[Music] This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk, where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Mia Lee of Mia Lee Financial. [Music] We’re proud to announce we’ve launched a new website at adultsidebroker.com. This attractive new site is easier to navigate and now includes this podcast inside of it. Check it out at adultsidebroker.com. Refer sellers or buyers to us at Adult Site Broker and our affiliate program ASB Cash will pay you 20% of our broker commission. This can amount to tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Check out ASB Cash.com for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles on age verification laws and more on the industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on us. Go to thewaronporn.com and check it out. Now time for our property of the week that’s for sale at adultsidebroker. We’re proud to offer a white label cam site that’s rapidly growing month over month. In fact, it’s more than doubled its business from 2023 to 2024. Because of this, we’ve had no other alternative but to raise the price. This is an excellent opportunity if you’re already in the live cam business or want to enter it. All traffic is either direct or organic. This is excellent for a company with cam traffic or one willing to purchase more traffic for the site. Best of all, the site is easy to maintain. Someone could easily add additional sites through the admin system without doing any more work. This gives you truly passive income with zero hours required to maintain it. Only $504,000. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adultside Broker Talk is Mia Lee of Mia Lee Financial. Mia, thanks for being with us on Adultside Broker Talk. Thank you so much for having me, Bruce. I’m so excited to be here. It’s exciting to have you. Mia is the co-founder and CEO of Mia Lee Financial, a licensed CPA and Series 65 registered investment advisor. She spent 12 years as a forensic accountant before transitioning into sex work in 2018. Mia’s first-hand understanding of the industry’s unique challenges drives her mission to empower clients through effective asset management and ongoing financial education. Mia Lee Financial is a registered investment advisory firm based in New York and California, co-founded by Mia Lee and Jay Chung, specializing in asset management for adult entertainers. The firm combines deep financial expertise with real-world experience in the adult industry. Mia Lee Financial aims to break down barriers to wealth building by offering tailored, judgment-free and advisory services. Or it should be judgment-free advisory services, but there you go. Mia, what first inspired you to work in the financial sector and what led you to specialize in serving the adult industry? To clarify, are you asking what led me to first enter finance as a career before sex work? Or are you asking me... Yeah. Okay. So I started on Wall Street when I was 19. Not because I was a genius. I was just fucking broke. Sorry. I don’t know if I can I curse on the thing? Oh, of course you can. Love that for me. Thank you so much. Appreciate that. So I was a Chinese political refugee. I came to the country when I was five and I subsequently went into foster care when I was 13. So if your listeners are not familiar, foster care is the system of indigent care for children that we have in the United States in place of orphanages in other countries. So I bounced around foster homes and then my last foster home was in a not so great neighborhood, a lot of gang activity in the school. So I graduated early from high school when I was 16. Previously, I had skipped a grade when I first came to the U.S. Also not great school district shitty ESL program. Had to teach myself how to read, so I skipped a grade and that’s why I ended up out of high school so young. And then I went straight off to college and in college I only lasted three years and I had to graduate in that time because my scholarship ran out and as I mentioned, I was freaking broke. So I started on Wall Street when I was 19 and I chose finance because I was like, I need to not be broke. And that was it. Like it was it was my first career. I was a survival worker and funny enough, I was giving an interview. It might have been Bloomberg or Yahoo Finance, one of these like mainstream business media presses and my I used to have a publicist and she had sent them my bio. And the reporter asked me, tell me about the start of your career. And I thought she was referring to the start of my first career on Wall Street. So I started answering the question and I was like, oh, yeah, it was really difficult at 19 being a survival worker. And sometimes I worked until four o’clock in the morning. My manager was emotionally abusive. I drank too much. And this went on and on for a couple of minutes and it turns out my publicist had fallen out of her chair laughing with a joint in her mouth. And then when she got back into her chair, she unmuted herself and she like for the two and a half years of work together, she had never interrupted me before. And this is the first time and last time she did so. And she was like, I just want to clarify that Mia is talking about her first analyst year in finance and not walking the blade on the Vodaya Avenue. And it was so funny because I didn’t even make that connection, right? And the reporter really thought I was talking about being a street based sex worker based on how I was describing my experience my first year in finance. Where were you working? Working the streets. Where was I working the streets? Where was that office? I think it was in Midtown. Oh, OK. Yeah, I was I was sitting on a 30th floor conference room at the time, I believe. And yeah, it was not a great work environment, but it’s not great to be any kind of survival sex worker. Or sorry, it’s not let me rephrase that. It’s not great to be any kind of survival worker. It’s difficult when you start your career and have no resources and no money. So it frankly sucks just as much. Well, I don’t know because I don’t have a comparison, right? But people have a lot of opinions about survival sex work and I’m like, homie, survival finance working that much greater. Like it’s not like I wasn’t working 100 hours a week because I didn’t need the money. Right. Yeah, that’s crazy. So it was in New York, then. It was in New York. Yes. Yeah. OK. And how about what led you to specialize in serving the adult industry? So that started with me entering the adult industry first. Right. So I retired, I’ll say, from my finance career in 2018 and I became Mia. So entering the adult industry, I, a decent amount of research coming from consulting, that’s kind of our MO. And I started noticing on different chat forums like Reddit Sex Workers Only and different groups that I started joining that there was a deficit of financial literacy and people had a lot of questions about everything from investments to taxes. And I just started answering them for free because I also started hearing stories about unscrupulous professionals and I’m using that term with big air quotes very loosely, basically selling services to a vulnerable industry that were at best professionally negligent at worst a criminal scam. And so I started doing pro bono work within the adult industry. I started getting invited by organizations to speak or teach or whatever it was. And I started taking them up on all of it because I was like, well, I have a unique skill set as a member of this community. And I want to share that with my community. And I think that that would be a useful and enjoyable thing to do. So I spent about five years doing pro bono work as Mia just by myself like Mia the CPA and to clarify, I never did taxes as a CPA. I did bankruptcy restructuring. So but but I still knew a basic amount of information about taxes and other elements of personal finance simply because I had my license and worked on Wall Street for 12 years. So after five years of pro bono work and with no intention of leaving the industry anytime soon, I actually have to fully admit that merely financial was not my idea. So my third co founder who prefers to remain anonymous who is now my chief operating officer. He was one of my closest friends from college. We were in the same professional fraternity together and we started at the same firm. He was I think he was a year ahead of me. So he spent his entire career in finance doing equities portfolio management research, etc. So he actually came to me and proposed this idea that we launch an investment advisory firm for the adult entertainment industry because he felt like it was a relatively unsaturated and underserved market that I specifically was in a unique position to speak to because, as you know, adult entertainers can understandably and for good reason be a little bit insular and not trust outsiders. And with the last five plus years of my pro bono work and having been in the industry for this amount of time, people seem to trust me and I was sort of recognizable and my colleague was like, you know what, we can do a lot of good and also probably make a decent amount of money helping these people. And he also just had this observation. He was like, well, it seems from everything that you’ve seen and observed, your industry basically has the NFL lottery problem, right? Like that you have a lot of people who come into more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives. And I’ve just heard too many unfortunate stories of adult entertainers retiring after having a relatively lucrative career with like $2,000 in their bank account and a couple of Chanel bags. And you see it and that’s not unique to our industry that that’s unique to sports players, entertainers, lottery winners. I was going to say that, yes, like Muhammad Ali went bankrupt, you know. Exactly, yeah. And my co-founder was like, you know, I think we can simultaneously provide a valuable services industry while also making a decent amount of money in an ethical way. So that was the birth of Mia Lee Financial and it was not my idea. I won’t take credit for it. Mia Lee Financial as a concept when we were doing company formation and planning became really real and serious for me when my chief investment officer, Jay Chung joined our team. So Jay was a portfolio manager at Tradewinds, a large hedge fund based in LA. And at Tradewinds, he was one of the key people. So we’ll say less than eight people, right? On the SEC filing give or take. I don’t remember the exact number. Who built Naveen investments as a subsidiary of Tradewind took that public. And then Naveen is now a subsidiary of TIAA crafts, but it was first taken private roughly 15 years ago by Morgan Stanley at evaluation of $5.75 billion. So Jay, as one of the handful of people who were key on that team and in the SEC filings, he retired at that point because he made a pretty penny on that acquisition and no longer had to work. So Jay has been retired and managing his PA. That’s what we call it. That’s how we refer to our personal accounts in the financial industry. So he’s just been trading his PA for the last decade or so. And he and my chief operating officer have a very close business relationship. They’ve worked together at a previous hedge fund. So Jay joined our team. So he came out of retirement to be my chief investment officer. And that was incredibly flattering to us because I was like, wow, this is a nascent company. We are doing something that is kind of a moonshot, right? Like no one has at least successfully done this before. So like we’re taking a moonshot and we’re having someone with like such an impressive resume and credentials and who literally does not need to work anymore ever for the rest of his life or anyone in his family. And this person is coming out of retirement to be the chief investment officer for my company to build the portfolios for our clients. And so that’s when it became really, really real to me. And I was like, I should probably work harder and make it worth this time. Yeah, there you go. That’s not a bad idea. So from your experience, what are some financial issues or challenges besides getting scammed that adult entertainers and businesses commonly face comparing to other industries? So I think this is one that’s applicable to many self-employed people. That’s not necessarily unique to adult entertainers. But when you work at a large corporation, they automatically enroll you in a 401k, right? There’s probably some educational resources potentially around retirement savings. And there’s also this sort of, I don’t want to call it a peer pressure effect, but a like what is everyone else doing a fact, right? So when I started my career in finance, like, first of all, they had a little seminar for us new analysts about retirement savings and all that, right? But beyond that, it was like just commonplace. Everyone around you saving for retirement, everyone around you has a brokerage account, everyone around you is doing these things. So you’re doing these things. And for self-employed people, especially adult entertainers, where we can be a little bit isolated, depending on our circumstances, nobody is doing these things. And you don’t really think about your business sometimes even as a business. So again, this is not even unique to adult entertainers. I would say almost every company that I’ve restructured has probably made some iteration of the same mistake where they have revenue and they think that that is EBITDA or earnings, right? So I see a lot of entrepreneurs, especially people in the adult industry, they’re like, "I made $4,000 today." And I’m like, "You did not earn $4,000 today, right? Like, you brought in $4,000 today, but the amount that you will have after taxes and expenses is absolutely not $4,000." So I think like even getting there is a challenge for a lot of adult entertainers. And then further to that, the idea of saving for the future for retirement, what not, is just a challenging concept for people who do not grow up with financial literacy to grasp. And what I’ve noticed coming from my background in finance is that the majority of people who are wealthy, however you want to define it, are doing well financially, are earning a significant portion of passive income, right? Meaning they have investments that are generating money for them that they are not directly working for. So I contrast that to earned income like camming or selling content where you’re working and you’re receiving payment for your work. So passive income is just such an important part of financial stability and security and retirement and wealth building. And that concept is not one that I think is adequately adopted in this industry. Very true. So mainstream banks often have reservations about the adult industry. I laugh because it just shut us out a lot of the time. How do you help your clients navigate or overcome these barriers? So on the specific issue of debanking, that’s beyond the scope of what my company does because we are an investment management firm. That being said, in order to better understand the challenges that my friends and colleagues face, I have actually gone to banks with some of my friends to either clear-fought alerts, understand why accounts were closed, change banks if their existing bank account was not suiting their needs, etc., etc. So outside of the scope of services that MLF provides, I have personally helped individual sex workers, including myself, prevent debanking. And I can talk in a little bit more detail with some tangible, anonymized examples about that if that would be helpful. Sure. So for myself, coming from my background in finance, I understood Know Your Customer or KYC relatively well, and I understood ML or anti-money laundering compliance terminology and language relatively well. So I had the advantage of that knowledge when I spoke to my relationship manager at my bank when I became a sex worker and I left finance. So it’s kind of like when you call tech support and you are an IT engineer, it’s a much smoother conversation and people tend to get less frustrated with you and you tend to get to the right answer much quicker. So I had that advantage. So when I went to my relationship manager at my bank, I was like, "Hey, I’m leaving finance and becoming an extensive hooker. Do I need to move my business elsewhere?" I was real honest about it. And he was like, "Are you kidding me? You got a seven-figure number of this bank?" "No, I want your business." And I was like, "Cool. So what do I need to do and not do?" And he basically walked me and he was like, "Listen, you can’t have a business account for an illegal business. You can’t support that. That being said, you can have multiple personal accounts if you would like." He told me, "Don’t structure your cash deposits." Meaning structuring is a technical term within bank compliance whereby individuals or entities or companies artificially deposit amounts under $10,000 in order to avoid filing. Avoid filing the form that is necessary for deposits over $10,000. And a lot of sex workers, especially those of us who work in person, have the misconception that if we just deposit like $9,000 every week or month or whatever, that that’s a good thing for us to do. And in reality, you’re putting yourself at risk because banks have these fraud detection, anti-money laundering, compliance algorithms on the back end that are proprietary that are meant to detect activity that’s going to get them into hot water with the regulator. So I don’t know if you were following financial news at this level back then, but I want to say maybe 10 years ago, there was a massive scandal around HSBC because they were basically allowing the Sinaloa cartel and terrorist affiliates of ISIS to move money through their bank. And they got slapped with like a massive fine deferred prosecution agreement. I actually worked on that monitor ship through my consulting firm. So I understand from the bank’s perspective what they need to do to stay compliant because sometimes you’re being discriminated against by a horrific piece of ship banker. Sometimes the bank is just trying to protect themselves and not end up like HSBC. And I think it’s very difficult if you don’t speak bank compliance to understand the difference in what’s going on. So for me personally, I was fortunate enough to be able to navigate that for myself. So I have never had a bank account shut down and my relationship manager knows exactly what I do for a living and has been able to address any compliance requests that came our way. I think I had a friend who is now a client. She had some fraud alerts, I think, or like some kind of like red flag notifications that came through on her Chase account. And she was ignoring them and I was like, "Look, why don’t I just go to the bank with you and tell them that I’m your CPA or that I’m ACPA? And why don’t we just clear this up because I’m pretty sure they want to keep your business because you also have a seven-figure amount in the bank." She’s like, "Oh my God, yeah, let’s do that." And first of all, I’m very honored that someone in like a discriminated against marginalized community, even as my friend, trusted me to help them with something this sensitive. But it was also so helpful for me to see her experience, her anxiety, and sort of like the resolution to it, right? And to see her anxiety disappear when I was able to help her solve the problem and also to teach her how to solve the problem for herself going forward. So honestly, the issue was as simple as she was structuring her deposits, which I honestly told her not to do. And I guess the bank was counting like a Venmo cash deposit and a cash cash deposit within one day as both counting toward that 10,000 limit. So then she was required to file whatever that form is and she didn’t file that form and didn’t respond to requests for information because she was scared. So we went into the bank and basically just cleared that up. And then I also tell a lot of sex workers who work in person, like, look, if you’re not sure about banking discrimination, they’re not legally allowed to discriminate against you with respect to a personal account for having a legal job that happens to just be spicy. What they can do is because you have financial trauma and you don’t trust the financial system, you’re more likely to make a mistake that is non-compliant that will then lead them to shut down your account, right? So what I tell a lot of girls who are escorts or dominatrices, I’m like, look, just tell the bank you’re a stripper. It’s going to have similar cash flows and it’s probably the easiest thing to do. And if you’re really, really worried about it, go get contracted at a club and dance one night a year. Now you’re a stripper. Congratulations. So that’s what I’ve told a lot of my friends who are escorts and dominatrices and actual strippers to do. And then the other piece of advice I give them is I’m like, listen, like discrimination happens to a lot of people. We’re not special in that regard, right? If you are a black owned business in Alabama trying to get a loan, you’re probably not having a great time either. So I tell my friends in my industry, just try to find a banker who is greedier than they are prejudiced because we’re really good at making money and they should want our money. They should. Yes, they absolutely should. It can be intimidating for adult entertainers to seek professional financial advice. So how do you build trust and make your services accessible to our community? So I think I had the benefit of having a presence in my community as an active sex worker that most people coming in from outside with an expertise like mine don’t have. So I had already a pretty significant advantage and I’ve been doing pro bono work in the industry for the last five years. So word has kind of gotten around. So that helped me. And then I additionally started doing a lot of things that the only consultant do, which is sharing more on social media. And I try to make myself available and accessible and public so that people can get to know me and also get to know my company and what we do and what we don’t do. And I am on X live in spaces every Wednesday at 1 p.m. Eastern time and again on Instagram TV live every Wednesday at 2 p.m. And I’m usually discussing some kind of like hot topic in markets and breaking it down to how does this affect you, your money, your cost of living, your day to day life. And those sessions are both interactive in the sense that on X people can ask for the mic and ask me questions. And on Instagram people can write in their comments and I’ll read out the viewer comments and or questions and answer them. Okay, great. Many adult creators have fluctuating incomes. So what simple strategies do you recommend to manage these ups and downs? Sure, that’s a really important question. So I have to give the disclaimer to make my COO happy. Information provided on this broadcast as a public broadcast is not to be considered individual financial advice and merely financial is not soliciting business on this public broadcast. With that being said, to make my lawyers happy, I will now answer your question, which is as a financial advisor in general, I recommend that the first step is knowing what all of your expenses are, business and personal together, right? And what’s fixed and what’s variable, right? So fixed is my rent and variable is the number of condoms I go through. So you need a total number and your business expenses, assuming you are filing your taxes timely, you’re going to get from your last year tax return. So let’s say your total business expenses, I’m just making up a number to make the math easy are $120,000. Then that means that your total business expenses are $10,000 a month on average. It doesn’t mean you’re spending $10,000 every month. It just means that that’s a good guideline to have in order to set your emergency savings. So I would say take your total business and personal expenses and get a total number for that. That’s an annual number, divide it by 12, and you now have a monthly expenditure that is required to maintain your lifestyle and your business. And have three to six months in emergency savings in cash or cash equivalents, meaning either your checking account, a high yield savings, money markets, CDs. Cash equivalents are an investment category that we financial professionals determined to be equivalent to cash because they’re so liquid and so low risk. So you’re not making a lot of money on these if any, but they are liquid and available to you at no loss to pay any unexpected expenses or if you have a slow month. I would also say as my friend and colleague now, Catherine Studley said in a previous one of your episodes, reserve 25 to 30% of your earnings for taxes because you got to pay those. You know, it’s interesting. You mentioned something you said, who gave in as an example condoms, do in-person sex workers, are they able to fill out a tax return and say what they do? Absolutely, I do. My tax return says adult entertainer. Interesting. And you don’t have to be that specific, but you can’t be inaccurate, meaning for a lot of my friends and colleagues, they don’t want to be that specific. I happen to be incredibly public. Like my face is in Yahoo Finance, Business Insider and the New York Post. So like everyone knows I’m a hooker. Like I don’t have a problem with this. Right. And because I’m so public about the financial side of my life, I gave the Washington Post my tax return. I have given Business Insider like bank statements for fact-checking purposes. So I think my 2022 earned income or AGI, it was either $1.2 or $1.4 million, was printed in the Washington Post post fact-checking. So I am that level of public. So I give zero fucks and I have zero vulnerabilities because I pay my taxes. Right. That’s really what they’re interested in. That’s what all the IRS cares about. The IRS wants every drug dealer, hooker and assassin to pay their damn taxes. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. Oh my God. Yes. You’re one of the good guys because you do. How do you encourage your clients to set both short-term and long-term financial goals and why is this critical for success? So that’s a bit of a complicated question. And I think I’ll simplify it by giving a tangible, anonymized example. So you want to set realistic financial goals. Right. So I think of retirement a little bit differently. Maybe that’s a generational thing. So I think like my grandparents generation, you work to factory job and like W2 job and then you got a pension, you save for retirement and then you retired, you stop working and maybe you play some golf. Right. But I think with longer life expectancy is the way trends are going with respect to work and my generation, I think of retirement a little bit differently for myself and on behalf of my clients. So I think of retirement as the amount of money that you have saved that is generating an amount of passive income whereby you no longer have to worry about money and you no longer have to work if you don’t want to. So that’s how I think about retirement. And in finance, we call that fuck you money because it’s the amount of money that you have where you can tell an employer or a client, fuck you. I’m not doing the steal. I’m not taking this job. I’m quitting. Right. So that’s how I think about retirement. So with that context set, I’ll give you a tangible anonymized example of a client of mine who’s an exotic dancer and her goal was to be able to retire and be a stay at home mom. And she wanted to save an amount of money that she could have my company invest for her and generate passive income so that she could do that and live comfortably. So I then turned back to her. I asked her how much money do you think you need on a monthly or annual basis or want in order to be a comfortable stay at home mom. And she said $5,000 a month. Right. So I told her I basically just ran what is called the present value calculation where any reasonable CPA or financial advisor or finance professional should be able to calculate from that goal $5,000 a month how much money you need today making certain assumptions on investment returns. Would generate roughly that amount of income for you pre-tax. So I calculated from her $5,000 a month goal that she would need to have invested because she has client with my company $750,000 give or take in order for us to generate that amount of income for her. And I’m heavily rounding these numbers just for exemplary purposes. So then her next question was, well, how long before I can retire. So then I looked at her earnings. I looked at her work patterns. I looked at her expenses. And I basically told her like, here’s how much you can realistically save without working yourself to death or becoming miserable, etc, etc. And based on that, and including compounding, which I will define in a minute and expected value of investment returns and your risk tolerance. I think you can probably retire in five to seven years. So I think that for a lot of people in our industry with money trauma and all of that, a lot of people are reticent to save for the future for many reasons, including but not limited to, we just feel like we’re running on a treadmill and we don’t have a goal. We don’t know what our number is. We don’t know how much we need to save. And for our clients, we’re able to work with them to help them understand enough about their personal finances and their needs and situation in order to get off the treadmill and have a light at the end of the tunnel and have a goal. And we’ll also sometimes level set with them for clients to be like, hey, listen, if you’re earning $100,000 a year and you want to retire with $5,000 in monthly income, you are not retiring next year. It’s just not happening. In the United States, are you retiring ever? Well, I mean, maybe it depends on what your circumstances are, right? But the thing is, one of the things that I think people who might not be very financially literate, and I’m saying that as an observational fact, not as an insult, would vulnerable to is get rich quick scheme. Bernie Madoff’s and that kind of thing, sure. Well, yeah. So Bernie Madoff is one example, but also just something as simple as mistakes that people make. Talk about some of those mistakes. Sure. So one of the most common ones is investing in things that you don’t fully understand and then subsequently losing money. Crypto is one example or like people will see the news, right? Let’s say so a recent example, Nvidia was down about 17% in one day and that was a huge dip. And a lot of people ask me like, oh, should I buy the dip on Nvidia? And I don’t recommend if you’re asking me that question and you don’t have an answer to that question based on deep financial expertise and market knowledge and etc., etc. Don’t buy individual stocks. There’s so much going on with AI. I sure wouldn’t. But anyway. Well, actually, the reason I say that is a little bit, it’s a little bit more macro. So I don’t buy individual stocks for myself. I have indices because I don’t think that I, despite my expertise in finance and especially because my expertise was in credit specifically, I don’t think that I can outdiligence the teams of quantum computers and PhDs and industry experts at hedge funds and asset managers like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. And in this information age of high frequency trading, once something hits the news and once something makes it through the news to someone who is not a financial expert, it’s already priced in to stock prices. Buy on the rumor. But don’t buy on the rumor because if you are not someone who has like a decade plus experience literally picking stocks for the top Wall Street firms, you’re probably paying the wrong price and you might get lucky or you might lose your shirt. And I tell all of my clients, I’m not going to get you rich quickly. I will get you rich slowly. Yeah. Well, and that’s the right way. Let’s face it. The right way is slow and steady. I think regardless your age, I’m 67. So obviously I’m in a situation where it’s got to be slow, but everything’s slow now. But, you know, I mean, I think that people need to be more patient. Unfortunately, they’re not. Well, I think some of that comes from a lack of knowledge and financial literacy, which of course people like Captain and myself are trying very, very hard to address. I don’t blame people for wanting to get rich quick, right? And I don’t blame people in the age of social media for seeing someone else get rich quick and feeling like they missed out. I understand that, but I don’t think it’s a great financial plan to count on getting lucky. You’re absolutely right. Have you noticed any shifts in the health financial institutions or the public view the adult entertainment industry over the past few years? I have, actually. So I have noticed with the publicity around only fans and the Canadian private equity or venture capital firm that acquired Pornhub and rebranded as Aelo. I think that Main Street Finance is starting to take notice in how profitable this industry is. And while it’s slow, we are starting to get more attention because bankers are greedy other than they are prejudiced. Ain’t that the truth? Yeah, absolutely. Right. So I think that’s very, very slow. I will caveat that because I had a conversation with the individual at this Canadian P or VC fund. I think it’s ethical capital partners, ECP. I had a conversation with one of the executives there at XBiz. Solomon? Yeah, I had a conversation with Solomon. He’s been on our podcast. Oh, amazing. Okay. I got to listen to that episode. Yes. So I had a conversation with Solomon where I asked him, like, what’s the deal with institutional capital coming into this industry? Why isn’t there more of it? Why was your deal the first public one? And why aren’t other VC and PE funds greedier than they are prejudiced or Christian? Right. And he was like, yeah, they just have an ick factor. And you show people the first page of the financials and you show them the balance sheet and the income statement. And financials look amazing because it’s a profitable industry, right? And then they get to the second page of the deck where they see what the business is and they’re like, ooh, I don’t know about that. And look, some of that is not necessarily based on prejudice. Some of that is based on things like our investors would be uncomfortable with this or we would lose business from other clients that are going to be uncomfortable. And that’s totally business legitimate, right? Like, I completely understand that. That being said, I think there’s just so much money to be made servicing this underserved and highly profitable industry that I simply disagree as a financial professional with that perspective. Well, yeah, you can disagree all you want, but you’re not going to get a lot of companies in it right now. I’m starting to see some European firms like family offices and the like get involved. So it’s a good trend when I’ve been to the two TES shows in Europe, I’ve met a couple of groups that are investing in this industry and I’m working with both of them. So it’s good stuff. And I think it’s something that’s going to grow for sure. These two are in the Netherlands. So that’s a good thing. Yeah, that’s actually interesting because Solomon told me the same thing, but he’s seeing family office money start coming in. And yeah, I’m just I’m curious to follow where financial trends go with respect to our industry. I’ll keep you posted. For sure. Yeah, I’ve actually started being solicited for consulting services for businesses that operate in this space. So we actually just sent out our first SOW or center of work to a potential client for that, which my co-founders and I weren’t anticipating this quickly, but I think it just goes to show you the deficit of financial expertise in this industry. Well, there’s some things we can do together for sure. How do you approach educating clients about financial literacy, especially those who might feel overwhelmed or unsure where to start? Absolutely. So that’s actually a really tough one and one that my co-founders and I have spent a lot of time trying to crack. And I don’t know that we’ve done it perfectly. I’ll be completely honest. I get feedback all the time, even from my content consultant, that I sound like a finance person, that I sound like a banker and that sometimes the way I speak is inaccessible to my colleagues. And I am always working on it. That’s where you come from. Hey. Yeah, but I live in both worlds, right? And that’s my value to my co-founders in my company. That’s why I’ve got my name on it is because my job is to break down these complex financial concepts and ideas for people who did not work on Wall Street. That’s the whole point. I also think that if you can’t explain something to a 10-year-old, you don’t really understand it or you have terrible communication skills. Both are bad. So what I do is, first of all, I’ve got a YouTube channel, Money Talks with Mia, and it’s basically a free financial resource. It’s sort of an outline of a personal finance 101 for adult entertainers across the industry. And they’re kind of 10-minute average videos on different topics ranging from how to navigate uneven earnings to navigating financial stigma to one-on-one of investing, like, what is a stock and what is a bond? So that’s one thing I do. I try to make most of my appearances and speaking engagements that are targeted at the community very interactive. So I really encourage people to ask me questions, interrupt me, give me constant feedback on what I’m saying and what’s resonating, what they want to hear about. Very good. So privacy can be a big concern in this industry. How do you help your clients protect their identities while handling financial matters? Sure. So we have it significantly easier than someone like Catherine, the only consultant, because we’re not custodying a ton of PII or personally identifiable information. So like, we don’t have all of their financial records, tax records, all of that. We have a custodian. So my Chief Investment Officer is making the investment portfolios and he is selecting the investments for our clients. However, that has to sit on top of a custodian or brokerage that has the infrastructure in order to house those accounts. So we actually chose a more expensive custodian than another alternative, one of the reasons for that being their built-in data security. And one of the good things about the financial system, especially in the United States with the respective banks and brokerages, is they’re very data security tight. And they invest a ton of money and resources in client data security because they don’t want data breaches that are going to cost them bankrupting amounts of money. So the short answer is we outsource it to someone who does it better and has more money than us. Well, the banks don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. We certainly know that. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, they’re protecting their risk. Exactly. So our goals are aligned in that one regard. There you go. How are mental wellness and financial stress connected and what strategies can adult creators use to ease that stress? Oof. So I’m going to give you a limited answer based on my limited expertise in this arena. And that is to say that I have observed the amount of money, trauma and financial anxiety that my colleagues experience. And of course, through my company and through my financial literacy, I aim to reduce financial anxiety, not add to it. I’m here to help you. I’m not here to judge you. But I can only do that for so many people and I can’t save the world. Bill and Melinda Gates have tried for years. They’re much richer and smarter than me and they still haven’t gotten it down. So I do what I can. And in terms of financial anxiety, I think that everyone’s journey to alleviating it is a little bit different, my own included, because I grew up very poor. And there’s only so much that I can do as a mere financial advisor or even a free resource online to ease people’s money anxieties, right? So I can work with my clients to show them their path to financial independence and empowerment where this is your path and these are your goals toward your retirement number, aka your "fuck you money" number. But I don’t know that once that person gets there, their financial anxiety is going to go away. For me, it took time after I got to that number. I got to my number and it was a pretty delayed reaction before I moved out of a studio apartment with mismatched furniture and started actually spending money to make myself happy. Yeah, it takes a while. It certainly takes a while. And I might add that as far as mental wellness goes, pineapple support is just wonderful. I was just going to say. Yeah. Yeah, on the mental wellness thing, I would defer to the actual experts on that because I’m not a therapist. They’re fabulous and that’s why we support them as a sponsor. Mia, I’d like to thank you for being our guests on Adult Site Broker Talk and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Thank you so much, Bruce. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your time. The pleasure is all mine. My broker tip today is part five of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week, we talked about new ways to monetize your site. Next, eliminate unneeded expenses. Constantly make sure you’re not spending money you don’t need to. Make sure there isn’t duplication in your staffing. From time to time, check services you pay for like hosting and see if there are better and less expensive options. Take it from me. I’ve done this and saved a bunch plus got higher quality hosting in the process. Again, ask us for recommendations. Along with this, make your profit and loss statement show more profit. Increasing sales and reducing expenses obviously does just that. Make sure your P&L statement accurately reflects your company’s actual costs. Not a bunch of personal expenses you put in. This will cost you money when you sell. It may help you with the tax man to put that stuff on your tax return, but it hurts you if you show that stuff on your profit and loss statement when you sell. Remember, every dollar in profit increases the value of your website as much as three to four times. This is why you need a good experience broker to help lead you through the process. We’ve gotten people thousands of dollars more on their sale just by adjusting the P&L statement to reflect actual business expenses as opposed to a bunch of BS. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with performer and director Richard Mann. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. And once again, I’d like to thank my guest Mia Lee of Mia Lee Financial. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. [Music] [Music] [no audio]
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