Increasing Tech Sales Performance Without Increasing Overhead Thorough Storytelling with Joe Ndu

There is how to increase sales that we don't currently have. Then there's also companies that are doing successful or doing okay. They have sales, have momentum, but they could be doing better. And then you also have companies that have momentum, but they're optimizing team staff, like leadership, et cetera. So there's all these different facets in terms of, looking from a leader's perspective, the pendulum of growth in a company.

the initial stages, product market fit founder sales fit really, frankly, typically most founders should be, in my opinion, doing founder led sales. Then you have maybe your actual strategies that you want to increase your channels. How do you get more people to know who you are, et cetera, et cetera. And assuming you're bootstrapping or you have some funds to to venture funds to either venture strap, which is a new thing, apparently like one round.

And then from there you bootstrap from the rest. And then from there you're starting to increase like the higher levels, sales leadership, sales org. Sales management at the whole nine kind of help me dissect your perspective. Where do you come in an organization's like life cycle when it comes to that like story arc that I just laid out? Yeah. I think. If you were to look at sales maturity as a three stage growth cycle, right?

So the first stage is we're really still trying to figure out the identity of the company what it is that we do and truly what's the value that, that we bring to the market. That's stage one, right? So that's like figuring out our story, figuring out how to who our ideal customer profile is. How do we get in touch with them? What makes them really want to talk with Then you have stage two, which is, okay, we figure some of these things out. Now we need vehicles, right?

So we understand the story. Now we need a vehicle to bring that story to the market,

match it up, start to scale, start to build some systems around that. And then stage three is like true maturity. Now we're actually really scaling. We've got, we've figured out what works and also we've really figured out what doesn't. And so now we want to accelerate the gas. I help people the most with stage one and stage two. Stage three is more of an operational exercise, right? So it's an optimization around operations. Whereas stage one is discovery.

Stage two is engineering and design of how to get to the market. And those are the places where I play the strongest. I like the term design because there is, a creative component to it, but there's also constraints. And especially if you work with founders, there's a multitude of different constraints, which makes the work exciting. Tell me more about the design work that you do in stage two. Yeah. So design I like the word constraints that you used, because.

I think that those constraints is what actually gives us the freedom to accelerate thing is, think of it like this, if I told you to write an essay and just give you a blank sheet of paper, that's really hard, but if I give you a writing prompt, now you can do something right St. Thomas Aquinas used to have this exercise about like rules and things like that, he's okay, imagine you build this huge mountains really high up in the air, you put 20 kids at the top of that mountain, And you leave

them there. They're all going to sit down and basically cry because I could fall off the edge of the mountain. But if I erect

a really firm fence around the barriers of that mountain, give him a soccer ball to play. It's fine. You can have fun. Yeah. Because they know that within this confine, I'm safe. So everything I do within these confines are safe. So understanding those constraints within the business are really important. And especially around stage two, if you've got a company that say sub a hundred million dollars in annual revenue.

It's really important that everything we do at this stage is directly tracked to bottom line KPIs. And so all of our design is around that. So for example, most companies I talk to are still looking for like virality. How do I do content? How do I get out social media? And all of these things are good ideas. But what I really help them do is get very clear about, we want one message, one vehicle, one ICP, and let's get that locked in a direct messaging approach.

And the reason why I'm really strong on that is because if I get more at bats, if I can have more conversations, if I can understand my metrics to go buy a customer, and I know exactly what it is that they're responding to and what their own language is and speaking to me about their problem, that gives me The tool set to build out other types of outreach, these things where I don't have as much direct control.

So the kind of design constraints that I'm looking to work with a founder is let's not do 20 things haphazardly without any coordinated strategy. Let's really Focus our resources on one specific vehicle and then push that, scale it, get a lot of at bats. Even if they don't close, I want to have a lot more conversations with people. And then that gives me the fuel and the formula and the, Speech patterns, really, of how to have those conversations at scale.

And and then once we have that, then you can start putting in systems, right? And then again, if you're still under a hundred million, it's important that the systems that we use to scale are still very personal, right? So it still requires conversations, even if those conversations are asynchronous. I'm not a fan of, Hey, I'm just going to throw you up against a automated webinar. You're going to do a form and then you're going to. I mean that, that can work.

But I find that you get much better, not just close rates and stick rates, but satisfaction and more importantly, referrals if we keep the human element inside, inside the sales process from the beginning. And in fact, if you do it the right way and your discovery calls really provide value, you can get referrals before people become customers. It's probably just to. Put a pin on it.

This is probably one of the most valuable things I've heard in a very long time when it comes to sales is usually when it comes to sales and marketing, we talk about, okay, how do we get more MQLs, SQLs people on the phone? How do we get more done deals, close deals one and move people to that stage. But that's usually where the thinking ends. It doesn't really go. It's how do we create the process so that we have higher LTV or referral rates lowering or CAC or cost for acquisition?

Like I think those conversations are more, not to Say, oh my gosh, Joe, amazing work, but it's dude, I like that because it's a more mature approach to strategy versus, Hey, let's just get as many leads as possible and as many close one deals tell me more about. So when you mentioned vehicle, that means a lot of things. Especially to me, like when we talk about vehicles and I can give you some context, when I look at vehicles or mechanisms, like unique mechanisms I'll give you a story.

One of my clients, they sell pretty much anything, everything that everyone else sells in digital marketing okay, we can do website, we can do content. We do all these different things. And I dove deep what's the one thing that you really do differently here? And what stuck for her was like, she does brand communities. And Oh that's different. That's interesting. So what does this brand community do for me? And then we went through the metrics of what it actually does for clients.

Like it increases revenue lowers, cost per acquisition, lowers ad spend all the, all these nice things that her clients want. Like, why don't we just sell that thing? Instead of selling the work and the hands of I can do all these different things. It'd just be a commodity. I'm going to sell you this thing that is different. So for me, that thing becomes the vehicle and I'm speaking in very simple languages here, but that, that actual.

Package product is what I call a vehicle or unique mechanism. I want to define here on your end. What does it mean when you focus on you mentioned one ICP, one problem, one vehicle is your vehicle that you're describing, like our go to market strategy or channel for outreach, or is it actually like the thing that you're selling? I think I'm in alignment with you here. It's the thing that we're selling, right?

So we want to have one core operational job that we're doing to bring value at the beginning. And that, that oftentimes makes founders freak out, but, there's just so much benefit from focus. And that focus helps you, not, Play in areas where you shouldn't play it.

So you can get really, good at one thing, which means you now can start getting economies of scale, you can fulfill faster, you can fulfill better, your revenue per deal goes up, you can start many of my, many of the clients that I work with don't do products, they do services. And so when we get into sort of one core vehicle allows them to not charge on time and materials, but charge on value. And so now they start seeing exponential EBITDA growth, like exponential EBITDA growth.

It's really beautiful because they're doing less work. There's less change orders. There's less client frustration. Everybody's happier and they're more profitable. It's it's a silver bullet and I can't take credit for this. It's not something I designed. There's many there's so many things. I wrote this a while ago, like everyone's going to keep writing about positioning and so many things will be written and have been written.

It's It's not going to change, but I think the interesting part here is that it stems back to our perception, right? We see things differently depending on obviously value based pricing, but it's all our perception, which I think it's what leverages and we were leveraging here. One, one of the interesting things here that I want to poke around because now I get where you're coming from and seeing where this is, where this can go.

So value based pricing, obviously we're not going to dive deeply into that, but I would recommend looking into. What is your market care about? And what is the deliverables that you actually do? And how for example, simple example, you have a heart attack and if you can get this thing, this cure, whatever, and they're going to save you from dying, how much is that worth to you? You'd probably pay several million dollars for that versus 30 for I don't know, a little.

Pill or something like it's all depending on what's important to

you. Selling services, finding the one thing let's dive into the one thing and finding that unique factor. How do you work with clients to find the unique factor? And I think this is going to be really enlightening for the audience, because I think right now there might be people listening to sell several types of things, multiple pieces, but. And I'm going to skip to the end saying, I know it's going to feel scary to position yourself.

It's going to feel scary to only sell one thing, but this is getting your foot in the door so that you can expand your services and do more for them. But it also helps you become more profitable and streamline operations. But I think the key thing is discovering what is that one thing and then working through your mechanism, which is you actually help them highlight that one thing through your technical storytelling system. So how do you combine both?

Yeah. So if you'll allow me to take a step back, trying to help a client figure out what their one thing is with one vehicle is depends on really what stage of maturity they're at. Let's start with stage one, which is based. They still don't really know themselves, right? They're still looking to figure out how they match with the market. And so they've built something. Some service, some tools, some technology. And they did it. Most of them, they did it with a problem in mind.

And then typically by the time they're talking to me is they've already hit some frustration there. So okay, I've got I've used, chat, GPT vision to analyze. Hey stubs, right? Because I want to shorten the close cycle for underwriting. Let's say that's a real example. And then I set up my, clay workflow. I'm pulling information from from Apollo and from seamless. I'm cleaning it up. I'm sticking it through email automation with AI on it. I'm sending out a thousand emails.

I've warmed up all my email addresses and I'm getting nothing in return. Yeah. And they're coming to me and they're like, okay, we'll fix my email stack. I'm like, Whoa, bro. That's not the problem. Okay. We're not saying the right words. So in that situation, the question becomes you've, got a tool. You think you have a problem, but we just have to have a lot more conversations. And like you said, it's scary because the reality is you got to pick up the phone.

And those situations, the job that I do for them is not let's go sit by the white board and diagram all the things out that we want to diagram out. No, we don't know the market is the one that knows. So you tell me who you think is going to buy this thing. And you tell me the two or three key problems you think that they're struggling with every day. Okay. And then what I'm going to do, and so let's use this as an example for context, right?

I think the person who's going to buy it as someone who's a VP at like a mid level bank and they've got a staff of underwriters and we're paying these guys too much to do clerical work at the end of the day, because they need to be doing high thinking work, but they have to do all this clerical work that specialize. And I think AI can solve that problem. Bingo. Now let's get a list and let's get on the phone. You give me two or three key problems and let's just call.

With a super simple script of Hey, I'm building this tool. Want to do some research. Help me out. I think people in your situation are struggling with one or one, two or three of these problems Do any of these resonate with you at all? And let's just have a quick conversation about this I'm not trying to sell you anything and you just do the work and that's scary. But those are really Good conversations to have. It's not hard to do it.

You spend two hours a day calling and you'll have two or three conversations, maybe four or five. It's not great, but the learnings in having your target market specifically tell you exactly what their problems are and how they talk about it and what they're in their own language, that's the key and how they're trying to solve it. And then now I can take that and one, I can continue cold calling because now I have the right language.

And two, I can go back to my email cycle and figure out where were we going wrong. What was the things that we were saying that we're making people not respond and we make everything buyer oriented. And then from there we get into the storytelling system, but we start telling stories that attract people to say, Hey, you get it. You get the problem that I'm having. Now I'm, now it's worthy of having a conversation because within the sales process, we must deliver value.

And even in your cold emails or cold emails must deliver value. We can't position it in the standard, but we Personalized intro line. Here's my quick case study. Do you want to have a meeting? No, we want to bring clarity to the person when they read the cold email. Hey, here's this problem that you're having. Let me help you articulate it better. Here's some things that maybe you've tried, but here's something that you might want to think about trying. Now, can I help you?

And you'd be surprised how those simple tweaks of getting oriented to your buyer's personality, how they talk about things and giving them value from every step of the way. We'll take a system that's producing nothing. And then from there you start getting some real traction. That's fascinating. I know we're going to dive in and get nerdy with the tech. And I know a lot of people like whoa, clay seamless. How do you tell me how to send a thousand emails? That's scale.

There's plenty of YouTube videos to show you how to do that, but it sounds like this particular example, they're more technically advanced. So I love using clay. I love Apollo, but I think you have to use them in a, this is like the, thinking that goes behind pressing send. So help me understand a little bit further, because this is, this Really insightful. First, we do the actual market research. What are we actually helping them with and do they actually care by having conversations?

And you're being bold enough to just dial, have a conversation, get feedback. And based on this podcast and other experts that I've had on and my own experience, you only really need to have 12. Conversations. That's the key after 12, I recommend 21 because you want to predict what the next one's going to say, but that's because I like to be very, precise, but you only need 12 conversations. That's not that hard. You can do that in a week. That's right.

You can do that in two days if you're dialing a hundred day. That's correct. I'll tell you, here's, the trick. Get an account at like Apollo or Seamless or something like that. Pull your list, get a trial account at one of these calling systems, like just call or Kie and you upload your list and then just say, okay, for the next 90 minutes I'm calling, which play on your phone. On your keyboard, you've got your headset and you're just having conversations.

You got your little script and you're just having conversations and you will get your 21 calls. Pretty quickly. I think that I actually think that's a good number because I think what we're really looking for is you want to have their problem into three buckets. You want to know, here's my ideal customer profile. And they've got I know if I talk to them, they for sure 90 percent of the time, they're going to have one of these three problems.

And I know how to talk about that problem in their own language.

And I know the three or four things that they've tried already that haven't worked or have only worked partially. Once you know that you're ready to go. So let's, put this in a framework, the goal that they want to achieve, the three problems that they have, the three or four things that they tried per problem and their own language. If you have that, is literally. A marketer and salesperson's goals. Like I can do so much with that. That's right. You have your whole story.

And then now you map that to your escape arrival framework. So it's okay, here's the place that I'm at and I want to escape from that. Here's the place that I'm going to, and I'm trying to arrive from that. You map out that transformation process and different people are going to be at different stages. And so now I know once I'm having a conversation with someone, where they are in this process, what's the next thing that's going to be interesting.

So tell me, how you work this into your technical stuff. Like storytelling system, because right now we just did the heavy lifting work. Like this, work in itself, to be honest with you every, startup, every founder has to go through this grind. You get that, get the insights. How do we implement this to get tangible outcomes? Like you mentioned. Yeah. Okay. So there's, two parallel tracks that are running.

The first thing is, once I have these buckets, I'm doing cold calls and I'm never stopping that. I'm just going to calling or doing cold emails, but I prefer calls because I think it's faster. And I think people don't do it anymore. So it works. Okay. So I'm doing that to have one on one conversations, but while I'm doing that, there's one missing piece, which is I have to do. Research into the market, right?

So I've done research into my client, my potential clients, but you didn't know the surrounding market. Like what's going on socially, economically, techno technologically, et cetera. What are the market outside influences that are present today in 2024, or whenever someone's listening to this, that are impacting their reality, because what I really want to do is look at. Trends as things are changing over the past three years, five years, 10 years.

So for example, let's go back to this underwriting thing. The annual salary of underwriters has gone up by 23 percent over the last four years. By getting access to funding as farter money's more expensive. So there's all this capital market stuff that I can weave in. There's all this salary. There's this there's this dearth of qualified employees. And so I weave all these things in plus you have FinTech coming in, which is Going digital first.

So you have all these standard local banks who were caught stuck with, I have aged technology, increasing overhead costs and no real way out of that situation. And if I don't do something, I'm for sure in the next two to three years my, my loan origination is going to hank, which means I'm not going to have any money. So now I've got a story, right? So I weave, I now that's the technical story is I've got the market. The tech, the technical part of what I'm actually trying to sell.

But more than that, I know their reality and I weave a narrative that's data driven around that. And then the question becomes how do I meet them where they are to tell them this story? And easy. I can do an executive briefing. I can do lunch and learns. I can do asynchronous webinars. There's many ways I can repackage that. So you're going to market with them. Then this year you get GTM, like that's how you get a market.

And this is how you educate and add value. What you do, here's you do top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom full of content. And then you mentioned on the email, because I get I'm pretty sure you do too. Tons of cold emails. LinkedIn, thankfully has stopped getting a lot of spam, or maybe I don't see it anymore. But a cold email. Some are great. Some suck. Most suck. Tell me more about like cold, calling. I think help the mystic. I know I said, but cold calling.

In my opinion, I think works better in middle market. That's just my opinion. I think if you're a founder or new, like it may not work as well, but I could be happily wrong about that. So I tend to lean towards the cold email, cold messaging. What do you think about that? I, maybe I'm not the best person to ask because I'm just a big fan of direct outreach. Like I put myself

through university selling AT& T door to door. So I have a weird personality where like the rejection doesn't bother me that much. But what I find is if you're really, if you've got a, if you know for sure this, I think this is really the thing. If you know that you're going to give value on the call, you're not scared of having the call. So if I know that if I get the right person on the phone, that the first thing is I'm going to give them an out immediately.

Number one, and then number two, that what I have to tell them, even if they never do business with me is going to at least improve them marginally, then it's fine for me to reach out. The problem is if I'm going to call and all I'm looking to do is just take, that's the problem. That is, feels smarmy and nobody wants to do that. And I feel safer by doing a cold email. But a cold call it's very simple. I ring you up. You hello, Raul. Hey roll. Listen, this is a cold call.

Do you want to hang up on me now or take 30 seconds and hang out, hang up on me then most people, are pretty chill. They're like, dude, you're being honest. Give me your ticket 30 seconds,

unless you're like in a meeting and they really can't take it, but more times than not, they're like, shoot. And then I know my three buckets. I'll go listen, rule. Most. VPs of underwriting are struggling with this, or this. They invite me in to handle these three things that I don't know if any of those apply to you, but if you could wave a magic wand and fix one of them, which one would you want to address? And then you start telling me, you're like I'm not going to say I'm perfect.

I think we do have this dot, And then I go, Hey, sorry, 30 seconds are up. You want to hang up on me now? Or do you want to keep going? Oh, let's keep going. And we're off to the races. So for me at any level, cold call works because it's very, simple. And there's tech, there's tools to not have you waste your time, like dialing and listening to ringtones and all those kinds of things. So you can optimize it. So I'm a fan of that. And then on the cold email side, I think.

There's two things you can do. Again, it takes a really scientific approach of split testing. And when I say split testing, I don't mean split testing, which is what people do, where they take two identical email copies and they change a couple of things to say, no, we're not looking for one or 2 percent change. No, I'm T I'm testing radically different approaches. Like you always want to have a standard sort of just straight up. Here's who I am. Here's what I think you're dealing with.

Here's how I want to help you. Let's roll. But then you want to do something completely wacky. For example. In this loan origination thing, one guy told me, I feel like I built a Frankenstein. I just, that was such a good visual image. So I called up, I didn't do it. Don't do GPT. I got an artist to draw me up a cartoon of a computer engineer, building a computerized Frankenstein that looked really nice. He was like smiling and friendly looking.

And then that was just the headline is like, Hey, building a tech Frankenstein for underwriting. There's a better way to do it. And then launch that against our standard and it outperformed it like 1.8x Yeah, I don't, but it was because that concept came from the market of this. Yeah. They, told you, they told me, so I just repurposed it and sent it out there, right? So for email, cold email, you're experimenting like that. No,

you don't need to get to a thousand emails a day. You can start with 20 to 50 until you figure out what's actually responding. Because for example, if you're getting 3 percent response rates, That's not good. People are like, Oh, that's great. No, it's not. That's not. That means you've, really messed up somewhere. Thank you for saying that. Everyone just says Oh, you're sending a thousand get three response. It's going to be amazing. That sounds terrible. Oh gosh. Nobody wants to.

And then you've got all this tech thing that you have to manage your whole, cause you're burning email addresses. There's all these other things you have to be paying attention to. But the bigger thing is man, how many, how much time are you wasting of other people in sending out? 97 percent of your emails are unwelcome. Yeah. No. So typically if your response rates are that low, you haven't done your research and if you have done your research, then your list is really poor.

And that's where people don't spend enough time. They get these tools, they put in a little selects, they see this big list of 10, 000 people. They're like, wait, look at all this potential. It doesn't cost me anything to send an email, so I'm going to market that whole list. No. Let's get that list down to two or 300 people. That's highly specific. I am more quality.

Yeah. For example, if I'm doing this underwriting thing, let's go find banks that are hiring underwriters right now, and they're hiring from for at least two positions. That means that's telling me that they have way more paperwork than they can manage and they're willing to pay 60 to 80 to 120 K a year to solve that problem. And so if I can come and automate that and save them 40 percent on just the manual labor, they may still hire those underwriters,

but now they're going to have the ability to go process way more paper. So those are the people I want to talk to. And now I can research very specifically and speak really clearly Hey, I saw you're hiring these two people here, that. Probably means you have this, and this. Let's have a conversation. And now your response rates are like 60, 70 percent because you're not doing, you're not doing anything in bulk. Yeah, it's more relevant.

You're not ready for bulk until you're at stage late stage two, stage three. Interesting. And I think that's one of the things that I, the danger of the terms do these things, quote unquote at scale, because all these things are, Technically automated, but here we're looking at relevance plus automation, plus research, plus actual thinking behind it in small batches versus just like a one full swift, like swing of 10, 000 emails. 100%.

Like one of the things I'm investigating, I don't have a solution to this, but I'm trying to use AI to do like certain types of web scraping and things like that. So for example, in this situation, is there a vision bot that can go and client crawl the job boards to make me a list of banks that are firing for multiple underwriters? That's probably doable. So that would save me the time.

But what I don't want to do is just go to my lead generation list and say, okay, I need everyone with this title. That's making this much that the companies between this and revenue and a senior level go that's such an, that's the beginning. One of the latest lists too, that I'm, that I built for a client is we're looking at specific language that they're using in their company bio so that we know exactly where they stand in terms of worldview.

And then from there we filter out team size and revenue, cause they have to afford the service. But then the third is like their tech stack. Like I have a very specific tool. Cause if they're investing in that tool, they must care about this thing. You have to care about this thing. Then we're also comparing that towards website hits and engagement on the website, meaning they're investing in these things that are growth oriented, but they're sucking in these

two areas. Therefore they know that's important. They care about it and they're more likely to respond to something around like what you mentioned, the three buckets. You might be struggling with this, or this. Which one is that? And that's the real work. That's the brain work that you have to do. It's beautiful to hear that. And most people just won't. They just won't do the work and to build, to bring value to someone, you have to put something of yourself into it, right?

To we have to give of ourselves to make ourselves valuable. And so sometimes you're giving of yourself way before you reach out to the person and that's perfectly fine. And we should be eager to do that because that's where we earn where we earn our paycheck because we're doing something of more value for that, client, namely not wasting their time and then giving them some clarity that they didn't have before. Yeah. You're in the right for it. Switching gears here.

I want to dive into a little bit of your story. Just briefly around the essence of do good work is like the beauty behind the struggle. Ever nice to have difficulty or it's ever nice to go through that. But no, one's going to see you waking up at 4 AM. No, one's going to see you burning the midnight oil and getting things done. So this is what the high, the highlight of the podcasts are.

I know there was a time in your, background when you mentioned where it was very difficult second child on the way you got let go, and. What helped you stick through that? Cause I think it's going to be useful for us to hear not only the good, but also like when things get difficult, like how'd you persevere? Yeah. I've had definitely my fair share of struggle, and I anticipate there to be fair share struggle on the way to, I don't think it's all behind me and that's good.

That's part of, that's part of caring so I'm Catholic just because that's going to be part of the framework of what, I'm talking about here. That's part of how I would say carrying the cross of my role in life as a first off as a husband, second as a father and I need to provide for my family, but there's a hierarchy to that providence of spiritual. Emotional, financial in that order, right?

And the world tells us to do it the opposite way as men are, the job is to provide financially for your family first to establish that kind of financial stability, then make yourself emotionally available. And then if you can spiritually is as great as a third. But I've seen through concrete events in my life that's not the case. And that, God, Jesus is very honest with us when he says, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything else will be given you besides.

And that's a really strong word. Like even if you go to the Greek gratis, that's the Latin, but the Greek is similar, which is it's a totally free gift. And so the question is is that something I can rely on? Can I bank my family on that? If so, then that means I can live my professional life in a very different way than, I would, if it's not the case. So let me give, put this, let's say it's almost like an iteration of Pascal wager.

Yeah. In a sense, But, the difference between Pascal's wager and what I'm talking about is Pascal's wage wagers okay, play your bets. And what I'm saying is no, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. But I'm just, I'm taking it the step, the next step, which is. put it to the test. There's very few times where God says, put me to the test. And, at the end of the prophet Malachi, he said in this situation, he says, when it comes to providing for your family, this is one place where put me to the test.

It's okay, let's see. So in this situation, I'll be very concrete. I got, so my, degree was in biomedical engineering. I went to school, I got, I went to, I'm, I happen to be blessed with knowing how to do school well. There's many things I can't do well, but I can do school really, well. I can hack standardized tests. I just did it. My brain works that way. I can take, I took, I was a B student, maybe A and B, but yeah. Yeah. I might be a B person, but I'm a great student, man.

If I could get, if I could get paid to just be in school, I do it all the time. I'm good at school. Anyway, so I got, I go to university early and I'm on this fast track to get my doctorate in undergraduate doctorate in six years. Wow. I'm like, yeah. But then I really rapidly discovered I didn't want to be a doctor. Okay. No problem. So I did, I pivoted and did biomedical engineering.

I graduate, and I come to the faith around that kind of time, and I'm here in Houston where there's a huge medical center, lots of firms I can go work for, and for me, and this may not be the case for everyone else, but what I discovered was all of them source their tissues from aborted fetal stem cell lines, and so for me, ethically, I had to walk away from my career. I couldn't find a company that could guarantee that I would never have to work with those board, those types of tissues.

I happen to have just gotten married and my wife and I were blessed with a pregnancy within the first six weeks of our marriage. And then that first, pregnancy was delicate. So my wife had to leave her career. So she leaves her career. I leave my career. We have two, I have two, I'm working two jobs now as a result. Because I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to go do. So I tested in for business school. I wanted to go to Stanford business school.

And I was working for a company that did test prep at the time running their Houston office. So I was working in the day, working in the night. My wife has the baby. Obviously I want to be home with my family. So we discern, okay, let's leave the night job because you're working too much. I need you here. And this is not really a good way to start a family. And so I leave the night job and then the next week, the day job has a layoff. So I go from having two jobs to none.

And my wife was also not working. I was like, panic, real time panic. And that was a really, stressful time.

And I did what everyone else would do, you start applying for things, you start looking at who you can who you can lean on, you start asking you, you basically start scrambling, I can remember we'd actually gotten an eviction notice to get kicked out of our apartment I'd even applied to waste management to haul trash, like I was willing to do whatever, and here's, waste management didn't even give me a call back, fine. So I do all that.

It's a Sunday night and we have to have, I think it's something like 6, 000 by the next Friday, or we're going to get evicted. I'm having this conversation with my wife and you can imagine she's pregnant with our second, we're in this really terrible financial situation. We don't really know what to do. And she tells me Like she's looking at me like you're the, head of the household. What are you going to do? I've tried everything. We've asked. We've applied. I don't know.

I don't have an answer for you. I wish that I did. I know that. This is not how we want our marriage to go. That's not the situation we want to be in. I understand very clearly how stressful this is and I'm carrying the stress too, but I don't know what we're going to do. It's God's going to have to help us. And she's no, like God yeah, God's helps. But you've got to put your action into it. God helps those who help themselves.

And I was like, no. If that is how God is, I'm not interested in him. It's what do you mean? It's I'm a bad father. I'm a new father and I would never treat my son like that. My son really needed my help. And I saw that he's been trying things that weren't working. I'm waiting for him to figure some things out before I lend a hand. That would make me a pretty crappy father. If God's like that. Then I You're out. I'm not interested. Yeah, I'm out. I'm out. I'm like, I'm totally out.

Wow. Because we went to sleep like that. I, kid you, not I, this is I, not joking. I woke up the next morning with an email from a client I hadn't talked to in four or five years. Yo Joe. Oh, wow. I'm actually I, wanna go to business school. I just discern I wanna go to business school, but I got a test in two weeks. Can you work with me every day this week? I'm home for break. I'll pay you 6,500 bucks. Can you, I know it's crazy, but can you help me? Absolutely.

You're good at school and this guy needs to go to school. Yeah, and and it was, and not just that, it was exactly the amount that we needed. Like within a couple of 30 bucks more, like it was exactly what we needed. And it was like that from one night to the next morning with me having done nothing, it just shows up in my email. I still have the, stuff from that check. It's in the frame for me to remember.

Yeah. So for me I don't when people that talk to me about like the struggle, I want to be very clear that for me, the struggle has been struggling to, to realize that. It's not about me, like all I can do is knock the doors, like St. Joseph was trying to figure out where he and Mary are going to go. And he's trying to figure out where is Jesus going to be born. The only thing he can do is knock doors. He's just knocking doors and trying and trying.

He didn't have some master plan that figured things out. He didn't have some it wasn't anything of his own merit. His merit came in his fidelity to the process of my job is to knock doors. God handles the rest. Yeah. And so for me, that's what I've discovered is I just put, I just do the next best thing that I'm supposed to do, knowing that I there's, 90 percent of what's going on. I have no clue. I don't know how it's going to pay off.

I don't know what's going to happen longterm, but I can trust the process and I can rely that God has the rest of it. And so I just keep knocking the doors. And so people are like, how do you know, how do these things work? I'm like I'm, not that smart. It's a discipline of hope, right? You're disciplining on hope and trust. That's exactly right. And just to. Put a bow around the story. So remember I said, I applied to waste management to haul trash.

It wouldn't give me a call back within three years of this event happening. I was in the boardroom of negotiating major deals with waste management. Then I told their CFO to his face three years ago. You wouldn't call me back to hire, to haul your own trash, sign the document, bro. That's awesome. That's incredible. Oh my goodness. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, man. Yeah. No, this is great. Joe, for everyone listening here where can they go to one?

Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing who you are and your insights and to learn more about what you're up to. Yeah. So the best place to reach me is on LinkedIn. So slash Joseph and do J O S E P H in the you that's my LinkedIn page. You can reach out to me there. Or you can go to the Catholic CEO. com, which is the organization I do most of my work through. Both of those locations are places you can get in touch with me and other folks like me who do similar work.

Because for example, my suite, my sweet spot is within technology, but if you're in a different kind of company, but you like this kind of approach and thinking there's people we can connect you with who, who think like this, but have specialties in different fields. I like it. I'll put the link to your LinkedIn on the show notes. Joe, thanks again, man. My pleasure. Take care, man. Thanks for having me.