James Catledge
speaker
208 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
James Catledge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, here's what I do. I let Chris know, you either cut me loose. Or I leave one way, you know, I'm leaving anyway. And he says, I just can't do it. So I did the hard thing. I went and found a office to lease. I take the receptionist who's at Chris's office with me, Elizabeth. She's my receptionist. She's been processing my apps, doing my paperwork. So if I leave, she leaves. My six guys leave.
I tell my wife we need desks in this empty cavernous space that I've rented. Need one for Elizabeth, I need one for me and the six guys. So we buy Office Depot desks that you have to assemble. My wife spends a weekend assembling desks with an Allen wrench. Those desks get all set up. We're now running an agency. I don't have a contract yet. I have a logo. I have a brand.
I do not have a contract yet. So a guy that I really admired who worked for Chris and it left maybe a year prior. Went out on his own. I go have lunch with him. His name's Scott. You may know this guy. Scott Childress is his last name. Name's familiar. Scott Childress was a baseball player for the California Angels. Rebels, California Angels, and then he's at Zockel's agency, and he's very good.
Very good. So I said to Chris, I need a contract. Who are you using? He says, oh, I've got your contract. I know what you need to do. I said, tell me. Tell me what you're doing. And, and I'm at this point, I don't just follow people around at this point in my life. I've seen enough been without enough. I keep my own company. That makes sense. I take data very rarely and moved.
If I, if I'm, if I'm headed in a direction, it's hard to move me. So I'm basically investigating Scott's idea, but I do need a contract. And so he says, listen, I'm with a company out of Atlanta, Georgia called the World Marketing Alliance. I said, never heard of them, but it sounds real cheesy. That's what I said. World Marketing Alliance. I said, it sounds like Amway. What are you talking about?
And nothing's more disgusting to me in my mind at this age than some type of MLM stuff, okay? I'm a licensed guy. I'm professional in my head. Dry cleaning.
It's all over the place. And I'm disgusted by the idea of it. And this is just my little arrogant way of thinking, okay? It's not right. It's just the way I'm thinking. Okay. So he says, World Market Alliance, you'll have your own contract with all the carriers. We've got lots of technology, lots of tools, lots of software. And I'm thinking, okay, that sounds great. It's a split. Yeah.
And I said, I did ask him, I said, how much do you make on my efforts? He goes, well, if you do nothing, I make nothing. But if you succeed, you'd be a first generation manager to me. And he says, the great thing, James, is you can build your own general agents. And I thought, okay, that means I'd never lose a James Catledge. If I find one, I don't have to lose him for his ambition. He can stay.
And so that was very appealing to me. The idea that I could hire someone with my mindset, my skillset, and they never leave. And so I go on, it takes me about eight years, but inside that culture, That's where I made $59 million with that one company. Okay. Now, if you want to know how it ramps up.
Everything's fine. I'm going to make it a truckload of money.
We didn't just wake up in a Ponzi scheme, and it was not a Ponzi scheme, although that is the journalist view of this. Here's what happened. World Market Alliance is sold. My mentor, Hubert Humphrey, sells it to Agon, a publicly traded company. I stay around one more year. We renamed the company World Financial Group. Better name. Yeah, definitely.
I leave World Financial Group, take about 300 guys with me. They write me a check for several million dollars because they're going to keep the rest of my guys. And now I sign a non-circumvention on the rest of my guys. I'm not going to take them. But I do have 325 that left with me. I start my own company. I now go get my own contracts. Agon provides me with one of my contracts, by the way.
And I end up recruiting 8,000 agents. Not direct, but through my organization, I have 8,000 licensed guys. We are selling, you just cannot imagine the volume of transactions that are happening.
I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I have a real estate. Everybody, this is back when your housekeeper owned three rental properties. Okay. Sure. Okay. We all remember this, right? Everybody owned rental properties. We have no real estate to offer inside our portfolio. None. We're insurance, we're annuities, mutual funds. There's no real estate. It seemed like an omission.
So I tasked my CFO to go find us real estate. I don't want everybody to be with Century 21. It's a conflict. It doesn't make sense to get them all real estate license. We could lose half our guys. I said, find us an opportunity to offer real estate to our clients so that we have that in the quiver. He brings me a father-son developer team out of the Dominican Republic.
They pitch us on their existing hotel operation. They want to turn into a timeshare operation. Now, they're going to leverage their existing paid-for hotel They're going to create timeshare fractional interest in it while they build out a new property. And then we're going to leverage fraction that one and build out a new property. So we're going to build three properties.
The brand we're operating under is Maxim. You know, the men's magazine Maxim. This is our partner in branding. This is just the real estate side of my business. Okay. My guys are offering anywhere from $15,000 to $300,000 condominium fractional interest in the Dominican Republic on the ocean called the Maxim Bungalows. So if you're Googling this, Google Maxim Bungalows, Dominican Republic.
That's our property. For five years, we sell $180 million worth of condominiums on the ocean in the Dominican Republic. In the sixth year, my partner and we, all money's flowing beautifully. I'm paid, company's paid, my clients are being paid. Everybody's winning. In the sixth year, it's 2020. Six, seven. The world's turning upside down economically. Vegas specifically. Money is less available.
People don't have 401ks, IRAs. They're being depleted. There's less money to borrow, less liquidity in the market. My partner says, you've got to increase cash flow here so we can finish this third property. I said, what do you mean? We're selling these units And you're basically taking the money assigned to room 101 and building it. What do you mean we need to increase the capital?
He says, I'm telling you, Catledge. That's the way he spoke to me. I'm telling you, Catledge, father, son, you've got to increase cash flow or we have a problem. I said, well, what could be the problem? We've got two finished hotels that are paid for. We're in the middle of the third. Cash flow is tight, but we're selling the units as we go. The clients have contracts.
Showing 141–160 of 208 · page 8 of 11
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