The Transcript Is Auto-Generated And May Contain Grammar And Spelling Errors
Tyler Jorgenson 0:01
You’re listening to biz ninja entrepreneur radio. This show was created for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers and dreamers who want to learn from the experts of today and drastically shortcut their own success to build a business that supports their dream lifestyle. Since 2011, Tyler Jorgensen has been interviewing business thought leaders from around the world a serial entrepreneur himself. Tyler also shares his personal insights into what’s working in business today. Welcome to biz Ninja, entrepreneur radio. Welcome out to biz ninja entrepreneur radio. I’m your host, Tyler Jorgensen. And today we have somebody who’s a bit of a legend on Instagram known as King credit. He’s got that fancy blue checkmark, but more than that, he talks about travel hacking, which as a lifestyle designer, I’m a huge fan of I’m super excited to talk to Yon Stravinsky. Welcome up to the show. Hey, man, appreciate you having me. I love this because like, I think I found you first from right when you started on tik tok. I think I saw one of your very first videos, because I love travel. I love lifestyle design. I’m not a travel hacker, because it seems like a lot of work. So I’m super excited to hear about your story. My very first question for you is when was the moment you first realized you’re an entrepreneur?
Yan Stavisski 1:26
I’d say when I was 10 years old, I had some sort of a realization because I’m like, I want to go and buy stuff for myself as opposed to asking my parents for stuff. So I decided to go wash cars in my neighborhood, my little bucket trolley, electric scooter tote around, went door to door. I’m like, Hey, your car’s dirty. Let me wash it for 20 bucks. If you don’t want to 20 bucks, I’ll do it for 10 bucks. I want to earn your business. I didn’t know. But nobody told me I was an entrepreneur. I realized like, what 10 years later, I’ll do all these hustles I’m like, man, I should have just went all in on business entrepreneurship. But instead, I went to college. Look, that’s it’s normal. But what I love,
Tyler Jorgenson 2:03
and it’s very common with people that come on this show, most of the people that now considers themselves entrepreneurs, instead of like a business owner or something else. They have that story around somewhere between like five and 15. They took something right. And they were like, I’m just going to take control of this situation. Like I was five and I wanted to earn candy and I was selling, you know, flowers to the old lady down the street. Right? So you got to have that first hustle, tell me So you went to college? Do you regret it?
Yan Stavisski 2:31
I regret it. I went to college for nursing. At first I had no idea what to do. I was a lifeguard I’m like, you know, I’m good at like medical stuff. So I’m going to go do nursing. My parents didn’t tell me otherwise. But they’re like, you got to go to college. So I went for nursing two years. And I’m like, What am I doing, I got all these hustles that I’m using to pay for my school. If I can do that, I should at least be doing business. So then I switched to finance and marketing. Keep in mind, I went to decent schools, I went to Berkeley and I went to San Francisco State University, got my finance at Berkeley got my marketing San Francisco State. When I came out, I literally could not get a job, I applied to 100 different places. I didn’t have any student debt. Luckily, because I worked my ass off to pay everything off during that time. But I could not get a job. I applied everywhere in San Francisco. And I’m like, I got two fantastic degrees, but not a single person even getting back to me. And the only job offers I have our minimum wage. It’s fascinating. I
Tyler Jorgenson 3:27
you know, my wife and I both have advanced degrees. But I often I have four kids that are starting to get ready to look at schools. And I’m like, Look, you don’t go to school to figure out what you want to do with your life. If you choose to go to college, just because the career you’re choosing requires it. Otherwise, it’s a very expensive way to find yourself and I’m a much bigger believer of apprenticeships and travel as a way to figure out who you are. How did you first fall in love with traveling?
Yan Stavisski 3:49
I was 18. And I’ve always wanted to go do a trip by myself. I had 3000 bucks in the bank and meet a friend wanted to go to Thailand really bad. And I’m like, you know what, I’m gonna spend all the money that I have and go do this trip. And when I came back, I’m like, Oh my God, this was the most amazing experience to go do this by myself, without parents would just with a friend experience new things, new culture, go on a flight, just not plan anything. That’s how I always do everything. I never plan, anything, just a flight, and nothing else. And when I came back, I had no money. But I did have a little envelope from Amex That said, if you spend this much money will give you all these points and these points you can use for a flight hotel. And I found a way to go and get these points while my friend a laptop. He paid me back. I got these points. So I didn’t spend anything. And two weeks later, there was another friend’s birthday, we decided to go back to Thailand, except this time, I didn’t pay for the flight. I didn’t pay for the hotel. I just paid for the food in Thailand, which was they’re cheap. And from there, I’m like March Brunner, mine started working and I’m like there’s got to be a way to continue doing this on scale. And so I started learning about Points rewards, how to get those points continuously get more credit cards, more bonuses, more statuses. And from the age of 18 to 22, I was going to school, but during the time that didn’t have any tests, I wouldn’t go and take a trip to a different country, and do a deal with one of my professors, or all my professors to just take the tests, because I had this family or deal, but the family ordeal was me traveling around the world. Part of it. So it’s your deal. So, exactly. So that’s how I got into it.
Tyler Jorgenson 5:29
That’s amazing. Very few people can say they started at 18 and fell in love with it that fast. I was 19 when I first like really left the country other than maybe Mexico, right? And then in South Africa for a couple of years. And there’s something about travel that just completely changed you I don’t I think you cannot come back from a trip. The same person you were when you left. I agree. So the fact that you not only did you find like this amazing love of travel that you found this really clever way to feed this new passion and turn it into not only like a money saver, but also a money maker is pretty remarkable. Now I don’t think it all started where it was rainbows and butterflies. And right after you were 18 it was just like money started pouring out you What was your first major setback? And how did you overcome that?
Yan Stavisski 6:15
The biggest setback came later after I got out of college when I was 18. And I actually made my first $100,000 with being an Uber affiliate, I never drove, I actually started making content and referring people to Uber and made my first six figures that way that paid for school, most of it. And the biggest setback came after I got out of college. So I was already in the credit game in terms of travel hacking requires credit, credit bonuses rewards, and I told you I couldn’t get a job after college. So I decided, Okay, I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, this is like my calling to go all in on entrepreneurship. Because I can’t even get a job, I got no choice. So I decided to go and start every business I possibly could I wanted to do drop shipping, I did Facebook advertising, I bought Tai Lopez’s course, this social media marketing, I did everything at once, and I didn’t have any money. The money I made when I was 1819 that paid for school, I had some money coming in as a personal trainer. And I was hustling a lot, I was doing like 3040 hours a week doing all these different hustles. But I was living in San Francisco. And that really paid for I was left at zero basically at the end of the month. So I decided to go into all these businesses. And while I didn’t have any cash, I had about 120,000 in credit lines, because from 18 to 22 getting rewards and bonuses required to get a bunch of credit cards. So I had like 20 or 25 credit cards. By the time I was 22. And with all that money, I figured you know what I’m going to go and use some of my credits go and try to start all these businesses. And six months in on doing four or five businesses at once I’m spending on my credit cards to go and test. Keep in mind, I’ve never done these businesses, I’ve only taken a course I’m doing all of them at once. And really I have no business experience by any means other than going to school and getting two degrees, which I thought finance and marketing, I should be a pro I should be super smart, right? But six months in, I am actually an 82,000 bucks worth of credit card debt. I’m paying the bank’s four grand in interest, I’m making half of that in income and still have money that needs to be paid towards, you know, utilities, rent food. And that was that was my rock bottom. It was like 2223. That was my rock bottom. Because 82k in debt credit went from like a 750 to a 490. I got collections on being sued. And it was a very, very bad situation.
Tyler Jorgenson 8:44
Not only you got the debt and the interest, but you start losing your ability to get those points. And you can’t take the trips to go recharge. So what what was your turning point you hit rock bottom, something had to happen? Did was there a catalyst? Was there a moment? Was there somebody that reached out to help? What happened? And how did you navigate out of that?
Yan Stavisski 9:02
I was listening to a podcast similar to this. And I was trying to figure out where do I go? I was kind of realizing that the entrepreneurship route right now because I have no skills no experience is really nothing going for me I have to go and get a specific skill. And the podcast said if you want to be a business owner, if you want to be an entrepreneur, the skill you need is sales that is an absolute given. If you don’t have that skill, if you don’t have experience in sales, you will fail as an entrepreneur. So I decided that was going to be the direction I will focus all my energy on and I’m gonna go get a sales job. The sales job I did end up getting was by accident because I started going to every single event possible. And one of the events that I showed up to finally worked out it was a cryptocurrency exchange back in 2016 2017. And I started doing sales with a crypto exchange for companies when they go public. They list on the exchange, they pay fees for that and those are the sales that I was doing. I started making decent Money month, two and three, I couldn’t close a single sale until then. But when the first sale came in, like a fire lit up, and man, two months after that, I became the number one salesperson in that company. Simply because I put myself in a position where it was either I make it or I’m done, I go into bankruptcy, I leave the country, I didn’t know what I was gonna do, I’m like, this is the only option I have, and I can not mess it up. And so I started making money, I was doing about maybe seven to $15,000 a month, and that was going towards a lot of the debt that I had. But at the same time, I realized I got to figure out how credit works primarily how to fix it, and then understand how to use it for business because I understood the travel hacking part of the rewards the bonuses, but I had no idea how to use it for business. So I first spent my time on the sales job 10 hours a day, every single day, I was, by the way travel, hacking my way to different cities to go get leads, which I wasn’t even supposed to do. But that’s what took me to number one of the sales company. And two, I was focusing on credit repair the entire time, how do I go and fix my credit, figure out these collections, these lawsuits. And finally, in six months, I’m still doing probably about 10 to 15,000 a month from a sales job, I paid off a lot of my debts and figured out in that time how to fix my credit, and actually not pay like 30k of these collections and still get a credit score of 750. During that time.
Tyler Jorgenson 11:24
That’s a lot of different things, you were able to figure out at the same and that’s not normal. But the nice thing is that you learned through all of this, and now you’re sharing your information. So let’s start with a little bit of like, why you’re now called like your Instagram King credit right there. Is that because of travel hacking, is that because you’d like to help people fix repair their credit scores, is it a little bit of all of it? Why did you pick that as a personal brand
Yan Stavisski 11:47
credit is because credit literally has initially ruined my life. And now it’s built, it’s helped to build everything that I have, all the money that I’ve made, that I saved, and the lifestyle that I live is because of credit, I realized that 90% of people because credit is going to be a part of their life. It’s either going to destroy their life, keep them financially enslaved, or they can go understand it, learn it, leverage it to help them make money, save a lot of money, and obviously get the everyday things like being able to get an apartment, a car, save hundreds of 1000s of dollars on interest over a lifetime. And so that’s why I picked King credit, I have the story, the incredible story that you know, almost bankrupted me and I failed the life to turning it around. And using the same exact thing. So build up this amazing life that I have, which by 26, I went to 49 countries a couple million dollars in free travel, that money that I would have paid for travel, I put back in the business to go and make more money. And at the same time I’m leveraging credit to go and invest to go fund businesses to increase the cash flow. So it’s three way street, it’s one, you get all the everyday things save an insane amount of money, not be financially in state to these banks to governments to obviously go get free travel, and three, make more money. Absolutely.
Tyler Jorgenson 13:11
So let’s let’s uh let’s talk a little bit about the inspiration of what you do in traveling right, so you’ve got some amazing, you got some amazing stuff on your Instagram on your tick talk about like travel hacks, share a few of the travel hacks that a lot of people just don’t even know exist a lot of
Yan Stavisski 13:26
the travel hacks, for example, start, the basic ones really start with understanding credit bonuses, and rewards that credit cards provide to you a website that anybody can just go to and get started with understanding how credit card rewards work is called us credit card guide.com us credit card guide.com lists all the major credit cards, all the bonuses when you should be applying what are the biggest bonuses, what you need to do to get those bonuses. And getting those bonuses is one thing. Understanding how to use those points and rewards is another thing. Because while people get 100,000 of your points, for example, that’s from Chase, they might be able to get the average person that doesn’t know how to use them might be able to go and get, I don’t know, two round trip flights within the state. I’ll go and use those points to get three round trip flights around the world. So there’s maybe a little different details. But that’s you know, that’s kind of the first part is go to the website understand how rewards work what credit cards give you what and that’s really the basic first step that everybody should take. Awesome. So just beginning with awareness beginning and understand they exist, that those points, they’re out there, but there’s different ways to use them to get maximum value. What’s what is your ultimate travel hack that you’ve ever like? What’s your biggest win in the game? biggest way to I mean this obviously goes to a more of the advanced travel hacks but that is getting insane flights and hotels that cost upwards of hotels 2000 bucks a night, or flights that cost 90 511,000 per flight that I’m getting for about 95 to 99% off. So I’ll give you an example. Last. Last year, I was in London, before the pandemic, so flights were still extremely expensive. It was like a 21,000 round trip flight. I got it for about $300.
Tyler Jorgenson 15:26
See, that’s the kind of dollar and savings that it almost it sounds unbelievable. It’s like No way, right? Like people believe, oh, maybe you got a half price or you got out of that maybe even 75. But like, if you want that’s like cheaper than economy, and you’re flying in the lay flat luxury beds, right and crazy stuff. That’s amazing. What as you continue to evolve, right, as you went through your story of college student, trying to start businesses going to get the skills, which I love that, you know, going and kind of finding an apprenticeship. What are you doing in your business now differently, now that you’ve gone through this kind of cycle,
Yan Stavisski 16:07
I’ve got two really main businesses in the credit space. One is teaching how to go and leverage your credit, credit repair and travel hacking, and to actually doing credit repair. So anybody that doesn’t want to go and learn themselves doesn’t have time. And they want to get their credit, completely fixed. This is mainly for people that have many collections accounts, and have really bad credit, and they want someone to do it. That’s the other part of the business. But if they have like small remarks, late payments, a couple of small things, I urge everybody to go learn it themselves, because those things come up. And if you don’t understand how to deal with them, it’s just gonna set you back so far, time, money, opportunities, everything else. But in terms of definitely in the business, I mean, every single month, I’m evolving, because I’m figuring out, this can be done better, this can be done better. Here’s a new method that I can implement. So I’m doing differently from last month. I mean, you said you went and learned sales,
Tyler Jorgenson 17:06
right? Like that was something that was super important in the biz, I totally agree. Every business needs Rainmaker. every entrepreneur needs to, it doesn’t matter how good your business idea is, if you can’t bring in cash, it’s not going to thrive. So how have you applied what you learned in sales into your current business, the
Yan Stavisski 17:23
person building the business has to be the marketer, the sales professional, and understand how to get that idea across. So people want understand it to see value. And so you can give that idea to your team as well. So they can actually run the business and close deals and whatnot. But the second part of it is, you should never be doing everything yourself. At first, you’re going to be wearing 10 different hats, doing everything. But the thing that you should be best that is either running the business or doing the marketing and the sales and being the front person, or you have a business partner, and you’re doing all the operations. So those are really the two main things in a business. But the the biggest thing that I learned is that those have to be delegated quickly, very quickly. Otherwise, you are taking away from the main thing that you’re doing. And that business is stalling the sales, you should not be doing yourself, you’ll be doing the marketing and the exposure and all that and being the face of the business, but the actual sales, the fulfillment, the customer service, all that has to be delegated. And if a an entrepreneur or a business owner doesn’t know how to do that, they should get focused on learning that pieces of business it will not grow, you will top out at I learned that you can get up to about 700,000 maybe a million a year, just working your butt off 24 hours a day, which is what I was doing without delegation any anywhere above 700,000 million. You have to learn that
Tyler Jorgenson 19:05
yeah, I think what’s interesting is a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs get started early. And not all of them go through like having a job for some were working for somebody else or having that experience. One of the things that you can learn from that is most careers most jobs you’re doing one or two core things you’re not doing. Right and so and it’s it’s amazing like when you go through like even like some of the basics of what Robert Kiyosaki teaches with rich with the cashflow quadrant, right, so many people get stuck in the business owner like in self employed, which is just like worse than being an employee because you have all this risk and you want stability, but you got to transition into business owner, which means letting go of all of the responsibility, all of the roles and delegating. I’m a huge fan of delegating, I think I love how Tim Ferriss talks about you got to eliminate before you delegate make it as simple as possible. And I think that exercise is such a powerful thing. What was your first Have you started growing a team? Yeah, well, first one is what role was the first thing you needed to fill?
Unknown Speaker 20:05
My first hire was assistant, because I was doing so many, just basic things in the business, like sending out emails, answering for appointments, setting appointments, answering support DMs. I mean, I was I was spending like six hours a day doing all those things, instead of just spending all my time marketing and growing the business. So that’s a lot of load off, for sure. The second hire was a salesperson, salesperson, because I was doing all the sales and my first thought, which is every single entrepreneurs first like opinion of their businesses, I’m the best at it, nobody else can do it. So I just continue doing it. That’s not the case. You can’t grow like that past even a couple $100,000 sustainably, and you know, go past six months, at least, without completely burning out.
Tyler Jorgenson 20:57
Most entrepreneurs aren’t by nature, phenomenal salespeople, right? Maybe they have some sales skills, or they’re passionate or they know. And so to have somebody who’s a specialist, so that’s all they do. And they’re an expert at it. Yeah, we’re gonna do better now. Will they know that? No, they have the same breadth of knowledge, the same background? No, but that’s not what they need they need to sell. I love that, man. That’s really good insight. What? Now you’ve been, you know, you’ve been growing your Instagrams growing, you’re ticked off, and all this stuff’s growing your focus your attractive character? What are you putting your energy into over this, like the rest of the year as you as you say, look towards fourth quarter? What do you like, okay, these are going to be my priorities from a business growth perspective.
Yan Stavisski 21:39
Audience 100% of my, my entire focus is audience right now until the end of the year, probably until October, November. Because the same effort that I’m putting into Instagram, that’s where I do everything I teach, I sell, everything is on Instagram, every other platform is meant to bring audience to Instagram because that’s where everything is done. And all the efforts that I’m spending on Instagram, it, the amount of money I make, can be significantly more if my audience is bigger, because there is nothing else needed when a bigger audience in terms of content creation in terms of a message. So that’s what I’m doing. My audience was quite small. Up until I would say a couple months ago on Instagram, I was already at about, I think 700,000 on tik tok at that point, and I’m pretty close to a million on tik tok right now. And I really focused my energy on growing Instagram, from all those platforms last couple months. And, and, but until until I did that I had literally 20,000 I’m on Instagram. And still I was the past year and a half of Marty doing seven figures a year just on Instagram with no ads, nothing like that. Not even considering my other businesses.
Tyler Jorgenson 22:54
You know, it’s amazing how many people I know that don’t have huge followings on Instagram, but they still do really well. And I love what you said that going from, you know, let’s call it 1000 followers to 100,000 to a million followers on Instagram. It’s not any more work in content creation or production. It’s just your platform has grown. And and I think that’s a really smart perspective. Now, I’m, I’m also a big believer of like, there’s traffic you own and traffic you can control. Yeah, it was never an Instagram, what are you doing to make sure that you aren’t beholden to the Instagram as a single platform risk,
Yan Stavisski 23:29
there is a risk for my deal, because my program called the inner circle, why teach everything leverage credit travel hacking, it’s an Instagram close spreads. So in that case, if for example, Instagram shuts down for whatever reason, all that content and all those people on Instagram, close friends, that gets shut down. However, I always keep a backup of everybody’s information, all the content. So in the case that happens, I move everybody else to my separate site. And I already have it built out as a backup. However, being on Instagram, close friends, everybody is already on Instagram every single day. So my delivery of content support that again, just DM me or my team and get a question immediately without having to do with email, go to a separate site. It’s right there that convenience is convenient. So is it far outweighs the risk.
Tyler Jorgenson 24:20
I’m a big believer meeting people where they are instead of trying to change their habits, right, the number of like, different masterminds or things that I’ve been involved in where they’re like, Okay, I know that you’re over here, but if you’ll come join us in this place, I’m like, I’m already visiting enough places either right? And now I remember to go over there it’s it’s not Yeah, so I think I get that I think that’s smart. I’m glad to hear that you have a backup. Now. Again, your visitor visa a little different cuz usually I’m talking to people who are like, head down in their business and not traveling, not doing things and I’m kind of like reminding them that’s the art of life. That being said, one is what is one A personal item not business driven on your bucket list you’re going to accomplish in the next 12 months.
Yan Stavisski 25:06
I’m trying to figure out what 50th country I’m going to be hitting in the next month. What’s the shortlist? The shortlist is Colombia, Greece, Dominican. And one other place. I told you, I literally don’t plan anything. And I’m a month out from doing four trips. And I literally just go to the airport and I almost get a ticket. They’re like my bookings are within 24 hours every single time. I never have a hotel. Because the system I have for travel hacking, it’s we just hop on input a little bit information, implement some hacks, and then bam, you got the hotel. You got the flight? And is last minute part of the of the of the hack or is that just how you do it? Sometimes it is.
Okay. Cool. Sometimes.
Tyler Jorgenson 25:56
I’m a huge fan of that when I traveled by myself. That’s how I travel when I travel with my family. We plan ahead for it. Yeah, but it’s but it’s a ton of fun. I mean to travel like that is a blast. Hey, it’s been awesome having you out on the show. I hope everybody go follow [email protected] slash King credit so on Instagram is pretty easy to find King credit. Follow him there. Watch all his stories. He shares a ton of information about travel hacking and hacks that he’s actively doing, and find out where he goes on his fifty country here coming up. Yon thank you so much for coming out on the show. I really appreciate you anything any, any last remaining words of wisdom.
Unknown Speaker 26:40
I think if anybody wants to go just learn free content, go to my Instagram go to IGTV. I’ve done 10 to 20 hours on credit repair on funding on travel hacking, everything credit related literally 10 to 20 hours that people can literally get the basics on and just learn about everything that I do and if they want to go implement it in their life. Fantastic. There’s a lot of details on everything that we talked about today.
Tyler Jorgenson 27:05
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming out. Now my biz ninjas is wherever you are listening, it’s your turn to go out and do something. Thank you for tuning in to biz ninja entrepreneur radio. What you didn’t hear was one more very important question that Tyler asks each guest if you want to be a fly on the wall when the real secrets are shared, go to biz ninja.com slash VIP and get your access today. Remember to subscribe so that you don’t miss any future episodes. And our one last favor. If this episode was meaningful to you please share this podcast with a fellow entrepreneur so they can grow along with us is ninjas. It’s your turn to go out and do something