AL EP 48: Salvatore Steffano – How to Recognize the Warning Signs for Agency Owners

Show Notes

Connect with Salvatore Steffano here –
Web: https://Salvatoresteffano.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salvatoresteffano
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/salsteffano
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/salsteffano/

Episode Transcript

00;00;04;02 – 00;00;17;08
Jesse P Gilmore
Everybody is adjusting to your agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control, Greater of Leverage for Growth. And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist, which scaled from 0 to $200000 a.

00;00;17;08 – 00;00;17;22
Salvatore Steffano
Month with.

00;00;17;22 – 00;00;46;06
Jesse P Gilmore
My own agency. We are the host of Leverage for Growth podcast Agency, Leverage and Episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets and leadership styles. We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money in order for you to get your agency to the next level.

00;00;46;09 – 00;01;09;08
Jesse P Gilmore
If you find value in these episodes, watch the case, Study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in control Icon slash Key Study at Niche in Control Icon slash Kingdom. You are now listening to Leverage for Growth. Hey everybody. This is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of Leverage for Growth.

00;01;09;09 – 00;01;36;23
Jesse P Gilmore
Welcome to the Agency Leverage edition. Today I am here with Salvatore Stefano, otherwise known as Sal. Sal is a digital marketing expert and entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience. He co-founded Social Marketing 180, the leading Chiro therapy marketing agency in the U.S. after overcoming personal hardships on his journey into entrepreneurship, Sal’s expertise lies in creative problem solving, sales, marketing and scaling businesses.

00;01;36;29 – 00;01;55;01
Jesse P Gilmore
He’s built several successful businesses from the ground up, generating millions of dollars in sales. As a fitness enthusiast, he has personally overcome obesity in Sal lives in Thailand and now trains for triathlons and uses his platform to inspire others to achieve their goals. Thanks for coming to our show today. So.

00;01;55;03 – 00;02;01;01
Salvatore Steffano
Hey, Jesse, first day being here. It’s been a while since the last time we talked. Yeah.

00;02;01;03 – 00;02;04;26
Jesse P Gilmore
A lot of changed in the last year and a half to two years.

00;02;04;28 – 00;02;17;18
Salvatore Steffano
Yeah, I got a couple of more gray beard. Gray hairs on your beard. I noticed. I do, too. I do too, you know, But that’s what. It’s a wisdom, right? Those wisdom hairs.

00;02;17;21 – 00;02;29;13
Jesse P Gilmore
Yeah. Awesome. Well, for audience, can you tell a little bit about your journey of starting and growing your agency? Maybe. What are some of the key milestones and challenges along your way?

00;02;29;16 – 00;02;49;29
Salvatore Steffano
Yeah, sure. So how this agency actually came to play, I had just exited a gym that, you know, I had some other partners with, and so I moved on to the agency space, which I’d worked for some other agencies for a while, including some of the biggest in the world. I started my first agency when I was like 20 years old just to help my family out.

00;02;50;01 – 00;03;10;01
Salvatore Steffano
Oh, that’s a long story. You can check my Facebook out, you know, for that. So, but with that being said, I was at an event over in California, actually in San Diego, I believe is actually my that’s my first time going there. It was for, you know, go high level Rob Bailey, Shaun Clark, you know, those guys were out there.

00;03;10;03 – 00;03;33;08
Salvatore Steffano
And so I got to meet that person. And I also got to meet a guy named Andrew Souza. He’ll all be kind of you hit it off. And, you know, he bought me some pizza and it was bromance at first sight, but on the real thing. So, you know, we ended up becoming, you know, good friends. And then, you know, he had been running his agency for a little while.

00;03;33;08 – 00;03;54;12
Salvatore Steffano
And so I was like helping him a little bit on the consulting side. And we had just decided to, you know, basically after the gym got on just to become business partner. So I kind of, you know, just start working with him. Right? So he had already started the company Social Marketing 180. And so at that time when we had met, I think, yeah, he was doing about somewhere around like five, $6,000 a month.

00;03;54;15 – 00;04;16;25
Salvatore Steffano
And so basically within about two and a half years here, you know, we took it from that to last year. You know, we did like 812 or maybe a little bit more than that, you know, thousand and course like 300,000, you know, a profit. So basically, yeah, I just told you the whole story, right? You from the beginning, you get the whole thing because sometimes that happens with the entrepreneurs, right?

00;04;16;27 – 00;04;38;29
Salvatore Steffano
Like 0 to 60 real quick. But so long story short, we got together and you know, what we were working on was basically instead of just generating people leads and instead of just sending them text messages in the gym, one thing I implemented was making sure that, like we called the leads right away. We called them within 5 minutes.

00;04;38;29 – 00;05;02;06
Salvatore Steffano
We sent videos to everybody for all these leads coming in, right? And so that speed, the lead was super important. And that’s, you know, I really learned a lot about that from Mike Garcia. And then, you know, Alex Hermosa a little bit, ah, you know, he doesn’t really know much about gyms. I do, but anyways, joking totally. So anyways, I learned a lot from those guys and we just applied a couple of unique things to it.

00;05;02;06 – 00;05;25;12
Salvatore Steffano
And then I basically took that model that we had kind of like Frankenstein together and applied that to the health and wellness space. And ultimately cryotherapy is what we niche down into. So we were able to generate all the leads for the clients, you know, running all their ads. We had people picking up the phone, calling them right away, outsourcing all that to the Philippines.

00;05;25;12 – 00;05;44;05
Salvatore Steffano
So we got great labor rates, We took care of our people, paid a lot better, so they stayed out. And so what that meant for our clients was we were able to provide a very high quality service and do a lot for them. Right. To actually turn those leads into actually conversions by, you know, doing what I preach is speed to lead.

00;05;44;08 – 00;06;11;14
Salvatore Steffano
And from what I’ve seen and over booking 15,000 appointments and social marketing, one area alone, the number one contributing factor to conversion, especially if you’re based on appointments, especially, you know, in the space that we were working in. Right. These like local retail type businesses, you know, whether it’s gyms, whether it’s the crowd therapy, whether it’s a med spa, you know, if you call those leads and you get to them within not even 5 minutes.

00;06;11;14 – 00;06;31;07
Salvatore Steffano
Now, here’s the key that I learned within 60 seconds, it’s game over. Now, on top of that, if you’re getting credit cards from them like our team was trained to, you’re getting you’re going to make sure that they’re going to show up. You’re gonna to make sure that they actually have money. And at that point, you take all that pressure off of the client.

00;06;31;09 – 00;06;39;27
Salvatore Steffano
So that’s in a nutshell what we learned in about two and a half years where we start because that’s where we ended, That’s not where we started, if that makes sense.

00;06;39;29 – 00;07;02;15
Jesse P Gilmore
Mm hmm. Yeah. And I’m sure that if going from the 5000 per month to where you ended off, there was probably a lot of kind of like be there pivots that you had to make or milestones are like sweet and then making an adjustment to your offer. What actually what kind of led you to make those decisions if you don’t mind diving back into the journey a little bit more?

00;07;02;17 – 00;07;32;05
Salvatore Steffano
So when we first got together, he was kind of doing the client. His got a few of the crowd therapy. Some of the massage is a few of these others. And then at that time I was more into like the gym space, right? And so this is right like in the middle of Kobe and all that craziness. And we’re still we’re getting clients results and everything, but we’re just like inside of ourself made really bad decisions out of fear for what’s going to happen in the future versus here now.

00;07;32;07 – 00;07;46;20
Salvatore Steffano
So in our minds, we’re like, well, these type of business is like, you know, like I don’t know if like, you know, next year the same thing is going to happen over and over again. These are going to be closed. And so like, let’s get into other industries. Let’s think of people who make more money and so on.

00;07;46;21 – 00;08;07;20
Salvatore Steffano
This this almost like put us out of business. So we started switching over to another industry. We started working with like personal injury attorneys. And our whole thing is, yeah, we’ll get, you know, appointment or sorry, we’ll get you somebody who’s been in an accident, right? And they’re going to have always qualifications and we’re going to charge you $500 for every one.

00;08;07;22 – 00;08;38;04
Salvatore Steffano
And so you only pay for that. You pay for like ten upfront, 20 know, whatever it was. Right. So that worked out really great. Within our first month of doing that, you know, we sold by February, took took on about 15 clients. The bad problem was we couldn’t quite get the results we thought we could from the training, from the person that we were working with who was helping us to actually implement the system of working with these attorneys and getting them the results.

00;08;38;07 – 00;08;59;13
Salvatore Steffano
And so basically we were able to make a lot of sales, but we couldn’t really do that on a regular basis to where it would be profitable for us, you know, And so that almost put us out of business, cost us a lot of money and making sure all those clients were taken care of and that we either gave money back or, you know, fulfilled on what we promised right.

00;08;59;16 – 00;09;15;26
Salvatore Steffano
That’s one thing I always try to do. My best to do, you know, is to always do. I say even if it’s as painful as it is, you know, And so we did that and then we just kind of we went to a realtor, real estate agents, which was great. You know, we were we were bringing clients on.

00;09;15;26 – 00;09;36;23
Salvatore Steffano
We were getting them good results. But then, you know, long sales processes and, you know, things like that. And then like clients that they just you could give them the most qualified people and the realtor just couldn’t sell. And obviously that’s a mistake on our end for not qualified people enough at once. I mean, it’s a newer industry for us, right?

00;09;36;25 – 00;10;02;21
Salvatore Steffano
Mm hmm. So one day, you know, this guy, uh, Benjamin Simkin, and I think a lot of people watch us know who he is of Australia. So I hired him as a consultant. Um, I do like what’s going on, though, because we were making money, but yeah, we were kind of getting stuck around was like it was like 4050 came up and he just talking to us and he’s like, Why don’t you just go off more credit therapy people?

00;10;02;23 – 00;10;20;20
Salvatore Steffano
I’m just like, Dang, bro. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, cool. Three grand for. Yeah, Like, that’s how I feel sometimes as a consultant. Work with other people. You are. Your problems are so obvious from the outside in, you know, same. But sometimes you get cost up. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how well you know your business.

00;10;20;20 – 00;10;36;29
Salvatore Steffano
And I guess that hurts you because it’s just, you know, it’s like drone like above. And you’ve got a wall and you side and you tell there’s these guys, there’s like, No, don’t go through that door. It’s like watching a movie, you know what I’m saying? And so so we got back into that and then, yeah, we really focused on that.

00;10;36;29 – 00;10;56;10
Salvatore Steffano
But then where we made the mistake and once again, we could have learned from this. Like RC talks about working with franchises and some kind of the dangers, you know, with that. Mm hmm. And so basically we started blowing up with some franchises and we did all this work, and then corporate got involved and then all this red tape, and we didn’t make any extra money from all this stuff.

00;10;56;13 – 00;11;24;25
Salvatore Steffano
So now we’re doing all this extra work, not making more money. And a lot of these problems really happened because I had a serial entrepreneur and like, I’ve just been like building business after business or work in some job where I’m working a lot, you know, because you’ve got to make a lot of money and because when you’re poor and you grow up like that, like it’s just, you know, like you don’t sometimes you don’t you realize you’re not in survival mode anymore.

00;11;24;28 – 00;11;36;17
Salvatore Steffano
You know what I mean? And it’s not like I was like looking back now, like, I was like, I don’t feel like I was like. Like, I just want all the money in the world so I can go buy lambos and all this crap. So, like, I’ve made the money to do that kind of stuff in my life.

00;11;36;19 – 00;12;05;16
Salvatore Steffano
But that’s not where my money, you know, most of it goes to my work just honestly, no, you know, like I have some family and some things, you know, some different issues. And then, you know, like obviously a lot of money, I to put it back into businesses. And so that’s how I’ve been able to build business after business with really like pocket change sometimes and build it up into a six figure company to six figures a month within anywhere from 9 to 8 months typically.

00;12;05;18 – 00;12;27;00
Salvatore Steffano
This company was a little bit different, though. Things were way slower than before, but I also did the thing of not making mistake. I’m not paying myself this time. We are me and my business partner or we had rent profit first, then we had to implement that into the business early. And so we were paying ourselves, you know, pretty decently, you know, compared to the money we’re making.

00;12;27;03 – 00;12;50;26
Salvatore Steffano
And so there’s a lot of good things too, right? It’s not like all doom and gloom, but the biggest problem of it all was I did I wasn’t taking care of my health. And over time, I just let it get worse and worse and, you know, I didn’t I, I remember one point like feeling like death, you know, like if I don’t do something, I’m like, I’m literally going to die.

00;12;50;29 – 00;13;08;19
Salvatore Steffano
Now, about a year and a half ago. Yeah. And it was at that point I looked around and I was like, Yeah, like, it one’s enough, enough. You know, like, when are you going to stop killing yourself to prove yourself to everybody else and to bend over backwards for everybody else and and just see, you know, how it is not for nerds.

00;13;08;19 – 00;13;30;09
Salvatore Steffano
I’m like you. We as entrepreneurs, I’m not trying to lose their. But a lot of times, you know, like what we do, it gets unrecognized, you know, like and people don’t understand the tough decisions we got to make. And sometimes, you know, and I got to a point, my health was so bad. I mean, I, I was an asshole in my business, just to put it bluntly.

00;13;30;12 – 00;13;50;01
Salvatore Steffano
I was mean to my employees. Like, I wasn’t like calling them names and stuff like that. I wasn’t, like, completely disrespectful, but I would lose my cool in meetings and I’m like, Oh my gosh, Like I told you guys a million times, it’s this all that kind of stuff. And that was because, like, I was just in so much pain that I was reaching out and everybody else.

00;13;50;03 – 00;14;10;22
Salvatore Steffano
And it’s like looking back at that or the craziest things is like, wow, like, I could have done so much more in business and we could have made so much more money and so much more profit and help so many more people. And it created even better than what we already did. If only I had taken care of myself and my own health.

00;14;10;24 – 00;14;28;14
Salvatore Steffano
This is like I built this after killing myself for so long. I built this business in a way where I was just like absent from a lot of it. Like I would build a system or process. You assign it to somebody and move on because I had frameworks, you know, operating systems that I follow. USC Traction by Juno.

00;14;28;14 – 00;14;48;05
Salvatore Steffano
Wickman That by the way, like, that’s amazing books that taught me how to actually scale a business, because before that I could always make a lot of money hustling as a one man show. But I didn’t really know how to communicate things like my vision property and get clarity. Even though I thought I did all this. I read that book that I actually did.

00;14;48;07 – 00;15;13;08
Salvatore Steffano
Yeah, that’s what really taught me. Like the proper structure of a business in order to, you know, have a team work around you, you know, to begin with. And then it was good to great that led me to, Oh crap. Like, you know, you know, there’s like one big point that the book made in My heart is to become a great business, to be a successful business in it.

00;15;13;10 – 00;15;56;29
Salvatore Steffano
You know, one thing, there’s two different ways to do it. You know, it’s discipline, right? So you can either discipline your people or have discipline of people. And as simple as that sounds, I’m telling you from somebody who’s hired hundreds of people over my career, both, you know, whether it’s in the U.S. or overseas, that right there made the biggest difference, you know, because once you look at it like, hey, here’s the business, here’s our process, here’s our rules for when things go wrong, which I learned from scalable dot com, you know, Ryan, they Ryan dice and yeah so no digital marker before all that you know OG back to the present days and warrior

00;15;56;29 – 00;16;18;23
Salvatore Steffano
forum and but anyways the point of the point I’m trying to make is I think it’s an important lesson. You know the way that you look at people is because you’re either going to hire people who are going to come in and do the do the work and the right person or they’re not. And, you know, and you had the right systems in place for that with your hire, recruiting and training.

00;16;18;25 – 00;16;27;25
Salvatore Steffano
Now, then you don’t have to worry about disciplining people because the system itself will take care of it. And those people are just going to want to leave. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Hmm. You know.

00;16;27;28 – 00;16;57;27
Jesse P Gilmore
And value Doctor a lot about different learnings that you’ve had on your journey. And and for those that might be new to hearing about you, and can you talk a little bit about the ending of your your time with that agency as time went on and kind of what it was like leading up to it? I mean, you talked about the physical aspect, but then there was a decision you had to make to kind of reclaim control.

00;16;57;27 – 00;17;02;10
Jesse P Gilmore
Can you talk a little bit about that?

00;17;02;12 – 00;17;31;20
Salvatore Steffano
Yeah. So towards the end, so to start with the beginning here again, so in the beginning there, there’s things that I had learned from a recent business was that, hey, like keep things just really simple, you know, and life will be easy, right? And the more complex you have, the more variables you have, the, the more you know it’s going to exponentially increase their headaches in business, right?

00;17;31;20 – 00;17;51;28
Salvatore Steffano
Is you’re going to anybody who’s had more than five people in their business can understand if you have it this when I tell you in the very beginning key things really, really, really simple. So there’s this one method you call the three piece, right? You pick one problem to solve for one type of person and you offer them one product.

00;17;52;01 – 00;18;26;20
Salvatore Steffano
Fantastic. For the most part, we did that. You know, it might’ve been different times we did that. Here’s where we went wrong. Anybody here knows Rob Bailey is going to tell you to have one type of offer campaign that you’re running for your niche. Well, what happens when you all of a sudden I run three, four, five, six, seven, ten, and then going a little bit wider on your niche and then add that to the different services.

00;18;26;20 – 00;18;44;15
Salvatore Steffano
So everything that we were doing right, we were doing a lot. We had a structure pretty well, but the thing we did wrong is we we weren’t charging enough for what we were doing. You know, we could for what we were doing. We could have been going after market who could have paid way more money than we did.

00;18;44;17 – 00;19;04;12
Salvatore Steffano
So we could have automated some of that stuff a little bit more. We could have not relied so much on so much labor. Because here’s the thing that our labor costs for what we were doing in our income levels was really it was it was cheap, right? The quality was good, but it was cheap. The labor. But what is it?

00;19;04;12 – 00;19;26;00
Salvatore Steffano
Cheap is managing all that labor as you scale and grow. Now you got all these systems you have to place and manage it. And then you know what? Where we really messed up too was in trying to force everything to happen to create all this bureaucracy. And that’s where discipline comes in and know hiring disciplined people or having a disciplined people.

00;19;26;03 – 00;19;45;01
Salvatore Steffano
If you work at a corporate if people who have worked in bigger corporations know there’s two types of corporations, there’s one where the management is always yelling at you all the time about your numbers and everything and just won’t leave you the heck alone. There’s a million frickin rules and a bunch of them are dumb because someone did something at one time.

00;19;45;04 – 00;20;04;10
Salvatore Steffano
Then you got the other side where they hire people. They just let them do their job and then they’re responsible for reporting in whatever their metrics may be. And as long as you only obviously give them proper training time and stuff like that, you know, to get acclimated to the rule. But then it’s like, all right, well, you’re either able to do your job or you’re not.

00;20;04;13 – 00;20;26;22
Salvatore Steffano
That’s enough. And so for me, like, it’s just there’s so many things because I’ve been doing it for so long that I do that, you see. Right. But there’s a lot of times where you start making excuses in your head to, you know, for your employees, for your people, or maybe you just don’t want to deal with the issue and you’re in your head.

00;20;26;22 – 00;20;45;15
Salvatore Steffano
You know, it’s not that big of a deal right now or I’ll deal with it later. This is a priority, right? That’s a that’s a very easy thing to get, you know, to happen. You know, because we had our weekly meetings where we have like our issue list and everything. But sometimes what would happen is like, you know, this isn’t that big of a priority because it doesn’t have to do with our projects this quarter.

00;20;45;21 – 00;21;14;05
Salvatore Steffano
Maybe the metrics are messed up, so we’ll deal with that next quarter and that next never got that. But you got pushed and pushed and before you know it, you’re too big to go back and make some of these foundational changes. And that’s ultimately where we were at. We had to make that decision. Do we want to keep running this business or do we want to sell it off or do we just want to get out of it?

00;21;14;08 – 00;21;38;00
Salvatore Steffano
Right. And so for me, the decision came down to me, you know, for you know, for my health. And I honestly realize, too, that I just didn’t have the passion for it anymore, you know, because for me, I got to a point where I just felt like we were just making everybody money and know I felt like a lot of people are just like, ungrateful, you know?

00;21;38;00 – 00;21;50;09
Salvatore Steffano
And I’m not saying that they are, you know, saying we have a lot of great clients. I’m not trying to bash and I’m just saying, you know, how you would feel. The Times is like, you got to think you’re from the agency side, right? You’re get clients results month after month. You can be nine months in a row.

00;21;50;09 – 00;22;18;23
Salvatore Steffano
They’re doing great. That month comes and it sucks. You’re the problem. You know I’m saying like or you make somebody 200, you help somebody make 200 grand in a weekend and they get upset because you didn’t send 500 people on their 10,000 list to D.R. and they missed a little bit of money. It’s like, I’m not saying that like that shouldn’t happen, but it’s like, you know, we’re all humans.

00;22;18;23 – 00;22;38;24
Salvatore Steffano
You, no matter how much you know, the guy software, we have the NSA. And so still human. Yeah. Yeah. And so once again that’s not it, you know, but when you add all that stuff together and you just get to a point where you just realize, you know, it’s just going to be easier just to close this thing down and build something new.

00;22;38;26 – 00;22;56;23
Salvatore Steffano
And it’s not like for me, it’s my first time doing that, you know what I’m saying? In fact, I can tell you, every time I’ve owned a business, either one of those things happened, you know? So either I built it up and sold off or, you know, my partner or what I do. A lot of times partner companies and I’ve grown to a certain size.

00;22;56;26 – 00;23;16;08
Salvatore Steffano
So what happens? I don’t be happy with where they’re at. So then I’ll buy me out and then I’ll go to another company or, you know, say or but for me, especially my younger or my business in my early twenties, it was always it was never that I wasn’t making money. It was just like, you know, we’re like, I want to do something else or this is fun anymore.

00;23;16;10 – 00;23;37;04
Salvatore Steffano
So that kind of stuff, I’m sure nobody can relate listening to this podcast, but you know, but I think when you have confidence in yourself and your abilities, you know, then you just don’t worry about necessarily like what’s next and where your next dollar is going to be. You know, it’s kind of like riding a bike, you know, and that that’s like how making money is.

00;23;37;04 – 00;23;56;21
Salvatore Steffano
And I don’t mean to sound cocky or talk about that, but I mean, that’s that’s how it is like and you learn there’s a lot more to life than just money. And so part of my health journey, it came into like a really deep spiritual thing to, you know, finding myself and all that hippie woo woo stuff, you know, that I used to think was like, stupid.

00;23;56;23 – 00;24;19;23
Salvatore Steffano
But, you know, I won’t get into like, meditation all the chakras, but. But what I am saying is, though, you get to a point where you realize, like, money’s great and you can do it and you want to make it right, but you realize that they’re just like so much more out there and there’s so much more valuable resources and assets that you can get so much more done than just looking at numbers.

00;24;19;26 – 00;24;38;18
Salvatore Steffano
So I’m like, it’s like Grant Cardone says, you know, contacts and contracts, right? Like, that’s one form. Like if you you are good at that, you conversating and talking with people and problem solving, right? So if you can solve great problems, people will pay you unlimited amount of money for that. But the thing is you got to be real.

00;24;38;18 – 00;25;01;00
Salvatore Steffano
You can’t be one of these hucksters that, you know, it’s like the old me was years ago about coaches, coaching coaches, the coach coaches, right. Like and I was just talking to somebody today that asked me, you know, if I’d be his mentor. And, you know, the first thing that I taught him was the first thing you got to do is get consistent with the skill and actually be great at it.

00;25;01;00 – 00;25;18;02
Salvatore Steffano
Because if you’re not great at it, like that’s why you just snake oil salesman and you’re never going to have confidence in yourself to grow and scale a company unless you’re just a complete piece of shit. I hate to say it, but that those are the people who grow companies like that, who don’t care what they’re doing. You know, I get into all kinds of stuff.

00;25;18;02 – 00;25;44;19
Salvatore Steffano
You’ll get very passionate about those kind of corporations. We all know who they are, but once you’re once you put your profits over people’s well-being, like, I mean, you I just I don’t know. That’s just kind of like a form of evil to me. I would say, you know, that that’s the kind of stuff that why you have these drug companies, you know, coming out saying, like OxyContin wasn’t addictive, you know, killing people.

00;25;44;21 – 00;25;47;06
Jesse P Gilmore
Yeah.

00;25;47;09 – 00;26;03;19
Salvatore Steffano
So that’s the dark side of entrepreneurship, you know, which is the deeper you get into, you have to make decisions and you got to live with the decisions that you make. And sometimes in the moment, you don’t realize when you’re making a bad decision and you’re not doing the right thing, you know, and we’ve all made those bad decisions.

00;26;03;19 – 00;26;25;11
Salvatore Steffano
I have to, you know, especially in my like, say, my early twenties, like I did all kinds of stupid stuff that I’m not proud of. But the thing is, you learn from it and you realize, like you can be honest and ethical in the way that you sell and market without even telling white lies, without trying to be something you’re not, or be just genuine or even promise people crazy results.

00;26;25;11 – 00;26;47;26
Salvatore Steffano
That’s the other thing I’ve learned is, you know, sometimes what I find works the best is not this promise of million people that you’re going to make $1,000,000, make real connections with the few people that you can actually help and help, though, and bribe those people right the way with those people in those companies. And I can tell you, that’s made me more money in my entire life than anything else was just a few good relationships.

00;26;47;28 – 00;27;14;14
Jesse P Gilmore
Mm hmm. MAN And there has been so many nuggets of lessons on this journey. There’s two main questions that I want to ask you, and then we’ll all hear kind of what’s next in the life of Sal. But number one is for anybody that’s kind of listening that might be having some issues with their agency kind of dominating their world and maybe they don’t know it’s an actual issue.

00;27;14;14 – 00;27;34;18
Jesse P Gilmore
So either it’s they’re working over the weekends nonstop or it’s affecting their health. What were some of the signs that if you were to look back and go, Oh man, if this certain things are happening, you need to take a good look at your relationship to the business. I think that would be one question and I’ll dive into the next one.

00;27;34;18 – 00;27;46;25
Jesse P Gilmore
So what are some of those kind of like red flags if you were to go back and if someone’s listening, they have problems, they don’t really know it is a problem right now. And you were to give them, hey, if you’re looking at these certain things that this is something you dive deeper into.

00;27;47;02 – 00;28;12;14
Salvatore Steffano
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the first things I would say, well, one thing that’s helped me the most out of everything is reading books. Whether or not there’s the most value in the books, more than, you know, YouTube courses, I believe. So the point is there’s author Mike Markowitz, and he has actually a test. Yeah, that’s really simple.

00;28;12;14 – 00;28;34;23
Salvatore Steffano
If you look at a. Yeah, he’ll show you what your current bottleneck is in your business. I mean, I could explain it to you right here and take 20 minutes, but it’s called Fix This and actually has a whole book about it. Or you can literally just read the first few pages or Google. You’ll find it and you just take that quick test and you’re going to know, you know, for me, if I’m working directly with somebody, it’s okay.

00;28;34;23 – 00;28;54;12
Salvatore Steffano
Well, first of all, a big red flag if you own a business and I did it, I didn’t even know this till this year. Okay? You have to understand your numbers. You can’t rely on an accountant for that. You don’t have the kind of money for the kind of business accountant that’s going to actually tell you what you need to do based on your numbers.

00;28;54;14 – 00;29;14;28
Salvatore Steffano
You have enough money maybe to hire somebody to do your taxes and do your bookkeeping. So you have to understand management, accounting, and all that is is understanding why your account of charts or your chart of accounts are set up the way they are. So it’s not generic, you know, it’s catered to your specific business model, very important.

00;29;15;00 – 00;29;39;21
Salvatore Steffano
And then you got to look at your panels every month. Okay. And then on those panels, what you want to see is where your percentage of sales are compared to what the industry averages are for different things like labor, overhead expenses, you know, your net profit or your gross profit, right? I’m not saying like you should have better standards than the industry standard, but at least you have an idea.

00;29;39;28 – 00;29;56;20
Salvatore Steffano
And that’s going to tell you you’re in the long term, right? That’s the long term answer you need to know. The short term is Mike Markowitz. Fix this next. But once you understand that, then at that point you’re gonna be able to look at your numbers and any business and you can tell where what’s going wrong in their business.

00;29;56;20 – 00;30;16;13
Salvatore Steffano
And then all you got to do is figure out how to get that number up and down and then you’ll have clarity, and then you’ll be able to focus on making one change in your business sometimes can be very, very small and basically make that one change. You reported over a month to three months, right? So you’re not you’re you’re you, but you believe that’s consistent, right?

00;30;16;16 – 00;30;33;23
Salvatore Steffano
Awesome. Now you can go work on the next number. Okay. So that’s one of the first things that’s going to tell you what’s wrong in your business. So looking back, are I my staff was a mess like in my career. You have to understand, like I’ve always been really big about sitting, you know, just making sales and money and everything else to fix it.

00;30;33;23 – 00;30;55;22
Salvatore Steffano
So I’m not true that. So that’s the first big red flag. The second big red flag was going back, was doing too much for too many people, too many offers and having all that later, that was a huge mistake right there going back and then I bring it up again. The third thing is your health good. If you’re in the shower and you’re looking down, you can’t see nothing.

00;30;55;22 – 00;31;13;22
Salvatore Steffano
There’s probably something wrong, you know what I’m saying? But all you see is your belly. Like, you know, you need to do something, you know? And I feel for you. I used to be I stop way myself at 330, 340, you know, I guarantee I was over 350 at my worst. And I tell you, and then you’re not taking care of yourself.

00;31;13;22 – 00;31;36;21
Salvatore Steffano
And you could be a skinny guy to not be take care of yourself. Right? So the point is, you know, there’s make an investment in yourself. You know, if you’re not investing yourself, if you’re waking up and you’re miserable every day, that’s another sign that there’s something going wrong. You got headaches every day. If you don’t if you don’t want to go to meetings, that’s a sign that there’s something wrong.

00;31;36;24 – 00;31;58;17
Salvatore Steffano
You should be waking up and digging around. There’s days that absolutely suck and you’ve got to push through it. But if 90% of your time you don’t enjoy, you know, like if you’re not looking forward to work and there’s something wrong with it’s probably not even your business, There’s something wrong in your life. And you have to figure that out because that’s going to that’s what’s stopping your business.

00;31;58;19 – 00;32;17;29
Salvatore Steffano
And no program, no coach, no consultant. And I can tell you spent over $100,000 on consultants. None of them can help you if you can’t take the time to invest in yourself to understand who you are to you know, I’m not saying you got to do everything all at once, but take baby steps now to work on yourself every day.

00;32;18;01 – 00;32;35;06
Salvatore Steffano
Because if you’re not doing that. No, but I’m telling you, you just you think that you can just spend make money and spend money and you’re going to get fixed because you have money for doctors or medicine or you have doc, you can go pay somebody to give you the knowledge or pay somebody to work. Take it from somebody who’s been there who took that.

00;32;35;08 – 00;32;54;17
Salvatore Steffano
It was literally I went from the guy who did everything because I couldn’t trust hiring nobody to the point I didn’t want to do anything. My business and I was miserable and I didn’t even understand my own business. Up to a certain point. I got so lost in my own business because I was so disconnected from it. So, you know, those are warning signs.

00;32;54;17 – 00;33;01;19
Salvatore Steffano
And if you go if you’re seeing them, just remember this podcast to come back to.

00;33;01;21 – 00;33;05;03
Jesse P Gilmore
And all of our laboratory growth programs that helped prevent.

00;33;05;05 – 00;33;16;12
Salvatore Steffano
That data acquisition. You got some good stuff out there, man. I mean, you know, you do. I want to be on this. I want to be on the show. You know, if I didn’t think that you’re doing, you know, good things out there for your people.

00;33;16;15 – 00;33;35;07
Jesse P Gilmore
Mm. Thanks, Sam. So for anybody that is listening, can you talk a little bit about what your journey next? You know, the post agency, what’s the life? And so I know you’re calling from Thailand right now. Is that really, really cool? So talk a little bit about your life nowadays and kind of what you’re excited about.

00;33;35;09 – 00;33;56;04
Salvatore Steffano
Yeah. So I recently just been a bunch of traveling, which believe it or not, when you’re not living in the U.S. and you got rid of all of your house, the cars and all that stuff you live really cheap across the world, like over here in Southeast Asia. It’d be jump on a plane every two weeks or so, go to Cambodia, go to South Vietnam, Japan, wherever, over here.

00;33;56;04 – 00;34;25;27
Salvatore Steffano
Right. And everything is just so cheap that it’s I say it’s like literally sometimes some of the things I buy, I spend money on here, I get like 5 to 10. So it’s like literally, like one of the best things you can do. You slow down a little bit. So what I’m getting at here is ever since I was younger, I’ve always had this idea to kind of be this master of worldwide economies by working remotely and using exchange rates and labor rates and different countries to my favor.

00;34;26;00 – 00;34;43;25
Salvatore Steffano
And it took me 15 years. But, you know, it’s like it’s crazy to finally be here. And don’t get me wrong, Jesse, I don’t even own a car. I don’t even own a motorbike. And I walk everywhere. I call, they call it a bolt or grab over here. It’s a mover, but it’s like, you know, it’s just simple.

00;34;43;26 – 00;34;59;24
Salvatore Steffano
I don’t have a lot of possessions and stuff, so I’m not stressed about money. Like, I can go enjoy myself and do it for way less money than just, you know, a rent or mortgage. Because in the U.S. and, you know, live on half of that in a month here. You know what I mean? I live an amazing life.

00;34;59;27 – 00;35;27;19
Salvatore Steffano
So I’ve been focusing on that. My main priority right now, is just my physical and my mental health this year. So I made the commitment that, hey, if I just get myself into the best possible shape that I can and, you know, I get, you know, kind of everything that’s been bothering me my entire life is going through like this physical and spiritual journey that basically then after that, I’d be ready to take on the world, you know, and really know what I want.

00;35;27;21 – 00;35;49;18
Salvatore Steffano
But in the meantime, I’m training to win the Ironman. I don’t know whether that’s going to be year five years or ten years, but I’m going to win the Ironman triathlon know, because I’m be practicing every day until I do. So I do that, you know, So that’s been really, really fun. And, you know, I spend about 5 to 3 hours just doing that every day.

00;35;49;20 – 00;36;10;16
Salvatore Steffano
And then, you know, the rest of my day is kind of just posting on Facebook, you know, just giving helpful articles about, you know, just teaching and trying to teach people about health and, you know, balancing in life and just like business is great, but there’s more to it. You know, the business should be a means to an end.

00;36;10;16 – 00;36;30;02
Salvatore Steffano
And it’s not the end itself, because I tell you right now, you can hit every goal after another. And as you hit each one, you’re going to have this moment. Yeah, that’s awesome. But as soon as it’s over, it’s back. And if you don’t enjoy and love the process and I hate to say this, I don’t care if you talks about it all the time, people are like, Oh, like, you know, I just don’t like to be that guy.

00;36;30;02 – 00;36;48;15
Salvatore Steffano
I just, like, follows what everybody else. But sometimes everybody else says something because it’s true, you know? And the people that I know that I’ve found true peace and happiness and what they do and let’s get some days suck, man. Some days really suck. And everybody’s telling you they’re just like, you know, peace and happiness and all day and all their bullshit.

00;36;48;15 – 00;37;19;08
Salvatore Steffano
You probably want your money. That being said, one of the things I am working on right now is really this group, and I haven’t. I’ve made like little previous to it, but basically, you know, I want to create this like tight knit men’s group where we basically, you know, meet each other, meet up, you know, like once a quarter, you know, and then we go somewhere fun just as guys, you know, saying no wives, no kids, none of that stuff.

00;37;19;11 – 00;37;37;14
Salvatore Steffano
And we just connect as guys and talk about like the real stuff that nobody else talks about. Like, you know, that people are afraid to say online or, you know, to tell the truth behind, you know, the rise in the false. Because guys, I can tell you, but for as much as you see somebody rise in life, that person had to go through hell to get there.

00;37;37;17 – 00;38;01;04
Salvatore Steffano
Absolute hell. And that’s why, like you said, you got that limit, that there’s a board in the back there, right? That right next to us is the 97%. And that’s true. And that’s why if you look at just look at mental health statistics, if you look at some of these different diagnosis, you got about 3 to 5% of the population that has those strange coincidence are.

00;38;01;06 – 00;38;21;11
Salvatore Steffano
So, you know, if you’re feeling like you’re a little bit crazy, you know, you got to be a little bit crazy to do what you do in this world to make a serious change. And that’s what greatness has done. Because, you know, the end of day, guys, you know, we’re made to believe that, oh, we’re just human. But I know we’re human, we’re limitless.

00;38;21;13 – 00;38;45;01
Salvatore Steffano
We got huge potential. And without getting into all conspiracy theories, you guys got picked on for that. The point is, like, you know, be very careful about the information. You know, be very open minded, don’t, you know, think you know, everything, be like a little kid, be curious about life and listen to the crazies. Listen to the stuff that sounds insane.

00;38;45;03 – 00;38;59;27
Salvatore Steffano
You know, people that have these special abilities and powers that you just might be blown away by what you could achieve in your life when you’re a little more open minded. Stop listening to all the bullshit out there. Know that. But you’ll get a lot healthier too.

00;38;59;29 – 00;39;08;10
Jesse P Gilmore
I love it. Thank. So what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you or follow you on your journey?

00;39;08;12 – 00;39;31;00
Salvatore Steffano
Absolutely. So I’ll be having my new website coming out soon. It’s not out yet. It’s Salvator Stefano dot com. Super hard to remember otherwise if it’s not out yet. By the time you guys see this, you just find me on my LinkedIn, I’m on Facebook or Instagram. I got 200 followers on Instagram, so if you could follow me on there, that’d be great.

00;39;31;03 – 00;39;48;14
Salvatore Steffano
I’ve just started like really these last few weeks. Jesse One thing that was important to me to kind of get over my own self esteem and confidence issues because guys, you can do accomplish everything in the world, but inside like that doesn’t mean that you have that confidence come out to the world. Right. And no, and I don’t blame a lot of people.

00;39;48;14 – 00;40;18;01
Salvatore Steffano
Right. It’s tough. You know, social media stuff. People get to hate on you and say all kinds of stuff and you have all these worries. So I just decided, you know, I try to preach or I try to practice what I preach. And so for me, I’ve been just about every day posts and different videos, my stories coming up with different content and really just sharing who I truly am and being authentic with people and going into the stuff that might be a little bit taboo that most people would never hear you talking about.

00;40;18;04 – 00;40;37;26
Salvatore Steffano
Right? And so I feel it’s important for people to understand the true, authentic journey that I’ve been through. And not only that, but when you when you put all of your skeletons out there, you know, then there’s nothing that I can really use against you in work because you’ve already put it out there. You’ve confronted it. And to me, like I like to be able to sleep at night.

00;40;37;26 – 00;40;59;18
Salvatore Steffano
And one thing that I’ve learned is I’ve just yeah, grew up a certain way and around a lot of it just say not, you know, it wasn’t very honest background. And ever since I was 20, you know, I made a decision that everything that I’m going to do in life to do with honesty and integrity, and if people don’t like that, then that’s okay.

00;40;59;21 – 00;41;19;04
Salvatore Steffano
But it was it hasn’t been until now that I haven’t really been afraid to show that openly on social media versus just talking to people know it’s easy when I’m like near people to be myself, but to put that out on the Internet, you know, and to give that as potential weapons for people to use against me, like, yeah, whatever.

00;41;19;11 – 00;41;36;15
Salvatore Steffano
Now, at least the people I’ve realized by doing this in just a short time that I’ve had quite a bit of people reach out to me and thank me because, I mean, I’ve been going through this struggle and I’m glad that you’re able to share that and be real with me, because now I know that I’m not alone.

00;41;36;18 – 00;41;53;06
Salvatore Steffano
And that’s kind of what led to me wanting to start this group of entrepreneurs where we could travel, get away from everything and just talk about real guy stuff and not worry about, you know, all the outside world, right? You know, not and not everybody’s going to want to be like me and put all their truth out there.

00;41;53;06 – 00;42;08;04
Salvatore Steffano
I understand that. But we all need that support. And, you know, and that’s the biggest thing that I think causes mental health problems with entrepreneurs is just not having people, other people who truly understand who are and just trying to get their money is awesome.

00;42;08;06 – 00;42;24;07
Jesse P Gilmore
And for anybody that’s listening, I will include the links to Sal and you can follow his journey and be a part of the men’s group when it comes out. I’ll put those in the show notes and Sal has been awesome talking with you today. I appreciate you being on the show and I look forward to following your journey.

00;42;24;09 – 00;42;28;12
Salvatore Steffano
Yeah. Thank you so much. Jesse is gonna be here. I appreciate you. Thank you.

00;42;28;14 – 00;43;02;27
Jesse P Gilmore
Agency owners. If you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business where you can regain control of your time, delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day. Go to niche in control dot com slash case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth, you can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems, understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year to live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve always

00;43;02;27 – 00;43;10;26
Jesse P Gilmore
dreamed about. Go to niche in controlled dot com slash case study that is niche in control dot com slash kasumi now.

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