Rashad Bilal & Troy Millings Talk 2022 Invest Fest

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The hosts of a wildly popular, wildly education podcast are bringing their business and financial literacy acumen to Atlanta.

Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings of “Earn Your Leisure”, the #1 business & financial literacy podcast have announced their Invest Fest taking place in Atlanta, GA on August 5th – 7th. 2022.

Source: Paras Griffin / Getty

Invest Fest will be hosted by the duo and will include additional words of wisdom from Tyler Perry, Rick Ross, T.I., Charlamagne Tha God, and Terrence J. Additionally Steve Harvey’s partnered with EYL for the annual event, which offers a weekend-long assortment of activities focused on investing, entrepreneurship, pop culture, and entertainment.

Described as “edutainment” by Harvey himself, Invest Fest boasts that it’s the ONLY financial literacy festival of its kind and attendees will acquire knowledge that runs the gambit ranging from investing in stocks, crypto, businesses, and real estate. The 3-day festival intertwines entertainment with invaluable education, which Steve Harvey calls “edutainment.”

Ahead of the one-of-a-kind festival that’s projecting 10,000 attendees Rashad and Troy chatted with BOSSIP about all things Invest Fest and how it smartly intertwines entertainment with invaluable education.

First of all, you guys obviously have this wildly popular podcast Earn Your Leisure. People could literally just sit and listen to you guys and get tips on financial literacy, but why do you think it’s important for them to get more than that and come out to Investfest?

Rashad: There’s nothing like an in-person experience. And that’s something that we’ve been doing for a while, whether we did Art Basel with DJ Khaled and Sean. We were in South by Southwest, which is amazing. We had Tobe Nwigwe, one of the top independent artists before we sold out the Apollo last year with our partner Ian Dunlap for our show Market Mondays. Our in-person experiences have become legendary within itself.

That’s one reason, but also even bigger than that is the power of networking and meeting people. I feel yes you can get educated by watching YouTube or social media, but you can’t find your business partner that way. You can’t collaborate, you can’t share ideas. A magical thing happens when there’s 10,000 people in a room and they’re all positive. And they’re all like-minded. And they’re coming from different parts of the world. And they’re all sharing information and they are looking to start businesses. They have businesses. They’re looking to buy real estate. They’re looking to put money into startup companies. To be in the room is something that you can’t really duplicate that experience. If nothing else, that is probably one of the biggest reasons why people should consider coming to Investfest for sure.

Source: Jerritt Clark / Getty

Was it intentional to have Invest Fest in Black Hollywood a.k.a. Atlanta?

Troy: Well, it was very intentional. Outside of the New York City region, Atlanta was our second biggest market, we’re down there all the time. People actually think we’re from Atlanta at this point. It’s the Mecca of Black business. It’s just one of those unique places in the country and probably in the world, right?

If I go to a restaurant the chances are, it’s probably owned by somebody that looks like me. The hair salon, the barbershop, there just so many different types of businesses that are run by people look like us. And there’s a lot of people who are execs that look like us that live in and are stationed in Atlanta. And so it just kind of makes perfect sense. We have a lot of people that are in our space that are from there. And like I said, the community’s so large and it’s been the hub. It’s been a hub for the music. It’s been a hub for business obviously and culture. And so last year we did it and we had a great turnout in the midst of COVID. We had over 4000 people show up. This year we’re expecting over 10,000. And so, Atlanta’s one of those special places and we understand that and that’s why we’re having it there this year.

Let’s talk about some of the special people who are a part of Investfest. We’ve got big-name speakers; Rick Ross, Tyler Perry, and Steve Harvey–tell us more about the celebrity aspect of Invest Fest and what you hope people can get out of connecting with these people.

Rashad: It’s one of these things where you take somebody like Tyler Perry, where he doesn’t really speak that much at all, let alone in a public setting, so just the opportunity to get words of wisdom from somebody who literally has probably done it the best out of anybody ever in our generation when it comes to what he’s been able to accomplish. To actually sit for an hour and receive that information live, I think is something that’s magnetic and something that is beyond inspiring, but could be potentially life-changing. And that’s the thing with live events, it’s really hard to duplicate that from watching it. You can watch the replay, you can see it on YouTube, you can see clips on Instagram, but being in a room where now not only you are inspired, not only you are being educated, but 10,000 other people are that leads to conversations, that leads to introductions, that leads to ideas.

These are all things that are very important in business. That’s something that a lot of people don’t realize. Having imagination, being inspired, networking. These are probably more important than actually even having the knowledge, because you can always learn, but it’s hard to actually have an imagination. And it’s hard to have relationships if you don’t necessarily cultivate them the right way. To have the celebrities there, I think is extremely important, but just as important is to have the people that are teaching about credit or teaching about student loans or teaching about business banking, teaching about life insurance, where they might not be celebrities, but they’re adding a tremendous amount of value. So we balance it out. We balance it out with the high profile names.

And then we have people like Dan Cathy, who probably nobody knows who he is, but he’s actually going to be the richest person the whole weekend that’s there. He’s worth $7 billion. He’s the CEO of Chick-fil-A. Imagine the kind of business insight that he has. Running one of the most profitable companies in American history. It’s just for us it’s about curating a vibe. And once again, it’s the same principles that festivals have, where they’ll have Wizkid perform, or they’ll have Kendrick Lamar perform. And people will go because they want the energy of seeing Kendrick Lamar live. They can watch the replay, but they want to watch him live, right? Well, this is in the same vein, but it’s just more valuable because after you get entertained only thing that you really have is that memory. After you get educated, then you could potentially go out there and make millions of dollars, change the world, change your family’s history, so not only are you entertained in that moment and you feel a rush, but you also gain supreme education and that is life-changing.

Troy: I think to add to that, the celebrity component. If you look at it strategically, a lot of them have talked about what they do in entertainment. I think what makes this unique is that we get to peel back the layers a little bit and dive into what they’ve done in business. And so when we talk about Tyler Perry, yes, we know what he’s done with his empire, with Madea, being the footprint of it. But let’s talk into the business. We got a chance to tour his studio yesterday. And it was just an inspiring experience to say the least, but the business behind it is the conversation that we’re going to have. Same thing with Steve Harvey. We know what he is as a comedian, but do we know what he is as a mogul in the terms of business and entertainment. Same thing with T.I., Dame Dash, all these people who we know from entertainment, but their business acting is just as strong.

Angela [Yee] being another one. You have celebrities and people will know that and they can get attracted to it, we’ve seen them, we’ve heard them before, but to hear them in this platform to hear them in this form is a little bit different, because now they’re giving you insight of how they got there, which is something that wasn’t always common. We’ve seen people have success, but we don’t really never knew how they got it. And they’ve been gracious enough to tell us how they got it and encourage us to do the same.

Lastly, let us know the InvestFest dates and where we can get more info.