 I had to send my people down to Mexico and they found out that there was zero agave planted for De Leon. And so when I saw that, I was like, no, no, I'm going to fight because it's bigger than me. So PDD is in the middle of a lawsuit. And he actually did an interview of revealing a lot of the ugly details recently with Earn Your Leisure podcast. And I think this conversation is extremely useful for not only artists, but content creators, the entertainment industry as a whole. Anybody, especially that is front-facing talent that might be doing business deals to increase their revenue and maximize the monetization of their influence. So you can see this associated press headline, Sean Diddy Combs' dispute with Diageo deepens as court unseals details. But we're going to get back to this. First, let's actually listen to Diddy talk about it himself. So I want to talk about the relationship with Diageo. So this lawsuit that you brought against them, right? People might not know, but I think Pharrell was the actual first one to sue Diageo. And it was for unfair treatment. So you had a historic relationship with them 15 years going back to Sirach. All right. So who knew that Pharrell had an alcohol period? Like Pharrell had a relationship with Diageo before Diddy had a relationship. I heard this and I was like, wait, what? So check this out. Pharrell sues Diageo, North America for $5 million for his liquor, his Q cream liqueur, actually. I didn't know anything about this, but we'll get into some of these details in a second because some things about that deal stood out to me. Deleon, I never even heard of Sirach until you started doing the commercials, blew it out the water, then you had Deleon and everything looked like it was on the up and up owned by a black man and all that. So a lot of people was confused when the lawsuit came about. You shared some information with us when we came to your house that we wasn't aware of. So can you really talk about that? Because I think it's a very interesting case study for entrepreneurs to understand. Definitely. The situation's in the courts now, so I'm going to share with y'all what I can. This is all public record. But basically I was called to have a meeting with Diageo and they knew that I was kind of killing things in the culture and they were trying to fix their diversity problem. And through that, a meeting was set up and I told them, you know, I want to be a owner that I have these ideas from promoting parties at Howard, just remembering that I will always get the door and never get the bar. That right there is a quotable right there. Always get the door and never get the bar. Anybody who throws parties know that in many cases, you do some deals, you will not get the bar, but the real money comes from the bar. All right. A lot of people will try to hold on to that, let alone owning the liquor, like literally getting the bar, but note that he said Diageo called him. They saw that he was having an impact in the culture and they wanted to actually reach out to him and get something going. Does that sound familiar? Right. Does that not sound like every influencer who has brands reaching out to them for your deal? All right. So this is why I think this is so important for everybody in terms of a case study, right? People see you have impact. They see you have some type of influence and you're going to get these people reaching out, but how do you go forward with that deal? And so I said I have aspirations to have black owned brands owned by black people behind the bar and a part of your organization, they're the biggest distributor of spirits in the world, biggest maker of spirits in the world. So we get a test project. I'm looking at their portfolio and they say we can start something from scratch, but I'm looking at their portfolio and I remember one night I was having a great, great time with Sirach. I had some Sirach. It was made by grapes and I remember, you know, having just such the greatest time. And so the light bulb went off in my head. I said, I don't want to wait and develop nothing. Let me show you what I could do with Sirach. Let me show you how I could turn your revenue around. They were losing $40 million a year and I went and turned it around and took it to 2.6 million cases from 40,000 cases. Okay. And so this is something that's never been done. Clap it up for that. So what I read was you're talking about a difference between apparently losing at some point maybe only up to $40 million in revenue and did he help and grow it to over $400 million every single year in revenue? But he said something he said, I didn't want to wait, right? To actually develop something from scratch. And when we talk about ownership, which a lot of this conversation gets into, when you're not there from scratch, it becomes a lot harder to own. Yes, you turn the revenue around, but I've seen this bug over and over again, especially from people who come from the music industry, right? Look at Kanye. He'll go to Nike or whoever and they'll create these things with the brand is already very established, right? You're not really starting from scratch. So there's a certain amount of leverage that's already on the other side. And if you're turning the revenue around, that's great. If you get a bigger portion than a regular influencer, but when the ownership conversation comes up, things look a little different. And I think Diddy tricked a lot of people, maybe unknowingly, I can't remember all of the campaigns, but a lot of people thought that Diddy owned Sirach. I remember a few years ago, what I read was that he had not ownership, but he had a joint venture. He had a profit share agreement, which is very common to people in the music industry. I'll speak more on that later. But more importantly, I read that he had a profit share agreement for US rights or maybe North American rights. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if so, that's mind blowing knowing what Diddy has done and that he only had North American rights when you're moving to drink worldwide because his influence, he does have influence or the ability to influence beyond the US. That's well more than clear. And so 15 years later, even though I had that success, I was always fighting for Sirach not to be pigeonholed, not to be pigeonholed as a black brand, not to be pigeonholed as an urban brand. I already went through that. I went through that with Sean John. They put me in the urban section. I had to go and disrupt the fashion industry, pull up on Fashion Week and show him what that black excellent swag is about. And that's what we did with Sean John. And so with Sirach, it was the same thing, getting into the Sparice industry. No matter what industry I went into, I always came up against this ceiling that they just wanted to keep me in the colored section. I would say for businesses, you have white only business, just like you have white only bathrooms back in the days. And you have black only business. And so my fight is to always make sure that we could just do business. I want the black only business, white only business, they wanted to keep me in the colored section. Now, some people might be like, all right, well, what does that mean? I mean, he's very clearly, and I've heard this when it comes to a lot of actors and actresses, it's really about placement. We only want to market you to a specific audience because we see you in a specific way and your influence in a specific way. I feel a certain way about that. But I think this is where the Pharrell deal comes back up. Pharrell sues Diageo, North America for $5 million. And I paused it and checked it out. Did he did have a deal with Diageo in North America? So we're talking about North American rights. What did Pharrell sue Diageo for? Well, back in 2011, Pharrell launched his very own LeCour Q Cream aimed at mostly high-end female audiences. But as the lawsuit he filed against producer slash distributor Diageo, North America outlines, the attended demographic wasn't allegedly reached or marketed to. In the $5 million suit, Pharrell claims that Diageo pushed Q Cream as a club drink, quote, unquote, which led to substantially lower sales. The document also alleges that some of the LeCour bottle tops were janky, causing both consumers and bartenders to avoid the drink. Check this out. They pigeonholed it as a club drink. And here's some telling information. This happened in 2011. You check out these photos from his launch party. You can see clearly that Pharrell is branding this for women. Look at the bottle. Very feminine. Curvaceous. You see the plants. Check this out. The way he spelled cream with flowers got Trina as a picture from the launch party. He did brand it for women. And this only ran for about two years. When he sued them, it was 2013. So he sued them for the exact same reason did he sue them. We hate to interrupt your regularly scheduled podcast, but my man, Brandy Manchin, got something he just been dying to say to y'all. Go ahead, Brandy. We're looking for a hundred of y'all. A hundred artists who could be at our next event on October 15th. We're doing another one. Those of y'all who know that we did this one other time, we have helped artists go from zero to millions of streams in 90 days. And we have artists who are at the first event who are already getting millions of streams. We're looking to help more artists. We want to hear your music. We want to meet you in person. We want to commune. This isn't something just get some education and keep moving. We want to chop it up, dap it up, take some pictures and hopefully build a relationship with you in the long term. But the last few details to Corey, you go ahead and let them know where it is, time, all that good stuff. Yeah, I got you. I got you. So if you want to commune, you want to, you want to learn, then meet us in Washington DC on October 15th at 12 30. But once again, we'll be meeting with a hundred of you. You know what I'm saying? You got to be real strict on that. A hundred people, not one or one, not one or two. If you want to make sure that you're one of those hundred people, click the link in the description or go to knowlabelsnecessary.com slash DC to get your ticket. And yeah, hopefully we see you there and we see some shit straight. www.knowlabelsnecessary.com. Remember we sold out real fast last time. We'll probably do it again. See you there. It doesn't matter your vision for how you're trying to market this product, we see you as a way to tap into an audience we don't know how to tap into, which I'm familiar with because I had companies reach out to me and say, Hey, do you want to market XYZ and product or do you want to join the company for a certain reason? And if the visions aren't aligned, it doesn't matter. You can kick the ball down the field and maybe have some success and bring in some money. But at some point you're going to hit that ceiling again. And I think the timing of things with Diddy, when he first joined Sarac back in 2003, this was unprecedented. And it was probably a beautiful way for him to market the club scene, the urban scene that he did have a lot of influence on when it came to what's cool and what people were consuming. But once he maxed that out, he's looking for more revenue growth and filling that limitation. I want to be treated equally like anybody else. And so that's what the fight is about. And it's not me just fighting for me. I'm fighting for us because whatever ball I set, y'all have to come behind me on that ball. And I want to make sure that it's right. So that's what the fight is about simply put. And the last things to make it clear was with Deleon, I still own Deleon. Okay. So with Deleon, I sent my people before you tell the story about that. Just talk about the process of getting Deleon, right? Because it was you moved yourself with Sarac. And so now there's an opportunity to create something else. But a lot of, first of all, corporate America is made and built for white men. So when you're going into corporate America, usually your entryway is to help them with a diversity problem. But help them with their diversity problem. I alluded to this earlier, right? Basically, we need you to tap into an audience that we don't know how to communicate to, period. Whatever diversity looks like to them, they likely are successful already because they know how to tap into a specific audience. But once they want to continue to expand, we're a corporation, we got to grow by all means, baby. How can we expand? Well, we got to tap into a different part of culture that we don't currently speak to. Well, how do we do that? We need to find people who understand those audiences and the quickest way to do that is somebody who already has influence and understand those audiences, no matter what your audience is. At the end of the day, you want to be able to open up doors. Sometimes you got to take that opportunity and get in. And so that's what I did with Sarac. But I told him, I don't work for nobody. Everything in my portfolio I own. So you guys have to know my ultimate dream is a tequila. Since I was a kid, I remember drinking tequila or being afraid to drink tequila at first, since not a kid, a teenager. Correction, please. He said, everything in my portfolio I own, which I love that idea, right? But in this particular case, it seems like he took an exception for Sarac. And he said, I'm just going to show improve. And I think this is a situation where maybe not starting from ground zero with the test product came back to bite him because he probably wanted to move at a certain speed. And this is what I've seen with Kanye too, where I think sometimes wanting to move at a certain speed, which is great for building, making impact and all those great things. But sometimes when it comes to dealings with those companies, it gives you, it takes away some of the leverage because they get your impact. They get to test you. And then they also get to put you in a certain part of their business without you having the leverage because you're thinking, oh, if I just show improve, they're going to think, oh, wow, I'm amazing. I just grew their business. And this guy deserves to own his own brand. Why would they think that necessarily? It seems like an obvious thing, right? It seems like maybe the right thing to do, but everybody handles the business differently. And, you know, Diddy was like, truthfully a pioneer in this space in terms of coming from music culture and hip hop and entertainment culture and leading the way at the forefront of a liquor brand. He was the one who popularized all these liquor deals. So maybe there was no precedent for him to follow. And this is just one of those things where sometimes the pioneers get those arrows in their back. I mean, I was over 21. Yeah, he was 21 at Howard. I remember it. But Tequila used to have a worm in it. That's how dangerous they used to like market it. But I was like, I really love Tequila. This was before the whole Tequila craze. So it's like you make a deal. You make a deal like I'm going to advance this for you so that we could be good partners and you could give me what I want, which is my opportunity for me to own my brand and to be able to build generational wealth for my kids and my people. And I just need the same 24 hours as you're giving everybody. What do y'all think about that idea, by the way, right? I'm going to show improve. And then I'll be able to own for myself. Do y'all think because I hear time and time again, people will say, like, well, Kanye, how come you don't just start your own or whoever? Why don't you just start your own? This is that same idea. Right? He did have a certain level of resources. I want to know what y'all think. Everybody else in your portfolio. And I couldn't get that. I had to send my people down to Mexico. And this is just to tell you what the fight is about. They went down to Mexico. And when they got down there, they found out that there was zero agave planted for De Leon. So there was no plan for us to be successful. It was no equal treatment. The other brands, they had agave planted. They had no agave planted for me. And sometimes you have to go check even your partners to see what's really going on. And so when I saw that, I was like, nah, nah, I'm going to fight because it's big audit, audit, audit, audit. Don't be afraid to audit and just make sure everything's straight, especially if you're a little suspicious of things going on. Bigger than me. It's about not just me. It's about we. It's about all of us. So I chose my purpose over profit. And that's the whole De Leon situation. Yeah. You brought up distribution. You clap it up for that. You brought up distribution and you come from the music world. This last point that they're about to talk about is extremely important. I think it drives things through. But before we get there, I think the idea of a joint venture, I know this is very, very common in the music industry. Of course, it's not the only industry that does it, but there's a joint venture mentality where people are really good at marketing in the music industry. And then they'll partner up and then like make some revenue together. But people are really bad at developing products and building companies. There's a mentality in the music industry, especially within the hip hop side of hitting licks, running plays together, and we'll get this revenue rolling. And you can do millions. You could do really big numbers, especially if you got sizable influence. But I think some of this comes from instead of actually building fruitful companies from the beginning, it's partnership, partnership, partnership, partnership. If you look at Jay-Z, there's partnership. And I'm not even saying there's anything wrong with partnerships. These guys are extremely successful. I'm just saying that we tend to default towards one type of strategy. And when you do partnerships and leverage your marketing influence or influence over and over again, there's some lack of experience in company building from ground zero. Instead of having just a portfolio of really successful businesses, I think we do need more people to build businesses from ground zero and understand those ins and outs of what that looks like as well. And I don't just mean a label, by the way. I mean, like after they do their music stuff and when they expand beyond, I think the next step is to see people leave music and build from ground zero instead of just partner and leverage their marketing arm. Distribution is a- Hold on, I need to say this. I need y'all to still support Deleon. You know, we're going to win this. Believe that. Still support Deleon, y'all. Still owned by a black man. Still owned by a black man. Owned by a black man. This is that money stuff, by the way. Good lord. Like going through stuff like this, but then still trying to do business together at the same time. You know, I'm not at that level yet. I got some business maturation to do for sure. You come from the music world with distribution means one thing. For some of the audience who may not be familiar, I'm sure that could consume spirits, but they don't really know what it means to have distribution inside of that space. What does that look like when you're building a brand like Deleon to interrupt? Yeah. Supply and distribution is everything. Whether you came from the streets, we all know that. We learned at a very young age. And so no matter how I market a product, if they just keep me in black neighborhoods through the distribution, I can never grow. I can never be as great as I could be or as great as we can be. You know what I'm saying? I had to go from me to we. And so when I started really looking at every decision I was making, I was like, that this is something that I have to change. I can't just come and get this check and not be changing. Last point, distribution. I think people underestimate the power of distribution. People think about ads running influencer campaigns or posting content on social media, right? The awareness side of marketing distribution is so, so underrated. So, so underrated. And when I first really understood the impact of distribution in a way that really clicked with me was when the Migos had wrap snacks, right? Their wrap snacks flavor dab a ranch, right? That was like a thing. They had like the dab a ranch. The dab was popular. Like the dance and all that stuff. And I knew about these wrap snacks. So I'm trending on Twitter. I love ranch. I love chips. So I was like, oh, bro, I got to try these. I had no idea where I could find them. So you have all this marketing and demand being created. And this is a high time where business could be booming, but there's no distribution in the physical world where I could actually go down the street and buy some. That's changed now. There are plenty of gas stations. And a lot of times though, you could even see, hey, they might start in the gas stations in the hood and then slowly pan out to other neighborhoods or maybe they never go to other neighborhoods. And these are the types of things that Diddy is talking about here. If I literally don't exist in certain areas, in certain bars, in places, I cannot be sold there. No matter how much people want it, if they don't actually see it in the real world, they're not going to be able to get it, which means I'm not going to be able to have those sales and it's only going to continue to seem like I can only sell within these audiences. But you're not even giving me a chance when George Clooney just turned around and built Cosamigos and he said, all different demographics. And you got Future talking about Cosamigos. You got all these different people and he just sold it to Diageo, right? Uthakila, even though Diddy has Deleon for a billion dollars. So these are the type of things that he's talking about. But I love this video and conversations like this because this is what everybody's dealing with in some form of fashion if you are on the influencer side, right? Building business in general, of course. But like the people who are influencers, the artists, so many people that obviously I talk to and my friends, we all have to think about not only how do we continue to build our influence or how do we leverage the influence that we currently have, but what does that look like when we do partner with the company, all right? And not only are they giving us a deal that we like on paper in terms of our percentage, but what is their plan of action to grow and help this thing be successful and is it limiting, all right? But sometimes it's hard if you don't go down that road and you don't have that experience yet because you don't see certain problems until you get to a certain level, all right? But we'd love to know what you guys think about this video. I think it's really insightful and just something to think about when you're doing deals. And if y'all would like to see more videos like this because this is my first one doing this, I've been wanting to do these types of videos for like a year and a half now, just now getting a little bit of time. Let me know. Put it in the comment section below and please, please, please subscribe. Peace. But if you want to keep watching, we've placed a video that will be so useful for you conveniently above. Go ahead and click that link and watch it.