Social Impact Heroes: Why And How Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings Of Earn Your Leisure Are Helping To Change Our World

I had the pleasure to talk to Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings Of Earn Your Leisure.

Rashad Bilal learned at a young age the importance of financial literacy and realized that he wanted to translate his knowledge into action. After graduating from The University of Hawaii in 2007, Rashad became a financial advisor in 2008. In 2018, Rashad partnered with his lifelong friend Troy Millings to start an educational platform called Earn Your Leisure (EYL).

Troy Millings was born in the home of Hip Hop, the South Bronx. From an early age, music influenced his education. His keen memory and ability to memorize lyrics translated into memorizing historical facts, equations, and literature. Those two passions would later mold the educator he is today. He taught for 16 years, beginning his teaching career in NYC Dept. of Education to, most recently the CSD of New Rochelle.

In the midst of teaching, Troy led Operations Crossroads as Program Director, a summer youth program designed for students at the secondary level of education. The purpose of the program is to introduce students to financial literacy through culturally responsive education while providing them with opportunities to gain work experience through summer internships in career fields of their choice.

Realizing there was a need to expand financial literacy education outside of the traditional classroom setting, Troy and his life-long friend Rashad Bilal came together to start an educational platform called Earn Your Leisure. Today, Earn Your Leisure has grown into one of the top business platforms in the world with its own podcast network, a top business podcast under its own network, and an online educational platform.

Earn Your Leisure is a revolutionary media platform that gives rise to emerging and established content creators from the world of business, finance, and entrepreneurship whose perspective, expertise and in-depth insight has been undervalued and overlooked.

Earn Your Leisure has three Top 100 podcasts under its umbrella, including “Earn Your Leisure.” The Earn Your Leisure Show has amassed over fifty million downloads and is consistently ranked in the Top 20 Business Podcasts in the United States, peaking at #1 on the Apple Podcast charts.

Earn Your Leisure has over 2 million followers across social media and 900,000 YouTube subscribers. EYL hosts live events across the globe, which includes the biggest financial literacy festival in the world, “Invest Fest.” Over 14,000 attended Invest Fest 2022, with keynote speakers including Steve Harvey and Tyler Perry.

Earn Your Leisure also includes an online educational platform, “EYL University.” EYL University is an online interactive community that includes over 200+ archived webinars covering a range of business, finance, and entrepreneurial topics. EYL University has over 12,000 active members and is one of the fastest-growing private business education communities in existence.

Invest Fest ATL happened on August 5–7, and the gentlemen are taking Invest Fest to London on 10/31/22!

Thanks so much for joining us. Our readers would love to get to know a bit of your backstory and origin story. So, Rashad and Troy, could you take turns and tell us the story of how you grew up?

Rashad:

Well, the story of how this came about is that we’re both from Westchester, New York. So, we grew up in a small town called Greenberg, which is 20 minutes outside the Bronx. It’s a real working class, blue-collar community, small town, and everybody knows each other. Everybody’s really related- friends and family. So, we met when he was in seventh grade. I was in fifth grade. And we’ve been friends ever since. So, we’ve just been lifelong friends, grew up together, played basketball on the basketball teams, went to high school together, and had the same friends.

I was always into finance my whole life. He went into education when he got finished high school. Then, he went to college and became a school teacher. After I was done with college, I started working as a financial advisor. So, I always wanted to reach more people than just a couple hundred people that I could reach during my financial planning practice. I always had the idea and the vision that it could go global and reach people, but I wasn’t sure how to go about that. Teaching financial literacy and teaching people about investing. When the internet and social media came about, I saw that as a great opportunity to, you know, spread the wings and teach financial literacy in a way that it wasn’t being taught before. With mixed pop culture and made fun.

And at the same time, as I said, he was a teacher. So, I started teaching it in his classroom financial literacy, and that turned into a program where it was every summer. We taught financial literacy during the summer for six weeks to ninth graders, and two things would happen simultaneously as we were teaching financial literacy, and then I was also building my social media page. We were using clips from the classroom to put on social media, like teaching kids about credit, stocks, student loans, and all that stuff, and people really started to gravitate towards that. At the same time, I was going on local public access shows and radio shows, and I would chop up clips from there and put it on my social media page.

So, the social media side of it was growing as we were actually doing the education of financial literacy in the classroom. Then, the social media bus just became like an avalanche, and at that time, podcasts were really popular. People already thought that I had a podcast, but I didn’t. So, they kept asking me if I had a podcast or when I would start a podcast. So, around three and a half years ago, I thought it’d be good. I did start a podcast! So, started a podcast and, being that we already had a relationship, I asked him if he wanted to do the podcast with me. He agreed. So, that’s how the Earn Your Leisure podcast came about, and it’s been lightning speed from there.

So, we started a podcast, and then from there, we started a podcast network, which now’s kind of grown into a media company where we produce six shows under the umbrella. Then, we started doing events which led us to invest fest. Now we started to merge. We started a subscription-based model education online platform. We just started so many different verticals, and during the pandemic, it really helped out a lot because people were really interested in financial literacy- and they had nothing else to do. So the interest in our content grew tremendously during a lockdown. So yeah, all of that just kind of leads us to where we are now. So now, Earn Your Leisure is best described as a community online and in person, with events and things of that nature media company. We focus on entrepreneurs and business investing, and that’s where we are at.

Troy

So, the education piece was vital. I was working in New York City, in the Bronx specifically, and this started feeling complicit. I was watching what was being learned. I remember grading state tests and thinking, what are our kids going to do with these answers in the future? And I was feeling overwhelmingly complicit in the situation. If I wasn’t helping, then I was part of the problem. So I had the opportunity to create this program in our neighborhood. It was for ninth graders who had aged out of the camp experience but were too young to actually get a job, and so our program was really to create job readiness for the next year. I thought that we could do something really special. Let’s give them six weeks of school that they missed for ten months!

So there were a bunch of topics, right at kid financial literacy, so many different topics that nobody taught in school. I’m like-we could do something special here, and based on their preference of where they wanted to be in the future, we could go out and try to place them with these careers, whether it be an architect, nurse, or doctor. Some people would even like to be a teacher, so I’ll find a summer school where a kid could intern and see what it’s like to be in that profession, and two things will happen when they do that. They’re going to say, “Yeah, I really like this profession. I want to visit this or revisit it in the future.”

Or they will say, “I’m glad I got to see you now because it’s not something I really want to do,” which most kids didn’t have. Right? Most juniors in college start facing that- and they’re already in student loan debt. We were like, let’s just get ahead of the curve and let them see what it’s like to be in this profession. The other part of its based on how they performed in it. We were going to pay them. So they could earn up to $500, and it was the first time that 14-year-olds were coming into contact with money. Well, we know what happens when we don’t know what to do with money. We spend it! And so, we wanted to teach them about the value of money, how to spend it, how to share it, how to save it, how to invest it, and most importantly- teach them about entrepreneurism.

And so that financial literacy curriculum is the foundation of what we were doing. As Rashad said, he had this amazing idea, to say let’s start recording this. People need to see this, and from what we realized, these kids need this information, but their parents need it too, and their teachers need it too, and the world needs it too, and so that’s kind of how it started. My background is not in finance. It was in education. So not only was I learning by teaching the lessons, but I was listening to him talking, and saying-I didn’t know that. He didn’t know what it was to be in the educational field, creating a curriculum, and having classroom structure and classroom management. So, we kind of learned from each other in that space, and it was just a natural fit. As you said, when it was time to do a show about it, it was like, “Well, we talk every day anyway. We’ve been doing that for about 25 years. I guess we can let the world in on our conversations.”

That’s amazing. So you probably have a lot of fascinating and varied experiences. Can each of you share the most interesting story or one of the most interesting stories, or even several stories, interesting stories that have happened to you since you began creating this community, podcasting, and this whole initiative to promote financial literacy?

Rashad

Yeah, it’s a lot of great, interesting stories. I think when we travel, that’s probably my favorite part of it. So, being able to travel all over the world- really like going to Jamaica, to Nigeria, going to Egypt, and going to different places is interesting- because you would think that people in different parts of the world wouldn’t really be interested in what’s going on in America. But probably my favorite international trip was when we went to London, and we did an event in London, we did a popup free networking event, and the place that we did it at held 300 people. So, we just put a flyer up. We haven’t been there before. So, we weren’t really expecting a massive amount of people to come, but long story short, 2,700 people showed up in the streets of London.

So it caused mass hysteria, and it was in February, so it was freezing outside. They had never seen anything like that before for financial literacy. So, it kind of caught everybody by surprise, just to see something like that on a different continent! It was extremely encouraging and eye-opening to see this is something that is definitely global and much bigger than anybody expected it to be. So, that, to me, was one of the highlights of our journey so far.

Troy

Yeah, I think my experience is probably along those lines about never knowing how far the impact can really reach. So we talk about it from an international standpoint, but even some of the people we looked up to in the world of business and finance. We had the opportunity to meet Robert Smith, he was one of the wealthiest black men in the world, definitely in the country, and before we got to speak to say our names, he looked at us and said, “I know who you are. I listen to you guys. I think you guys are amazing!” And we’re just sitting there like- wait, what just happened? Like he knew who we were before we could even introduce ourselves. So, I mean, that’s always Even Tyler Perry, who’s going to be at Invest Fest. When Steve Harvey was speaking to him about potentially being part of it, he was like, “I saw your interview with him. I love them. I think they asked the important questions and the right questions.” So, you never know where the impact is going to go or how far the reach is, which is always super humbling, but it’s like super encouraging. We’ve got to keep going. There are so many people that we can impact with this message. So those are two for sure.

It’s been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a funny mistake that you made when you were first starting and the lesson that you learned from it?

Troy

Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of mistakes we had. Especially we don’t come from engineering or audio backgrounds, and we’re doing a podcast, even from a journalism standpoint. These are things we kind of had to learn along the way, but I remember doing an episode, and we were doing it, and I started looking around and noticed that the camera was not on. [Laughs] I said, “Wait. We’re 30 minutes into this episode, and we haven’t started recording this?!” And so it was like, we need to have a bigger team to help with this production. So, these are just like growing pains that you sometimes you just have to learn through the experience and from it. You become better and more efficient, and you put systems in place that help these things never happen again, but that was an interesting one.

Rashad

Yeah, I mean, it was a variety of different mistakes, and even now, we still make mistakes. One of the issues that we still struggle with is audio, and that was something that was very frustrating for me. It’s like, you want the listeners to have the best experience possible, and if the audio isn’t up to par, then that can cause the listeners to not be interested or just a black cloud over the whole situation. So that’s something that we struggled with early on. As he said, we didn’t have any knowledge of microphones, sound, and other things of that nature. So we had to really work on that and get the top microphones. We had to get a bunch of different microphones from the original mics that we had.

Then we stepped it up. Then we stepped it up more. Then we stepped it up even more. And we’re still in the process of even mastering it. It’s not something that I think people have a full appreciation for. Audio and visuals are actually a science. It’s not easy. So when you see these film crews, it’s a reason why there are 30 people on set. If one person messes up, it doesn’t matter how good the acting is. It doesn’t matter how good the content is. They’re really the most important people, and if they don’t capture it correctly, it never happened. So, that was definitely something that was a painful learning experience for sure.

That’s a great insight. Okay, so let’s talk about your program and the podcast. The name Earn Your Leisure is very instructive to me. I sense that’s a lot of depth behind it. Can you unpack that? What exactly do you mean by earning your leisure?

Troy

As you said, it takes many meanings, right? The listener, the viewer, or the person that sees it could have their own interpretation. I kind of like to leave it like that. But for us, at the time, I was looking for a hashtag, which was very popular on Instagram at the time, and I was like, “Yo, I got one for you, man. It’s perfect. It’s perfect! It’s going to fit you perfectly!” and he was like, “What is it?” I’m like-”Earn Your Leisure!” I explained it to him as a lot of people see the end result of success. But they never see the hard work that goes into it. They never saw him waking up at five o’clock in the morning, working out, and going to school and studying.

And even when he was going into his financial advising career, I remember him locking himself in a room for a week. Like, “I can’t come outside. I really got to study.” Same for me. I was working two jobs! Going to school at night, going to school on the weekends, no one saw any of that. They just saw us having nice cars and traveling all over the world. They’re like, “Yo, these guys really do what they want!” They can, but they didn’t know that we had to really fight and earn some of these luxuries that we were able to have at the time. So I was like, yeah, earn your leisure. That needs to be a hashtag, and he used it. When we were coming up with the podcast, we had a couple of names, but that one just kind of sucked because, as you said, somebody could interpret it so many different ways, and for us, it was like, all right, bet this is going to be perfect. It could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.

Rashad

Yeah, that’s what I kind of take from it. As I said, it was his idea, but how I interpret earn your leisure is that everybody always glamorizes the end result, and even on social media, you see the Lamborghini, you see people showing vacations, but nobody ever really glamorizes the work. You have to fall in love with the process, and that is what is something that we fully stress. So, it’s not like we’re selling a lifestyle. A lot of people like their lifestyle, and they’ll try to entice you with shiny objects- but our thing is just to keep it basic, plain vanilla. We give you the information and let you know that work is involved with anything that you want.

So, you can potentially achieve the highest level of success and reach that level of leisure, but you have to earn it! I think that’s extremely important, and that’s anything in life, whether it’s sports, business, even working on a family, or having a family. It takes time to get to a point where you’re in a peaceful place. So, everything is earned, and that’s something that we really try to stress. There’s no “get rich quick.”

So, this is our signature question that we ask in all of our interviews. So, you’ve had a lot of experience now. Looking back, you’ve probably learned a lot of lessons on the way. Can each of you share five things you need to create a highly successful podcast like yours?

Rashad

I think you need to be consistent. I think consistency is extremely important, and that’s true with anything, but especially with the podcast. Everybody has different formulas. Some people put out podcasts just whenever they feel like it, but our formula has always been weekly. So that’s something that sounds easy, but that’s not easy to actually be dedicated to putting out content every single week. You have to film the content. You have to upload it. You have to edit it. So to be able to put out weekly content is extremely important, and that takes a lot of discipline and consistency, even just to promote the content on social media.

Number two is to have a platform because you got the best podcast in the world, but if nobody knows you have one, then it doesn’t even matter.

So, we built a platform first. So that goes back to the origin story. Before this started, I was building my own personal platform for two years before we thought about Earn Your Leisure. So, my Instagram page grew to like 30, 40,000 followers. When we started Earn Your Leisure, that gave us a tremendous amount of leverage. Because now, I can just promote Earn Your Leisure from my own personal page, and now that transitions 30, 40,000 people to the Earn Your Leisure page! If we had just started with nothing, who knows, it probably wouldn’t have taken off the way that it did. So, building a platform first is important before actually even thinking about a podcast. Building a platform first and then having a podcast comes second. So, I think that that’s extremely important.

Then I think, having a niche topic that you’re going to focus in on. I think a lot of people start podcasting at too broad a range. Like one week they’re talking about food, the next week they’re talking about travel, the next week they’re talking about religion. That’s cool, but you’re just covering too many different things. I think people like to have a niche, and that’s what we did. We are focused on financial literacy. Now the good thing with financial literacy and business is that it can cover pretty much anything because everything comes down to money. But the conversation is always based around money and then finding a unique way to have your own personal take on it. So, there are a lot of shows and a lot of platforms that talk about money, but there is not a lot that does it in the way that we did, especially when we started dressed in t-shirts and hoodies. We use cultural references, and we tie in music and sports.

So that is a new way to talk about business. You don’t hear that on CNBC. You don’t hear that on Bloomberg or any of these others. It’s just straight buttoned up, and that caters to a certain demographic, but there are a lot of other people that were left out of that conversation because they didn’t feel comfortable with the jargon. So, that was our niche, to kind of have the barbershop conversation on a very high level talking about high-level finance. So, that would be my third principle. Troy, you want to give some?

Troy

Add value and figure out what your value add is. A lot of people come into the podcast space because they think that it is the way that makes money. Everybody’s doing it. We can get paid. Most people who come in with that mindset will be gone within a year- if that. Maybe six months. Right? So the number one thing is, what value can you add to the world or to a community? If you do that, money will be a byproduct of all the things that you do. So that was kind of our thing. Like we were very transparent about how we didn’t make money for the first year. Even if we did, we put it back into our business. We reinvested into ourselves because we wanted to make a better product. So adding value and figuring out what your value add is. It’s super important.

The last thing is- just start. We didn’t wait! We took it with imperfect actions. Like Max Maxwell said to us. Imperfect actions are the key to success. Right? We didn’t wait to say, “Hey, we’re going to need a producer. We’re going to need an audio engineer. We’re going to need the right cameras. We’re going to need the right map, book, and sound.” We were just like, we got something that we can add to the world. We can add value. Let’s just start, and as we go, we’ll build, we’ll get the right equipment, we’ll get the right engineers, and we’ll make this look better! The beauty is that when people see you start from the bottom, they get to grow with you to the top, and that’s kind of been the process. If we start at a high level, we have to maintain that level, which is difficult, right? If you don’t know what you’re doing, and so we were very honest about it. This is what we got, and it’s going to get better. Taking that imperfect action to start is one of those to have. To have a successful podcast, you got to have that type of mindset.

That’s amazing. Do you want to share with our readers a bit about Invest Fest? Why should we all come to the InvestFest next time?

Rashad

I feel like Invest Fest is an opportunity to change a life. Looking at the festival landscape, Rolling Loud, Coachella, Made in America, and so many festivals, usually they’re all based around music or some type of fun experience. I don’t think there still is, to this day, a financial literacy business festival. So, how do we take the best elements of festivals but then also add something productive where you can actually learn? So, we have food trucks; we have games; we have musical performances; we have a vendor marketplace. So, we took those elements of festivals that are already successful, but then we added panels on cryptocurrency and web 3.0. We added fireside chats on stocks. We added keynote speakers like Tyler Perry and Steve Harvey to break down their business models and we took the core principles that made us popular and added the festival feel to it. So, I feel like it is a unique experience to be around 10,000 people, like-minded people where you can network, meet your potential real estate partner, and meet your potential business partner. Soak up information, gain insight, become motivated. We got people like Dan Kathy, who’s the CEO of Chick-Fil-A, I think he’s worth $7 billion. Don Peebles, who is a billionaire real estate developer, who’s working on building the tallest skyscraper in New York. So to be in a room with these types of people, it has to motivate you. It has to make you think bigger. Sometimes, being in person is way different from seeing something on YouTube or on Instagram. Actually being in a room, it’s just like a magical moment. So I feel like this is an opportunity to gain insight, gain wisdom, have fun, and leave memories that are going to last forever. But more importantly, leave with information, resources, and relationships that could potentially change your life.

Troy

Yeah, man. He pretty much nailed it! I like to think of it as, “This is where commerce and culture meet.” Alright. So, you could potentially find your next business partner. You could potentially find your next business investor. You might even find your life partner, man. You never know. Earn Your Leisure is a major situation. To have all those things come together in one place. People have watched us grow to this point. So they’ve been waiting for this type of moment, and it feels enormous.

Amazing. So, this is our final question and it’s a big question. So, because of the position and the platform that you’ve built, you are both people of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.

Rashad

Yeah. For us, the movement that we are already starting is based around financial literacy, but it’s more, it is bigger than financial literacy, right? It’s about working together. You know, group economics is extremely important, and I feel like financial literacy can change the direction of the world. Whenever you have the highest crime rates, wherever you have people that are in the highest level of poverty, that’s always going to be the lowest living conditions, health, crime, everything. Whenever you have wealthy communities, you have longer life expectancies; you have lower crime rates, and you have less stress. So these are all things. That’s a direct correlation to financial literacy, economic empowerment, business, and to entrepreneurship. It also relates to political advances because we know that politics is related to money as well.

So when we see social injustice and when we see political actions and different things of that nature, these are all things that tie into politics, all tie into financial literacy, business, and investing. So, I feel like the movement that we are starting is bigger than just helping people make money.

That’s the first level of it, but the next level of it could potentially keep marriages together because we know that’s probably the leading cause of divorce. It’s financial difficulties and financial issues. So, relationships are better when money is flowing; everything is better! So, that is something that I think could potentially change the world for good. These are all issues globally but definitely issues in America and something that we haven’t been able to solve.

It’s only getting worse! When we look at the prison population in America, America has 10% of the world, 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population! And 80% of it is black and brown people. So that’s an issue when we only make up less than 25% of the population in America! The economic disparity in our community is something that is disturbing and is an issue not only for black and brown people but should be an issue for everybody. What is your neighbor’s problem will eventually become your problem. So I feel like getting at the forefront of this, championing this, and having financial literacy taught in school, is something that everybody should want to champion. It is not something that’s detrimental, it’s only going to be beneficial for everybody, and ultimately it will only uplift everybody as well.

Troy

Yeah. I mean, we call it “the financial revolution” for a reason! We can really see the impact that it’s having. So rather than trying to start a new movement, let’s continue and move forward with this. You know, we talk about financial literacy, but the goal is really to have people be financially fluent, right? And so, after they understand it, now let’s be fluent and let’s have the conversation.

We never know whose household we’re impacting. We never know what conversation we’re impacting, but we can see it in our world. When we go to places, people are not talking about who’s the best basketball player anymore. They want to talk about their portfolios, and so imagine what that does to a community long-term!

And so the beauty of it is that the revolution is here, and there are so many leaders of it! We’ve been in this space and kind of been at the forefront of it. So people look at us like leaders, but there might be somebody in Greensboro, North Carolina right now who’s holding a financial literacy class based on what they may have heard us say on an episode! So it’s one of those things that can’t be stopped. I’m proud to be a part of it. It’s very exciting because you never know where it can go and how far we can take this thing. If we’re uniting, I work together and really show what it looks like to work together. We have a show together and we grew up together. We are two black men, and we came together to do something that was just bigger than ourselves. We know we’re very going to be very cognizant of that, right? This is bigger than us and so the mission is not complete. There’s still more to go, and looking forward to what it’ll do in the future.

Amazing. I’m honestly so inspired by, your story, your passion, and your vision, and I wish you only all the success in the world. So how can our readers continue to follow your work online? How can our readers find out more about the Invest Fest?

Rashad

You can go to earnyourleisure.com and Earn Your Leisure across all social media platforms, on all podcast outlets, and on YouTube. So real easy, earnyourleisure.com and investfest.com is where you can get tickets.

Thank you so much, Troy and Rashad. I wish you all the best and hope that we can stay in touch.

Rashad

I appreciate it. Thank you.