ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Tay Sweat, an investor, author and business innovator who has strived to help others achieve healthy bodies and fat wallets.
Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, and now in Puerto Rico, Sweat said he decided at 19 that college wasn’t for him. However, after finding a deal, securing an $80,000 job and buying a house, he was back living with his mother when the housing market crashed around 2008. It was that crash, he said, that eventually started Sweat for Life, his first business. venture.
“When I go through the crash and I’m on my mom’s floor, the only thing I think about is, ‘how am I not going to go through this?'” he said. “The biggest thing is that I will never, ever, ever be at the mercy of someone saying to me, ‘Hey, you don’t work here anymore, you don’t have a job anymore.’ So I said, ‘Hey, I want to start a business. I want to create my own job, right? So I go out, I create my own job.”
Sweat was drawn to professional personal training in large part because of his own weight loss journey, losing what he said was more than 120 pounds by age 22 and impressing those around him. He even used a treadmill during Corie’s interview, we found out.
[EXCLUSIVE: Become a News 6 Insider (it’s FREE) | PINIT! Share your photos]
“Everybody looks at me and thinks, ‘Whatever you did, you have to make a living. You have to help other people lose this weight.’ So I said, ‘Okay, great. I’m going to start my own job, Sweat for Life, and that job is going to be what I’ve already been doing, which, you know, is helping people lose weight,'” he said. “I was burning before that. I had diabetes, I had high blood pressure, I had terrible eczema on my face. So I changed my diet, I got certified in nutrition… I went and got my trade certification and that, got certified in personal training, and Sweat for Life was coming up.”
Sweat said he would continue to learn a lot about people in this industry. Specifically, that personal trainers often had a certain type of client: the rich.
“As a personal trainer, I got to work with a lot of wealthy people. Those are usually the only people who can afford personal training, right? And what I noticed was that my average personal training client was trying to get back what he or she has lost, which means they put their health on the back burner and now what they do is try to catch up , they try to play catch. up, ‘Hey man, I’m sick, I got this going, I just need you to fix it,'” he recalled. “… A majority of my personal training clients were white, white clients, Indians, but very, very, very, very, very, very few of them were black. So I think to myself, OK, why is that? Why is it? Is it that we don’t need a personal trainer? It is not. Is it that we don’t want it? I don’t think it is either. So I started thinking, I said, ‘Man, the economy, the economy’.”
In time, Sweat found his answer. No matter how good his nutrition advice was, some people would tell him that they simply couldn’t afford either his services or healthy food in general.
This, Sweat said, made it a financial and solvent problem. Soon enough, it led him away from the healthcare industry and into investing.
“OK, so I have to teach you how to make some money,” he said. “…I started investing. Just a little thing here and there. Then I get a client who was a billionaire, his name was Charlie – and Charlie, he’s got a little dirty leg – he says, ‘Hey, man, if you could help me fix my leg, I’ll do whatever you need for me. to do whatever you want, just help me fix my leg.’ I said, ‘Listen, keep your money.’ I said, ‘I need you to teach me what you did to make that money. How did you get to where you are? I will train you for free. You just have to teach me the game.’ So that scheme you know played out over time… I started to learn exactly what private equity was and what it meant to make money on your money versus going out and trading time for dollars, right? And I say, ‘OK, this is what my people need right here,’ and as it started manifesting to me, I started making thousands and thousands and then hundreds of millions of dollars, and you know I’m a millionaire now at this point.”
Hear the full interview on Season 3, Episode 14 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Watch each episode in the media player below.
Copyright 2022 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.