Episode 082 Part 1 – Dean Soto

Dean Soto  0:00  

And so for me, what powers everything is really being systematically lazy. And it’s funny because I was just like you I would always see, I would see things. I’d say, “Well, why don’t you see that.” But what I do is, I try to help people to see two things. One is, is there a system that can be created where you never have to do it again? Or are there things that you’re doing right now that literally you can stop? Like, literally stop doing, take these things out and then either put something in its place or don’t even do it at all and just change this one thing. So it’s a lazy way of getting out from under the thumb of the whole idea of I’m always, I have to do this because this is the way we’ve always done it.

 

Richard Matthews  0:50  

…

 

My name is Richard Matthews and I am live on the line today with Dean Soto. Who is one of my favorite people in the world? Dean, are you there on the line?

 

Dean Soto  2:03  

I am, Richard. I am.

 

Richard Matthews  2:05  

Awesome. So glad to have you here today. For those of you don’t know, Dean. Dean is near and dear to my heart because he has really helped grow my business a lot in the last couple of years. So he is known for a couple of things. He is the founder or co-founder of, I believe, Prosulum dot com, which works on helping people find virtual assistants. He actually helped me find my first virtual assistant and really changed my business. And he is the host of another podcast called Five Minutes to Freedom, which if you haven’t listened to, I highly suggest you stick it on there because, again, it’s changed my business a lot. So I’m super excited to have you here today. Dean to start off with, why don’t you tell me what it is you’re known for. Now, why is your business? Like? What is it that you actually provide to the market?

 

Dean Soto  2:51  

So good to be on a man. It’s nice chatting with you and being with you. We have to go have lunch again over at the Lazy Dog –  a few months ago. So what am I known for? So, for over a decade, I’ve been outsourcing and one of the major problems that I had personally, was that whenever I would find someone, you can go to Upwork at the time was Elance, and oDesk, and all that other stuff. And, but whenever you would go to Upwork, or onlinejobs.ph, or all these different places, I’d find these people I go and hire these people. And they looked good on paper, they sounded great on Skype, everything was great. And I would start working with them and three months in six months and they would either leave or they would not be what I expected. And it was just this constant over and over and over again, where I was stuck. Training and training and training and spending hours and hours and hours and hours training. And I saw that I wasn’t the only one doing this. This when it came to hiring, whether it was somebody overseas or here in the States, and so I’m like, “There has to be a better way.” I ended up stumbling upon a number of things. But one thing, in particular, was this book by a guy named Sam Carpenter called Work The System. And, Work The System is a free book that you get from his site. And I read it. I’m like, holy crap, this is awesome. It’s all about documenting the process is all about being – It’s step-by-step as possible with these processes. And to where you could essentially have anyone off the street. Do what you’re doing and clone yourself. And I’m like, “This is awesome. I’m gonna do this. Now. I can have time with my family. I can do all this.” 

 

I can offload all this awesome stuff to people overseas or even people over here. And I realized when I did my first process that it freakin’ sucks writing all that stuff out. One process literally took me about eight hours. And it was something that in my head was super simple, but actually writing it out detailed enough for somebody else to take it was really tough. And when that happened I realized crap, that sucks. But the other cool thing about it was, it actually worked. I spent eight hours and it was horrible. But when I gave it to it was a guy named Josh Woodward at the time, he actually was doing my podcast, and I outsource my entire podcast to this guy. And I was like, “This is so cool.” But I never want to do that for that again. So I ended up creating this system with people overseas that we train them to create from the video. Because video you can spend five minutes 10 minutes that’s why you have the Freedom in Five Minutes Podcast. It’s from video, you as a business owner only spending five minutes at a time. But that other person is documenting step-by-step what you just showed them and now that’s documented they can clone you. So,  so now I teach business owners I get business owners set up which with what we call Virtual Systems architects, which are VAs with superpowers that are able to take your five-minute video, document it and then do it and get them hooked up and completely transform their business so that they can scale fast as possible.

 

Richard Matthews  6:50  

Absolutely. And it’s really a powerful thing too. Because you know, I hired a Virtual Systems Architect from Dean and he’s been on my team now for we just had our first year anniversary a couple of months ago. And he’s been fantastic. And we have over the course of the last year documented somewhere close to 300 processes for our business, and my clients, businesses and other things and actually built an entire system for our podcasts that allowed us to actually turn it into a service for other people we’ve started going to market with that. So we actually have the Push Button Podcast service and we can actually handle the whole process for someone you know, from the moment they hit Done record all the way through editing their stuff. Creating their graphics, creating all the written assets, doing all the research, doing all the publishing and announcing everything from one step from beginning to end. We can take it off of someone’s plate, and I don’t do any of it because my team does all of it and we can scale it as well because all this stuff is documented really well. And it’s super cool.

 

Dean Soto  7:58  

I’m all tingly man. I love it like and so how long do you think that specific thing took you?

 

Richard Matthews  8:09  

Just for Push Button Podcasts? 

 

Dean Soto  8:11  

Yes. 

 

Richard Matthews  8:13  

So it probably took us the better part of eight months.

 

Dean Soto  8:17  

No, how long? How many hours did it take you to document all that? 

 

Richard Matthews  8:22  

So to me personally, to document it. A lot of it was trial and error on our part trying to figure out what we needed to do but – So the sort of the backstory for The Hero Show actually is that I started this in 2015. And I recorded eight episodes. And then, I started trying to process those episodes and get them to market like actually publish them. And it was about eight hours of work per episode to take an hour-long episode and get it to market. And I just, you know, I didn’t have the time to do that because I also needed to eat like I needed to pay the bills. So, as much as I loved the concept of this show and what we’re doing, I had to shelve it. 

 

And I brought Mark on from Prosulum.com. And our first goal was I wanted to figure out how to get The Hero Show published. So we started looking at all the different things, it’s like, Okay, what are the pieces that actually need to happen and like, the system didn’t exist. So it was like, our first couple of tries at it weren’t that great. And over the course of about eight months, it was like, okay, we know exactly what needs to happen, we have to have editing needs to happen. And then we need to have graphics that are created. And then these things need to be created. And then we can start doing the publishing and then we can do the announcement posts, blah, blah, blah. So like it sort of turned into something. But the actual processes are probably if you take out all of the experimentation and inventing a new system, the actual documentation of it’s probably maybe 10 or 15 hours worth of processes, 

 

That we’ve documented and what’s cool about that. Is  something that we do one time, and then we can update them as we improve our systems. And I have an entire back end database of each step of the process. So if I need to hire a new video editor, we hire new video and it’s ready to go. If we need to hire a new writer, we hire a new writer, it’s ready to go when we have templates, and we have everything all in there. And all the way down to like, we’ve documented our process for documenting processes. So like we’ve hired a second person who’s doing process documentation for us, and I love it. So we use those processes a lot. And it’s been really, really cool. So like to your point, I love the idea of  their VAs with superpowers because it fits in well with our story here on The Hero Show. But it’s a huge benefit to businesses.

 

Dean Soto  10:52  

I love it, man. I love it.

 

Richard Matthews  10:54  

It gets even better too because I’ve actually missed something. I think we’re actually chatting on the side. With your business partner a bit about put together a whole language for describing a system so systems workflows and processes and steps and like how you actually put them together and how, and when you should use automation and when you shouldn’t, and like where the deciding rules are and how you like front load decisions so that you can hand work off to two VAs without having them have to stop for decision and stuff like that. So it’s we’re working on writing our own book and putting our own training course together on systems development. So a lot of it thanks to your influence on my business.

 

Dean Soto  11:40  

I love it. That’s so cool, man. So happy.

 

Richard Matthews  11:45  

So my question, my next question for you is your origin story, right? So we talk all the time, every superhero has their origin story, it’s where you started to realize that you were different, that maybe you had your own set of superpowers and that you could use them to help other people. How Did you start to develop or discover the value of bringing this world and getting into this world of entrepreneurship?

 

Dean Soto  12:06  

That’s an awesome question. First and foremost, I actually never wanted to be an entrepreneur ever. I might, my family now. My family, like, I came from a background where my – so I lived with my grandma and grandpa. And my grandma, grandpa worked for the same company for like 40 years. And everything was like you need to get a good job. Stay in there, get a pension. And just that’s to retire when you’re 65 or whatever. If you want to retire at 65. You can keep ongoing as long as you want. But that’s that was the background. And so I never, ever, ever thought I would ever be an entrepreneur. But in 2008, I found out that I was going to be deployed to Kuwait for about a year and a half. And obviously, my wife was not too pleased. But being in the Army Reserves, that was always a possibility. 

 

And so in 2008, I got deployed to Camp Afrijan in Kuwait. And while I was there, my daughter had a – so my wife saw me and she’s taking my daughter to the doctor and said that she has some kind of bump on the side of her temple. And the doctor ended up saying that it was a tumor, and we didn’t know if it was cancerous or whatever. It didn’t really matter it had to come out because it was starting to integrate itself into her skull. And the more it did that, the more likely if it was cancerous, that it would end up very bad. Very badly.

 

So, when I got that news, it countered some good news that I had actually gotten was that I was going to end up coming home for Christmas, which is months, months, months later. And so I had a choice: wait? You know, it’s April, do I wait till Christmas to come home? Or do I go on emergency leave, now? And I’m like, this sucks. Why am I in this situation? I was in the situation predominantly because of money. Money, money, money. And I got out I was like, I’m gonna I have to start my own business. I don’t want to be caught in that situation ever again. So my wife told me to – And long story short, my wife told me just you know, come home and Christmas. You’re not really even going to be able to do anything for two weeks. And, you know, I got home. I’m going to be an entrepreneur, there’s no – There’s no way I’m ever going to get put in that situation again.

 

And started my own business. It was like an IT company at the time and found myself working 60-70-80-90 hours a week, yet again. All for money and trading my time for money, not seeing my kids, not seeing my family. And I knew something had to change. And so over time, I started outsourcing because it was the cheapest, most inexpensive way. I never thought I could hire two employees in general. I always had like some kind of block with that. But over time, I started seeing that even when I hired people, I was spending so much time and so eventually I learned systems. And eventually, I was like I can bring this to other people. So that they can easily start creating systems because I started finding myself working like you. When you brought on Mark, it went from 40 hours a week down to like an hour a week. And I’m like, “Oh, what do I do now?” 

 

And that’s what was happening was I started seeing that my drop shipping company was running, selling my affiliate marketing.  All these different companies working on their own. And so it was from that I’m like, “I must have some kind of skill set that other people need.” And I found out from small mom and pop, people now we have people in  500. In 500 companies who use our services. Use our Virtual Assistants Architects because they want to be able to go from working 60 hours, 70 hours a week. Down to Richard Matthews style four hours a week, four hours or four hours a month. 

 

Richard Matthews  17:08  

Well, I do work more than that, because I’m still in the process of building things. But it definitely went from, from working, you know, 60 hours a week on the stuff that I needed to get done in order to get paid to. I average four to five hours a day now. And probably 80-90-120-180 hours a week of work gets done. And it’s one of those time leveraged things that you don’t like, I don’t know why we have such a mental block about it in the entrepreneur space. But it’s a – if I can figure out a way to put an hour’s worth of work and get 10 hours of work back.  That’s insanity. Right. And I was. The cool thing about systems documentation is that it’s significantly better than that, but people don’t believe you when you tell them, right? So you say, you know, I can put an hour and get 10 hours of work out there. Like, that’s insane. But look, the reality is if you put an hour building a system that can be repeated, ad nauseum. You put in an hour’s worth of work, you never have to touch it again. All right, so we’re talking thousands upon thousands of hours of return on that kind of investment. So when nobody believes you when you say that, so if you don’t believe me, just ignore it and go back to the one hour for 10. And do it a couple of times and see what it does in your business. So my next question is about your superpower, right? 

 

So is this what you do or build off of in this world that really helps solve problems for people? The things you use to slay the world’s villains, so to speak. And the way that I have been framing this for my guests lately is something that sort of shifted for me was realizing that you probably have a lot of skill sets, right? A lot of things that you might think I’m really good at. But if you really look at them, there’s probably one thing you’re a zone of genius or your superpower that really energizes everything else. For me, that was like I’m a systems guy like I think that way. Right and thinking in systems and being able to see systems where other people don’t see systems is what allowed me to do a lot of things right. I was really good at webinars and really good at writing copy and really getting these other things because I can see the systems behind them. For you. Do you know what your skillset is that sort of energizes or powers the rest of your skills that you have sort of your zone of genius or your superpower?

 

Dean Soto  19:34  

So my superpower and I always thought, well, maybe I’m a systems guy. That’s really what I am. And like, that actually was something that, it’s almost like a result of really, and this is gonna sound really weird because this is what my grandma always used to tell me. The lazy man does twice the work. And that was meant as a bad thing. And, because I would always be cutting corners, I would always be trying to find some way to get out of doing work. And she would just get so frustrated with me. And I heard that pretty much every day or every week. The lazy man does twice the work. And so what I’ve actually found is I’m not really totally a systems guy. Where I help people –

 

Richard Matthews  20:38  

You’re an optimizer. 

 

Dean Soto  20:40  

Where because there are some times where literally there’s  – You don’t even need a system. It’s just one thing that either needs to get you – like you’re doing something that’s stupid, to begin with. Just stop doing that stupid thing. It’s finding these little things that you know people get stuck in. You see this when you’re helping people with systems people get stuck with the “This is the way we’ve always done it.” Especially in archaic real estate. There are tons of people like that which, you and I, both know, it’s really – there are ways that things have always been done. And sometimes it’s just as simple as saying, “Well don’t do that.” And so for me, my what’s powers everything is really being systematically lazy. And seeing that there’s – that is being able to – And it’s funny ’cause I always just like I would always see I would see things and I go, I’d say, “Well, why don’t you see that.”

 

But what I do is I try to help people to see two things. One is, is there a system that can be created where you never have to do it again? Or are there things that you’re doing right now that literally you can stop, like literally stop doing take these things out? Bah, bah, bah, bah. And then either put something in its place or don’t even do it at all and just change this one thing. So it’s this lazy way of getting out from under the thumb of the whole idea of  I’m always, I have to do this because this is the way we’ve always done it. I have one customer. His name is Matt Laird. He’s number 117 in our podcast, Freedom Five Minutes Podcast. And he comes from the oil and gas industry. And it is super archaic and old. And He has literally taken all the stuff that his competitors think has to happen in customer service, in delivering lubricants, in how many employees there has to be. So he’s Inc 500, number three fastest-growing company in Oklahoma. Number 36 in the energy sector and in the Inc 500. So his next competitor up has 100 plus employees, and he has less than 10. And a lot of that is simply because we talk all the time- is simply because of taking, like not doing what everyone else is doing. Just you don’t need to do that. Stop doing that. That’s it. And here, just use this little piece of software and you’re good. That’s it.

 

Richard Matthews  23:59  

I call that being aggressively lazy. So, my best friend and business partner, if you’re — you and I both trade where we’re aggressively lazy. Where we will spend an obscene amount of time to develop something, so we never have to touch it again. And most people will continue touching the thing forever. Because most people are like, “If it only takes me an hour, and I do it an hour, once a week, for the rest of my life,” I’m like, I don’t want to do that. If it’s the same thing that’s happening, once a week, if I can spend 20 hours over the next week to fix it, and then I never have to do it again. It’s a type of delayed gratification. Where you’re talking, like, it was one of my mentors growing up, and I think it was really powerful that he said this to me as much as he did, and it sort of translated everything to my business he said, “Hard things first. If you do the hard things first, everything else will be easy.” Most people and I see this in my children a lot. And you probably see this in your children a lot too, is they will look at their set of things to do. And they’ll do the easiest thing. The path of least resistance, and then their life just gets progressively harder as they go. And I keep trying to show them the other way of doing things. But like, for me, I’m always like, what is the most complicated, difficult thing I could possibly do? That will make it so I don’t have to do anything afterward. Right? Everything else is easy.

 

Dean Soto  25:28  

Totally. And it’s funny. I was talking with my wife about that. That’s where like the whole the lazy man literally does do twice the work. But you, to never have to do that thing again. Just like that. Like, just like you where it’s, “I might spend five hours trying to figure something out.” That takes me, which usually takes me 30 minutes a week or 30 minutes a day. But once that five hours is done, it’s just as if you bought like a rental property. Like, you pay upfront. But eventually, your idea is that you’re recouping your –

 

Richard Matthews  26:06  

You’re creating like passive time. Passive income in terms of time.

 

Dean Soto  26:11  

Exactly. And that’s the whole idea behind there. One of my favorite people, David Heinemeier Hansson, he wrote Rework with Jason Fried, the Basecamp guys, 37 signals. He was in an interview and he simply just said, “I refuse to do the same thing twice.” And I was like, That’s brilliant. Most people would be content with “I’m working hard.” I have to ask this question. I have to go through and walk customers through this questionnaire onboarding, or I have to do whatever, – “No.” like if I do I really have to do this thing. I’m not going to do it. If I have to do it twice. It’s pretty much an indication that there’s a process or a system there that can be offloaded in some fashion or another.

 

Richard Matthews  27:03  

Yeah, I know.

 

Dean Soto  27:05  

So anyway, that’s –

 

Richard Matthews  27:06  

I love it. I might steal that and stick it on my window up here “Refuse to do the same thing twice.” Because it’s almost like a compulsion for me. Like, I’ve kind of got an obsession with it. It’s like, if I’ve done it more than one time, I need to figure out a way to systemize that. And my group of friends in my mastermind group all sorts of things, I’m nuts. Because a lot of people think that way. But they’re like, “You’re the crazy one who does things.” And we were at one of my mastermind, it’s a small group, we got like eight of us. And we all come every year with like, here are some things I’m going to teach and I did a talk on how to build systems and processes in your business, because everyone hears, like, you should have systems and processes and then they are like, “Oh, that’s great. I know I need to have systems and processes.” WTF does that mean? Right? So what do I do next? And everyone’s like, oh, McDonald’s is great. They’ve got cool systems. And they’re like, that’s cool. Well, how does that translate into your life? So I showed them like, here’s how you do it. How you take something you’re doing over and over again, and how you actually build a process around it. And I used our Push Button Podcast as an example for it. Here’s what we’re talking about. Here’s how it works out in real life. Here’s another thing. Here’s another example of how it works out in real life. And by the end of it, they were all like, are you selling that? And I was like, “Selling what?” And they’re like, the podcast thing. And I was like, I’m not. It was just for my business. And the whole, “being blind to your own thing.” They were like, people will pay you for the systems that you’ve already developed. And I was like, that’s genius. So not only does it save you time, but it can also when you build systems are what allow you to innovate in market spaces. 

 

Dean Soto  28:59  

For sure. And scale, because sure you could be the one doing all the work behind the Push Button Podcast system. But you can only take on a certain amount of clients.

 

Richard Matthews  29:17  

I can handle. I couldn’t even handle one. I couldn’t even handle my own.

 

Dean Soto  29:25  

And so, but now it’s like, Okay, well you know your numbers now you can just add, when you add x amount of clients, you add another virtual assistant, or you add whomever and you and there’s – That’s where -because you were lazy enough to make all the systems around your podcast. That became something of value to somebody else that you can literally, “Oh, I have the system. I just need to turn on the switch. To actually let people pay for the system. Awesome, aggressive laziness can be –

 

Richard Matthews  30:06  

The biggest problem with flipping the switch is like I needed to have customer onboarding systems, which I didn’t have before. I was like, “Oh, I guess I gotta develop customer onboarding systems.” I’ve got a couple of months to build that. But yeah. The thing that’s really cool is like we’ve got it separated now. So like, because I’ve got three test clients for that. I was like, “Hey, I’m gonna just beat the hell out of my systems with – at me. And so I got three test clients, and we know exactly like, for an hour’s worth of content. How much time does it take our editors? How much time does it take our graphic designers are writers? And so we know it’s like, “Hey, we can handle five shows that are this length. For this number of people. If we add another five shows, we need to add one more media person, one more writer, one more graphic designer, and then everything’s ready to go. So I know exactly how we are going to grow. Right?  So it’s really cool. And that means, over the next year for me in our business going from three clients to 30 clients doesn’t change my workload at all. It’ll change. It’ll change a bit of my business. It’ll change it a lot, actually, because I’ll have to, I’ll be forced into a more real CEO position where I’m like, looking at how do we hire people and direct a company and bring on CEOs and other things like that. But like the actual work, I don’t have to be involved in it. It’s a scalable ad nauseum.

 

Dean Soto  31:31  

Totally. 

 

And sellable 

 

Richard Matthews  31:34  

And sellable, which is so cool. That’s actually another thing that I just wanted to mention for people who are watching this if you haven’t if you can’t tell I’m really excited about Dean and the work he does. If you haven’t brought in a VA to do this, one of the things that really blew me away I was working with and I still work with them, a company that does physical product sales on Amazon, and they are looking to exit their business in the next 10 years because they want to retire. And one of the things that we talked about was, they needed to document all of the processes in their business. Otherwise, you have something they call the golden handcuffs. And the golden handcuffs being you can sell your business, but you have to stay on for the next five or 10 years. And your payout comes out over those 10 years for your business, because you have to train the new CEOs, you have to train everyone how to do all the different things. Whereas, if you had everything documented, you could just hand them the whole business as a package and walk away. And the business is worth more, like significantly more when all the systems are documented. So everything all the way down to like we have them going through their warehouse and their manufacturing facilities and like taking their iPhone out and being like, this is where the label maker is and when the labels are done. You take them from here and you move them over to here and you put them in the bottle machine blah, blah, blah, like, like documenting all the processes because the way that it’s currently done is when someone changes positions or they hire a new person, one person comes in and trains them how to do that thing. Or the boss comes in and trains them on how to do those things. And when you learn how to develop systems and document those systems now you have a sellable business. 

 

Dean Soto  33:12  

Totally.

 

It’s funny because that’s actually one of the things that brought this all on is back in the day, I used to sell on Amazon. I used to do sponsored ads on all that stuff for my business while he was working for my cousin at the time. He ran a big, multi-million dollar Amazon warehouse when people would leave. There’ll be two to three people helping the new person. And now you have, like the man-hours of three people being taken up because there were no processes or anything like that. And that was one of the definitely contributing factors, just in general, like a lot of companies run that way and as soon as you create these Document ID systems and it’s not hard. At least when you do it the way that we do it. You find that exactly what you said, your multiple for selling that business goes through the roof. Nobody wants to buy a business that they have to be in.

 

Richard Matthews  34:20  

I have decided that the way most businesses approach systems is the term for it is poorly managed chaos. And it’s amazing how much of a business is chaos. And there’s nothing wrong with that particularly. But you can dramatically increase a business’s output and a business’s value and other things when you start to take that chaos and order it. But it’s not to say that when you know because businesses do it all the time, they’re super successful and have systems that are like three people helping one person do the thing. It works. You can do that. But we’re just saying there’s a better way that’s more efficient, more profitable. And everything. 

 

Dean Soto  35:11  

I love it.

 

Richard Matthews  35:13  

So the flip side of superpowers, if your superpower is being aggressively lazy. The flip side of superpowers is your fatal flaw. Right? So just like Superman has his Kryptonite, right? Something that has held you back in growing your business, growing your brand, doing those things, and I think more important than what it is that’s held you back, but how have you sort of dealt with that? For people who have struggled with the same kind of thing? Maybe they could learn a bit from you?

 

Dean Soto  35:39  

That’s a really good question. So with the aggressive laziness comes the idea that there are certain things I just don’t want to do in general, and one of the things that have actually held me back has actually been marketing. I’m not so I know a lot of marketing. I know copywriting, I read pretty much all of Russell Bronson’s books, tons of different marketing books. And for whatever reason, because it might not seem like it -Because I do talk just like you do all over the place where we talk about, we work and spaces and a couple of different arenas and stuff, not arenas, like arenas but just like different venues. I’m an introvert by nature. And so when I see like, marketing does not just come naturally to me. And so it’s been – So whenever I try and do any type of marketing in general by myself, it tends to fall flat and then I go, “Well, why am I marketing? I’m just gonna go work on my homestead and so on.”  It’s more fun, I’m making enough right now where it’s very comfortable. And, my eight kids. So we have one on the way, by the way. So you knew when we had seven, we have one on the way, so eight kids. We live very nice, very nice life. And so one of the – So it’s always been marketing in general. So it’s funny because people are like, “Wow, you had ProSulum for almost a decade and I’ve never heard of you. And I’m like, let’s get second marketing. That’s all good. And I have a good client base that I’m very picky and selective of who I work with in general. I kick a lot of people out. We actually just kicked one person out who did not want to follow our system and we give them multiple chances. If you do not follow our system, you will not be a client, I have no problem just sitting by. But marketing, in general, is not my strongest suit. So the way that I get around that is that I partner up in some fashion or another whether it’s through how many people they bring in, or full partnership or anything like that with people who are very good at marketing and who have that personality. And so like right now Paul, who you met. Paul Tran, he’s built, he’s marketed for companies like Five Guys Burgers, he helped build them from, I think he said like seven stores to now they’re 3000 stores. 

 

Richard Matthews  38:45  

Nice. 

 

Dean Soto  38:46  

Amazing sales guy. He owns 11 of them — in Southern California. He’s been able to get us into very large companies that we wouldn’t have been able to get into otherwise. And so I’m like, “Why should I do that when someone else is better.” And I don’t want to necessarily have to hire someone I want someone who has, like some kind of stake and has some kind of motivation to grow the business. And so that’s happened to many, many, many times. One of the books that I wrote on Amazon called leverage, which I’m republishing. I’m also publishing another book, probably within the next month called Freedom in Five Minutes. Talks about partnering. And if you do it right, it’s such an easy way to just outsource something you’re not good at,  and bringing on Paul, literally grew my business like 400%. Just within two, three months.

 

Richard Matthews  40:04  

So that’s really cool. So you said something else too that I kind of want to touch on a bit. I think –