Rich Paul & Junior Bridgeman On $600 Million Business Blueprint, World's Top Sports Agency & LeBron

Rich Paul (0:00)

Because marketing is not endorsements. Marketing is storytelling.

Endorsements are endorsements. Marketing, the best marketing companies in the world, they never tell you a price, but they show you the product, but they never tell you the price. Honda's gonna say, this is the Civic, 2023, with leather, it costs you $36,000. That's a different, that's a sales thing. That's a totally different thing.

Rashad Bilal (0:23)

All right, all right, so I wanna start with Mr. Bridgeman. I wanna, so it's crazy, because when we first started Earn Your Leisure, I told you a story, and I wanna retell it. Correct me if I'm wrong. You played in the NBA years ago, right? And you never made like maximum amount of money, couple hundred thousand dollars, but during the off seasons of your career, you worked in a Wendy's.

People might have thought that it's kinda odd that an NBA player is working in Wendy's, but you were working in Wendy's to learn the business. After you were done playing, you purchased a Wendy's franchise, and you grew into the largest franchisee owner of Wendy's and Chili's in the world, I believe, right?

Troy Millings (1:20)

He said, yes, keep going, keep going.

Rashad Bilal (1:24)

And amassed a fortune of over $600 million in the process, and then sold his portfolio of fast food franchises and purchased the Coca-Cola bottling distribution centers for Canada, right? And then also purchased Ebony magazine and just the whole thing. So it's a very interesting story and something that we covered. So did I do it justice?

You did it? Yeah, OK.

Troy Millings (1:58)

He's also the king of Louisville.

His real estate portfolio is incredible. What else did we miss? Proud Father.

Junior Bridgeman (2:06)

Yeah, I didn't quite get the question of what you said.

Troy Millings (2:09)

I was saying, did we miss anything?

Junior Bridgeman (2:11)

Oh, no, that pretty much sums it up.

The only thing that I got to get out there, sit next to this gentleman right here, who handles all of these players making, they make a little bit of money nowadays. But when I came into the league, the total salary for 12 ball players and three coaches, total salary for 15 people when I came into the NBA was $1.8 million.

So you divide that up, and when I left the league, I made the most money that I made my last year, and that was $350,000. And that's a lot of money. There's no question about that, but when you talk about taxes and family that needs money and all of that, I left the league knowing that I would have to have a job doing something else. And I worked, as you mentioned, at Wendy's, but I also worked for an insurance company, and I worked at Howard Johnson's in the off season. I actually went back to law school for four summers, and you can't get a law degree in four summers, so don't try that. But just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And the only reason I stayed with Wendy's was, I figured I'd hire somebody to run it, and they could make money for me, while I figured out what I was going to do in life after basketball. And I got an offer from the Milwaukee Bucks to be an assistant general manager, making $50,000 a year. But as attractive as that might have been at that time, I wanted to see what I could do myself. I wanted to see what I could grow. I didn't want to have somebody telling me I need to be at work at 8.30, and I couldn't get off until 5 o'clock. And so that's why I got involved with Wendy's. I figured food, people always need to eat. So we'll see how that develops, how that goes.

Rashad Bilal (4:16)

Hold on, let me just follow up. So how were you able to scale that Wendy's business to become the number one franchise owner in the world?

Junior Bridgeman (4:27)

Well, we started off like most companies at that time, if you're black and you're gonna get involved, they're gonna put you in the black area town. And so it was no different. We started in Milwaukee, because I spent all those years there with five stores in the inner city of Milwaukee. And they were not very good restaurants, but I figured if we worked at it, you could turn things around. And I'll tell you, the average volume of those five restaurants was only $600,000 a year. And you're not making any money at that volume. Today, those restaurants, and my son runs them, so we still have a lot of them, but they do over $2 million in sales. And how do you do that? By getting involved with the people and letting people know that you care about them. Now, how do you do that? Back at that time in Milwaukee, if you got stopped for any traffic violation, they took you to jail.