Growth Doesn’t Create Problems... It Reveals Them!

We talk with Damiano Raveenthiran  about why entrepreneurs accidentally build founder dependent jobs and how to redesign an agency into a real asset. We get specific about delegation, positioning, accountability, hard lessons from fraud, and how AI is reshaping what clients should pay for. 

• Bootstrapping an agency from scratch and scaling fast
• Spotting founder dependence and the hidden cost of burnout
• Delegating with the 70% rule and tightening the playbook with systems
• Shifting from selling services to selling outcomes and strategy
• Building trust and referrals through real client follow through
• Thinking like an architect using OKRs and proactive planning
• Using a sports team model with KPIs, reviews, and performance standards
• Recognizing when the business cannot run without you
• Learning “trust but verify” after a costly embezzlement story
• Using AI to automate repetitive tasks and move up the value chain 

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Welcome to The Brad Weisman Show, where we dive into the world of real people, real life, and everything in between with your host, Brad Weisman! 🎙️ Join us for candid conversations, laughter, and a fresh take on the real world. Get ready to explore the ups and downs of life with a side of humor. From property to personality, we've got it all covered. Tune in, laugh along, and let's get real! 🏡🌟 #TheBradWeismanShow #RealPeopleRealLife 

Credits - The music for my podcast was written and performed by Jeff Miller. 

Transcript

Cold Open And Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:30

If somebody comes to you and their company sucked, okay, or their services suck, I don't care how many Google ads and Facebook ads you create, it's still gonna suck. This is gonna be a good one, Hugo. The Brad Wiseman Show. Real people, real life, and everything in between. So, what do your kids think of this?

SPEAKER_03 0:51

Oh yeah, still in the character.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

I'm not here for the money, but I'll still take it off the boat.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Unfiltered conversations with the people shaping our world. Because you're judging yourself by your attentions, they're judging you by your actors.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

You know, my wife said to me, You go to work and you give everyone the Mitchell buffet. You come home and you give me the sprouts. And now your host, Brad Wiseman. All right. We're back. It's another Thursday. Another Thursday in paradise.

SPEAKER_03 1:19

Yeah, that's right. Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

This is paradise right down here in the basement where nobody knows we actually hang out. It's unbelievable. It is funny. Everybody, you know it's funny a lot of times. People ask me, where do you do the podcast? And like, they're like, is it in your is it in your house? Is it in your house? Like, no, it's not in my house. It's in it's in the basement of our office. It's where people put us. But uh, so how are you doing? You doing right? Good, good, good, good, good, awesome. We got a great guest here today, like we normally do. He's coming from Canada. We have a lot of Canadians coming into the the studio here or joining us streaming. And uh it's kind of cool. It just shows you that they got a lot going on up there. They got a lot going on up there. So his name is Damiano, and I'm gonna see if I got this right, is Raven Theron, I think is how you say it. He caught my eye because he actually builds up agencies, they call them, you know, makes them profitable, gets them running without him, and then sells them as an asset. And actually, the quote or the the thing that I wrote on the top of his uh where his name is is why most entrepreneurs build themselves a job instead of an asset. So I think we get caught in that trap a lot as entrepreneurs. So let's talk about that. All right. All right, Damiano, how you doing, man? I'm good, Brad. Thank you so much for having me. Did I brutalize your last name? Was it close? No, you got it. It was close. I think it was close enough. I got to see you. That last name made me really nervous. Really nervous. That a lot. It's all good. Yeah, it was good, it's a good one. It's a good one. So yeah, so welcome to the show. I love it. The fact that we're we're talking to another Canadian. I mean, we're getting a lot of Canadians on the show, which is awesome. I mean, it's not like you're far away. We all I've I've gone fishing in Canada many times. Love it up there. It's a beautiful country, and and it's not hard to get it's not hard to get back and forth either. It's pretty simple. You just wave your passport and you're in, you're out. It's good. So it's always a good time. But yeah, the thing that caught my eye was the why most entrepreneurs build themselves a job instead of an asset. That was one of the things that stuck out to me. And and maybe you can kind of right off the bat talk about that. And it seems like you are very into coaching entrepreneurs or or or showing entrepreneurs uh how to build businesses or build agencies or build anything into an asset instead of just being a job. So why why don't you dig into that?

SPEAKER_02 3:23

Yeah, a hundred percent. I'd be happy to. Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, my background is very much in building agencies. You know, I'm 36 now. I started when I was 24 about 12 years ago. 12 years ago, I I was living in Montreal. I moved to Toronto for yeah, I was like a big, bigger city, bigger opportunities. There's probably gonna be a better job there for me. I moved, and after I paid my first month rent, I had $400 left in my pocket and I freaked out. And so I literally walked into a bunch of stores. I had been learning to build websites by watching YouTube videos, and

Bootstrapping Then Getting Founder Dependent

SPEAKER_02 3:54

I just started started asking random stores if they needed a website built and closed my first couple of clients that way. Over a period of seven years, that little effort on that day turned into an $8.4 million company with 75 employees and three offices. Wow, whoa, seriously, in in seven years? Yeah, yeah, seven years. And it did pretty well, but you know, halfway through that company, one of the things that I realized is that I I don't have a background in in I don't have an MBA, I don't have a background in business. This was like just me getting started, figuring it out as I went totally bootstrapped, and I had just had jobs until then. And so I had built the business to be very founder dependent. Everything was going through me, every decision was going through me, every escalation was going through me, everything was basically like if I stepped away, the whole thing would would fall apart. Yeah, um, even though we had 75 employees, and even though like everything, everyone was doing what they were supposed to do, I still kept my cars close to my chest as much as I could, and I wanted as much control as I could through that. Well, that's burnout. Did you burn out? I did burn out several times, yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Yeah, I mean you'll you'll stress out to the point where you you you you'll it's not good, you'll need like meditation and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

Yeah, I had a lot more hair back then. I could I could tell you that. Uh but but yeah, like I I burned out and I burned out several times, and and you know, at a certain point I was like, okay, well, burnout is mental. And so I started working on my mentality, working with a few coaches, like making sure that burnout was as far away as possible, and then my body started giving out, right? You get sick because you're putting too much stress on yourself, right? And so I kind of realized at a certain point, and then the breaking point was really when my son was born, because my son was born with a very rare genetic disease, and so for the first three months of his life, he was in the hospital, and so I couldn't focus on the business at that point. I had to be at the hospital, I have to be there, and that's what really opened my eyes where I was like, if I can't walk away from this, and this thing can't keep going without me, this is not a business, this is a job. Yeah, and um I was already like you know five years into it at that point um of building myself into a job. And so the following two years after that really became about me taking a step back and being able to delegate correctly. I worked with Dan Martel. Dan Martel was one of my mentors, and he wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time, and then I learned a lot from him about that specifically, about buying back your time. And over a period of two years, we scaled the business in a way that, like, hey, it didn't require me anymore. I was able to take vacations, I was able to go see clients wherever I wanted. I didn't have to spend all of my entire days on the phone as well, which was kind of nice. I had an executive team that was taking care of all of that, and the the departments were became pretty self-sufficient.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Now, do you do you think that that the entrepreneurs suffer from control freak? Yeah, I mean, I I think that that that to me, and I mean, this being in leadership position in a company we have here, an ownership position, I think a lot of times it's very hard to leverage or to let go because you I think also the ego in us thinks that nobody can do it better or do it the same.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Yeah, yeah. And uh and I hear that every day, right? I I coach agency owners and and entrepreneurs these days, and so I'm in these conversations a lot. The reality is if you just come, if you just figure out like

Delegation Systems And The 70% Rule

SPEAKER_02 7:14

what needs to happen, they don't need to do it as well as you do. They need to do it like 70% as well as you do. And the the other 30%, that's on your processes. And if your processes are set up in the right way, you'll be able to take that person that's 70% as good as you, and that person will be able to give you the right outcomes. You know, like one of the analogies that I usually give my clients is, you know, we'll we've all been to high school, right? I'm sure you guys all had people in high school where you're like, man, this person's a total idiot. Like, what are they gonna do it like later on in their lives? Yes. And you look at them now, 30 years later, and they are, you know, underwriters at insurance companies. You know, they're literally in charge of deciding whether people get their insurance claims or not. And you're like, how did this person who wasn't the brightest light on the Christmas tree get a job that complex? Yeah, and the reality is that insurance company built their processes so well that they can take any idiot and put them into that into that position. And as long as they're following the playbook, the outcome's always gonna be the same.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

That's incredible. Yeah, it's a that's a really good, that's a really good way of explaining it. I've never heard it explained that way. And the the only thing I'm afraid of, I wonder if I was the idiot that was and now they're all going, look at this guy, he's running a real estate company. How in the world did that guy get to that point? I'm just really worried I'm the idiot. That's the only thing. But no, but that's a that's a great way of looking at it. That really, really explains things. And it shows you, so like you said, so the insurance company or the company that that person's, let's just say Mr. I for idiot, wherever they're working, has developed a process and systems that that person can take care of their job.

SPEAKER_02 9:11

Yeah, and like in some of these companies, they spent millions of dollars doing that, right? Like banks and insurance companies and all these like super large companies, they don't want to rely on the talent of their staff to get a specific outcome.

SPEAKER_03 9:22

Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

So it is all into their systems, and and that's what oftentimes as solopreneurs, like we lose track of that. Like there are certain skills that you have to learn on this self-development challenge called entrepreneurship, and that is one of the skills. It's it's no longer being a freelancer, it's building systems, building systems that are going to get people that are decently good as long as they have two arms and two legs, and sometimes that's even debatable. Yeah, they should be able to do the job, you know?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

It's interesting. And also, you know, my thing, you said you didn't go to college, is that right? I dropped out. Okay, well, I didn't even go at all. So, but do you think that somebody could that an MBA would have taught you what you learned during that six or five to seven year period when you realized, oh my gosh, this thing won't run without me, or I'm or I'm not I'm not leveraging enough. Do you think you could have learned that in school?

SPEAKER_02 10:13

No, I don't. And not only that, but I have a funny story. You know, when I was in school, especially in college, like I was C or D student. Like I was really not good. I started cheating at a certain point. I started hiring people from Harvard because I was like, hey, these guys are also broke, so I might as well just like full-time, take some of my paycheck, hire them to write my papers. And I passed a bunch of my courses doing that, but couldn't do it until the end. And and you know, like after my first agency sold, I got a bunch of press from that. And people from another university here in Montreal reached out to me and they were like, hey, we would love for you to give a class in our MBA program. Wow. So for like a year I did that. I was teaching an entrepreneurship class, and here I am. Like, I really wasn't good even good enough to go into an MBA program. And now I'm like teaching them how to do it. And I I could tell that they asked me because it's super hard for people in those kinds of programs to get this like real life experience.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

I agree a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

Yeah, and that's why my clients come to me to learn this kind of stuff because it's there's nothing like experience. There's there's not nothing on MBA program will be able to teach you about what happens if a client is really pissed off and is about to pull out of a 15k month retainer and tackle your revenue.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Yep, that that that makes you grow up real quick. You grow up real quick, and it builds, I always say builds a lot. I always say this in real estate. 2008 for the real estate industry for me, build a lot of culture, a lot of culture and character. I got a lot of character from that, man. You learn real quick what you can do and what you can't do when you have a market crash in 2008. But you know, but it's the same kind of thing. You've learned so much in those five to seven years. And now what did you so now you take it on? One of the other things I loved here, one of the quotes that you that you had in here was when a client doesn't understand your value, they start questioning it. Like, like let's let's go into that a little bit about about your you know clients. You said, you know, you lose a client for that's producing 15,000 or 50,000 a month, you know, you notice that when it's gone. And and obviously you got really good at building the value of your brands that you had in order to sell those brands when the time came. So how did you how did you get yourself to get make sure your clients understood your value?

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Yeah, I mean, in my space, in the digital marketing space, there's a lot of people that are selling services, right? A lot of people will be like, we'll go to a brand and they'll be like, hey, we'll sell you Facebook ads or Google ads or SEO. The reality is when you sell a service, you are playing, you're playing a game that's uh the it's it's a race to the bottom, right? That like if you're selling Facebook ads, the guy next to me is gonna sell it for cheaper than you, and I'm just gonna go there and get the same result. And so a lot of getting the clients to see the value was around changing the positioning of the company, where instead of selling the service, we started selling the outcome of like, we are not gonna sell you Facebook ads or Google ads as a service, like we're gonna sell you more business because that's

Selling Outcomes And Keeping Clients

SPEAKER_02 12:59

what you want, right? And so a lot of our positioning and the way we started pitching ourselves and the way that we built our services actually became that. And then very quickly, I realized that like, hey, it's actually changing how we deliver things as well. Like, where I was offering Facebook ads, but the outcome was this guy, this guy just want more business. And sometimes the solution is not Facebook ads, you know, there's other ways to get them more business, right? And so it got us to become a lot more strategic. And from that strategic standpoint and moving up the value chain, that's where the the value for the clients really came, and that's why our clients stayed with us for a really, really long time.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Yeah, because if you think about it, if if if if somebody comes to you and their company sucks, okay, or their services suck, I don't care how many Google ads and Facebook ads you create, it's still gonna suck. So if there's a whole, there's a whole there's a whole world there. It it you're not just you can't just use Facebook ads to make you money. So that's it's spot on. You you sold the results, not the the ads. Or what what were they gonna get from what you were serving them? And and it's funny because like you said, otherwise it's a race to the bottom because every somebody's always gonna undercut you. Always. I say that about car sales and about home sales. We all sell the same things. It's a matter of the experience you have before it, during it, and after it. That's really what matters because we can all sell a car, we can all sell a house, but it's it's the the experience and what you what you do for your client that makes them go, oh my gosh, Brad's were the best, you know. Yeah, that that's that's what makes a difference.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

And building the relationships, right? Like you guys know this absolutely in the real estate space, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Like it's all about relationships.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Yeah, I mean, in my space, there's a lot of there's a lot of agencies that will close a client, they're their best friends during the sales process, but as soon as they pay, they'll never talk to that client again.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

How many times do I talk about that, Hugo? Yeah, I talk about that all the time in real estate. I say this to my to our agents here. When you win, when you win the sale, that's the beginning. Exactly. The the the process to the end of to the end of when the sale is over, that's where you gain referrals. You don't gain referrals by getting the sale, you gain referrals by what you did from the time you got to the sale to the time the sale was over, and then what you did after the sale. That's what matters. That's where you get referrals from, and that's where you get people coming back to you over and over again. Because, like you said, it's the same in your business. Obviously, if you just go, you get paid and you say bye-bye, they're like, okay, they were in it for the money, they didn't really care about me. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

I mean, like, I I get hit up by real estate agents all the time, but there was this one real estate agent here in Montreal when I was like looking for a house. She, I I had spoken to her maybe once at a networking event. She sent me a birthday cake on my birthday. That's that's amazing. Well, like that's I and I ended up working with her. That's amazing because like the hundreds of other real estate agents that reached out to me, none of them had that attention to detail. And I was like, Wow, this is amazing. I'm like, I will work with you too.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Isn't that funny? And look, and look who's talking about it. And you're talking about it on a podcast. Yeah, isn't that amazing? That's that to me is right there. It's it's you know, that's incredible. But I'm not gonna be sending you a cake for your birthday, just so you know. I just want to get that out here, right away. I don't you think I'm because if I asked you if you like chocolate or vanilla, then it gets really complicated. You know, it's just right, right, right.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

You have allergies, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But no, that's cool. So, you know, knowing the understanding your value is is very good. And this goes right, and this is another quote. A lot of the stuff I just jotted down. You're no longer the operator, you're the architect. What does that mean? I mean, obviously that has a lot to do with making it building themselves a job instead of an asset. I would say that the operator is not the one that's gonna be able to sell. The architect is the one that's sitting there kind of just looking over everything.

SPEAKER_02 16:48

Exactly. Yeah, and and what I what I usually tell my clients is like, you know, imagine you need to build a house, you have a piece of land, you want to build a house on it, you're not gonna go see a contractor and be like, here, here's two million dollars, build me a house. Right. You're gonna go see an architect first because you're gonna need the guy to really think about the strategy and think about like make the blueprint. And then

Be The Architect Use OKRs

SPEAKER_02 17:06

once you're happy with the blueprint and everything makes sense, then the architect will give that to the contractor, which will go and build it, right? Yeah, in business, it's the same exact thing. If you're doing all the work yourself, you're the contractor without a blueprint that's trying to figure out how to build the best house. Um, and that's just not the right way to go. You should work on the blueprint. We work with this management consulting framework called Objective Cure Results or OKRs, and it's all about like setting up really good goals, being accountable to those goals, setting up goals in terms of the systems that we need to build for us to achieve the outcomes that we want, and then just giving it to the team and letting the team implement it. They are the contractors, they're they're they are the roofers and the foundation people and the and the and the flooring and and all of that, right? So that's where you want to get to as a business owner. So you have to trust your team.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

You have to trust your team because you think about when you hire a it's a good analogy, when you hire a builder, you're not micromanaging the flooring people and the cabinet people and the countertop people. You go to the contractor, you trust one person, which is the contractor, and then that person is the person you that you trust to make sure that all your dreams and wishes go correctly along the way. Because there's like I used to be in new construction, there's 300,000 components that go into a home on the average, 300 this and 300,000 different components. That's a lot to manage, and so you you can't micromanage that, it just doesn't work. You have to trust each contractor that knows along the way what they're doing. So that makes a lot of sense. I it totally because otherwise, if you would hire the flooring person and hire the countertoppers, that would be crazy.

SPEAKER_02 18:36

Yeah, 100%. And especially without a plan, right? Without a blueprint. Yeah, without a blueprint.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

So so that's the thing. Like for us, like in in in our companies, you know, at the beginning of the year, we lock ourselves in an office for like five days just to make our plans for the year and to really know what we're gonna be setting up and who we need to hire when and where do we need to be at the end of Q2, right? So that's that's a fundamental piece that a lot of people just really don't think about when they run their businesses. It's like, are you running a reactive business or a proactive business? Because if you're running a proactive business, you know exactly what needs to happen every week.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah, that's such a good that's a great lesson for anybody, for myself, for our company, anything is to really make sure each year you're not just you're not just doing the same thing every year. You're not running the same business every year. You have to have some kind of a goal or something that's gonna put you as that's gonna set you apart from everybody else in the next year. So it's that's good good stuff there. The other thing that I thought was interesting too is growth doesn't create problems, it reveals them. Boy, do we know that in our business makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'm sure you see that a lot. What I guess you coach on that, you you you try to get people to understand that or get them to realize that hey, when you grow, you know, that doesn't cause the problem, it just reveals the ones you already have.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

Yeah, 100%. I mean, what I the way that I that I pitch myself when I when I talk about what I do on the coaching side is you know, business is a never-ending exercise in problem solving, right? Just because you solve one problem doesn't mean you're not gonna have any. Like it's gonna keep going. And even multi-billion dollar businesses have problems that they have to solve every day. You know, you're never gonna be in a point in your business where there is no problem, it would defeat the purpose of the exercise. And so, you know, I'm really the person where that is there with business owners, specifically agency owners, in helping them with that process. They have problems, and I've solved them before, so I tell them how to solve it. And the reality is that just because you have a system that is shit doesn't mean that you do it won't scale. It's just that when it will scale, you'll just have more shit.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Yes, true.

SPEAKER_02 20:37

So, yeah, and so that's the thing. Like, once you start scaling, you really start seeing the problems in your foundation. Yeah. Of like, well, this system wasn't as tightly knit as I needed it to be. And now that I've scaled and I have more clients, it's just breaking everything, right? It's yeah, and it was there from the beginning. And so I think inspiration goes goes a far, a long way.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

You even had an image, I think it was on your Instagram, of like a bridge with all this stuff coming down on it, and it was more and more business, and the bridge was like kind of crackling away. I'm pretty sure it was on your Instagram as well, because I was I was doing a lot of research on you, but it was very it was a good image to show, you know, you might have you might think that your structure's good, but the reality is any bridge can only take so much. You know what I mean? So if there were small cracks in the bridge before and you put more and more weight on there, you're gonna now reveal the problems you never saw before because now it's cracks get bigger and become more dangerous, obviously.

SPEAKER_02 21:29

Yeah, yeah. And you have to solve them instead of just keep on scaling. Sometimes it's okay to take a step back to solve those initial problems so that you can scale properly.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Yeah, it's good stuff. Good stuff. So this is the big one that was different for me, just because our like with Keller Williams, we have a different way of doing business and things like that. Not different, we're just more culture-based and things. So I didn't know if there was like if it was different than how you're doing things, but you you have down here building the sports team model. Explain to me what that means when it comes to building the company and leadership and the different levels and things like that, and how you how you work through having to remove people that maybe are not, you know, up to where they need to be.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

Yeah, 100%. So, you know, I think that was a big mistake that I made with my first business. I really started building the business wanting to take care of my employees. Like it came from a good place, and so I I would always tell them,

Sports Team Culture And Accountability

SPEAKER_02 22:25

like, guys, we are a family, like we're a family here. But what does what do families do? Right? Like, you can't just get rid of your brother or get rid of your sister, right? They're always gonna be there.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

You just ignore 'em. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

When you go to the family reunion, you just ignore him, or you just wait until he's drinks a couple beers and then you talk to him or something. But yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:42

Basically, which is not the right dynamic that you want in a but by the way, I get along great with my brother.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

So just so you know, I didn't want my brother to hear this and go, Oh. What is he saying about me? I love my brother, he's great, so go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 22:52

I do as well. But yeah, that's the thing. And and and very quickly I realized that I that kind of culture and that kind of mentality wasn't the right one for growth. We can't treat each other like family. That's not the right way to do it. And so eventually I came across um the sports team model where it's very much based on performance. Like we will be nice with each other and stuff, but we'll keep each other accountable. And there has to be a certain level of performance. And if you're not performing to that level, you're gonna get cut from the team and we're gonna replace it with someone else. Every team has to do that because we're you know in a championship, you need to win. And so the way that I do that, there's there's a couple of ways. Like we do employer reviews every six months. We give people KPIs that they have to follow and that they have to hit. If they don't hit their KPIs, then they have we have a fork in the road. We either let them go or we give them a performance improvement plan that it's very specific, they have to hit uh certain goals by a certain time. And every six months we fire the weakest link. We just ask ourselves like who is the weakest link in our company. We identify that person, fire them, replace them, and we will do the same thing again in six months. And so after a while, we end up with a brand new team, but at least it's the highest performing team that we could possibly have.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

But do you do you think along the do you think along the line though, the 80-20 rule? You know, the 80-20 rule just says that you know, 20% of the works, yeah, 80% of the work's done by 20% of the people. Do you feel that if you're constantly firing that weak link, eventually the person that wasn't the weak link now gets pushed to being the weak link?

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Well, hopefully you get to the point where you don't need to fire anybody anymore because things are working well, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Got it. Okay, that's good.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

Yeah, by weak link, I mean someone who is like not consistently not hitting what they're supposed to be hitting. And the thing is, it's nothing against the person, right? They might be sitting in the wrong seat, like they might be great at certain other things and not that. So by firing them, you're actually doing yourself a favor, you're doing them a favor too, because they can go and find something where they can actually perform.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

I think we do the same thing, we just say it in a nicer way. Right. No, we just I think because Caleb Williams is very much it's all about culture and building leaders and things like that. It's a lot a lot of those things, and and really also the thing, the difference with us too. We're building, we're building culture and leaders out of people that are all self-employed that we work with. So it's not we only have so many employees, you know. So it's what we have seven employees, but we have 145 agents that work in our off in our company. So we're constantly trying to lift them up to make them the best business owners they can possibly be. So it's a little different. Whereas you might have 70 employees, and I get that. You have 70 employees, everybody's got to be pulling their own weight, and they got to be making their numbers and all that stuff, and it makes sense. So, yeah, so it's not near as it's it's not as when I read it, I'm like, geez, this guy's just getting rid of people left and right. This guy, these guys rough.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

Yeah, no, the goal is to end up with a really good team. Of course. Think of the Formula One, right? Like it's totally got to.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

And you know it's too what you said in there too, which is pretty much the way I always look at when whenever you're letting somebody go or you're feeling that I feel that you definitely are doing them a disservice by keeping them in a position that they can't excel in. 100%. You know, because because imagine what that's like for them coming into work every day, knowing that they're not keeping up with their promises or their their commitments or their what they're supposed to be doing. And I think I think a lot of times it's it's also, man, go out and find the right thing. Maybe you're actually an amazing painter, maybe you're an amazing mechanic, or maybe you're an incredible engineer. You know, maybe sitting at this desk doing what you're doing is not your forte, it's not your God-given talent, you know, and and I think that's where I think we kind of go in that direction when we're, you know, it's just kind of in a different way, you know. So for sure, for sure. But I I do like that. The coach, I like the sports team, I like the idea of that sports team model. I do like that. It's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02 26:41

Yeah, yeah. And and you know, a lot of my clients, I get them to implement that into their businesses, and it's night and day, right? Just within a year, they they skyrocket in a lot of cases, and they're way more confident in the team that they've had. I also have like, I'm a very empathetic person, so I don't like to fire people and have difficult conversations, but I had to learn to do it. Yeah, uh, but now it's like in a lot of cases, if I know that I'm gonna fire somebody and I really like the person, I'll usually try to line something up for them. I'll go into my network and I'll be like, hey, friends, family, do you guys need an extra person that could do this? No, that's cool. That's cool. Make the referral, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Yeah, and I think it's what it is. Most of the time, it's just not the right fit. It's really what it is. It's just not the right fit. I mean, that's the way I always I've been fired. I've been fired, you know, when I was younger, I got I got most of the time when I got fired, it was because I was doing musical stuff or whatever. But I've been fired, and and it's funny that now looking back the times I was fired, best thing that ever happened to me. Best thing ever happened to me. When I was let go or was told that, you know, I mean, I wouldn't be here where I am today, you know, if it wasn't for those people because I could probably still be at a desk working for something and doing something I hate, you know. So it's definitely it's it's it's to me, it's a gift sometimes. Or most times it is a gift. So let's go, let's keep going in here. I love this. It says the business you can't leave. How to recognize when your agency relies too heavily on you and what it's really costing you. I think that you realize that. Obviously, in that five to seven year, that big one that you did, you know, the first big business you did, you realize that. And how do you recognize when it's time to to get to get to that point? Because when you're building the company, you can't just disappear. There's got to be a point where you realize, you know what, I'm at that point right now where I need to leverage it all and start backing away.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like every business is different in that sense, but for the agency business,

Scaling Milestones To Buy Back Time

SPEAKER_02 28:32

for example, you know, the agency business model has been around for like 200 years, since like over 200 years, since 1812.

SPEAKER_03 28:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

And so the business model has always been the same. And all of the problems in the business models have already been solved by thousands of agency owners before us. And so, you know, there are certain things that you're supposed to do at certain times, and a lot of people like miss them. Like, for example, most service businesses are four departments: lead generation, sales, project management, and delivery. Once you hit your 10K a month, you know, you get started, you hit 10K a month, you're there for three months in a row. The first thing you should do is get yourself out of project management and delivery and start focusing on lead generation and sales because you're the founder, you're the only one that can generate those leads and close them, right? So, ideally, you bring in someone that you hire full-time to just take care of what happens after the sale is done. At least in our business model, that's kind of how it works. You stay in that position all the way to 100k a month, but once you have more resources, then you you hire out people to do the sales for you. And now you're like really sitting on that uh above everything and just making sure that things are moving in the right direction. And if you do it like that, then eventually, once you scale, you know, past 200,000, 300,000 a month, you bring in a general manager that will take care of the overseeing part, and now you're free.

SPEAKER_00 29:43

So you're free to go.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

You're free. Yeah, so so there's a there are certain things that you have to do at certain times, and then sell it.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

I mean, do you think you sell it then? Or I mean you you could stay in that freedom part for a long time also and not have to sell, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:58

Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, I've I've sold some of my businesses, other businesses I still run them today. They're just making income for my portfolio, and then from there I just take that and reinvest it in other stuff. And sometimes I'll buy more boring businesses, sometimes I'll find a startup that's super interesting and put some money in it and really start diversifying. So yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of things that you can do.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Did you ever have to jump back in because the person you thought could do it wasn't doing it?

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Yeah, yeah, many times. Absolutely, absolutely. But what does jumping back in mean, right? Because yeah, if I have to jump back in and do the work, then that's not right. But if I have to jump back in to re-hire someone that needs to do that work, I'll I'll do I'll do my part for sure. I mean, like in my portfolio right now, I have like seven companies, and so I like I'm not in every company every day, but yeah, I'm like above all of it, and then I I just honestly I just travel a lot and meet people.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

That's awesome. I just I just shake hands and kiss babies. That's good. Hey, there's nothing wrong with that, man. Nothing wrong with that. And then the other thing I was gonna say, like, how about stealing from you, embezzling from you? Have you had those kind of situations? Yeah, I did. I did many times. I learned it's so funny. Everybody always laughs and smiles because it's pretty much if you're in business, it's kind of happened. It's part of the game, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:11

Yeah, it's yeah, I did many, many, many times, many, many times. Do you want a story?

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Yeah, sure. Give me a story, man. We got a little bit of time yet. Oh, he has to lean back for this one. You see that?

SPEAKER_02 31:25

Uh yeah, you know, when you remember, you look up, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, like six years into my business, my first agency. You know, here in Canada, we speak English and French. Yeah,

International Expansion And Embezzlement Lessons

SPEAKER_02 31:37

yeah. So, you know, we started off in English, but then we had a bunch of French clients come up come our way. I'm also bilingual, I speak English and French, and so started hiring more people that spoke both languages, and and then eventually we started offering services in French as well. And then we started realizing that, like, hey, you know what, like 30% of our revenue actually comes from French speaking clients. And then I was like, as a young entrepreneur, you know, I was 29 at the time. I was like, hey, you know, maybe we can open an office in France, or French clients. Here we go. And so I was like, oh, international expansion, let's do it. And I thought it was gonna be great. I I went to France, I met two people at the government there, went to the banks, like figured everything out. I traveled there like three times, and eventually I was like, I think my agency at the time was at a million, five million dollars a year, and so I I ended up opening an office there. I hired a CEO that was paying, I was paying $250,000 a month. And and basically I was like, all right, dude, like you gotta build the French side of the business now, like do this, and and he turned out to be a con artist, which I yeah, right? Turned out to be a con artist. I brought in a a client which during COVID, the metaverse was taking off. Remember that? Yep. Like everyone was talking about the metaverse and metaverse properties and everything was metaverse, yep. Yeah, and this client basically came to me because he was like, Hey, I have this huge artist, like this music artist in France, and he wants to do a concert in a metaverse environment. We're gonna sell tickets for it, it's gonna be great. All the all these fans are gonna come to this virtual environment to watch this concert. And you know, like this wasn't foreign to me because like Travis Scott did a massive concert in Fortnite. That ended up making like $25 million or something in a couple hours. And and so I was like, I I understand this, this could definitely work, so let's do it. And my CEO basically he he was like vouching for the guy. He's like, I've known him for a long time. This guy has a lot of money, I've been to his office, he's he's got like 40 people working there, and like over a period of like seven months, they basically manipulated me and a bunch of other people into just fronting a bunch of work, and so we fronted about $275,000 worth of worth of work. The guy at some point disappeared. The guy worked for you or the guy who was gonna do the concert? No, no, the the client, yeah. The guy who was doing the concert. He he disappeared. When he disappeared, I actually looked started looking into him. I just googled his name. Turns out that he was a career criminal. My gosh. There's there's huge, huge stories in French about he had like the chief of police in his pocket, he was getting information and and and you never googled him because you never thought you just thought that he was vetted.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

You thought he was vetted. Isn't it funny? When you trust somebody, when you when you trust this person, you trust the person they bring in without even asking questions. But well, now you will, but I'm just so so I it went bad. So he was a criminal, he was a lifetime criminal, this guy.

SPEAKER_02 34:28

Yeah, 100%. So so he he uh he sold $275,000 from us, and then the CEO, because at this point I didn't understand they were colluding, right? They were like working with each other, the client and the CEO. So I kept on working with the CEO for several months after that. And by the time I understood what was happening, he had embezzled $1.7 million out of the company.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Oh my gosh, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see, now the MBA would never teach you that. Yeah, they don't have that course in college, it's amazing. They do not have that course in college. Wow, dude, that's a lot.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was that was a pretty big failure. I understood a lot about I learned a lot about it like international expansion. It's not that easy. Yeah. Just because we speak French in Canada, doesn't mean that doesn't mean the people in France are the same, they're not at all. Oh it was it was very, very difficult at the time when it happened.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

But think about the coaching, about the coaching experience. I mean, obviously, one's one point how many million is is a lot to make up, but think about the the experience allows you to coach and also see that when something comes about that's close to that, it seems like that, you go red flag right away and go, okay. You know, and it's like my dad always says, you know, trust but verify. You know, I think that's that's the biggest lesson my dad ever taught me from business is trust but verify. It's simple, everybody knows that term, but it's true. You can I can trust everybody here. I trust you go, you know. Well, I'll still verify, you know, but but seriously, and you're stupid not to if you don't if you don't do that. It's it's actually crazy not to. But so yeah, I wanted to get into here. We're gonna wrap this up here, but I wanted to find out what what is AI doing for you in your business or in what in what you're doing? Like how what do you think of AI? How are you using it? You know, is it is it a good thing for you? Is it is it is it bad thing for you? You know, tell me a little bit about that, and then we're gonna wrap this up.

SPEAKER_02 36:21

Yeah, 100%. You know, anytime there's a really big technology shift like this, like for example, when the intranet came out, right? Agencies, there's always agencies that think that it's the end of the world and they're gonna be replaced and their business model is done. And then there's the the other agencies that are like, hey, I'm gonna use this, I'm gonna adapt to it, I'm gonna move up the value chain and I'm gonna make this work for me. Right now, at least in the agency space, but in a lot of other spaces

AI Changes Execution And Raises Value

SPEAKER_02 36:44

in business, I do think it's the golden age because all of the repetitive tasks and where you had to hire people before can be can be automated through AI. That forces companies to have to move up the value chain and have to talk about context and strategy and really be that brain where the execution is done by by AI in the agency space, at least, in my agencies, margins are going way up because we just need less people, right? Yeah, not sure what that's gonna do for the world, but at least in the business, but you can't fight that.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

It's nothing we can fight, you can't fight that. 100%. You know, and and and I'll tell you, I have to say this when when and this has happened several times in my industry, and back in you know, when the internet really started going a hold. Oh, realtor.com, when that first came out, I remember agents they were jumping off bridges, like saying that our business is over, it's done. And I remember the same thing happening with travel agents. I just had this, it's actually in my book that I'm writing. We talk about there's a paragraph in there, we talk about travel agents, and everybody thought travel agents were going to be gone. And what really happened, the really good travel agents are making a shit ton more money now than than before because they're providing a service that because you and I, who are busy people, we're all into leveraging, right? I know I can go on like there's a trip my wife and I go on for 15th, 15th anniversary. I know damn well I can go on and research Napa. It's really not hard to do. And I know I can do all these different things, whatever. But guess what? I don't have time. I don't have time. So we have a friend of ours that is that is really good at doing it. She's wonderful. I like talking to her. She has all these ideas. That's who's booking our trip for us because she knows that she knows the quality, the real quality of the place is as opposed to what we see on pictures. That's the only thing that's happened with the internet. You know how it is. You go online and you're like, oh, this house looks nice. And then you go see it and you're like, what the heck? So it's always nice to have that one-on-one, like somebody that actually knows about what you're gonna be experiencing. So I think it's true too. And I think AI is doing the same thing. It's upping the game of everybody that doesn't give up. You're gonna up your game, you're gonna have a better value proposition, and you're gonna make more money. Your margins are gonna get better, and you're gonna make more money. And the people that don't do it are gonna be out of the business. It's the way it is. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, so it seems like it's the same in pretty much every business, is what I'm what I'm hearing now. 100%. Yeah, it's amazing. But you know what? What a comp great conversation, man. 40 minutes has gone by so quick, and I just I really enjoyed it. This was a good time. And thank you so much for being on the show. We're gonna get all your information so that we post the show, we're gonna have all the information. Where how do people get in touch with you if they if they want to reach out to you and they want to get some advice or they want some coaching, whatever? What's the best way to reach out to you?

SPEAKER_02 39:21

Yeah, so I'm very active on Instagram. So if you look for Damiano R, you can find me on Instagram. I'm also super active on LinkedIn. Um, I have a pretty good following there. So you can just look for my name, Damiano Rominteran.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Awesome, man. Thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing your time and your your knowledge about everything that you have there. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. All right, cool. All right, there you have it. Damiano, I'm not even gonna try it. He just said Damiano R. So I'm gonna go with R. That way I don't screw it up. But man, I just it's what's a great time. He's talking about entrepreneurs and about uh, you know, creating it, not having to create a job but an asset. So if you're an entrepreneur, make sure you get to the point where you can leverage and you can sell the asset that you have. You don't want to have a job if you're an entrepreneur, you want to actually be able to sell it and move on and have the freedom that we talked about, which is most important. All right, that's about it. Come see us every Thursday at 7 p.m. We're gonna have some more great guests coming up. All right, thank you so much.