In this powerful Episode 16 of the Shining Brightly Podcast, I am honored to have Magie Cook share her story from extreme hardships of living and growing up in an a orphanage as a child and youth to the Mexican women’s national basketball team, a basket scholarship to the University of Charleston then becoming homeless…and with a gift of $800 she started Maggies Salsa and brand that she sold into supermarkets and grocery stores nationwide being acquired by Campbell’s Soup for $231 million dollars. Magie then pays it forward by returning to her orphanage and saving lives. As a best-selling author and award winning international bilingual speaker, she now shares her story and message of hope on stages all over the world and coaches’ others in Speaker Mastery.

Mentioned Resources: https://magiecook.com/

Book - Mindful Success

Magie’s story video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK3zqXnUQ8k

About the guest: Magie Cook

Founder of a company with $800 (after she was homeless), that later sold for 231M with GF. She works with organizations that want to create a culture that can overcome any adversity, and who are hungry to re-discover their passion and become something bigger than themselves. After living a life of suffering in an orphanage for 18 years, Magie created mindset strategies that changed her life. Magie now dedicates her life to helping others unleash their full potential. Magie is an internationally recognized speaker and expert in the fields of business and personal development. She has been featured in numerous publications, magazines, and television networks such as Daystar, Bloomberg TV’s ‘The American Dream’, and many more. She has received many awards, including induction into the Hall of Fame at the University of Charleston, a Nobel Entrepreneurial Prize in Mexico, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from UC.

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#shiningbrightly

Hello and welcome to Shining Brightly. This is

Howard Brown, your host your Maestro at the mic. I am excited

to talk to you today. I have to tell you, I've got a little bit

of man crush and fandom going today. We have Magie Cook, I oh

my god, I got introduced to her a couple of years ago. I follow

everything she does on social media because she is my

inspiration. Because what your story you're gonna hear of her

what she overcome, and how successful she is now and how

she gives back is in such alignment with me. And I'm so

glad you're here, Magie, thank you for coming on Shining

Brightly today.

You're very welcome, Howard.

Oh, and she's so humble to well, Magie, I'm going

to actually share a screen right now because I want people to

hear your introduction and get a feel for you. So my audience

hears you. So we're gonna do a shared screen right now. And let

me do that and bring it on and we're going to play your bio

intro, and we're going to share that so people on listening,

you'll hear it if you're on video, you'll see it.

My name is Mike veillonella Kruskal Garcia. I am

the founder of Max LLC. This is a company that I started with a

gift of $1,800 when I was homeless, and a company that

sold a Campbell's soup in 2015.

When I first tasted Magie salsa, I was blown away.

It was awesome product. I could tell it was fresh. I could tell

it was made with quality ingredients, and I knew that it

would be a great product from Walmart.

I am from Mexico. And this was life in an

orphanage. And yes, these are my 68 Brothers and sisters. Ever

since I can remember. I mostly work in construction, digging

ditches, cutting trees and gathering topsoil from the

mountains. At times, we had no food for weeks, so some of my

brothers and I resorted to hunting with our bare hands. We

basically hunted at night using spotlights and nets to catch our

prey. When I was about six years old, I started digging caves and

sides of mountaintop canyons. These were my secret hiding

places to rest. This was a way to try to escape to cope with

the things that I saw in Lent. As a way out of the orphanage, I

pursued basketball and got recruited in high school to play

for the Mexican national team. But I broke my collarbone. My

ticket out was months later, when I got recruited to play

basketball for the University of Charleston. That's how I came

here. I learned to play basketball really good by

covering my eyes with the help of an orphan kid named fine too.

We found Pancho in a dumpster as a baby. He couldn't walk because

he had spinal bifida in my job was to carry him everywhere I

went. When I graduated college, I couldn't find the job and I

became homeless. I ended up living in the streets and also

in the woods in a nearby forest. But to be honest, I didn't even

know that I was homeless because that's how I live most of my

life. In 2004, I started my salsa company with a gift of

$800 When my friends entered me into a salsa contest, I won the

contest and I had an aha moment. I started my business and it

grew very, very fast. My products sold in 38 states to

supermarkets like Walmart's Whole Foods, Sam's clubs, and

many more companies carried my products. Shortly after my

company was sold to Campbell's, I went back to Mexico and helped

save 31 orphaned children who were in grave danger. Some of

them were victims of sex trafficking. We later were able

to involve the federal rallies in the military in the

continuous pursuit of the safety of these kids.

The best type of giving currency is not money. It is the

willingness and given life service. Never take for granted.

One single moment of your life. Change starts now.

My God, take my breath away. Bless you. I don't

know if you know this, but I played basketball and it's my

happy place. That's how I recovered from cancer by getting

back on the basketball court. And so we have that income.

We're gonna have to go shoot hoops, Magie, sometime down the

road when we get together. Oh my goodness, I have to tell you. I

love that introduction. And you just are living values. You've

had a lot of tough times in your life, and you've never forgotten

those. And so Tell me what you're doing now. You told me

that you're you're speaking and you have a specific talk. That's

your, your purpose is you? Tell me, tell me, tell me how that

all originated now and where you're trying to take people.

I think that everyone who is in this time and

space has a purpose. And a lot of us go through life without

really knowing or, or understanding what that is, when

we feel lost. And I think that when we take the time to find

out, figure out, why are we here? What's the reason that we

were born in this time, then we can begin to discover and live a

life that's truly fulfilling for us, and also a life that truly

makes a difference in an impact in the world that you live? And

my purpose is you or your purposes you came about,

because, you know, I, I really believe that every person should

should know that about themselves. Like my purpose, you

know, with even with my salsa company. If people ask me, you

know, what's your secret recipe? My secret recipe is me, right?

Because I'm the the one that originator. But it really

started when I was eight years old, and I was in the orphanage

and my caregiver who was a doctor, he was giving medical

attention to the poor on a Sunday. And this mother came in

with her kids and, and he treated them and then they were

about to leave. And I remember him grabbing me and saying, Do

you know how I can tell they're so poor? And I said, No. And he

said, because look at their hair, it's so thin and yellow.

Look at their bellies, they're malnourished, look at their

feet, they don't have any shoes, and they have calluses from

walking in the dirt. And that's in stone. And he says that's how

I know that they're very, very poor. And then he kind of

grabbed me and squeezed my hand he says, I never want you to be

that bad. And so I remember that he left to give him some money

for like a taco, I remember him saying something about a taco

get a taco and money for the bus fare. And I remember looking up

to the sky and and thinking I'm gonna do and be something bigger

than myself. And that's when I realised that that was my

purpose was to do something bigger than myself. But I just

didn't know what because I was eight years old stuck in this

orphanage. And that was my life. But at that time, I began to use

my mind to get me out of the suffering state that I was

experiencing. Because sometimes we would go without food for two

weeks, or three weeks, and I became a hunter. And we would

hunt at night, I still have the miners already at night that I

used to hunt with. And I remember I dug a cave, and it

was my secret hiding place where I would meditate. And I didn't

even know I was meditating until I read it in books later here in

America. But that's where it really started in the really

profound understanding that everybody has a purpose in that

purposes you it's not a product or service, it's you who becomes

that product and service eventually to so everything

starts with you the fire, the shining brightly, as you say

starts within you. And that's where that comes from.

Well, I have to tell you, you you overcome a

lot. And you've had some, you know, you grew up on the

orphanage and you you had to learn to hunt. And it's a lot

for a young child to see this but you you're in your

surrounding. So you maybe don't know, because you have nothing

to compare it to. And you watch this other family come in, and

they were worse off even a little bit than you were and it

looks like you found your spot being Basketball. Basketball

became a place that you could focus and you were it's a team

sport, it teaches you discipline and, and you became pretty good

at it as well. Do you remember your coach who you have a

specific coach?

Actually, I'm gonna be very honest with you, I start

I discovered basketball and it was something new in Mexico. The

big sport was soccer, soccer. And I started I remember in

junior high school. It was the first time that we actually left

the orphanage to be in the city to go to school because we did

the rest of the previous years in the orphanage. And I remember

passing by the principal's office and looking at it as TV

it was like a little black and white really long TV. And I saw

Michael Jordan play and I asked if I could come and watch one

breaks and he said yes. And I learned all my moves from there

because the physical education teacher that we had didn't even

know how to dribble a basketball, right? So I just

taught myself and became very good. And then I got recruited

to play for the Mexican national team. And that was went out

there

and you got you Right. And then you got to the

University of Charleston, and you recovered, I'm assuming from

your shoulder dislocation, and you got to play and you played

college basketball. Yes. It's incredible. It's that that

that's amazing. And you couldn't have predicted that you didn't

know that that was going to be your way out. And so then after

college, you actually and you said in the video that you

actually had a period of time where you were homeless?

Yes, I Well, I want to say that when I broke my

collarbone, my, my caregivers who is a doctor also told me

that my dreams were over. And at that time I was we were waiting

for three months for the Mexican national national team to call

us back. And the day that I broke my collarbone, and he told

me that I was like, No, even though I had a few tears, I

said, if, if not destined something better. Because even

though three days later, when the Mexican national team called

and I couldn't go, it, I still fell crushed. But I think it was

4-5-6 months later, we went on tour and to the United States on

a bus. And we got invited to a picnic. And if I hadn't played

in that day, that picnic, because my father, my caregiver

told him told me when my dreams were over, I wouldn't be

speaking to you today. Because I said to myself, if not destined

something better, I don't know how. But I believe that

something better is going to happen to me. And that's sort of

the mentality of intrapreneurship that I've had

since the beginning. And because of that, I got recruited to play

basketball for the max for the, the University of Charleston.

And that's how I ended up here.

Yeah, but you never gave up, even in the worst

of times. And I mean, you built up this resolve. That's all I

can call it. It's just as human resolve, because of so much what

you've had to overcome. I've had this burning question. Did you

even know how to cook? How did you how did salsa How did you

make this amazing sauce? And how did how did you? Where did that

come from? Where did the origins of that come from?

So salsa came about in the later years when I was in

the orphanage when we had more resources to buy produce. And

then I got the recipe from one of the villagers and I would

make salsa and put it in the orphanage for the orphanage. But

when I was in college, I used to make it for my friends and my

friends told my teachers and my teachers had me bring it to

class. So it was a very popular thing. So when I graduated

college, I couldn't find a job and it was interior design my

degree in West Virginia. And I became homeless, but one of my

friends from college entered me into a salsa contest. And that's

how I won the the contest. And that was my aha moment to begin

that journey of making fresh salsa, and you know, being an

interior designer, I hadn't, I had no idea that was going to

happen, but I was hungry for something. Because I was set to

prove my father wrong. Who told me that I would never amount to

anything.

That's okay. That's That's motivation. That's

one type of motivation. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. It was motivation. But it was based

on fear, which only gave me so much success. And I feel like

when I realised that fear couldn't be part of my success,

that's when I broke the ceiling, and became even more successful

in selling my company to Campbell's Soup with garden

fresh for 231 million.

And you had you had other people trying to buy

this your company for a lot less?

Oh, my gosh,

you held you held on it. You didn't just give into

the first offer that came through that takes a lot of

discipline. And but you had to kind of learn and grow with the

company. It happened very quickly.

Yes. Yes, it started in 20- 2004. And by 2000, and I

was just doing, you know, friends and making about 250

pounds of salsa a week. And then I started doing cold calls to

supermarkets and I remember getting like 90 rejections and I

had was checking them off. And then I decided to flip the list

upside down to reach out to the largest supermarket and that was

Whole Foods. I called them I was I was like telling myself I hope

they don't answer because I was so scared to pick up the phone

and call and I left a message the next day they called me and

they wanted to meet me and I went to Whole Foods and that

made the rest history because they their first total order was

for 10,000 pounds of salsa and and that that took my company

that year from $12,000 a year to $1.9 million a year with just

Whole Foods and now everybody that said no to me was were

calling me to help because the thing is that people don't

understand that when you have a really good product and it's a

niche product and it's not known in the market. The market will

resist you because they don't know about it. But I knew that

it was special because people tried it and they just kept

ordering it and So I had to be resilient, relentless, and

resourceful in the way that I'm going to keep moving forward.

Because I'm not going to stop short of gold here. I'm going to

continue to because I feel like this is something that could go

big. And it did. And I almost gave up because I was alone.

Nobody else would help me being a Latina, in America. And

there's there's a lot of disadvantages, but I didn't

really think that way back then I just didn't think that I had

the support. But I just kept moving forward until I broke the

ceiling and the rest of US history.

You're an amazing case study for resilience and

success and entrepreneurism. So I this you may not know about

me, but I'm a past trustee of Babson College, the number one

school for Entrepreneurial Studies, and they focus on

entrepreneurship of all kinds, and family business and their

niche are actually still today, women owned businesses only get

around 2% of the funding that men businesses get. And so they

have the Centre for women's Entrepreneurial Leadership

called see well, and I'm going to get you to speak there

because you You're such a role model to everyone. And so, one

of the things that I want you to speak on is that because what

you did next was you decided to give back, you went back to the

orphanage, okay, that you grew up in, and you you started to

make lives better there. And it's talked about in the video a

little bit, but something that I picked up on using giving as a

currency, can you can you speak to how, how that came about,

because you didn't owe anybody anything at all, you did it the

hard way. And you worked really hard. And tell us about that

experience of going back, you know, as a real successful, you

know, entrepreneur, and you sold your company. And now you wanted

to give back to this giving as a currency.

When I was growing up, we would get donations from

the US for the orphanage. And we never really saw that because

they were allocated elsewhere, or given us elsewhere. That's

why we suffered so much. And when I tell people to give, you

know, it doesn't have to be money. It can be time. It can be

resources. If you want to give money, that's fine. I have a

foundation right now in Mexico called Matthew 2533. And we

don't give money we give things because I know the kids will get

it. And we know that young adults who are struggling with

drug addiction will get those things. It's totally different.

But you don't have to give money to make a difference in the

world, you're all you have to do is use your voice when you plant

the seed, help someone in some way that sometimes it becomes a

ripple effect, somebody else sees you doing an act of

kindness, and they in turn do it for someone else. And that's

just giving me chills speaking about it, because that's really

the humanity of the soul of giving and making a difference

is to having to know that that yes, you don't have to be very,

you know, you don't have to give money, a lot of money to make a

difference you can make it for me being in the orphanage and

rescuing those 31 orphan children from the drug cartel

was I was giving my life because at one point, I thought I was

going to die. We were outside of one of the rooms we kept all the

kids inside. And we were told that that 50 cartel members were

on their way and I had just one gun and my other brother had

another gun and we were out there like I thought okay, I'm

probably gonna die tonight. So we were scared but we we did

some things like let people know, the the peasants that that

come Pacino's from around us that we were armed and ready

even though we just had like two hands. But I also did a lot of

things with the Federalists, the Federal rallies and Mexico in

the military. And I asked if we could get support if anybody

came and eventually they came, and helicopters and everything

which was amazing, but for me to give my life, I would do it over

again. See those kids? Because you have no idea what I saw in

how destroyed some of these kids, four year old boys and

girls, five year olds, boys and girls were in the conditions

they were so yes, I would do it again. And I'm not afraid to die

because I know. I know that. What I'm doing is for something

that save souls. So That's what I mean by that type of giving.

So Magie, I want to tell you that I've been

called this and this guy Roger Babson who started Babson

College has been called this, but I'm going to, I'm going to

label you now as an angelic troublemaker, you have this

mission in this will, that, to bring others forth and make a

better life for what you did for yourself, but for others, and

that is, you're an angel on this earth. And this is why I

consider you such a role model and a hero to many, but to me

personally, because I would hope that I can model things now I've

not been faced with cartels, or had to actually have a gun. But

I've been faced with death twice. And I will tell you that

one of the you talked about 68 brothers and sisters in the

orphanage with you, my wife, Lisa, I met her in California

after cancer one. And she said you'd be a really good Jewish

Big Brother. And I became a big brother mentor to this one young

10 year old named Ian, now you've had a lot more scale than

I have. But Ian, I am telling you that I've he's now part of

my family. My daughter calls him uncle Ian, he has a son. And

he's a very successful attorney. Now, he made something of his

life. And he grew up in in poverty, real poverty. And I

will tell you that people always like Howard, you did so much for

me. And I was like, Oh my God, you have no idea how much en did

for me and my family. To show me you know, how to actually build

a human and a build a human with values. And this is this is why

Magie, I just tell you that you love walk the walk, you talk the

talk, but this is why you're telling people to try to pull

this giving currency out. And you're trying to tell people to

find what's inside of them. And that's not easy to do. But I

hope people are listening, I really do. I really hope people

are listening to you. Because just your raw emotion that you

express here today. It just means you care. And you care.

And it's bigger than you and and you're so humble. Today, I want

you to kind of finish and tell people before we get you know,

and wrap it up a little bit tell people how to get in touch with

you and what you're doing now. Share people kind of what your

hopes what your hopes are.

So my why and this is something that I help people

do my why to use my voice to create an impact or inspiration

so that I can make a big difference in the lives of other

people. My greater Why is to help others use their voice

through speaking, because I'm a motivational speaker so they can

make a difference in their world. Thus, the ripple effect.

And so now, I'm not only speaking internationally in all

types of stages, across the country in the world, but I'm

also teaching coaching people how to do it as well. And I do

it through speaker mastery, we just launched speaker mastery

about two weeks ago, they can go to join speaker mastery.com. And

they'll be able to join the Facebook group there. And I give

trainings every Monday night, they can also go to Magie

cook.com Magie with one G and you can see me speaking live on

stages. Yeah, that's, I'm on social media everywhere. So they

can also find me there. And that's what I'm doing. And I'm

so passionate about making a difference and helping others

use their voice. Because trust me when I was growing up, I

couldn't use my voice. And now I have an opportunity and I'm

making 110% sure that I use it and I share it for a good cause.

Magie, I want to tell you that just spending a

few minutes with me and my audience is the fuel that I will

use to carry forward and spread our light message of, of shining

brightly and making the world a better place. One person at a

time, one day at a time. And we can do it. And so I'm gonna put

on my sunglasses here for those just listening. And Magie, you

are a shining light, okay to everyone. And I am. I'm in line,

I'm your disciple, I'm going to follow on I'm going to do what I

can do to teach what you teach and and make this world a better

place. And I just I am grateful. I am blessed and I'm lucky to

know you. And I just love what you're doing. And I hope people

will really take the time to listen and then take positive

action towards finding their purpose finding their why and

making making their themselves and others and their communities

a better place. So thank you for being here today. And just one

more time, your website, your book your speaking so I'm gonna

put it in the show notes but just give everyone the how to

get in touch.

Yes, Magiecook.com Magie with one G my book is

Mindful Success. You can find it in the website, you can find

speaker mastery on the website as well.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming

on Shining Brightly and will shine together. And just I feel

very honoured to know you.

Thank you. Likewise, you're you inspire me to thank

you.

Well, this is one of the most important passionate

episodes of shining brightly to date. And so Howard Brown and

you can find me at Shining brightly.com And this is an

episode you don't want to miss. Thank you, Magie. Thank you