From Engineering Student to Entrepreneur: Michael Lanctot's Journey to Creating Young and Retired

Have you ever felt the frustration of pouring your heart and soul into a project only to see it stagnate or worse, fail? Do you lie awake at night wondering if you're on the right path? If there's a secret to scaling your business without sacrificing your sanity?

If you nodded your head, this episode is for you. Today's guest is Michael Langto, the founder and CEO of Young and Retired and best selling author of Pipelines to Wealth. He's not just another entrepreneur, he's a visionary who turned a challenging sales job into a multimillion dollar enterprise.

In this episode, you're going to learn how Michael navigated the turbulent waters of door to door sales, redefined his life's mission, and built a thriving business network, all while maintaining a work life balance. We'll peel back the layers of his journey, focusing on the systems he built that allowed him to scale rapidly and efficiently. As if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe. And now here's my conversation with Michael Langto. Enjoy.

Hello everyone and welcome again to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment podcast. I'm your host, Dave Goulis, and this week my guest is the founder and CEO of Young and Retired and the author of the new book Pipeline to Wealth, Michael Langto. Welcome, Michael. Hey, thanks for having me, Dave. Glad to be here. Yeah, yeah, we appreciate you taking the time. If you could, for everyone. Can you tell us how you became an entrepreneur? Yeah, I'd love to.

I really started off in college, so I did chemical and nuclear engineering. It's funny that I ended up in sales because it's not, you know, my dad actually was pushing me, always go to business, go do sales, go do, you know, And I was like, no, I'm, I'm too smart for that. I'm going to go do engineering. That's what I would tell them. And so I did chemical nuclear engineering.

And you'd see all these really smart people who had great ideas and nothing really came of them, right, because they didn't have money, they didn't know how to market, they didn't know how to sell. And so they ended up doing research for the universities or they ended up doing research for these companies. But at the end of the day, they didn't really own any of the stuff that they were making.

And so I'd say in college, that's what really sparked my entrepreneurial spirit is because I was like, you know what, I can go out make stuff, but I want to own it. Which is actually how I got into Sales, because I knew you could make a ton of money in sales. And so I wanted to go build my own stuff, make my own inventions, but I didn't want other people to own them. So that, that's kind of what really sparks that for me. Okay, interesting.

So when you're in college, you're in, you're in a degree program for chemical nuclear engineering and you have this epiphany in terms of the advantages of sales, the income opportunity and this quest for ownership. So then how did you make that u turn, so to speak, and like what was your next move? So that's, it's funny, I was in Washington D.C. doing a mission trip and I was, I was at church and there were some guys that I used to tutor organic chemistry in that, in that session.

And I was pretty confused because I, I tutored them in New Mexico, that's where I'm from. And so I asked, I was like, what are you guys doing here? And they said they were doing pest control sales door to door. And I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. And I told them that. But one of them, he was like, yeah, Well I made 13 grand this month, so it's not that ridiculous. And so I was like, whatever, because you know, we're, we're 20 years old.

And so that, you know, 13 grand, especially to a 20 year old, is quite a bit, especially what was that eight years ago? And so I didn't think much of it. Got back home, I, I finished off my degree and I was getting an internship at a nuclear power plant and this was my junior year of college. And so I was asking them, hey, what is the, like, what's the max pay I could get? Like, what, what does that look like? And they were pretty confident.

They said that they were going to pay us more than the other interns and that it was going to be 10,000 after expenses like living and stuff like that. And it was kind of just like, yeah, that click in my head of but my buddy made 13 selling pest control door to door in Washington DC. What the heck? And so I called them. I was probably the easiest recruit there ever was. And then I went out and worked with them that next summer.

And that's what started my journey in sales and sales and entrepreneurship. I say they go hand in hand. Obviously they're not, not the same thing, but you need to know how to sell if you want a business that just kind of has to happen. So I went out, did sales for, for that company for two years Then I went to a new company for two years and then I left sales completely, started my businesses. Okay, interesting.

So door to door sales, right. Is about as brutal and as tough as it gets. So. Oh, yeah, from. From someone that was like a smart guy. Nuclear, chemical engineering. And in that type of program to do like you said, right. It doesn't sound. Doesn't seem to go hand in hand. So what was that experience like? Like getting the allure of the income and the opportunity, but then dealing with like having to learn how to sell door to door. What was that like for you? It was pretty funny there.

When I went out, there were maybe 50 of us who went out to work with this company and by the end of it there were maybe 20. Right. Because it was hard. But I was used to working two jobs in college and, you know, I. I can't tell you how many times I slept at the university, just in the chemical engineering department because I'd be up studying super late. My work was pretty close to campus and it was like 2am and my shift was at 7am so it's like, okay, I'm just gonna sleep here. And so I was.

I was used to working extremely hard, studying all day, going to my jobs. And so when I got to this job, everyone was complaining about, oh, it's so hard. Oh, it's this. And I'll be honest, I was like. I was getting eight hours of sleep. I thought it was fantastic. And it was. Yeah, it was, it was difficult kind of talking to customers because it was. With pest control especially, you're talking to customers all day. You're talking to customers and you're knocking on every single house.

So I've done solar as well. With solar, you don't do that. It's. You can only go to specific homes. But it's pest control. It's every single house. So it's kind of like getting rejected by 60 people a day. And so that. It's. I would say that's the more mentally taxing part. But for me, I would say I kind of had a leg up because I was already doing pretty difficult work for the last few years. Whereas most of these guys came in and this was the hardest thing they'd ever done.

So it was a different kind of hard, but it wasn't, it wasn't too bad. I'll say that that's an interesting perspective to where now you could actually get eight hours of sleep. So compared to what the life you had, it was easier. And thus you're able to reframe that and so much of sales, too, right. Is just dealing with that rejection, not taking it personally, reframing it in your mind, being able to endure to continue to get to those yeses where all the benefits come from.

So, yeah, congrats on that. Thanks. I was going to say, I'd say probably the hardest part with it is I always like to be challenged. I always want to be doing something and you kind of just figure it out. Right. With sales, you get, you know, you get the same responses. I need to think about it. Let me talk to my spouse. Do you have a car? You know, it's kind of like the same 10 responses every house.

And so once you kind of figure it out, it just gets a little boring because you know what they're going to say by their body language, they turn a little bit like this, you know, they're going to ask you for a card. And so for me, that was probably the hardest part is after a couple of years of it, I was like, what am I doing? I'm not learning anything new. I'm not getting better. You know, I'm making great money. But it's kind of boring now.

Okay, and so that's when you went and went off on your own, started your first business, correct? Yep.

So then I started a company called Fleet and Go. So this was like right before. I say this was right before COVID got really bad. It was during COVID but it was right before it got really bad. And I don't know if you remember, but there was just like a massive car shortage and you couldn't find rental cars or do anything. So I started buying up a ton of cars and putting them on Turo and it was killing it. And then I picked up some Airbnbs and I started a business called Fleet and Go.

And the idea behind Fleet and Go was some people have money for cars and some people live in great locations. Let's link those people up so that the people who have great locations and want to take care of people's cars, you know, kind of create this network form. And that went really well. And same thing, it was, it was going really well. We had expanded to four, four states, six cities. And I kind of just had another epiphany of, man, I want to have way bigger businesses.

And so I ended up getting back into the door to door sales world. But this time when I got back in, I started my own marketing company versus working for somebody else's company. Okay, and so what, what was the company you started then? Young and Retired. Okay. Yeah. All right. And so I know you post a lot on social media about that. So what does that company do? So basically what I do is I go out and I explore all the different industries out there.

Credit card processing, insurance sales, solar fiber, pest control. And I look for the companies that have the biggest pros and the least cons. And so I do all this research on these companies and then I make these contracts with them. And then after we have those contracts, what I do is I just go fill them up with salesmen. So when we're doing our ads for recruiting people, it's, I like it a lot more. A lot of companies, they just push you to do whatever kind of sales they're doing.

For us, my goal was I want to put people in the best positions for themselves. So when I'm talking to someone, the conversation is really like, hey, tell me about yourself full. Here's our options. What are you interested in? And we have jobs where you stay at home. We have jobs where you go door to door if you want to become really good at sales. We have some where it's business to business. And so that my, my goal is I just wanted to cast a really wide net.

And we went from zero salesmen, zero revenue. When I got back into it hasn't even been three years and we did 50 million in sales this year and we had a thousand employees. So it's just, we've been crushing. Well, we've been really crushing it. So you're, you're the agency. So these companies, right. Their model needs sales reps, whether it's door to door, call from home, what, whatever type of model it is.

And you basically will recruit, train and manage the staff that's selling for these different companies. Is that right? Exactly like you've heard. Have you ever heard of Quantum or CenturyLink? Yeah. So we had a contract with them. We go out, they do a lot of fiber optic sales. So fiber sales are really big right now. It's high speed Internet. So we go into a market, we put on a ton of accounts. So between, we're doing, we're doing fiber sales for, I want to say eight companies right now.

And between the eight of them, we're doing a little over 3,000 accounts a month. So Fiverr has been a really big one. And so we'll go to these pretty big companies, we'll do some smaller ones and then I'll go and I'll negotiate a contract based on what the volume I think we can do for them is. Winning deals is as simple as the sales tools that you use, pipedrive's easy and effective CRM lets you track your sales pipeline, manage deals and automate the whole process so you can focus on one thing.

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So what do you think? Because, right, clearly you had experience door to door, right? You kind of, you had a unique perspective and some early success in sales, right? Very ambitious. Just hearing you tell your story. But I mean, just like you said, going from nothing to 50 million in revenue within three years is a very, you know, very impressive accomplishment.

What do you think is, has been the, you know, some of the reasons you've been able to scale so quickly in terms of like least a thousand employees? I mean, that's a lot to manage. Like, what would you attribute that success to? I would say it's. And I talk a lot about it in this, in this last book that I came out with in Pipeline to Wealth, I talk a lot about like, my marketing business is a business and for any businesses you need to have the proper setup before you start the business, right?

In my opinion, you need to have passive income coming in. So I didn't have to worry about my mortgage or my wife or, you know, our car payments or anything like that, because I still had my money coming in for my TURO business and I still had my money coming in for my Airbnbs. So no matter what, I was cash flowing enough that even if my business had a really bad quarter or something, we were fine. Right now we were fortunate enough that the business just took off and it was killing it.

But it was really that peace of mind of I can go all in and just focus because no matter what, we're good. I'd say that was one of the big foundation blocks of why we were able to do well. I say the second big one was the systems, right? So I made it. My goal was I wanted to lower the barrier to entry. So I, when I did pest control, for example, sales, like I told you, we had maybe 50 people show up on that office and like 20, maybe a little bit less finished.

And so I was really focused on how Do I make more people finish? How do I make it easier for people? So I try. I started building out systems to where we could hire people easier. We could get them to show up easier, and they could succeed easier. And because of that, we had just better ratios. 75% of our hires showed up, 75% of them finished because of the systems we set up, whereas our competitors were having less than 50% show up and less than 50% finish.

We have, I remember there's one big competitor. They had a really bad year last year, and only 20% of their salesmen showed up. And so they booked housing, they did all this stuff. And it was because they were doing a lot of hiring online, which is where I primarily do my hiring, and they try to get into there, but it's very. If you don't have the systems in place, you'll get killed. So I would say I wasn't worried about my finances because of the passive income.

And I had built up a lot of systems and I had skills in those things so that my business was just able to thrive and just duplicate really quickly.

Can you talk a little bit more about those hiring systems? Right. Too. And just like kind of specifically some, like you said, you always want to set people up for success and make sure that, you know, that they're happy and they do well. So of course they stay. I mean, can you just talk a little bit more about some. Some of the strategy used to do that? Yeah. So let's start with interviews. Right. No one ever trained me how to interview people.

And I saw see that at a lot of jobs, like when I was in college working at, you know, Kiva Juice, the person who was interviewing me, they were just asking random questions. They no one trained them on how to do interviews. But then I remember when I was going to a more professional job, they had, like, you could tell it was a structured interview. They knew exactly the questions they were going to ask. They had a form they were filling out.

And so I was kind of just like thinking back to my past when I had. I was not hiring as many of the people as I should have been. And I was like, okay, what is going on? And so I kind of just had this idea of, I'm going to make a standard interview. I'm going to script it, I'm going to type it out, I'm going to put what questions to ask, I'm going to make a video that explains what I would normally be explaining on the interview.

And they can watch it first and then I can Go straight to asking questions. And so I built out the system of multiple interviews, these videos, the standard information. And what that did was it not only allowed me to do the same interview every single time, but it also allowed my managers that I hired to all duplicate very easily. Right. So I lowered that buried entry. I don't have to go train each of them how to do interviews now.

I just gave them the links for the forms and the videos to send the. To send the potential recruits. I would say that, like that just as an example of systems we had built out, that was one of the big ones. So we can make sure, A, we're getting quality candidates in, but B, it saves all the responses so we can now compare. Oh, the people who answer like this show up. People who answer like this are less likely to show up. And we could.

We could just start collecting as much data as possible from that. Yeah. So it's just like an sop, right? Whether for your interview or anything else. Okay, exactly. That's it. And it's not. It's not like it's anything I do. I wouldn't say anything I do is really groundbreaking. Is we just. But we just do it, right? Like the interview process or. It's not that. It's not that it's that complicated. It's just, why aren't you doing it for your business? Right. Why. Or not you.

But, you know, why is it, you know, maybe someone listening, why aren't they doing that for their business? Why aren't they getting their managers to be able to duplicate everything they can do easily and make a system? And so I just made everything very easy, I would say, for when I hire a new manager. Like, I have one new manager, he's worked with me a year now, and he has 100 salesmen that he trains and takes care of.

Which is crazy, because to get to 100 salesman, it took me five years, and this is his first year. And 100%, he'll tell you all day. It's because we were able to lay out a really good system for him to where he could just. He knew exactly what he was supposed to be doing all the time. Now, granted, he puts in 80 hours a week of working. So, you know, it's not just assistance. You still have to put in the work. Sure, sure. But like you said, right, like that laying that foundation.

And then that, that, that's got to make you feel good because you create this duplicatable system. And then you get a young, hungry, ambitious person that'll put in that type of effort and the synergy between those two creates results that you haven't seen before. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's. Have you ever used MannyChat? No. Okay. So it's an automated messaging software. And so we have a lot of VAs, and we usually hire VAs out of.

Out of the country because it's a lot cheaper to do our messaging for us. And so this is just another example of. I was just kind of getting sick of it because vas aren't always awake. People were going hours without being responded to sometimes and all this stuff. And so I was like, okay, let's just make high quality auto messages. So I go on mannychap. And it was really funny because it's just a system, right? Input. They respond next, next, next, you know, and it just keeps going.

And it was almost exactly like the program we used. It's called Aspen for chemical engineering. You would have some kind of an input and then you'd get your output and then there. And it was just the same drag and play. And it was pretty funny because I was like, oh, it's just again, it's just a system. That's what we learned in school. And I kind of had this like, aha moment of in school. You know, I always joke that it's like it's a pretty decoration on my wall and that I'll never use it.

But it did make me think in terms of systems, specifically because of the degree I chose, which I think has. Then when I go into business. His wife why I've focused so much on systems. That's interesting too. So the fact that we're in engineering and all this chemical and nuclear engineering, like you said, a lot of systems and a lot of operational type stuff, and then you're able to use that knowledge base and apply it to business.

And then again, just see the way to create a system so you can duplicate something as quick as possible. Yeah.

I mean, at the end of the day, everything's input and output. What are you putting in, into what system? What are you getting out? And so it's kind of a black and white way to think of stuff, but super effective. All right, and so let's talk about this new book you have that you have just released a pipeline, the Wealth. Yeah. So I had. I had written a book before this one called Unchained Wealth. This is actually this one. This one is Unchained wealth. And it kind of talked about how.

This one talks about a very in depth of like, there's so many ways to get passive income today, like it's, it's ridiculous. Like one of my favorite things to say is, you know, yeah, college is more expensive. Money's worth way less now than it was for our parents. Like, if you do what our parents did, you're going to be in a worse off situation. So you need to go get past, like, you need to go do stuff our parents didn't do. Like, we have way more opportunity.

And so that book really hits on all the different opportunity for passive income and stuff like that Pipeline to Wealth is kind of the overview. It's like, here you are. What do you need to do to get to wealth? Right? What are the different stages? What, what does that pipeline look like? And so it starts out with, hey, you're here right now. What skills do you have? What marketable skills could you then go gain? Right? And it starts with gaining skills. You then go from the scale.

Because I mean, like I did, I went the sales route. Not everyone wants to do that. Right. And that's fine. There's a lot of things people can do, like for example, using MannyChat and setting up automated messages for people. You can make a ton of money doing that. You just for people, different people's businesses. And so it talks about gaining skills, gaining marketable, useful skills specifically. Right. Like juggling is probably not going to help you a ton.

And then just going from there over to using those skills to make a large income, taking that large income, creating passive income. And you don't need like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Passive income, that's always what I push guys, is like you just need enough passive income to cover your expenses so you can have that like mental weight of how can I pay for my mortgage? Just like off your shoulders. And then you need to go start a business. Right?

Like no one became wealthy working for somebody else. Right. Once you're good, you should go take the risk, go start a business, go build and that it kind of goes over.

That's, that's the pipeline. And so I'll have more books coming out about specifically what kind of skills to look for, how to develop them, what are like the best practices, what are the marketable skills right now, how to market those skills. That'll be another book on like what kind of ways can you plug that in? And then I'll have another book of different kind, like starting a business, how, what the framework should look like, when to get into that.

So Pipeline to Wealth is the overview of that. Okay. So like it's, it's the Basically a setup for all these different kind of expansions of the different concepts you teach. It will be multiple more books on the way. Exactly. All right. And so, Michael, if people want to learn more about what you're doing, get in touch, you know, for, you know, party, be part of your company or just, you know, find out more about your book or anything else you do. What's the best way people can reach out to you?

Yeah, just reach out on Instagram. I'm always. I'm always checking my. My Instagram messages. So it's Mike's young and retired. You can also find my website. It's Young and retired dot com. But I do check my Instagram, like, constantly. And I've. I've got VAs on there all the time. So if you want to reach out and you want a copy of Pipeline to Wealth and Dave, I'll send you one as well. I'll send you, you know, free ebook. And yeah, it's just. It worked really well for me.

It's worked really well for other people. And so I really enjoyed doing it. As far as sales go, it's. It's not for everyone. I'm. I'm probably the biggest advocate of people not doing sales unless they, like, really, really want to. And then it's like, yeah, if you, if you really want to get that skill and learn. Yeah, reach out and we'll find the best place for you. All right. And we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone as well. So. Awesome. Okay, well, thanks for having me, Dave.

Yeah, thanks so much for taking time. We appreciate it, Michael. And that is all the time for now. We will see you next time.