Exclusive Video Interview with John Paul DeJoria

We want to thank Mark Victor Hansen, author of Ask! and Chicken Soup for the Soul (almost 500 million copies sold) for setting up this interview with John Paul DeJoria.

From being homeless—not once, but twice—to becoming a self-made billionaire, John Paul DeJoria has one of the most compelling entrepreneurial stories of our time. Sleeping in his car while trying to sell shampoo door-to-door, he refused to let circumstance define his future. Armed with just $700 and an unshakable belief, he co-founded John Paul Mitchell Systems, turning it into a global hair care powerhouse.

But he didn’t stop there. DeJoria went on to co-create Patrón Tequila, transforming a small, ultra-premium idea into a multi-billion-dollar global brand, ultimately selling to Bacardi for $5.1 billion. His journey is a testament to resilience, creativity, and doing business with heart.

In this exclusive Billionaires.com interview, we dive deep into how John Paul DeJoria built multiple iconic brands from scratch, the principles that guided him through adversity, and why giving back has always been just as important as building wealth.

Richard C. Wilson:
Welcome, everybody. It’s Richard C. Wilson at the Family Office Club and Billionaires.com, and I have with me here today John Paul DeJoria. Very excited to have you here. Thanks, JP, for being on the interview.

John Paul DeJoria:
You’re very, very welcome, Richard. Glad to be part of your interview, and hopefully I could be of some benefit to somebody out there with some of the answers.

Richard C. Wilson:
Sure. Of course. There’s such a depth to your story. I know this whole interview could literally just be your story, and even the beginning parts of your story. Growing up with a single mother, being in foster care, in and out of a street gang, being a janitor, selling encyclopedias door to door, being homeless twice. One of our mutual friends, Mark Victor Hansen, is who introduced us. And what do you think is most important for people to understand about your childhood? Obviously you didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in your mouth, with every advantage in the world helping you get to where you are. But what type of extra color do you think is good for people to understand about you?

John Paul DeJoria:
Yeah. Well, in my day, in the late ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s people liked to work. Just having a job was something really, really cool, and not staying at home. So at seven years old, when I was able to sell Christmas cards at seven and eight years old door to door, I did that. When I finally had more of a complete job with the Variety Boys Club, where I would make planters with my brother out of wood, go out and sell them. That was fun, too, even though we made a quarter here, a quarter there. And then at 11 years old, just the fact I could have a paper route every single morning. And even though, and this is like the early ’50s, my brother and I only made about $30 a month. We were able to give that all to my mother so we could live a better life together.
But we just loved the fact that you got a job. And the fact we had a job, no matter what we made, all the other kids said, “Wow, you got a job. That’s the coolest thing.” Things have changed a little bit. It seems like kids are home a little bit longer. Don’t want to get jobs as fast as they should.

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah, for sure. I grew up selling Christmas wreathes for the Boy Scouts, stuffing mailboxes to mow lawns for $5 a lawn. And the salesmanship and even the marketing of making those little flyers with clip art back in the 1990s. That’s part of why I’m successful today. Is part of your success accredited to going door to door selling encyclopedias and just getting yourself out there and making those requests and just being a good salesperson?

John Paul DeJoria:
Beyond any question of a doubt. Some of the best experience I ever had, other than as a young entrepreneur myself not knowing what the hell I was doing, is when I was in my early 20s and started selling encyclopedias for Collier’s Encyclopedia door to door. Commission only. Training is five days to memorize it. No pay. You only got money if you sold your set of encyclopedias on commission only, period. The average life of an encyclopedia salesman was three and a half days and they’re gone.

Richard C. Wilson:
I bet.

John Paul DeJoria:
I lasted three and a half years because I believed a couple of things they said, and we’ll talk about it during your interview. The biggest thing was this: most of you aren’t going to make it. Those that make it are going to do very, very well. But remember this: you have to be just as enthusiastic on door number 50 as you were on everyone before that, even if they were all politely or not politely close to your face. You must be just as enthusiastic at door number 50, 51, 52.

For me it was 101, 103, 104, but I believed what they said. Just kept on going and going like the little rabbit that keeps on going in circles. In other words, I had learned you don’t give up. There’s going to be a lot of rejection. We all get, in our lives, rejection, but don’t let rejection slow you down. And as long as you know you’re going to get it, you’re prepared for it and it’s not going to stop you.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Got it. Okay. There’s a couple of nuggets there for people listening. And I didn’t mention it at the start of the interview, Paul Mitchell hair systems, almost everybody knows. Patron tequila, almost everybody knows the brand name of. You’ve been responsible for multiple $1 billion-plus scaling up of assets and companies you’ve founded and co-founded. So obviously your approach works. Just to give people another preview nugget for this interview, what else, besides that sales background and the grit and just keeping at it and that mindset do you think really explains why you’ve been exceptionally successful? You’ve spoken so many times publicly. What does it all boil down to as a little preview of some of the other questions we’re going to go over?

John Paul DeJoria:
I would say, just to preview it out, is this: as you’re doing things, remember this, that what you are doing, it’s a cinch by the inch. It’s hard by the yard. So if you’re going to something brand new, to do it, do it an inch at a time. Don’t plan to immediately just take everything over. You’ve got to inch your way in to see what you’re doing and fully, fully understand it. As we go through the interview you’ll see also other ideas that I’ll give you examples to as we go along, too. the quality of your product and how it’s presented to the customer, where they want to agree with you where they need it.

Richard C. Wilson:
Got it. Okay, great. Let’s go back in time a little bit. 1980, you launched John Paul Mitchell Systems.

John Paul DeJoria:
That’s correct.

Richard C. Wilson:
I read that you had a $700 loan to get it started. Your original investor for about half a million dollars backed out. You lived in a car for a bit, famously, to get the business off the ground. When you look back, that took some scrappy grit to make it through there. So what really made the difference? Besides your tenacity to sell door to door, what was the difference maker there?

John Paul DeJoria:
The big difference there is that I knew I had a product. Even though I had no money for advertising, no staff, no nothing, I knew the product was so good that if I could get it into someone’s hands, it’ll automatically put me in the reorder business. I had no money to reorder anything with other than the product itself, because we had no money when we started. And it was $350 from my partner, $350 bucks from me, which I borrowed from my mom because there was a change of circumstances during that day. And it talks about it in Success Unshared is Failure, the book. But I just went for it and I thought this: one, I’ve got a product. If enough people can just try it, I will get reorders, because I made the product so good. It’s that people want to use it again and again and again.

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah.

John Paul DeJoria:
And that was one of the big secrets to succeeding with nothing. You knew that if you just got it in people’s hands to use it, you just got it in their hands to let them use it, that they’re going to want reorder it the majority of the time and that’s how we started building the company from nothing.

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay. When I first heard you start to answer that I wasn’t sure if you were saying you knew the product was so good and you were so passionate about it. Your passionate sales pitch is what closed them. And obviously you have to have some of that. But just the actual product itself was so amazing. They would tell other people about it and they would just keep reordering because it was better than anything else they could order, right?

John Paul DeJoria:
That is correct. Or if somebody has a good service. Many people are in a business. It’s a service business.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
Meantime it’s a one-time sale, your service is so good that they’ll want to tell friends about it or recommend you to others because, once again, you’re in the reorder business. You got to look at ahead instead of what you’re going to do right now. Now, does this work? You take cosmetics. Someone told me the average cosmetic product for your hair or skin is really promoted big for about three years. Then they look for something new.

Richard C. Wilson:
Sure.

John Paul DeJoria:
45 years ago I started John Paul Mitchell Systems, the Paul Mitchell product line. Today, my first three products, Shampoo One, Shampoo Two or Three, and the conditioner, leave-in conditioner, are still good sellers from Paul Mitchell 45 years later because of the quality of the product. People keep on using it. And hairdressers. We sold directly to the hairdressers, and you can’t fool them. If they like a product, they’re going to use it and they’re going to tell somebody else about it.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Got it. Yeah. No, makes total sense. Awesome. Appreciate you sharing that. Was there some point when you were ramping up where you acquired an asset, a form of distribution? Some sort of strategic move that you made and, as soon as you did that, everything went 10X or 100X? Was there a strategic choke point that was a huge difference-maker?

John Paul DeJoria:
There were a couple. We were in business about three or four months and then we introduced a product called Hair Sculpting Lotion.

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
And that really took us off. That took off. However, the big one was, remember clear as can be. We’re two years in business making it hand-to-mouth every week. You should’ve got out of business. If you went to college, you would’ve got out of business. Right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah.

John Paul DeJoria:
It didn’t make any sense, but we believed what we had. It was two years in business. Two years in business we had, for the first time, paid all of our bills on time.

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
We didn’t pay them off, but we paid everyone on time, and each had $2,000 left. And that was the greatest thing. We were so happy. That was like 1982. We were the happiest people on the planet. We thought that’s a tipping point. Yay. We’ve made it! Which, even though we were very enthusiastic, it raised it to the next level with just that success that we had. We finally got extra money in our pocket.

Richard C. Wilson:
Interesting. Yeah. It’s interesting that your first answer was, “Our product was so amazing that it sold itself after you used it.” And even your second answer sounds like, to me, “We came out with another product that was also so good that people also wanted that other product.” It seems to be like a consistent answer that goes across how you think and how, probably, you’ve had success in other companies, I would imagine, just having that same mindset.

John Paul DeJoria:
But we also started a trend. We started the trend of the 1980s, the big hair.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
Sculpting lotion was like a setting lotion that we developed. Okay?

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
That we worked with things we found and added things to it. So you would put it on your hair and, your hair is damp dry. You’d put it on your hair and then, with your fingers, you can put waves in your hair, or with a comb. However you do it and leave it alone, it dries like that. So now you have a wet look. Your hair looks wet. It’s all wavy or straight back. Now, if you want a different look you just comb or brush your hair, and now it becomes the dry fluffy look with the same pattern you put in your hair, whether it was straight or whether you put waves in it. That was really cool and that was a big deal, followed by our freeze and shine hairspray for the big rock and roll groups. You spray it on and it stays there while you’re on stage, and the humidity doesn’t knock it out. That’s pretty good.

Richard C. Wilson:
Interesting. Awesome. Okay. Well, related to that, if you were mentoring somebody and they’re an entrepreneur, what could you share with them that would be worth far more than $1 million that you just wish somebody told you early on? Or you think a lot of people know, when they’re under 10 million in revenue, they need to hear this idea?

John Paul DeJoria:
Right. Well, it would be the two things that I shared with you so far. Very important. Number one, be prepared for rejection. You’re going to get it. As long as you know that, you’re not going to give up because you’re prepared for it. Right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
Not prepared for it, you get turned off. The second thing is the quality of your product. Make sure that quality’s so good. We just covered that. Okay, you’re in the reorder business. The next thing is this: take an item, a service or a product, and add a whistle to it or something that’s not out there right now, and go after something that could be a $1 billion business, which we did. Cosmetics, big $1 billion business, but we had to do something different. What did we do different, though we had no money? One, used our shampoo only once, not twice. Every other shampoo was shampoo once and then repeat. You save time and money. Our conditioner, you put on your hands, run it through your hair, and leave it in your hair. It saves time, money, and helps prevent your hair from excessive blow-drying damage.

Or it uses just as a pomade. So they were clean products, they were good products. So these were some of the things we did to get the little edge. Everyone should know you could have a good product, but if you have just a regular me too and there’s not something a little different, you’re not going to catch that much attention to somebody. You want to sell what the feature is and follow it up with the benefit to the person.

Richard C. Wilson:
Got it. Yeah. We see that constantly in our investor club. So many people say the same thing as everyone else in their industry.

John Paul DeJoria:
That’s right.

Richard C. Wilson:
And then they wonder why they’re not getting a lot of traction. Right?

John Paul DeJoria:
That’s right.

Richard C. Wilson:
What’s something that we have not talked about yet in this interview but is the most number one costly mistake that you see so many people making when they come up to you for advice or you see why they’re not scaling?

John Paul DeJoria:
Or even going into business with somebody, because I’ve started several other businesses that didn’t quite make it, is this: you could trust somebody, a partner or somewhere you want to invest. Trust is fine, but go in there and verify it.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
If I were to look at what mistakes I made, a couple of businesses that I went into that didn’t make it okay along the way after Paul Mitchell, I realized that I thought everything the guy was telling me and my partner was true. Then later on, when I finally found out sometime later, the times were losing its hold on something or the money was not showing up the way it should. I started verifying things, and I didn’t do that before. A big lesson to learn. Trust your friends, trust the greatest guy, the best people in the world. They’re sharp, but verify everything. And that was one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned. Or you lose it

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. That comes back around to, it became very obvious when Joe Polish interviewed you, just that you’re a good human being and you go out of your way to do really amazing things for people. I know you’ve impacted and changed thousands of people’s lives. I think you feed 30,000 to 40,000 people commonly in a couple of different cities, et cetera. I have to believe that all comes around full circle, not in terms of identifying who else is out there and believes in creating good karma in the world or who else has your values. Any tips just on, when you’re meeting with people, how you save time and identify those with similar values? Or is it really just following your intuition and verifying, like you’re talking about, and there’s no formula or process you think about in your brain explicitly? You just really trust your gut?

John Paul DeJoria:
Yeah. You reach out. I get first a gut feeling, then I verify whatever they’re telling me is correct. Like, “We had this thing analyzed. Already did testing.” And then you find out later on, no, they didn’t. You know?

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah.

John Paul DeJoria:
They want to do the testing with you but they haven’t done it yet. So there’s a lot of things. So you get your gut feeling but still, verify. Still verify what they told you is correct and the actual product or service is what they say. No disrespect to them, but you want to verify it before your money.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Got it. Any other tips related to mindset? Because I’ve read 125 books authored by billionaires. We’ve interviewed 45 billionaires so far. And to get exceptional results you have to take exceptional actions, which usually come from a unique set of mindsets. And we’ve heard you talk about grit, salesmanship, expecting rejection, trust but verify. Are there any positive mindsets? Is there any positive self-talk? Are there affirmations? Do you have something on your wall you read each morning?

John Paul DeJoria:
Well, there are affirmations galore, okay? One I can show-

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
Most of them are just… I have whole pages in my book about affirmations and what I do. But it’d be things. For example, pay attention to the vital few. Ignore the trivia, many. And in the end everything will be okay. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. But I can give you another example because we talked about this even before we started the interview, I would give you this example. How does one take a product? Let’s take Patron tequila, right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
And change the world of tequila. When I brought out, in 1989, Patron tequila to the marketplace, there was a lot of tequilas out there. I introduced the first high-end tequila. Call it an ultra-premium tequila, Patron.
Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
Nobody would buy it at first. It was too expensive.

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
The average tequila in those days was around $5 a bottle. I think the most expensive one was around $14, $15.

Richard C. Wilson:
Wow.

John Paul DeJoria:
We’d just sell ours for $37.95 cents a bottle just to get going. A lot of people said, “It’s incredible. The best I’ve ever tasted, but it’s just too expensive. People aren’t going to buy it.”

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
We had a real difficult time getting our distributors right, but we finally got them and, after a few years it really took off. We built one hell of a team. So now I sold Patron about seven years ago. I had a five-year non-compete, but at that time I was starting another tequila. I had to put it all down for that time so I would not compete, because I had a good partner for Bacardi, and I told them I would not do that at all. I kept my promise. However, Bandero Tequila was the next one. Now, how the heck do you do that when you have a Patron, which is the best of the best, the biggest ever ultra premium? Why a Bandero? How do you take something that good you have and have something else that’s a little different? Well, for starters, Bandero was not a Patron formula at all. Not anywhere like a Patron formula we’re going to change. Not at all.

We worked on another formula with some pretty older fellers down there that knew what they were doing in Mexico, because here was my criteria: we’ve got the greatest tequila ever, Patron, and it’s just taking off. What it’s going to look like in five or 10 years from now? So in my mind was people are going more towards no additives, clean, take care of the environment, and do something of that nature.

Richard C. Wilson:
Sure.

John Paul DeJoria:
So boy, that’s good. So I started developing that tequila, called Bandero. And I held it back. Got back at it a little over a year ago when my non-compete was up. But one that was no additives added. The smoothest tequila, in my opinion, imaginable. Okay?

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
Recycled glass. Even the leather that surrounds the bottle is vegan leather. Well, what was the difference? If you walk into, for example, a liquor store, you walk into a nightclub, better yet, why in the world should I buy this? Because today most of them have five or 10 tequilas there. Why should I buy one other? Well, it’s quite simple. Besides having no additives and being one of the mellowest tequilas you’ll ever do, this tequila won, last year, a gold medal as one of the smoothest tequilas in Mexico when they had their big contest in Latin America, in Guadalajara, the center of tequila. We won the gold medal as one of the smoothest tequilas ever. Is that a good enough reason where you would want your customer to have the newest and the very best stuff that won the gold medal?

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
In other words, when you look at a different thing, was it Patron? No. Do I tell people it’s a different Patron? No, it’s totally different. And when people say, “Well, JP, would you drink Patron or would you drink Bandero? Which do you think is a better one?” My answer is quite simple. They’re different and they’re both unique. You should have at least two tequilas on your shelf, Patron and Bandero.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Right. And Weber Ranch, is that part of Bandero or is that separate?

John Paul DeJoria:
Weber Ranch was another one we put together with my key people at Patron. They had five-year non-competes also. Ed Brown, for example. Greatest CEO in the world. My big marketing director came on board with us, Lee Applebaum, and David, and four of our top staff, all non-competes, came on board. And then another one was head of one of the biggest distributorships in the United States. Came on board with us. They all got a little piece of the company.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
What do we want them to do? How many vodkas are out there? A whole lot of them, right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah.

John Paul DeJoria:
But it’s a big market. So we invented something different. When you drink things like vodka, your insulin spikes. It just does, right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay.

John Paul DeJoria:
It might be a good alcohol for you, but it still spikes. Well, this is the only tequila, to the best of our knowledge, ever thought of made out of Weber agave. Weber agave is what you make tequila out of. We made a vodka out of Weber agave down there in Mexico. Shipped it up here, put it together in the United States. So it was created and we’re right behind it. So what you do is this: when you taste one, it’s not going to spike your insulin like other ones would. And second of all, it is so mellow… I’m not a vodka drinker, but when they let me taste it I thought, wow, I could drink this. It’s that mellow. So with Bandero tequila we have the mellowest, in my opinion. And with Weber, same exact thing.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
And so we have two other things that came out. And we had another vodka, by the way, before I sold Patron. And it was a great vodka but it sold for a lot of money. So it’s like going into the business again, but in a little different way.

Richard C. Wilson:
Sure. For people listening to this, is it your ability to find something that is already top 1%, 0.1% and then you’re like, “I can partner with you and I can shine a light on this and make it amazing?” Or are you just finding a very capable team and you said, “Let’s develop. Let’s R&D. Let’s try 1,000 formulas until it is 0.1%.” Which way does it usually happen with you in all these partnerships?

John Paul DeJoria:
For us, it’s looking at the [inaudible 00:20:38] of the marketplace, and I’ll give you a couple examples. Paul Mitchell. Hairdressers needed products that they could use quicker, faster, that worked every single time, that people want to reorder them. Right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
And they could take home to use in between visits. So I knew that filled the need in the marketplace there. And then now when we move along here with our other products, we look for, first of all, the need in the marketplace. And then what would be the need? How do we address it? Tequila. Sometimes you hold your breath, sometimes you chase with a lemon or lime, right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah.

John Paul DeJoria:
How do we make one so smooth? And that’s how Patron was born. And we knew nothing about tequila when we entered the industry. Martin and I knew nothing about it whatsoever. We entered the industry, we learned. But it talks about it either in… if you see the movie Good Fortune, the documentary that was done, it talks about that also. It also talks about it in Success Unshared is Failure, the new book that came out. But we found shortcuts on how to do things that would take years to learn, how we learned them a little bit quicker. Well, it’s the same thing when we came out now with, how do we do something to fill the need in the marketplace?

You have Patron, an unbelievably great tequila, but maybe there’s a need out there for something that’s a little different in smoothness and a little different in some of the characteristics it has. We went for the little difference. With Weber it was really simple. Ed Brown’s genius was, let’s try a vodka of different things. And they kept on trying it until we got it right with agave. We went straight for the agave until we got it right.

Richard C. Wilson:
Got it, got it. Okay, interesting. I was going to ask you, how do you identify these upcoming trends and attach yourselves to the right ones? But obviously a big part of the answer is to find where there’s a gap in the market, find where there’s something unique, find where there’s a great need or a growing demand or a trend. We want something that doesn’t have additives and artificial things in it, or is ultra smooth tasting. Is there anything else you’d add to that that you haven’t said yet about how you identify new trends and what’s worth your time?

John Paul DeJoria:
Yeah. Those things weren’t obvious. In other words, they weren’t obvious. To people, tequila is tequila. But to us it was, it could be smoother. We found a guy that can make it smoother. With the Weber, hey, it could be smoother and we could make it out of this tequila, but let’s give it a try. So instead of trying to find what the new trend is, we created these trends. When we came out with Paul Mitchell, I created in salons… it took a few years. Salons recommending to their customer products to take home to use in between visits for the same hairstyle.
So with Patron it was, find something mellower that’s not out there right now. And of course with Bandero it was, let’s make this smooth as can be, award-winning. And with the Weber it was exactly the same thing. It was find something, make it better. Create your own trend. Once I came out with Patron, all of a sudden people are trying to come out with a better tequila. And I think there’s over 200 of them out there right now. Paul Mitchell, people started paying more attention to helping salons merchandise in the salon to help the customers. So we helped create the trend, not just follow a trend.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. You have to have the courage to go and do something that other people haven’t done or don’t think is possible, I guess, right?

John Paul DeJoria:
[inaudible 00:23:40] take it back. With the big hair of the ’80s, we wanted to create something so you could have that big hair without all the actual not only just fluffing, but blow dryers and everything else, which we did, but also without the flaking. We knew that would be great for people, so we tried to develop a product that would do that.

Richard C. Wilson:
Got it. Makes sense. What’s your number one piece of advice for investors that are listening to this who want to gain asymmetrical returns? They’re trying to figure out where to invest their energy and their capital as a family office, for example.

John Paul DeJoria:
Okay. Well, if you’re an investor in capital, watch what you’re investing in and know the vocabulary of the industry are going in. Very important. It’s like we went into the alcohol business. We didn’t know anything about it. Know the vocabulary, what all the words in that particular industry needs and what they use. Because a lot of industries use different words that we just don’t use in our regular nomenclature. Know the words of it, first of all, on it, and then know the industry. Get a couple books on the darn industry a little bit and what it does, or the products, and then it doesn’t hurt. Then you test other people’s opinions of it. What do you think of this? Would you buy something like this?

And then think to yourself, if I invested in this, who’s the competitors? How can I make this better? How can I make this better so, when I go out there to sell it, it’s something more than what people are getting now and it’s value-added? Not discounted, value-added.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Got it. Okay. But if you look back over the history of bootstrapping your businesses like Paul Mitchell, would you handle your capital strategy differently now, looking back, or do you think that was the right way because it forced you to have an amazing product? You didn’t get to advertise your way into growing revenue. And that genuine, authentic love for the product fueled, obviously, part of your success.

John Paul DeJoria:
I wouldn’t change a thing. People ask me that often. JP, what would you do differently, getting to the point you are now? I said, “Not one thing.” Because if it wasn’t for going through the experiences I had, I wouldn’t be as successful in a business or my own personal life. And people have to realize that. There is no such thing, really, as a failure. They’re all lessons to be learned.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
You have little blips along the way that are like, “Oh my god. That didn’t work very well at all. I’m out of business.” Who knows what? You find ways to overcome it. So anytime one runs across a disappointment, what they consider maybe a failure, it’s a learning experience. It’s all in how you look at it.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Got it. And what about for capital raisers who listen to this? We have some founders in our investor club that are looking for a joint venture partnership with a billionaire or a centimillionaire, or maybe it’s just a decimillionaire. But for anyone working with investors, what would help them close two times as many transactions and not waste time having to pitch so many people? If they really think that they’ve found the right partner, what would be your advice to them?

John Paul DeJoria:
Well, my advice to them is find out what their interest would be in that marketplace you’re going into and how you could show them how your product is different and better where, if they use it themselves, or if it’s something for ladies, “Here’s one. Let your wife try it. See what she thinks.”

Richard C. Wilson:
Sure.

John Paul DeJoria:
In other words, sell the person first, not just the money you make out of it.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
Money is great, but if someone’s just going in for money period, they won’t be anywhere near successful as well if they didn’t go in with passion behind, like, “This is really, really cool.” Then they not only put money into it. They put some of their own efforts into it and some of their suggestions. There’s companies I’ve invested in that I didn’t own, I didn’t run, but I had so much interest in it I would give them some advice, some information on something that I thought could make it even better. In other words, I wanted to be value-added at something because in the past when I wasn’t value-added, I just put money in, it didn’t work out as good.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Right. Makes sense. Awesome. You’ve done several of these interviews before, obviously. What’s the number one best question that anybody’s ever asked you? Or what has nobody ever asked you and they should because you’d love to answer that question?

John Paul DeJoria:
I think the most interesting question that anyone’s ever asked me that I will answer for everybody… but understand this: I love what I do. I love who I do it with and I do it around. And the question was this: JP, how come you haven’t retired? You’re 81 years old right now. You’re full of energy, everything, but you could’ve retired years ago.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
Yet you keep on continuing with Paul Mitchell as chairman of the board. In Austin, Texas you’ve got so many programs going for the homeless, for battered women, for children. And you have businesses here in Texas you started brand new. JP, why are you doing this? And my answer was quite simple. I’m going to live to be way over 100 years old, and I love what I do. I’d rather be doing what I’m doing right now, go on vacation when I want to, but not sit around and watch TV and try and figure out, what am I going to do right now? What am I going to do next? When you love what you do, you’re not working anymore.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
They say, “JP, what was the last job you had that you really loved?” And I said, “It was the day before I started Paul Mitchell,” because even though when I started Paul Mitchell I lived in my car, I ate from hand-to-mouth. It was very, very scarce. Okay?

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah.

John Paul DeJoria:
I wasn’t working. I loved what I was doing and I was happy. I was happy. And even though it took two years to pay our darn bills on time and have some money left over, I loved what I was doing. I believed in it so much and I realized that, hey, common sense says you don’t have a lot of money. This will take a little bit longer. But if you keep on going behind it and the people love what you have and they tell you that, you just need a lot more customers and a lot more ways to tell people about it.

Richard C. Wilson:
Got it. Makes sense. So your new book, Success Unshared is Failure.

John Paul DeJoria:
Yeah.

Richard C. Wilson:
Can you tell me why every entrepreneur should get a copy of that, in case it’s not obvious to them already after this interview?

John Paul DeJoria:
Oh, no. Sure. Gladly. I wrote that book with in mind the idea of this: it’ll be a book that everyone who reads it, I don’t care what size your business is or if you don’t have any business at all, you’re going to benefit. You’re going to benefit business-wise. You’re going to see how businesses were started with no money and became like Paul Mitchell. I believe today we are the world’s largest privately-owned salon haircare company in the world. We’re in about 130 countries, approximately.

Richard C. Wilson:
Wow.

John Paul DeJoria:
Grown out of nowhere knowing not a damn thing, nothing about any tequila or any product other than drinking it. Right?

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah.

John Paul DeJoria:
How the hell did you put the whole darn thing together? You and your people that you were with at that time? How the heck did you do it? Well, it’s in the book. At the same time, how do you give back along the way? How does it start when you have no money, giving back, help people? But the biggest secret is how you’re kind along the way no matter what happens and how you realize success unshared is failure. And that gets you to great success. Another thing, too, is this: a lot of people equate success with money. How much money did I make?

Richard C. Wilson:
Right.

John Paul DeJoria:
That’s not success. Success is, number one, how far have you come in life from where you started? How much do you like doing what you do right now? How happy are you and how well do you do your job when nobody is looking? That’s success.

Richard C. Wilson:
Awesome. I’ll definitely link out to that book and make it easy to find after this interview. One thing that maybe didn’t come up quite enough out of my questions that I’d like to ask one final question on is about the things you do which have the biggest meaning or that are on the side of giving back or philanthropy, because I know that you’re so active there. And the whole interview could’ve just been on those things that you do to help other people in Austin, nationally. Do you want to mention a few of those, just so people understand who you are?

John Paul DeJoria:
I’m very happy to. For example, here in Austin mostly, but I didn’t forget my homeless days in LA. So I support one group in LA, or two of them, actually, in LA, but mainly here in Austin. And we take homeless people off the streets. Many of them have never had shelter in a year or two. We give them a place to live and organic gardens to eat with in their living facility there. Everything they need to be able to exist. We created for them a metal shop, a wood shop, an auto shop, jobs to do so they can make some money, an organic garden. I even put together an entrepreneur center there for one of my projects. Actually for three projects there’s entrepreneur centers. And people said, “JP, you’re putting way over $1 million into entrepreneur center. These are homeless people. They’re not going to be entrepreneurs. They’ve already made their choice.” I said, “No. Let’s just watch.”

After I put it together, in approximately 18 months, maybe 20 months maximum, that homeless place with the entrepreneur center in it where we taught people how to paint, if they didn’t know how to paint already, pictures, how to do jewelry, how to do pottery, all kinds of things, aqua culture. They sold almost $200,000 worth of stuff. They got to keep it all.

Richard C. Wilson:
Wow.

John Paul DeJoria:
And then the other one would be… well, actually we had another group there in Austin that a little lady started. This was during COVID. She went around collecting food from all these sandwich shops that would have to dump it after 5:00 because they were still open, or catering services. She’d personally pick it up and go to old folks homes or homeless centers and give it to the people in need. Well, when I found out about it, I made sure she had a truck. And now she has 150 volunteers and a couple of trucks out there doing it.

Richard C. Wilson:
Wow.

John Paul DeJoria:
And for some people living on their own, very, very proud of Grow Appalachia. Appalachia is about seven different states. And going back to 2010, we had a lot of unemployment because of the recession. In that area there’s about 150,000 families on food stamps. Want to change it. I worked with Berea College, and I paid for it all, and what we did was this. Phase one: we’re to go out there. If you have a big farm with several people, we’ll buy you a tractor. If not, I will buy you your seeds, your fertilizer, your irrigation, all your tools. We’re going to teach you how to plant and grow these various vegetables. How to can them for the winter when they’re not growing. Now you have your own vegetables. That’s phase one. Feed yourself and your family veggies and then sell.

The next year you could grow more and sell it to local markets as organically-owned produce, organically… I’m sorry. Sell it to those markets as organically-grown produce. Now you’ve got an income. Then we brought some bees in, then some chickens in for the eggs, and let them be self-supporting while they’re feeding themselves at the same time. That’s just a few.

Richard C. Wilson:
Wow.

John Paul DeJoria:
There’s other things we have where, I think we’re feeding each day quite a few thousand orphans in Africa. Not just all the thousands upon thousands here in this country or what we do in all over the world. We’re kind of scattered out with our philanthropy, but it’s mostly all in the United States. And it’s not a few hundred dollars, it’s in the millions. We’re very proud to do that because success unshared is failure. You’ll also see how, along the way, people learn that by giving, what you get in return is phenomenal. But you got to give it from your heart, not just to do it so it says, “Hey, I did it. Aren’t I great? Put my name on the wall.” Big difference.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Awesome. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that and I appreciate you doing this interview here today. I think that-

John Paul DeJoria:
[inaudible 00:34:22]. This is great.

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah. And I think it’s good for people to see somebody extremely successful be generous with their thoughts and advice, but also to have that grit and discipline and the mindset that this will be very hard. Most people would not stick to it but if I see it through, it’ll be amazing. I find that that’s so critical. Our friend, Mark Victor Hansen, his success is because of that same mindset. Right?

John Paul DeJoria:
Mm-hmm.

Richard C. Wilson:
He talks about that when I had coffee with him when we both used to live in the Scottsdale area.

John Paul DeJoria:
Yeah.

Richard C. Wilson:
And he was nice enough to connect us for the interview here today. But I think it’s good for people to see success. Sometimes in the media you’re portrayed in negative ways. Business people who are successful can be portrayed as negative. And you bring up things like being kind and giving back and creating good karma in the world, et cetera. And I think that’s really important for people to hear. It’s not all about just raising capital or trying to do hundreds of millions in revenue. It’s really the meaning and just doing good every day while doing well. Just delivering the best product on the market, and that is how you did well.

John Paul DeJoria:
The other thing we didn’t cover, most businesses don’t cover, which to me it’s okay, but there’s a better way to do it is, how do you keep your employees? We’ve been in business for 45 years. I think my turnover is just a little over 300 people. Maybe even 400 people. That’s global. Our people are everywhere.

Richard C. Wilson:
Wow.

John Paul DeJoria:
How do you keep employees? How do you get somebody and reprimand them where, when they walk out of the room, they love you for it and the way you do it? How do you get somebody who did something little and make it so big so everyone loves you and the person thinks you’re a genius? In other words, there’s ways to reprimand, there’s ways to acknowledge people. You’ve just got to do them and then you have less turnover. It is amazing. And all this is some of the stuff that’s in the book, too, by the way.

Richard C. Wilson:
Okay. That’s what I was going to ask because it sounds like another 45 minute interview, just going into that, but we had-

John Paul DeJoria:
We could do that for an hour. I do that at universities and other places, but… and Mark Victor Hansen could tell you when the book’s coming out. We’ve just completed it now and I’d say that within the next couple of months it’ll finally be out.

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah, it makes sense. Larry Connor is a billionaire we had on stage recently at one of our events, which, by the way, you’re always a welcome guest to for a fireside chat, but he said that, “95% of all problems and opportunities are people problems and people opportunities.”

John Paul DeJoria:
Yep.

Richard C. Wilson:
And that keeping the amazing team is really the secret to everything. And Mark Cuban said almost the exact same thing when we interviewed him. So I appreciate you bringing that up.

John Paul DeJoria:
Yeah.

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah. Anything else you wanted to add?

John Paul DeJoria:
Yeah. The proof’s in the pudding because the team at Weber Ranch, best vodka ever. That team is my key team from Patron that came over after their non-competes up, too. Yeah, you stick by some good people and you treat them really good and take very good care of them, and I did.

Richard C. Wilson:
Right. Awesome.

John Paul DeJoria:
All of that money that I got from Patron we gave to everybody. Most of our entire staff got big, giant bonuses.

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, I appreciate your generosity.

John Paul DeJoria:
Richard, a real pleasure, sir.

Richard C. Wilson:
Yeah, you too. Thank you for your time here today.

John Paul DeJoria:
Thank you, buddy. Peace, love, and happiness.