Latest / Live 100 Podcast with Jason Yarusi / How Junior Bridgeman Went from NBA Bench Player to $1.4 Billion Entrepreneur

Transcript

How Junior Bridgeman Went from NBA Bench Player to $1.4 Billion Entrepreneur · Live 100 Podcast with Jason Yarusi

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: What you should be doing today off for tomorrow, it will grant you some magic ability to do better.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: But potentially you're just losing the opportunity to have one more chance to go after it.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Today to just talk about time.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We think about time so much.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: By the end of his life, he was worth an estimated$1.4 billion.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And his journey from NBA six man to billionaire, it began at an unexpected place.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: It takes you to go out there and to figure it out for you to go out there and be productive, for you to go out there and take chances and understand that it's going to come with failures.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you may not start at the greatest success.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And but it does and can make you wealthy, create a legacy, build you a fortune, connect you to just amazing people around this world and live your life to 100.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's go.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you're tired of not feeling fit, tired just not the focus, tired just not having a life that you deserve.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is the place to be.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jason Russi.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Today is just talk about time.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: We think about time so much.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: We put ourselves in the past, right?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: We try to predict where we will be in the future, and then we just miss out on the present.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I can think of just so many times that I was waiting for tomorrow, right, to actually go out there and try to take action because I was thinking that tomorrow would grant me clarity in the mind or just having clear space or a clear understanding or just better results or more mentally prepared, physically prepared, financially prepared, emotionally prepared, you name it, right?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: That you think if you put what you should be doing today off for tomorrow, it will grant you some magic ability to do better.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: But potentially you're just losing the opportunity to have one more chance to go after it.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: We think about life in ways of just saying, well, what did we miss out on, right?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: What was it that put us in a spot to excel or to succeed that we didn't capitalize on?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: We look at it from a point of just many times looking at sports stars, right?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: They were supposed to be this great thing.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: They were the number one pick.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then so happened that they went out there and they were a massive failure, right?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we look at that as a staple, right, to what their life is or how their life is.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk today about junior bridgeman.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, junior bridgeman, he was a basketball player and he earned about$2.95 million across his 12-year career.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Never made more than$350,000 in any single season, which if you think about the MBA today, that that's not even, I think, the minimum earnings set a player can get just in any season.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: But by the end of his life, he was worth an estimated$1.4 billion.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And his journey from NBA sixth man to billionaire, it began at an unexpected place.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was working at a cashier at Wendy's.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you drive through and pick up food and you don't think about it as that there's a person on the other side that maybe is doing more than just trying to fill the hours in.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Junior Bridge was selected as the eighth overall pick in the 1975 NBA draft.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he was traded, which is a funny note, to the Milwaukee Bull uh Bucks as part of the trade that actually brought Kareem Abdul Jabbar to the Los Angeles Lakers.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Never became an NBA superstar.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: He became something that just every great team needs, just to depend on player.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: He was the sixth man, right?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: The first person off the bench, one of the best reserves.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And years before the NBA even created the award for this, he was the guy filling this role.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Over 12 seasons, he averaged 13.6 plays points a game, made zero all-star games.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: He was great professional, right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: 12 career 12 years in the NBA, right?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: That is much longer than most ever get to do it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't that career that just left him with generational wealth.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when he did this next thing, which was just so extraordinary.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: During his offseason in the 1970s, Bridgeman began working at Wendy's, right, in Milwaukee.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he wasn't there as an owner of the restaurant, right, like you would see today, and wasn't there as an investor.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: He was there as a cashier.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: He took orders, handled customer complaints, watched how the kitchen managed tickets and dormed a lunch rush and just was there doing his thing.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: But he didn't need the paycheck.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: He was doing it because he wanted to know how this place worked.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to understand how did the business operate.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted an education.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: How did this go from the ground up?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, 1988, a woman went to Wendy's in in South Milwaukee and she walked up to the counter, saw this tall man behind the counter, and recognized him as a former NBA player.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Later this week, funny enough, you know, Junior Bridgman was driving to work and he was listening to the radio, and she had called into the local radio station complaining about what a shame it was for a former professional athlete to have him be reduced to working in fast food, right?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Bridgman, he was driving to his downtown office, and what that didn't woman didn't know is he actually now he owned the restaurant.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't the only one.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: He had owned several around the city.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: But his success, it didn't come immediately, right?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Bridgman and his former teammate Paul Silas opened one Wendy's in Brooklyn, New York, and it failed.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: So he didn't just say, oh, guess this doesn't work.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: He started again.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: He went and acquired a handful of restaurants in Milwaukee, learned from his mistakes, and continued buying new locations.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And at his peak, his company reportedly owned more than 450 restaurants across the U.S., including Wendy's, Chili's, Fazois, and Golden Corral locations.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And at one point, he was the second largest Wendy's franchise owner in America.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2016, Bridgman sold most of his restaurant empire for a reported$250 million.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: The same guy who never made more than$300,000 a year went and moved to the next stage that took him from Zeros to mega millionaire.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: But he didn't stop there, right?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: He made the next move.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: He took a turn that put him on a stance of billionaire.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: He entered the Coca-Cola bottling business.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Bridgeman, he took his proceeds from that sale and he went and acquired a bottling territory for the heartland of Coca-Cola, serving communities across Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and he later actually just added a stake in Coca-Cola's Canadian and bottle and distribution services.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't glamorous, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: You think about this, oh, working at Wendy's, buying bottling plants, but it was protected, scalable, and enormously profitable.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how many times in your life are you looking for this glitzy, fancy, this thing that stands out, right?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you're missing the nuts and bolts, the picks and the axes, right?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: The things that make America go out there and take and crush it.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: This Heartland Coca-Cola business, it grew into a business approaching$1 billion in annual revenue.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: A business that, think of a bottling business that you wouldn't even think about today.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: He understood that ownership, it could protect more than wealth.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: It can protect more than latency.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2020, I mean he even brought Ebony and Jet Magazine out of bankruptcy for a reported$14 million.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you look at this and you ask, man, a man, yeah, sure, he did great.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: He got into the NBA, but he didn't stop there.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Many times people have a success and they can't figure out how to detour into the next stage of their life for that next success.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in 2024, full circle, it was reported that Junior Bridgeman, he participated in a purchase of 10% stake in the Milwaukee Bucks as a reported billion-dollar team valuation.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: The same franchise that actually traded him away and traded for him in 1975.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you think about that.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: He went from being on the Bucks bench to actually owning the Bucks.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's a remarkable story that if you think about it, there's so many ways that you can win in this life, but it takes you to go out there and to try.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: It takes you to go out there and to figure it out, for you to go out there and be productive, for you to go out there and take chances, right?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Explore, see what is possible, and understand that it's going to come with failures.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you might not start at the greatest success.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And some of it might not be sexy and glamorous and ritzy, but it does and can make you wealthy, create a legacy, build you a fortune, connect you to just amazing people around this world and live your life to 100.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I have for you today.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Little Winter Podcast.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm J Chin Roossi.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do this.