Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. Joining us on this episode is Carol Roth, who's a well-known

advocate for entrepreneurship and

small businesses. She's the creator of the Future File Legacy Planning System,

a billion-dollar dealmaker, best-selling author, and TV host. She's also the author of the best-selling

book, The Entrepreneur Equation. Carol, thank you so much for joining us. It is so fantastic to

be here with both of you. I'm really looking forward to this. Well, we're excited to talk with you and

wonder if you could tell us more about your background, how you got to where you are today.

Oh, goodness. Well, that's a, that's a crazy sort of situation. I always back and say that um i had sort of no chance to be

normal because i was born to a mom who was martha stewart crossed with share and a dad that was

half mobster half jewish grandmother so i'm the normal one in the family but there wasn't sort of

a lot of normalcy going on. Neither of my parents

graduated from college, so I ended up being the first person in my family to go to school

and got myself into Wharton undergrad, the top business undergraduate program in the country,

and went to my union electrician father and

said, you know, I'm going to the school and he was like, I have no idea how you're paying

for it. And I walked him through the whole thing. Went to school, got my $40,000 in college

debt, which today sounds like not a lot, but back in 1995 was about the equivalent of $120,000

today.

Sure.

And decided I had to pay that off quickly because that is one of the lessons.

And so I became an investment banker.

I kind of always felt like there were two options, either a consultant for the people who like to deep dive into something and investment banking for those who had ADD.

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