A $1997 seminar should never sell for $97 unless:

1. The seminar is actually only worth $97. By offering his seminar at $97, is Grant Cardone saying that he has only $97 worth of information and wisdom to impart to his listeners? If so, then his claim that the seminar is worth $1997 makes him seem like a scam artist. No one offers a 95% discount on a product unless that product is basically worthless.

The actual ticket price to Cardone’s event is meaningless because the bottom line is this: Grant Cardone is a hustler and uses hustler gimmicks like offering you a 95% discount so that you can buy a ticket for only $97. Grant Cardone acts like he is your friend by giving you a discount so deep that he will surely lose a fortune just so he can help you become wealthy. What a swell guy he is. Cardone’s fake magnanimity is part of his hustle. No surprise here: The hustler is gonna hustle!

2. The price is a gimmick to lure the suckers in. This is Grant Cardone’s operating basis: Get “bodies into the shop” (a charming L. Ron Hubbard phrase) and then the real high-pressure selling begins. Once Cardone’s attendees are in the seminar, Grant Cardone and his staff pitch attendees on Cardone’s high-priced coaching, selling, and marketing classes.

In Grant Cardone’s world, success and wealth can only come if you “invest in yourself” by purchasing his courses and services. This is because you are too stupid to figure out success on your own. Scientology has the exact same mentality. Scientologists promote themselves as being the experts on the mind, on literacy, education, drug treatment etc. But it all comes at a steep price.

3. Grant Cardone has a hidden agenda. Grant Cardone sold cheap tickets to his previous 10X GrowthCon. He then used the event to raise $15 million for his Reg A Cardone Fund V. Cardone bragged about how he raised $15 million in 90 minutes at his 10X GrowthCon:

As we reported, Grant Cardone has recently been slammed with three class action lawsuits which allege securities fraud, i.e. Cardone made knowingly false representations to investors about his Reg A deals. The video above contains a factual misrepresentation in which Cardone claims that all of an investor’s money goes into the fund.

While this is technically accurate, it is misleading. What Cardone failed to disclose is that he buys his deals himself and then sells them to his funds. In his self-dealing scheme, Cardone charges investors 6% interest on his money he used to buy the multifamily units. He then sells the units to his fund and takes a 1% acquisition fee on the Fund side of the deal. Cardone double-dips in this way. The money for Cardone’s double-dipping comes from his investors. The investors pay Cardone’s fees and thus take a hit on their investment at the outset.

4. Like the Church of Scientology, Grant Cardone also makes his investors agree to binding arbitration as a condition of investment. Cardone stacks everything in his favor, engages in undisclosed self-dealing and bad faith — and he does this while he acts like he is doing his investors a giant favor by letting them into deals only the big guys get. In the fine print of its contracts, Cardone Capital states that investing with the firm is an illiquid high-risk investment in which an investor can lose some, or all, of their money. Grant Cardone has definitely found his inner L. Ron Hubbard.

5. Grant Cardone uses his seminar to allows other hustlers sell their products in exchange for a hefty percentage of the sales. Russell Brunson said he raised $3 million in 90 minutes at Cardone’s event. This got Cardone’s attention. Cardone told Brunson he had never seen a “table rush like that” of people flocking to Brunson’s sales table after he spoke to purchase his product. Look at the language of these hustlers: They are working the crowd into a frenzy in order to create a table rush. The hustlers want to see the marks rush the sales table while waving their credit cards to buy whatever is being sold.

Cardone likes money-makers and invited Brunson back to future 10X events. This is how the sales and motivational game works: The big names sponsor an event and draw a big audience. The big names invite the little names to speak and sell at their event in exchange for a hefty cut of the action. Sometimes the big guys take as much as 50%.

Scientology events typically have as many as 8-10 legally separate and competing Scientology religious corporations raising money from the attendees. These corporations include the IAS, Flag, CST projects, WISE, ABLE, Bridge Publications, CCHR, the Ideal Org program, the Volunteer Minister program, and whatever other Scientology fundraising programs are in effect at the time of the event.

Because Grant Cardone is a Scientologist, he uses many Scientology selling and organizational techniques. As with Cardone’s $97 seminar price, Scientology gets people in the door using extremely low-priced courses, the most common of which is the Scientology Communications Course. Scientology also offers a free personality test that is extraordinarily deceptive and manipulative.

Here is one of L. Ron Hubbard’s secret orders to his managers on how to handle staff:

“MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MORE MONEY.” – L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, 9 March 1972, MS OEC 384

This is what Grant Cardone expects from his managers and salespeople in his various companies.

Scientology Fun Fact: After reading Les Dane’s book Big League Sales Closing Techniques, L. Ron Hubbard became so enamored of Dane’s focus on the “hard close” and “breaking down the brick overcoat of resistance” that Hubbard licensed Dane’s book for use in teaching Scientology’s salespeople the art of high pressure/hard close sales techniques. Scientology salespeople are called “registrars” or “reges” for short.

Hubbard ordered his salespeople to get trained in Les Dane’s Big League Sales:

Reges who have never studied Big League Sales usually can’t close. So they promise the sky, tell people they’ll get their money back anyway, offer services only delivered in heaven and generally muck up the scene.

When you have incompetence, you generally get dishonesty. So the answers to this consist of getting Reges on, cramming them on Big League Sales, make sure their own cases are flying and that their own personal ethics are in, Otherwise, the deals they make backfire, cost one and all a lot of work and add up the yelling in the reception room and a case for the Claims Verification Board (the Refund Department).

If you don’t handle this, you go broke. And the only crime you can really commit in Western society is to be totally broke. — HCO POLICY LETTER OF 26 OCTOBER 1975, GROSS INCOME/CORRECTED GROSS INCOME RATIO FAILED CASES AND FAILED STUDENTS

Scientology is all about selling and closing Scientologists to buy things and donate money. L. Ron Hubbard was into high pressure sales and his disciple Grant Cardone teaches and preaches high pressure sales. Get the close. Always Be Closing.

Here is a classic L. Ron Hubbard sales close:

“Advanced Courses [in Scientology] are the most valuable service on the planet. Life insurance, houses, cars, stocks, bonds, college savings, all are transitory and impermanent… There is nothing to compare with Advanced Courses. They are infinitely valuable and transcend time itself.” – L. Ron Hubbard speaking of his Operating Thetan Courses, Flag Mission Order 375

Cardone makes the same basic argument: Cash and other assets such as a home are trash. The most valuable thing in the entire world is to invest everything in multifamily real estate with Cardone Capital. Cardone has told people to sell their homes and invest with him as Cardone Capital is the only safe and guaranteed investment. Cardone has told people to drain their bank accounts because “cash is trash” and invest the money with him.

For someone who claims to think so little of liquid cash, Cardone spends virtually all of his waking hours chasing the liquid cash other people have. Cardone wants to put their liquid cash in his pocket and he has many ways of separating people from their cash. He calls these his multiple streams of income. Cardone lies when he says cash is trash. Cash is Cardone’s lifeblood.

Grant Cardone wants to turn the liquid cash of others into illiquid investments that give Grant Cardone a hefty sum of liquid cash in return each month. Cardone calls this “cash flow” and yet it is very misleading when you break down what Cardone is saying.

Cardone argues that liquid cash in the bank is trash. He says people are stupid to think having money in the bank is safe. And yet in Cardone’s world “cash flow” is liquid cash going into his pocket each month. He gets this liquid cash flow based upon his having locked up his investors money into ten-year illiquid investments. So while Grant Cardone always has liquid cash in the form of cash flow, his investors do not. Instead, they get little monthly distributions from Cardone Capital that are taxed as income. Meanwhile, Cardone Capital enjoys deducting the accelerated depreciation on its income (cash flow) producing properties.

Cardone wants liquid cash coming into his bank accounts each month. He says this even as he teaches that for you to have liquid cash in the bank is stupid. Grant Cardone is a hypocrite and a liar when you analyze what he is really saying.

Grant Cardone likes to be folksy. In this vein, Grant Cardone is an old boy who pisses down your leg and tells you it’s raining. For example, Cardone set up Cardone Capital so that its investors don’t have the right to cash out their investments. Hence, Grant Cardone enjoys a daily liquid cash flow while keeping his investors illiquid for a ten-year time horizon.

Grant Cardone has one set of undisclosed rules for himself while he keeps his investors locked up in contracts of adhesion. This is so typical of the Scientology mindset when it comes to business.

Cardone doles out small cash distributions each month to his investors and acts as if he is beneficent for doing so. Earlier this year, however, Cardone suspended cash distributions to his investors for a few months. Cardone has the contractual right to do so at any time for any reason. Grant Cardone is not anyone’s friend. Read the fine print in any Cardone Capital prospectus and you can see this for yourself.

Below: We have posted a “hat write up” (job description) written by one of Scientology’s most successful fundraisers. If one ignores the Scientology-laden language, it is easy to see the Scientology hustle at work. The essence of a Scientology sales closes is to exert extreme time pressure and psychological pressure. The are many parallels between how Cardone sells and how Scientology sells.