Exclusive – Jessie Conners of The Apprentice (Season One)

Posted by: Philippe Matthews in Professional Development 1 Comment 19659 Views

Jessie Conners

Okay, everywhere I go I tell the story about my addiction to watching the hit reality show, The Apprentice. Mark Barnett and Donald Trump struck gold with this TV deal, earning it stratosphere ratings. Thirteen candidates coming to New York to compete for a position to work as “The Donald’s” apprentice for one year with a $250,000 paycheck! Not bad work if you can get it!

The group was divided up between the men against the women, the women ruled! The women’s group, “Protégé” wreaked havoc on the men’s “Versacorp” and the battle of the sexes emerged. It was fabulous! The women all looked like supermodels and the men looked like Chip-N-Dale poster boys but each individual, including Omarosa had their own unique stories, skill sets and reason for auditioning to become Donald Trump’s first Apprentice.

One such woman happened to be the youngest of the group and made it through six weeks before finally hearing those infamous words, “You’re Fired.” Jessie Conners was 21 at the time she auditioned for the show and out of 215,000 applicants, discovered she was chosen to fly to New York to hopefully become, The Apprentice.

HOW WE MET

My friend and mentor, Robert Kiyosaki was in Chicago the last week of April and was appearing as a guest on The Philippe Matthews Show and before the interview began, he and his wife Kim Kiyosaki mentioned that one of the cast members of The Apprentice was in the hotel to see him. After the interview was over, my crew and I went downstairs to get our car. As we were walking in the lobby, there stood a face I had been watching for six weeks in the privacy of my living room. I approached her and said, “The Apprentice, right?” Jessie said, “Yes, thank you for recognizing me.” The reason Jessie was there to see Robert Kiyosaki is because at age 17 when Rich Dad Poor Dad debuted, she became a devotee of Robert’s principles and wanted to finally meet the man who virtually coached her into a real estate millionaire!

Philippe Matthews
From reading the Apprentice website, you were born in an Orphanage?

Jessie Conners
“I was working in an orphanage. I did that for about a year.”

Philippe Matthews
How old were you when you did that?

Jessie Conners
“Fourteen or fifteen.”

Philippe Matthews
What do your parents do?

Jessie Conners
“My dad is a chiropractor and my mom is a mom. I have four brothers and sisters who are all younger.”

Philippe Matthews
Now you were raised on a farm with no electricity or running water in Minnesota?

Jessie Conners
“I grew up around Minnesota and moved quite often until I was about eight years old. We lived nicely when I was young; we lived in the suburbs of Minneapolis. My dad had a nice chiropractic clinic and everything was going pretty well. My family was not really gelled together so my parents decided to move us to Wisconsin. We moved to 265 acres of pure Jack pine forest. There was no electricity, no running water, we lived in a little mobile home and that was the majority of my childhood living up there with nothing.”

Philippe Matthews
Wow! What a shift.

Jessie Conners
“It really was. The school was so far away that we had to be home schooled. My parents were so busy because they had to learn to cook without a stove; how to keep your food cold, how to keep it hot…”

Philippe Matthews
How do you go from chiropractor to survivor!

Jessie Conners
“My father sold his practice when I was about eight and felt there was a need to get back in touch with our family again and that’s what we did. It was mainly to get time back with us. I learned on my own practically. My home schooling was I had books and I had to study them. That was my education. I had to be self motivated then I had to help the family because I was the oldest so I did what I could by selling chicken eggs and porcupine cones. It was really good for me actually learning the dynamics and economics of running a family and that’s where my initial business skills came into play. That’s where I lived for about six years in the middle of nowhere, milking the cows every morning and studying as much as could. I knew every edible plant in the woods and was really good at math and science, managing accounts and budgeting. There was so much money had in a month and this is what we can do with it.”

Philippe Matthews
So how did the orphanage come about?

Jessie Conners
“We were attending this church and a lady came in was talking about how she was in Monterrey, Mexico and there is this orphanage down there that is really in need of help. You can give all you want but they really need people to go down there and help hand out food. That sounded like a good idea so we packed everything up in our suburban and there were six people in the car because my little sister had not been born yet along with all of our stuff which goes to show you how much we had. We drove down there and didn’t speak a word of Spanish. However, I became very fluent in Spanish to the point where I would actually dream in Spanish so within a month or two, I got really good at it. I began translating to groups. It was an incredible experience. I worked at the orphanage and the bible school, in the cafeteria everyday. I would have to wake up real early to feed the students and everybody that worked there and teach classes to the bible students.”

Philippe Matthews
How long were you there at the orphanage?

Jessie Conners
“Well, my little brother got sick and we had to move to Texas and by that time we had run out of funding because when we were in Wisconsin, we were living off the land and didn’t need a whole lot of money but my dad had sold his clinic and the house so we were living off of that money. So when we moved to Texas, my dad opened up a clinic because we needed money. I went to high school there for about half a year and then we moved back up to Minnesota in Still Water which was like a historic town where my dad grew up. I turned sixteen and my dad opened up his chiropractic clinic and I went into high school and there were over 2500 students which was an adjustment for me.

Then I wanted to work because I had been working my whole life. I started applying for jobs and my dad said, ‘why don’t you work at my clinic?’ I was like the assistant to the assistant but my work ethic was pretty strong and I learned that I loved chiropractics and the philosophy and basically the first day of work, my dad hands me a phone book and tells me to call these people and tell them about chiropractics. So I did all of the marketing for his clinic and I built the clinic up from a hundred clients per week to seven hundred patients per week. It took a year to do it and that was my junior year in high school. My father wanted to open up another clinic and put me in charge of it and it went the same way. I was seventeen and managed the doctors, the staff and did all the marketing. I got out of school at noon because I was doing well academically even though, I was never in school for seven years, and I tested into everything and graduated with honors.”

Philippe Matthews
It really started going well for you, yes?

Jessie Conners
“It was going so well that other doctors started calling me and before I knew it, I was a senior in high school and managing about thirteen different chiropractic clinics doing their marketing and employing my classmates and that’s when I opened up my first business, Exposure Marketing. I didn’t really know anything about running a business, I knew how to manage and budget but I didn’t know how to manage people and it was hard. There were a lot of lessons I had to learn during those first years and I was making significant money.”

Philippe Matthews
How is it that you didn’t squander your money being so young?

Jessie Conners
“Well, I grew up with nothing so squandering my money was buying a new outfit once a month!”

Philippe Matthews
When did the real estate begin?

Jessie Conners
“When I was nineteen, I bought my own house. I bought a little hobby farm in Wisconsin.”

Philippe Matthews
What is a hobby farm?

Jessie Conners
“You are not harvesting the crops and selling the milk, it’s for fun. I have horses and a potbelly pig. When I bought the farm it was the worst day of my life. It was so scary. I moved out right away when I was eighteen and I had apartments but having a farm and having to worry about shoveling your driveway was weird for me.”

Philippe Matthews
What else happened when you bought your farm?

Jessie Conners
“I got really immersed in economics and the whole idea of building wealth. I was making quite a lot of money at that time and I asked myself the question, ‘now what do I do with it?’ I looked at putting my money in a bank and saving it and finally I said, ‘damn it, it’s going to take me too long to become a millionaire!’ If you save a dollar a day and let the interest compound it would take you so long. When I was a senior in high school I wrote in my yearbook, ‘I’m going to be a millionaire.’ That’s what I wanted to do, so I decided to interview everyone I could. I started out on this mission and I started interviewing financial advisors and a lot of the advice was just crap. I learned more about what I shouldn’t do than what I should do. They would come to a restaurant to meet me and be dressed in a suit and show me their fancy graphs and tell me what amount it’s going to cost and when you are this old it’s going to be worth this much. Then we would walk out to their car and they couldn’t get their car started! Then I said, ‘why am I taking advice from someone who isn’t’ really doing it themselves?’ That was the most frustrating thing to me. Everybody wanted to show me how to do it but they had no proof that they had done it themselves. How are you going to listen to advice from someone who can’t even do it on their own?”

Philippe Matthews
What did you do after that?

Jessie Conners
It is in my system that I know how numbers work. I will sit up late at night and study the Federal Reserve that’s how crazy I am. I know that system inside and out because that economic structure is obviously what the country is running off of but you can take some of those principles and apply them to your life individually.”

Philippe Matthews
Give me an example.

Jessie Conners
Just in terms of leverage. The Federal Reserve is all about leverage. They can say they are in trillions of dollars in debt but all that is really is a piece of paper. Nothing is based on gold anymore and all they do if they need money is print it if they need funds but what they are in debt to is themselves and they are in debt because they are holding our liabilities. For instance, me as a property owner, I don’t own my house free and clear and no one should. The more we can leverage the better. Guess who is holding that debt — the banking system that goes all the way back to the Federal Reserve. So the Federal Reserve is holding that liability but those liabilities add up and that is the debt that they proclaim the country has and that is a leverage ploy for their political campaigns also. It’s not a real number; it’s a piece of paper.”

Philippe Matthews
I heard that the Federal Reserve Bank prints $480 million dollars a day in money.

Jessie Conners
“Oh yea! If you really study it, it’s not healthy to know too much about it because we need to have trust in something. If you lose trust in your economic system that could be a bad thing but the principles that it is based on you can apply to your own life, there are loopholes in the system.”

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