On a second look, however, it would become obvious that Malascalza’s newfound online fame isn’t the goal itself. It’s a product of careful and deliberate cultivation of relationships and marketing strategies that mix personal branding with accomplishing professional and personal goals.
Anthony Malascalza is not an influencer but an entrepreneur with a robust social following. He’s a person who rubs elbows with celebrities to promote his business but also partners with them for food drives. He’s the new kind of entrepreneur who understands how digital clout, the social capital of today, can be leveraged to achieve goals, and he’s not afraid to do it.
It took a while for Malascalza to learn those lessons, though. His early career choices were anything but focused on clout.
“I didn’t have a strong guidance of what I was going to do,” he recalls. “My father wanted me to take a trade growing up, so I took plumbing as a trade.” Things took a turn for the worse when Malascalza was kicked out of his home at 18, forcing him to focus on finding a source of income just to survive.
At this point, he remembers applying for up to 250 jobs and not getting hired once until a company representative in the energy deregulation space decided to give him a chance. That chance helped him deal with his homelessness issue. It got him a job as a recruiter and the ability to earn more as a salesperson.
More importantly, Malascalza needed to learn to go into business for himself. After seeing how good he was at building a business for someone else, he decided to make one for himself and his partner. A year later, the partnership ended, and he went into business for himself.
“I went in. I supported everything myself. I purchased my own office space. I was probably working more hours than ever,” Malascalza recalls. “So I started from nothing, and five years later, I’ve built a large brand.”
With a full-time staff of up to fifteen people and another hundred working with the company as contractors, Malascalza’s LCM Inc. has become a prominent outreach company in the energy deregulation space. The company uses the door-to-door techniques that Malascalza used back when making door-to-door sales to supplement his income. Those experiences proved invaluable to him now that he’s in the boardroom, even though his view from the top makes him see things differently.
“Over the past year or two, I’ve taken a lot of my money from the sales side, and I’ve been investing it back into the brand when it came to either building or scaling,” Malascalza explains. “I want to have a lot of cash flow income without having to work every day and be able to do seminars for individuals who come from adversity and want to go the entrepreneurial route. I want to keep changing not only the customers’ mindset but also those of the individuals who work for me.”
A part of his grand scheme was setting up a real estate company, LCM Real Estate Ventures. The company opened a venue for Malascalza to invest his money, earn additional income, and satisfy his curiosity and need to diversify his business activities.
The same entrepreneurial spirit got him to collaborate with music artists. Malascalza spent the last couple of months of 2023 intensively collaborating with celebrities to promote his giveaways, which ranged from vehicles to one-on-one business training sessions.
He went as far as to travel to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and organize a food drive that saw them reach hundreds, if not a thousand, families who needed their help. Equally at home in the boardroom and on the red carpet, Malascalza is using the following steps of his entrepreneurial journey to further his business and personal goals when he started LCM Inc.
“Every year, we do a seminar, and a couple of years back, we had an 18-year-old kid who worked for me. It was his first year. He broke $350,000 his first year,” he recalls. “Stories like that remind me of where I came from and what I did. And I want to keep going.”