John Paul DeJoria: The Business Mindset That Turns Setbacks Into Billion-Dollar Success | Entrepreneurship | Lost Files

Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha: Entrepreneurship and Self-Improvement Podcast

John Paul DeJoria shares his transformative journey from poverty and homelessness to building billion-dollar brands like Paul Mitchell and P

Key takeaways

• Resilience and integrity are competitive advantages, not soft values.
• Rejection is training, not a stop sign—persisting through setbacks builds strength.

Main topics

• Rags-to-riches entrepreneurship
• The power of generosity and positivity in upbringing

Notable quotes

"Success unshared is failure."

Conclusion

John Paul DeJoria's story proves that humility, generosity, and relentless

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) What's up, young and profiters? Today's episode is a special audio-exclusive bonus just for you guys. So here's the backstory. I had the absolute honor of sitting down with John Paul DeGioia. He's the incredible self-made billionaire behind Paul Mitchell and Patron Tequila. Unfortunately, the video files got corrupted. I was so bummed. We had to rerecord the interview, but the first conversation was just so magical. And we're finally gonna release it to you because I feel like it's something I want you guys to hear. You're going to hear him open up about his journey from sleeping in his car to becoming a billion dollar brand and why he believes success means nothing unless you share it with others. So stick around because there's a lot of wisdom packed in this conversation. Now, here's my original sit down with John Paul DeGioia. Enjoy. Speaker 1 (0:47) John Paul, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Well, Speaker 2 (0:50) thank you, Holla. It's really a pleasure being here. I like the focus of your podcast, helping others out. Speaker 1 (0:55) Thank you. Well, we are so honored to have such a successful entrepreneur on the show. like yourself, and you have an epic rags-to-riches story. And so when I was learning about you, I found out that you grew up in Echo Park, Los Angeles, which is now like gentrified. But back then, it wasn't such a nice town to live in. You grew up in poverty with a single mom. So let's start there. Take us back to your times in Echo Park. If we walked into your home, what would we see? What would we feel? Speaker 2 (1:23) Well, the first thing you would feel if you walked in my house is, wow, this is a little box. The house I grew up in is just a little bigger than your studio room here. It was a little one-bedroom house. My father was a deadbeat dad, so by two years old, we really didn't have a dad, my brother and I. But my mom did a good job raising us. So you would find a very small place with a very humble means. For example, we did not have a refrigerator. We had an icebox. Ice boxes were real, where the ice man would come around for 25 cents a week, I remember, and put a big giant block of ice in there. It would last the entire week. We had the vegetable man blowing a horn as his truck went up and down Scott Avenue or Fairbanks Avenue there. I mean, it was just really... unusual times. We never had a television, though this is 1949, 1950, 51, 52. We didn't have a TV, so we didn't know what it was like in, shall we say, the outside world. But our community was made up in those days of... A lot of Europeans and Hispanic people, mostly Europeans. And everyone just got along with everybody. It's just an interesting thing. Everyone from every race, color, creed, whatever, kind of lived in the neighborhood. And my mother gave us love, nothing but love. So we grew up with a lot of love. That's one thing my mother gave us. And we thought we had everything in the world. We didn't know any better. And then along the way, we had many great experiences. Speaker 1 (2:43) So you could have... grown up with this victim mindset because you didn't have a lot of money. Your dad had left when you were two years old, but your mother really instilled confidence in you. And she taught you so many lessons about generosity and positivity and the meaning of wealth. Can you share some of your favorite stories with us? I would love to. Speaker 2 (3:02) And then around five years old, my mother became very, very ill. So my brother and I went into foster care. So we were foster children until the time I was about nine and a half years old. But we were the lucky ones because we got to come home almost every weekend and see our mom, where many other kids couldn't. So we kind of experienced that. But my mom did something different. She made sure that we had to experience a lot of things, a lot of people experience that we consider to be wealthy. They have much more money. One great example of it was this. My mom, I can remember, brought home once a little small piece of filet mignon steak. And she cut it in three pieces, just about little square-inch hunks or something, just three little pieces, and said, boys, this is something called filet mignon. And it's what the rich people eat. We eat just like the rich people. We thought, great, whoever they are, this is wonderful. And another time, but in those days it was a lot less expensive, she brought a little bit of caviar and said, boys, this is caviar. You know, she was European when she came over. She says, that's what these rich people eat also. We eat just like they do. I said, how cool. Another thing that really sucks in my head, we were finally home there at... 10, 11 years old, and we had paper routes in the morning. And one day, I'll never forget this day, we were home, it was on a Friday, and my mom said, get whatever money you had. We said, we have a few pennies. Anyways, we raised between us 27 cents. And mom said, we have life made. Boy, we are so rich because one, we have vegetables that we were growing in our little teeny garden there. We're happy. Our bills are paid, and we still have 27 cents left over. Aren't we wonderful? We thought, yay, that was the kind of mom that we had. I know at seven years old, when I was out there selling Christmas cards off the back of a comic book, they would send you in some six samples or so, and you would sell them, and then someone would put their private name or message on there, and then they would get it back. So the way it worked was I'd go to my neighbors. I'd say, here's six Christmas cards you could pick from, and we'd put your name on it. I gave them examples, right? And then they would give me a 50 % deposit, which was something like maybe $2. I would send it into the company. They would print them up because everyone, trust everybody in those days, amazing how those things went on. Anyway, so they'd come back. I would deliver it to them and get the other $2 and got to keep it. So I thought, boy, this is cool, only at Christmas time. But my mother encouraged us to look at people and smile and just come from your heart when you tell people things. So we grew up with little to nothing, but we had everything. So we had a lot of love and a very caring mom. It's interesting when that happens in life, when you are really, really loved and people care about it. There was a place there in East LA we go to when I was in foster care called the Variety Boys Club, where we would hang out and make flower boxes that we would go out and sell to somebody else. So it was a unique way of living up. Even though we had very, very little, we lived on an upper scale because we had the love, we were excited, we were happy. And my mother was incapable of lying and was one of the most positive people on the planet. We had so little. But she did so much for us. Well, Speaker 1 (6:10) that's so wonderful. Like, what a great story about your mother. And it's so awesome that she was able to instill that generosity and confidence and positivity in you. And look where it took you because you had that really strong mindset since you were growing up. So where did this passion for generosity come from? Good Speaker 2 (6:29) question. That's going back to mom, too. At six years old in Echo Park. At Christmastime, my mother took my brother and I. We had trolley cars in those days. They actually had real trolley cars, right? Anyways, we took downtown L.A., maybe a five-minute ride by trolley car. Because at Christmastime, and downtown L.A. was a bit different than today. They had the Bullocks, the May Company, Saks Fifth Avenue, and all the big department stores by 7th and Spring, that general vicinity. Anyways. We would go down there and there'd be like puppet shows going on in the windows, little trolley cars going around, little, I should say, little trains that we got to ride. We thought we were the luckiest kids in the world to see all this stuff, right? Anyway, so mom gave us a dime and said, boys, I want you to hold the dime together, walk over and give it to that man with the red bucket ringing the bell. So we did. And we said, mom, this is now 1950, okay? Mom, that's two soda pops and three candy bars. Why do we give that guy with the bell and the red bucket our dime? And she said, boys, that's Speaker 1 (7:32) a Speaker 2 (7:32) Salvation Army. There are people that have no food and no place to live, and they help those people out. We could only afford a dime this year, and I'm going to volunteer a little bit of time with them and what little time I have to volunteer. But boys, always remember this is when you grow up and as you grow up, there'll always be somebody that needs something more than you do. Lend a helping hand. And if you don't have a dime to put or any money, volunteer a little bit of time. Speaker 1 (7:58) And Speaker 2 (7:58) that stuck with me. I Speaker 1 (8:00) love that. And you have a new book called Success Unshared is Failure. That's correct. So talk to us about why that is such an important mantra for you. And also, failure is a pretty strong word. So why is it actually failure? Well. Speaker 2 (8:13) When you grow up the way I grew up with a lot of challenges throughout my whole life, even when I started my first company, Paul Mitchell, I was homeless. I was homeless, right? I lived in my car because of circumstances. But so I've been through it all at 22 years old. I was married very, very young, had a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and my wife could not handle being a mom anymore. She just split, took what little money we had, the car, and left me with a kid sitting there. And here I am in my early 20s, what are you going to do? So I've been through a whole lot. I've been in places, for example, where when I was down and out with a little child, one of my dear buddies who... shall we say, traveled a lot with the Hells Angels, he would have the Hells Angels come over and give us a helping hand. Some of the mamas would help take care of my kid while I went to work, and I would ride motorcycles with the Hells Angels. Never had to really join the club because they knew I was working all the time, and I couldn't attend their Thursday meeting, which they call church. But they liked me, so we kind of rode together a bit out of Griffith Park and other areas. But growing up, I ran across so many things. Not having any money, having to live in a car, just a lot of different things. different things and a variety of jobs that I experienced to all of a sudden finally making it on my own through great difficulty. Well, with all this information, all of a sudden coming from nothing, like with Paul Mitchell and later on Patron, all of a sudden I had money where I could pay my bills on time. And then I realized so many people weren't quite as lucky or so positive. So I started volunteering when I had no money. at Griffith Park at Loven's, where you would feed people at, or you would be in line helping feed people at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even brought my little boy with me when I had custody of him. He was living with me and kind of just grew up helping. And it made me always feel good, not just because mom said, don't forget, but always made me feel good. So as time went along and I was able to afford it. I not only gave some of my time, but I started giving money. Today, it's millions of dollars a year. But we don't consider it charity. What I consider with my family is we're investing in the future of our nation and the planet Earth and the future for others to treat our great, great, great, great, great grandchildren even better and have more opportunities. That's how we figure. So when I say success unshared is failure, I do know quite a few people that are also billionaires and other very wealthy people that are so stingy with their money, they don't really want to help anybody out. They talk about it, but they don't. Or when they do, they want credit for it, whatever. That's not really where it's at. So I say in the book, success unshared is failure. Because throughout the book, it points out how we started with lemon and means, and then by being nice to people and being kind to people, how we could achieve something but give a little back. Let's put it this way. If there was an epitaph, which people ask me not to think about this one. If you did have a tombstone, an epitaph was on that tombstone, what would it say? And I said, you know what it would say, I think? And I thought about this a little bit, is this. He came to this planet with nothing, like most everybody does, nothing but just a body and a being in the body. But he left, and when he left, he made the planet a better place to live for millions of other people. He was one of the good guys here. So put in a good star seed that was here to help this planet evolve. That's what he was here for. That was his purpose. And he went through a lot of bullshit and a lot of problems along the way, but he came out okay. But he understands where other people were at, what they're trying to fight, and could do it a bit easier. Speaker 1 (11:41) That's amazing. Like, you're such an incredible human being, and I'm just so thankful that you're here and able to share your stories with us. Thank you. So much that you've done for humanity so far, and we'll unpack all of that. But first, I want to get into your background in sales. Sure. Because I found out that you were working since seven or eight years old. Going door to door, was that normal back then, or was that something unique to you? Speaker 2 (12:06) No, it wasn't normal. It wasn't normal, okay. No, Speaker 1 (12:08) well, Speaker 2 (12:08) I'm sorry, the newspaper route was, excuse me, if you could get a newspaper route. But the first one I would say in selling would have been the Christmas cards. And that was followed up by the planter boxes that we made at the Variety Boys Club. They were about maybe two feet wide. flat on the bottom, a kind of curve with an opening and two little loopholes that you could actually hang it up if you wanted to. So it was 25 cents worth of wood, but the Variety Boys Club would give you credit. I learned about credit, right? So I'm a little kid, whoa, 25 cents. So my brother and I built one. Took us a couple days, earliest little kids, but we built it. We went out to sell it. Finally, we sold it for 50 cents, went back. gave them their 25 cents, and the other 25 cents, we bought another one. And the other one, we made it. You know, we bought the one, and we made it. Sanded it, shellacked it, everything. We went out and sold it. We had 50 cents. Now, 50 cents in the early 50s is a lot of money. It's like a kid having $5 or $10 today. We thought, wow, this is really, really cool. And then later on, around 10, 11 years old, I had a paper route, so did my brother, with the Morning LA Examiner. And we made only about $30 a month. month each approximately, get up early in the morning, pedal our bicycles, fold the papers, go out and deliver them. On Sundays, it was fold these giant papers, shove them in your bags, and have somebody stronger than you help you on your bicycle. If you fell down, you're in trouble. It took forever to get it back up again. And we would deliver it. But you would get an extra dollar if you could go out there and get new subscriptions. And that's exactly what we did. We went out there, we got new subscriptions, you know, maybe Worked half of a Saturday, maybe got one or two, but we made an extra couple of dollars. And that was really cool. And we learned how to look people right in the eye, because when you're looking around, they're telling you, well, I'm over here. You know, you're a little kid. You're kind of, you know, anyways, to look them in the eye and give your presentation. We even had a song. A kid up the street, his name was Michael Vucic, and I would go out together. We thought, let's team up and get, you know, these little dollars each, right? We'll just split it all. We even made up a little song. Now, we're kids. We're 11, 12 years old. We made up, forget it was, good evening, good evening. We're the Examiner Boys. If you'll subscribe to the Examiner, we'll sing a song for you, right? And we do one of these. Speaker 1 (14:26) First time we did it, we were so embarrassed. When we were done, we Speaker 2 (14:29) looked at each other and ran away. And the guy in the door said, so what the heck is this all about? So you try different things. I Speaker 1 (14:36) love that. But Speaker 2 (14:37) Encyclopedias was a big one. Speaker 1 (14:39) Yes. That was your first like real sales job. Most reps quit. the first couple of days, but you actually lasted like three and a half years and became a top seller. Speaker 2 (14:48) That is, if they still had door-to-door sales, I would insist that every one of my children do it for at least a minimum of three months because it was unusual days. And I'd just gone out of the United States Navy looking for something to get into, and I was interviewed and very impressed by it. The way it works is this. For five days, you're in a training class. to learn a word-for-word presentation. Then you go out in the field. It's all commission only. You don't get paid in mind unless you sell something. But they said something to me I never forgot. And they said this, some of you are not going to make it. In fact, they didn't tell us this, but I found out later. The average lifespan of an encyclopedia salesman on commission only, no leads, it wasn't Britannica or World Book, it was Collier's Encyclopedia on Herb, right? Was three and a half days. Because once you get out there with your training and people are closing doors to your faces, it's, I don't want this, I'm out of here, there's no money. But he told me something I believed. And it's good to pass on to all your entrepreneurs. I don't care what age they are. And it's this. be prepared for rejection. The way they explained it was that you may call on 50 doors and they're either politely saying no or maybe not so politely close to your face. You have to be just as enthusiastic on door number 51 as you were on the first 50. Well, I believe what they said. It wasn't door 51 for me. It was 100 and something. But I believe I was just as enthusiastic and it worked. And then. Oh, let's say maybe I have to do 10 presentations to make one sale. Maybe. Finally, as I learned more and more, I had to do it better and better. If I gave three presentations, I did at least one sale. And that's commission only. And that lasted about three and a half years. And it worked out well until I finally got burnt out on knocking on doors, even as a sales manager with them. You were still required to go out there and every week get at least one order. And I said, now I got to go into something else. So I went into a variety of things. But I learned so much overcoming rejection, believing your product is of high quality, everybody needed it. And I would say to all entrepreneurs, I learned this when I started my first company, Paul Mitchell, Speaker 1 (16:56) is Speaker 2 (16:57) another big secret to really making it in life is not only be prepared for a lot of rejection in business or even in your personal life, because people are going to tell you things you don't want to hear. If you're prepared for it, it goes off one shoulder and into the air. Be prepared for it. You're going to get it anyways, right? The other part was make sure you'd never go into the selling business. Now, let me explain what I mean there, okay? Most people or companies create something in a presentation to sell to somebody else. Okay, there's a need in your marketplace. This is it. I don't. With Paul Mitchell and Patron especially, we went into the reorder business. Paul Mitchell had no money, no nothing. You know, just door to door and three products to start with. But they were so darn good that we knew if we put them in the hands of hairstylists, okay, they say this is really good stuff. And then recommended to their customer to use in-between visits to look the same. In other words, we were in the reorder business. Now, if you have a service that's not a physical product, you still want to go in the reorder business. Meaning this, what you're giving them is so good. Not only will they want to use you again, but there's nothing to have. It's Speaker 1 (18:06) a Speaker 2 (18:06) one-time sale. They'll tell people about it. Speaker 1 (18:08) So Speaker 2 (18:09) those are the two big things. Be ready for rejection and know it's coming. And when it comes, don't let it bug you. The second thing is whatever your product or service is, is so good. People will reorder it. They want to reorder. Speaker 1 (18:21) Yeah, I feel like that's such great advice because you don't want to be in the business of just having to spend endless amounts of money on marketing and branding and trying to like push out your products and services. You want it to be so good that people just order it on their own, spread it by word of mouth. We Speaker 2 (18:35) had to. We had no money to advertise for market or anything. And also we had to start a company with Paul Mitchell or the backer pulled out. Speaker 1 (18:44) Yep. Speaker 2 (18:44) And that was a big deal. Because we could do it for half a million dollars. Today, they'd be two or three million in 1980. Pulled out. So it was a matter of I left everything I was doing, everything I was doing, and said, what the heck? Left everything behind, better car, the house, everything else. Went down the hill with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. And son of a gun, okay? The guy didn't come through. Another lesson for everyone to learn here. People are asking, especially the youth of America or even people that are older. Can you do today what you did in 1980? You know, you started at difficult times. How in the world did you get an office? How did you get people to pay you immediately? How did you do all this stuff? That's almost impossible. Well. It's all in the book, Step for Step, how we got an office for $16 and how we got somebody that was used to paying in 45 days to pay us immediately, how we did it. There's ways to do these things, but it's a process of learning along the way as you do these things. So there was nothing there. We had to create all this on our own. And it's interesting when you've got to create something on your own. The entity in us, that God form that is in us, is very smart. Just leave yourself open to the universe. It's going to guide you. Prior to that, I was fired from three companies, all in the beauty industry. One, because I complained all the time about them testing on animals. They were hair care products. You know, not skin. You don't put a rabbit's eye until they die or inject it in them. But they wanted to look at it to be the scientific approach. Well, they got tired of me in upper management complaining. They said, JP, we love you, but you got to go because you're now telling everybody the same thing. That's not how you run a major corporation. Whether we're right or wrong, you stick by it. I didn't want to stick by something that was wrong. And I had a good job. Went to work for another company, Syntex. It's just by Thermadel. And they needed someone to train their people in sales and marketing, which is what I did. After one year, I wasn't one of them. In other words, you're not one of us, okay? You're not with us playing canestas on the weekends. You're to love it in Griffith Park, right? And other things, too, that it's no need to mention right now. But they were really mean. It's one of those types. So they fired me. I said, great, no problem. Time to leave. Then I went to work for another company that was a little dinky company. And they need me to almost run their company for them, which I did. I quadrupled or tripled their sales in one year. By the way, with Firmidel Syntex, I increased their business by 50 % in one year. And then with the other company, I tripled their sales or doubled. No, actually, I tripled them. But they fired me after a year. Now, the way they fired me, this is interesting. But what came out of it is the more important part about leaving yourself open to the universe. Okay. They fired me because they said, JP, you made more money than. owner of the company. I said, what are you talking about? You know, this is in the mid-70s, right? I said, I agreed to work for you for only $3,000 a month and 6 % of new sales. They said, that's what got you the new sales. You created so many new sales. You made more than the owner of the company. I said, but your company is bigger now. It's worth more. And how about I get 10 % of your company? I'll buy it from you, but give me a couple of years to pay for it, right? And maybe... take a little less that you're paying me and put it towards that purchase. They said, absolutely not. We have a fellow name. I'll never forget this. David Chapman, that'll do it at one third the price. I said, oh, well. And so I went on. Long story short, I consulted a little bit after that. Then I started John Paul Mitchell Systems. It took us two years, as people said, when did you become successful? It took us two years. And the reason we knew we were successful was because we could pay our bills on time. We didn't pay them off, but we paid them on time. But all of a sudden, around that time, something hit me just out of the blue. I said, oh, my God, there is a God. There is something real called fate. Had I not worked for all three companies, learned something different from all three in the professional beauty industry, I would have never been able to start Paul Mitchell. Whether it was with $700 or whether it was with $10 million, I wouldn't have had the knowledge. It's almost like I was doing a darn good job at each company. but it wasn't my destiny. It wasn't my purpose. I couldn't help enough people out. I couldn't make enough money to do some of the things I wanted to do to help the plant. I couldn't. So the universe said, okay, you're not doing it. We're going to do it for you. This is not right, but you got to learn. You got to learn. You got to learn. So when people are down and out, just remember that. Don't think about how bad things are. Because you can't change yesterday's newspaper. You can't. It's already happened. Leave it behind you. Leave it behind you and just go forward and leave yourself open to the universe. It works and it works really well. Speaker 1 (23:28) Yeah. We're Speaker 2 (23:29) here to learn lessons. And some of the bad stuff are good lessons for us to learn