Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - From Blue Collar Hustles to Billion Dollar Businesses: The Journey of David Royce

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

As a kid struggling with ADHD and financial instability, David watched his family nearly lose their home before taking a door-to-door sales job as a broke college student. He was terrible at it at first, but instead of quitting, he became obsessed with learning sales, systems, and business psychology. That mindset helped him build and sell four companies, scale across 5,000 cities in 34 states, and turn one of the world’s most overlooked industries into a $500 million empire. In this episode, David joins Ilana to share the sales lessons, leadership principles, and mindset shifts that helped him build through rejection, near-bankruptcy moments, and why some of the biggest opportunities today are hiding inside “boring” businesses. David Royce is the chairman of AP Environmental, one of North America's largest residential pest control companies. Starting from door-to-door sales as a college student, he built and sold four companies, reaching over 5,000 cities across 34 states and a $500M valuation at exit. In this episode, Ilana and David will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (04:58) The “Problem Kid” Who Built a $500M Business   (13:22) Sales Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs (17:06) Taking the Leap to Build His Own Business (21:17) Surviving the Early Business Chaos (29:02) Biggest Lessons from Tony Hsieh (33:52) How Scaling Exposes Every Weakness (37:45) The Failure That Forced David to Evolve (41:39) How Bankruptcy Changed His Definition of Success (45:34) “Boring” Businesses That Build Real Wealth (54:37) The Power of Risks in Creating Bigger Lives David Royce is a four-time exit founder and chairman of AP Environmental, one of North America's largest residential pest control companies. Starting from door-to-door sales, he built and sold four companies over the course of his career. His third company sold for a reported $135M, and his fourth, AP Environmental, reached a reported $500M valuation at exit, operating in over 5,000 cities across 34 states.  Connect with David: David’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/david-royce-22539425   Aptive Website: aptivepestcontrol.com/   Resources Mentioned: Delivering Happiness - A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh: https://www.amazon.in/dp/145550890X.  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW WAY for professionals to fast-track their careers and leap to bigger opportunities.  Check out our free training today at https://bit.ly/leap--free-training

AI is not clogging a toilet anytime soon. But, you know, it's not going to be climbing on your roof. Certainly not going to be treating termites inside your walls. Please welcome this four-time exit founder, Chairman of Active Environmental, David Royce. He's the man who proved that you don't need a sexy industry to build a $500 million empire. My mom came to me. It's probably not until the eighth grade, but she told me, I think we're going to lose a home next month. And it really freaked me out.

I have this theory. If you can see it, you can be it. I knew it was obviously the way to make the money. I just had to get better at it. If somebody is in corporate, they want to now start maybe their own thing. There's all these changes. They're freaking out.

First of all, what do you tell them? Passion can be very dangerous. What happens when you run out of passion trade? You don't want to do it before. If they are looking for these opportunities, where do they look? 43% of all 0.1 percenters, meaning if you make $2.3 million or more per year,

43% are these boring, blue-collar jobs. There's so much money being made. Welcome to the Leap Academy with Ilana Golan Show. I'm so glad you're here. In the Leap Academy podcast, I get to speak to the biggest leaders of our time about their career, how they got where they are today, the challenges, the failures, and countless lessons. So lean in. This episode is going to be amazing. I'm in a mission to help millions reinvent their career and leap into their full potential, land their dream roles, fast track to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship or build portfolio careers.

This is what we do in our Leap Academy programs for individuals and teams. And with this podcast, we can give this career blueprint for free to tens of millions. So please help my mission by sharing this with every single person you know because this show has the power to change countess of lives. Deal? Okay, so let's dive in. Our next guest, he started as a broke college student, At a snowboard shop, he'll tell you all about it.

He took a door-to-door sales job. He was kind of horrible at it. And it ended up building four of the most successful pest control companies in North America. He's the man who proved that you don't need a sexy industry to build a $500 million empire, 5,000 cities across 34 states. Like, incredible. You just need obsession, endless grit, and a system. So please welcome this four-time exit founder, chairman of active environmental, David Moore.

He's so good to have you. Hey, thanks so much. Appreciate it. It's going to be so fun. And just one more thing for our listeners. Remember, every week we choose a question from the Leap Academy with Ilan-Golan YouTube channel. So if you didn't post your question there, please do. This week we have Jake who asked a great question about how to tell his story better so it resonates.

Ooh, such a good story. So stay tuned to the end of the conversation. So I'll give you my framework. It's going to be super fun for an unstoppable story to land up opportunities. Let's dive in, David. So good. Okay, so you, I'm actually going to take you back in time, if that's okay. And as you grew up, I believe you had ADHD at school.

I did have ADHD, yeah. I didn't know it at the beginning. Yeah, yeah. Well, nobody really knew it at the time. So share a little bit. How was school for you in the beginning? like kind of the younger days. Yeah, you know, and I think in the 80s and 90s, I think there's probably a lot of cases,

you know, that went by where, you know, we're more on the spectrum. I probably have more mild ADHD than others, although my parents used to constantly refer to me as bouncing off walls. So, yes, when I was in school, I remember probably the second grade to third grade. I started not understanding things. I had a hard time focusing. And instead of, you know, saying, hey, I need help. I just kind of like swept under the rug.

I didn't want to seem like I wasn't smart. and over time it progressed, right? Because if you miss certain steps in school, especially math, gets harder and harder to catch up. And it was really catching up to me in about the fifth grade. In the sixth grade, though, I had a teacher named Lynn Luft, who was really instrumental in getting me to believe in myself. She was huge on self-esteem.

And she created an environment where, like, nobody was allowed to say something negative. I never heard the word or the term self-esteem prior to that. but she really helped me to believe in what I was doing. And I started to get A's on different projects. And I just thought, oh, like, is this me or am I the other person? And she just kept telling me, you can do this. So it was nice to have a teacher who really changed my trajectory, especially at a hard time. I was having a hard time with my family.

My dad was traveling a lot. He had left a job. He had been a CEO of a company, Motel 6, actually, if you know what that is. And he started traveling because he was no longer there. and he started trying to take, I think, pieces of equity at different companies. And we struggled for a long time. You know, you start up any business. You're, you know, not typically making as much, especially if you're taking equity in different businesses.

And my mom came to me. It's probably not until the eighth grade, but she told me, I think we're going to lose the home next month. And it really freaked me out. Like, it was weird, you know, I just kind of stay quiet about it. And she was leaning on me because I guess I was kind of the man of the house. My dad was gone five days a week. I was doing all the chores around the house.

Like, she just really needed my help. She was working to, would wake up at five in the morning, you know, make sack lunches for us, go to work, come home, make dinner, you know, do laundry until the evening. We didn't have any housekeepers or anything like that. So just, it was a tough time. But I do think that a lot of what I did, looking back, especially having, you know, talk to therapists about it, it's probably has a lot to do with a 13-year-old boy just not wanting his mom to be scared, to be honest. Oh, that's heartbreaking. But tell me, how did that actually not take your dream away to actually be an entrepreneur? I mean, that sounds like a really scary moment for a kid.

Like, how does that not instill the feeling that I need to always be safe? Well, I think what it does is it instills the desire for control, financial control over your life. So when I was 14, I went to get a job at a pizza parlor. My mom basically lied about my age and helped me to get this job with the guy. And then I got let go from there after about a year and then down on my luck. I go apply at the one place that'll take anybody. I went to McDonald's. And I worked there for a couple of years just on weekends and in the summertime.

But, you know, what's really fascinating about that is McDonald's is a well-oiled machine. Right. It has some of the best systems and practices. There's, you know, rules for everything, checklists. And, you know, the pizza parlor, it was very mom and pop. It was good people, but no systems at all. I probably owe a lot of my career. The amount of times I've said what would McDonald's do, you know, while I was building my business.

And I probably said that like hundreds of times. So I probably owe a lot of my personal wealth to a job. I was actually embarrassed having, you know, while I was a teenager. So you ever know what you're going to learn, right? That's such a good lesson, though. I think for everybody, because we can probably pick a lot of things from every single place. Sometimes it's what not to do and sometimes it's what to do. but I think we can actually learn a lot and we're content in learning phase. It's actually

pretty brilliant. So I love that you did that. I love that you share that. So how did you get into like snowboard and a snowboard shop and then door to door sales? Like take us there a little bit and how did you recuperate from those really hard moments in your in as a kid? Yeah, I worked a lot of random jobs. I got in construction and when I was going to school, I was working part time and I was going to school in Utah at BYU and you know there's a lot of resorts there and I thought okay well how can I get in the resorts for free well I got access to the snowboard shop and then I had access to seven different resorts any time I wanted to go so you know snowboarding four times a week trying to do school and you know tried to work at the same time and it's just it wasn't going great and I had a friend

come to me and say hey I made $25,000 last summer while I was doing this pest control sales job out in northern California do you want to go with me? me this summer. And I didn't know what pest control was. I just said, sure, I'm in. Whatever that is. Because I really wanted to focus on my school. And I was starting to, you know, not snowboard as much. And I really wanted to get more committed and dedicated to it. So I drove out 10 hours out to Sacramento, California. And I was horrible. You can imagine how excited I was. This was like the opportunity to make all this money and maybe not even work during the school year. And five days of zeros, basically just getting, you know, free,

cardio in. And my friends around me were selling. Tell me more. Tell me more. What does it look like? So you literally go around and you like knock on the doors. Yeah. Explain this a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So what you do is you're kind of given like a territory or a neighborhood. And it's like, you get you drive out to an area with someone else just to save on gas money. And they're like, all right, you take this side of the neighborhood. I'll take this side of the neighborhood. And you just knock a bunch of random doors and talk to people that had no idea you were going to show up. And the goal is really to try to close maybe two doors a day, three doors a day. And You'll probably talk to about 150 people, maybe only a third of the people will even answer the door.

So that's kind of like the funnel. You just kind of have to know that that's what the odds are. But I was really bad at it. So that first weekend, you know, my friends were selling probably one to four per day around me. And I'm selling zeros. That weekend I went to a bookstore and bought about a dozen books. I want to take you there for a second because I read that and I felt like that was such an interesting way to cope. because some people at that point will just throw in the towel and we'll say,

screw this, this is not going to be my life, right? And for some reason, you decided to do exactly the opposite and buy a bunch of books to get better. Why did you feel, is it because you saw other people successful and you had that trust in yourself? What was it that drove you to do that? I have this theory. If you can see it, you can be it. And so if somebody else around me, I noticed this when I was snowboarding, if somebody could do, you know, pull off a trick, I could do it too.

Like I would just, if I could see it, for some reason my mind worked that way and say, well, I can go try that too and maybe get to it. So I knew there was obviously a way to make the money. I just had to get better at it. My personality is very that much that way. If you tell me I can't do something, it's like gasoline on a fire. I'm so excited to go, like, prove you wrong, even if I don't really know what I'm doing. I do believe that, you know, talent is directly proportional.

to one's desire. And so if you want it bad enough, you'll just keep practicing. That's what I tell my kids all the time. Oh, so good. This is so good. I literally, I wrote this one because it's such a good. It's so true. And part of why we started Leap Academy, like I wanted people to see what's possible, but it's so good. So, okay, so you realize, and like you suddenly get better. So take me there for a second, and you realize sales is actually a system. And I believe that that made the big difference also in your companies, but take me there for a second. So what gets better? What are some of the biggest thing? If somebody now wants to start a business, what are some of the biggest thing they're like that they have to know about sales? So I committed myself to 90 minutes a day studying. I said,

I'm going to wake up early. I'm going to read and I'm going to practice. I'm going to write out a sales script. I'm going to keep working on it to refine it. And then each day, I'm really going to try to work on two things per day to improve. And once I feel like I've mastered those, I'll move under the next two things. And by the end of that summer, I was the top sales rookie at about 200 people. Oh, my God. But it's funny because because of that first experience, it made me want to work so much harder to actually do better and to study, you know, and learn. I think the key things, if you went back, you said, well, what was wrong? Looking back, it was, I had no idea how to close, number one. It was just, I'd finish kind of the approach. And I'd say, so what do you think?

It's not very inspiring, right? It said, it's like, hey, would you, I'm going to be here tomorrow, you know, three or five p.m. work best for you. You know, where it's an option close, both are helping the customer move forward, you know, in the right direction. But yeah, and then features and benefits, too, you know, a lot of times when people get into sales first, they want to talk about what the features are, but people don't buy features. They buy the benefits, right? Like, they buy why. Like, what is it that thing does? Like, people don't want to know that you're just spraying or on the base of the home or, you know, spot treating in the yard. It's like, what does that actually do or what is it getting rid of? That's

single. Boom, mic drop. This is like the basic of like all sales. This is so good. And I think there's also an element that because you initially weren't good at it and you learned to be good at it, you can also teach teams better how to improve versus somebody that was always good at it. Like I feel like sometimes you don't know what are people missing, right? There's a little bit of that too. Yeah, I felt far more confident to be able to teach others. And then that next summer actually went out as a sales manager and brought friends out. And I'd switch companies. I went to work for another company. The first company was a hundred million dollar company. The second company was a startup. It had just only been in business for a year. And I got there and there was no training manuals at

all. It was like, I'll do. Like, I thought this is going to be better. So I actually asked my boss and said, hey, do you mind if I write a training manual for you? I wanted my friends to do really well. And then we started creating training videos. And he was actually, he was a great guy. Like he was very involved in like helping us to train as well. But it's nice to be able to wake up the morning and read a training manual. It's nice to have a training manual recorded so you can actually listen to it all the way out to the area. And eventually we got to those types of things. But our sales team doubled what his other sales team did at his other second location.

And we did so well that he said, I want you to lead the program. Will you develop the program? And then I'll give you a commission off everybody that works for you. And so I was like my second big opportunity. And I did that for the next couple of years. and I got to a point where I was making $225,000 a summer, leading about 100 salespeople, you know, and we were like the top sales company or top, you know, pest control company that had this sales program out there.

And it was still fairly early on that people had been trying this form of marketing for about 10 years. And a lot of people think it's old school. But, you know, eventually I ended up building a sales force of about 3,000 people, you know, college students out knocking door to door doing this sort of thing. Incredible. Oh, my God. So tell me, what made you then start your own venture? Like, why not just do that all the time? Like, what made you do not say, you know what? I want my own thing then. So I was studying finance and school, and I was planning to go to New York to do investment banking. And I thought, oh, between finance and my sales background, it would be a great way to, you know, demergers and acquisitions. Yeah, and I went to my boss and I said, I need a letter of recommendation from you. And I needed to be really good because I'm not sure how. impressive this pest control thing's going to be, you know, to the investment bankers.

And he just looked at me and he's like, I don't get it. Why on earth would you go like work 100 and, you know, 80, 100 hour weeks or whatever for somebody else? You should really just go do your own company. And he had mentioned the idea before. And I was just like, oh no, like I'm good. Yeah. And the first thing that I come to my mind was, this is embarrassing.

It's just not that impressive, right? like blue car thing like you don't need a college degree to go do this and then he told me he's selling his business for 10 million bucks to terminix and that he was going to take a breather and i thought wait he's only been in business four years and i've been here for three of those years and i know how much you put in wow that's an return and so you know eventually i swallowed my ego and you know chose the opportunity to go do that and actually i got him to invest in the business i'd saved up about 300 grand over the course of four years because i lived very very thrifty just like a college student, but I was packing it away because I wanted to pay for college and then

also maybe have money for a home, money to go to MBA school. And I thought, okay, I can take all this money I've saved, put it into the new business. He was going to double down on what I was going to put in. And I even licensed his name when he sold his business because I didn't have any brand recognition, he got to keep the business name. And I said, hey, do you mind if I just take your company name? And I even had some of the former sales reps that had worked for me to come work in California at my first location just because, I don't know, they just thought, well, it's the same company. Why not? But, you know, there's a lot of risk.

It's starting something out completely new. Yeah, I know. I want to take you there for a second. Was it scary? Were you too young to be scared? Like, where was it meeting you? Yeah, and it's definitely young, right? It's like, you know, mid-20s and you're a business owner.

And it is hard. I found that I had a harder time recruiting older people to work for me. I don't know if it's just, you know, the age difference. And I thought this guy was. crazy. I still remember my first employee he showed up because I was going very, very big. I knew the plan of the program and how to scale because I had worked in it and was so good at it. And I just remember my first employee. He came in. He was eventually our COO. But he came in and we had all these trucks that there was no furniture in the office. But in the back, I had this

big jig storage area and I had, I think 12 or 14 trucks parked back there and he's like, what is this guy doing? Like this doesn't make any sense. Why would you buy these trucks? There's no business here. And I'm like, yeah, we're going to go really big. Just, you know, this is how we do it. I've already done it before. So the experience was really key for me. I knew because of the experience how to do that side. The operations was what scared me because I didn't know that as well. But that's why I wanted to bring my old boss in was to at least be able to call him. He just wanted to be a silent investor. But he's like, yeah, if you have questions, just call me. And so it was a way to leverage or to mitigate the risk, I guess. Yeah. And I think you're basically,

buying a mentor, a really experienced mentor. I mean, there's nothing better that money can buy, I think, if, you know, if they've been there. Like, that's incredible. What a good tip. If you want something, right, like, the key is, like, find somebody already has it and then emulate what they've done. Yeah. Yeah, totally, totally, totally. So take me, and I actually love, you have, I think, a quote that I read somewhere. I hope it's yours, but something like passion won't make you rich, but problems will or something along these lines. I might be, you know, You know, so, like, deciding to go to a boring industry is actually, like, a great thing. So, but take me there for a second because still, you're young and you're trying to build this, like, business, which is not easy.

And I'm sure there's, like, fear and mistakes. And take me to, like, one of those dark moments because everybody has dark moments that were like, oh, my God, I'm going to lose everything. Well, darkest moment was within about four or six months because I almost bankrupt the company. of just not knowing what I didn't know. And I learned that you can be killing it and dying at the same time. So I thought we would maybe put 4,000 to 5,000 new customers on that first year. And we ended up putting on 74, 7,700 accounts. And the problem is you're paying out the commissions to the salespeople prior to the money coming in.

Because you're counting on these customers maybe lasting up to five years, but you're going to pay out more up front in order to make it worth it for the salespeople. sales reps to be there. And so it was, it was really tricky. The good thing was we were so successful. It's like we were, it was a good problem to have. We were very, very successful. All the sales reps had an amazing experience. Almost all of them were coming back the next summer, you know, after they went to college during their, the break. Yeah, it's just, I basically convinced a few of them to say, hey, will you take 10% interest on this money if you hold out for an extra couple months? I'll pay you in a couple months, but I need, I just need some time to make the cash flow

work. And they were totally cool with it, just because I worked in the trenches with them. I trained with them and their sales teams. And I think it's the main thing about being loyal and also being willing to have, you know, hard conversations. Yeah. Oh, my God. I love that. Oh, and then from there, I made sure to watch my finances every week.

I looked at my bank accounts. And I made sure that my bookkeeper is like, hey, you've got to get these to me on time. Never want to be in that position again. I know, but it will happen. Like, I mean, I think in business, like cash is king, especially if it's not like mega venture back. They're not pouring millions at you. to invest in you, I think. Then you were building Altera right when the economy collapsed.

So take me there, and that actually was success. But tell me, take me there for a second to some of these like decisions that you need to be making and some like those fears of money, I think specifically. You know, the first company was a lot like working in a lap, right? Like you're just learning all the basics of what does it like to be a business owner. The nice thing is I had so much time. I didn't have kids. I did get married fairly young.

My wife was going to law school and I was working and we're both doing, you know, 15-hour days, which I actually loved. I thought it was so much fun because actually reduced my stress by working long hours. I didn't have to, I knew most people out there or most, you know, competitors are probably working eight hours a day. And if I was working almost twice as long as them, I could run circles around them. Like there's no way they could catch up to me in the day. And yeah, it was much, very much like working in a lab, learning how operations worked, trying to figure out systems. my boss had given me a list of about 30 things he would improve on the business.

So it was fun. It was like I knew what I needed to work on. I'd also seen how a much larger company had worked. So I knew there were other best practices I could implement. And then I had got basically a PhD out knocking door to door and what customers didn't like about their pest control services. So we started adding in different things and trying different things to see if we could increase customer retention, you know, increased sales. And it really worked out great. So we had a really good model with the first company. And then I ended up, after four years, I ended up selling off just the customer base. So I did what's called an asset deal where you just sell off like the book of business with the corresponding technicians for the

customers. And Terminx, they primarily grow that way, you know, maybe through MNA, about two-thirds, I think of all their growth is through merchants, or a public company that got to hit certain quarterly numbers. And it was an awesome way to get capital. Initially, we, we, had maybe 600 grand to throw on the business, but I sold it for, I'm an NDA, but Forbes said, I sold it for $13 million. So now I've got millions of dollars to be able to grow the next business. And so we immediately went into four states, you know, seeing, okay, will the model hold up if I'm no longer in those locations personally? And we grew that one to about nine states after a few years. We sold that one again to Terminx. Forbes said, Forbes said was for $30 million.

So now I've got tens of millions of dollars to throw into the next business. And that's when we got Intel Terra and that was where we had, we had so much money that we're like, okay, what can we do to differentiate and really be different? I don't want to be a pest control company anymore. It was, it was blue collar. And I'm like, it's fine, but can we make it different in our way, the way that, you know, I would want to, where would I want to work? And so I started studying places like Google and meta and went to the Nike headquarters, went to Zappos, eventually went to Tesla. And I noticed they had all these cool amenities. So I said, all right, well, we can do that too.

So we put in an NCAA basketball court at our headquarters. We got a golf simulator, movie room, ping pong, blues ball, air hockey, all this stuff. And it was really very contemporary. And when people would walk in, they thought it was a tech company. And when they found out it was pest control, it almost like it didn't matter so much. They're like, I just want to be part of this. This is really cool. I can tell that the owner, you know, cares about his people.

And, you know, you guys are doing all these, like, amazing company retreats. You've got, you know, an NBA suite at the local jazz arena. So we just, we had a lot of fun with it. It was key because I wanted to scale really large, and I knew that talent was going to be the toughest thing to be, you know, to be able to recruit to it. And then we already had a great sales program. We already had really great systems in place by that point, by the third company. So we did that and then got to the, the, the third one as well. Forbes said it was for $135 million.

So now we got, you know, $100 million to throw back in the business. So it's just, we kept, you know, doubling down, tripling down, growing the business. And we got to a point where we just didn't need more money. And we said, okay, we're active now. We're going to grow active as large as we can or until I don't want to do it anymore. And the coolest thing I'd say about active where it was different, people always said, well, how was apt to the others? We actually gave a long-term incentive plan away to our employees. And so every executive team member, but also every regional manager, division manager, you know, sales manager, ops manager, everybody had a piece of the

company, 25% of the company was put into this equity pool. And so we aligned everybody's incentives. And, you know, we got up to about 500 million. I felt like we were in 5,000 cities. I thought, you know, if I expand another 1,000 cities, 2,000, 5,000, I'm not going to learn much new at this stage. And we're also getting so big that I was worried that we were going to become too large to be able to sell. We're going to have to go public. And so I decided to sell after 20 years. And it's really cool because, you know, we had hundreds, if not thousands of people, you know, to make six and seven figure digits when we sold. So cool. Yeah, I had a lot of, a lot of people calling me going, hey, I just, you know, paid up my

house or I just bought my parents, a brand new car. You changed my life. It's cool. So it was a thing you get off the phone. You're like, you know what? That was worth it. It's really amazing. That was incredible.

What a journey. What a journey. But take me for a second. So first of all, I know Tony from Zappos made a big impact on you. Can I take you there for a second? And it's interesting how many times his name actually came up in the show. It's actually pretty interesting. He was a very interesting person that impacted a lot more than probably he thought.

But take me there, David. It's funny because he wasn't, it's not like he was just an entrepreneur. He was an entrepreneur of entrepreneurship. Like he came up with so many different ideas to revolutionize business in general, where he started out and, you know, Zappos was just like a shoe company. They're selling online and then it becomes something much bigger. But his focus was he said, look, it's whatever business you're in, you're actually in the customer service. business. It doesn't matter that I'm in shoes or whatever. And he really took care of his people. And he just changed the thinking. We got to the point where so I was in my second company,

Eco First, I felt like things were becoming more corporate, you know, because we had so many systems. We're trying to maintain control as we scaled into all these different states. Yeah, it was actually my brother. He gave you this book. He said, I think you really like this book. It's about this, you know, company in Vegas, and it's kind of quirky and different. And I read it, and I was so fascinated by it. I'm like, this is the answer I've been waiting for. because the thing I was most worried about was, especially starting with just one location, is I didn't want. Maybe tell more for people who don't know this, but like all of it. Yeah, tell more to the audience. So I started with one location. And back then, you know, I knew everybody's names. I knew their kids' names.

I knew, you know, what they really wanted out of the company and what they enjoyed doing. And as we got bigger and bigger, I did it. And I felt like, how can we like have that same family feel? and I actually thought about going back to business school to, you know, do an executive MBA at Wharton. Yeah, and I read this book and I'm like, oh, that just saved me, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars. I don't have to go to school now. I get it. It's all about culture. You know, it's being intentional. It's not, culture's not just like a vibe.

It's like very intentional. You know, it's core values. It's, you know, creating hero stories out of the things that you want to promote and stick in people's mind so that they want to go out and do the same sort of thing, you know, to get recognized. And I ultimately went to Tony's office. You could tour. You might still be able to do it. I'm not sure, but every hour or every couple hours. And by the way, for those who don't know,

I think you're talking about the book Delivering Happiness. That's right. Yeah. Right? A path to profits, passion, purpose. And yeah, and I think in around 2010, Tony, you know, wrote that. So, yeah, that's so cool. Okay, I love that.

Yeah, it was right after he sold to Amazon for a billion plus dollars or whatever. A billion. Yeah. He talks about the story of his previous. company. I think it was called linked exchange. And he had grown. I think he sold it for 250 million, but he was miserable. And he said, the reason I was miserable is we didn't focus on our culture. And then we just started hiring for resumes as opposed to, you know, people. And just with the second one, he said, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something different. And he was so

intentional. Like his hiring process, you can fly into Vegas. And I think, yeah, every couple hours or so, you could tour the facility. Like any random person could come in. And, you know, you're probably be there for maybe 45 minutes and you go from room to room and people are all waving at you saying hi and they went through a lot of the things that you know made them special and unique and just the amenities there were so amazing to see it's like wow this is so different than what most places were like working at back then and then he also created this three-day or a cultural conference that executives could attempt to learn you know how to improve their business and i met tony there and i asked if i If I pulled him aside and I said, hey, I'm really curious, why do you do this?

Like, you were giving away all of your competitive advantages to other people. Like, aren't you worried? Other competitors are going to steal, you know, all this amazing, amazing ideas that make you so great. And he's like, I just think the world would be a better place if everybody operated this way. And I thought, yeah, like, I'm really selfish. I need to be, I need to be better at it. You know, and it made me want to, you know, get more involved with my alma mater and the entrepreneurship program, judge business competitions, you know, work with students and they're in the incubator program in the

summertime. And then now, too, like even with podcasts, it's made me want to go out and just for free, like talk. Yeah, so that's why you're here with us. So cool. Yeah, so cool. Oh, I love this story. It's amazing. So tell me, but when you want to scale a company to, you know, nine figure or whatever, there's going to be, I mean, there's always multiple places or breakpoints, what I call, in a business. And one of them is definitely the beginning. Right? Like there's chaos. I don't know how to sell and all the things. But there's also growth problems, right? When you grow too fast or you grow and break things. So can you take us to something that you learned the hard way? Yeah. So when we were getting really large, so we were getting up in a couple

hundred million dollar range per year, we started to get to, it was a really tough time because I started to notice we just weren't having as many ideas that were new. We're getting bigger. And none of us had ever got to that place yet. And everybody who I had worked with, we all were really gritty. Many of us were just out of college, were very young at the time. Like our bookkeeper became, you know, like our vice president of finance. My first employee had become our COO, you know, worked his way all the way up. But it was hard because a company gets to a certain size and you need a certain level of knowledge and experience to be able to work it. And it was the hardest thing I ever did because I realized like what got me here won't get me to the next level. And

I needed to bring in more experience, a talent. And so we started hiring people in from billion-dollar companies to come in and help level up the business to be even more professional. And we found, it reminds me of Jim Collins' book Good to Gray and talk about like, get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus, or get people in the right seats on the bus. And so we were still able to find for a previous executive team, you know, other places where they could be successful in the company and they were actually all still with

the company, you know, until we sold. And the new team was really, really helpful. But it was really hard. And I'll tell you this, too, the first CFO that we hired, he had an incredible resume. You know, but resumes don't build companies. People do. And he had worked at a billion-tar tech company, a public company. And so we gave him a lot of autonomy at first, thinking, oh, this is going to be amazing. You know, he's going to be even more accurate than, you know, our previous person. And we started to notice that our financials were getting off. after about the first six months to a year or so. And what we realized was that he had really been the face at the other company. At a large company, you have a whole department underneath you. And we were used to being very gritty, you know, and like being involved in everything. You're kind of a jackball trade when you're in an entrepreneurial organization. And so he really didn't have his head around the numbers.

And it really stung. The thing that was the hardest is we just launched a process to sell half of the business. and each month our numbers were getting further and further off from the forecast, and buyers hate that. And we had actually had offers already valuations at a billion to a billion six to have our company purchase for at least half of the equity purchase. And one by one, each one started falling off. You know, first you have your initial offers of intent, and then you're working towards your

LOI with one of those companies. And in between those, they all bailed and said, you know, we want to see what happens over the next year or two just to make sure, you know, you guys have everything out of control. So we like, we lost this amazing valuation and we had to rebuild for the next two and a half years until we sold again. So take me there for a second, David, because I can I can totally see myself not sleeping at night and trying to like toss and turn and how the heck did I make this happen and all. Like, how do you take yourself out of the downhill spiral and into, okay, shake this off. This is what we're going to do and recover. Because I think some of the little.

listeners are right now in their own downhill spiral. How do we recover from those? You know, what's weird, I think the reaction for me, like some people got really nervous and scared or sad. There's a whole host of emotions. And I kind of went numb for some reason. In my mind, it was the best thing that could happen for me personally. Just so I wasn't very emotional, I could try to keep a level head, you know, through the whole process. Okay, okay, well, let's pick things up. Let's figure out where we got to go from here. Let's plan out the strategy over the next, you know, a couple years. These, you know, different firms have wanted, and we'll go from there. So there's three takeaways that took from that. One is trust but verify

when you have somebody new, even if they're executive who's worked for a billion dollar company. Two is never, ever miss your numbers, you know, because the buyers hate it, and it also gives them leverage over you and the deal. And then the third is that only about half the businesses sell when they, you know, go to market, when they run a process. And what you're going to learn, it's not all wasted. You're going to learn what the buyers are looking for and where you need to improve so that you can be ready, you know, on the next round when you go out to market. Right. That's so powerful. So, so, but I'll have to go there for a second because many founders have like one lucky hit and that's already amazing. But four lucky strikes is like like almost

unheard of. So first of all, what do you and again, it's, you know, I can see how you kind of sold to some of the same players and it's like whatever but still like you always kind of knew what to do but also how do you avoid like a trap of becoming really comfortable and just like I don't like how do you do this why for how did it well for me it was it was always about capital you know I learned from that first experience where I said okay I don't ever want to not have enough capital and if we want to expand fast enough we either have to go get investors and then we're going to have to give up a portion of the company, or we can sell, do an asset deal and sell off just the book of business and then keep all the equity, keep all the control, and just keep rocking and rolling and keep

building. And so we're very fortunate. We're able to do that, you know, three times. And on the fourth time, we ended up selling the entire business to a private equity group. I think one of the key things is it's always being entrepreneurial, staying entrepreneurial. You have to keep that same entrepreneurial ethos you had from the early days. I always say that there's three phases in business, there's the startup, there's the scale up, and then there's the screw up. Right? And so when your startup, you're gritty and you're just trying to pull it together, you're trying to create systems and processes. The scale ups, once you have those systems process, you start scaling across the country, you're scaling at a much bigger level.

You know, you're getting hundreds of millions of dollars. And then you're always fighting against the screw up because you don't ever want to get to the point where you say, we're good enough, you know, or we're the biggest, we're the third largest residential pest control company, you know, maybe even in the world, we're good enough. Like, you have to always be looking for the next thing. It's, it's really dangerous. All companies, if you think about the Fortune 500, that list was created back in 1955. And today, there's only 10% of the companies that were on it are still on it today. You know, and sometimes industries die. Sometimes in industry, they get taken over by some young buck that runs in there and says, we're going to disrupt it

and do it a little bit of a different way. And so, yeah, you got to keep on. You got to keep on. You got to keep growing. Got to keep of all of you. You're not growing. I love that because there is no stuck anymore. But tell me, there's always episodes where you lose cash, you don't know how to pay the bills, you don't know how to pay salaries. Was there a moment that you didn't share where you're like, I don't know if I can, I'm going

to survive it. Like, I'm kind of in the screw up maybe. Like, how do I go back? There's two things. one, having gone through, I think that financial trouble when I was a kid, was helpful because it made me safe. It made me very thrifty, and it focused, it helped me focus on saving away for a ready day. So that's why I had so much money to be able to invest in my first company. I just, I like seeing money in a bank account. And when I almost went bankrupt, but the first year,

I went, okay, don't ever want to go through that again. I got really good at paying attention to my financials and watching my bank accounts and making sure I had enough. So that's a one of the reasons why I would sell is because I wanted tons of money in the bank, because I knew if there whatever was a rainy day, one, it gave me growth capital, but two, like, I always had plenty of money in case something ever happened. So we never, we never got into a situation where we didn't, we didn't have enough money to get through it. I always had, you know, tens of millions of dollars, you know, stored away, and I kept them in fixed income. I didn't put them in the stock market. I was like, this is the bank account in case I need it. Looking

back, probably not the best idea. Probably should have diversified in equities. but I just wanted to make sure it was always there in case some sort of a screw up happened so that I'd never have to go through it. But that's how I got through it. Wow. That's amazing. Do you ever go back in time to your kid self or like to your parent? I don't know. Like was it ever a moment where you went back and you're like, how was that? Yeah. I thought a lot about it. I've gone through, you know, therapies I've gotten older and tried to analyze myself. Why did I do what I did? You know, and definitely. You know, and. I think that's one of the key things is it's understanding maybe what made you who you are, but it was really a gift. You know, for a long time, I probably saw it as painful and why did this happen to me? But as I've gotten older, I go, I probably wouldn't have done what I did. If I didn't have that push me to go, I want financial control of my life. I'm going to start studying how to be wealthy.

I'm going to start studying how to build businesses. I'm going to make sure I have, you know, a great stockpile of money aside just in case for a rainy day. And so, yeah, it's really a great thing. The thing I think I've wrestled with now, especially after selling and, like, you know, be able to put a lot of money away and I can just live off investments if I want to now is how do you make peace with something that ultimately helped you do something incredible? Because it's part of me. It wants to just say, you know what? You don't have to be afraid of that anymore. But I think it'll always be there.

I don't know that it'll ever completely go away. I think it's ingrained in my nervous system. But also, do I want to completely let it go? There's probably a sense of peace that I could get from not having that anymore, but it creates a really great drive. And I saw that most entrepreneurs have a chip on their shoulder about something. In fact, I think many of them are, they're working so hard, you know, for whatever reason they're working, like that maybe it's for an individual or, you know, to prove something to somebody else. But oftentimes those people, they're not even watching anymore. They don't even know who you are.

It's like they forgot about you. Maybe something happened in high school, you know, that you weren't the cool kid or whatever it is. You didn't get enough respect from friends, parents, whatever it might be. It's fascinating. Yeah, there's usually a deeper why that drives you and fuels you at a whole different level. And you're right. Like, nobody's watching, but it's still somewhere like a chip there. You're going to need to prove.

So for people who are listening, David, you have so much knowledge. And you shared already so many amazing tips. But if somebody's in corporates, they want to now start maybe their own thing. They see the career ladder. I want to talk a little bit of how you see the future as well. But they see maybe the career ladder is like burning. There's all these changes. They're freaking out.

First of all, what do you tell them? And then let's take them a little bit. Like if somebody actually wants to start a business, how do you get started? So let's do like a little, we have a few minutes. Like let's do like a little packed David brain here. If you're talking about somebody who has maybe is older. is going to maybe make a career change, that's also different. Whereas if it was somebody who was younger, I might tell them, okay, you know, go get experience

in an industry and, you know, actually go work, build a competitive advantage in that industry, kind of like I did, where sales was my initial competitive advantage. And then, you know, save up some money or go get investors and then you go try to build your own company. There's a lot of people out there that go, oh, I just want to jump in because I'm passionate about this, you know, but passion can be very dangerous. what happens when you run out of passion for the industry and you don't want to do it anymore. In a lot of ways, it's kind of like lest in my mind.

You know, in the beginning of a relationship, you know, there's all those chemicals flow and you're super excited about the relationship. But, you know, scientists tell us that after a year or two, you know, those chemicals start to wear off. And then you've got to figure out how do you actually make this work and how do you have, you know, build a family together and based on who you really are. So to me, it's all about obsession. It's saying, I'm obsessed about this, but it's a choice.

I want to be in this. And I want to achieve certain things. It's about setting goals. Passion is, I'm just going to go, I'm going to go try out for the NBA just because I love watching in the NBA. It's like challenging LeBron James to a game of basketball. And you've never even played the NBA before. Like, nobody would do that, especially nobody would bet all their money on that or go tell friends and family, hey, invest in me.

I'm going to play against LeBron. They would call you crazy, right? So for those who are older and that maybe we are thinking about a career change, the best mentors. So back in the day, used to go to college in theory to get knowledge, right? Because there wasn't any internet. And when I went to college, and this really dates me, the internet was, wasn't that great, actually. It was in the early 2000s. It had crashed.

A lot of people were not wanting to run to Silicon Valley anymore. Like, that's why I was thinking finance at the time. And you went to college to go get the knowledge, like the business school knowledge. Or maybe you knew some mentors. some people who had access to it. And today it's a completely different world, right? Like, we can listen to your podcast. We can watch master classes on the internet.

You can get on chat GPT and ask it so many questions. It's the best mentor for anybody. In fact, it's probably even more accurate than many people when they speak. Even if they've been successful in a business, it doesn't make them successful in every business. And I'm amazed at how powerful chat is to be able to ask it questions and what it can spend back. So if you're interested in getting it to a new business, new industry, just ask you, hey, chat, like, what, what are the best blue-collar businesses out there with the highest profit margins where there's still opportunity, you know, to get in

there and do well? What would you advise me to do? And it'll start spending out all kinds of different numbers. And I'll tell you secret. One of the most amazing thing is that, you know, these unsexy industries have sexy margins. Some of them have 20%, 30% margins. And they're essential businesses. They're like recurring revenue models.

They're going to be around. A lot of people are afraid of AI today, right? They talk about, oh, no, it's going to reduce workload. It's going to take away a lot of entry-level jobs. You know, it's even coding now. It's taking jobs away from entry-level programmers. Same thing, reviewing legal docs. And I'm just thinking, you know what, AI is not on clogging a toilet anytime soon.

I felt like you want to do that. But, you know, it's not going to be climbing on your roof. It's not going to certainly not going to be, you know, treating termites inside your walls. And so the hands-on work businesses, even if you don't want to be the hands-on person doing the work, but you want to own a business, there is an amazing opportunity out there. There are so many baby boomers. There are hundreds of thousands of these types of businesses, you know, car washes, home storage, you know, laundromats, all kinds of stuff that people be like, oh, it's not very sexy. But those industries, there's this massive turnover. I think they're calling it the silver

tsunami. But a lot of these boomers, they're ready to sell and get out of it. They're either just going to walk away from their business or oftentimes they'll sell it to you even for on the cheap because. Yeah, just take it away. Yeah, they just don't want to do with it. Or they want their employees who still have, you know, a place to work and that sort of a thing as opposed of just, you know, shutting their doors. Here's one of the craziest things of all. I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal last year. And we are called the Stealthy Wealthy. I didn't know this, but there's a professor out of Princeton that calls us the stealthy wealthy. 43% this article has said 43% of all 0.1% percenters,

meaning if you make $2.3 million or more per year, 43% are these boring blue-collar jobs. So almost half of all the millionaires out there are in jobs that you would just never, ever think of. And it's fascinating. The article, I think it talked about this guy who, for 35 years he'd been making some sort of a machine to rip up carpet. And his niche was schools, different elementary schools. He said, it turns out kids are

really dirty. And the carpet has to be ripped up every single year. And I got kind of into this, like, through another company. And I thought, oh, there's a better way to make this machine and started creating this machine. And he talks about, you know, he goes to the South of France every summer for a month. And he's got multiple homes. And it was so like counterintuitive. There's so much money being made, you know, in different areas that people don't want to talk about at fancy dinner parties. Yeah, but I actually want to go there. Okay, because we have all these people. Yes, you've been in tech, you've been in all these cool companies, but right now, all of these are burning. I mean, there's going to be other jobs, but it's all like, there's going to be like a lot of uncertainty. And you're

right, like a lot of these blue colors, they're not going away anyway. Like, actually, they're the ones that are more stable than probably others. If they are looking for these opportunities, where do they look? Well, when I just get on chat, GPT and start asking you questions, I had someone, else recommend to me too. There's someone to name Cody Sanchez. I don't know if you know who she is, but she has a book that she wrote called Main Street Millionaire. And I just read it. I thought, well, this is really incredible. This is so great. There's like an entry level way to get into it and start thinking about how could I buy a business, you know, with the SBA loan. And then how do I run it efficiently and that sort of a thing? That's what I'd recommend is getting on there on chat GPT and

just starting to ask ask it. And then you could Google it from there. Who else other than Cody Sanchez is out there that's, you know, promoting these sorts of businesses. Oh, I love that. I love that. That's such a good, a good tip. Yeah, this is so valuable, actually, like, from our audience. It's like, so cool. Okay, amazing. So if somebody is interested to find more about you, David, or anything that you do, how did they find you? Yeah, I just go to LinkedIn. I'm on there. I don't have anything that I'm particularly promoting, you know, other than just entrepreneurship. I feel like if I can inspire somebody, just one person off the podcast, then I've done a great job. It's been so much fun. Like chasing the American dream, helping people expand their mind in terms of what's possible. It's hard. I think a lot of people, they just didn't have the mentors growing up or maybe didn't have a relative or somebody that was a business owner. And so they don't know whether it's possible.

And that's the beauty of podcasts. There's so much information out there to learn today. Like you can see. If you're seeing is believing. I know. And again, that's why we do all the programs and we do the podcast and all the things because I want anybody to have access to whatever it is. that they want. But tell me, David, maybe last thing, if you would met, you have met yourself

early on, either as a kid or even later when, you know, you were kind of in a dark moment, what would you wish somebody told you or what would you tell yourself? Because I think sometimes the audience needs to hear it. Persistence is genius in disguise, you know? Just grind it out. Work, work, work. Like, if you want something that bad, be willing to pick up a book or get on Audible. To be fair, I almost listen to all my books on Ottawa. I listened to a couple of months. It's so much so much easier, right? Like you can be driving, you do multiple things at once. I'm doing dishes. I can listen

at a, you know, on an earpod. Totally. But yeah, if you read, you can get the knowledge. I almost think that today, it used to be that you had to know where to get the knowledge, you know, and I think that's why people, they go to school, they're learning, learning, they're trying to cram it all in there. But the reality is it doesn't, that doesn't really matter. What does matter, in my opinion, got to have access to cash to figure that part out. You can go figure if you get in sales, you're going to have cash. I promise. And then

two is how, what is your horsepower? How hard are you willing to work and continue to grinds? And can you do it? I do think for a lot of people, there's a time period between, say, 20 and 35, where you can work crazy hours. If you're older, you got to make sure that you're paying attention to your family and your kids. I know that was really hard for me and not having my dad around for a lot of that period of time. So make sure to find out ways to, you know, if you spend an hour in the morning with your kids or half hour, you know, getting them ready, you know, being there for breakfast with them, if you can come home, you know, be there at maybe 7 o'clock for dinner, you know, get them in bed.

There is time prior. You can wake up early in the morning. That's when I found my best hours to be able to work because I'm not getting bothered by anybody or later at night. Usually my wife wants to spend time with me by that point. But there's ways to find additional hours in the day. Same thing. When you're driving, you can be listening. You can be like learning along the way. So I think Teddy Robbins calls it net time, no extra time. Find ways to make all of your time valuable to

you and productive. So valuable. David, thank you for coming on the show. That was so inspiring. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Whoa, what a conversation. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And oh my God, who would have known that blue color opportunities are right there. There's so much margin. So, much money in there. It's not being disrupted by AI. Amazing. So I hope you got a ton of value. If you did, please share it with friends, colleagues, whoever needs to see it. Because again, why not spread the love? Spread the success. Let's make this world a better place. I love this. And now we're going to talk about the question. So let me look it up for a second this week.

Jake, Jake, thank you, Jake, went to remember in our YouTube channel, it's Sleep Academy. We Ilana Golan. So Jake, you asked a great question about how do you tell a story in a way that actually resonates? And that's such a good question because right now it's very, very hard to rise above the noise. It was always very important to have a concise story, but now it's more important than ever. So first of all, in order to create a great story, you're going to have to remember the three whys. Why you, why this, why now? When you, when you, you articulate your story to the person in front of you. Now, this is going to need to change a little bit based on knowing your audience, right?

Who is in front of you? Is it a panel? Is it one person? Is it a CEO? Is it a hiring manager? Is it a clerk in the supermarket? Is it a peer? Is it an employee?

Like, who is in front of you? What motivates them? What drives them? What frustrates them? What are they thinking about? And with that understanding, now say, why are you the right? Why are you the right person for this opportunity? Why this now is the right thing for you and for this and for the company and for that

opportunity, whether you're trying to be hired, whether you're trying to get a client, why you, why this and why now? And when you articulate these three pieces really, really well and you change it according to your audience, you will become unstoppable. Now on top of this, you always want to continue building your authority, continue building your brand so that you have a lot more opportunities open up, a lot more people have you top of mind. It is hard to rise above the noise right now. So the more people you have out there being your ambassadors to bring those opportunities to you, the better it is. Now remember, the more generalist you are, the more spread thin you are. People will not put you in a bucket. They will not bring opportunities

to you. So go be specific because the specific is what counts right now. Okay, so let's go. Let's get some wins. Why you wait this right now? I'll see. you next week. Remember this episode. It's not just for you and me. You never know whose life you are meant to change by sharing this episode with them. And if you love today's episode, please click the subscribe or download button for the show and give it a five-star review. This really means the world. Join me in helping tens of millions of individuals reinvent their career and leap into their full potential. Look, getting intentional and strategic with your career is now more important than ever. The skills for success have changed.

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