In this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez sits down with Curtis Nalley, founder of Lending America LLC, to dive into one of the most overlooked yet powerful strategies for boosting event impact and conversions—understanding the financial well-being of your attendees. Curtis brings nearly two decades of experience in the coaching and event industry, with a resume that includes collaborations with Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Grant Cardone. His companies have helped fund over $1 billion at 0% interest for event participants looking to invest in coaching, masterminds, and education programs.

What sets Curtis apart isn’t just the numbers—it’s his heart for service. This episode is a masterclass for event leaders who want to shift from high-pressure selling to high-integrity enrollment. Curtis explains how getting a financial snapshot of your attendees, through tools like soft credit pulls and third-party releases, allows you to serve your audience more effectively. By understanding where your attendees are financially, you can offer support that’s relevant, realistic, and genuinely transformative—while also increasing your own event ROI.

Curtis also breaks down how zero-percent financing, when paired with ethical credit education, can help remove barriers that keep people from saying yes to life-changing opportunities. He explains the benefits of credit cards when used strategically—from chargeback protection to teaser rates—and highlights how these tools can be used responsibly to purchase assets and make informed decisions. This isn’t about pushing financing. It’s about empowering people to invest in themselves with confidence.

A powerful thread throughout the conversation is Curtis’s belief in “mission over commission.” He shares his personal journey from being a high-performing sales closer focused on the win, to becoming someone deeply committed to doing right by the people in the room. This shift, he says, not only led to better outcomes for his clients but also created more alignment, trust, and long-term success in his business. The episode wraps with an inspiring reminder: when event leaders take just one more step to understand their audience—especially financially—they unlock a whole new level of service and transformation.

If you’re an event leader looking to increase conversions, build deeper trust, and create lasting impact, this episode is a must-listen. Curtis’s insights will challenge the way you look at financing and inspire you to lead with greater purpose and integrity.

Want to connect with Curtis?

Lending America LLC: https://lendingamericallc.com/

Black Bridge Holdings: https://www.blackbridgeholdings.com/home32089845

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-nalley-43a34164/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/curtis.nalley

All right, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to today's episode. We have a special guest with us. Mr. Curtis Nalley. Welcome, sir. I love how destiny keeps bringing us back together. We reconnected at a networking event here in Puerto Rico. I haven't seen you in so many years but you and I originally met, what? About six, seven years ago when we first both moved to Puerto Rico back in 2019 or 2017 I think it was?

Yeah, dude. I think it was 2017. We were both at an event talking about the tax benefits here.

And look, here we are 2025, and we're both here. We made it. We're the Og's now. For our audience here who maybe you're hearing Curtis's name for the first time, Curtis, he is an OG not just to Puerto Rico, but to the industry. He's been around coaching events since 2008 and him and his companies have funded over $1 billion with a B at 0% interest helping event attendees get access to the funding they need so they could invest in coaching education mastermind type programs and he also has a part of their business that does bridge as well to help people also get access to credit and he's also funded almost $30 million in that sense. So yeah, you've been around man. You also have worked with Tony Robbins and Robert Kiyosaki. In fact just before this interview I was watching an interview of you with Grant Cardone. I mean you've been there, you've done that and I know one of your highest values is sharing good information with people. So I'm super excited to hear what you have to share with us today.

Yeah, man, like I said Rudy, thanks so much for the opportunity and any light or education that we can bring to your audience, that's really my kind of mission statement is anybody that I get involved with is to try to bring value into their life. So I hope I can help.

Beautiful. Oh man, our shows all about the value. Let's just jump right in and I'm gonna hand the microphone over to you to share with us your golden nuggets, from your almost two decades of experience in industry.

Beautiful. So I think one of the things that's super important to talk on since most of your audience is all about events and in that coaching type niche, first off, I've been in and around the coaching in a series since 2008. I've done everything from pitch on stages, on the phone, I know how to run rooms. So hopefully I can shed some light on really maximizing the financing potential of the room and furthermore optimizing the client base that comes into rooms because a lot of the people that were probably going to see this today. You guys probably run events. The one thing that I can really help you understand and wrap your head around is understanding the money side of the room and the financing piece of the room whether or not that you work with a financing company or not. I'm not really even here to plug any of my companies. I'm really here just to spread education and hopefully if it can fundamentally help you guys change what you do. So you affect more people positively. That's what's important. So the the biggest thing that I think needs to be mentioned, especially when we're running an event, I don't know if most of your audience are running multi-day events or single-day events, but one of the biggest things that people need to understand no matter if you're pitching real estate or you're pitching internet opportunity or you're even pitching wellness. One thing that ties a lot of those things together is your financial well-being and one thing that every coaching company, every events company that exists should be doing for their clients not only a fact so you can understand your clients better is just understanding and getting a picture of their financial well-being when they step into your room. One of the things that I often see that is so lost in events is like I work with tons of guys that are really good, just like you man, about having great presentations. Getting people really excited. Getting that that back-to-the-room rush to sell whatever they're selling so many of those aspects, but so many of them lack in understanding of really getting a picture of like I said the financial well-being of your client because I don't care if you are working in the wellness industry or whatever you're teaching is completely not even focused on finance.

It's a huge part of our lives and in an event space, it's something that we need to understand. Myself and my wonderful wife we do a lot of things in the wellness space and one of the things that I always try to focus in in the wellness community is talking about people's financial well-being because the happiest state that you're gonna be in is I think when you have financial freedom and you're kind of living the life that you want to live so getting a picture of where someone's financial well-being is is super important when you attract them into a room. The best way that I have always found to do that is really by giving the people an opportunity to work with a lot of people like there's tons of financing companies and if I'm blatantly going to plug my own. That's Lending America, right? We focus on helping people understand their financial situation when they're in that room because a lot of people in the coaching space are always focused on other people's money and the financing game. So if you have a clear picture of what's going on with a person's not only balance sheet but credit report. You can have a better understanding of their financial well-being and this works really well when you're working a three-day event. If you're working a multi-day event it's really good because you can soft open the event with saying something as simple as like hey, the financial well-being of everybody in this room is paramount to our company and one of the things that we like to help people understand is actually getting a picture of where they're at at this moment. The best way that we know how to do that is by taking a look at your credit report and asking you a few questions. So at one point in time what we'd like to do for everybody is we're gonna send everybody a text message. That's going to have a link that's going to give you a soft pull.

It's not gonna affect your credit or life but what that is going to do is help us get a better financial picture of where you're at today and then later on in this event we can hopefully have opportunities to set down individually with you or at least on the phone after this event so we can identify plans in which we can help your financial life above and beyond all these other things. This is something that's crucial especially because when we're running a multi-day event, if we start by getting a picture of understanding even someone's credit report and you're working with a good finance company, they can go to your wholesale organization and they can give you a breakdown as long as, and this is something that's super important, you need third-party release. So if I collect credit data from anybody and I discuss that with Rudy's team, I have to have a third-party release and that's something that if you're working with any finance company for your own production make sure that you're doing that right. Get that third-party release from the customer that should be as a part of the link that was sent to them and what this will allow them to do is discuss what's going on with that person's credit picture with your with your sales team or with your ops team. So therefore when you're going into that event you can really help maximize the room from not only a revenue present potential but really a help potential because most of the people that are in the event space their main goal is helping to try to improve someone's life financially and It's really hard to do that. If you don't know where they're financially coming from when they enter your room, right? So I think it's paramount for every event company

Awesome, Curtis. That was some great information. We had a little snafu here on the internet, but I want to recap what I heard you say. What the value of knowing the financial well-being of your attendee before they come to the event and you having a process to identify what that is, how to best serve them at the event and maximize the potential of enrollment and signups at the event. Specifically in your process you send out an SMS in advance of the event for them to fill out and there's also a release in there as well. That gets signed so that you can actually share that information with team members, operations people, salespeople, etc at the event. I'm just curious to know that message that you send out in advance to people working in the event. What's the context of that message and what is communicated such that they fill it out and are willingly wanting to provide that information?

That's actually a super good question. It's really tailored to the type of event that we're working. So most of the stuff that I'm really familiar with is like real estate or like business startups type stuff. So generally when we send that, it's usually presented with the stage presenter. If they're doing it on their own, what they'll do is they'll say hey, it's a good understanding to look at someone's financial well-being. What we're going to do is we're going to send an SMS notification everybody that is going to allow us to take a look at your current credit profile and it's going to have a third-party release to allow that to be discussed with you personally not with anybody else and the whole purpose of that is because in real estate one of the most important things is understanding your financial well-being and understanding how we can maximize that to put you in a better deal or get more flexibility. So it's really tailored around the event that you're working with and running because if I work with you Rudy, you and the way that you pitch and the type of customer base that you're working with is going to be tied to a specific certain type of audience, whereas if I worked with Kiyosaki, for example, his rooms were ran where he was never in the room. They just used his name to get people in the door and then they had a whole team that broke down his system but it was all based around real estate so it was super easy lead in to get that picture of someone's financial well-being, but this works in every industry because oftentimes I see a lot of people that are in kind of different subcategories of the event space that aren't really trying to pitch real estate or make money online or crypto or whatever. Maybe that is about someone's health and well-being or maybe that's about psychological well-being or so many different things.

The most important thing to do is tie that to your audience because any aspect of improving someone's life often ties back. Like you'll hear me say financial well-being of a person because number one, you as a coaching company or an events company, you don't want to deal with a customer that's in a bad financial place because most of the time what's going to happen is that customer is going to cause a ton of problems. You might not want to work with a guy who's in the upper echelon of finance. Your identifier, your perfect customer might be in the middle of those two things where they're kind of in the middle. So what identifying and looking at someone's credit report does for you is it helps your team and you understand where every individual is in that room at least from a credit standpoint. This allows you to know where to maximize the amount of money that you're going to get from a customer if that's your objective. Or if your objective is just giving that person lessons around how important credit is and how it can value your lives and why you should use credit cards or why zero percent funding exists. There's a million different ways that you can attack that but you must understand the financial basis of your company if you're ever expecting to help them in a financial standard.

If your goal is to improve the lives of the people that you bring into your community, then your goal should be to at least help them understand a better situation of, for example, why credit cards are awesome and not bad. I mean, here's something that almost never anyone will communicate. Okay, a credit card if it's used properly is one of the best tools a business owner can have, number one, because you have chargeback protection. So if I'm a startup and I pay Rudy for something, and Rudy would never do this because he's epic, if a service provider didn't deliver a service I can call up American Express I could say hey, I want my money back and that's called a chargeback. I'm gonna get my money back. That's like having a superpower. That's what a credit card can grant you. Number two, if you're using credit cards properly, they have teaser rates. They're called zero percent introductory periods of time. Use them during that time frame and you can own assets for free. Furthermore, if you default on a credit card, you go through what's called a charge-off process. A charge-off process is after 90 days when you have a card that's defaulted on they typically sell off that debt to a third-party collection company or they push it into their own internal collection team, but they write that off as a bank. It's much easier to get that item fixed from your credit report than it ever would be for you to have to go through bankruptcy. Furthermore if you're using business credit cards, it is protected underneath the business name. So, in most cases the debt utilization is being reported there not on their personal credit side and furthermore you get points from using them.

So I'm a big believer in my own financial life by using credit cards to benefit me, and that's a good conversation to have in an event scenario because it gives you an opportunity to educate people on the value and benefit of credit cards. If you're working with a good finance company, they'll be able to highlight that for your customer. They'll be able to get customers new zero percent cards and that will help them benefit their lives so they can purchase your product or your service or do whatever your objective is. So if we can spend more time identifying the financial understanding and the balance sheets of a person's life the better we're going to be able to help them and the more that we're going to be effective at selling the person. I'm a big believer in selling the sizzle not the steak and getting to understanding a person's pain point and not using, I'm not a big believer in leveraging pain points against a person. I'm a big person in understanding a person's pain points so I can help them solve those problems in their lives. One of the biggest pain points that I've seen so many times in so many events that I've worked with in front of tens of thousands of people or even in groups of 20 people is that there's always people in that room that have a lot of misinformation about financial things. Like what I just said about credit cards or different loan products that exist or Understanding that if a person is carrying too much credit card balance on their credit report how it can hurt them.

So if we can get a snapshot of where they're at on the day that we're at that event. It helps us serve our customers better and put them in a better position and affect their lives better. Then when our sales team goes to close on that client and help them move forward and get aboard our culture and purchase our products and become involved with our company. It helps your sales team navigate that set process right then. I believe in a set and a close process. If we're speaking over the telephone to someone, you have a setter that identifies where a person is. You have a closer that presents and closes the deal. I'm a big believer in having that two-part close because it allows building posture for your closer. It also helps you identify pain points and financial well-being of people and all this other stuff. So what you're effectively doing by working with someone's snapshot of their credit during an event is like having a set and understanding just by looking at that balance sheet what some of their pain points might be. This just helps people navigate through themselves through the sales process and then purchasing your product and going into your culture and really using the things that you're trying to object and I think a lot of this is lost because man, I've had the benefit to work with some of the most Influential people like Grant Cardone and Tony Robbins and they do things amazingly well and they do things amazingly.

I've also had the terrible experience of working with companies that got affected by the FTC and got shut down and weren't doing things right. That really comes down to oftentimes we have a huge disconnect from a guy, for example, when I was in the coaching industry or the events industry I was the sales dude. I was the hype guy. I was really good at getting people across that pain point because dude, fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. When you step into it, it looks all black and murky. You step into it and you're like, oh dude, I can walk. It's easy, right? When you're selling you care so much about commission because it's your livelihood. That further disconnects you to the guy that has to deliver what you're promising to that customer so the more that we as sales organizations educational institutions, whatever your magic sauce is, the more that we can identify where a customer is today and help them lead to a better position in their life tomorrow, is the more the longer that you're going to have client retention. The longer that you're going to have better relationships less complaints because I've spent too much time of my life. For a great example, I worked with a coaching company back in 2008 where I was the sales guy. The FTC actually came into our office and shut us down. It was one of the craziest experiences of my life.

I had to find a new job almost immediately and do you know how many hours I've cried about that? A lot because dude, I'm a guy who literally has a tattoo on my shoulder that's a heart because I truly wear my heart on my sleeve. I'm a very emotional person and dude, it killed me as a person to know that I had taken individuals and I'd used my silver tongue or my sales ability to put them in a position where it hurt them. That sucks, right? I truly believe that today most companies, they're not trying to run bad coaching companies there or events companies. They're really trying to change and benefit people's lives but so much is lost between the guy that is presenting and the guy that is fulfilling and the more that, not only we can identify where our customer is, the better that we can help them which is truly what sales is about. Sales, I do not believe in the whole sales funnel where we get a person to the only option they have is to say yes I believe in guiding people through processes that I believe in that will change and benefit their lives and just highlighting the things that will help them. So then they always have the option of saying no, and if they say no, they weren't meant to work with me. They were meant to go with someone else.

That's great. Not everybody's supposed to work with Curtis Nalley. Not everybody's supposed to work with Rudy but at least when they come into my life, I can benefit fit them with value and I think that's the core of what most people are trying to do in the event space is affect people in a better way. If we take just one more second, if we do just one more thing, and look at a person's financial situation, we can help improve it. If we put ourselves into a position where we talk about that stuff and we bring it to light, because look man, I don't know if you came from the same type of family that I did but dude, I was super blessed to have a dad that talked to me about financing in life, man. My lovely and amazing wife, she's the exact opposite. No one in her life has ever talked to her about finances. They're terrible and I can't even have a conversation about it with anybody on her family's side because it's so closed off and they're so they have trauma about it. I believe that more people should talk about their own financial well-being with people that are in better positions with them so they can improve because Rudy may be in a much better financial position than me. If Rudy understands my financial position going in and he's truly here objectively trying to help me. He's going to change my life tremendously and he may be able to tremendously help my life by just dropping one little gem that makes me make a paradigm shift in my head and makes me move through a better process in life.

And then I live a better life, right. So the more that we as people that are truly trying to be in service of others through coaching and events. It is the biggest service that we can provide to people by talking to them about their financial position, fighting through, excuse my directness, fighting through the B******* that is spread throughout the finance world by gurus and everybody else and hell maybe even at one point in my life I've said some stupid s*** online because I'm a growing person. I'm not perfect but at the end of the day, dude, we need to have that conversation with our customer base because if we're not even doing the job we started in the first place, we're not really trying to move people forward. We're just trying to get a money grab and if that's your objective don't contact me because that's not my objective in life. My objective in life is to be of service. It's to be of service in everybody's life that I run in contact with. Grant Cardone said this directly to my face because I've been lucky enough to have somewhat of a friendship with him for over eight years now. He said, as a successful person, it's your duty to help other people around you become successful. It's your responsibility because I came from bad positioning when I was younger. I got kicked out when I was 16 and it was rough, it was hard or whatever, right? But I grew and now I'm a better version of myself today and that was a lot because of the Rudy’s that I came in contact with.

The people that I've surrounded myself with have had hard conversations with me and put me in a better position. So the key point of what I'm trying to focus on here is if we can understand the financial well-being of a customer when we are trying to be of service to them we can be of better service to them and furthermore we can affect their life in a more positive way. We can clean up all the stuff that is misrepresented. From a guy who's trying to get paid by commission because he's selling for me and a guy that's trying to fulfill on all the promises that he gave at the front of that stage, Those are two big things that are often in counterbalances in coaching and events companies and the more that we balance those two things out the happier customer that you have the low the more customer attention that you have and the less that you have to spend on getting more people into your events to sell them over and over again.

Beautiful, Curtis. What I'm hearing is a tagline that I tend to share its mission over commission. Doing what's in the best interest of your clients ultimately leads to money revenue, etc. Create value, the money follows. Chase money, it eludes you. So really clear that your value is to be a service and and you're able to do that through your company as well and being able to provide those lines of credit and more importantly education for people to educate them on how to be himself in a stronger financial position how to intelligently use the resources that they have and ultimately make it an informed decision that could likely positively benefit their lives.

100% and I mean that dude, that's why, I mean I've still maintained connections to you because that statement right there sums up who you are and what you believe in. You believe in affecting people's lives in a positive manner. The more that we focus on doing that, the better customer base that we have the better that we can be of service. The better that our events run the less c*** that we have to deal with people. But I think it all comes back to too many people aren't just using the technical side of doing a soft pull at their event so they can Actually look at a person's credit report and then going the extra mile and getting the third party release because I'm telling you guys right now, if you are working with a finance company and they're not giving you third-party releases, I would suggest for you to pivot and run, because at the end of the day, they may be killer at their jobs and they may be of really good service to getting more money in your pocket but that's going to come with complaints and problems and sticking people with the wrong product, because for me, I use our financing products to improve people's lives and how I do that is I focus on people getting people zero percent capital. That's all done through teaser rates. If you want to look up a bit more information do some research about me. I use that product to improve my own life because if I can use money at zero percent and own an asset, whether that asset be intellectual property, whether that aspect asset be physical property, whether that aspect asset be human capital, all of those things an asset can be anything.

Whether or not it's an asset to you is what matters. If we step back and we have conversations with people about their financial standpoint and you have internal conversations with yourself, man because I've spent a lot of time around some of the best salesmen in the world and their financial lives were wrecks all because they are really good at selling but they are really bad at managing their finances of their lives. So if you can step back and not only look at your own financial balance sheet and your own credit report and see where you're at today, that's going to help you improve internally, but externally it's going to help your customers. It's going to help you have the good conversation with them that yes, maybe hard at that event but it may lead to a change in their life. A huge change in their life that benefits them and allows them to do amazing things because I've been blessed enough to see people grow their companies from nothing to companies that dwarf my own right like my first year in funding. I actually had a company that came to us through an event believe it or not. It was a State Farm event about teaching new State Farm agents how to build insurance offices, okay, when this gentleman came to me, I'm not going to mention his name or his company, but he had $127,000 of credit card debt. All being charged over 20% interest and no one had sat down and helped him look at that and see how it was killing him. What I was able to do with that person is his wife had great personal credit and they'd done the intelligent move of keeping things separated. So what we were able to do we financed his wife.

We got her 160 grand, I think it was $167,000. I think if my numbers are dead on but we got that at zero percent. He balance transferred all of his credit card debt out of his name onto hers which saved him a metric boatload of interest and number two it cleaned up his credit report. Then we went through and we funded him. We got him an extra like hundred thousand dollars. It was, thinking it was 102 of financing at zero percent and that man went to build on, he became the number one State Farm insurance rep in the country. He had, last time I spoke to him, was probably like four years ago. He had 54 state farm agencies, he was doing something like 50 million top line and he had over 205 employees. So that all came from identifying where he was the day of that event looking at his credit profile and having the the hard conversation and the more that we can step back and and initiate that stuff within our businesses and our lives, the better we can be of service to our clients and the better that we can lead people through the sales process and the better that we can work on them with fulfillment. I feel like I'm kind of beating that horse to death, but it's the most important thing that I think I can communicate to your audience.

That's perfect, brother. I think that's a good place to kind of wrap things around. I'm going to share just a quick personal experience and then you can share any final comments as we wrap up. I thankfully had a mentor and a father figure for about 20 years. He passed away just over a year ago, but one of the things he taught me early on was what you're describing is how to sit down and understand a credit report and how to understand personal and business credit. He taught me like how to actually get good credit and he helped me navigate a situation where I didn't have good credit and I would say that financial education that he provided to me and support as well because he put me on a line of credit as well to help build my credit really changed the way I thought about finance. So for anyone that's listening to this right now, I highly recommend if nothing else go get a credit report. Reach out to Curtis, check in with their team, see if they can help you but even if they can't, at a minimum go get a credit report somewhere. Curtis I'll let you share where they can go to figure that out. I think it's good even if you're not having a conversation with someone else, have that conversation with yourself. Take a look to see where you're at and then just start from there. So Curtis, any final words as we wrap up here? And maybe you can give some people direction on where they can go to have that conversation with themselves or with someone else about the financial?

First off and foremost, one thing that you can expect if you ever come to me or my company, we do credit analysis for people for free. All for free. We're not charging anything up front. We'll have a free conversation with you about where you're at in your financial life, what your goals are and where you want to go and everything that we charge is actual record retroactively. So oftentimes I give people money by paying down their cards to help them well before they ever pay me. So just be aware of that, the best way that you can look up information about me is if you want to know about me personally just type in Curtis Nalley on the internet There's tons of documented data and great videos that you can watch. Many like this one and you can learn more about me personally. The two companies that I really work with and represent I founded Lending America. That company's goal is to help people get zero percent financing to improve their lives. We have a team full of guys who are experts in working in the event space because that's where I came from. I'm not so much involved in that company, rather I just put it together, my team functions. That's it. They run it. They do a killer job. I'm the active CEO of Blackbridge Holdings. The objective of that company is we just pay down people's credit card debt because what I noticed a long time ago, especially in the events world and the coaching world is too many people have personal credit card debt, there's very few solutions out there.

So we actually have a crazy product where I'll pay down your credit card debt. I'll update your credit report in two to three days and then you can restructure it all on zero percent credit cards. That's pretty cool and beyond all of that, I put together a law firm that's called Marker Law. I'm not an owner in that because I'm not a lawyer, but I help them in many different ways in their structure and how they do things. They're the only company that we know of that will legally escrow money off of credit cards. So if you're in the real estate space and you want to use a zero percent credit card to purchase a home, you can actually do that. If you want to look me up, it's Curtis Nalley. My companies are lending America LLC and Blackbridge Holdings. That's both at dot com, pretty easy to find and hopefully I can be of service with you.

Thank you, brother, and we're going to include links to those here near the episode recording or audio. So just look around here somewhere. You'll see links to Curtis and his companies. Thank you, man. It's been a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for coming on as an OG and being willing to share some valuable information with our audience. Much appreciated to you my friend.