– Welcome, everybody to today’s Building My Legacy Podcast. Thank you for being with us. Today I have Manuel Suarez with us. He is CEO of Attention Grabbing Media, Attention Grabbing Media, and he started his business basically from start-up and he’s taken it to being an eight figure business, very incredible success. So many people want to do that, they get stuck and don’t get there. And you’ve had a really interesting journey in the process, so share with the audience, please, some of what your journey was, what got you here, but before you do, I just want to also share with the audience that Manuel has been featured in several places, Yahoo Finance, Intrepreneur.com, and also he’s been ranked on the Inc. 5000 list. So he has obviously accomplished a great deal and has a lot of credibility. So share with our audience, please, your story.

– Well, thank you very much, Lois. This is obviously a very interesting subject for me, which is what you guys are focused on, building a legacy and something that is very near and dear to my heart. I really believe in that particular process of building a legacy more than anything else in this world and it’s so important. So I wanna start out by saying that I love your mission and what you stand for and I appreciate-

– Thank you.

– What you do to help people get in that process of building their own legacy, it’s such an important thing. I started a business in 2007 with my father, co-founded a company called Natural Slim. And he was already established in Puerto Rico and the brand was created by him. We are now 23 years old. In the year 2000, he launched Natural Slim in Puerto Rico. And then in 2007, as I didn’t know what the heck to do with myself, I was in the United States and I pitched to my father the idea of helping us, maybe allowing me to start getting his message out there in the United States. And he gave me an opportunity and we got going, and my wife, myself and my father, we created a partnership and we started building the Natural Slim brand in the United States. And a lot of things happened along the way, obviously the economy around that same time completely melted. And I was one of the last people to ever buy a property in that real estate booming market before it all fell apart. We lost everything, and 2010 while business was trying to survive, I personally declared bankruptcy with my wife and we had to rebuild ourselves and a lot of things have happened. We don’t have enough time to talk about all of it today, but a lot of good things happen enough that drove us to where we’re at here today. Talking about this story as the main thing was that we discovered the opportunity of internet, social media marketing platforms in combination with the fact that I had an incredible unicorn than I had in front of me, which was my father. And I was able to get him in front of a camera and start communicating to the world about his message, his value, his super power, his information, his knowledge that was gonna make somebody else lives better. And we started creating a YouTube channel and getting his content sent out on this platform. We were doing four episodes a week for a couple of years, and then Facebook came along and we started doing Facebook and distribution of his content. We did that for many years and fast forward today, we went from having no business, no attention to having a business that’s gonna break $45 million in revenue in the year 2021. And we’ve accomplished massive success and there’s a lot of good things that we did along the way. We made some mistakes, but we made a lot of good decisions along the way, and one of those major decisions was building my father’s legacy and getting his message in front of the world. As you already know, Lois, my father sadly passed away early this year and seven months ago already, and obviously we’re still dealing with the fact, it’s still very fresh. My father and I were really close, he was the most important person in my universe and he was that person for my whole life and not only in our business years. So it’s been very tough to say the least, but we have something that we’re moving forward with, and that is what your podcast is all about and that’s legacy. And that allows us to keep on going, because he did an incredible job of building something that goes way beyond his body. And that is my motivation every single day, because I know that’s what he wanted. He wanted to have that message that he was good at distributing, good at sharing, he wanted to keep it moving forward. He wanted to have people discover his message way beyond the years that he had in his body and that’s what we’re working on right now. We’re working on pushing his legacy to the next level and at the same time our company keeps on growing with it. But the focus is legacy, we push that legacy and the more we push that legacy the more the business grows, it’s kinda like a magical formula, that’s what we do.

– So share with the audience a little bit, what is his legacy and what is it that you’re pushing forward with that, I think it’s fabulous.

– The other day I was looking at a definition of the word legacy, I was doing content. I do a lot of content myself and I wanted to explain to people what this meant. And I know you guys are here learning about that subject and you’re all focused on creating your own legacy, but hey, if you haven’t seen this definition before, it is an interesting thing to pay attention to. And it says, an amount of money or property, this is just a basic definition you can find on Google, left to someone in a will. There’s a lot of more information about this subject, but then it goes on to saying, a thing handed down by a predecessor, a thing handed down by a predecessor. And he has a sentence here that goes with it, it says a legacy of centuries of neglect. So for me, my dad’s legacy is what he handed down to us. What is it that he handed down to us? We have 2,213 episodes, video episodes that he handed down to us that are with us until the end of time, until one day technology stops working and maybe we have an atomic bomb or some kinda like massive phenomenon happens in the world that ends everything, we’re gonna have this legacy that we’re gonna keep on pushing forward. That is something that becomes immortal that doesn’t really have a connection with his body. It’s something that keeps on being handed down for generations. It’s information that he gave on all these videos, not to mention all the books that he wrote, we have six books where he talked about the different subjects that he was expert at, in our case, my dad’s obsession, his subject that he was good at was metabolism, health, overall weight loss education, energy, and in general, correcting the misinformation to the public is being given out there because this is the thing. He made it a mission personally to give people this information because he was observing how there were all these big pharma companies out there that were profiting from people being sick and how they wanted to keep people sick. So he really had a personal conviction with giving people the right information so they wouldn’t have to pay attention to bad advice that was trying to keep them sick. So he was trying to give them real information. So he did that for thousands of videos, thousands of hours, millions of words, hundreds of articles, and a lot more and that is basically what we have as his legacy. The thing that he handed down to his heirs, which in this case is our company, us, my children, myself, and our mission is to keep on spreading that word. And I have a company, Lois called Attention Grabbing Media, AGM short, and our obsession has been capturing attention. And I love taking people that have a great message, probably a lot of people that are listening to this podcast have a great powerful message that they wanna share to the world and they wanna have people listen to it because it can really make their lives better. I have an obsession with getting that message in front of people. My dad had an obsession with just getting people to see this message because he knew he will make the lives better. So when we do this, when we spread his message and we generate the millions of views that we generate every single month, that helps us, help people number one, and number two, it helps us grow our business. We don’t focus on growing the business only, we focus on helping people, and by helping people and by spreading this message and by getting the legacy in front of more people, our business magically grows. So it is a formula for expansion for any business out there and that’s what we focus on.

– I think for so many people getting message out there, it is so difficult and I think because they spend their energies hyping rather than really delivering a real message. So do you wanna just speak about that for a moment, ’cause legacy is real, it’s not a hype?

– Lois, my father was very withdrawn from products and from money and from selling, he hated that concept. And at the same time while he hated that concept, our company has expanded dramatically. So I have proved this entire concept to be the correct strategy. I have other people that I’ve helped over the years, some of you guys in the English market and the American market, you might’ve heard about this individual who’s very similar to my dad, but he speaks English and his name is Dr. Eric Berg. And he has a YouTube channel with almost six million subscribers at this point and a big following across social media. He really does not sell products, and what he does is just help and provide value and educate people and give people information. By doing so, they’re able to bring people into their world and now get a chance to offer products and services, but you’re not looking like a sleazy salesman and that’s basically what my main strategy has been just to turn people into real value, providing people on brands that actually have a desire to help others along the way and make a difference. Like in my case, I just talk about marketing all day long. Anybody that’s a business owner, anybody that’s a marketer that wants to learn marketing strategies and they wanna take their marketing games to the next level, you can find all the information out there that I do every single day here in the world of marketing to accompany success for free, you don’t have to ever pay me a penny. And even though I don’t ask for people to come into my world and hire us, I’m so lined up with people that wanna work with us all the time, because I’m giving so much to them. I always like to give them an analogy. People ask me like, “What should I do, this is my content,” I’m a mechanic, for example, or I’m a realtor, I’m an accountant or whatever the case may be. And I tell them this analogy, I say, look, if you really wanted to have a mechanic shop full of people that are looking for your help so that you can change their spark plugs, or you can change their oil or do a tire rotation or fix their cars somehow, all you gotta do is get in front of a camera and give them the exact details of everything that you do all day long, break it all down in steps, show them exactly how they will never need you. If you focus on doing that all day long, you’re gonna have so much business that you’re not gonna be able to service all. And I know a lot of people will think about, well, wait a second, that’s counterintuitive. My intellectual property is too valuable and I should not be giving it away for free. Well, that’s not the world that we live in today. The social media world is a world and YouTube platforms and all these platforms that we have to be access to are platforms to provide value first, before you make offers and sell things, because they are being presented with so much content right now. There’s so much information out there for them to select, so many options that if you don’t put a value out there first, you’re never gonna connect with these people to begin with. This is not the traditional world of running a half a page on a magazine or running a 30 second TV ad, or a 98.7 FM station one minute radio ad, this is a very different world. This is the world in which you have to connect with people first before you make them offers, before you present services and that’s done for something that we like to call content, images, videos, graphics, that’s what is gonna help you capture the attention of these people, which in turn will help you be able to generate revenue for your organization.

– So Manuel, what kind of clients do you especially like to work with?

– We have many different types. We do a lot of e-commerce here. At this point, Lois, we are a pretty big agency, we have a hundred staff and we have helped, my favorite ones are personal brands, people that have a message. I have Daymond John, Lois, you’re familiar with Daymond John from Shark Tank?

– Yes.

– So that’s somebody that I worked with and he has a message. He’s a content unicorn, I enjoy really working with him. He calls me his marketing guy, so that’s somebody that I work with every day. My father obviously being the content creator that he was, I had the pleasure of working for many years with somebody that was probably one of the greatest artists in our world and his name is Chick Corea. He passed away also this year, early this year. He was a jazz musician, one of the greatest ones of all time and 25 Grammys over his career, an incredible artist. So we got a chance to work with him. Dr. Rick Berg. I have gotten a chance to work for the last two years with Nancy Cartwright, who’s a voice of Bart Simpson and helping her spread her message and her passion. She worked for a nonprofit organization called Know More About Drugs. She’s educating people on the harmful effects of psychotropic drugs and opioids medications. So these are guys that I really enjoy working with, but we actually get to help a lot of smaller brands, e-commerce brands, Amazon sellers, doctors that are looking to generate leads and identities and people to service. We pretty much are all over the place, especially when it comes to… When it comes to marketing Lois, we all need the same thing, which is attention. If you know how to market and if you know how to put yourself in front of people, if you don’t how to create videos that are attention grabbing, we can help anybody grow their customer base, their prospects, funnel, and that’s something that we’re pretty good at here. But my favorite one is obviously people that have a message, that have the passion, that wanna get more attention, and that’s something that personally I enjoy because these people are game changers, they’re the ones that are actually making the world go around, they are people that are influencing others, they’re making people do better and improve their conditions in many different areas and I really enjoy working with these type of people, for sure.

– Manuel, that is I think going to be more and more the key to building a business in the future. So many people complain about the decline in market right now, or the uncertainty and what does that really mean for them, and at the same time you see other companies really flourishing and grow. And I think we’re gonna see a bifurcation, yes, you may really be able to grow a business with the traditional process, but people are getting tired of that and it may get worn out. This other though, it takes a very different mindset and that generosity of spirit is a different mindset. So would you mind talking a little bit about that? ‘Cause yours is different, you’re bringing something very different to the marketing process.

– It is a mindset just like you just talked about right now, Lois, right? This is something that I like to explain to anybody that wants to get our help. If you have a business, you have also a superpower and we all have it. If you don’t have it, you really don’t have a business that makes the world a better place, and any good business out there makes the world a better place somehow, whether you have a makeup line or you do accounting services, or whether you have a wood shop or it really doesn’t matter what it is. Every single one of these businesses improves the life of somebody else somehow, maybe that’s spiritually. Like if business consultant is gonna help somebody improve their business and get better results, be able to hire more people and scale their business and get their products in front of more people. A one-on-one coach, a personal coach is gonna help you get more results personally and maybe help you spiritually feel better. An individual designer is gonna help you feel better about yourself, because it’s gonna be able to put a better stuff in your home and you are gonna feel better about it, whether that’s a personal designer or whatever it is. So you see everybody that has a business, you somehow create a positive effect in the life of somebody else, unless you’re selling something that maybe is not something that I would agree on, like for example, if you have you’re in the business of selling drugs, that’s not a business that I will support, and that’s not making somebody else better, it’s actually destroying people. But generally, any business it’s gonna make somebody else better. So the first thing that you got to understand as part of this process is that you got to really get what that purpose is that you have. What is your business trying to accomplish? How are you really at the individual level changing the life of somebody else out there that is trusting you enough to open up their wallets and giving you their money? How are you making that person better? And when you have a conviction that you really wanna help these people because you believe in your products and your services, that is the best way that you can get started. Once you start with that mentality and it’s not about, “Oh, I wanna generate more money so I can buy myself a brand new Maserati,” or whatever the case may be that you wanna buy yourself or a Rolex, or I want to buy myself a better equipment, it doesn’t matter what that is. If you have the mindset that begins with, “I wanna do this business because I want to help people,” that is something that is gonna take your doors a journey that I have been traveling. Trust me, it is a worthwhile journey because as you’re growing it and you’re getting more revenue and you’re expanding and you’re able to provide better for yourself and for your family and for your employees, you’re also helping a lot of people and that’s first and foremost, the first thing that you need to pay attention to any business that makes the life of somebody else better. If marketed correctly and handled correctly, your revenue will grow hand in glove together with it along the way.

– If you’re helping others, your revenue will grow, that is for many people, it’s a difficult concept because when you’re an entrepreneur and beginning, you’re so tuned into, how do I make a dollar today? And I think part of what I love about what you say is if you take the focus off of how am I making a dollar today and put it on, how am I improving the life of somebody today, the money will follow.

– I love that. How am I improving the life of somebody today? That’s a great question to ask. Because it also opens up this next point, Lois, responsibility. Responsibility for people that are on the other side that might have not been lucky enough to find your product and service that’s gonna make them better, and you have a responsibility for reaching them because you have the ability to make them better. When you have that viewpoint in place, like I cannot even begin to tell you how many stories we have with my dad’s content, his information, how their lives have dramatically changed. I mean, we’ve had people that were suicidal, that because they were depressed about how they felt with their bodies that have a happy life again, we have had people that were taking 17 different medications because their body was so out of control and now they’re back to life. We’ve had people that could not find a partner and because everybody was somehow they couldn’t even like connect with people and now they have a life again. So when you have that responsibility in place over people, over humans, magical things will happen. And it’s a combination of those elements, understanding how your business really helps somebody, and once you really understand that, have responsibility enough to really want to make these people better and also responsibility for reaching them, because if you don’t, these people are gonna keep on going downhill and it’s something that you can change yourself if you took responsibility for them. It’s a very powerful statement.

– I’m gonna go back to something you said at the outset of our interview, and that is, you hit a point where you went into bankruptcy, you lost everything. And so many people, Manuel, when they lose everything, it’s what happens in your mind about who you are as a person, and will you be able to come out of this and succeed? And clearly you’ve done that. How did you manage that mind of yours during that period of time so that rather than giving up, you just forged ahead with a positive wonderful attitude?

– Lois, I think is described by utilizing two words, and those two words are necessity level. Necessity level is defined as how much do I need in order to survive, and I gotta go out there and I gotta get it? When I was broke and I had to declare bankruptcy in 2010 and we lost everything, including our home, vehicles and all of it, I actually was not just trying to take care of myself, at that point I already had a wife with two kids and a pregnancy on the way. So it’s not only about me, I had a necessity to survive and that was the first thing that drove me. At that point I wasn’t thinking about revenue, I wasn’t thinking about growth, I wasn’t thinking about building an empire, I wasn’t thinking about anything else, I wasn’t thinking about helping others. That’s not how it started, that’s how I operate now, that’s how my dad operated for a long time. I was thinking about survival and that led me towards coming up with ideas and things that I had to get going and trying some things and failing and not giving up and standing up again and keep going and trying new things and failing again and standing up and keeping going, because I had a responsibility that went beyond just myself and my body. And these people would not be where we’re at if it wasn’t for my drive to make them better at that point. So it’s viewpoint of, I gotta make this go, I gotta make this happen, or else we’re gonna be in trouble and I can not allow that to happen. And my wife believed in me, she trusted me for me to provide for the family and I had to step in there and do something about it. I hear a lot of people talking about business and they say, “Oh, I’m not in it for the money.” But in reality, Lois, at the beginning we’re all in it for the money, at the beginning we’re all in it because we wanna make more money, we wanna have freedom. And the freedoms that come with building a business are quite unique. So that’s how it all starts. Along the way you kinda conquer the world of making money and you know you can make it and it keeps on coming in and you see it flow in and out and steadily and you feel that stability, so the game becomes now, how do you keep on influencing more people? How do you build a better legacy? How do you make sure that you prepare? Because here’s the thing, these bodies, if there’s one thing that I learned is here, wow, they are frail.

– They are frail.

– And at any time and you have people that care about you around you and you don’t wanna let them down. And if one day you don’t wake up, what’s gonna happen? And I know I’m not trying to be all negative here and Debbie Downer and in general like think about the diagnosis of it, but you gotta think about the reality of life and life is frail and it can disappear in a moment and treating life as you’re living every single day as a bonus. It’s how I operate right now, I don’t take anybody for granted, I don’t take my kids for granted, I don’t take my wife for granted, I am nicer to people. You know I lost the most important person in my life, Lois, this year. And I think I have a lot of things that I can be thankful for. I was able to build a close relationship with him over the years, I was able to tell him a lot how much I loved him, but there is so many things that I wish I could talk to him about that I can tell him about and I don’t have that anymore. And he was only 71 years old. I think I lost 15 years that I shouldn’t have lost with him, at least 15, 20 years and it was a big lesson. I don’t think anybody that has experienced a loss like that really understands that. So if you guys listening to this haven’t experienced any of that, don’t take anybody for granted around you. All those people that care about you, that love you, that you love and you care about, make sure that they know it, make sure that you’re doing everything that you can, because the one thing that you can not get rid of is something that we all call regret. There’s nothing more damaging than having regret over something that you can not fix anymore. And when somebody, I mean, if you have a relationship with a person that is still alive, that regret is optional and it’s voluntary and you can go in there and you can resolve it. But if that person is not there anymore, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s gone, you’re gonna keep on regretting forever. Right? So the more that you can avoid regretting relationships with people or things that you should have done or shouldn’t have done, the better it’s gonna be when one of these terrible things happen. I’ve had a very tough year, not financially, I’ve had an incredibly successful financial year, a lot of expansion, but spiritually has been a crushing year and a year in which I’ve learned a lot of lessons and senior lesson above all has been to make sure that I don’t take anybody for granted and that I let everybody around me know how special they are. And I’m nice to people and I don’t try to, I don’t know, keep on living life as if I’m gonna live forever, because that’s not the truth, it can disappear any day. I had a friend that was 35 years old, I had another one that was 42, I had another that was 71, unexpected things happen, that’s just the way it is and that’s life and that’s part of it. So that brings me to what we’re talking about today, which is legacy, right? That legacy, the understanding that we’re living things way beyond this body, living something that goes way beyond what we have over here, which is quite unique. I mean, you have the ability to press a couple of buttons and go out into the world and share your message on these platforms. And if one day I’m not around, which it will happen, inevitably, I mean, I’m 40 years old, I don’t know how long I’m gonna be around. It could be a year, it could be five, it could be 50, I don’t know. Whenever I’m not here and my family wants to find out, remember me, my grandkids want to see how I was, their grandfather, they can just press a couple of buttons and see me, and hear me, and feel me and understand our journey and that’s not something that we didn’t have before. And I don’t want any of you guys, including myself to take that fact for granted, because I wish I could go back and see my grandfather’s journey to where he was and I don’t have that. The only images that I have of my father, not my father, of my grandpa, the only images that I have of him are in my head. And it will be very special if I could go and see how he operated in life, how he was, how he dealt with problems, how he communicated, and how powerful his message was. All those things, that will be very special if I can actually be a part of that, for sure.

– And that is legacy, isn’t it?

– That is legacy, that’s what you’re leaving behind.

– It is what you leave behind. Manuel, you do such a beautiful job of challenging us, challenging everybody to think about that. And so I really appreciate that and appreciate the work that you’re doing, because I think right now people are really looking for what is it that’s gonna give me a sense of purpose and meaning and how can I give back? So thank you very, very much for that message. The last thoughts or comments that you have before we close?

– Well, thank you very much for having me, Lois. And I’m hoping that as many of you as possible work really hard in the time that you have here on this planet so you can leave something that is gonna continue way beyond that body of yours, which we know it’s very special to have, it is quite unique. Life is precious, life is beautiful. It’s so incredibly beautiful that we’re able to spend the time that we spent here, the people that you have around that take care of you, they love you, they appreciate you are so incredibly valuable and if you can do something to leave your little mark on this planet, that’s something that I hope that a lot of you are taking Lois up on building for yourself. And I think it’s worthwhile to have something like that and I can tell you that my dad right now, if wherever he may be, he is extremely proud of what we’re doing with his message, because I know that’s what he wanted. No matter what, he wanted his message to be heard, he wanted his message to be seen by people, he wanted to continue moving forward and reach new people and help people with his message and that’s what we’re doing every single day and we’re gonna keep on that and hopefully a lot of you guys go down a similar route.

– Thank you so much, Manuel. And so for those of you who are listening to Building My Legacy Podcast today, thank you for being with us and remember to visit our website at www.build2morrow, with the number two .com. Thank you so much.