Why Risk Takers Need to be Rewarded
There are guests who come on the podcast with a polished story, and then there are guests who sit down and just open up their whole life to you in real time. My conversation with Danny Klein was the second kind, and I am still thinking about pieces of it days later.
I wanted to share what stayed with me most.
The Month He Made $14
Danny did not start out as the guy everyone in The Elliott Group knows today. He started out selling cars in Northern Virginia, at a dealership he described as anything but fun. He was nineteen, maybe twenty, working for a friend whose dad happened to be the general manager, chasing a fifteen thousand dollar a month dream that felt nowhere close.
His first real commission check was two hundred dollars. After a twelve dollar draw, he told me he walked away that month having made fourteen dollars. Fourteen dollars, the same month Covid hit and the dealership called everyone into a meeting to announce layoffs.
He survived that round by the skin of his teeth, not because he was a veteran and not because he was crushing it, but because the math happened to work out in his favor that day. He knew it too. He told me he had no idea how to close. He just knew how to talk to people.
The Night Everything Changed
What happened next is the part of the story I keep coming back to. That same night, panicked and broke, Danny went to YouTube and searched how to sell cars. Andy Elliot’s videos came up. He watched three of them.
The next day, he sold three cars in a single day, what he called a hat trick, and walked away with a little over two thousand dollars in commission. He texted Andy that night just to say thank you. Andy called him back the next morning, and the two of them talked for 45 minutes. Danny told me it never felt like he was being sold to. It felt like someone actually believed in him.
The next day, driving into work, he had what he called an epiphany. He was already broke and about to get fired anyway, so what was the worst that could happen. He sent a picture of his credit card to Andy and said he was in.
By the end of that same month, before he had even flown out to meet the team in person, he had sold twenty units. The next month he sold 23 cars in 15 days and became the number one salesman across both dealership locations, out of about fifty salespeople. He beat a man who had won the sales board every single month from January through May. Danny’s name went up in June.
Learning What Uncle Sam Was
His first ten-thousand-dollar take-home check came not long after. He told me, half laughing, that this was also the month he learned what taxes actually were. He had made eighteen thousand on paper. Taxes took nearly seven thousand of it. Still, going from selling six cars one month to twenty, then twenty-three the next, felt like a full circle moment for someone who had dropped out of college and spent over a year doing nothing but playing video games and avoiding the question everyone kept asking him about what he was going to do with his life.
By twenty years old, living in his parents' house, he had made his first hundred thousand dollars and saved fifty thousand of it.
The Hardest Day He Ever Showed Up
Then, in January of the following year, Danny’s father passed away. He drowned in a pool, a sudden and devastating accident. His brother showed up at his apartment door at nine at night, and Danny told me he knew what was coming before a single word was said.
The next morning, he went to the gym.
He told me he thought about what Andy Elliot would do, and he made the decision to go work out on what was one of the hardest days of his life, when every part of him wanted to stay sedated and shut down instead. He sent Andy and Sean a picture from the gym with a long message thanking them for the mental strength to make that choice. Andy responded with a ten minute voice note of encouragement.
A few days later, while Danny was cleaning out his father’s apartment, Andy and the team called and asked him to join them in Arizona. Thirty days after that call, the day after his father’s celebration of life, Danny had booked his plane ticket, shipped his cars, broken his lease, and spent ten thousand dollars at twenty one years old to make the move. His sister asked if the company was even going to cover his travel costs. He never asked. He wanted them to know he was putting his own skin in the game.
March 1st, 2021 was his first official day with The Elliott Group. He landed, walked straight into a studio full of cameras and lights, and was put on a Facebook Live within minutes of arriving, before he had even had a real conversation with anyone on the team.
What He Has Learned About Growth
We talked for a while about what it actually means to grow a business once it gets past the mom and pop stage. Danny’s take was direct. If you are a business owner and you stop growing, you are not maintaining anything, you are slowly losing everyone around you. People who have been with you for years want a pathway forward, and if you cannot offer them one, they will eventually leave to go find it somewhere else. He described it as selling someone a dream of opportunity and then quietly failing to deliver on it once the growth stalls.
He told me he thought hard, early on, about what it would actually take for him to say he wanted to be with Andy Elliot for life and have that be true, rather than just something people say. For him, that meant becoming good enough at selling and leading that he could eventually stand as something closer to a business partner, not just an employee with a long tenure.
Rich Mindset Versus Wealthy Mindset
One of my favorites was Danny describing a trip to Miami, standing on a balcony overlooking the harbor, watching yachts pass by every night. One yacht stayed parked in the same spot the entire week. He took a picture of it and used AI to look up everything about it, how many bedrooms, what year, what it cost.
He told me his first instinct was the same one most people have, assuming whoever owns something like that must be incredibly rich. Then he caught himself and realized that instinct itself was a kind of poverty mindset, because it kept the idea of ownership feeling impossible rather than achievable. He started asking a different question instead, one about what someone would actually need to earn, after their house, their car, their business expenses, to be able to afford something like that as essentially the last item on the list.
That shift, he said, is what he means by moving from a rich mindset to a wealthy one.
Relationships That Actually Hold Up
Danny also told me a story from a training he gave for another team, where he bet the room that he could randomly call someone from his contacts and they would pick up. He scrolled, picked a name he had not spoken to in nearly a year, and the person answered immediately with genuine warmth. He has never done business with that person again since. The point, he said, is that real relationships are not about constant contact. They are about being someone people are glad to hear from when you do call.
He told me about a man named Eli, whom he had never met in person, who let him use his camera lens and his boat for an entire week in Miami, simply off the strength of one conversation they had had two years earlier. Danny said he tries to make every interaction, even a short one, impactful enough that someone remembers him fondly years later.
His Advice to Anyone Listening
I asked Danny what advice he would leave with anyone listening to this episode. He told me not to put money on a pedestal. Go try the sales job, go try the business idea, take the leap. He said the conversations that stick with him most are the ones where someone is still sitting on a decision they have been too afraid to make, whether that is starting a job, asking someone out, or taking a real risk.
He told me the regret of never trying will always cost more than any amount of money lost along the way. Failure, in his words, is not failure at all. It is the lesson that actually moves you forward.
A Note on Gratitude
Near the end of our conversation, Danny brought up something his stepdad told him when he was 14, that the past and the future do not exist, that all anyone actually has is right now. It took him years to understand what that meant. He said if you can train yourself to focus only on the present moment, you end up with the best possible future ahead of you, simply because you stopped spending today worrying about yesterday or tomorrow.
That is something I think about a lot as I keep building this series. Every guest is in a different season of their life, and this conversation is a record of exactly where Danny is right now, before the next chapter even begins.
About me:
I am currently a Master Facilitator for The Elliott Group in addition to being on the board of advisors for our Cultural Transformation Department in ELLIOTT ARMY.
With over 14 years of client service experience, I have held substantial leadership roles in the automotive industry. I’m also an accredited coach, a speaker, a triathlon finisher, and a wife. To contact me for engagements, you can reach me at [email protected].
