Mel Carter is a top music executive owns his own label, Second Estate Records, and 18 Bojangles restaurants. Carter also serves as a consultant to the A&R team for Warner Records.
Carter who previously worked as the senior vice president of A&R at Republic Records, spoke about investing to realize long term-success
Why is financial literacy critical to you?
It’s vital to me because I grew up with nothing. When you have nothing, you’re not able to do much. I think one of the biggest things for me was understanding the power [of money], such as financial freedom and the ability to do whatever you please. In my case, I want to help a lot of people. As much as you mentally want to help a lot of people, unfortunately, there are minimum things you’re able to do without having money. I think that’s where I started understanding the value of learning financial literacy and what to do with money.
I’ve had times in my life where I’ve made tons of money and just wasn’t able to keep it, because I didn’t understand the power of long-term investing. A lot of people don’t understand that you might put away one dollar and it turns into five dollars in five years. When you have a safety net of one dollar being somewhere, or a million dollars being somewhere, then you’re never really broke. A lot of times, it’s OK to be cash poor, if you have assets, and sometimes you need to have cash to buy assets. But I feel like there’s never going to be a point where I can sit here and say, “I fully understand it,” because every single day, I learn more about it.
What are some tips for people who want to start investing their money?
The first thing I would do is identify what you want to do. People saw this Bojangles announcement, and one guy called me and was like, “Man, I saw you three weeks ago. You could have told me you were buying Bojangles.” I was like, “I’ve been working on this for three years.” He was like, “Really? I thought you just bought it last week.” I was like, “No, the announcement was last week, but it’s a process.”
It took me three years and four different deals to figure out which one would work best for me. I think it’s identifying what you want to do, and then planning that out. I can only speak from my perspective, my experiences, and what has worked for me. I don’t spend too much time formulating what I feel is the right plan, I just go after things. I would just advise anyone, if you know truly in your heart believe that this is something for you, even if you don’t know how to do it, just dive into it. Just make sure you learn and figure it out.
