Luke Lintz - Founder of HighKey Enterprises | From 300k in Debt to Deals With The Kardashians

We were buying some bikes and TVs in grade 9 of high school. It was just to make $50, $100 profit on every single bike. Luke Lins didn't just want to follow trends. He wanted to set them. At just 16 years old, Luke co-founded High Key Technology, a company born out of a simple frustration, the hassle of corded earphones. So then we started a YouTube channel, which was a gaming YouTube channel. Created that for eight months, then it went absolutely nowhere, so massive failure. Every single entrepreneur has a desire for wanting more. All entrepreneurs have certain qualities inside of them, and then it's qualities that they develop over time. Losing thousands of dollars in high school, that was our entire banquil. Problems go through every stage of life. You can't get away from problems in life, it's not possible. From there, Luke and his brother, Jordan, turned their vision into a six-figure business within six months, silencing every doubt or along the way. That's when we started up our first company, so to speak, which was the first ever wireless ear buds, kind of, to be sold across North America. So we scaled that up to seven figures of sales. Having a focus on one business allows you to catapult way faster than having your focus spread across multiple businesses. You only lose if you quit. But Luke didn't stop at selling ear buds. Today, he leads an empire of digital services, transforming how personal brands and businesses dominate social media and public relations. For him, the secret to success isn't flashy campaigns. It's about consistency, building emotional connections, and creating a legacy that speaks louder than words. This is the story of how a teenager who started with YouTube inspiration and a dream built a seven-figure business and why he's only getting started. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clarity. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast. Our HubSpot has been a huge supporter of the show, and I'm happy they are because I'm a huge believer in HubSpot. I've used it for everything from this show to all the companies that I've ever run in the past. And I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs in the audience and let me ask you a question. If you're an entrepreneur, you have to figure out marketing even if you're doing yourself or you have a team. And do you ever feel like your marketing team is just running from fire to fire? Creating endless content, launching campaigns, generating leads, scoring them, nurturing them, and just when you put out that one fire, three more pop-up. These days, marketers have never been more spread than. That's where HubSpot and its new built-in AI assist in breeze commit. When you combine the power of marketing hub and content hub, every quarter can be your best quarter. Imagine AI that instantly remixes your content for any channel. Smart leads scoring that automatically spot lights your hottest prospects. And an AI-powered analytics suite that puts all your KPIs in one place. Plus AI co-pilots and agents that handle those time-consuming tasks that you've been juggling. Stop spreading yourself thin, marketing is tough enough, building a business is tough enough, stop putting your fires, start making major moves with HubSpot. Visit HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. Luke, I'm excited you're here, man. It's going to be a lot of fun. I think that the way that I like to kick these off just so people get to know you a little bit better. Think it back to an inflection point when you were growing up. Something that sort of set you on the path that you're on today. What do you think that was? Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me on here. And yeah, the starting point in business was actually when we were buying and selling bikes on KGG. We were buying and selling bikes and TVs in grade nine of high school. And I didn't realize at the time that that was like the first business endeavor, but that was like the first thing that we ever did myself and my older brother. And it was just to make $50, $100 profit on every single bike that we bought and sold. And it really brought us into the entrepreneurial spirit. Of making profit off of specific, specific things that we were buying and selling, looking at margins, all of that. It was like arbitrage? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. This is actually a very controversial clip that I put out once. And one, there was a guy who was a billionaire and was talking now he owns a whole bunch of companies. And he said like, if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, like show me your lemonade stand or show me when you were buying and selling some shit and arbitrage it or show me when you were in grade school, like trying to sell packets of gum to your friend, whatever. Do you think that entrepreneurship is something you're born with that you just have like when you were arbitraising bikes off Kajichi, why did you do that versus trying to go get a job? I think that all entrepreneurs have certain qualities inside of them. And then it's qualities that they develop over time. So I think every single entrepreneur has a desire for one and usually that one anymore is in the monetary sense that's usually the easiest, quantifiable answer. And so for me it was I just wanted more money. And so I was just doing any activity to make more money on the side even on top of my jobs. And then the second thing was being able to take on risk. And so I don't think I was inherently extremely good at taking on risk but then I realised in high school I gambled a ton when all the money that I made for buying and selling bikes and then also the jobs that I had. I did demolition, painting work. I also worked at an organic food store. All of that money, I gambled it. And it was just really. Yeah, it was my appetite for risk at the time. And so I also think that's actually wild. That could be problematic, but I actually believe that so I believe the people who are entrepreneurs, they are like one step away from taking all that energy and putting it towards like a very bad vice. I think because you have to be addicted to become a good entrepreneur. I think you have to be addicted to something that it's positive. But if you like veered off and like a little direction that could be very neck because it's a personality trait of an entrepreneur that puts like everything towards something. Yeah, isn't it with that continuum of like love and hate being right beside each other? Brits very similar. The bridge between that is so close together. It's kind of like an entrepreneurship, value of interest. You know, the positive energy that you got with entrepreneurship is so close to like there was biases that you could potentially be putting. Well, I think that's why some entrepreneurs can spiral so easily because they all they know is to give 110% to something. And if it's not business, then if it's a bad vice like gambling, drugs, like women, like drinking, then all of a sudden you spiral because entrepreneurs are inherently all or nothing. I think most of them are. But that's something you did like kind of very early on. You were like, I have a high attitude, attitude for risk. And this is like, I'm going to live my life. You're gambling. You're earning your money. And like what, high school? Yeah, yeah, great tent of high school. That's why. So obviously that doesn't, that's not like a way to build a business or to live a life. So as you like mature and whatnot, you still have that attitude for risk. But at what point are you like, okay, this is obviously not, this is not like a secure way to make money just gambling on, I don't even know where you like betting sites. And so it was all sports best sports. But yeah, but it was a lot ahead of the curve. It was like consistently losing on sports betting. Like that's because the house is, the house is always in a way. I was not good at sports betting. But we weren't even betting against the house. We were betting against other people. Like we were doing draft street, draft kings, all of those sites. And losing thousands of dollars in high school when like that was our entire bank rule. And so I think way taught me was that it got me completely disconnected and really numbed out from money, honestly. We're, we're gonna be good and bad. Yeah, it can't be good and bad. Okay, so that's high school. So what did you, what did you start like moving on from arbitraising bikes and gambling? Yeah, and when did you start like actually building stuff? Yeah, so then we started a YouTube channel, me and my older brother, which was a gaming YouTube channel in at the end of grade 10. And it's because we were watching like all of these YouTubers, mainly like KSI W2S, these people who played video games. We were like, we could do that. We're kind of funny people. We played video games like let's just record ourselves. So we did that, create very cringey YouTube content. I love it. Oh, we deleted it all. I wish it was still up. Yeah, create that for eight months and then it went absolutely nowhere. So massive failure, eight months of creating YouTube content that just went down the drain. And then we kind of reflect they were like, okay, what do we wanna do next with all of our time? And in high school, you have a ton of time. Yeah, ton of time. How are you? Working, paying rent, anything. No responsibilities. You have all this extra time. You're not necessarily working because you're in high school. And so that's when we started up our first like company, so to speak, which was the first ever like wireless earbuds kind of to be sold across North America. How did you think through that concept? Well, we had a buddy who thought of the idea of wireless earbuds where it's like, there's wireless headphones out, why isn't there just wireless earbud? Yeah, before like AirPods. And so we just did tons of research online of like, where can we find prototypes? So completely wireless earbuds. We found one pair in China and we were like, this could be it, order the sample, we were like, wow, this is pretty cool. So then we bulk ordered it, slapped a low go on it, create a name and we were like, okay, now we have this sick product. How do we sell this? And so we used the only platform we knew at the time, which was Instagram, which we used personally. We're like, okay, well, let's create like, you know, some meme content stuff that we consume and just like product place that your buds at it. I had to do it and it ended up crushing. Yeah, it's because it was just a sick product. We didn't do any crazy marketing. It was just such a sick product. And so when you have like a really good product and really good timing, like you can really do any type of marketing into a crush. And so that's a lesson. You could see when people try and market really shitty products and then you just end up like spinning your wheels. Exactly. So we scaled that up to seven figures of sales before I sat and figured, what was the margins on that? Pretty horrible margins because we were selling it for so cheap. We were selling it for like $60 per pair of wireless earbuds compared to like AirPods that, or yeah, a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. So you have like seven figures, but ultimately at some point you're gonna have cash flow issues or it's gonna be like really low margins. So it's a business that yeah, it's a business, but you're gonna have to scale to like the tens of millions if you really wanna have a significant business and actually be able to take money out of it. We didn't really take that into consideration. It was about 10% profit margins. That's really low, really low. And then we ended up wanting to product diversify because we were like, okay, well, we can't bank all in all these wireless earbuds, especially since AirPods started to come out and all of these other earbuds. And we were like, okay, if we wanted this business to actually grow, we need to go into other product sectors. And then what did you do to diversify? When we went to other product sectors, speakers, backpacks, that's when it went horrible. Be because they were just... I expected you to say something else. I know I kind of know this story. We've just spoken a lot, but I forgot that there was a point when it just tamed. Yeah, horrible. It's because there was just so much competition. And it's because we weren't as good at marketing. Advising, that'd be awesome. But that's the curse of getting early success, huh? Because then you think you're good and you think that you can figure out anything else. But I mean, obviously not so much. Very true. So, okay, so then after that, did you... This is still you and your brother. Did you kill that business completely? Yeah, so we ended up growing actually $300,000 in debt from ordering products you couldn't sell. Ordering products that we couldn't sell. And then all of the increased in cost, the fried in shipping to get the shipping from China to the US and then the holding cost because they weren't selling. Subaru, they're sitting in a warehouse somewhere. The warehousing fees were just ridiculous because backpacks and the batteries inside of them because they were charging backpacks. We're just like burning cash. Burning cash. And at one point, we were like, okay, well, we need to do something or else we're screwed. It wasn't debt that we could go bankrupt on. Yeah, because it was debt from our family members. And so they invested. Yeah, oh my God. And so, I would have delivered my eight prep. I was so stressful. Yeah, I was 18, very. Yeah, and so we reflected back. We're like, okay, what was something good that came up all of this? Or like, okay, we knew how to grow an Instagram page. That's one thing. We had millions of natural views on Instagram. We had 250,000 plus followers. So we knew one thing from this. We were going to a growing Instagram page. We were like, can we do this for other people? And then we started up an agency. And also, agencies are not easy to grow because there are also the agency market still super saturated. There's tons of agencies out there. But I mean, you saw that you probably grow Instagram better than most people. And I also think most agencies don't know what the fuck you're doing. But that's two sides of the point. So even like at that point when you're 18, you just talked to me about like even some, because a lot of the stuff that happened to you at 18 would probably stress out so many people, so much that they'd never jump into anything else. So when you were 300,000 dollars in debt at 18, that's a significant amount of money. And then your family's money is on the line too. So you're probably stressed about that. So what would be the advice for somebody who's going through their first business and is in debt and owes investors money or owes somebody money and they're just trying to figure out, how do I keep going when I'm dealing with all this bullshit? Because all this bullshit is normal for entrepreneurs, for anybody who's taken a risk and built something. But for the first time, you're going through it. It's very stressful. So what's the advice for people like how did you go through it? Was it just, because you could have gone in two ways. You could have said, I'm never fucking doing this again. Your families, they're supportive, but they're probably all like a little bit pissed off. So what do you suggest to that first time entrepreneur? Yeah, the going the two ways is very true. It's kind of like with a lot of things. Like for example, if you grow up in a household that's extremely toxic. A lot of the kids grow up two different ways. One, they take those toxic attributes and they bring that into their adult life or the second way is they want to get as far away from that as possible. And so they do everything they can to get as far away. It's usually like very polar opposite. And so like I think that's very similar with going the two ways when you're under extreme amount of stress and entrepreneurship, especially when it's your first business. For me, just when you're asking that question, I was thinking back to the mindset I was in back then. And I remember it being so hard every single day. I would wake up with so much stress on my mind constantly. And what I would do is I would just numb myself out from reality by just going straight to my desk every single day and literally working 14 to 16 hours a day. I wouldn't talk with anybody. I wouldn't say anything if people asked about how the business was going. I wouldn't talk about it because it was just so much pain inside. And so I really just thought that I could work through it. And if I was working constantly that I would get to a place where I was out of this pain of this stress. And it very interesting that me and my brother have constant conversations now. My brothers, so like because our low brothers are completely part of the business as well. And we actually look back on those times and reminisce on those times. I laugh at them in a good way, in such a good way. It's like wow, because it's such a perspective shift of being able to have such a low point in your life. Where now I'm able to, like now I go through hard times still, you can't get away from problems in life. It's not possible. Problems go through every stage of life. And if you go down a street and look at people who are walking down the street, every single person is facing their own problems, whether they're rich poor, whether they're happily married, every single person has their own problems. And so being able to have that perspective shift of looking back on like what you thought was just, you know, just the worst time of your entire life is pretty, pretty fun. It was good after he got there. It's not good in there. Do you think that the way you dealt with it is the best way to deal with it? And I don't have an opinion or I don't know what the best way to deal with it is. I've never had, oh, my family, $300,000. That to me would be super stressful. I don't know how I deal with that. I don't know if I deal with it well at all. I mean, I've had investor money before, but it's like different when it's family because you don't wanna lose anyone's money. You don't wanna lose investor money either, of course. But family is like, family's gonna be with you forever, no matter what, no matter what business fails, they're gonna be around. So how do you think I was like the smartest way? And not just, don't answer that question just from the perspective of like this specific problem. Answer it from the perspective of any time you're dealing with something that is a degree more stress than you're used to dealing with what is like the healthiest way to work through that. Even if you owed somebody, family, $300,000, or you owed investors $10 million, and things aren't going well, what's like the way to work through that? So you can still be effective, but you still protect your mental health. Yeah, I personally believe that there are so many statistics out there about stress killing and stress causing diseases inside of your body and stress being the biggest cause of cancer, stress being the biggest leading indicator of early death. I think stress kills more than any single other thing, any workout routines, any health diets, all of that, I think stress kills more than that. So I think figuring out ways to eradicate stress of your life is the number one priority that people should be working towards. And it's very, very difficult during times like that where it is very stressful, like being $300,000 in debt at such a young age, what I did was I just numb myself out from reality as much as possible. And I created a safe space with work. So everything outside of work wasn't safe and work was safe. And so I still have this to this day where every single morning, most of the time, I wake up with anxiety, even though there's not really anything to be anxious about and it's because for a four year period of time, I train myself to every single day I wake up, I wake up with anxiety to get as fast as possible to my computer desk to start working. And so it's like your brain is a computer and it can be trained. And when you train and start a way for such a long period of time, it's very hard to train it out of that. Do you think that's healthy? No, I don't need to tell you at all, it definitely. I didn't know that's how you are. Yeah. So when you work, when you first start working every morning, it's from a place of, it's almost from a place of a little bit of fear. Very anxiety-based. And is that, I mean, that thing that happened with your family when you were young and you owed the money? How long did that last? How long was that period? Oh, wow. Three years. Three years. Yeah. That's some trauma, dude. Yeah. That's some trauma. Built up trauma. So when you talk about stress being like a silent killer, have you, I mean, this is, say what you want to say, but you've not tried to do work to try and unwind that trauma? For sure. Because now you don't have these money issues. You have business, you have stress, but you don't have, like, you have experience. You understand that $300,000, first of all, is not a lot of money in business context, but it can be repaid. Any amount of money can be repaid. And no problems are so significant enough, especially what we're dealing with. I mean, maybe there are people that have much bigger problems than us than they do. But the stuff that we deal with on a day-to-day, even in a business, even if it's doing very well, you're still going to be alive tomorrow. The business is going to keep carrying on. So have you tried to, like, go through, like, I don't know, like, therapy or anything like that, so you don't approach each day with trauma, but, like, you have a different perspective. Dude, for sure. Yeah, I've been in therapy for the past 10 months, weekly. So this is more of a new thing. For sure. And do you find that it's working? Yeah, the therapy that I go to wasn't directly for stress. It was mainly for relationships. And it was because of, like, childhood trauma that was built up and created the type of person I am. But a lot of things, a lot of the problems that we face today, I think, come from childhood experiences. And so unpacking a lot of the things that I faced as a childhood in my childhood was able to, you know, give me more clarity in terms of how I operate day to day, even so much as, why do I operate from an anxiety-based framework? And why do I operate where I feel the need to be constantly working? And it comes from childhood of the feeling of not being good enough or only being good if I perform in a certain way, and things that are trained into you. I mean, sometimes, sometimes, like, someone's dark side can actually help them in their career. And it seems like it actually has helped you in your business, but it may not be the healthiest way to do what you do. And have you thought about that before, like, your dark side helping you? For sure, yeah. I think my childhood and my dark side, like you're saying, has helped me tremendously in business, but has been a huge detriment in every single other area of my life. What was the thing in your childhood that you think led to this feeling of anxiety? It was probably just sort of further doubled down on when you owed your family some money. I'm sure that didn't help at all, but it came from much earlier. Well, we get unpacked a lot here. Like, I could speak about this for hours. Like, I was talking hundreds of hours of my therapist, yeah. But yeah, my parents went through a divorce when I was at a very young age. And the thing that was very unique about our situation and very difficult was the child custody case. And so whenever two parents get divorced with kids, like, if they can't work it out themselves, then it goes to the court system to be able to figure out the child custody. And sometimes it goes like 50, 50, or sometimes like they can't agree on anything. And so we started off 50, 50 between our mom and our dad. And then our mom pretty much like completely parental alienated us from our dad. And so people don't necessarily know what parental alienation is, but it's basically like instilling beliefs and instilling sort of thought systems inside of a kid's mind. That's like very susceptible to, you know, yeah, influence. And so she instilled these thoughts that her dad wasn't safe and that the only person that was safe was basically her. And pretty crazy thoughts like things like sexual abuse inside of our minds when it never really happened. And then a good line to so many different things where we went into CFS, which is basically like child custody services in Canada and all of these things. And that brought its own set of problems, but basically within all of that, I was the person who stayed quiet throughout it all. So I was like the stationary ones, they quiet the majority of brothers. Yeah, like my older brother was the one who talked adamantly about a lot of things because he was the one who my mom like mainly worked with, so to speak. And then my little brother acted out throughout all of them. And so he basically was deemed that he had ADHD. And so he got put on medication at a very young age and it led to his own problems with that that he has been able to get over tremendously. And he's an amazing human being now. But myself, what I did was I just stayed quiet. And so I went through a period of, you know, getting a very lack of attention. And this is trauma building up. Yeah, I'm not saying anything else, speaking out, you're not dealing with that. Yeah, and so like my parents, well, my dad ended up getting custody of us and he grew us into like the people we are today, the men we are today. And so like my dad is the person who I have to thank for the people who me and my brothers are today. And the reason we are today, he was an amazing dad with the stuff that he was given. And you know, the situation that that was. But yeah, throughout all that, it was the lack of attention that I had. It was that I was never really taught how to showcase my emotions. And to acknowledge my emotions inside of my head and then to actually communicate those emotions. And so it led to just the ridiculous amount of problems. But in business, it was definitely helping you out in the business. It helps, but I mean, there's a lot there that nobody should ever have to go through. Like I mean, like it sounds like you're, I don't know your whole family scenario, but it sounds like your mom like weaponized a court system to a degree. What, yeah, which is super fucked up. And that's a whole other conversation that should never happen ever. And then when did you, so when did you start sort of getting back in touch with your dad? Or just to understand like the timeline. So like when you were for example, like going through all this stress about your business, where you close closer with your mom or your dad at that point. Yeah, so our dad got full custody of us when I was about nine. Okay, so this point you, so you had trauma. Yeah, but then you spent, then you got full cut, your dad got full custody. So you did have positive influence in your life from nine until so that there was still remnants of very early childhood trauma that were like playing over when you were going through this whole like business failure. Okay, I understand, I understand. And I'm just more curious than anything because you mentioned you've only been going to therapy for 10 months. Why did this all come to pass? And I think that it's actually maybe just tell a little bit just briefly how you're sort of entrepreneur, career evolved over the years. And then even 10 months ago, which I know you were successful 10 months ago, and I know that you have an incredible business 10 months ago. Why at that point, where you like, now I need to go to therapy? Because this is after, this is after a lot of success. Yeah, I'll touch on the business journey and then we can go on that and just make sure I hit that. Okay, I'll remember, yeah. So how the business journey went was basically start up the wildest year, but it's had a massive amount of success with that before graduating high school, lost it all, went into debt, had those huge feelings of stress, wanted to transition to an agency, transition to the agency, start making some money and getting clients with the agency, start being able to repay back some of the loan, start to build up cash flow. Then we completely closed out the wildest year about business and the product-based business because we were like, okay, the thing that we have to do is focus. We need to make sure we're focusing on things. We didn't listen to that advice. We end up distract ourselves with so many different things, but do you have the right intentions? We have the right intentions at the start. And then we ended up going into a lot of different services within the agency. So we started doing social media, then we started doing press services for our clients, and then we started doing the giveaway for our clients. We're basically a partner of wisdom celebrity and they would do giveaways to grow our clients followers. And that's where things really grew up. Well, that was probably a lot of people do social media marketing, but I think that working with celebrities doing giveaways, that's something that's so niche and not a lot of people do, and if they do, they don't do it well, and that probably gave you. And also, that's a massive high-ticket item you're selling. So the revenue from that's also incredible. But do you still do those as much? Because when you look at your business now as it's evolved, you still do the social media. You still do the giveaways to a degree, but not as much, correct? Yeah, we do the giveaways once a quarter now. So when you look at all the different things you sell now as an agency, why do you sell things the way that you sell them? Why do you only giveaways once a quarter? And maybe even explain what those are. Because that's very cool. You get to work with celebrities and whatnot, but then why don't you do them once a month? Yeah, so we're even transitioned our business model is as much of a retainer model as possible. Just because we're trying to get out of the sales, where we're trying to get into fulfillment. I love fulfillment. I love trying to make our product and services better to make our clients as happy as possible. I'd never really like sales. I was never a natural sales person. I had to force myself into sales. And so being in a retainer model, where we create a product and service, that's as sticky as possible, where people are getting the services and getting the results that they're looking for and stay on for as long as possible. And that's with our social media management services. Where we come in, take care of full service, everything, from the videography, editing, strategy, post-production, the posting, all of that. And then when you look at the other side of the business, give away side, which is really just you partner with the celebrity. I think people have seen these giveaways before. They have like 10 Berkins or whatever. And then they're like, or like a whole bunch of like like Macbokes or phones or whatever and they're like, okay, this is like where they follow. And then you do a giveaway and then somebody wins the prize. Yeah. And why do you do those once a quarter and why didn't you just kill them off? Yeah. So the celebrity partnerships, yeah. It's where we give away massive prizes. And then we say, the celebrities are basically saying, guys, I'm giving away all of these prizes. All you have to do is go to At Hike Clote and follow everybody that they're following. And then our At Hike Clote page, we follow a list of our giveaway sponsors. They're each paying us to sponsor the giveaway and then gain the followers in return. And so we used to do those once a month. And then we cut it back to once a quarter because they still make money and there are a great way for us to get very notable inside of like the celebrity industry. You get association with a very cool people. Yeah. But we stopped doing them once a month because they're a lot of effort, a lot of time commitment and they're just one time sales. So it's no retainer sales. It's all upsells of our past clients. And so it's like making some quick money but it's not what we're trying to do. Where we're trying to increase our enterprise value which is done through the recurring revenue which makes a lot of sense. And also like I think about it for clients that actually do participate, do you feel like the value of like the actual fault because it's like giveaway followers? So it's like different than I have been following your product or service for like the past six months and I'm a big fan of the content you post. So do you find that like there's a lot of value still for people to like engage with this stuff, get giveaway followers like you see a lot of those followers like churning or do they actually like retain? For sure, yeah, about 20 to 25% of the followers drop off after the giveaway and really the only people that makes sense to enter the giveaways to sponsor them and gain a ton of followers are ones with high ticket services. And so that's why we primarily focused on the aesthetics industry over the past years and why we're focusing heavily in the future because if you think about like plastic surgeons, for example, they have services that go all the way up to 30,000 plus dollars for these massive surgeries. And so they get one client from this giveaway of gaining say 60,000 followers, which is very reasonable over a period of time. 60,000 followers come in, you're gonna get one. They're gonna get one client over the period of time, especially when it's coming from a celebrity like Cardibee or Nicki Minaj where it's women that- Someone in that audience wants plastic surgery. For sure, yeah. And so then they make back that money times three or four. That makes sense. So it's like even like when you do like these, like kind of like growth hack kind of things, like you still have to have a way to monetize them and make sure that you're actually capitalizing on it. Like it's not just getting followers. For sure. Yeah, unless it's just some rich kid that's wanting to like have vanity metrics. Which is, yeah, I mean, but that doesn't serve a purpose, like a business purpose. Like you actually want to make use of this, you have to figure out a way to actually monetize those. And I'm sure you probably get that shit from people that go participate in the giveaways. Like they're like, well, I didn't get results from this. I'm like, okay, well, then you have to focus on actually building a business around your Instagram, not just having an Instagram with followers or followers. Say for sure. And this is actually probably where you hit them with like the other side of the business. It's the off sell. But yeah, yeah, no, that makes a lot. Okay, so now I understand like where your business is at. How you sort of grew the business was, you did the giveaway that made money, but it's super labor intensive. And that was like, that was a kind of not high tick. And I mean, it could be high tick. The sixth grant could be high tick, depending on what else you sell. And then you took the customers from that and then you move them until like a recurring revenue retainer model, right? And then I mean, that's actually, I think that something that most service-based businesses should focus on like a retainer-based model. But it seems like a lot of agencies like still don't get it right. I feel like they're still very project-based. Or they're retainers. I'm curious how you structure your retainers and why you've built a successful business around a retainer model when I work with a lot of agencies that seem to, maybe it's the quality of the service you deliver. Because I've worked a lot of PR agencies and just agencies in general. And I honestly find like the retainer is too expensive for what I'm getting out of it. Or even with like PR, it could be five grand, it could be 20 grand a month. But then there's like no guarantee that I'm even going to get anything. When I do get stuff, I feel like it's like bullshit, media placement. So what are the issues in your industry and why do you stand out so much? Yeah, so when you're starting up into agency, that's a retainer model. I'm just going to speak from like our agency. So like if you're going to start up like a social media agency or any type of marketing agency, one of the biggest levers is like the price point that you're at based off the service that you're delivering. So you have an option. You could be the lowest in the market, the cheapest. You could be middle in the market somewhere in between or you could be the highest price in the market. So the only one of those three options that give you zero benefit is being right in the middle. Because you're going to get outpriced by the lowest in the market and that you're not going to have enough margin to actually pay for good staff. And then all of the things that increase your hard cost to deliver more value. So they kind of want to spend money then they'll go to the premium. Exactly, okay, exactly. And so basically we were choosing between the lowest cost option and the highest cost. And what we want to do is we want to be working with constantly the highest level individuals because they're the most enjoyable to work with. They don't complain about their bills. They want the highest value, the best experience. So they're willing to pay for it. And working with the highest level individuals you actually learn from. And I wanted to learn from my clients because that's an amazing thing and being friends with the clients is awesome. And do you think that like when you, when now the services you actually sell are PR, social media, do you, and then you do the good boys? What people, let me actually, let me say this differently, is PR for every business owner. Do you feel like every business owner should be engaging in PR or are there certain people where it's not useful for them? Because I think there's actually, there's a, was it a Bill Gates quote? I think so that you said like if I had, I was down to my last dollar, then I would spend it on PR. Yeah, he's talking about the power of PR. Yeah, I know you said this quote a few times, but do you believe that to be true? I think every single business owner can have some level of PR. I don't think every business owner needs to be constantly featured in the media, constantly featured in press TV, but we've gone the direction of practically every single one of the packages that we sell, we put a little bit of press on it. So getting them featured in some sort of media because at the end of the day, every single person is searching up on Google before making a purchasing decision. And so having some level of media on there is going to benefit you in the long run. Do you feel like traditional PR is starting to die compared to social media? For sure. Yeah, 100%. Traditional PR is on the steep decline. When you say PR, where are you putting people? Are you putting people in Forbes or Inc or on MSNBC? Where are you actually putting people where it still makes sense? Or are you trying to get them on podcasts and shit like new idea? So PR is a very broad term that encompasses even newspapers, no boards, it encompasses like pretty much every level of marketing. It's just the aspect of leveling up somebody's brand and presence pretty much physical and digital, where we focus on is new age media for the most part. So the only type of old age media that we focus on is digital based publications. Where people are getting only featured in digital media that ranks on Google. But then outside of that, it's like working on getting the featured in podcasts. Sometimes working on influencer collaborations, which is like PR related. Because I think that even in new media, people don't know really how to capitalize on PR. And like for somebody who's like a business owner out there right now, somebody's listening and they want to like figure out how to get started in PR, should they focus on just getting placements first or should they figure out kind of like what you alluded to before, they should figure out like the funnel of how they're going to use that PR. Yeah, it's a good question. It depends where they're at in business. Like if they're just starting out or if they're currently making money, an easy way to start with like Crest is just going and doing press indications for your business. So basically this is where you go on to like access wire, Globe and News wire, there's tons of press indications where you can go on. You write up basically a press release. And so this is like a one page outline of a major updating your business. If you acquired another business, if you are maybe just starting your business, released a new product line, this is where you're running from the perspective of your own business. You go on to access wire, Globe and News wire, there's tons of them. Do people have to read that? What it does is it ranks on Google underneath your name. Okay. And so that's the primary thing. We don't really do press for the purposes of gaining a huge new audience from the publications that they're being featured on. It's mainly for the perspective that ranks on Google and how amazing that is when anybody searching up their name for that additional authority. So it's like social proof. Basically it's a social proof. They like you've done something impressive. When I Google your name, which is like your new resume, this is what comes up. And when you think about social media versus, so if I'm trying to create social proof around somebody and thought leadership around somebody, they have all their socials. If I Google their name, they're gonna have a couple articles around them. But now anybody can pay for verification. So what is the signal that I'm cool and no worthy and actually know what I'm talking about? I'm asking that because now I don't know what to look for. When I'm bringing on podcasts, guys, it's hard when somebody is verified across all platforms. It seems like everybody now is very good at becoming like a thought leader and recognized online. So outside of Wikipedia, which seems to be like the last place that nobody can sort of like growth hack their way in. I'm sure there's ways to do it anyways. It seems like everybody seems famous online now if they're focused on it. So where do people, that being said, if I was a client and I said, listen, I wanna really stand out, not just pay whatever the seven bucks a month for Instagram verification or whatever it is. I wanna really stand out. What do I have to do so that I look better than everyone else who's paying for verifications now? Yeah, so one way is that this is kind of like a hack for growing any brand and it's the associations with credible figures. And so you can't really fake a constant association with celebrities or leaders within your industry. And so if you're going on to somebody's Instagram page and like you see that they're associated with other credible figures, that's high level entrepreneurs, celebrities or anything like that, that's an indicator that you can't really fake. So then if I was gonna, yeah, but so if I'm a business leader and I wanna become more of like a thought leader, whatever, is there a strategy that you would tell, is it starting a podcast and interviewing people like what's the strategy that I would have to do? Yeah, well, I guess I think the podcast is the best way to getting like some sort of interview style. Yeah, a podcast is amazing. It's actually the first way that we got clients. And this is for any single social media agency or marketing agency, it's literally the best sales funnel out there. It should be illegal pretty much. Basically what you do is you partner with a high-level podcast or you do your own podcast. It's easier if you partner with already established podcast and you say, listen, I'm gonna give you an affiliate cut if you basically refer over guest to me, but you don't have to refer over guest until we do services for you for free and you see the results that we get. So this is exactly what we did. This is how we got our first, I'm glad it is. This is how we got our furry clients. Yeah, this is how we got our first clients. It is that we partnered with this one podcast that was already established. We did all of his services for an extremely discount rate managed all of his channels. After two months, he saw the results that we did. He's like, you guys are great. And then we're like, you should start referring us over to your podcast guests. Then we booked podcast guests onto his podcast that we knew would be good clients. And we gave him a script to say at the end of the podcast. So we basically go through an entire podcast and then at the end of the podcast, they would close down the recordings and then they would just talk one on one. Of course, as you always do. Yeah, and so they would talk one on one and always the podcast guests would bring up and be like, hey, so you're Instagram, it's pretty good. He's like, matter of fact, I have a team that runs it and I'd love to give you their information, booked up a call with us and we close them. That's actually how we got some of our best, we have retainer clients that are paying us to this day that we're from that funnel. Because I mean, it's so funny. That conversation about who do you work with or like who puts this all together or who runs your social. I actually probably have that conversation with like 95% of the guests that come on because they're all interested, right? Especially if you've built something significant. And they're like, okay, so like I take a look at your social, you're putting out X amount of clips per day or look at like I love the production value of your show. Like who does this for you? And I think that's actually, that's a very smart strategy. We started, we're going to start doing this in the aesthetics industry where I'm starting up a aesthetic space podcast that I'm just going to invite on or ideal clients onto the podcast. Talk to me about niching down. So you've done that very well. And I think when did you start niching down recently, right? Very recently. So you, this whole agency that you built all of Hike was just really a, not a generalist agency, but you had a general customer profile or avatar that you targeted. It was anybody that wanted social media PR, basically, right? You still take other people outside of aesthetics, but now you're niching down. What has changed in your business since you started to niche? Yeah, I'll give some background before the niching down. And they'll say like what's changed? So we were a very generalist. When we went into throwing up the agency first, we actually focused mainly on real estate. And so you're working with real estate investors. And then since we did good work for our first real estate investor, it brought us to a whole other repertoire of real estate investors. So we were working with many different. And then we started expanding to lawyers, cosmetics surgeon, a lot of different industries. And so then it was about two years ago. And we were looking at our entire client roster between the giveaways, press, and social media. And there were zero consistencies with our client base. And so we were running into a major issue on a couple of different levels. One was client acquisition. So basically with Facebook ads that was a huge way that we were attracting leads and Instagram DMs, we didn't have a solid approach that was getting us a specific type of client tell because we were going after really just any business owner. And then retaining top level employees and training up employees was very difficult because we were having to train our sales staff on talking with 15 different client avatars. That's interesting. And yeah, I don't know you ever think about the staff side or the employee side of having like not a clear vision for the business because then they're just as confused as you. Very true. Yeah. And so during this entire time, we were listening to so much Alex Ramose. Big Alex Ramose fan. And during all of this, we were listening to all of Alex Ramose's advice but besides his major pieces of advice, which is focusing and niching down. And the main, it was a mental barrier we had to get past where it was mainly like if we niche down, we're cutting off all of the other clients that we currently have. And like how would we say no to other clients on sales calls? So very, very difficult for our mind to get over. Then it got to a point of where we were spending around $40,000 per month on Facebook ads plus all of our other marketing. Literally getting hundreds of book calls per month for our sales team. We had a massive sales team and very little sales coming through because the conversion rate was just horrible. What was it? So you had 40 grand. How many leads did that give you? Oh, it's a conversion rate on that. So it was a non-niche conversion rate. Non-niche conversion rate. So it was $40,000 per month. We were getting over 1,000 leads from Facebook lead in forms. So they fill in the Facebook lead form. Then we were directing them towards a calendar booking to book a calendar. Then we got say about 400 to 500 bookings from that per month. And then from that we rated the leads. So we'd rate them one to five to five to five. I would highly suggest that anybody who has CRM when leads are coming in, even if you're niche down, rate the leads in quality because how do you rate the leads in quality before you speak to them? So we got a VA to basically go through and see the form that they filled out. Search their Instagram page and search their website. And then we rated it based off of qualification factors that we had, trained up one VA to do it. And so one VA's entire job was just rating the leads. So then we would end up getting about 100 to 150 for our five to five of five leads, which are deal client they should close from the 40,000. We were making money from it, but the operation was just ridiculous. We had so many salespeople, so many sellers, so many closers, and it was just ridiculous to manage everything. And also was it slightly profitable or not? For sure, it was, it was profitable, but it could be much better. Definitely profitable, it could be much better. And with much less like staff overall. So we looked at this and we just did the 80-20 rule. We looked at all of our customer base, the customer base took all of the revenue from each customer and then took the 20% of the top paying customers, longest lasting customers. And it was just so eye-opening that it was completely in the aesthetics industry. So we're talking plastic surgeons, med-spaws, all of these people, because they got the highest value services from us. That's when you niche down. That's when we niche down. And then completely niche down was it changed, because you know, it's so interesting. This is we can actually somebody ask the difference between growth and scale. And I actually looked up the definition and grow, because it was a great question. And growth is just increasing your revenue, but scale is increasing your service delivery without increasing your expenses. And I think that that's where people really don't think about the scale of their business, and about growth at all costs. How do we hire a ridiculous amount of sales team or whatever it is, so we can keep servicing new customers? But what if instead of 10% profit margin or 15% profit margin, what if all of a sudden we just niche down and we can get like a 40 or 50 or 70, whatever the number is? And I think that business owners, there is a point where you have to think how to do that. And it's a scary point, because you're having to restructure what got you to where you're at. And you don't want to just absolutely blow up your business. But then you realize, okay, if we keep operating with this, we can't have like 300 sales people. It's like it's too much. It's like, dude, you're literally speaking exactly from my head. I was doing this math in my head and I was like, okay, for us to get to a $100 million business, which is like what we're trying to get to, we would literally have to have a staff of just 300 to 400 sales reps. And it's like, I do not want to manage a team with 300 to 400 sales reps. And there's no way that that's needed in the stayin' eight. You know, so then you start to figure out like your revenue per head. Yep. And do you actually have that number? Like before and after, if you don't. I don't have the revenue per handle, but yes, it's improving, is the answer. Yeah, that's what you're trying to optimize. Very, very. So now that you've got this whole switch out, like what have you seen in the business? Well, we ended up completely liquidating and canceling our entire sales team. The whole thing, how many people? Whole operation. There was at its peak, there was like 30 people. It's a decent sized. Yeah. And you were still on sales. Just on sale. Who were just managing them yourself? I had a manager in place, and then I was helping manage an aspect of it. And then, so this new strategy, just focusing on aesthetics, which I think is a very smart entrepreneur lesson. Like you figure where your customers are coming from, find a way to niche down. What has it done to the business now? Dude, it was crazy. It was literally nuts. Like the second that we niche down, opportunities just start flowing our way. We changed up our website and like referral started coming in. It was crazy. Like just natural bookings on our website of people in the aesthetics industry. Us getting booked on, we got booked on five speaking gigs in the aesthetics industry in the year of the slash few months. And now we're specialists in this industry. And so it's really unbelievable that in terms of like revenue numbers, we're at the exact same revenue that we were beforehand. If not a little bit less, but our profit margins went from about 20 to 25%. Now they're at like 50%. That's phenomenal. That's absolutely phenomenal. And how long did you take you to do this whole transition? It took us about seven months. That's not too bad. I have a question. What was the, you did an article where you had to submit like tax forms. Who was that with again? What was the whole, what was that article about? That wasn't about your transition into a new type of, that was just about the entire story just going through entrepreneurship journey. It was mainly speaking about Gen Zs in entrepreneurship. What was it, what were they trying to figure out? So tell the story about what happened. I think it's actually very interesting too. Because I didn't know that when business insider does a story on you, you have to submit your tax forms. So they do their due diligence to make sure you're not foolish to it. Yeah. So some journalists are extremely good at their job and take it very, very seriously as they should. And what did they reach out to you? So they reached out to us. Actually, our team reached out to, our team reaches out to journalists all the time. So our team reached out to them and it peaked their interest because they were needing to do a story on Gen Z within whenever it got published like quarter one, basically. And so they're like, this is the story I'm going to do. And so they wanted to do an entire basically off speaking about our cells and our evolution through business as a Gen Z and what it meant. And then basically threw out a giving tips to like other Gen Z who are trying to start up business. And so this particular journalist who is doing an interview with us needed to fact check every single dollar value that we were explaining. And so when we were talking about our overall revenue numbers, she asked us to submit our tax forms. I was like, well, I've never experienced this before. But it was business inside one of the publications. So I asked my Karen, because I have even collected all the tax forms in one place. And so he collected the tax firms from 2020 to 2024. So like about three to four year time span. And we submitted them in and yeah, total to 23 million in revenue, which was pretty cool. That is pretty cool. That's pretty, I didn't know the business insider did that. What was the purpose of the article? Because you've also said, and we had this conversation, we could talk about this as well, that like younger generations are getting lazier. So the article was not about younger generations being lazy. No, that was the different, that was the different one. Okay, okay. Yeah. So this one was just about, but with like the, it was your story. It was meant to be like, Hey, this is what you can accomplish. What was the article that came out about Gen Z being lazy? There was this other interview that we went on where this journalist was interviewing me just about random things. And we were just having basically a chat. It was almost like a podcast that was off the air. She was just interviewing me about random things. And she was asking my thoughts about Gen Z and stuff. And I just said this one line of, I think the majority of Gen Z and millennials are lazy and they're getting lazier. And she's like, that's money. We're running with that. And so we ended up taking that and she wanted to build a full story. So she just did an interview. But basically the outline and premise of that is, I think for the most part, Gen Z is extremely lazy in comparison to previous generations, where previous generations in the 1900s, like men were going to war, people were working on farms doing hard labor, all these things. And I see so much complaining around people my age and in Gen Z in general, when we have life so easy. And I think it's only getting worse because now we have AI where people don't even have to think for themselves anymore. And especially the younger generation, like Gen X or wherever, where they're growing up, literally where they're developing minds don't have to think anymore. I just want to take a second and thank fresh books for supporting today's episode. Now, there are three numbers that you have to know. 30 million, 60 billion, 192 hours. What did these mean? Over 30 million people have used fresh books. Over 60 million invoices have been paid through fresh books and over 192 hours have been saved annually using fresh books all in one account. If you're an entrepreneur, a freelancer, a solo entrepreneur, if you are tired of chasing payments and drowning in receipts, fresh books is here to make your life easier. It's the all in one accounting solution that helps you manage everything from creating professional estimates and proposals to tracking time and automatically billing clients. If you need to capture expenses on the go, just snap a photo. 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So I'll tell the story we're talking about. We're talking about before we press a quarter thing. It's interesting. So I use a lot of AI and I also agree. So a couple different things we can talk about. I also think younger generations are getting lazy. I think that I notice it myself and I notice it through friends because everybody's having a very hard time hiring entry level talent. So entry level talent is not seem to want to work. And this is going to be a generalization. They'll get me wrong. But I'll tell you some stories that have happened. I think I've told this story before. I can't remember if it was even to you. But one of my good friends, she's probably tried to hire 10 different videographers. And I've also tried to hire videographers. You try to hire them full time. And he's got, he's a, listen, he's a very good guy, nice person, like the smart business leader owner, whatever. He's not the guy who, if you work for him, you get, oh, this is the worst fucking boss in the world. No, he's a very nice guy. And he's very fair and he pays very well. And he's gone through about 10 different videographers, mostly because they're quality docs. But as like you can't find good talent for like 70 grand and so Florida for some reason. And he's hired some guy on a W2 full time videographer. The guy signs the contract and he comes into work. And the first day of work, he's like, I need more money. I've never in my life signed like an employment agreement. And then after I've signed the employment agreements that I need more money, I'm like, you're stupid. If you want more money, you negotiate before you sign the agreement not after. This is not like a contractor. This is a W2 employee, like full time employee. I know your Canadian W2 is a very merit. Yeah, I say it now because I'm down here. Got to talk American. But I like, it's like you are no more RRSP is down here. I like, it's a 401k. But no, it's like, it's full time employment. It's just full time employment. You can renegotiate that. You get a job, go get a salary job. You don't renegotiate that after. In the first week of your job, like what are you, what's wrong with you? Yeah, wait till you've done some work. Anyway, that's one thing that pisses me off. I don't understand that concept at all. To me, it's just like someone, that's from an entitlement say, I think it's entitlement. But it's entitlement plus stupidity, which is probably the worst kind of person. Yeah, because if you were smart and entitled, you would apply for a job and before you sign the contract, you'd say, actually, I want to make this amount of money. And then the hiring person can be like, yes or no. If they think like, I've negotiated salaries before I've gotten jobs before, it's like fine. But not after, not in the first week. And the other thing that I think you mentioned is really smart is about AI. And people not having to do the work themselves. So I notice this because I use AI in my post-production and some of my content. And AI, I mean, what do a lot of people use for the same thing for writing? A lot of people use it for writing. And AI is getting very good. And if you take, for example, if we record a podcast, or if I even just record into a mic, and then if I've written pieces in the past, and I like that writing style, and I can go into a generative chat tool or an LLM, and I can take the writing style that I like, and I can take the context that I want to speak about. And I say record into a mic so that it's not just a simple one-line prompt, but it's like a topic with context. It's a significant amount of information about a certain topic. I can feed the LLM. If I take that plus the writing style and put it in, I could have some tweets. I could have some posts, like social posts. I could have captions. I could have newsletter. I could have blogs all coming from that particular input. And I can just probably, I can create unlimited content with that input. And I don't really have to do a lot of thinking and creative writing anymore. But when I do that, I notice that I never realized how much writing helped me think, helped me communicate, helped me pull thoughts quicker. And when I don't write for significant period of time, I feel like I'm getting dumber. I don't know how else to describe it. I just feel like I'm getting dumber when I don't write. And I think that writing is just something that stimulates your brain to think in a different way. It's different than just consuming YouTube videos, for example. But I now force myself to actually write my newsletters, because I find that that allows me to aggregate all the thoughts and all the things that I've learned in my life, and then find a way to articulate them and sort of feed them back and make sure that I actually understand them, which I think that you mentioned before, is the real way that you can tell if you've learned something. But if I don't do that, I find that I just get dumber. And I mentioned another example. I interview a lot of people and people that have had success in the process of building right now. And then also people that have sold companies like five or 10 plus years ago. And the people that have sold companies years ago, listen. They're not stupid, obviously. But if you listen to when they were in the process of building a company versus five or 10 years into retirement, they are not as sharp as when they were currently everyday building things and dealing with problems and basically just operating. So the less you do and the more that you outsource or the more you're removed from the work, it impacts your brain. It impacts your cognitive performance. And I think that's something that people have to be careful of, because I'm saying this is, again, you said this very well, I'm a grown-ass adult. I brain is fully formed and I'm feeling and seeing the effects of this. Whereas somebody who is not, you know, their brain is not fully formed if they're already lazy and they're already not taking school seriously. Because again, I talk shit about the traditional education system all the time, but it's better than nothing. It's definitely better than nothing. Like I rather you go through university then not do any sort of, you know, personal development, professional development, education or anything like that. But if you are just outsourcing all of your work and you're learning to AI, I think that you're going to end up with a pretty stupid society. And that's more concerning than anything. If people just get lazy with it. Now there's the argument to say that like, if you use AI, you can, for the first pass at creativity, then you can sort of take it to the, you can sort of refine it and you can do the like the last mile of creative work. But I think that you still have to force yourself to think and do hard work and solve hard problems and not just use AI as this approach. This gets into actually a very scary topic of what could happen potentially with the entire world. And this gets into some like conspiracy theories types. That's okay, let's do it. But what are the conspiracy theories? So I might take a topic that's completely of left field from of this conversation. But if you look at the pyramids, Egypt and how they're one of the wonders of the world. And it's because of how they were built was so unbelievable in terms of putting these massive ton bricks that even with today's technology would be very, very difficult to create. And that could potentially be because they had technology that was completely different, but on a higher scale or unique to what we have today, and then it was completely eradicated somehow. And so that's similar to like where we're at today, where this new generation and even my generation, potentially even your generation, don't have the skill sets of the foundational building blocks to get up to the technology level that we have today. And there's fundamental building blocks that evolution built on top of. So for example, this new generation is just learning about AI, for example. So they're going to know how to use AI better than anybody else. But do they know how to even build the systems that created AI? And then before that, do they even know how to build computers that build the systems that build AI? And then do they know how to build the code that build the systems that all of these things build on top of each other? It's like with farming basically. People don't even know how to farm anymore. And nobody's even like creating their own food. And so for example, if there was a worldwide EMP that wiped out all technology, which like there's technology for EMPs that could do a worldwide EMP there was another war that would be a strategic move by a country. Yeah, what would happen to every single person? Every single person would just be beside themselves not knowing what to do. I mean, podcasting isn't useful in the world where there's no electricity. And I don't know how to farm. I don't, but I think what happens is and you have what's the word I'm looking for. Like the knowledge and wisdom and wealth is then hyper concentrated in a small group of people that understand how, like in farming, people still farm. But you know who makes the most money? Like huge conglomerates. It's not the individual farmer because there's less and less of them. And in technology, well, there's gonna be a very like small select group of people that understand how to code and how to build. And I think that wealth and knowledge is just gonna be more concentrated. And I don't think that's actually a good thing. I would hope that technology allows people, allows people to explore and learn and be proficient whatever, like you mentioned, like not just in using AI, but building AI and building sort of like, building the whole supply chain of AI. But you have to make sure that people aren't lazy for that to happen. Because they have the opportunity to, but are they actually using it? I don't know. I think that their people are ambitious. And I mean, people are not suit. I think that, I don't know. I don't have an answer for that because I know that more people are entrepreneurs than before. And that's sort of like a counterpoint to people being lazy. Why are more people entrepreneurs than ever before? I don't think entrepreneurship is lazy, but then I also see like somebody who is trying to get a nine to five and they're talking about quiet quitting or whatever it is. So then that person is skewing lazy. So why are some people more ambitious and why are some people more lazy? And I don't have an answer for you. I just noticed that there's like extremes on both ends. Maybe because, maybe because people don't want to be, maybe because life is expensive and people don't want to be stuck in the middle. It's kind of like you either want to be ultra rich and wealthy or you just want to live off government handouts and there is no more middle class, which is the sign of like a failing nation. That could also be. But the sign of a third world country is when there's no middle class, you have these two extremes. Yep. I think that's, this is not as important, political block up, but as I said it, I think that's actually very interesting if people like try and stew to one or the other. Cause I don't, I think the middle class is starting to disappear. Middle class now, like what's middle class? Making even like a hundred grand in most cities. What is that after tax? And Canada, you make a hundred grand taxes, like what 50, some percent can't remember what it is now. Same as New York, like you live in New York, you make a hundred grand per year. It's like at your poor. So you have to go one or two directions. Am I going to try and bust my ass for a hundred grand? Cause that's no longer middle class doesn't exist with a hundred grand anymore. Or am I just going to vote for a more socialist country that gives me some handouts. It gives me, you know, like minimum, what's this? Like a guaranteed salary or what? Oh yeah, I can't remember the term now. Yeah, but you know what we're talking, yeah. So am I just going to focus on moving to a country that's just going to pay me just to exist? Or am I going to try and break out and become somebody who's worth tens of millions of dollars because I see it all over Instagram? I don't know what, what prompts somebody to go in one direction versus the others. Probably was taking it back to how they were raised and a lot of the shit they went through the kid. It's also them thinking maybe that they're not capable of it. There's a story about you finding a mentor as a, you were young and there's a Canadian mentor that you had found who I think has passed away now. What was his name is? The Stefinario. The Stefinario. Now as part of that story, you actually said, I think your mom introduced you to him. So going back to, I found this point interesting after understanding your relationship with your mom and maybe this will lead to how you evolved as an entrepreneur and a human. So there was a point where you became close with your mother again to the point where you're spending time with her, you're trying to repair a relationship. Why was that? When my dad got forecasting when I was nine, we started seeing our mom under supervised visits from the age of nine basically until I was 18 where I was able to make my own decisions. And so when I was 18, I saw my mom unsupervised and was basically just, yeah, trying to maintain a relationship. I didn't necessarily need her as a mom anymore. I was 18 and I was living on my own, story of my own business. And so I was more so doing it because I felt it was a duty and felt like it was good to maintain a relationship with your parents somewhat. And so that's kind of what it was. It's like we would go out once a week, maybe a couple of times a week to lunch and just talk about life. And that was one time we were out for lunch and there was the person saying behind us talking about just ripping into a social media team and being like my social media managers, suck, they're horrible. And then my mom overheard that and when he was walking past, she asked, so I heard you were talking about your social media team. He's like, yeah, they're horrible. And then she's like, my sons are actually great at social media. We're spending time with your mom. Your dad got full custody. You try and sort of repair relationship with your mom. And then you get over this like $300,000 hurdle. So like it seems like at that point, like sort of like the trauma in your life is sort of like fixed and managed at least, right? Like it seems like all the shit that you had gone through growing up, it's you sort of found a way to deal with it to a degree. You found a way to deal with it in a unhealthy way. Yeah, sure, sure. So then this is, I mean, after you've paid your family off, how many years ago was that? Yeah, so this kind of gets into what we were talking about previously of like why went to therapy 10 months ago? And this kind of like we're at all meets a point. So I was in a relationship with a girl, I won't name her for two years, two and a half years. And we were living together for pretty much all two and a half years. And this gets into an amazing component of, yeah, how so many people in entrepreneurship all they do is focus on the business side of things and they don't talk about other aspects of their life when those other aspects of their life could not be going well. And so I was in this relationship where I was pretty bonded to this girl like over two and a half years, we only spent three days apart from one another. So this is like significant, like very significant. Yeah, I had problems, huge problems of even thinking about not being with her all the time, even though like being with somebody for that long without the periods of breaks is so unhealthy. And so it got to a point of where I was basically working all of the time, pretty much the same way that I was working back when I was in debt, very, very long hours. Like second I woke up to the second I went to sleep where I wouldn't even go down to eat and this girl would like be bringing me food basically. And I would have like short interactions with still this, still because of anxiety. This was for very similar reasons, but yes, anxiety based, but what it was is the same reasons of wanting to numb things out. So I was wanting to numb myself out to reality and work was always my safe space. And so there was problems within our relationship and instead of addressing them head on and addressing these problems, I would just numb myself out with work. And what it was was there was like in the mindset of being like if I'm able to work to solve my problems at least I'm being productive. That's where it was always going on in my head. But in reality, like what you need to do is you just need to address problems face on. And that will, you just need to live on authentic life. And that will give you all the happiness that you want. And so at the end of two and a half years, this was last year around this time. I realized that this relationship wasn't going in the direction that I wanted to and so I broke things off. Why was it not going in the direction like it was something that you could not fix just by having hard conversations? Yeah, it's a great question because it's like I was of the, I'm of the belief system now that like most things you can get through with difficult conversations if both people are willing to change and if both people have the capacity to change and if both people have the capacity of wanting to have the relationship work. And so like I don't believe in the perfect person anymore. I don't believe that there's like a perfect soulmate out there for you. I believe that those people who are good for you and people who really like you and are willing to grow in life together basically. And so this was a situation where a hard conversation wouldn't do it. It was stuff from the past that I just wasn't able to get over. And that was probably my detriment for a lot of it, your past or her past, her past, yeah. And then it's because it wasn't really in the past it was still in the present and it's hard to explain. But basically, yeah, I won't vote too much into it, but basically it wasn't where a hard conversation could get past. So I decided to end things and it was literally the hardest thing that I've probably ever done in my entire life. Harder than going through $300,000 in debt. I literally was very, I went into a very, very, I don't wanna say depression because like depression is like where you can't really acknowledge where the feelings are coming from, but I was going into a very dark place for a period of time very sad. I was crying every single day. Yeah, I was very, very difficult. And then that's what led me to part of the therapist. Sorry, bro, I didn't know that. That's very shitty because this, I mean, on the surface, like it looked like this was like the perfect match because like not many people can deal with somebody that works that much. That alone is like a special kind of person. Somebody who's like cool with you actually putting that much time into your business. It's just tough. I mean, it's just tough. I do, I agree with you. I think most people have to know it's perfect. There is no perfect match. You have to grow together. I totally believe that. I totally, totally believe that. But that, I mean, you have to know that and find the person that also believes that before you start dating. You can't, not like one person can't discover that as you're dating and then like trying to take the other person long for the light. I didn't just difficult. And the therapy was, but I think at this point, like therapy you mentioned before was like kind of like for a relationship, but I don't know your whole life. I just know a little bit of it, but I feel like there's like a lot that was wrapped into that therapy that is probably gonna make you like feel so much lighter on the other side of it. So much. I think that every single person should get therapy. No matter where you're at, you always believe that? No, just once I got therapy, every single person should get therapy. One thousand percent should be talking with a therapist that they connect with and that is very, very educated for a long period of time. It's like a coach basically. And yeah, I had extreme benefits from it and not just the relationship side of things than many different when I was a kid and pretty much all the way up until I got therapy, I was so confused constantly. I always felt in a state of confusion, not just about emotions, but a lot of things, like things that were going on inside my head, inside my body, I always felt confused that I wasn't able to answer things myself. Emotions was definitely a huge thing. Like I would feel anxious and be like, why am I feeling anxious right now and I wouldn't be able to answer it? I'm feeling stressed, why am I feeling stressed? I'm feeling fearful. Why am I feeling that? I feel like in most people. Yeah, I think that's most people. Yeah, and I watched inside out too. Yeah. And it was very, very good how that movie deconstructed and like put in very simple terms, how people feel emotions. And so that movie really got to me for sure. I feel like after I actually have a question because I've actually tried to find like therapists before and I've had bad luck. I've had bad luck with my personality. Not that I'm like a bad personality, but I'm also somebody that's working like 14 hours, whatever, 12, 14 hours of working on stop basically. And I have a hard time finding somebody that is a therapist who understands that. Like as, like, and for me, it's like so obvious. Like this is like the season of my life right now. I enjoy it, I enjoy my job, dude. I enjoy this so much, so much fun. But I don't mind putting like 14 hours, but if I had a kid, I wouldn't want to be doing this for 14 hours a day. Like I would, there's a different season to my life now. But I've always had a hard time finding somebody who's a therapist, who sort of gets the type A entrepreneur personality. I think it's some, I've never found one. And that's actually busy for frustrating. But you said you found one and was like a one time like first shot good or no? No, definitely not. No, he said to sit out. And so I treated finding therapists like hiring inside the business. And so it's the Alex Hermozia, Laila Hermozia approach that you do like 100 interviews. Like you get 100 resumes. And then you treat the interview process like the learning process. So if therapists is a bit more difficult because people aren't submitting resumes to work for you. So you do have to pay a significant amount of money where you're doing like intro sessions with people. But I just did multiple intro sessions with lots of people, did lots of research on various people. And I had the exact same thing of resigning with somebody that was a business owner. And so I found a therapist that was actually an influencer. And so has a very significant following on social media runs his own business. And then is very expensive, obviously, because he's a business owner that is a therapist but he still gets it, is able to resonate with it heavily. Yeah. What was the thing that made you like him versus anyone else? Like what did he say? What was like the... So I think like a lot of entrepreneurs probably, if therapy, but I think there'll probably a lot of people listening will have the same problem as both of us. That's a very, very good question. What made him really stand out at the beginning? I think what made him really stand out at the beginning is that most therapists, and when you think of therapy, it's them asking you questions. And I didn't need that at the start. I didn't need to be asked a bunch of questions because I was very confused. And I didn't even know how to answer certain things authentically. And to give... If he was asking me, like therapists usually ask your emotions around certain topics and like how you feel around certain things. And these therapists weren't fucking getting like that. I don't know how to feel these things. Like I don't know what I'm feeling right now. Like I can... And then I needed a therapist who is basically giving me variations of answers that I could say yes or no to. And I could tie myself to and help like go through the progress of learning. And so this particular therapist, like when we talk about particular subjects, he is explaining it heavily. So I'm getting to understand it. It's like basically where he's like a teacher instead of just listening to me and asking questions that I could ask myself or that I could go on to chat GPT and ask myself exactly, yeah, you need somebody to actually explain like context around like what. And you said like, and I think this is also true, not just entrepreneurs. You said you have like a hard time understanding like why you feel a certain thing at a certain point. I think most people just kind of go through life being very reactive to their emotions, especially you get entrepreneurs. Like they have, like this mental fortitude that allows them to get through these emotions. But I'd be lying if I said that every day isn't like a fucking roller coaster. But yeah, I can get through it. And I can still be a perform at a high level. But I don't really love the fact that I have to do that even if I'm stressed or anxiety or angry or whatever. And sometimes you don't even know where it's fucking coming from because you have over the past week, I can't even remember all the things that went right and went wrong. And you don't know what was the one thing that triggered that particular emotion, but you're just kind of going through life like whatever. I know that I'm stressed about something, but I don't even have time to think about what that thing is. To have a hundred other things I got to figure out right now. So when you go through this process, talk to me like sort of like the end results. It's been 10 months, been like a couple months. So what's the sort of change like the before and after as like an entrepreneur is like, you have another girlfriend now, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you don't know. No, okay, yeah. So they can't remember. Yeah. So yeah, so they explain like the after. Cause I think again, this is I love this dude. This is so good for entrepreneurs to have a conversation about mental health and therapy and everything. It's very little talked about in this industry. I know that I know it isn't talked about a lot. And I'll tell you a story and then I want you to answer. I had a friend on who again, all it's all entrepreneurs come on the show and he told me a story about one of his friends that had a company that a hundred person company and it was in real estate. And it's great. You get a hundred people like these decides got like tens of millions of dollars in this company. And I think it was something to do with the real estate settlement or something to do with like the lawsuit around how realtor show how I was just and get commissions. I'm not a real estate. So I don't know this. But there's like a whole thing about like NAR and like there was like a lot of suits. Anyway, so it was going to like significantly impact his business. He didn't do anything wrong. But he saw that this was going to impact like how his business functioned and how much he could make and his margins. Basically it would like fundamentally shipped how he did business. Anyways, so like the settlement came out of the lawsuit came out of the result of the lawsuit came out. And then on Friday, he laid off a hundred people. No, and then he killed himself. Oh my God. Yeah, seriously, very serious. He killed himself the day after he laid off his entire company. And in his mind, his whole identity was wrapped up in his business. And the guy who told me the story is a good friend. His name is Colin Campbell. He's a Canadian entrepreneur. He didn't name me the name of his friend. But that's he wasn't in the podcast. I'll tell you the story himself. But yeah, so he killed himself because his identity was so wrapped in his business. And he felt like he was letting so many people down. He could not. You could not deal with it. And this guy has more money than 99% of the world, right? And he killed himself. So it's fucked up. And it wasn't because he did anything wrong. It was because he couldn't manage living on this earth disappointing a hundred people. It's very sad. Now that hits, that's so sad. It did something I work on happily with my therapist where I think a lot of entrepreneurs can relate to this of a feeling of only being loved and getting attention when you have accomplishments in life. And it's something that comes from childhood of where you either only got attention or you only felt love from your parents, whether it's true or not, if feelings are feelings, you felt this way. And so it was a reason you felt this way. And so you felt the only way you could be loved by other people is if you performed. And I had this tremendously of, I felt that I was only worthy of love if I performed and if I was successful, whatever that meant in my eyes of being successful. And in reality, what parents are supposed to do and how you're supposed to feel as a child is that the world loves you and your parents love you, no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter what you are, no matter what you become, and they just love you for being. We're human beings. We're supposed to just be and be loved for being and has nothing to do with what we are tied to. And I'm not fixed by any means, it's been 10 months, but I'm starting to get to a place of where the stuff that I do inside of my work is separate from the person that I am. I experienced something this past weekend which actually threw me off a little bit. And I don't want this to sound like people that are like entrepreneurs is bitching about how they're perceived in the world. But I know it's going to happen to me to actually throw me off. So I was at this event and a great event. But I've noticed that as I do better in my life and my business and I put my name out there more, people also start to look at you as a little bit of a commodity. And what I mean by that is, so I went on stage a couple of times and spoke and taught whatever. Then after the session, people would come up and ask a very tactical advice for their business. And like I have this problem, how do I solve it? And then like after I answered those questions, like nobody talked to me. And I'm just sitting there. Like nobody go on that like a casual conversation and just like see what I was like life, like what's going on. It was like everybody was like, how do I extract information from this like little walking business and psychopedia. And it was like kind of like shitty. I'm not gonna lie. I was like it threw me off. It actually really threw me off. Because I haven't just, and I think the reason why I noticed it is because I was hanging out all day. And again, like I don't mind this. I love teaching people, but I haven't really hung out all day at a conference in a long time. Usually like when you go to speak, you go, you speak, you leave usually. And this, it was really just like, because I was there all day that I noticed it after about, you know, spoke like the whole, like a lot of the room. It wasn't like a huge session, like about like 30 people asked me questions. And then after they asked me questions, it's like, we don't need Scott anymore. It was just interesting. Ship, man. It was just really dark. No, it was just like, and I was laughing. And it was like, so this is what celebrities feel like, like after they take, it was like actually, like after a couple of people like took a picture with me. And then I was like trying to talk and they're like, then I'm busy. But that can reinforce the belief system. I know it can reinforce a belief system. And again, it's just, it's hard to, it's hard to like explain. Because I'm like, oh, like, oh, you're cool. Someone took the picture with you. Why are you bitching about that? And it's not that. It's because at the end of the day, like sometimes like, you still just want to like have like casual conversation and not feel like like somebody's just throwing a picture of you because they like your, your podcast or like your speech, or that you gave them like a great piece of business advice. And they're like, okay, I'm done with that guy. No, just shitty. It was just weird. It was a very fucking weird feeling. Because usually if you've experienced that before, never, never experienced that because I've only really started speaking at conferences in the past like year and a half. And before that, the podcast wasn't big. I didn't get like recognized ever. So this was like a different feeling for me. Or people recognized me from the show. And then they, they wanted like a very tactical like thing from me as opposed to me just going to a conference as like an attendee. And we just being like part of like the mass of people just going to the conference. Very different dynamic. It's very, very strange. It was weird. It was fucking weird, dude. I'm not gonna lie. It was very straight. It felt like you were super pigeonholed into like a very specific kind of person. And because that's how people saw you, they wouldn't see you as anything else. I don't know, it was strange. But I don't know if you've ever experienced that at all, but I guess if people like, I've experienced the aspects of that. And it's similar to what we're talking about. That's why you went into that. Yeah, because like growing up, I didn't feel the pressure that you did about performance. I don't think. I may be a little bit from my dad, but not really. Not really. But now I'm feeling it. And I'll tell you something. Like when you have a, when you have a, so podcast is something that everybody wants to get on. It's, it's very, it's very interesting to understand like who wants to like talk to you, because they like you versus who wants to talk to you, just because they want to eventually get on your show. And I'm assuming it's the same with people like again, the people that I know that are worth like hundreds and millions of dollars. I don't even fucking know how they make new friends. It would be so stressful to me to make new friends because you don't know who's genuine. You have no idea who's genuine. Like I don't know how, I don't, I don't have a playbook on how to do that. I'm sure if I did this for the next 30 years, I'd figure it out, but I don't have a playbook on if you have like achieved some success, how to have like a filtering system as to who's full of shit and who's not. I don't think there is a filtering system with that. Man, but speaking about friends, I, this is something I work on happily with my therapist where like I, I looked at my life and I realized that all throughout my life, I never really had any like real like best friends besides my two brothers and in family, it doesn't really matter, but it doesn't necessarily count. And that's another issue. You want to talk about like problems with technology? That's a big problem for sure. Yeah, making genuine connections with people. That's a huge problem. Do you, like, I mean, you work with your brothers and you fuck it, but you, you left the US to go to Puerto Rico. Like you like, you like, you asked me before, like would you ever think about Puerto Rico? I don't want to like give up on like building like a great community and network and, and friends and like, yeah, there's like, there's tactical reasons for a show why I want to be 10 minutes from Miami Airport. But at the same time, like, there's a lot of ways you can make money in this world. If I wasn't doing it with this podcast, I'm sure I could figure out another business to have in the past, right? But I don't know if I want to go like live, like in some remote part of the world for like tax reasons. You know, I feel like isolated and shit. Like how do you, like how do you manage it? I mean, like you have your family. I would love my brother to work with me. Yeah, trust. I would love my brother. Like I'm, he doesn't know yet, but he's got, he's in law school right now. He's very useful. I have a brand new work with me. But no, eventually he will. But like, I think that's why families are great. But yeah, we have some friends, but it's like, the friends that I have actually are people that don't need me for whatever reason. They've had success. They've made their money. They, they, it's not like there's like, no, they don't need anything from me. I think that's the best kind of friendship. Because when you're as an adult, I think people, especially in Miami, dude, a lot of people want something from you. That's just not, it's not, it's like hiring, like filtered through all the bullshit. Man, it is something about Puerto Rico. Like it, it's just me and my brothers that then also like one of our employees, well, two of our employees who are out there in the same area, they're employees. Yeah. Well, you can be closer to that. Close to that, at the end of the day, it's still like a business relationship. It's definitely more of a business relationship. But we saw Puerto Rico as temporary play. Yeah, like not necessarily, you know, raising a family on Puerto Rico. And so yeah, maybe always having a home base out there and then having other homes outside. But yeah, definitely like, hopefully before I get to the thirties that I get a place that doesn't think I hear so young. Get a place to the thirt, get a place to the states and meet people. But you asked a question about therapy. I want to make sure that I don't want to talk about it. So I got into my own shit and like that. This is what happens when you start opening up. Like now I have all this like shit that I got to get off my to do therapist. Yeah. Hey, go ahead. Go ahead. It's good. I'm glad you shared that. Well, because you asked a question about therapy in terms of like what were the benefits? Or like, wait, who are you? Who are you after there? I think, and I think this is like from a point of view. Like obviously, I just realized it. Like sometimes if you if you are any type of whatever success is successful, it starts to become a little bit lonely. And I just like experienced it like in the past 48 hours. So to some degree, not significant, but like a little bit. So what would be the result of like working through some of your shit? Like you spoke to a therapist past 10 months. Like who's like Luke after the top things that I've experienced from therapy would be one, just having more clarity of my emotions in general. And so when I feel something, I'm usually able to attribute to something. If I feel not worthy, if I feel anxious, I'm usually able to tie it back to even a thought of childhood where it's not necessarily truly myself. And it gives me a lot of relief where it's like, I don't have fixed this inside of my head. And I know how I deal with this. And it's normal, but I'm feeling this way, basically. The second one is inside of a relationship. It communicating just completely authentically. If I feel a certain type of way, there's a reason why I'm feeling that way. And if I'm trying to be in relationship with somebody else, I need to just articulate why I'm feeling that way and work through it with that other person, like with my significant other. And I'm not perfect by any means where I'm communicating. I'm still absolutely horrible at it. The thing that I've gone past though is that when I feel a certain type of way, I communicate it. I need to work on how I communicate that way better. What are you here? So you communicate it, but like the way you're doing it could be rough or like, Ray, I communicate is very rough. Yeah, very, very rough, but at least I'm communicating. So I'm making progress. But I'm going to work on that because it makes the other person feel a certain type of way. Obviously, when you communicate and it makes them feel not good enough, makes them feel unworthy. And you don't want somebody that you love to feel that way. And so those are definitely the two biggest things from therapy that I've experienced. How has it helped? I mean, now you look at like your life, run a great business. You have a girlfriend. How is it just helped the dynamic between like work and life? And not like I don't like the term work life balance because everything is integrated when you're building something. There is no cut off point for work. But how is it sort of helped the the health of the relationship compare it? And how does the health of relationship help with work and all of that? Well, it hasn't just helped in my relationship with like the girl that I'm with, but also helped with my relationship with my brothers, where my brothers have definitely had an aspect of being trauma bonded together with what we went through within our childhood. And so we had very hard time being independent of one another. And so this is something we're actively working on right now because we're all getting older. Like my older brother is turning 28. And so we're going to be starting families like within the next five years, probably all of us. And so it's a good idea for us to be independent of one another even though we run a business together. Just because it makes it easier for families and it's not healthy for people of our age to be completely depending on one another. So things like when we traveled, we always like had to travel together. We shared bank accounts with everything. The money situation between us wasn't fully transparent. There was tons of things that were going to depend on like that could be like, it's so wild how like everything that it's like could be a negative also could be a positive because that trust you have in your brothers for business is phenomenal. Well, you can't get that you're not going to fucking share a bank account with an employee. You can't get that level of trust anyone else. But now you're realizing like, okay, so like like there's some things that are great. Some things that have to be fixed. There are pros in cons about everything, honestly, everything. And like this gets into a deeper stuff of like, like ultimately what is the meaning of life and stuff, but it's like, I think it's just a constant progression of working towards being a better version of yourself. I want your take on this. Why do we have such shitty male role models? And why do all of them focus on kind of, I don't know how to describe it. It's like, let's like look at tape and the exact, yeah, yeah, tape and the example of like, yeah. Current, in my opinion, not great male role model. It's kind of like he focuses on the end result of being a better man. But the process, like I find that there's no, there's no steps. It's almost just like, be better. Like, like snap your fingers and be better. And I'm not even be better because that's really not his message. But he's like, be stronger, be more powerful, make more money, whatever it is, be in better shape. But I feel like the, the average male role model now is like, just painting this picture of what a man should be. And they're not actually helping men get there. And I don't really understand why that is because when you talk about your journey, and you talk about going through therapy and some people, I think some, I think everybody could at some point talk to somebody, whether or not it's like a therapist or they have like, network around them of people that are helping them go through shit. And you talk about like fixing yourselves. You operate better in your business and your relationship. And you want to get married enough kids. You want to fix like relation with your family. Like that to me is like a healthy version of a man going through life and figuring their shit out. I don't see a lot of people having these conversations. And, and I don't see a lot of male role models, like sort of like preaching this stuff. And I'm just curious if you think you have an idea as to why that is. Because a couple reasons, there's the reason of why these role models are preaching the things that they are. Like, agitating stuff. And then those are the reason why people are so attracted to listening to that. So I think all these people, like if you look at agitate, dambell zeroion, any of these like massive like male role models, so to speak, that are celebrities, influencers, and have attracted a huge audience. I think they do it from a place that that's very, very ego-fueled for the most part, extremely ego-fueled. And their ego comes out when they're explain everything. I can experience that firsthand. Like, I felt that I wasn't good enough and felt that I was only good if I was seen as successful in other people's eyes, only worthy of love and attention, if I was seen as successful in other people's eyes. And so that's when I got my first piece of success. I bought a Lamborghini. And even though it was a horrible purchase, horrible business decision, horrible decision for like my future, you know, wealth. I did it from the standpoint of I wanted people to look at me when I was driving through the city. I wanted people to look at me and stare at me. It'd be like, wow, that guy's cool. And have that attention that I felt like I was in desperation of. And I think that's a standpoint where these people come from. In terms of why they don't, they don't give you a playbook for it either. Yeah. They just talk about the end result. Like a dambell's there and he's like, oh, just get jacked and then like you'll have like a whole bunch of like OF models on your yacht. Like there's no, there's not like, there's not even telling people how to get there. It's just like, I'm the ideal figure it out, which is stupid. First of all, the shitty ideal that it's still stupid. Horrible ideal. I know. And he's full of now. He's going back on it. He's talking about monogamy. Dambell's hearing is literally explained. He's like with all the word stupid as shit, like honestly. But he's saying with all the women that I've sucked with thousands of different women, I actually think that monogamy is the answer. So silly. Well, of course it is. Yeah, I know, because nobody wants to feel like empty their whole life with no actual legipse of matter. Yeah. You want to be building something, building something with purpose with one individual and the person who you choose, as like your relationship and your significant others, the biggest decision you have in your entire life. And these people who cheat and are with so many different women, they're just trying to fill the empty void inside of them. And men who cheat, I've been around lots of men who cheat. And I always ask them, I'm like, why do you cheat? And like, how do you cheat? Like, how is it even possible inside of your conscious and stuff? And they literally just burry down the feelings and they justify it within their head. Like the woman made them feel a certain type of way and it justifies why that they're able to cheat and stuff. But going into like why Andrew Tade and Dambell's hearing have been able to get so big, it's because they sell the dream outcome. They're great sales people at the end of the day. And so when you look at selling, like this Valks or Mosey approach is that in the selling, you're selling the vacation. You're not selling the destination to getting there. And that's exactly what these people are doing. They're just selling this dream vision of this fantasy land. What not that I want to like always just do the cliche, like take a less than that of like Tade's playbook, but you're in social, you know social very well. Your brother is phenomenal. Your brother like studies a shit every single day too. You think, yeah, I have no, does he like read like documentation on like different social platforms? Like trying like reverse ending your algorithms and shit like that? No, but he, he mainly, he watches a lot of content. Yeah, the question I had was like, I mean, are there, are there lessons that we can learn from like their content? From Andrew Tade and stuff? Well, of course. There's infinite lessons that like like things that are not like rage Bay, that the average person could like try and understand how to use that in their own content. Well, Andrew Tade's approach was very, very unique. That's why it blew up. So there's three, there's three reasons why any piece of content goes viral, like in terms of topics that things go on. So if you're posting on social media, the piece of content either has to be entertaining, educational or inspirational. Those are the three topics of any single piece of social media content. And the ones that go the most viral have a combination of all three of some sort. And so that's what Andrew Tade was giving, as he was giving the inspirational, talking about like this dream outcome for people to go to. It was entertaining because he's a, he's actually very funny, it is hilarious. And then it's somewhat educational because even though if it's not actually educational, where he fabricates a lot of data and says a bunch of, you know, a lot of stuff that's completely fake in terms of statistics and stuff, then it comes across as educational. So a water-pissed content hits all three pillars. And so that's basically the biggest thing that could be taken away from his content. That's why, so that's why it keeps going viral. So if you, but that's really the framework that people have to learn from. Yeah. Okay, cool. The last thing that I thought would be interesting is because it's sort of like tying like all, you so all the things you've learned over your life right back to business and things, we're trying to figure out how to grow our business, make money, all that shit. Do you find that like having a steady relationship is helpful to you, like as a business person, as a business owner? For sure. 1,000%. Yeah, having a steady relationship keeps you grounded. Keeps you grounded in a, it a place where business is so much uncertainty, basically, on a day to day basis, even if you're doing well, there's so much uncertainty. That's basically what you're accepting with entrepreneurship is all of the unknowns that comes with it. And so having a relationship that's committed and certain is a very freeing feeling. Also just the energy that you're playing into something is the same thing as a business that, you know, having a focus on one business in one specific industry allows you to catapult way faster than having your focus spread across multiple businesses, have your focus on one woman, instead of many different women, allows you to just progress in that relationship and progressing yourself way better. What would be one more, it could be one more thing you'd like to teach to the audience or one more like belief that you have, that you think that, you know, the audience gets wrong. Like a very commonly, like a belief is commonly held, do you think it's incorrect? To be a business marketing life doesn't matter. Yeah. Well, you're fun to chat with, so yeah, I think it, you can probably do this all day, yeah, literally. Literally, this is a cliche and it said all the time, but if you can truly instill this of you only lose if you quit, like truly, truly instill it, like it's such a relieving and peaceful feeling. Like I've genuinely instilled this, that you only lose if you quit. And I never quit. I never have and I never will quit. And so it's literally impossible for me to lose. And it really is, like, and over the course of business, like if you were literally doing business every single day, the skill sets that you were building inside of business become invaluable. Skill sets that you build in life are the one thing that can't ever be taken from you. If you get thrown in jail, if you get deported, if you get taxed for your entire life, if you go bankrupt, your skill sets are still there. And so people who are going into business now, I think should have a focal point of what are the most high-value skill sets that I can learn? They should detach from any monetary value that they should do and how big that they want to grow, how much money that they want to make. And literally just look at what are the most high-value skill sets I can learn over the next five to 10 years and it's impossible for you to lose. I think about, literally, it's impossible for our company to fail. Now, it would be impossible. We would have to do so many crazy things for it to fail. Well, but you could also, but for to define failure, that means that you've stopped. Exactly, yeah, for sure, 100%. But say we did stop in the business and everything got completely shut down to business. The skill sets that I have right now that I've built purely from building the business, I could go to any single company with my resume and my skill sets and get hired in seconds. I know exactly how to be the best interviewee to get hired inside of a company. I could get hired for a six-figure job in two seconds easily. And that's just from the skill sets. And it's a very relieving and peaceful feeling, knowing that that can't be taken away. You know what you've done, which a lot of people have trouble with, is you trust yourself. And it sounds so easy to say, but I think that so many people have problems trusting themselves. The people that are successful, that do take the most risk, they trust themselves explicitly. Like there's zero, there's zero lack of almost like to a point of delusion. Like I'll figure it the fuck out. It doesn't matter what happens, I'll figure it out. But that's what attitude you have to have because we don't trust yourself and you take zero risk. But that, like I've learned all these skills and I can go get a six-figure job. I can start a new business. Who are you trusting to do that? It's you. And I think that's a powerful thing. I made an entire 15-minute YouTube video just on confidence and how confidence is having trust in yourself and then having trust in yourself is staying true to your word and your own commitment and you build trust in yourself because you build trust in others by them saying certain things and following through with it. And then as soon as they say something that doesn't match up or that they lie about, that trust gets broken. Same thing that happens in your own head where if you say something that you're going to do something, if you say you're going to go to the gym, if you say you're going to work on your business today and you don't do it, that trust that you've been building up for months gets broken because you've created that belief system that you don't trust yourself anymore. If people can take one thing away from like all the lessons that you've learned over your life, your journey, you know, the harder time with your family, the therapy, the wins and the losses in the business, what would be outside of just being confident, being yourself, being authentic? What would be like one last lesson that you want to leave people with? And I usually phrase it, I didn't phrase it this way because you're already young as hell. But I usually phrase it and saying like what would be one lesson you tell your younger self for your 20-year-old self. But just one lesson that you think is very useful. Man, I don't want to say this because it's shit that Andrew Tate says, but there is a component of working out that I think is a massive benefit. It's not a bad lesson. Working out is a massive benefit to every single area of life. I started working out just by chance because my brother started working at high school. So I started working out in grade nine and I've been working out ever since. And so, weight training. And so the benefits that I had from working on a consistent basis was I ate healthier because I didn't want to work out and then boost that. I was extremely dedicated. I was doing something very difficult other than business or other than anything in my personal life. I was staying committed to something. I was getting more confident because I was working better. I was feeling better because just when you work on a consistent basis you feel better. I think that any single person who are where they're at, whether they're successful, whether they're not successful, whether they're young, should just start working out and be the first stepping stones to increase in their quality of life. I think it's very, very smart advice. I mean, I'm kind of like you. I've been lifting, I used to play a lot of hockey, but I've been lifting for forever. And it's probably like the one thing. It's probably the one thing that has outside of having like a really supported better half a partner. That's the other thing that sort of like saved my mental health is when shit doesn't go right, like going to the gym and lifting. Outside of all the derivative, outside of all the other habits that come with like eating right and what not and getting good sleep and making sure that you're healthy and not getting sick and right self-umentation. Those are all good things. But outside of that is like the act of beating yourself up in the gym is like the most therapeutic thing that most people can ever go. And on a biological level, there's a lot of benefits that will help you overcome stress and anxiety. But I think that that's outside of therapy. I think that that's probably one of the most useful things that many people to do. It's also one thing that's very controllable. Like the thing like of sleep. Sometimes people have insomnia and sometimes people can't control that. Working out every single day on a consistent basis, you can control every single person and you can find 30 minutes to an hour to work on a consistent basis. I actually started doing a friend of mine, Chris Cavillini. I work out with him whenever I go to Tampa Bay and he runs a nutrition company and he showed me a different style of workout for entrepreneurs. That's very, very quick. And he was explaining, it was hilarious. He was like the average person goes to the gym. That goes to the gym and works out. The average person does the set structure of basically where they do three sets rest in between. This is what I said. And so he basically broke it down. And he's like, okay, well, let's break down the average person that goes to the gym. So they do three sets of an exercise and then how many different exercises do they do? Four to five in the gym. So they do three sets of, say, let's say 30 seconds of time under tension for each one of those. So you do three times five, which is 15. So 15 different exercises, three sets of each, 15. And then 30 seconds for each one of those, 15. You're in the gym for 45 to 60 minutes on that. And your time under tension is only seven minutes and 50 seconds. Yeah, seven minutes and 30 seconds. And I was like, oh, wow. And so his workouts are basically where you're doing a combination of exercises where it's a form of like hit training basically like supersetting or more than that. Huge supersets basically. And you're super saying the entire time and you're only taking breaks in between a superset of five different exercises. And so you're working out for about 22 minutes and your time under tension is about 18 minutes. And so you're getting two to three times more than the average person. That is, like does it work? Yeah, yeah. The shirt doesn't really show it, but I'm pretty shredded for like, eh. No, but it like you like compared to traditional bodybuilding for it, it works. For sure. It depends which, well, she was like, I'm not trying to be a bodybuilder. She's trying to say like, I want to like look good. Yeah, like in diet plays a huge part of that. But yeah. Huge thing about working out is like, what are your goals with it? Like those, you're a long, this is a diet too. Are you going for longevity? Are you going for looking as aesthetic as possible? Are you going for strength training? And so you have to assess like your goals so that you know the direction you want to go. For me, I'm trying to be as healthy as possible. I want to live the absolute longest and then I'm trying to be aesthetic. The last thing I want is to be fat. Like the worst thing that you can possibly be is like a billionaire that's fat. What do you, what's the, like the diet? The, like is it like hit training? So you're not doing low carb? Yeah, I do, do high protein diet and then I medium carbs. The medium fat. Yeah, I don't count my calories at all, but I probably hit somewhere around like 3,000 to 3,500 calories. And then yeah, that's smart. I mean, the main thing is just zero for diet, zero processed food, zero. Like as minimal amount as possible. Like I will only have it as like a dessert on occasion where like I would rather just have homemade ice cream for example, if I'm going to do a dessert. But if you have zero processed food, I think if you look back at videos in the 1900s, people weren't fat like they are today. Not yeah, but even like, even like like 1950, 1960, 1970. I was talking to a dude the other day and he's like, what was like the, the stereotypical American meal in like the 1950s? It's like a diner with like cheeseburger and milkshake. Yet no one's fat. Yeah, but if we, cheeseburgers and milkshakes, now everyone's fat is shit. Yep, so why is that? So all this is all the garbage and everyone says it. Like when I go to Europe, like I don't even work out and I lose weight. Dude, that's so concerning. That's actually so concerning. So first of all, I'm annoyed because you're telling me I can eat like whatever the fuck I want. If it wasn't processed, like it still like keep it off, I wouldn't get fat. But also what just because the US is like so bad at monitoring all these additives into your food, all this garbage that now you're just putting on weight. Like eating the same amount of calories as somebody did, like you know, 40 years ago. Same type of food now you're just turning obese. That's horrible. That's absolutely horrible. Well, and then you have these influencers like Logan Paul, KSI and Mr. Beast coming up with lunchies. Yeah, and they're just completely processed food, just going for the amount of money that they're making. But I don't know why they can't put out good food. I mean, even prime is garbage, not prime. Yeah, prime hydrant. Yeah, prime. Yeah, prime is just sugar. It's so bad. Garbage, it says that has coconut water in it when it's less than 10% coconut water. There's a million chemicals in it. It's horrible for kids that are taking that down. That is disgusting. I have so much influence too. Yep, that's what's shitty. And they're using that influence for that. Like when I raise kids, I'm going to be raising them on all organic foods, all whole foods. It's going to be dull, then even baby food is blocked. You know, like I rather they not do job. Like there's so many different kinds of products that you can launch. That's what's annoying. Like there's like with their influence, they could launch any product they ever wanted. Why are they doing shitty food? Why don't you like anything? Anything support any product. Make your money. Like, yo, take, like make your bag. I don't give a shit. There's like, this is like why was shitty food? I don't know. I don't know, I don't want to answer. I don't want to do that. I guess because maybe like this is what they're getting advised to do or they feel like there's like a market for it or whatever. Man, when I was at the aesthetic conference this weekend, he was, there's this one speaker that was super sick. He was like carnivoreally astile, like talking about like all of the whole foods, like red meat, liver, like all this important things. And then he runs a clinic of himself. And he said when people come into his clinic, he would ask them a very simple question that got them to tear up basically. And these people who are coming to his clinic are usually pretty unhealthy or they have problems with their body or wellness. And he just asked him a question. He's like, what's the last time you taking off your shoes, taking off your socks and just walked in the grass? And it's crazy because like even me when I think about, I intentionally walk in the grass and I still only do it like once a week. I don't know how to do it. I know it's crazy to do it. I mean, like the layout of this of this property, I literally have to walk in grass to get to this studio but I don't take off my shoes, right? And you're not getting it by, you're not getting the grounding benefits by through your shoes. No. And as kids, you're frolicking through the grass all the time and you don't give a shit. Yeah. And now I mean, people, like when I was living in a condo and I worked from home, there'd be like days where I wouldn't see sunlight. Well, yeah, it's not good. But this is like the environment that a lot of people live in. First of all, like if you don't force yourself and I still would go to the gym and even going to the gym, I threw a condo, you didn't actually have to go outside. Yeah, you get in your gym. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Scary man. It is. It's interesting though, because like life expectancy is getting longer but I don't think quality of life for a lot of people is increasing. So the US health system is very reactive, not proactive. So they're keeping people alive. Great, but I don't think that people are thriving. I think that people are their mental clarity, they're foggy. I think that testosterone is decreasing and fertility is increasing. Like all these things are showing that people are not actually, they're living, they're not healthy. They're not living healthy. We found a way to keep people alive that aren't that healthy. So I think that it's not just about keeping people alive, but like how do we keep people alive and healthy and thriving and feeling good and not like feeling like shit every day, which is not normal, but I think people accept it as normal. And I'm not a doctor, but I like even like you go to the gym, I go to the gym, I already feel like we're like light years ahead of society. Like every time like my mom, she tries to go to the gym, God bless her. I think she does a little bit more now. But I mean, every time I go, she's like you still working out, I'm like, yeah, like four times better. And she like goes on and off. And she's like like periods where she goes and she doesn't. And even that's better than most. Yeah, but I mean, people don't pay attention on what they put into their body. They don't pay, they don't, they don't lift it. The health industry is just as fragmented as like the fucking online guru entrepreneur industry. Like I was trying to figure out which one's worse. Like health gurus on Instagram or like entrepreneurs on Instagram and Lamborghinis. And I really don't know which one is worse because they're both like I'm the only person you should listen to. You should listen to no one else. Everyone else is wrong. I'm right. Like the internet created all these opportunities for information, but also disinformation and incorrect information and fragmented information. And it's like tribal ideology around different ideas. And I think that it's just, I think the average person just shuts off and it's just confused and it's just overwhelmed. And I'm getting this, I'm getting five ideas on how to build a business from all these click funnel gurus. And I'm getting five ideas on how to diet from all these health and wellness influence on Instagram. And I don't know what to do. So you know what? I'm not going to do anything. And that's also not useful. The easiest way to diet besides eliminating all process foods because that's a limiting all process foods is for every single person. But outside of that, just listening to your body on what to eat. Is our bodies are so smart. A great example is my girlfriend was having a lot of stomach problem and wanted to go see like a lot of different specialists and spend a lot of money for it. And every single time after she would eat for the most part, her stomach would hurt. And a lot of women faced a lot of these issues meant to, but primarily women. And she ended up just wanting to listen to her body. And she realized that there was a correlation whenever she ate red meat that her stomach had a problem. It was because she was vegetarian for a time, a long period of time where she wasn't eating red meat. And then she integrated meat back into her body. But what happens is it needs very hard to digest on your body. And so you need to have enzymes in it. I eat so much meat, but I always have eaten meat. I never really stopped. I stopped for a period of two months to try vegan horrible. But basically you have enzymes in your body to break it down. And so she didn't have those enzymes or as many enzymes as it was. And that's just one component of it. And so once she cut that out, all of her problems went away. Is there a way to reintroduce enzymes that you can eat me? That's something I don't know, but that's a huge thing. But that's just an aspect of how you can just listen to your body. And that's how people know that they're lactose intolerant. Like they drink dairy and it's just horrible. But they don't do that with other aspects. Like if people really are conscious about every single thing that they eat, they can analyze it. Like when I eat fast food, I feel like shit. If I ever eat, I have a name fast food over a year. But when I did, I felt like shit afterwards. When I eat a bag of chips, unless it's just like potato, salt, and avocado oil type thing, I feel like shit. Where could people connect with you then? Yeah, best place is Instagram at Luke Lins. If people want to work with you, what are they, where should they go? Should they go to your IK website? Or yeah, best place, highkeyagency.com, or just send me a DM on Instagram, usually a response. Awesome dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming on to Baking Road.