126: From Electrician to Multiple 8-Figure Exits with Mike Agugliaro

Today, I’m sitting down with Mike Agugliaro, an author, investor, and the founder of multiple 8-figure businesses, including both a $32 million/year home services business and a coaching company that sold more than $40 million in one year.

A former electrician, Mike’s entrepreneurial journey started with a belief that he could do a better job than his current bosses. Tired of working long hours under questionable leadership, Mike took a leap of faith, spending $35,000 on a business course and going all-in on entrepreneurship.

Since then, Mike built and sold 2 high-figure businesses. He has been featured on CBS, NBC, and Fox, and is the founder of FuDog Group, a high-level training organization that teaches peak performance secrets to help people elevate every area of their personal lives.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear about Mike’s “dips and curves” theory for helping businesses scale from 7 to 8-figures, why he doesn’t believe in firing the bottom 20% of his employees, and how he got a 200-person team aligned on the same goals of growth and development.

Inspiring Quotes

• “You don’t cut the weakest link. You help reinforce it.” – Mike Agugliaro

• “I didn’t want to be the best in the world at hiring A players. I want to be the best in the world at taking B and C players and turning them into A players. That changed everything.” – Mike Agugliaro

• “People will only grow into the next fishbowl that they believe they can go into.” – Mike Agugliaro

• “If you want to scale and win, tackle all those shame, guilts, and traumas. Hire people, get resources, read books. The more you get rid of the mind’s resistance, the faster you will scale into the future you want.” – Mike Agugliaro

• “If you can facilitate removing shame, guilts, and traumas, every single employee improves.” – Mike Agugliaro

• “My goal with culture was to see how many ways I can look at every circle that overlaps and bring it together and let them see how we all function as one organic piece.” – Mike Agugliaro

• From employee to business owner
• The dips and curves to scale from $1M to $30M+
• How trust can win you your time back
• How to attract, improve, and retain top talent
• The organizational chart of the future
• Marrying work culture with family culture
• The difference in marketing from 7 to 8-figures
• Reading more efficiently
• How Mike sold a business with one activity
• Advice for people just starting a business

Brad Weimert: Mike Agugliaro, I appreciate you carving out time.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. Super excited to be here, Brad. Thanks for inviting me.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, for sure. So, I don’t even know if you remember this but I met you briefly at Genius Network many, many years ago, randomly. As I was on my way out the door, crossed paths in the parking lot, and your name came up many times in the last several years. So, when I got the opportunity to pin you down for a conversation, I was super pumped to do so.

Mike Agugliaro: Right. I wish I could say I remember that but I do remember you had other engagements that we spent some time together. Not too many people got the kick in the mohawk and stuff.

Brad Weimert: Fair enough. Well, there are a bunch of things to talk about with you but a little framework. You started as an electrician and built a $32 million home services company that sold to PE. After that exit, you had another multi-eight-figure company and lots of things beyond that. The framework I think is very helpful because when you’re listening to people and taking advice, it’s good to know where they’re coming from and whether or not you should really listen. So, let’s start at the beginning with you from kind of the electrician background and how you even thought about starting a company because a lot of the time when people I think today, in particular, entrepreneurship is put on a pedestal as the sexy thing, and there’s even some pressure for people to do it.

And I think a lot of people are better served to not do it because they’re not going to be good at running a company. They would be better being a contractor or a salesperson or a technician. How did you think about that transition and how did you fall into it, or how did you jump into it?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. I mean, being an electrician, the short version is I thought everybody I worked for, all my bosses were idiots, and I figured I could do it better than them, so I started my company and ended up I was an idiot just like them. Because you only know what you know. I thought I was going to take on the world. I’d be so much smarter. But you find out every habit they had, you have it. You just didn’t realize it yet. So, that’s how I ended up in my own business.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that that is a very common thought.

Brad Weimert: I think it’s most common for salespeople, actually, where salespeople have this, especially good salespeople. They have this idea of management in the company is stupid. Why are they doing the things they’re doing? I’m the one that’s making it rain. You know, the company is dependent on me. And I have the good fortune of having been in that seat and having all of those thoughts and opinions just like you it sounds like, and then finding the other side of it. So, you decide they’re stupid. You want to launch a company. What is the path from solo electrician or working for people into kind of the first million, $1 million company?

Mike Agugliaro: The first thing is people don’t really change until they have an awakening or they have so much pain and suffering. For me, the awakening that really made me gain the momentum was two parts. Part one was that you don’t know what you don’t know, right? You just have this like, “Hey, you can’t keep grinding out seven days a week.” Being an electrician, you’re climbing in attics, crawl spaces. There’s a good chance you’re going to either die in the crawl space or get electrocuted. It’s a dangerous trade to be in but I loved it because it was dangerous. And then the really big awakening for me, Brad, was the day my son was born and I went home that night. My wife was in the hospital with my son, and I put together one of these like rocking, gliding things so she could do the whole breastfeeding and stuff.

And sitting in that thing probably about 11:00 at night and just breaking down crying with the reality, not that I just had a son. I’m going to be just like my dad. I’m going to work a million hours. I’m going to miss every possible thing possible. It’s those awakenings that you either die under your own demise or you get momentum. And it made me wake up and say, “There’s got to be someone that someone’s got to have figured this out.” And that’s when I went on the quest.

Brad Weimert: And what did that look like? Because a lot of the time when people have that thought, they still go nowhere or they start trying things but they don’t approach it from the place of mentorship or learning, right? And so, the language that you used I think is really valuable, which is somebody has to have figured this out.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. I started searching and now it’s not like today. Today, you’re talking to your phone. It does the searching for you. Back then it was like real effort. You had to ask people who figured it out. And I came across the best practice organization and I was like, “Well, they must have figured it out.” I went to visit, Brad, an electrician shop in Pennsylvania. And when I went to visit this shop, I was blown away. It was clean like you could eat off the floor. Everybody was wearing buttoned-down shirts and ties, the electrician. And I was like, you know, I’m there in cut-off jeans, I’m tattooed, guinea tee. And I’m like, “Look at these people.” But I figured it out really quick, especially when the owner, he said to me, “Mike, let me show you what I made last year.”

Now, this is decades ago. He made $350,000. Now, maybe today that’s a lot for some but maybe not a lot for others. But back then I went, “Oh my goodness.” So, I left there. I had a business partner at the time. I said, “If these clowns dress like this that our crappy electricians could build that, what could we do?” And so, we joined this organization, which was a stretch, Brad. I mean, I think it was 35K. I mean, can you even imagine 20 years ago, 35K Amex? I don’t even know why American Express let us even put it on a credit card. And they sent us boxes like this big with VCR tapes in them to watch. Can you even imagine the time? So, I got the one box that was marketing. My partner got the other box, which is all like understanding finances, QuickBooks, and numbers. Like, we knew get some money, pay a bill. That was it, man. The party was started. I just consumed that stuff through the night until I was like, “Okay. This is the secret sauce here.”

Brad Weimert: Wild. So, that was called Best Practices Organization?

Mike Agugliaro: Oh, that’s not what they’re called but it was a best practice. It was an organization just built for plumbers, HVAC, drain cleaning guys, people that were in the home service teaching them how to do what they see as a best practice to a customer client in the market.

Brad Weimert: Got it. That’s super interesting. So, that was 20 years ago. So, we’re talking early 2000s. Those companies today are rather prevalent, not necessarily in home services, but in basically every vertical. You have somebody that’s trying to sell you information on how to build a company. But then, like you pointed out, that’s a big box of VHS tapes.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. And a lot of… Look, today, there’s no lack of people but I do think there’s a lack of true, let’s call it true authority and credibility. And I love that everybody wants to help people but it is very dangerous in my eyes. It’s only my feedback. It’s very dangerous for someone who created a company of 2 or 3 million to be teaching somebody that’s 10 or 20 million because they have never experienced the dark side of what’s in the closet. So, they’re giving them stuff that worked but you miss a point today in business. It’s not like you recover in a day. Sometimes it’s very hard to recover.

Brad Weimert: So, do you have a sense of how big that organization was? I imagine you did not know going into it. You mentioned you met somebody that was doing $350,000 a year. But when you bought into this ecosystem…

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. That contractor was doing millions at the time, which we never broke a million. We did maybe 700,000, 800,000. And I think anybody, it’s hard to see a company today that lets say they don’t understand marketing, they don’t understand sales, they don’t understand operations. It’s very rare that they’re going to break $1 million in business. And if they do break a million and they don’t know marketing, sales, and operations, there’s a good chance the next bracket and I could talk about this theory of dips and curves I have, that they will reset back because they won’t have the business information of what it takes to scale.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, let’s dig into that because I think that that’s for, I know a lot of people that is the crux. It’s, hey, we figured out how to get things established. And then there’s this point of this messiness in the middle where systems start to break. Specifications aren’t quite there so everybody went from wearing tons of hats, but then you have a gap before anybody can just put on one. So, what did that look like for you? And did the system that you bought into, how far did it get you before things broke again?

Mike Agugliaro: Well, I wouldn’t say it broke. It took us to about five-plus million. And then an awareness came in for me that if you have a best practice group, everybody’s doing the same thing, which then if you have a lot of people in your market doing the same thing, there’s a saturation point of if you all look the same, Joe’s Plumbing, Bob’s Electric, and you all have the similar fancy looking truck. So, after about 5 million, I stayed in the group, but I started studying Zappos and Disney and I could talk about that a little bit as it became a competitor. And my goal was there was five founding fathers of that organization, and I outgrew all five of the founding fathers in less than half a decade. I outgrew all of them. So, let me do the dips and curves and we could loop back to that.

The dips and curves are so important of what I learned now scaling big companies. First one took a decade to go from under 1 million to 32 million. We were tracking 40 and then I sold it in 2017. And the same dips and curves I’m going to tell everybody about is what scaled a coaching company that sold over 40 million in coaching in 2020. And I exited that. I coached over 1,000 service companies. If you look, a million’s the first to bracket to even prove true of something. What I learned is the next one is 3 million. But if I draw with my hands from 1 to 3, there’s this dip. Because to get to a million, you could get there just selling and delivering a product. But to get to three, if you don’t know how to hire, maintain, build a culture, you’ll reset back below that million.

And then I’ll give you the numbers that I learned. So, it’s one, three, five, seven, ten, all millions, 10 to 15. Because once you start stabilizing these processes, a $10 million company to 15 is a little dip. But then it goes from 15 to 20. Then when you hit 20, you can go to 30. Now, so what’s the point, Brad? Why do we even want to know about dips and curves? Well, if you look at a $20 million company on how it runs and you look at a 1 million company below, well, if you have scalable systems, processes, operations, thinking on culture in this, you can scale and minimize these dips that you’re going to go. Learning curves is lack of education. That’s what it is. It’s lack of knowledge. So, if you have that knowledge of a $20 million company and you create the identity of someone running a $20 million company, you will then scale like this and you won’t have that jagged, painful ownership life that can happen sometimes.

Brad Weimert: So, how do you think about prioritization of time through that process? You mentioned kind of a different approach to mindset through there. One of the struggles I think, certainly for me through growth, is deciding where to put your time when you move from one phase to the next and how your role changes. So, you said that you started to think about things a little differently at 5 million. And for you, part of that was you felt like you were stamping out the same product as the rest of the market. What had to shift in terms of your schedule to move from 5 to 7 to 10?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. I don’t think it’s prioritizing your time. I think it’s prioritizing your trust, right? Because everybody’s doing something in their life because they don’t trust someone else to get it done as good or better than them. So, what I always look at in my time, and especially if I’m feeling any restriction or resistance, is who do I need to trust that can handle those things that gives me the space to stay within that area of just my expertise? I’m probably like a lot of listeners. I’m a vision guy. I’m a creative. So, I can create to the point of destruction, right? I could throw a million ideas at my team. They all think I’m telling them to do it. I’m just venting on a million decent ideas. Majority of them, it’s the wrong time. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they’re doing the right stuff at the wrong time.

So, I also look at I’m a big believer and I’m sure you’ve had other guests when you do restrict the amount of time, you focus more. I mean, the day before you travel for vacation, I watch my wife like it could be the last six hours before we leave. She’ll do like 30 hours’ worth of stuff in six hours of time. So, that’s some of my first thoughts about time. And I am a big, a lot of people when they are mapping out their time, Brad, I watch a lot of people do their like workouts in the morning. I’m a martial artist, so I don’t go to the gym and stuff. I’ve been doing martial arts for 38 years. And I never did it in the morning because that was what I would call my prime time, most focused, most energized, most ready, so I can get a thousand times more things done.

I think a lot of people they’re doing the stuff like workouts and stuff in their most optimized time, which is stealing the rest of their time. That’s why I always did my workouts at night to force more energy, so I could do an additional optimized time in my day.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I have lots of thoughts on that and I definitely appreciate trying to take advantage of when you are in current state or what you can get out of your body. To the point on trust, you’re ultimately through growth and business, you’re trying to get people, you’re either growing people or hiring people that have more expertise as you get bigger to grow things. And my perception there based on that comment was that in order for you to free up more space, you have to be able to trust those people. But my head still goes back to the time component because once you trust those people, that frees up your schedule to focus on the next thing. No?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. And I think about like if I shared with people one of the secret sources I learned about scaling companies and trust is once I figured out how to like the marketing operations systems like this was a component, it became very early on within the first probably 2 or 3 million not to develop people. I needed to create personal growth in them. There’s a difference because most people are focused on developing skill sets, and I was focusing on developing their mind. That’s why I talk about, I think, mindset’s a problem. I think the term alone that people have been programmed with the mind and using the word set, which is like if we poured concrete in our mind, it would set, it wouldn’t move. It’s mind growth. So, I created a culture of craving mind growth.

And I knew if I could expand their thinking, which is most of the time in most cultures, if you can facilitate removing shame, guilts, and traumas, every single employee improves. So, how do we get back to the time? When you improve people’s thinking with mind growth and you embed inside of them because they want a sense of ownership, it’s not the owner doing the things. It’s everyone else taking ownership to do the things. So, I really only got to be smart enough to flip the one domino, and everyone else has to crave to flip the next domino better than the one before.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, how early in the company did you start to change that approach where you thought, “Hey, I don’t need to teach people how to do everything. I need to teach them to want to learn it.”

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. Once I joined the best practice and I started to learn marketing and sales, probably about soon as we broke a million, I don’t know, it’s probably a coach or somebody said, “Why are you treating…?” Like, I had multiple identities. I had an identity that was a husband and then I had a slightly different identity when I was a dad, I had a very hardcore identity because my dad was a mason. So, he was a very strong big guy, and his identity was ruled by kind of fear and force. And, somebody said to me, they said, “You have all these identities. So, one, we just got to get you into your one identity. But why do you keep leaving your martial arts philosophy, theory, leadership if you have martial arts? Like why aren’t you bringing that into your business world?”

And I didn’t know at first how to do that. And then before you know it, as soon as we broke a million, I said, “Let me bring all these other philosophies. Like, why wouldn’t I bring these philosophies of how to think in wisdom and I don’t want to call it Zen, but the ability to get mindful and deal with chaos situations?” That’s when it really started to change. When I brought all those identities together and brought all my worlds into my world, even to the point I would come in the morning when we were a small crew of maybe ten people and say, “Hey, team, do you ever experience one of those nights where your kid’s up throwing up all night?” Let’s see, for all my years before that, a struggle, I never shared my personal stuff with the team. I kept it all isolated in the box like I didn’t want them to know I can relate to pain and suffering. That changed everything.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I feel like there’s a cultural shift that the younger generation has an easier time being vulnerable and maybe too much, but certainly, I had the mentality early of I’m supposed to be something like there’s some role I’m supposed to be filling that is what a leader is supposed to be. And that involved being somewhat stoic and isolating parts of my life. Like, I wasn’t allowed to swear or I wasn’t allowed to be authentic functionally. That’s how I experienced that growth curve myself. Tactically, how did that show up in your business? So, you mentioned an example of being able to just share a personal story. Where do you insert opportunities for personal growth throughout the organization to encourage it?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. So, we did all company meetings once a month. And in the all-company meeting, we would always facilitate an environment that had three different aspects of it. The first aspect was always ownership of yourself. So, we would break them into little groups and say like, “What part of your life are you taking ownership for? What part are you not?” The second part was ownership of your career. So, what part of your career are you taking ownership to advance in and improve, and what part are you not? And then they would share that in small groups and sometimes we would shuffle them around. And the third one was the ownership of the organization. Where are you taking ownership where you’re not an employee but you’re a part of? And where are you not taking ownership of that?

And they used to call that kind of a win-win-win theory. Like, if the employee wins, then the company wins, and the client wins. So, that made me think if we get people to just take ownership, everything starts to shift because they don’t see this as this is just a job. And even though I wasn’t in the military, I always believed the theory because I trained with a lot of military guys. And if any military is listening, thank you for your service is no soldier is left behind. So, we created a culture of we’re only as strong as the weakest link. And you don’t cut the weakest link. You help reinforce that link. And that’s how we would tactically put it right into every all-company meeting we ran. Even when all company people think big, all companies like three employees is an all-company meeting.

Brad Weimert: We don’t cut the weakest link. We reinforce the weakest link. Yeah. I love that.

Mike Agugliaro: Otherwise, you create a culture of people are expendable. People tell me all the time like, “Oh, you just cut the bottom 20%.” I said, “Well, that’s what a crappy leader does because they don’t have the skill set to constantly improve the bottom 20 to become the top 20.” See, we mastered early on, Brad. I didn’t want to be the best in the world at hiring A players. I want to be the best in the world like getting B and C players and creating them into A players. That changed everything.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s, I mean, a fundamentally different approach. So, back to tactics on this. You’ve got all-hands meetings whether that’s three people on the team or 150 or beyond. Where else do you insert that? Do you have allusions to personal growth and development in the job posts through the interview process? Where do we see that in your organization as it grows?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah, a great question, especially when I look at a lot of people that are recruiting today. They say, “Recruiting is a big problem.” And I say, “No. The owner’s the big problem. There’s no lack of people on planet Earth.” We started to build these really strategic ads, like in New Jersey, it wasn’t a big thing for everybody, but it was for a lot of blue-collar like we had a lot of people that loved to hunt. So, one of my ads that we put in that shifted their thinking was, “Never miss opening day at deer season again.” And this was like a super magnet because like, are you kidding me? I come across that. I work for somebody. I appreciate hunting. And my last boss told me, “I haven’t gotten a deer in four years.” And I’m telling you, “Don’t miss opening day of buck season.”

And that just becomes a mind-shifting like, “Wait, this place is very different.” And then like our all company meetings, we would put in different ads and marketing like, “Have you ever had a company meeting where you felt like it was a rock concert, where you were so excited to go serve the customer that you never wanted to go home?” But family was important in like our all-company meetings, they would walk in like AC/DC’s playing. There’s cash thrown on the floor. And we’re banging tables and chairs and stuff. Like, we were majority men in that company because it was tradespeople. We had some women but we allowed men to be real men, we allowed women to be real women, and we allowed them to be their truest self when the whole world was trying to frame them in a box of, “Oh, you got to talk like this and act like this and be like this,” which, disclaimer I paid 8,000 a year for insurance.

I told my business partner just for any silly sh*t that would come out of my mouth because I didn’t want to curb my behavior, but also I didn’t want lawsuits. So, I bought all kinds of insurance to protect me from that. So, I’m not telling everybody, not giving you permission to show up with tattoos and swearing unless you buy insurance, I guess.

Brad Weimert: I love it. Yeah. It’s a weird environment. I mean, I think that, sadly, based on where you are in the country or out of the country, the geographic area has started to dictate, certainly in the States, what culture is like. That’s always been that way to some extent. It’s just become more polarizing. But I think it’s important to realize that whatever the current frame is that you have, there’s an opportunity to shift it and make it whatever you want it to be, if you buy insurance apparently.

Mike Agugliaro: Yes. Yes.

Brad Weimert: So, that’s great. So, you’ve got the lead magnets in the job posts are awesome. I mean, the idea of looking at kind of who the avatar is that you’re speaking to and crafting the ad around it. I love the idea of positioning the internal meetings that way.

Mike Agugliaro: You want the next step two to that?

Brad Weimert: Love it. Absolutely.

Mike Agugliaro: So, step two is we invited everybody for an interview but what they didn’t realize is we scheduled 50 people to be interviewed in the same hour. When it was smaller, it was smaller, and we would shove them in a big room and all 50 people would be in this room, like thinking, “Man, I’m here for a one-on-one interview.” And then I would say, “Welcome to American Idol.” And they would laugh and I would say, “Hey, we call this our hiring experience. So, before you panic and we would set a whole stage,” I say, “Look, some of you are probably who’s my introverts? Who’s my extroverts? Introverts, you’re having panic attacks right now. Let’s all breathe together.” And we would spend an hour and there would be popcorn in the room, and I’d be throwing candy bars.

Before they even entered the room, Brad, we would have them waiting outside to come in the building, and I would go out there. They had no idea who I was. Most of them would be like, “Oh, what are you here for? Oh, wow. I’m glad you’re here.” Then before you know it, they’re in the room, and here’s the owner in front of them. And this experience because what happened was my managers, I kept asking like, “What did you do yesterday?” They’re like, “I interviewed people.” I’m like, “Yeah, but like you didn’t get anything else done for eight hours.” They’re like, “How long do you think an interview takes?” “You know, an hour per person. You’re almost eight hours with in and outs and stuff.” I said, “We got to solve this.”

So, we created this hiring experience, not job fair and stuff. It was an experience because when they showed up, I would model it until I built the model to be followed. I’d interview 50 people in one hour and just have the biggest blast like there was AC/DC music. We’d go around the room. If you were a car, what type of car would you be? And I was looking for the one class of person I would say, “I’m a muscle car, strong and reliable.” And then I wanted someone else to say, “I’m one of these little Japanese cars. I’m fast and quick and I would just be like…” And then we would have our team. Over time, as we grew, we’d have our team behind me, and they would start fighting over who they’re going to grab in this room.

And we’ve asked people to try to sell us a stick of gum and a bottle of water. That sets such a unique stage, our competitors started to come to just see how we did it, and we would end up hiring our competitors. We didn’t even know, and I didn’t care who came in the room. I was just there to serve. So, from a very unique ad to an experience, and later we did it virtually 50, 80, 100 people virtually. And then later after that, we would teach companies how to do that. Changed our recruiting forever.

Brad Weimert: I mean, it sounds like a lot more fun.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. Listen, cash thrown, candy bars being thrown, rock music being played. And what happened when you think they left? The next one kept growing because we would tell those people, “Hey,” and what do we always say? “If it’s not a fit now, it doesn’t mean it’s not a fit forever.” And we really were a serving culture. I said, look, if it’s not a fit, and we know another fit, and sometimes they weren’t a fit and we would do our best effort to try to find them a job with maybe one of our friend companies or something. So, they would immediately tell their buddies they’re having a hiring experience. They would come back to it, and our employees would come to them and they would say, “Don’t pay me. I just want to be in the room while you do this,” because they would be so energized and excited.

Brad Weimert: So, tell me about what you’re looking for, for people with that type of interview, and what the criteria is then to hire, and what the next steps are in the hiring process?

Mike Agugliaro: I did and I’m not telling people not to do this. I did every DiSC profile at one time. And I’ll answer your question what we’re looking for. And one time someone came to me and they said, “This guy is not a fit.” “I don’t understand why you’re saying he’s not a fit.” “Well, the DiSC profile says this and that.” So, I went to the guy. He was a Czechoslovakian guy, and I said, “Hey, they came to me. They said that test.” And he said to me in broken English, “I didn’t know half of the words.” And I go, “That’s a problem,” I said. That guy stayed with me 18 years. He was a million-dollar-a-year service expert. And my team was going to throw him out because he missed a DiSC profile. So, what am I looking for?

I think a lot of people would say personality. I’m looking for a raw piece of clay. I’m looking for back then a blue-collar worker that’s rough around the edges. I’d have a guy with like tattoo lips on his neck or something but I knew if I could help him see life in a different way than how he was brought up, he would be so loyal, he would listen, and he would serve at a high level. So, that’s what I looked for. My interviews would blow most people away. It’s like even today I’m like, “Do curse words bother you? Do you have thick skin? Do you love to learn? And like if you do something I love, what do I got to tell you? And if you do something I don’t?” And if they answer those questions, I’m like, “Yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s get started here.” So, I learned and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I did all that top grading and the process was long. You really don’t know someone until they’re in the game.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s generally my experience is you don’t know somebody until you’re actually working with them. So, this interview process was specifically for service workers, front-line blue-collar. Did you grow everybody into management and sort of executive team? Because if you had, how big was the team at the largest point?

Mike Agugliaro: 200.

Brad Weimert: So, 200 people. And you had to have some management staff or executive staff at some point, maybe not, but I imagine you did. Was the hiring process different for those people or did you grow them all internally? What did that look like?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. 90% of them were grown internally. And we focused because we were, like everybody probably knows listening to this, what an organizational chart is. But most people that have organizational charts have the chart of today, not the chart of the future. And I was doing a job which will help frame this for the listeners, Brad. When I was wiring in the field, I was wiring a church. Now, not a regular church. This was I think it was Baptist. It’s one of those where they play electric guitars and drums. And like, I mean, it was a rock concert in church. And when I walked in one day, they had a big frame of this building they were going to build. And the pastor there, who just happened to drive a Porsche and had a Lamborghini and stuff, I said to him, “Pastor Ceroy,” was the name. I said, “Pastor, what’s the deal? Because I’m always curious, what’s the deal with this picture?”

Plus, Brad, I was thinking, “Man, that’s a big building. This is going to be some good electrical work in the future, right?” He said, “Listen, Mike, people will only contribute based on the level they believe of what’s coming.” And I went, “Okay.” So, later when I built this organizational chart, I was thinking one day, “Wait, people will only grow into the next fishbowl that they believe they can go into.” So, we build an organization. Let’s say someone listens a million. You should have your 3 or $5 million organizational chart and tell your people, “Okay. Where do you see yourself and how fast?” So, when you have that, it’s quick to grow to that next level because people start envisioning their minds.

And then I’ve been a mindset guy and mind growth person for over three decades so I would have them in our all-company meeting, “Hey, just pause a minute, close your eyes. And where are you going to be six months from now?” And when they would make that mental commitment, they would start taking the physical actions on it. So, that part is now, as for interviewing the 10% that we would bring in, we would run them. Everybody had to go through the hiring experience because if they didn’t love that, like if they don’t love energy and they want to come in and like sip their tea and eat their muffin and read their newspaper back then, they’re not going to fit when they walk in the door and there’s AC/DC playing and everybody’s like moving their head up and down. They’re not going to enter. So, they have to come through that.

And then from there, which a lot of people still don’t do today, when we were interviewing managers, we said, “Look, two things have to happen. One, submit me your 90-day plan. What does your first 90 days look like? You know our company. You don’t have to know all the brackets. Tell me what you think you should do.” If they did a great job on the 90-day plan, there is a high success rate. If they didn’t submit the 90-day plan, well, the answer was a no right there. And from there, we would have them come in and do a one-day what we call drive along. They would sit pretty much a half a day was. They would sit in every department and then come back to us and say, “What do you love and what would you improve in every single department?”

And after that, we knew if we had a winner on the top management level. One more tip and I’ll hand it back to you is we rarely brought in a manager as here is your manager. We almost 99% brought them in as a consultant and move them to management. Some people may not know the answer why. You bring in a manager. Everybody in the culture is ready to fist fight and do whatever they can to make him prove himself or get his ass out. At least that’s my experience. You bring him in as a consultant, he comes in as a friend, he gets to build credibility and authority, and after 90 days you get to say, “Hey, everybody, do you love this?” “Oh, I love that guy.” And now we can move him right into a role. Now, it took me years to figure that out and watch culture sabotage managers but eventually, I did figure it out.

Brad Weimert: So, that’s interesting. I’ve definitely done that a couple of times. From a hiring perspective, when you’re doing that, are you running ads for the manager, looking for the manager, and then talking to them about the approach and saying, “Hey, so we’re going to bring you on and you’re going to be a consultant in the role for a while to set the stage”?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah, that’s exactly. And we worked really hard to not use terms like manager. We use terms like coach. We did have directors and some formal stuff. But the term manager, like I wrote a book years ago called the Nine Pillars and it was mindset, skill set, action, clarity, alignment, accountability, and then it was coaching, training and managing. And what I found out is, when we were hiring managers years ago is a manager by the term is like main team. They feel like they got to come in and keep the boxes moving and just make a move a little bit better.

But a coach comes in and his goal is to build peak performance to get everything to improve so you can win the Super Bowl. So, I found out that terms of how we brought them in like, hey, this person’s going to be our coach for the next 90 days. And sometimes we would hire that position. We’re looking for a coach. And then we would talk in the ad about, if you’re looking for a job where your manager come in with a whip and stuff like that, that’s not this role. We’re looking for someone who has a track record of helping people go from being a junior sports person to entering the Super Bowl in a short period of time.

Brad Weimert: And this is a little granular but valuable for me and hopefully others. When you brought that person in as a consultant, did you start them as a W-2 or 1099?

Mike Agugliaro: 1099.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, you truly had them in as a consultant. Everything was framed that way.

Mike Agugliaro: And then flip it over afterwards, yep.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it. That’s great.

Mike Agugliaro: Congruency, everything we did, I had to be able to prove it if it ever had to be proved out. And that’s what kept us out of a lot of trouble is if anybody ever question like, no, because look, your human resource people, your accounts payable people, like everybody sees everything. Someone leaves their pay stub behind, you got to be as congruent as possible. And then you’ll maintain a healthy environment where there’s no deadly, what they would call like company cancer’s growing or something.

Brad Weimert: Well, so while we’re on– so a lot of this, I mean, this is super helpful, the approach to hiring and the approach to filling the org chart, and also tactically, how you do it, people both ignore some of those things. And also, other archetypes will get completely lost in the details. And they’ll spend all this time and energy going to the nth degree of detailing the SOP, but missed the point. You have a big emphasis on making sure that the culture is accurate. The culture is what you want it to be in serving. There’s a whole group of analytical entrepreneurs that see culture as a squishy proposition. Tell me where the rubber meets the road with that.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about culture first because the majority of books out there on culture, they’re talking about one aspect of the culture. When you look at culture, you have employee culture, you have family culture, you have clients that are culture. You have people that sell you, your products are culture, your communities are culture. And so, if you really want to talk how to effectively scale and then scale a company quickly, you have to understand how every culture works together. And I’ll make a simple point without all the points. If you look at the culture of the company and then you take your team, and the culture of their family at home does not meet up the culture. So, at home, the wife or husband says, you work too much. You’re always killing yourself or whatever. But then the culture in the company is like, well, we’re here to serve the customer and, like, stuff doesn’t just break during the day if we don’t merge these together.

So, my goal always with culture was how many ways can I look at every circle that overlaps and bring it together and let them see how we all function as one organic piece. So, when people enter our culture, we’re identifying what are all their experiences of cultures in the past and how have they functioned within those culture. Because whatever you sell, it doesn’t matter. Let’s say you sell something online. Well, the buyer of that is a culture. And I think when you look at things like, maybe I don’t drink the product and stuff, but like Red bull, what do they do? They create a culture of product, meaning the culture of the buyer online. And then all of a sudden, you have these Tough Mudder races. I did one and swore I’d never do it again. That’s just not my jam.

But then they merged that into the physical culture. So, I’m not sure if I answered your question, but I wanted to frame so people, if they could just take a moment today after listening to this and say, wait a second, how is the family culture of my employees interacting with this culture? You’ll find out that there’s a tug of war happening.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this because I have, I think, a similar but maybe different frame on that. So, I think about that in terms of value set. So, very often, when I’m interviewing people, first of all, I think it’s like, there’s a book out there or some blog post that tell applicants what questions to ask. And so, one of them is, what are the values of the company and what’s the culture like? And I find myself routinely saying, and I believe this deeply, that I’m very clear on our values inside the walls of this company, Easy Pay Direct. It’s in our job posts. It’s in our onboarding process. It’s in our weekly meetings. It’s on the walls. We talk about it.

I have no interest in having you adopt our values. My job through the interview process is to find people that already share our values so that when they come on, they’re already very similar and living in a way that the rest of our team is, inside the walls of the company, because it means that they’re probably living that way outside the walls. Is that different than your approach? And if so, how is that different?

Mike Agugliaro: Maybe a little slightly different. But let’s talk about values because I’m a big values believer and understanding values. When I first started scaling the company, I read Zappos and I was like, well, I got to build 10 core values. It took us months to build it. I couldn’t remember any of them.

Brad Weimert: It’s so many.

Mike Agugliaro: It was a nightmare. So, then, of course, I’m a big believer on. At one time, I had seven coaches. I’m like, do you want to solve a problem faster than anything? Hire someone who has a track record of solving the problem. So, then we got it down to five core values. And I built those and they were company core values. So, what I found out then was they fit the company, but they didn’t fit the person outside of the company. So, then we developed core values, like integrity, what we called doing the right thing when nobody was watching and we would share. Now, we found out that that’s a value that has to be congruent in the company and with everybody we hire. So, we would ask those types of questions.

I think when you’re looking at interviewing people, the values are one. In every one of our people we hired, there were skills and competencies we needed. So, the values are their belief systems, and the skills and competencies is going to be what they can put in effort when they come aboard. And the goal is not for them to meet every skill and competency. It’s for us to identify and help them find a way to keep growing their skills and competencies. But I agree, we used our values on every one of our recruiting ad, said, like another one of ours was safety first.

And safety first is key because we want them not to just be safe at the company. We want them to have a safety environment at home. And one more was, we called it all for one and one for all, right? And that’s the no soldiers left behind. Like, we don’t just care about you at the company. And the way that I framed it, Brad, that most people once I said this, it didn’t matter where they worked. They never made the most money from me. That’s an interesting thing. And we could talk about that.

I never was the person that had the hourly rate way past everybody. But what I did have was I shared with them, I want you to imagine you work for me and you’re in the organization. And because these guys went on jobs and your wife broke down, you don’t ever have to worry about it. You just call us. We’ll send out an army. We’ll go get your wife. We’ll make sure your children safe. We’ll take care of the car. We’ll get everything fixed. We’ll get her exactly where she needs to go. And you’ll know that everything’s handled.

And at the minute you share that example, and it was true. We’ve done it over and over. They knew that this was a different place to work at. So, it’s not just a lot of people have it on the wall. It can be on the wall. They have to feel it bleeding out of you as truth because everybody I ever interviewed, I said, look, you’re interviewing me. I’m just doing asking questions to see if you’ll invite me into your world, and will I invite you into mine? And if we’re willing in the end to invite each other into our world, because I need to know, and I know this sounds, Brad, everybody says this, like, the why, right? Everybody’s got the why.

But I bet everybody listening right now if they shook their head, like, so everybody listening, shake it like me and Brad are watching you. How many of you know the why of every single employee in your company? You know they want to put their kids through college. You know they want to move into a bigger house. You know that they got to take care of their family. And I’m taking a guess. A lot of people are not nodding their heads. But if you are building this culture and these values, wouldn’t you want to know every single employee or team member? Exactly, they’re not there to make a paycheck. They’re there to create an outcome in their future.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s a big deal. And I am certain that everybody listening is not 100% on that one. I think there are also really important– I fundamentally don’t believe in altruism. I don’t believe that we do things for purely selfless reasons or only selfless reasons. There’s always a self-serving part of this. And the self-serving part is that if you serve the people around you, you are going to create a better environment in life for yourself. But to that end, I think there are a bunch of marketing lessons through that as well, which is all of these things apply to your end users. Whether those are clients or customers or whatever, if you’re not looking at sort of the idea of selling, this is not your product, but what it actually provides to them in their life. And it’s a different approach to telling the story or it’s a different narrative entirely, and often a very powerful one. I love that.

So, let’s shift gears a little bit because the culture side of things, the hiring side of things, I love, and it’s an ongoing living experience for me. I’m always trying to get better at that part of it, the hiring part specifically, and aligning it with the company vision. Talk to me about the later stages here. So, you gave us this framework earlier of– you gave a couple really good examples, one, the different stages of growth in the company, 1 to 3, 3 to 5, 5 to 7, 7 to 10, 10 to 15, 15 to 20, 20 to 30 million in revenue. When you got to that phase, how was your marketing engine different or your client acquisition strategy different at, call it 20 million versus 1 million?

Mike Agugliaro: I think the difference is diversification in spend is really what changes. I was just sharing this because I was on a session with a really great YouTube guy, really smart. If you’re looking for a guest, this guy would be a great, great personality. And the thing that I notice about marketing, and I’ve done in one year, I spent in my service company, we did 2 million in TV. I had something like 500 billboards up at one time. I did 1.4 million direct mail pieces and analyzed and A/B tested, and tested it again and tested envelopes and letters and live stamps and sizes of things.

But the thing that always stands for me is, sometimes you forget that what you started doing, you should keep doing. So, I’ll give everybody that caveat on their marketing as you scale. I’m what I call a boutique brand builder. I build brands that take a little more heavy lifting on the front end, but they’re very impactful on the back end. So, if you look at CEO Warrior that I built and scaled, where we were coaching over a thousand companies, what the heck was a CEO Warrior? You made your assumptions, but you never thought it was a blue-collar training and implementation organization and maybe going off a little bit, but I want people to have this framing even FuDog Group, like most people, some people don’t know what a FuDog is. And so, it’s a boutique brand. It’s a brand that takes a little bit of heavy lifting on the front end, but it’s very sticky on the back end. Why do I say that? Well, I think when you’re looking at marketing vehicles, marketing spend, it’s so easy to get stuck in what people want, which is this easy route to things. They want to just throw a dollar in a machine and easily get gratification of 10, 20 out.

But in building all these companies, I found that if you cannot get stuck in that, dopamine gratification of trying to just throw money at it, but you actually stay and look at the vehicle and why does that vehicle goes back to what you were saying, Brad, about values like I don’t market in a place that is against my values. I just don’t do it. And you can tell me it will give you a million clients you want. If it doesn’t match my values and what I feel or think, I just won’t do it.

So, marketing is a big bracket. I would say for anybody listening to this, to play the marketing game, you first should really understand. Everybody should be a study of marketing. And Brad, you know Dan Kennedy, I mean, he’s the godfather of marketing. Who doesn’t know him? And I remember him setting me up for the kill at one of his events decades ago. And he said to everybody, he says, “What business are you in?” And I was so proud, “Electrical contracting.” And he was like, he’s grumpy, like, “No,” he’s like, “No.”

Brad Weimert: Dan Kennedy, grumpy? No.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah, right? He said, “You’re all in the business of marketing.” And I just sat back and went, “Wait a minute here.” And I have a phrase I always ask myself is like, “Why is that brilliant? And why is that brilliant now?” Even when I hear somebody say something, I might have heard it a thousand times, I go, “Why is that brilliant? Why is it brilliant now?” And that set me on the quest of not just trying to find someone to solve it, but make sure I have a framework of understand. I don’t know algorithms of Facebook and I don’t know YouTube, all those pieces, but I understand copy and I understand split testing and I understand colors and design and I understand marketing is emotionally moving people from where they’re at to where you want them to go. So, hopefully, I answered some things for somebody there.

Brad Weimert: Well, I love the idea of why is it brilliant and why is it brilliant now? And to me, and this might mean something different to you, but to me, what I heard was the application of the moment is valuable. So, somebody told me this forever ago, they were talking about rereading a book, and they said something to the effect of, “It’s a new book every time you read it because you are a new person.” And the first time I heard that, I thought they were stupid. And as I matured as a person and I think, for strong business people, there’s a direct correlation between growth as a business person and growth as a human, I started to realize that I can hear the same lesson 100 times, but if it doesn’t hit me in a moment where that lesson is needed, I often don’t get the lesson. And from a marketing perspective, there is simultaneously this idea of don’t let go of the thing that’s working for the new shiny object. And also, just because you tried something in the past doesn’t mean that there isn’t a version that will work for you today.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. I’m not a shiny– I used to be a shiny object person decades ago. See that thing and jump right on it. I learned that, and people did this, and maybe it worked for a lot of people, like when Clubhouse came out, maybe that’s a good thing still today, I don’t know. But when it came out, everybody was like, “Mike, you’re not on Clubhouse.” And I’m like, “Look, it’s new. Everybody’s run into it had fun.” But why they spent time trying to act like they’re now friends with Daymond John because they were in Clubhouse with him or something? I scaled another couple million in the time they were distracted by the shiny object. So, I’m true and steady until like we’re looking at a trend of something and what is the solution?

And if you’re not good at the 80% of what you’re doing, man, don’t take on a new thing at all. Get good at the 80%. I know for some, they’re probably shaking their head like, “Yeah, this makes so much sense.” But you and I, Brad, you look on social media and we probably both have friends that you look and go, “Why don’t they just listen to the basic?” And I think you could see it too. I shared with somebody years ago, you post a book on social media and everybody right away buys the book. And I’ve written, I don’t even know, 25 books now, but people reading books to not solve a problem like now, if it’s social reading because you’re sitting on a bench, that’s cool. But if you’re reading a book, I believe, read what it solves and the minute it solves it, stop reading the book and execute on it. This changed my life.

I always called it read to revelation. So, the minute I’m reading, I’m like, “That’s what we got to do.” I shut the book and I execute, and then once it’s executed, I come back. If I don’t need the book no more, I put the book away. But in school, everybody’s been programmed. If you don’t finish Tom Sawyer, you’re a failure. You get an F in school. That’s been, in my eyes, it’s only my belief is that I think that’s holding a lot of people back. And guess what? If you have a problem to solve, read the five books on it or the minute it solved, then give the books away.

And I was a consumer of books. So, like, please, people, do not put me on a pedestal. Everything I’m saying good, I’ve done everything crappy too. So, please don’t try to inflate me in any way that you think here. I’ve done so much wrong stuff. A friend of mine told me, Brad, he said– like I had million-dollar lawsuits, like everyone else. He said, “That’s a really expensive damn seminar. Just don’t go to that one again.” So, for those of you that are looking to scale and grow, consider taking on that. I mean, I got rid of most of my books because, one, I was choking on dust and, two, I was like, you know what? If I need it, I’ll just buy that book again, and then I’ll give it to someone else.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think for me, my experience with entrepreneurs and somewhat myself is, I think, less myself. I don’t have as much of a problem with this, but I see it happen a lot is, people are perpetual information seekers and they don’t act. But I think the other challenge is clarity of purpose and clarity of outcomes. And so, they’re like, “Yeah, I want to grow,” right? But they don’t know exactly what their problem is, so they’re not trying to solve for a specific problem. So, the danger for those people is if they read until they find something interesting to take action on, then they drop the book and they go take action, they’re not really driving towards a goal or solving a problem. They’re just doing exactly what we said not to do, which is shift gears repeatedly instead of focusing on the 80%.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. Back to that Nine Pillars I was talking about, clarity, alignment, and accountability. So, almost every speaking gig I did, I just did one for 600 people, I always say, “Who wants more money?” And everybody’s hands go up. So, then I grab, “Who will come and take the money?” And I hold that money. And first off, at a 600 people, one person got up to come and take the money. And then I’m like, “Man, you could sit here.” I said, “All of you out here in the crowd, you physically want more money, but you want someone to walk up, pull up your pocket, and put it in.” But the one person that grabbed it, I said, “There’s a dollar. You’re done. You can leave now.” It’s not that you want more money, back to your point, what is the amount of money you want?

And I always a little caveat for people. Years ago, when I sold my first company, I can’t say the exact number, but let’s just use 28 for a number. I use the number 28. And it was exactly the number 28. And someone said to me, “You got to put or more after everything you say, 28 million or more.” And man, wouldn’t you know? It seems like a universal belief or something out there that when you say 28 or 20 million or 5 million or more, it gets there. I’ll give you one more point because I think this is value for– at least it was a practice I did.

Every year that I was growing, when I was going to grow to 5 million, Brad, every morning I woke up and I had a black magic marker, and after I showered, I put right here on my arm, and good thing I didn’t tattoo it because I’d have all these numbers crossed out, I’d put 5 million every day. Every day. Five million. My team would see it. My kids would see. Everybody see this. “What is that?” I said, “That’s my target.”

Now, there’s a difference between a target and a goal. A goal, people have learned goals fall short. You’re like, I’m going to lose 10 pounds and you don’t, it was a goal. But the military, a friend of mine in the military says, “We don’t have a goal to take down the enemy. We have a target. It’s a destination.” So, I went, “Oh, man, how do I use that in my life?” So, when I hit 5 million, I changed it. 10 million every day. 10 million, 10 million, 10 million. And there’s something about, and I’m not telling people to go write it, maybe write it where no one sees it, but clearly, I don’t care where it’s written. But for me, there’s something about a marker intention and action that creates this outcome that people desire.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, I would encourage people to write it where people can see it. I think the accountability element of it, which is one of the pillars you just mentioned, is important. I also think that the act of writing it, but also the act of reinforcing creates another data point and another data point and another data point and another data point. And one of the reasons that people lack confidence is a lack of data points. And so, when you start to stack data points, it provides evidence for you that you can do something even if that evidence is manufactured.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. This probably goes a decade and a half ago when technology was already pretty big and everybody was doing everything on computers. And I started studying how my employees behaved. And I’ll share how this created a world-class exit for me, too, and that service coming. So, we did was we had a whiteboard. It wasn’t even a whiteboard. We painted a wall and my partner’s brother did glass, and we had glass put across the wall. And we had a red marker and a green marker.

And at our individual meeting, say, it was tradespeople, plumbers, HVAC guys, they would go up and they would write. If their conversion was where it had to be, it was green, and if it wasn’t, it was red, and then their average ticket and then their revenue and then we had memberships. And they had to physically go up with the red or green marker and we would tell the other team members, “You can heckle a little bit, but heckle with kindness to help them later.” So, if someone was a lot red, think about, what the hell is your problem? We allowed that, right?

But in the end, the person that was green in conversion, we would have him go up and say, “Tell everybody the one thing you did this week that made you green.” And then he would talk to the person that had red conversion. And the fact of this writing with this on a whiteboard is the same reason that this company, I believe, bought our service company. If I have a minute, I’ll tell it real quick.

So, when you’re selling any of you that sold companies, one, what, less than 40%, 50% actually go to the finish line, and two, there’s a moment where they need to, if you have a physical building, the people buying it want to walk through it. And this is scary because you have employee. So, this guy is going to walk through our building. And Brad, I am ready to lay it down because this is going to be a world-class exit, big money. And I’m ready to show off, like, let me show you this beautiful building with these things. And the guy comes in suit, like big money guy, and he’s like, okay. And I’m like, every room I went to, he went, okay.

He went to one area and it’s the only area, he stopped at two areas. One was a map of the State of New Jersey. Now, he’s only there 15 minutes. So, six minutes in, I’m the Italian guy. I’m pretty annoyed fast. I’m thinking, F this guy, my ego’s like, why are you not impressed, right? So, he looks at this map of New Jersey and I have all these little tags on it, Brad. It’s every competitor in new Jersey. So, he stops a minute. He goes, “So what’s this map?” Now, my partner sitting there and he’s trying to tap me like, don’t blow this deal up with your attitude. So, I go, I get all like mafia, I’m like, “Oh, these are the people I allow to exist in my market.” And the guy looks, pauses a minute, walks.

So, we go to one more and there’s a whiteboard we’d written. He goes, “What’s this?” I said, “Every day our managers, they got a red marker or green marker, and if they’re good, they’re green. And if they got to take action, they’re red.” He went, okay, he left. So, my partner goes, “Did you really have to get mob-like with him?” So, Brad, I’m like, oh my God. So, now, the phone rings and it’s the broker. I’m thinking, this is bad. So, I get on the phone, I say, “Yeah, what’s up?” And he goes, “I don’t know what you did, but the guy said he’s taking the company.” And I went, “Oh, well, I mean, I did a really great tour and everything.”

And later I ask the guy, he goes, the level– everybody should write this down. Even if you heard the word a million times, he says, the level of certainty that that company that you had– now, they owned Fridays restaurants, Friendly’s restaurant, medical facility. They were $1 billion or a PE firm. He said, “We’re going to take what we watched in that building and what you did, and we’re going to bring it to facilities.” I was like, “Do whatever you want, just buy it.” So, the point is, sometimes we’re making things really complex, and the people that want are just looking for simplistic and effective. So, I hope that story was valuable because it created a world-class exit for me.

Brad Weimert: I love that. And I think, for me, in this moment, I’ve said this 100 times so far this year, probably on this show alone, but our theme this year is Do Less Better. And the narrative there is exactly what you just said. When you find yourself trying to solve problems that don’t have a big impact and don’t really need to be solved, realize that and refocus on that 80% that the big rocks that actually are going to move the needle.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah, that’s really great. I love that. That should be everybody’s mantra for 2024. It also will be their success mechanism, that mantra because if you’re getting confused and distracted with this, you’re going to lose track. And 2024 is, don’t take it as what I’m going to say is bad. It’s the octagon. It’s training. In 2008, those that trained, they won. Those that didn’t train, they felt pain. And I am a believer, Brad, for all listeners, the next couple years is the greatest opportunity. And I’ll probably see in this lifetime compared to the industrial age of creating abundance wealth companies, there’s no better alignment in history if you look at the merge and conversion of everything that’s happening. It’s amazing times.

Brad Weimert: Well, I know we’re coming up on our time here. Couple other quick ones, if you could have done one thing differently from call it the $5 million to $30 million range in the first company, what would it have been?

Mike Agugliaro: I would have hired somebody or hired a resource, a tool, or person to give personal growth training to every employee. That would have been, we would exit it at $100 million if we did that earlier.

Brad Weimert: So, another quick one, you’ve sold multiple businesses that were multi-eight-figure companies. What advice do you have for somebody that is just starting in business today?

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. If you’re just starting a company, I believe everybody should do this early on, when you go to exit a company, the broker builds a pitch book. And a pitch book, in the sense, for those that never heard it, is a book they’re going to go to the market to. And they’re going to show PE firms or buyers or people acquiring companies, and people are going to read that book and go, I think this is a fit for a portfolio or not.

I believe a company should build that pitch book in their first year of business. Make up the numbers because everybody’s going to exit a company no matter what. You’re going to give it away. You’re going to sell it. You go out of business, I hope not. You’re going to die. You’re going to exit the company. So, if you can build this pitch book, like one day you’re going to hand it over to somebody, this will start to create and align your brain of everything you need to learn, everybody you need to hire, every way you need to start to think. So, the first sale, I didn’t know it that much. The second exit. I built that pitch book years in advance, and it was no doubt that the second company was almost twice as big and built in a half a decade.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. So, tactical ways to create vision, create org charts for the future and the future scale of your company, create a pitch book for the person that’s going to buy your company in the beginning.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. And the other thing is, I’m a big believer in– you guys probably know gap analysis. And for those of you that don’t, simple gap analysis is where you’re at, where you want to go, the action steps to get there. What nobody seems to teach is there’s a line at the bottom pointing back to where you’re at, and I call it the resistance line. The resistance line, the biggest resistance I see in people’s lives is some form of shame, guilt, or traumas that they dealt with. They were bullied as a kid. They were told they’re no good. They felt that they build something and it failed. If you want to scale and win, tackle all those shame, guilts, and traumas. Hire people, get resources, read books because the more you get rid of the mind’s resistance, the faster you will scale into the future you want, which I believe what people want. Like, I help people create, Brad, life, business, and wealth by design.

Years ago, people say, “What do you want?” You want freedom, which is to do what you want, where you want, with who you want, without any restrictions of time and money. And I said that for years. Sounds brilliant. I think what everybody wants is a vacation style life. Not sipping pina coladas on the beach. I think a vacation style life is you live the exact life by design you want, and you love every single waking minute of it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I lean heavily in the direction of alignment over balance. And to me, what that means is that the things in my life are working together. I don’t need to step out of the thing I’m doing to try to find “balance.” I don’t want to have to leave the thing that I’m doing. I want to enjoy the thing that I’m doing. And to me, that is, in your words, the vacation style life.

Mike Agugliaro: Yeah. Yeah, I love that.

Brad Weimert: Mike, it has been awesome getting some time in. As I would expect, I still have a thousand questions about exit and building companies, but it’s for another time. If you want to point people to what you’re doing now, I would love that. And I’d love to check it out myself, but where do you want some people?

Mike Agugliaro: Awesome. Yeah, and I enjoyed the time. And thank you for this. This is so much value and serving of other people, what you’re doing here. You could go to FuDogGroup.com, so just like it said here. Also, find me on Facebook. When I do talks like this, I don’t want it to be a drive-by. I’m answering all my own Facebook private messages. It’s not an AI. It’s not a bot. I’m not against those things. Just so you know, it’s going to be me if I respond.

And we always have cool events coming up and different things to help people and books. So, feel free to hit me up or just go to FuDogGroup.com. And if I could serve, if I could throw one plug out there, Brad, if anybody is working with any veterans or shelters or battered women thing, I have a cool book called Mind Power. If you hit me up, I will send the book. I’ll pay for all the shipping and everything to get that book in any hands of anybody that’s just feeling down on life or down on block or they need someone in their corner. I’d love to do that. So, if anybody keeps me in mind, if there’s a place that I can serve, let me know.

Brad Weimert: That’s amazing. And the website is F-U-D-O-G.

Mike Agugliaro: Yep. And then G-R-O-U-P dot-com.

Brad Weimert: Group. Thank you. FuDogGroup.com. Mike, thanks so much for the time, man. It’s been great.

Mike Agugliaro: Thank you, Brad. Take care, man.