45: Business Trends and Insights for 2021 with Joel Block

We are delighted to be speaking today with Joel Block, a rock star in the worlds of speaking, finance, and real estate! Joel has a background as a venture capitalist, a CPA, and in real estate. He is also an entrepreneur and a board member of the National Speakers Association. 

In this episode, we focus on what will be coming up in 2021. We discuss the changes and trends that Joel foresees and who he thinks will own the assets in the future. 

We hope that you will enjoy this very interesting and thought-provoking conversation and benefit from Joel’s knowledge as much as we did! 

Joel Block’s bio 

Joel Block’s CPA experience started in 1985 at PriceWaterhouse, where he first got exposed to the syndication business as a team member doing tax returns for 500 real estate limited partnership syndications. While he did not love the tax work, he was fascinated by the partnership agreements.

Futurist and money business insider, Joel’s a long-time venture capitalist and hedge fund manager (gobbledygook for a professional investor) who lives in a Shark Tank world like on TV. Since selling his publishing company to a Fortune 500 company, Joel keynotes conferences, sharing Wall Street insights that supercharge stakeholder value with growth strategies and the inside track on ways to accelerate innovation so companies can compete better, faster, and smarter. Joel’s goal is to empower business executives and their teams to “Disrupt Their Competitors’ Future”.

Joel’s background

When Joel started in the CPA business, he was a terrible fit and did not like it at all. The last account he worked on at PriceWaterhouse was a giant company that was raising money from investors, and he decided that he wanted to be a dealmaker, just like them. So he quit the firm and started his own operation.

Venture capital

Joel fell into a venture capital transaction where he and a partner invented the concept of delivering stock quotes to investors by fax. And because he had learned how to raise money from doing real estate deals, he managed to raise ten million dollars to launch his company. He traveled the country selling his stock holds by fax service to the big newspapers. He ended up selling that company to a Fortune 500 company seven years later for a good price. 

Joel Block as a business model expert

Joel Block went through the entrepreneurial cycle, and after that, he started buying and selling other companies. Now, he is considered a business model expert, and he helps other companies to be the best that they can be.

The future

Joel considers himself a futurist. He has developed some great techniques for looking forward in time, and he advises his corporate clients about the future.

Betting on the future 

To incentivize himself when he thinks about future trends, Joel takes money and bets on what he thinks will happen. If he is right, he makes a lot of money.

The trends we should be aware of going into 2021

Joel advises his Mastermind group of hedge fund managers to organize their cash and ready themselves to start buying. Assets are going on sale in 2021 because business and real estate owners won't be able to keep holding on for much longer before they run out of money, so prices are going down. 

Taxes

All the occupancy and payroll taxes from hotels that would normally go to the cities and states are no longer happening. People are also buying much less, so there are a lot fewer sales and gasoline tax happening currently. Some cities are down by seventy or even eighty percent.

A crisis is looming

Joel sees a tremendous crisis on the horizon for municipalities, cities, states, and other governments.

Economic cleansing

Joel sees the crisis as an economic cleansing. He thinks many companies will end up way better off on the other side of all that is happening right now because the whole economic structure is set to change. 

The winners

The winners will not be coincidental. They will be the people who will take specific actions, act smartly, protect themselves, and take necessary risks. They will do that in consultation with advisors and people who have experience and insight and know what they are doing.

The greatest time in American history

Joel thinks that the other side of this pandemic will be the greatest time in American history. Getting there will not be easy, however.

Gaining success in the meetings and events industry

Over the next six months, people in the meetings and events industry should be planning for the last two quarters of the year. 

The future of meetings, according to Joel Block

Hybrid events are here to stay, says Joel Block. They save companies a lot of money. About half of all the people who used to go to conferences don’t need to go to conferences, so future meetings might only need to be half as long as before, with half as many people attending them.

Meetings professionals

Although shorter meetings with fewer people will not affect the meetings professionals, it will affect the hotels. Meetings professionals will need to embrace the hybrid concept and start organizing Zoom meetings in affiliation with digital producers and people who are good at producing events. 

Twenty Trends for 2020

Joel has a group that puts together a research report, and they created a trend report called Twenty Trends for 2020. Even though they could not predict the pandemic, they did very well in predicting the business trends that would affect the world.

An impending social media crisis

In getting ready to revise it for 2021, they have come up with some new trends, and one thing they noticed was that businesses are starting to reject social media. So, there is an impending crisis in the social media world.

A solution

As a solution, they came up with a platform that would allow a company to go directly to the handheld device of everyone important to them, to network and make sales without any friction or social media interference.

Sharing expertise

When it comes to sharing expertise, Joel looks at the bigger picture. He looks at what you know that others need to know, want to know, or could learn from you. 

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