Noob School - Actively Building Acumen with David Pence

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Today on Noob School, we’re joined by a top tier entrepreneur in David Pence. David takes us on a journey through his diverse career, from the forming and successes of Acumen IT, to some more recent ventures, including some insight on Bitcoin mining, and how the blockchain world actually works. Tune in for a lesson in entrepreneurship, sales, and much more. Check out what the Noob School website has to offer: https://SchoolForNoobs.com I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

New School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. Today I've got my good friend David Pence. David's one of the great entrepreneurs in Greenville with multiple companies. And you'll hear his story, but he pretty much started his first company before he went to college. So I don't think you ever worked for a normal business before, have you? I worked for one company called Tech Resource Group in Raleigh. And they had a satellite office in Greenville.

And I said, I did do that for a few years. Okay. I learned how to be a consultant. I realized, when I started the business in high school and college and a graduated college, I realized you don't know how to be a consultant. Uh-huh. So I actually paused Acumen for a while. And I traveled the country for Tech Resource Group for about three years. So you had one three-year gig with a regular company, but you had this Acumen company from the time you were in high school.

Yep. And you kept it through college, doing technical consulting and programming. That's right. Damn, that's so cool. That's so cool. I recommend everyone do that, right? I mean, if you know, you've always loved this technical world, you know, since you were in high school. You know, why not start then and just, you don't have to wait until you're, you know, 30 years old. Yeah, there's a lot of demand. A lot of demand. Yeah. So, David, are you from Greenville?

I was born in Greenville. My dad worked for Hammocks of Gaffney. So we moved to that side of the upstate. So I ended up going to McCracken and Spartan High. Wow. So, but I'm born in Greenwood Memorial. Okay. Okay. And you started Acumen when you were in high school. Yes. And so proprietor back in the time. How does you come up with the name? Listen, uh, it's a great question. So I watched other businesses and I would watch people open the phone book in the yellow pages. And I was always curious as why there was triple A towing. Yeah. You know, Zed's lawn service and stuff like that. And I'm like, who calls Zed's lawn service?

So because Acumen meant intelligent, you know, the best in the class, whatever, and it started with an A and even a C after that, I was like, if I start a business, I'm going to name it with something that starts with a that means smart people. Nice. So that's what it did. That's a great name. And it's particularly strong because you were probably a ninth grader when you thought of that. It was probably 17 or 18. Jeez, really. And then you went to, you ran that in high school and you went to Clemson, right? Yep, computer engineering at Clemson.

Which is the harder one. I understand there's computer science, computer engineering. Yeah, computer engineering. Engineering degree is pretty rough because the math is strong, very hard. The only degree harder at Clemson than computer engineering, I think, is chemical engineering. It's very hard. So how much would you have to study in that major every week? Yeah, fair amount.

I mean... 10 hours a week? Easily. Jeez. I know that I called home when I was a junior to my parents crying going, what am I doing? This is ridiculous. Because as a junior, you watch your other friends and other degrees,

and they're at Tiger Town, you know. So it's not that I didn't have my fair share of Tiger Town. Well, that's cool. I bet you did. Yeah, well, that gives you a great base to operate in the technical world and the fact that you're also a great entrepreneur and salesperson. You really got the triple whammy, and one of the reasons you have, you know, five different companies is you understand all three pieces to make that happen.

Yeah, I'll tell you something slightly embarrassing when I was a little kid. I was the kid that would go into junior high school or whatever, and I, first of all, I grew up in a family we didn't have much. So if you wanted something, you had to figure it out. And thankfully, that was my life. Because now I have to figure it out, right? But I was the guy that made, like, the cinnamon toothpicks and brought him into school and sold them. I was the guy that went to the medical nurse or whatever, and I'm like, hey, I got a sore throat. What do you think?

She's like, how about a box of lewd and cough drops? and I'd say, how many boxes do you have back there? And she'd say, I have four. I'd be like, I would like them all. And I didn't buy them off because I didn't have a cold. I bought them all because I actually sold them as candy. Nice. I was that kid.

Nice. Kind of crazy. But, you know, the 70s and the 80s were a little different. People now might think that's appalling, but it was very common. Whatever it takes, man, whatever it takes. Isn't that funny? But it is funny. That is funny.

So when you were just starting out, well, actually, you were in high school, tell us about going from doesn't know any much about sales to selling your services as a high schooler. What can you tell us about that? A friend of mine worked at Radio Shack and he got a Novell networking computer certification. And he was my best friend and I was a couple years older. I was so thrilled about what he had accomplished. And he was a high school guy, right? So he was getting paid well with a high school and a certificate.

no college and I was like wow that's interesting and you and he got the certificate in like 90 days not four years of college so when I realized that was a possibility I said how can we do this and so the answer is is that the Radio Shack would have people come in and ask for stuff but they couldn't go out and service them because it was a store so the store gave us all the business and we would go out and help all the people nice yeah that was Was it just with that one radio shack or was it with a whole group of them? Just one radio shack in Spartanburg.

Okay. So you went to your friend, your buddy, and arranged for him to offload service business to you. Yeah, they did everything they could legally do in the store. Yeah. And then somebody said, well, I need you to come out to my doctor's office. And they're like, well, we can't do it, but we know a guy and I would go. Perfect. Perfect.

Well, as salespeople, of course, that's what we love, right? It's we love a hot referral. Leeds, baby. Yeah, a good lead, you know, the Mitch and Murray leads. good leads. Well, that's cool. Collie, you've had it figured out for a long time. Not really. I wish that were true. Okay, so you got out of college with that great degree and you had Acumen, but you decided to go

legit for a couple years and learn kind of how business worked as a consultant. Graduating college and doing Acumen full time for a little bit, I realized how little I knew about being an IT consultant. So this company that I ran to was looking for them. And computer engineering was smoking hot back then. It was like unbelievable. So you could work anywhere you wanted. Yeah.

So TRG Tech Resource Group, I worked for them, and they put me on planes flying around, fixing stuff in New York City and L.A. and everything. And I got to be a consultant for three years. Then I quit and did Acumen. Yeah. Just learning how to fly around the country like that. As a young person. It's super valuable.

Yeah. I remember that I was like 24 years old and I'm flying on a plane and there's some software. There's a faxing software called Siren Software that was developed in California company, but they used Indian programmers as well. And the system was broken with a brokerage firm in New York City. So they sent the 24-year-old from Greenville up there. and they would meet me at the airport with the latest version of the code

and say, go fix it. And so I would go in there and I was realizing back then, this long time ago, fax machines were important. They were charging these guys $5,000 a day for my time. And I was like,

I wasn't getting paid that, but I was like, this has got legs. Yeah. You know, this is for real. Yeah. But I got in there. They had a,

Siren Software had a software program that could handle like 200 fax boards, modem boards. And so that was back in the day when stocks are up or stocks are down, they would fax out 2 million people and say, you might want to buy Microsoft or Apple or whatever it was back then. And the guy in the smoking jacket with cigar would see the printout from the fax machine with the message. It says, we're your broker and we believe that Apple's a good buy right now or whatever.

And that means so when the system went down that I was the technician for, no information to their customer base. They paid $5,000 a day. They would have paid a million dollars a day. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's it, man. It sells people, of course, that's what we're looking for. I'm about to take advantage of people, but we're looking for,

where can we clearly delineate value for a customer in exchange for what they're going to pay us? Right. And I think when we start as salespeople, at least most of us, we're just kind of like, we're just kind of wandering in there trying to get them to buy. You know, we don't really, really understand why they would buy or why they wouldn't buy. It was just like maybe, like, remember the, you're not a good example because you knew what you were doing, but I didn't. Like going into the sales call and you leave and you come back and you're talking to your people and they're like, how was it? Like, we had a really good talk.

I mean, I think we liked each other, you know, and how are we going to help them? Well, I don't know. We didn't get to that, you know. So I think what you're talking about is just. so important for the salespeople is where's the value. Yeah, you've got to have a value plan, value chain. Well, let's talk about Acumen. We've got three businesses to talk about with you, at least.

But Acumen is the first one, and it's a strong company, mostly here in the upstate in Greenville. Right. And you, as I understand it, you're an MSP, so you go, say, we'll take care of all your equipment for, one price a month and we'll just make sure it all works and fix it if it breaks kind of thing yep yep so if they're smaller like 60% of acumen's business is industrial and 40% is professional services so like law firms accounting firms doctors offices so if they're smaller like a law firm or accounting firm and they've got 15 to 60 people in the office you know knocking it out paralegals and stuff they're kind of too small to have their own full-time IT guy so acumen's a great choice

much less expensive than a full-time person and having a total knowledge of, you know, 30 or 40 people instead of one guy, it's better. And we have a software and security stack that we've been assembling for like 25 years that we didn't realize how strong it was, but it's so strong. So if you had a hundred person in law firm, so I'm going to hire a guy. Well, what's that guy bringing? Oh, he's got a degree in computer engineering or something. Great.

But does he have an IT support stack of scripts and things to automatically push and update and secure and test and monitor? No. He's just the guy. Right. So he has to develop all this if he ever does, which most don't force small business. Because he's not going to be given the budget to do this. If you think about it, Acumen may manage, say, 10,000 users.

Okay, well, that little 40-person law firm is never going to have a software support stack like the enterprise version of Accumann. Because, I mean, 10,000 users is enterprise, right? So we had like an enterprise stack that we've built that's made for small business. Yeah. It's really cool. So that 15 to 60 knowledge worker thing is what we call. is perfect. If you grow above that, they'll have a one to five-person IT department.

So as an example, the Greenville-Sparrenberg Airport is one of our customers, and they have a five-person IT department, and they use the Acumen Stacks. We don't support their stuff, like you mentioned. We don't support their end users because they have five guys that do that. We support the five guys. And that's sort of a neat concept. Wait a minute. The IT department needs support. It's kind of like, yeah, they do could use some support. especially when they're using our stack of software and scripts. So they can say, listen, we've got to roll out 100 Lenovo laptops, and we've got to migrate the old data from the new ones.

And we say, well, we've got scripts to do 80% of it. And if you'll tell us what to do, we'll customize the rest of it for you. So it's automated. And they go, done. Yeah, yeah. I suppose that's like if you have an in-house lawyer, that they use other lawyers for special things. Absolutely the same thing.

Cool. So you can take care of it all yourself, or you can supplement. a relatively small team. I drove over here. We are signing a contract today with another pretty decently sized company that has like five IT guys.

Wow. And they want us to supplement just like you're talking about. Good, good. And anything else on Acumen? Any plans for it in the future? You know, it's been around, it'll be 25 years this September 1st.

Wow. And that's the incorporated version, not the little kid version. So 25 years is a professional LLC running. And I don't know. It's a great business. Really, that's probably about it, maybe. Yeah, take care of the customers to keep growing.

Yeah. Happy, customers are happy. It's good. That's good. So that's a strong company that's been around for 25 years. And then you started a couple years ago, I know, because it was kind of big news. The blockchain mining, Bitcoin mining company, Trace blockchain, right? Yeah, right, right.

Tell us about how you started that? How many years ago? So I actually started mining on my own in 2016. I actually got curious because Acumen would have a few customers that say, hey, we got ransomware. And somebody told us we have to send them some sort of thing, something called a Bitcoin. And you've got to figure it out. And so since 2011, we had known about ransom wearing and certain customers. And our advice, by the way, is don't ever pay anybody.

Okay, but the point is, is that all kinds of variations have happened. But we kind of learned about Bitcoin and blockchain and stuff from our IT security side of our acumen business. So I started saying, huh, Microsoft said in an interview and an article that they were going to support the Ethereum framework on Microsoft Azure cloud services. And that gave legitimacy to me. I went, that was in 2016. And I went, what? Microsoft's going to support Ethereum network? Okay, let me look into this. And I realized that you could actually run GPUs and video cards to make a profit.

And so I started doing it in my house. Then I actually owned some real estate and I actually had a tenant, a business tenant move out of like a multiflex building. And instead of re-renting it, I loaded it with motherboards and video cards. I had 80 motherboards with seven video cards each running. And I was the largest Ethereum miner in the United States for like one month. And so you've explained it to me once, but maybe for the group, explain how mining works. Yeah. For those of us who don't have a computer engineering degree.

Yeah. So basically, a couple kind of versions of two things put together is that if you think about like a military, they are, say we have our military in the U.S. right now, and they're at bases, let's say, in the U.S. There's other ones too, but let's talk about the ones in the U.S. And, well, what did they do today? Well, they may have worked out, done some pull-ups, some push-ups. They're reading, they're learning, getting educated to. They're at the shooting range, shooting.

It's like, well, are they fighting anybody that day? No. Well, did they get paid that day? Yes. Why? Because they're preparing and trying to be ready at all times. Bitcoin mining is the same thing. Those things run and they solve ridiculous problems all day long, mathematical problems,

to prove, just like Marines do ridiculous amount of push-ups to prove that they're ready, more than I can do. Brainiac computer servers, they do brainiac push-ups to prove that they're ready in case a Bitcoin transaction comes along that they're going to verify. It takes 30 servers on the Bitcoin network to come up with what's called a consensus. They all raise their hand. They check 30 versions of a database and say, does user A who's sending Bitcoin to user B have enough Bitcoin for this to go through? So let me go look at my version of the Bitcoin network database.

Yes, he does. Then the other 29 around the world that are randomly chosen on the network, they all come back and say, yep, yep, yep, yep. So then if I was sending you 0.1 Bitcoin or something like that, my wallet would be checked 30 times. And then they would come back and say, yep, yeah, yeah, he's good. Then it would go to you. And by the way, when it goes, they also do all the work. Not only do they do the checking, but they change the ledger.

So they're like accountants on steroids for the Bitcoin network. They're doing push-ups like Marines all the time to prove that they're ready. But then when a real transaction comes in, they stand up from doing all the push-ups, and they literally do real work for, you know, a few seconds. And then they go back to push-ups. So your servers, right? Your servers and in your Bitcoin farm, they're working, they're solving problems, getting ready. And then when do they get to mine the Bitcoin?

When do they get one? The bitcoins are mined in two different ways. They get paid for the transaction that they did. Those 30 servers that said, yes, he's good. They get paid. There's a transaction fee. So those 30 servers split that transaction. Okay.

So let's say it's 30 nickels. So nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel. So my machines are in there running getting nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel. They make money that way. The other way they make money is kind of like Bank of America and the Federal Reserve. So the Bitcoin network actually spits 900 bitcoins a day onto the global network. And it's rewarded to all of the servers who can do the most push-ups per capita. So if I'm a server and I'm faster than you're a server, say you're a server and I'm a server.

I'm doing 12 pushups a second and you're doing 10 pushups a second. We will both get some of those 900 bitcoins that are coming out as a reward for being ready. Just like a soldier getting paid, it's like, well, why are we paying soldiers? Why do we pay police officers? Why do we pay firemen to be ready? Why are we paying Bitcoin servers to be ready for transactions? You think about Bank of America, Federal Reserve says, hey, we decided to create another trillion dollars because they just pick a number right in the air and then they say we we decided to

issue another trillion they call their best customers which would be like Bank of america say hey we just found a trillion dollars in the backyard I like a joke about that and uh would you like a hundred billion dollars to lend out to your people that's why when you go look at a checking a savings account and you get paid 0.2% on a savings account even now when the interest rates have gone up you know so high you're like why aren't the banks paying us three or four percent on a savings because they can get money from the Federal Reserve for pennies and the Federal Reserve makes money out of thin air. So Bitcoin makes money out of thin air. They're issuing brand new 900 Bitcoins a day. Well, the Federal Reserve issues like a trillion dollars, you know, every couple

of months or every quarter or every year. It's the same kind of thing. But the Bitcoin is capped though. They're issuing 900 a day, but it'll stop at some point. Yeah, there's a thing called a halving event, like cut in half. And so actually, I think around April 20th this year, we will go from 900 a day, which it is right now, to 450, half. And so that all the servers that I have will get rewarded half of what they got rewarded the day before. We have to live with that. But the sort of good news is for all Bitcoin investors and stuff like that is, what would happen if you had all these Tonka trucks that are digging gold out of the ground? And to make it easy, let's say they dug 1,000 ounces a day all around the world.

Just 1,000. It's way more than that. But let's say it's 1,000. But what if tomorrow all the tonka trucks go out and dig like they normally do? Instead of 1,000 ounces, they only dig 500. How many more days later, what happens to the price of gold in the world if the tonka trucks are only pulling out half the gold out of the ground? Yeah. Exactly.

So people are like, how are you so sure Bitcoin's going to go up? I'm like, well, I've read the code. I've seen the formula. I'm telling you, it's supply and demand. If we go from 900 to 450 to 225, blah, blah, blah, down to four a day, Bitcoin goes up. And it's up now, right? 70 plus thousand.

You think it'll have any more dips? Sure, of course. Like another like it's not going to work kind of thing. Oh, maybe. The U.S. government approved 13 Bitcoin spot ETFs in February, which is monumental. And that means that the wealthy, can finally get into Bitcoin.

The wealthy are people like, you may say, well, what do you mean? Of course, they can buy whatever they want. No, they can't. A lot of the wealthy are inside of maybe like a trust fund. And that trust fund's only allowed to buy certain instruments. They can't just go get a Coinbase account and start buying Bitcoin with grandpa's trust fund money, right?

But when a trust fund can access an ETF is totally different. Yeah. So ETF legitimizes it, right? Yeah, sure. So 13 American, there's dozens of European and Asian. EDFs also. So that did change the world. I think they may reduce the dip sizes to your point. Okay. Well, it's fascinating. I can't believe that you're doing it. It's just, it's crazy. Most people can hardly understand Bitcoin to begin with and you're mining for it and have been for a while.

So that's pretty, that's pretty cool. I guess so when we have limited time, let's just cover one more business. Let's cover team cadre. Yeah. Which I know a little bit about, you told me, but my understanding is you've got a large number of people in Latin America. Yeah. And any other countries? Nope. In Latin America, and they're doing primarily either accounting work or administrative kind of sales you work?

Yeah, they do remote professional services work, basically. So that marketing people, accounting people, IT support, IT developers. sales outside or excuse me inside sales or lead generation yeah and so they're in essentially the same time zone that's why it's Latin America makes it easier and um I suppose depending on the job how well they speak English is really important crucial that's one of our biggest value ads to our customers as we go dig dig dig dig for English I like to say on a scale for 1 to 10 10 being American English that you and I are having right now yeah we like to put people in positions that are like eight and nine's.

Because if they're tens, they're Americans, pretty much, right? So these are not Americans, they're Latin Americans. But if they're an eight or a nine, you can barely tell the difference. And sometimes you can't tell at all. So we really search for the eight and nine's with the right skill set. That's the hard thing. So, again, I think it's a softball question, but same time zone, speak good English, why would I want to use them?

It's a price thing, right? price and availability here in the U.S. They're like 9 to 15 million open positions in the U.S. depending on the quarter and the reporting from the government and everything. And the unemployment rate is so low that there's just certain people that may not, you can get down to a 2% unemployment rate, it's like, okay, we're almost at zero, right?

So the reality is there's nobody to work. There's really nobody to work. And now certain positions, yes, but accounting, I was talking to an accounting 30-year veteran the other day. And she said, she knew all this stuff. Remember, I'm a computer engineer, so she's teaching me. And she says, look, the baby boomers are retiring, and they do accounting, among other things. And they said, the millennials who are now up to 45 years old, and the xenials, like my son 17 is a zennial, that range right there that went through college or going through

college today are only taking accounting at a 67% replacement rate of the boomers who are leaving their positions. So the big four accounting firms, Price Waterhouse, all that, they normally go recruit the seniors in college. Well, now they recruit the seniors and the juniors, and now they recruit the seniors or juniors, and they talk to the sophomores too and say, hey, Price Waterhouse, price waterhouse to, you know, a 19-year-old. So that just shows how desperate they are to try to be like, you should think about Price Waterhouse. I know you got three and a half more years of school or two and a half more years of school. Yeah.

But think about us. And, yeah. So price-wise, are we talking half? Oh, yeah. Costs a big deal, too. So it's kind of funny. Even if they were the same price as Americans in accounting, they'd be hiring people left and right. Right.

Because they just got to have it. Right. But it is also a super benefit of the cost is generally half to a third. Okay. And I would say it's half on the very, very low end. Like if you want a low-in American for customer service, you want a low-end Latin American on customer service, salary benefits, taxes, the whole nine yards, apples to apples.

Oh, by the way, including our fee, we charge nothing up front. All we do is market up a little bit, kind of like somebody's local guys with BMW. And they're saying, well, it's $22 an hour is what I'm going to pay you. And I'm going to charge BMW $25 an hour or something like that, right? Okay, well, we do the same thing. we just do it by the month instead of by the hour. And so even with all my fees, everything, the total loaded price coming from Team Cadre

to the American company is half as expensive as an American equivalent, five years, 10 years experience, whatever. But the more you go up, if you say, well, I want a 15-year veteran accounting person, I want a dot-net developer enterprise architect. Okay, it's going to be a quarter of the price of an equivalent American. Well, the other thing that I've learned, I've limited experience, I've got one great employee who lives in Ecuador, is just desire. Like, they're so thankful.

The work ethic's awesome, number one. Number two, in Ecuador and in most of the countries in Latin America, the standard work week is 48 hours a week, Monday through Saturday, 8 to 5. and they're still kind of old school. A lot of them stuff to drive or take a bus or take a train to a 30-story building and there's a cube farm and they have to go to that. So we're like, well, how about you work out of your house? Like an American, 8 to 5 Monday through Friday, only 40 hours a week, we'll pay you 10 to 30% more.

You get to practice your English and practice your degree or whatever your skill set is. And they're like, okay. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's amazing. So they want to keep these jobs. That's great. Well, it's a great program that you have, and I want to talk a little bit about how, I know you have lots of accounting customers and some marketing customers, but personally, you know, one of the things that I talk to the noobs about is prospecting. And, you know, you and I both know, as salesman at heart, that prospecting is one of the most important things you can do to be effective at selling, and yet most people don't do it because nobody wants to.

to make cold calls, they get too busy or whatever. So I know how busy you must be, but you prospect better than anybody I know, and he does it without lifting a finger. I'm doing it right now. Right, you're doing it right now. He's got two ladies at Team Cadre in Latin America that have his schedule and they have his LinkedIn, and he's told him who he wants to meet with in the upstate, I suppose, and here's the spots he can meet every day and they keep you busy doing at least one or two meetings a day right

yeah right right yeah they can wear me out i've done five or six in one day i've had so much coffee that i'm like this and five or six coffees in a day you know the coffee shop yeah uh yeah so they can wear me out if they want to but i have paired it down to maybe one or two a day yeah but it's just kind of cool that you can get uh cadre services to do this for you you get your assistant to do it or somebody um but to try to fill your schedule every day with at least one new person you're trying to reach to see if there's anything you can do together to make sense for both of you. Like David and I, I mean, we've got multiple things going back and forth.

I'm helping him, he's helping me, and we're doing lots of things together. And I think that's what you look for, is that kind of situation where you can help each other. That is correct. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Team cadre, I love it.

But let me ask you this. Do you follow anyone in specific in sales, like you follow Ziegler or any of those people? I don't follow a sales person per se. I will tell you that one of my favorite sales books of all time is this book called the Ultimate Sales Machine. Okay. I don't know if you read that one or not. I have read it, but a long time ago. But the guy wrote one book, and he actually passed away a few years after that.

But he was a sales trainer, and he would go in to train and there would be like a thousand people at a time. he was pretty successful at that, and he decided to go into writing his own book. And you should read the foreword of that book because there's a lot of famous book writers and sales trainers, like the Zig Ziglar type, kind of known people back in that era, who are in his foreword. And they basically say, in his preface, and they basically say, are you kidding me? This book is incredible. And it's a little more than just sales. It's really got some, like, how to run up.

better business and stuff like that in here too a little bit. But if you think about it from I'm a a salesperson and I'm going to have my own admin assistant one day, I'm going to have my own lead generator one day because those are forced multipliers for me to go quadruple my income. That's how you should be thinking about it. Think that you own a little small, tiny sales business even though you work for somebody full time. That's what I like to tell people. And even, you mean, you might not have to pay for you might be such so good at sales that the person you work for or people you work for say listen man keep it going what else do you need you know think about the star baseball a pitcher they're like get up on the same side of the bed the same way do this they're asking what do you need

you need you know you need some uh liquid you need an iv you know what you're such a good pitcher yeah same thing with great salespeople do you right so the the business owners will be like what do you need and you'd be like wow you know an admin assistant might be nice and maybe a legion or it might be nice. And once you get those, you force multiply yourself. And I would say work towards that. Well, guess what? When you're working towards that, reading this book is incredible. Good. Well, I'll tell you what, I'll read the book and I'll do a review of it. But I have read the books a long time ago. Was the guy's name Chet? Do you remember the author's name? Yeah. Check something? Chet Holmes? Yes, that's it. Good memory. God. He's good. Yeah. He's good.

Let me ask you this. We just did, is that your Your favorite book? Favorite business book? What about favorite, favorite band? I'll tell you one of the business book, too, just for Gilles. For people building that little small business, there's a great book. And if you want to be a salesperson that can relate to business owners, there's a book called Great by Choice. Oh.

Love this book. Same guy that's good to great, same author, but Great by Choice. And it's about smaller businesses or medium-sized businesses. And it's a story. It's fantastic. Favorite band, you know, my wife and I are thrilled with the lead singer changeout of Journey. Have you seen the new guy? I think he's Korean or something. He's a younger kid?

And he comes in and replaces Steve Perry. Yeah. And he sounds just like it. And his vocals are just unbelievable. And they have so many good songs. So we saw them recently. And I'll tell you, Journey is just one of those lifetime bands that's probably one of my favorites. Yeah.

I agree. I love Journey. Favorite word? A lot of things, when I get new hires, my favorite word that I like to teach a new hire is anticipate. I'm like, if you'll anticipate your customers, your prospects, your peers, you'll be shocked. They'll be shocked at how awesome you are. And you'll be shocked at how much you're appreciated. That's a great word.

That's a great word. You want to be ahead of thing. That's wonderful. So is there anything in particular, we've already talked about three of your businesses, anything in particular you want to promote or any way they can get in touch with you if any people want to have this one of these coffee meetings?

Sure. You know, our target market for Team Cadre is, you know, how you go hunting, you talk about sales, and you go hunting and there's like rabbit and deer and maybe elephant hunting or something. We just go after rabbits and deer, right? And so a small business that is less than 10 people that wants to hire one person, that's a rabbit to us. And then bigger businesses that want to hire 10 or 20 or 30, we are really good at going in and putting in the mainline worker.

So if there's an accounting department with 15 people in it, we want to put in, and you're hiring five more, we want to put in those bottom five more because normally the bottom five because the other guys are getting promoted. So all the Americans are getting promoted, great. And we bring in the Latin Americans to do some of the jobs that these guys have graduated out. of right so that's I would say team cadre I would love to have business owners or people who know a business owner or a manager to recommend us because once they get what's going on they love it our customers are like I I can't believe this exists six hundred and sixty million people in Latin America double the population of the United States and I have a lot of business owner friends of

mine and stuff who have 10 20 hundred four hundred and And they're like, I had no idea. And to be honest with you, I had no idea either until I got into this business. Yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah, well, that's good. So I know it, I know you're easy to find on LinkedIn, right? And your people are looking at LinkedIn all the time.

That's a good way to reach you. Sure. And then again, if somebody wants to try cadre, they could literally say, let's try one marketing person or one accounting person. Yeah, 90 day. It's a 90 day, you know, no question asked. No benefits. Just a flat hourly fee. You just pay us. We just invoice you because we have to take care of whatever country they're in.

We have to pay the different currencies and taxes and health care. You just pay an American company. Team Cadre is an American company. I own it. And so we just send you a monthly invoice. You just pay it. That's it. Cool. Well, it's fascinating what you've done so far. And we'd love to have you come back. You know, and you probably have three more companies this time next year. You know what would be really fun next time? Tell me. Let's get together and do one of these on straight up lead generation. Yeah. Because I have learned so much in the last two years on what to do and what not to do. We'll do it. I think it'd be super valuable. We'll do it.

We'll do a lead-gen thing. And maybe I can get some more people and we'll do a panel or something. That would be cool. That'd be great. But thanks for being here. Man, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, appreciate you.

Thank you, sir. All right.