things that create the scarcity so drought pollution um population we have the same amount of water that we did 100 years ago and we'll have the same amount of water 100 years from now right and we continue to grow as a people and we consume a lot it takes 15 000 liters of water to make two pounds of uh beef and we consume a lot of beef yeah so when i say agriculture it's not just oh growing food its meat consumption is the highest wheat is about i want to say 1.5 liters um there's wheat there's um rice is about 3.5 liters of water but the largest 15 000 uh liters of water go into two pounds of beef and it's like you know when people like elon musk talk about colonizing mars uh it may sound like he's fantasizing but he's dead serious yeah and it's like for a lot of different reasons but we're all we're already destroying earth and raping its resources at a vicious rate yep so either we stop or we find somewhere else to live so he's like all right we got to live somewhere else i might as well beautiful we'll find someone who else that has resources colonize this situation take the resources and by the time they get tomorrow they'll already be the landlord you have to pay me to just live here yeah let me be the real man it's crazy until it happens yeah that's a fact no i'm thinking about the agriculture because even if you look at some of these middle american uh cities and states you just see that water just running and running all day all day just wasting water but was what we see is like so big business i have been approached by these larger companies um like saratoga water was brought up by i want to say pepsi a few years ago so we're one of very few and like my goal is to stay an independent minority water source um because we see what our future well not even our future we've seen what history has history has shown us um we're at the bottom of the totem pole we sit we saw that in flint we see what again i bring up flint because water is there but it was the infant structure which is another issue america's infant structure when it comes to water is over 100 years old right and they say there's five trillion dollars to upgrade that we're never ever ever um going to be in a good space if we're relying on them to provide us with something as something as natural as not even as natural as essential as water so so being that it is a commodity um long term do you see yourself potentially going ahead into the stock market with this that could be a possibility um what we're doing super so um what i i couldn't sleep the other night i was like up for like two days i couldn't sleep so something dropped into my spirit and i'm like okay i'm gonna do a kickstarter campaign but i'm gonna attach a coin to it so for every something yeah yeah so for at a water coin so for every bottle for every dollar that you go to our kickstarter campaign and help us with right for every dollar you'll get a coin not a coin you'll get a token for every 10 tokens you'll get a gallon of water that's about eight bottles all right so seven and a half so i estimated to about eight bottles of water so every ten dollars you'll get a coin so for every dollar you get a token for every 10 you get a coin and then you'll get a gallon of water so i'm going to pre-sell 3 million gallons of water i needed to figure out how i can raise money to keep this in our community yo that's i mean i'm thinking to myself right they give it to me for oh they didn't give it to me i got it for 1.5 yep millions getting offered within four months that's not typical less um less than four months yep yep upwards of twenty million upwards of twenty better person to me all right good luck with the water y'all i'm out of here alicia has been earned you guys are horrible i honestly feel like god has made me a servant of water and i don't know what it is again from the very beginning i do not want to be in the water business you just wanted to get i want to taste water but i feel like i was positioned for such a time and i feel like i'm a small piece of a big puzzle right because earn your leisure i feel like we should do a um a fundraising campaign we gotta do something earn your legion water or something like that too i feel like i believe in this situation i'm thinking of master p too like i know we like with like like hardly ken but i'm if somebody's offering 20 mil now imagine the five years or imagine what it's really worth what is it in that brain they probably work 500 million exactly like that like i'm saying and those are the numbers that they were kind of kind of telling me so he thought i was going to be real simple and be like oh yes sir please give me a box no like i understood what i i understand what i have i didn't initially right i came into this super blind but i think because i think of because of who i am and why i'm in the space to help people i know why i'm here i know what i'm supposed to do um and we don't know what the next 10 years is going to look like we saw what corona looked like right right and we we saw the lack of access and we understand that people who are in poverty will suffer the most true and they look like us as a fact that's a fact no i salute you on that because that's definitely something that's commendable and um yeah you know keep your your eyes and your ears open because you know they play all kinds of games yeah they try to finagle a situation and take the land it happens all the time they try they try yeah they try um so you do y'all live up there now i moved up there um i moved up there in july so i could be close to the factory so i'm about 20 15 20 minutes away and i'm up there every day um i drive back and forth i come down to the city on a thursday i'm back up there on sunday night so that's that's what i need to do puzzle so i understand what the the company needs at this point to make it great right to make it be able for in order for us to compete um i understand what it needs at this point because i've been in the business i've been working it i've been doing it and i've sacrificed so much to be in this space right so this when this came to me i couldn't sleep for two days i'm like i get it i'm gonna just pre-sell water like that's it i'm not gonna ask another person for a dollar i'm gonna sell water because that's what i have that's what i'm that's what i have and this is what we're going to do 12 pounds could change your life sure that's a fact six months could change six months to change your life that's the fact that currently changed our lives and obviously it's it's changed yeah that's amazing powerful very enjoyable conversation so how how can the people support how can they find out more information how can they buy the water what's the social media website all that information so i'm at um on instagram i'm at paula mccarthy that's p-a-u i guess you guys will put it on there too right p-a-u-l-l-a mccarthy m-c-c-a-r-t-h-y um i'm at paula mccarthy and then you can i guess from there we'll kind of funnel everything out of our instagram my website is youth saving society um and that's pretty much our i wanted to kind of keep these kind of things too those separate so yes water will have a landing page um it'll just be where you can go and see and get information about our fundraising so that's yes water.com yss yeah first i want to give a huge shout out to our boy francis he called me and said sure i just met well i just heard one of the most amazing people i've ever heard speak where do you see here speaker clubhouse you heard it on coke house and um that story's so dope you gotta hear it i'll say all right man i'm sure two days later jamal calls me and says troy you gotta i just heard that story you ever heard in your life you gotta meet this this young lady and i said right cool i'm gonna call it and then jamal called me four days later he's like you ain't calling at it i'm gonna call it so i want to give those two gentlemen credit uh so shout out to them and shout out to everybody on patreon.com y'all notice our pride to pay program shout out to all the earners out of tier five that are part of eyel university the number one place for everything in business finance and entrepreneurship we are tremendously uh happy with all the growth that we are seeing from our earners they're not just taking the information they're actually implying and putting it in their face in the facebook group so we're actually watching these stories and watching people create businesses and create their own generational wealth so we are tremendously honored to be a part of that um so shout out to y'all shout out to everybody supporting merch and uh yeah man we appreciate everything that y'all done yeah for sure um thank you guys for rocking with us we'll see you next week peace peace my graduates from my school being forbes back drop back drop my drop back drop bag

Channel: Earn Your Leisure

Views: 219,179

Keywords: earn your leisure, business, finance, The business of water, Natural resources, Commodity’s, Paulla McCarthy, Black owned business, Water supply

Id: PioNywPDsSQ

Length: 74min 38sec (4478 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021