ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Tay Sweat, an investor, author and business innovator who’s strived to help others get fit bodies and fat wallets.
Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, and now in Puerto Rico, Sweat said he decided at 19 years old that college wasn’t for him. After finding a trade, securing an $80K job and buying a house however, he was back to staying with his mom once the housing market crashed around 2008. It was that crash, he said, that eventually started Sweat for Life, his first business venture.
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“As I go through the crash and I’m on my mom’s floor, No. 1 thing I’m thinking about is, ‘How do I not go through this?’” he said. “The biggest thing is, I will never ever, ever be at the mercy of someone telling me, ‘Hey, you’re no longer working here, you no longer have a job.’ So I said, ‘Hey, I want to start a business. I’m gonna create my own job,’ right? So I go out, I create my own job.”
Sweat was drawn to professional personal training in large part due to his own weight loss journey, dropping what he said was more than 120 pound by the time he was 22 years old and impressing those around him. He was even using a treadmill during Corie’s interview, we found out.
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“Everybody’s looking at me thinking, ‘Whatever you did, you need to do it for a living. You need to help other people lose this weight.’ So I said, ‘OK, great. I’m starting my own job, Sweat for Life, and that job is going to be what I’ve already been doing, which is working out, you know, helping people lose weight,” he said. “I was passionate about it. I had diabetes, I had high blood pressure, I had horrible eczema on my face. So I changed my diet, I got certified in nutrition... I went and got my trade certification and that, got certified in personal training, and Sweat for Life was on its way up.”
Sweat said that he would go on to learn a lot about people in this line of work. Specifically, that personal trainers often had a particular type of client: the rich.
“As a personal trainer, I got to work with a lot of wealthy people. Those are usually the only people who can afford personal training, right? And what I noticed was my average personal training client was trying to recoup from what he or she has lost, meaning they put their health on the backburner and now what they’re doing is trying to catch up, they’re trying to play catch up, ‘Hey man, I’m sick, I got this going on, I just need you to fix it,’” he recalled. “...A majority of my personal training clients were White, White clients, Indians, but very, very, very, very, very, very few of them were Black. So I’m thinking to myself, OK, why is that? Why is it? Is it that we don’t need a personal trainer? That’s not it. Is it that we don’t want it? I don’t think that’s it either. So I started thinking, I said, ‘Man, the economy, the economy.’”
In time, Sweat found his answer. No matter how good his nutrition advice was, some people would tell him that they simply couldn’t afford either his services or healthy food in general.
This, Sweat said, made it a financial issue and a solvable one. Soon enough, it led him away from the health business and into investing.
“OK, so I need to teach you how to make some money,” he said. “...I started investing. Just a little something here and there. Then I get a client who was a billionaire, his name was Charlie — and Charlie, he’s got a little gimpy leg — he’s like, ‘Hey, man, if you could help me fix my leg, I’ll do whatever you need me to do, like, whatever money you want, just help me fix my leg.’ I said, ‘Listen, keep your money.’ I said, ‘I need you to teach me what you did to make that money. How did you get where you are? I’ll train you for free. You just need to teach me the game.’ So, that arrangement, you know, played out over time... I started to learn exactly what private equity was and what it meant to make money off of your money versus going out and trading time for dollars, right? And I say, ‘OK, this is what my people need right here,’ and as it started to manifest for me, I started making thousands and thousands and then hundreds of thousands of dollars and, you know, I’m a millionaire now at this point.”
Hear the full interview in Season 3, Episode 14 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.