In this episode, we had the distinguished honor of hosting Charlie Garcia, a distinguished figure whose life journey is a testament to the power of service, leadership, and love. With a multifaceted background spanning public service, military accolades, and impactful contributions to the intelligence community, Charlie’s story is one of unwavering commitment to bettering society.
Charlie’s accolades speak volumes about his dedication to public service, as evidenced by his receipt of the Distinguished Public Service Medal for his efforts to enhance candidate diversity across military service academies during the administrations of Presidents Obama and Bush. Additionally, his commendable work in war-torn Central America in the 1980s earned him the prestigious Defense Meritorious Service Medal.
Beyond his illustrious career in public service, Charlie is a prolific thought leader, having founded R360, a community of centimillionaires that are creating massive impact in the world. Charlie also authored two best-selling leadership books that have resonated with readers globally in over ten languages. Charlie shares valuable insights into effective leadership principles. His leadership philosophy serves as a guiding light for aspiring leaders seeking to make a positive impact in their respective spheres of influence.
At the core of Charlie’s ethos lies a profound commitment to service, underpinned by an abiding love for his country. Each day, he renews his pledge to utilize his gifts for the betterment of society, embodying the essence of true leadership and selflessness.
Join us as we delve into Charlie’s remarkable journey, uncovering invaluable insights into the art of service, leadership, and living a life driven by purpose and love.
In This Episode
- His background, distinguished career in public service, and transformative work in business and entrepreneurship.
- Wealth beyond financial assets, encompassing elements such as family, relationships, and personal fulfillment.
- R360’s archetypes framework for understanding investors’ risk profiles and behaviors.
- The significance of family as a source of true wealth and fulfillment.
Charlie, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Dave.
Charlie, I’m honored and grateful to have you on the show today. You’ve been an inspiration to many. Your vision is bold. The impact that you’re creating is powerful in your communities, with your family, with your relationships, and those that you’re connecting with. I applaud that.
The listeners are in for a big treat today to understand and unpack what that means to you. First and foremost, I would like to thank you for your service as well, as a fellow veteran. That is one of the biggest causes that we are trying to support. Thank you for your service.
Likewise, who we are.
Super. For folks who may not have heard of R360 or Charlie Garcia, tell us a little bit about how things started for you in terms of your path and your journey.
Human capital is about skills, values, and health and wellness.
I grew up in the Republic of Panama and I had a difficult relationship with my father. He wanted me to go to an Ivy League school, and the last thing he wanted me to do was to serve. I had this calling to serve so I applied to the service academies. I wanted to be a fighter pilot and I got accepted to the US Air Force Academy.
I went that route, but unfortunately, the lights out were at midnight and I was studying under the cover with a flashlight until two or three in the morning. Unfortunately, my eyes went from 20/20 to 20/100, so I couldn’t fly airplanes anymore. I used to watch all the James Bond movies. I said, “I’ll be an Intel officer”. I went to Intel school.
In the 80’s, Guerrilla Warfare was going on all over Central America – El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. I got sent right into the middle of all of that. I spent about five years doing all kinds of interesting things. Then, I was working for a four-star general, John Galvin, who was the head of Southern Command.
I wrote a lot. I’ve always written a ton. I wrote a cover story in May of ‘87 for Mortimer Zuckerman, the editor of U.S. News, Morel report. It was about how the Cubans were using drug traffickers to infiltrate arms. Then they were laundering money through a bank that was set up. He had been on the regional selection committee for the White House Fellows. He told me that I should apply and he wrote me a letter of recommendation.
In the last six months of the Reagan administration, I went to work for a guy who became a mentor, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, John Whitehead. John had been the deputy secretary of state under (George) Schultz. He got me thinking about the finance background that came a little bit later. Bill Bennett came in, I love Bill Bennett. He was appointed as the Drug Czar. I helped write the nation’s first National Drug Control Strategy.
Then I decided to get out of the Air Force and I ended up going to Law school. At Columbia, I was also the first person in my class to publish on the law review. I found out that law was a business and there are better ways to make more money than every six minutes writing down what client you’re thinking of to get paid.
I decided not to go on a clerkship when I graduated from law school. I started a Hedge Fund focused on the banking and thrift industry. Two Hedge funds later, I started a broker-dealer in 1997 and we grew to sixty offices in eight countries. We were the fastest-growing private firm in Florida for two years, and the fifth or sixth fastest-growing in the country.
Fortunately, we were bought in 2006 because we cleared Bear Stearns, which a few years later disappeared. I got lucky in that regard. That’s my entrepreneurial journey and how I built wealth as a veteran. I did not have an MBA, I have a Master’s in Public Administration (MPA).
Somebody told me to join the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO). They said that they had a competitor called Vistage. It was called ‘Tech’ back then. They were both peer-to-peer groups to help you be a better Chief Executive Officer. I joined them both. When I sold my business, I left Vistage, but I stayed in YPO.
If you have a connection to something bigger than yourself, spiritually or through faith, you can understand and articulate your life purpose.
Then somebody told me about TIGER21, which was an organization I joined in 2011. That taught you to be a better investor. I was pretty good in Stocks, Bonds, Options, and Equities. But I’m not as familiar with Private equity credit, etc.
Real estate commodities, all kinds of global investments; for eight years, I became very familiar with it and learned a lot. But then I wanted to do something different because at least in my case and others, it was about our families and ensuring that the wealth that we created did not negatively affect them or my great-great-grandchildren I’ll never meet.
At the end of the day, I believe that money is the energy to make transformative changes, either in your life, your children’s lives, or the world. That energy can be both positive and negative if it’s not handled correctly. I decided to create a different organization, a different peer-to-peer group where we could use the privilege of wealth to form a new paradigm where we collect individuals with a generosity of spirit that is going to use their God-given gifts for the benefit of the world, humanity, the health of our planet.
Creating a legacy that their heirs will continue with these values and continue solving some of the world’s most intractable problems by putting their entrepreneurial mojo to work. That’s my story. I’m married, the love of my life is Cristina. I have four unbelievable children and two grandchildren. I’m very happy that I’m still here. My dad died young when he was 61 and I hope to be around for a long time so I can be the guiding force in my immediate family and my extended family.
That’s such a powerful story and evolutionary as well, Charlie. I can relate. It’s difficult. Leaving school, going into the military, and then coming out. Did you have a time when you were at the Law firm or shortly thereafter when you knew you had to become an entrepreneur, was there some type of itch or some type of sign that led you down that path?
Absolutely. I had a classmate who ended up going to Raymond James, but I was at Greenberg Traurig in Miami and we were taking these banks public. What I noticed is that they were coming out at 50 cents a book value. Peter Lynch, who was big in those days, wrote an article in Barron’s. He said, “You buy a used car for 10 grand, you go home to wash it, and you see in the glove compartment, there’s a bag with 10 grand in there.”
It’s not what you have, it’s what you keep.
That’s what it was like. These stocks would come out at 10 and open up at 17, 18, 19. One of the bankers on the deal, one of the associates said, “Charlie, would you like some stock?” I was a little bit older when I went to Law school, I was 32 because of the military. I said, “Sure. I’ll buy four thousand shares.” Sure enough the next day, it opens up at 19 bucks. It’s like, “Wow. I just made thirty-six thousand dollars. Guess what my starting salary was going to be the next year”. When I showed up, it would be seventy-two thousand. I would have to work 3,000 hours.
I remember asking my Executive assistant at the time who worked with various people. I asked her how much she made. When I calculated 3,000 hours by $72,000, she was going to be making more money than me. I was so happy, but when I saw the associate, he was looking down at the floor and I said, “You just made me 36 grand.”
He said, “No, I told the partner in charge of the deal, he said it was in Kosher Financial Institute and to cancel it.” I said, “What? Did he cancel it?” At that moment, a light bulb went off and I said, “Law is a business.” If I can make half a year’s salary in an investment that’s a no-brainer, where they’re coming out at 50% of book value. What did I do? I started a bank and thrift Hedge fund.
It was at a time when there was a lot of consolidation in the banking industry. I opened up over 300 accounts at Mutual Funds all over the United States. In those days, they weren’t as particular that you had to show up with. As long as you had a UPS PO Box, you could sign up.
If that bank decided to go public, the mutual owners were the people who had accounts and you could buy up to 4.9% of the IPO. There was no way to lose when you have a fund that only invest in these banks that are going public and are coming out at 50% of book value. We had a 37% compounded annual return for three years.
I decided to get out because my partner had half his money in there. He happened to be my ex-father-in-law, and he was super happy that I had taken his money, and he had put in $100 million, and I doubled it in two years. I wanted to take a three-year record, go out, and raise a billion dollars, but he didn’t want to do it. That’s when I decided to go off on my own.
Wow, fascinating. Charlie, what does wealth mean to you?
If you’re doing good work in the world and you find nine others with the wealth and desire to help, you can collaborate and amplify your impact.
When we founded R360, this was an important definitional issue. R360 is a member run. Going back to that law firm. Back then it had about 300 lawyers, now there are about 1,500. I thought the worst job in the world would be managing partner of a law firm, of all these egos.
When we first launched R360, I surrounded myself with a group of people who said, “You should have 40 founding members that all have a little bit of equity.” I’m thinking, “I’m going to get these very wealthy, strong-willed entrepreneurs. It’s going to be like that law firm.” We agreed.
Coming back to your question, wealth is not about money. It’s not about how much money you have in the bank. Real wealth is something we call fishes. You’ve heard the proverb, “Give a person a fish, you feed them for the day. Teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime”. The fish that we are getting our members to master is the way we define wealth holistically.
It’s not only financial capital, it’s intellectual capital – social, human, emotional, and spiritual capital. That’s the way we look at wealth. The meetings in R360 thematically flow around those six forms of capital that we all are trying to elevate and get better at every single year for ourselves, our spouses, and our children.
Having such a holistic view of wealth is so empowering. Yet it can be so elusive to many people out there. Wall Street talks about this financial independence and they wave it as this sought-after goal that you’re going to get to. Oftentimes, people haven’t done enough deep thinking about what that means to their lives.
Such as, does that create more time in your life, so you can spend time with your loved ones? Are you able to create more impact with different people? They think it’s more of a freedom to get out of what they’re doing. But when you can do some deeper thinking on it, it could take you to new places. What do you think is holding people back from having more of that holistic view of what wealth is?
Being around individuals of great wealth, in R360 we have 114 members whose average wealth is $400 million. Fourteen of those members did not graduate from college. Eight did not graduate from high school. Maybe ⅓ of those grew up in a poor household, and many suffered from trauma.
There’s this misconception that to create wealth, you have to have a certain focus. I find that if you have a connection to something bigger than yourself, spiritually, through faith, you know what your life purpose is and can articulate it. My life purpose is to inspire and connect others to achieve extraordinary things. It takes my three God-given gifts.
I’m very clear about what my values are. So when any opportunity arises, I can filter it through – does it align with my purpose, my gifts, and does it align with my values? When I think holistically about wealth, if intellectual capital is a foundational piece of wealth, then I’m thinking, “What am I going to do over the next 12 months for me, my spouse, and my family on things that I want to learn?”
I’m in this deep dive. I’ve been for over a year in artificial intelligence, machine learning. I needed to be in a creative state, so I decided I was going to learn to play the electric guitar. I’m going to write a novel that I’m on chapter 65 of. By doing all those things and creating constant growth, it then also allows me to uncover opportunities in other areas.
Human capital is about the skills, it’s about the values, it’s about health and wellness. There are a lot of things that I’m doing on the health and wellness side that increase my energy. I have right behind me a Shiftwave chair that I sit on every day and do a guided meditation. I have over a hundred different guided meditations and there are eighteen electronic pulses vibrate. I have a thing I put on my finger that measures my pulse. That is for the physiological impact on my body and my thinking in that component.
Social capital is important. I did not know you before, Dave, and now you’re part of my social capital and I’m part of yours. I happened to be at one point, one of the twenty most connected people in the world on LinkedIn. Today, I’m in the top one hundred as it expanded.
When you think about business, when you think about investments, the only things you should consider are risk and cash flow.
It’s one of those gifts that I love nothing better than to meet someone and introduce them to someone in my network who can help them in their journey. I am part of what R360 is about, it’s creating social capital for the members, their spouses, their children, mentors, people who can guide them, and business partners for the future.
If you’re doing good works in the world, let’s say I’m interested in taking plastics out of the ocean and nine other people have the wealth and desire to do that. Now, I can work together with them and increase my impact. That’s the way that I think about why people have this view of what you need to do to create wealth.
You need a bit of luck in the universe smiling at you. You have to have the resilience. I’ve learned more from my failures than my successes. You have to be methodical, and thoughtful and have all these components working together for you to amass, maintain, and positively use wealth.
That was an evolutionary trajectory in terms of how you view wealth. Were there any moments that were pivotal in terms of changing your thinking, especially coming from having an RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) practice, you are a first-generation wealth producer? Were there any things that helped you get insights into this more holistic view?
I read a lot. People ask, “What’s the best thing that you got at the Air Force Academy?” It happened before school started. There were three weeks where they taught us two things: how to type. You had to type sixty words a minute. Back in 1979, when I went to school, not all guys typed. We learned that.
The more important thing is they taught me how to speed read. You read every single word, you would just read down the middle of the page, and you don’t enunciate. There was a methodology. I’ve been doing it since I was 18 years old. if you think of the Neuroplasticity in my mind, I can read a 300-page book in three hours.
I did a deep dive into investing. Because I had a couple of Hedge funds, I developed an investment strategy that fits my personality. 90% of my wealth has been created through my investment portfolio which has grown and with specific objectives.
10% of it, I am a contrarian value investor focused on yield. I’ll tell you what that means. I’m also looking every year for one or two Asymmetric trades where I can bet a dollar to make ten. It’s a good risk-reward profile and they don’t come out all the time.
I noticed that Warren Buffett makes 55% of his returns over Dividends. He’s concentrated. Everybody tells you to diversify. Most people who diversify through (Exchange-Traded Fund) ETFs have hundreds of stocks. I have three. I like to find good baskets and put all my eggs in there.
What I’m searching for is companies that are increasing their dividends by 15 to 30 percent a year, there’s not many. I also think about taxes because it’s not what you have, it’s what you keep. With dividends, you only pay 23.6 percent and you can reinvest them or take them.
When I think about investment, I got lucky because I didn’t say I’m going to buy low and sell high or I’m looking for growth, no. If I buy a stock for $10 and if ten years from now it’s still at $10, I don’t care. What I care about is that they’re increasing their dividend by a certain amount every year because that’s about Cash Flow. When I think about business, when I think about investments, the only things I think about are risk and cash flow.
I wanted to create a portfolio that was throwing off a minimum of three million a year in income and growing at over 10% a year, which means it’s doubling every seven years taken by the magic of compounding. That’s basically what I’ve done. What people don’t realize is I bought a stock that I had my eye on for a couple of years.
During the pandemic, it had gone from a high of $30, all the way to $7. I bought it at an average price of about $10. At $10, the dividend was $1.80 per share. That’s an 18% yield. Where do you get 18% on your money? Not at ordinary incomes, but at 23.6.
Imagine, you buy a million shares for $10 million, and now you’re making $1.8 million a year. But this is the only company that I have found globally. There are 60,000 companies if you look at the Stock Market of every public company. This was a company that was growing its dividends by 20% a year for 20 years.
Now it’s been like 24 years, and the last couple of years they’ve grown by 25%. What that means, if you use the rule of 72, if it’s growing at 20%, that means in three and a half years, the dividend is going to double. So if you buy it for $10 a buck at 80, in two and a half years, it’ll be $3.60 if it keeps growing at that rate, then it’s going to be $7.20.
Eventually, you’re going to be making more in dividends than your cost basis for the stock. In this particular stock in the last, I got lucky. Now it’s closer to $70. You even have the price appreciation. If you pick two or three of those, that’s what Warren Buffett has done. He doesn’t trade. He just buys good companies at good prices and he holds on forever.
Unless some disaster happens in the company, then you get out of it. My style is instead of buying a hundred companies and hoping you get an average mediocre performance, I find good management companies that are paying growing dividends. Hopefully in different industries, and building my wealth like that.
You have to be methodical, and thoughtful and have all these components working together for you to amass, maintain, and positively use wealth
Every once in a while, if there’s an opportunity that comes up, I’ll invest a dollar. Sometimes I lose, but oftentimes, I’ll make 20 or 30. Because I know how to use Options and Futures, I can make little bets that can make a lot of money with leverage which I wouldn’t recommend to anybody unless they were a professional.
We’ve had Michael Sonnenfeldt on the show a couple of months ago and we talked about TIGER members allocation of roughly around 20 to 22% exposure to Public equities. Are there any trends or overall percentage allocations from R360 members that you could share with us?
We don’t do what they do on purpose because we don’t talk about things like that. What we do talk about is risk. You have to identify, based on your Asset allocation, that we have a risk per asset. We track the average risk of our members’ portfolios. It’s fairly on the conservative side on a scale of one to ten. Ten being the most aggressive, one being the least – it’s about 4.6.
Our net wealth is about $420 million, which is substantially higher than TIGER21. People are in more of a wealth preservation. We have members whose 80% of their total portfolio is in Bitcoin. We have members whose 80% of their wealth is in Real estate because that’s what they know.
If you looked at my portfolio, you’d see a stock concentration because of my particular strategy. I also own a lot of Bitcoin and precious metals as well to provide myself some diversity and because I like the Asset class.
I don’t think it’s as useful a measure because everybody is different in what they do, which is what I love. We have a call every month. We have unbelievable investors. We have one guy who’s the number one Hedge fund manager for the last five years out of 5,000 that get measured.
We have global value investors. We have a guy who managed eight billion for George Soros and he only invests in credit. We get together and we talk amongst ourselves about what opportunity they are seeing. If you’re a credit expert, that’s all you invest in, and you come to the group to say, “This happened. It’s trading at 50 cents on the dollar, it should be trading over par and I just bought a boatload.” That’s how we help each other out.
The problem with TIGER21 is, that there were five groups in South Florida, and usually, there are one or two members with an expertise that I would call significant. Most people were joining because they wanted to learn. I like these calls because you have experts who are managing their wealth in a particular style which you can learn from.
4.6 being conservative is where my members are. You have to make a decision, is it pedal down? Are you on neutral or are you on breaks? Right now, our members are neutral. There’s a lot of liquidity in the market. You see what’s happening with NVIDIA, which we recommended four times to our members when it was below $200.
When I say recommended, we write something called a ‘Nidal’. We take the collective wisdom of our members and we write pieces on financial, intellectual, etcetera. We try to identify these trends. We have members, maybe six members from India. We put together a 40-page white paper on how to invest in India, which has one of the best demographics.
If you look at TIGER21, they have little exposure to overseas markets. We put out about a year ago, that the dollar was going to go down. When the dollar goes down, you have a rise in Global equities outside the US.
The United States does not have a monopoly on the best stocks. We have about 6,000 to 7,000 stocks out of 60,000 globally. Our members are experts on developed markets outside of the US from tier markets.
What would you say is your perspective on the psychology of money? We always find this fascinating talking to different investors, based on where they were raised. What types of peer groups do they have, what have they been exposed to? There’s so much around that psychology of money, what it means to them, and what they’re looking for. What can you share with us on your perspective around that from a mindset perspective?
It’s an important question. I had the opportunity to teach at MIT for two years. I taught, how to use behavioral analytics to lead high-performing teams. For anybody that joins R360, there’s a battery of assessments from colors to the predictive Index, to the Enneagram, to different things to gain insights on your Behavioral DNA.
It’s important for a leader because the most important quality of a leader is self-awareness. The second is empathy. If you have four children and you want to maximize their potential, you have to approach them differently. The same applies to investments. Having a self-awareness about your personality is very helpful. The reason why I’ve become successful is that I have organized my investment style around my personality.
I made my money in financial services and to me, it’s an industry scam to say, “What we’re going to do is to diversify you in a million different products. Hopefully, it goes up. We’re going to take a fee of 1 to ½ percent.”
For the same amount of work, as your portfolio grows, I’m getting paid the same amount of money. If you lose money, I still get paid. Instead of sitting down with you and saying, “Let me help you and educate you.”
They put everybody in the same box with the same 60/40 Allocation of Stocks to Bonds, maybe in recent times, 70 percent. It’s not the right way to invest. The other indicator I always look at is Warren Buffett, who’s sitting with more cash than he’s ever sat at any time in the history of his firm.
The most important quality of a leader is self-awareness; the second is empathy.
That’s an indicator to me that our members are neutral right now, is the right place to go and their eyes wide open. Because when those stocks drop from $35 to $7 or $10, you’re sitting with cash, and you’ve studied. When everybody else is panicking, that’s when you want to invest.
You want to do the opposite of what everybody’s doing with great companies, with a great track record that is on your watch list. You’ve just been waiting for a price and then you hold on forever.
It’s such a great strategy. I love the concept of understanding your unique investor DNA and aligning that with an overall strategy. With that, something I’ve found fascinating around R360, and as I’ve gone through my self-awareness journey as well, I’m constantly trying to develop that. You’ve created this neat concept called the ‘R360 Archetypes’. Can you share with us what that’s all about?
Right. I’ve been a student of personality archetypes for a very long time. When we founded R360, we found that no assessment tells you how you want to make an impact in the world. R360 is all about impact. R360 is about how we aggregate a thousand families, 500 in the U.S. and 500 abroad that have shared values, excellence, honor, generosity of spirit, curiosity, joy, and entrepreneurial grit.
You’re grateful for what the universe has given you and you want to use your wealth, your intelligence, and your family for the benefit of humanity and the health of our planet. I wanted to find out what where the archetypes of these types of individuals who have created great wealth.
It took us two years of working with a few Ph.D.s in organizational psychology to come out with the world’s only assessment. It would cost a few hundred dollars if we were trying to make money off of it, but we give it away to the world for free. You can go to our website and find out.
Are you an adventurer? Are you an altruist? Are you an Olympian? Are you a sage? Are you a seeker? I am an Olympian. We’re all a combination of all five, but we typically have two that dominate. I am an Olympian seeker. There are only six of us within one hundred fourteen members of R360. Now there could be an Olympian adventurer, an Olympian sage.
My wife is an altruist sage. You can see the compatibility of individuals and it gives you a guide for how you’re going to move in the world, what kind of purpose you’re going to be seeking, and how you are going to make an impact in the world.
Start with a measurable goal, focus on it, and think holistically. Accumulate a hundred thousand, a million, two, three million in a bank account before retirement.
At the end of the day, when we’re gone, there are only two things you’re going to be remembered for. How you made people feel and the impact that you had. It’s not going to be where you went to school, or how you got three awards for being Entrepreneur of The Year. No one’s going to care or remember any of that.
We focus a lot through this archetype assessment, on how you can increase your impact and how you can leverage your God-given gifts to make people around you – immediate family, friends, community, anybody that you meet, feel good about you and think about you when you’re gone. Like, “Wow. That was an incredible person.” That every time I was with that person, he or she wasn’t like these energy vampires that suck the life out of you. It was the opposite.
I felt like I was rejuvenating with my spirit, soul, and energy. That’s what we’re trying to emulate, to be a light for other families of wealth that should use their wealth and the duty of the privilege of wealth, to use it to benefit veterans and benefits communities that are in need.
Interestingly, the Family Office model has much more of that holistic type of perspective. This is one of the reasons that I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom with the community, Charlie, because, the listeners out there might be thinking, “I don’t have a hundred million in net worth. I may never have that.”
But in all of the lessons that you’ve been sharing today, whatever your net worth is, you can be a part of that. You can work on self-awareness, you can work on empathy, you can develop your family. From all of the different capital aspects that you shared.
Tell us about your family. I know how near and dear family is to you. You’ve taken this to a level that’s so inspiring, how you’re trying to support your family, and your future generations.
Absolutely. Curating the membership is important. At TIGER21, there’s no membership committee. There’s a membership committee of seven and I’m not on it. They’ve turned down 71 people to date, including nine billionaires. One of the billionaires was a very close friend of mine. That’s the way it should be because they are being very thoughtful about who should be a member.
Family is important. I had this attitude that you set an example. Your children mimic you. I was very purpose-driven. My father died when he was 61. I had this bucket list that I wanted to use my gifts to benefit the world. I was on the National Board of the Girl Scouts. One of two men on a 30-person board.
I care about entrepreneurship. I was on the Board of Junior Achievement. It’s in 22,000 schools teaching kids entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. I care about education. I was on the 3DE Board, which is revolutionizing public high school education and redesigning it in America. I was very involved with veterans.
When we’re gone, there are only two things you’re going to be remembered for: how you made people feel and the impact that you had.
I met with all my kids as an exercise of R360. The question was, “What have I done well as a father and what are the opportunities to do better with you?” I never said how I’ve been bad. It’s basically how I can up my game. All of my kids without exception said, “Dad, we admire you for everything you’re doing and the impact that you’re having in the world in the things that you’re deeply passionate about. But what about me? When was the last time we went on a vacation one on one?”
For that matter, you work so hard, when was the last time the family went on a vacation? That hit me hard. They’re just fighting for my time. I felt that I was so busy living my purpose that I wasn’t fulfilling the obligations of a father, a husband, a son, a brother, or a friend.
A lot of people look at what I’ve done and think I’m 80 years old. I said, “You know what? I’m going to get off all the boards. I’m going to remember that I run a Family enterprise. The family members are my human capital. I need to invest my superpowers in them and make sure that they’re all strong.”
It’s not only my immediate family – it’s my nieces and nephews, my brothers and sisters. When I dug under the hood of the car, I found out there were tons of issues. When you have an employee and you’re not an entrepreneur, and they don’t do what you say, you can let them go, and find a new one.
Your kids are like, “Dad, I heard that one.” If you have a spouse, it’s a different type of leadership. When I think of R360, what I think about is family enterprises of 400 million on average, where a patriarch or matriarch has created the wealth. 20% of our members are second or third, so they’ve inherited it.
The dynamics of how you run that is very complicated. I could tell you, if you were in that network, join a group of fifteen. When I had an Advisory Board for my company, I had five people and I paid them $5,000 per meeting. I have five meetings a year, so it was $25,000 each. But imagine getting fifteen incredible humans to be advisors for your Family enterprise.
That would be $75,000 per meeting, but you’re not paying for that. You couldn’t get these people anyway because they wouldn’t do it for $5,000. We believe that we’re providing incredible value to those members and their families. It’s a family experience in that we have programming for young children. There are certain things that you can do between five to ten, ten to fifteen, and fifteen to twenty years old to help them. I’ve learned these things. Unfortunately, I’ve learned them at a time when I’m going to have to work on those with my grandkids.
As an entrepreneur, ensure you set aside money instead of continually reinvesting in the business. It’s crucial to understand the value of saving and collaborating with outside shareholders to build wealth while reducing personal risk.
We also have a very successful rising leader program of a hundred children of our members that get together for three days. We go through the six forms of capital, they have a ton of fun, they have a peer group, and we’re helping build their social capital.
Then we have health programs that cover the whole family’s health, and mental health as well. Our purpose at R360 is to architect an oasis for strategic wealth creators and their families to flourish. In this oasis, it’s all about the rejuvenation of family. We have some entrepreneurs who focus so much on their business, that their extended family is not where it should be.
They learn now how to develop the type of relationships that they should have, but they don’t for a variety of reasons. Personally, that’s the journey that I’m on at the moment. It’s a lot harder than you think. It’s a lot easier to be focused on your investments. It’s a lot easier to take every individual in your family.
I’m in Colorado right now, and I moved out here because I had a daughter who had some challenges that she’s overcome, but I wanted to be close to her. She graduates in May, and I need to be in South Florida where all my members are. But I have an 87-year-old mother in Daytona Beach who isn’t doing so well, almost passed last year. I’m the only sibling who can do it, so I’m moving in June to Daytona Beach to be with my family.
I am prioritizing choices. My father, before he passed said, “You’re the oldest boy and if something happens to me, I’m counting on you to take care of your mother”. For the remaining years that she has left, I want to take her to play bridge. I want to take her to the movies. I want to take her out to dinner. I want to be there.
I am prioritizing family over using my superpowers. Part of the reason I created R360 is that before I die, I want to touch three billion people on the planet in a positive way. I can’t do that on my own. One of the exercises I also had to do for R360, is I had to write my eulogy. You had to write the eulogy not about your accomplishments. How did you make people feel and what impact did you have?
When I was done writing, part of the exercise, I had to share it with my kids, my wife, and my mother. It’s aspirational because part of it is like, “When are you going to die?” I wrote, “I’m going to die when I’m 101 years old.” These are some things that are aspirational and they all edited it.
R360 is one sentence in that eulogy that I was at the forefront of establishing R360 as a platform that impacted positively the lives of over three billion humans on the planet. That’s where I’m moving. I read my eulogy once a week at least because I believe in the power of manifesting. If my calendar isn’t leading to that eulogy, then I blow up my calendar because I’m doing things that aren’t leading me to where I want to end, and you never know when you’re going to go.
We’ve had two members that have passed. One of the members was 53 years old, a great friend of mine, playing basketball with his brother and his 15-year-old son. You have to lead that type of life as “I can be gone tomorrow and I’ll have no regrets.” I certainly like to live longer than that, but I live my life so I’m prepared to go if I’m called.
That’s so empowering, Charlie. I love the focus on family and there’s not enough of it in the world. We held our mastermind, our annual event with investors. It was fascinating doing this wealth visioning, and mind-mapping exercise. Family was at the forefront of everything.
With focus on saving more than spending and wise investment, you can achieve your financial goals.
Yet it can be so elusive. I have four kids as well, trying to get everyone together on the same page and create those shared values, a shared framework. It’s amazing what you’re doing there. Where would you see yourself in the next decade?
I want to run four solid R360 groups in South Florida, where we’ll have 75 members. I want to continue to go on all the trips. We have joy as one of our values. We’ve had trips to Morocco, to Israel, to Canada, to Costa Rica, all over the U.S. Our members love to have fun. I like to race cars. I like to surf. I like to to continue doing those. More recently, I love to write. On my bucket list was to write a novel.
It’s a lot harder than I thought. I wish I had taken creative writing in my younger years, but I’m getting the hang of it. I love writing and I’m trying to write a novel that hopefully gets picked up and made into a movie. It’s trying to create something in the world through storytelling because I was going to write a book about reconciliation among religions and within religion, especially the Abrahamic religions.
Some folks said, “No one’s going to read that. You’re not going to influence anything. What you need to do is write a novel. Only one of two million novels gets picked up for a movie. Be lucky enough that your character in the drama starts a conversation in the world because it goes viral or gets picked up.” So I’m in the middle of that.
I’m learning to play the guitar and music. I just want to be a positive force for my family and collaborate with others on their philanthropic journeys. We just had an R360 member present last week in between meetings we have, we get together all the time for presentations. This 39-year-old using Digital Media raised $120 million last year for a nonprofit he’s passionate about.
For every dollar they invested, he raised ten. When he started working with them in 2017, their budget was $300,000 around this area. This year, it’s $15 million because of what he did. I was fascinated because the biggest problem nonprofits have is raising money, growing, and scaling. We have such incredible humans in R360.
We have a 35-year-old woman who was living out of her car when she was nineteen. She had no wealth, no money. Grew up on a poor farm in South Carolina. I’ll tell my members what they need to focus on is, “I want to have a hundred thousand in the bank.” When you get that, “I want to have a million in the bank and then ten million in the bank.” You can do it over 30 years if you’re focused and you save more than you spend. Then you invest it wisely.
She was a missionary in either Africa or Latin America, and she wants to end human trafficking and violence against women, but she doesn’t want to raise money. So she said, “I’m going to have to make money.” She got into Real estate. She met Richard Branson, who bought his island on the British Virgin Islands, in Necker Island when he was 29. She was nineteen years old, had no money, living out of a car.
She says she’s going to buy an island before 29 and she’s going to use it. All the money she makes is going to go into this nonprofit. At the age of 28, she bought Buck Island and renamed it ‘Ariel’. She’s married to a Green Berets sniper, has 20 years in service, and is retired. Jeremy Locke is a great guy.
I’ve been to their five-day program where they take mainly veterans of Special Forces, Navy SEAL, Force Marine, and Reconnaissance, who have all suffered from suicide and they go there for a five-day program. It’s unbelievable what they do. Those veterans end up being deployed all around the world when there’s a crisis, earthquakes, or hurricanes on their other missions.
She’s 35 years old now and very focused. I got the idea of doing the eulogy through her because we have this deck of cards for each form of capital. One of the questions was, “What was your daily routine?” She said, “I do this – I pray, I read my eulogy”. I said, “Whoa. You read your eulogy every day? That means you read it today, so why don’t you read it to us?” When she read it, it was all about her impact, how she made people feel.
She does it every year, in the first week of January. She has a 20-year plan, a 10-year plan, a 5-year plan, a 1-year plan, and then the eulogy which is leading her to all that. One of the things I wrote about in my first book, ‘A Message from Garcia’, I learned something valuable from a guy who already passed, he’s a mentor and he had read a book that came out in the ‘20s called It Works.
Right now, it has no author and it said to Charles Kelman when he read it in the ’60s that, you can condition your subconscious mind and your mind is an antenna that transmits and receives. If you knew you couldn’t fail, what are the thirty things you’d want to do with your life? Write them all down. You have to prioritize, you can’t do thirty things. What are the top ten? Put the top ten.
Put them in order of priority, write them on a piece of paper, and read them three times a day. Just read it. Charles did that. He wasn’t good in school at all. The number one thing he wanted was to be famous because his parents told him he wasn’t going to amount to anything. He wanted to invent something that was going to change the world.
He became famous in that, he played a Saxophone. One of his songs was a top 20 song, and he was interviewed by Johnny Carson. Then he went on to invent. He was an eye surgeon and he invented the process to take cataracts out of people’s eyes. Number three on his list, was in ‘61, when he wanted to have a helicopter, which was big. By the time he passed, he had three helicopters, he became a pilot.
The point for your listeners is, that this is not BS. If they do that simple process, that’s what Brittany is doing when she reads her eulogy every day. She has 10-year goals, 20 years, 5 and 1. It’s that relentless focus. I became friends with a brain surgeon at Stanford who wrote some amazing books. His name is James Doty. He has a new book (Mind Magic) that’s just come out which I recommend.
He talks about the physiology of the brain and how by using the five senses you create this movie in your brain subconsciously. You could be at a dinner party and you hear something. You don’t hear it but your subconscious does because there are billions of signals coming in and it filters everything out, but somebody could be saying something that aligns with this movie that you’ve created. It’s like, “I got to talk to Dave over there because I heard something that he said.”
Then I talked to you and you have a message for me that leads me or propels me on this goal that I have. So many people who have created great wealth, those that didn’t go to high school or college, it’s these little things that they have done that I see over and over that many people don’t think about are trapped.
Without wealth, they don’t know how to create wealth, but if they just start with a measurable goal that they focus on, and think holistically about, they should be able to accumulate a hundred thousand, a million, two, three million in a bank account before they retire.
If they’re entrepreneurs, make sure that they’re putting money away and they’re not reinvesting in the business all the time. I’ve had five entrepreneurial ventures that have failed and I learned that you have to squirrel away money and it’s better to give away some of the company to outside shareholders so that you can build wealth and not take all the risk yourself.
Charlie, if you could give just one piece of advice to listeners about how they could accelerate their holistic wealth trajectory, what would it be?
Anything you want to do in life, someone else has already done it. Learn from their mistakes to avoid making your own.
My grandfather once said to me that when you learn to shave, try to learn on someone else’s face first. I took that advice to heart. Whenever I want to do something, I find somebody who’s already done it. If they have a podcast, they’ve been interviewed by you, I can go to YouTube, I can read their books. I get smart on the strategy.
If various people have done what I’ve done, I read them all. I pick up the phone and I reach out to them. I will try to get an introduction, I’ll get their email. Most people, if you approach them the right way through LinkedIn or other ways, and you ask them if you just want some counsel or advice, you’d like to be able to text them or email them, and have a Zoom call; Every couple of months, they’ll do it.
The best advice is to have multiple mentors. In every area of those six forms of capital, I have mentors right now. I’m always working on being a little bit better every single day and being very intentional. The one advice I would have is anything that you want to do in life, someone else has done it. That person may have made twenty or thirty mistakes along the way, which they can help you avoid doing. That would be my greatest advice to your listeners.
Excellent. This has been such a wealth of information, Charlie. I can’t wait to go back and listen to this again. There’s been so many pearls of wisdom. Again, I’m grateful for you sharing all of your wisdom with our community. If people would like to learn more about R360 or try to get involved with the impact that you’re creating, what is the best way for them to do that?
They can go to our website. They can take the Archetype Assessment at no cost. On LinkedIn, they could sign up for our page, and follow. We have a lot of white papers that we put out on these topics. My partner has a book, Bloomberg published, called Wealth is More Than Money. I’ve published a few leadership books – Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows.
A Message from Garcia, which is more about my entrepreneurial journey. I also have my mentors and what I learned from them. In the White House Fellows book, I interviewed 228 extraordinary individuals like Colin Powell and many others. I took all of their lessons on how they became successful.
If you can’t lead yourself, it’s going to be hard to lead others and create wealth because you need discipline, focus, and strategy. You have to develop internally yourself first to do all these great things that you want to do. That’s what I would tell your listeners to do.
Great. We’ll make sure that we get all of that typed into the show notes and provide links for everyone who’s listening. Charlie, thank you again so much for your time and your wisdom today. I’m grateful.
I’m grateful for you, Dave. Again, thank you for your service. Hopefully, we’ll be able to swap stories sometime in the future. I’m sure you have a lot of great ones.
Outstanding.
Important Links
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Books
Books Mentioned
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Further Resources
Your 10-Step Actionable Checklist From This Episode
✅ Clearly articulate your life purpose and core values. This clarity will guide your decisions and actions.
✅ Embrace a holistic view of wealth beyond financial assets. Include intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects in your definition of wealth.
✅ Regularly review your progress against your goals. Reflect on what’s working well and where adjustments are needed to stay aligned with your vision of success.
✅ Consider concentrating your portfolio on a few high-quality investments rather than diversifying excessively, aiming for substantial returns like Charlie‘s focused approach.
✅ Regularly educate yourself about investment trends, opportunities, and global markets, leveraging insights from expert groups and publications.
✅ Consider integrating personal values into your investment strategy, similar to Charlie’s alignment with impact and community-oriented investments through R360.
✅ Conduct regular family discussions to gather feedback on your role as a parent, spouse, or sibling. Focus on improvements rather than dwelling on past mistakes.
✅ Write down your life goals, including an aspirational “eulogy” that reflects your impact on others. Review these goals frequently to stay focused and motivated.
✅ Seek mentors in various aspects of life, not just professionally, to continuously improve as a person and as a family leader.
✅ Remain flexible and adaptive in your approach to personal growth and family dynamics. Embrace new opportunities and learn from setbacks.
About Charlie Garcia
Charlie has been honored with the Distinguished Public Service Medal, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, and post-9/11 awards for his national security contributions. A best-selling author of two leadership books in over ten languages. He cherishes time with his wife Cristina, their four children, and two grandchildren. Charlie is dedicated to a life of service, enriching society and his country.