Dove and Dragon Radio with host M.L.Ruscsak and guest Rocky Singh Kandola

M.L.Ruscsak:

Welcome to Devin dragon radio. I'm your host M.L.Ruscsak. I'm here today with Rocky, the CEO, founder of Hair made in India. Welcome.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Thank you so much for having me today.

M.L.Ruscsak:

Now we do a lot of authors, but this is really cool. Switch it up a little bit because you're an entrepreneur, but in about hair extensions that obviously you don't need.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

I have actually had head surgery myself.

M.L.Ruscsak:

So, oh, okay. You're a little bit too young to be doing that, but it's okay. I get it

Rocky Singh Kandola:

I just thought it was a bald spot on top of my head and I'm six-two, so no one else can see it, but you know that one of those things where you can see it and you're like, no, no, I need to fix a lot of things. I went ahead and had it done in India.

M.L.Ruscsak:

I get it 100%. But you have all these products, but what led you to get into this?

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Definitely. So I'm the story behind here, but India is quite a journey. One that I was almost ashamed to admit to in the past for fear of my parents as well, you know clients and then possibly losing clients because they, they, they knew about my past. Here, my India is a business plan was actually created. I had a journey and a phase in my life when I was in a lot of struggle with drugs and violence, with all kinds of parties, women, et cetera. And I was actually in Alabama state penitentiary on a snuck in Beltone, laying on the ground under a bunk bed, hiding from the crushing officers and calling my bunkmates sister and her friends asking about hair extensions and the industry and the pricing and et cetera. It's one of the number of business plans I've created while I was in prison and sitting there. And about three years later after I was out I found myself in India looking to change my life and looking to do something different than I have done for the past 20 years. And just a one-page business plan, photo cost. My last from there I started researching and I made one Facebook post and all my friends from high school said, oh gosh, right here. Like you, we'd love to work with you. And that was it. I hadn't looked back, slowed down or stopped since then. And that was about seven or eight years ago now.

M.L.Ruscsak:

That is his journey, but you know what? I love the entrepreneurs that go, they hit a brick wall. They have nowhere to go, but up and they create something spectacular like this definitely. I mean, that's what being an entrepreneur is. It's hitting rock bottom, creating the business plan and take off.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Definitely, definitely. I think a lot of people think that you know, entrepreneurship is something that either you're born with automatically or something, you just kind of press a button. It's not something that you can't develop if you don't already have it within you. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs I've met have always had some sense of like entrepreneurship or quote-unquote, like hustler mentality since, you know, childhood age. I was that kid that was, you know, selling lemonade, trading baseball cards and cutting grass, you know, as young as I could and always looking for the next way to kind of improve the financial retail holdings.

M.L.Ruscsak:

Exactly, it's all about the next job for us. It's not just doing one or two things. It's all about creating something more. We're always doing it is can be doing the baseball cards. It could be playing video games online to get money. It could be creating a 300-page business plan for the sheriff to act on board. So this is, this is what entrepreneurs do every day. We get up from 7:00 AM, 5:00 AM, whatever it is, and we figure out how to make a product work for us.

New Speaker:

Definitely, definitely.

New Speaker:

Now with Hair Made in India, what other products are you adding to hair extensions?

Rocky Singh Kandola:

So Hair Made In India started, you know, just not my first thing when I kind of went from the old lion illicit world, you know, wanting to do something legitimate and proper, that secure feature for me and my one day family from there, because she has expanded and grown tremendously just to speak on the company itself. You know, we actually went from not sure about reselling a wholesale to kind of really sit in this mode of being the company that the hair extensions helps other businesses grow and flourish and develop their own companies, everything from, you know, there's at-home stylists. So, you know, a full-blown salon in Beverly Hills, they do a hundred pounds a day. From there we'll add a different positive in the company. Bob also branched out now quite a bit myself. In the beginning, I started another company called monology when we infused CBD into teabags I haven't put as much energy behind it. However, the brand is out there, it's recognized we have a beautiful product. The issue editor, there was a lot of advertising and media advertising is still kind of talking through that word. Things are running properly in order to, you know, kind of advertise on Google ad words and Facebook and things like that. I've also started a vacation rental company. I bought my first condo in Florida. And now I'm renting that out on the love doing it. And I'm just talking to the clients because that was my childhood favourite area. So when guests come there and are excited to come, I know what restaurant to send them to where the nightlife is with the museums, all with beautiful, hidden beaches are, I love kind directing them where to go and showing them how to have a good time down there. And then the works were, I've been doing a lot of my little time, you know, free time getting there lately is getting more and more into investments such as you know, what's copied as cryptocurrency as well as some stocks as well, nothing like day trading, more kind of like medium to long-term holdings. And then the cryptocurrency. So there's a couple of things I'm working on and talk, my podcast is kind of leading into my next thing, which is I am currently writing two books, one about my story and one with a compilation of all my journals from childhood boot camps in schools and prisons. And I'm releasing those hopefully shortly. And I kind of want that transition to the field of being able to travel and speak to children, adults in schools, in prisons and rehab centres all across the country and especially across the world. That's something that really speaks directly to my heart and my passion. You know, even with the air company and everything I do, I feel like I feel a sense of stillness when I'm able to help someone put a smile on their face. And when I have that one random message at eight o'clock in the morning and says, Hey, Rocky, I've been following a long time. You're like a mentor to me. I appreciate you. Please keep calling. So finally going from like a straight partnership, looking for turnover, turnover, there's something that is actually going to be aligned with my heart as well. That I can really feel that give back a hundred per cent you doing on the side. Well, I haven't done as much as I want to, but it is hard to have my house and what's known as the revolving coach. So when everything has someone missing, they can kind of call me throughout the weekend tennis and my favourite game since childhood. So I'm going to try and do it all. I have no job.

M.L.Ruscsak:

I mean, I thought I did a lot. Okay. Between running the radio show, running the podcast, running a book publishing company. So yeah, I'm a publisher doing acting. I thought I was doing a lot, but you're killing it.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Yeah. I can imagine how tough it is to run like a podcast just by itself. And then especially the book publishing on top of that and everything else. That must be a handful as well.

M.L.Ruscsak:

It is, and then being an author on top of that. So it's yeah, I get the whole entrepreneurship. I get the whole being an author. I get everything you're doing because entrepreneurship and authorship go hand in hand. If you're an author, you can be an entrepreneur because if you're an author, you're doing everything an entrepreneur does. But for a book, if you think about it, it's your resonance, your book is your business. And I just put out a tree and press magazine for authors and entrepreneurs that bridges this gap. But yeah, if you're an entrepreneur, you can be an author. Now you're an author. You can be an entrepreneur. It just goes hand in hand. So I get the mentality. I will ask you what your five-year plan looks like because you're all over the place, but it's, I mean, you're killing it. I mean, I see your social media. It's wonderful. So with getting into being an author, if you go to authors in the classroom, that'll give you, all the classrooms after COVID gets back to normalized, being able to give your story to children around the world. Well, groups, prisons, it gives you everything. So you just put out an advertisement, Hey, and I'm an author. I talk about this. This is what my book's about and the teachers or whoever's ever doing the program will contract you. And it's perfectly free for them, perfectly free for you. And it's great getting your story out.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

I just thought I want to do that's when it kind of just spread that message to as many people as I can then hopefully inspire, motivate them, especially people that are kind of having struggles and are stuck and in tough times. And you know, as we know right now, much, much of the world is facing a lot of hardship, a lot of tough times and not knowing where to go. And hopefully, my story can inspire them or a swamp of life in their mind to make them do something else. They want to do it.

M.L.Ruscsak:

Well, you know, the pinnacle of, Hey, I was in prison and I was able to create this business while searching for myself. You've done it. If you can do it, we can teach people how to do it. Being poor, being in the mindset of, I can't do anything is going to keep you in the mindset of, I can't do anything. When you change your mindset to, I can do something, I want to do something. Then you figure out how to do it.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Exactly. That's so powerful. If it's really all about your mindset. I mean, I remember 10 years ago, I used to have this mindset of like I'm against authority and everyone's out to get me all the time. And I would always have that app. And I was learning to please, somebody gets pulled over and we argument, I will be walking down the street and you bump into somebody. The argument, you know, even when I started my business, the very beginning, it is Morgan as the client. And I like learned to change my mindset over time, by really tuning into the positive people on, on use. It really likes Tony Robbins, Ralph smarter, Robin Sharma Joe Dispenza, all these different guys out there putting amazing positive, free content out there on, especially Dr Wayne Dyer who talks a lot about, you know, mindset shifts. And slowly over time after listening to amputation, tailoring my life from listening to just music and watching TV to kind of putting this information in my news, 24 7, and almost it started to totally affect the change that I didn't even realize at first. And now I'm can become aware of it. I realized how much of it, literally how much I create around me, whether it's good or bad based on the way I'm thinking inside my brain. And now that it's a conscious thing. I realized, however, things are showing up in my life. Whether it's something I want or don't want to, the way I was thinking about it, the way I was perceiving them in constant thoughts, I'll tell them myself, how does big part in a big role to play in an issue, not the entire one.

M.L.Ruscsak:

Exactly. And it's all about the mindset, a great coach to listen to. That gives a lot of free advice on social media on YouTube is Antonio T Smith. He's been there. He's been broke, the poor living in a trashcan, and he's now a multimillionaire. He does all these things to get you up from ground zero up here. I mean, I wouldn't be here on camera if it wasn't for him.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Beautiful. I love that. I love that I, that can have the same impact one day, because then you've got like, literally you're talking about like Antonio. Like I feel like without even knowing them there, there are my teachers on that floors. And it has an essence saved my life in many ways. Literally

M.L.Ruscsak:

They have and there's so many of us out there that we don't contact the motivational speaker and say, thank you for teaching me. What's more, we take all this information and regrow and then we have an epiphany and then we get here.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Yeah. I've I'm one of those like I've emailed like Ralph Martin and a couple of guys on Instagram and email directly, but they get probably hundreds of thousands of messages a day. So as long as I can just kind of say like on Trent Shelton videos and live videos and a couple more like a couple of days ago, I'll decide brother, thank you for doing everything you're doing. I hope to learn, see you one day and then make some magic happen together. So even if they didn't see it, her hair, you know, like I, I'm one of those, like I have to kind of express a feeling that my gratitude out there.

M.L.Ruscsak:

The same thing. I'll go to bread blazer. I'll go to the shark, the shark Daymond John. I'll go to Antonio. Antonio is a close friend of mine now. So I mean, I'll go to them and say, thank you. You teach me so much. And I was just on the cover while it's coming out, actually in may for M O B magazine and a couple of other mentors. Thank you. And I had to send them the cover and I haven't even released this on social media yet. So you actually, the first one, not in my inner circle to know this, but I had to send them the cover of the magazine because it's, it wasn't real until I sent it to my mentors. Beautiful. We have to say, thank you to those who help raise us up, regardless if it's just, Hey, I'm stalking you on Instagram or stalking you on YouTube or whatever because you're teaching me and you don't even know me. We have to say, thank you.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Definitely, definitely.

M.L.Ruscsak:

So I mean, I don't know if anyone at home sees of Vogue shirt today, I'm sporting less because I'll be in an article for one of their magazines as well. But that's beside the point.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

I noticed them be getting all that. Okay. I'll figure it out here a little bit further down. And I think I saw some posts or something about fashion week or something like that. I think I saw one.

M.L.Ruscsak:

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm doing a lot of things, but I wouldn't be here without the motivation and the mindset is everything. If you don't have the mindset to grow, you won't grow. If you're stuck in the mindset of negativity, you're going to attract negativity to everything you do.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Exactly. And it's not even just about like, speaking of that, I see a lot of people, especially on social media, kind of speaking these things up, it's really like once you really know in your heart and you can feel it in their heart, that's the word you say? And the actions you take and waiting on a daily basis reflects that automatically. I know for me, like there's, a lot of times I had to like kind of start saying it out loud and to listen to it in layers over and over again until I got down in my heart and sunk in. And even to this day, like, like being, like they say journey, healing, isn't a linear journey. It's up and down and there's peaks and valleys and spirals and curves. So you're not, I'm trying to be general myself on that. But like I said before, now that I have the awareness and I know all this information it's up to me to constantly, you know, mama self when I do start getting a little negative, it's like, Hey, Rob you know, this, you know, you can shift your mindset to shift your perception. You can see us differently. There's another way to look at it. Any kind of quote, unquote curse you may have in my life, I've seen come to be a blessing. Even the lowest points in my life when I was, you know, couldn't have potential Bootcamp where I was sitting on. My dad said, you know, on Centennial in medicine for a year or I was in prison all of that came together now where I am today, present-day, sitting here. And as part of my story and my journey and something I'm able to share with people and helping them as well. And the lessons I learned during all that on top of this are just almost accident.

M.L.Ruscsak:

See, that's exactly what it is. It doesn't matter if you're negative, whatever is a health thing. It doesn't matter if it's a financial thing. It doesn't matter if it's a self-made thing that, you know, whatever choice we make, we can rise above it. We have the mentality, we are human beings. We can grow. We do this every day. It just, you have to change the mindset. You cannot sit at home on your couch, eating popcorn or potato chips or whatever, and say, I hate my life and not do anything to change it. You have to get up and change something.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

I agree. I understand that was kind of like the second step for me after, after getting it in my mind and believing that there's something more out there, I kind of took a week of faith and left the country and left everybody. I knew the odds for a good seven, eight months. And that was kind of my, for me, that wasn't getting off the couch, you know, getting out of my comfort zone, getting away from what I knew and what I had created my identity. And just shifting that totally. And taking that leap of faith and going off more importantly.

M.L.Ruscsak:

It is sometimes it's getting away from your family, getting away from all your childhood friends, getting away from everyone that pulls you down because what happens, you're a crab bucket. You're going to do whatever the people around you are wanting you to do. You could try to climb out and they're going to pull you down. Why? Because they don't have the same mindset.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Exactly, exactly. And a lot of times, even from our family, you know, people, people that love us and want us to keep us, you know, safe whether it's a good intention or not, that kind of safety net sometimes you'll end up strangling us. I know for my, my parents in this business in particular, they were in the beginning very against it, like rough, you know, go back to school, wanting to be a doctor or, you know, do something else, do something. And this nurse, and, you know, there comes a point where you're like, you know what? Like I have to see I'm going to fail. And if I do fail and learn shifts from it, I think as we're talking about entrepreneurs, that's one of the keys is, you know, we have to be flexible. We have to be adaptable. And we have to take chances, you know, at certain times and see what works and people think of it as a failure, as a negative thing. But I think Michael Jordan said it best. He said, I've taken X amount of shots, I have missed X amount of shots. And after all that he succeeded because he learned from every one of those mistakes, every one of those miss shots, every one of those, you know, missed rebounds, and then take that learning material inside of there changed and shifted into something beautiful and better.

M.L.Ruscsak:

Exactly. A failure is only a failure. You look at it like that. If you look at it as a learning experience, you never have a failure. Benjamin Franklin who invented the light bulb or supposedly, because I wasn't around that many years ago, you know, said best I didn't fail. And Megan light bulb 99 times, I learned how to not do it 99 times. I only had to get it right once. Well, that's what an entrepreneur does every day. We don't look at our failure today. As a failure, I have had a couple of business fail. Won't why, because I needed to learn more to run the business. It happens. Every entrepreneur does this. I've had a great mentor that I worked with when I was 20 years ago that had a business close and then open a very successful restaurant later on. He needs to learn from the clients. He needed to learn how to be a restaurant treater. It wasn't just, I'm going to open a business. As we all think it is, you have to learn things and it takes time. It's not going to happen overnight. Your business is not going to run into a million-dollar business overnight. It takes years, it takes growth. It takes a lot of mindsets to tell yourself, this is not failing. This is me learning.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

I agree. A hundred per cent. I think I have these days, like looking at social media, I'm going to be on TV. A lot of people like are starting to read and go here. Then, you know, these things do kind of have an overnight quick. And what I love to see, like when I have doctors out there that kind of gave you the transparent step-by-step story. Like, Hey, you know, 10 years ago I was homeless and sitting here and I started to take your XYZ and stuff. And you know, I've met one person who decided to start a podcast for them, restart this now with them. And then kind of slowly kicking that. I think that that kind of information is so valuable, especially the generations, you know, before younger than us right now. They, they need to kind of see that, you know, in their interface and say, well, okay, what I can do this a hundred per cent for sure. There might be a long journey attached to it. It might not take me as fast as I want, but the most, the best part for me is all the fun, all the magic, all the beauty in that journey, all the learning and everything is all right there, but like the end outcome, like doesn't, it shouldn't matter as much. I don't see a failure at all. It is a beautiful product and the people that do buy it, absolutely love it. That's how you look at it.

M.L.Ruscsak:

I mean, you're opening new businesses, you have a team and we're going to get all these links in the comments section. As soon as you know, for all her viewers, you can find it in the YouTube comments section and for our listeners on all the radio outlets. Also in the comments section, if you go on the digital, so you can find all of this, but tea is a different thing you CBD will. We just started seeing an explosion of CBD here within the last two years. So you're before the curve if you did four years ago,

Rocky Singh Kandola:

It was about you. It's crazy. It was five years ago and we went on the advisors getting to LA and I didn't, so there's the licensing and everything for CBD at that time was so low. It was like, I think, I think I should get what I wanted to get going when it was down like around $40,000 which I didn't even have $4,000 at that point. I reached out to everybody, my family I'm like, God, please, I'm telling you, CBD is going to be huge. I'm in California, I'm in the grassroots area I'm seeing is starting. I know what's going to happen, you know, kind of back me up. But they had just seen me come from that lifestyle, you know, marijuana and drugs and this Nash they're like, no, no, no, don't do it. Don't do it. Three years later, I'm getting messages from people like, Hey, so about the CBD thing. And I was like, ah, that's traded left already. You know, the licensing, the law now for some of that stuff that I want to do close to a million dollars. So, you know, and I'm happy that we have to establish a foothold in the industry. And we did like tea festivals. You know, I went to a lot of them, the high end, like conscious dispensary on the west side year, you know, specialized in CBD. One or two of them actually held my phone up for a while. So I was really happy to be out there. So I have a, you know, a beautiful product, you know, available on the website as well. I don't really do like I said, many sales at all on it. But the people that do like it, they love it. That's totally, and a hundred per cent behind it.

M.L.Ruscsak:

Well, one is marketing, which is hard. Let's say, keep anything, you market that is hard, especially when it's something new. And then you have all the regulations with CBD itself. So it's hard to get into marketing with that. So getting people to know about it, it's just like pulling teeth because it's all word of mouth. Then you go into, okay, you have the word of mouth, but each person only knows X amount of people that's full to try it because there's this stigma of, you know, all the negative. Well, we're trying to work past the negative to get to the positive with the mindset for the CBD it's happening because I have a grandmother that uses CBD oil or author writers. So it is happening with the older generation that they're seeing the positive.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

It is. It definitely is. I see a transition more and more. And you know, like we, I recognize this in the very beginning of us starting it. I recognize the bad cause directly to my family, the stigma around it. So that's the reason we created a product with tea. And because you know, people, especially older people, they don't want to smoke anything or take my pills. They don't want to give jumper kids some kind of high sugary gummy, or a session kind of smoking or will know though. But tea is kind of like a widely accepted, you know natural herbal type of medicine. We use natural herbs from India directly. So it's kind of like the idea of hand, but I don't know what let's be. The people that allow people to transition from whatever kind of, you know, Western medication or using it to something more realistic and natural bobbing. Let's give them a nice way to do it. That involves a nice cup of tea. And that was kind of the way I think our, our motto for monopoly feed is that we wish to way to change the way the world deals with and one cup of tea. And you know,

M.L.Ruscsak:

It is a great model. So it is wonderful. And I thank you so much for being on the show today, but before I let you go, where can our listeners or viewers find you?

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Definitely. So as we've been talking to I'm all over the place, I like to say I'm one of the easiest men to fight in the world, Google, Rocky Singh Kandola and you will find all kinds of stuff on me. But beyond that, I've created my own website, which is RockyKandola.com from there, you get links to my feed companies, my hair company, to the vacation rental company, off to the acting stuff I've done in the past and the book, as well as the things about doing the future on RockyKandola.com

M.L.Ruscsak:

So yeah, we've either have that website and you on the webcam and you see this on YouTube. If you look above our heads, you will get that website for Rocky. Yeah. I know. We want to look up, right. But that's the one site that gives you all the information where to find him how the good neck, because we entrepreneurs love connecting with people, but in serial entrepreneurs, like having one website that directs us to everything. Exactly. Exactly. Again, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Rocky Singh Kandola:

Thank you so much for having it in a very much enjoyed it. You

M.L.Ruscsak:

Involved of course, in all of our viewers and our listeners, happy reading.