On today's episode of Gathering the Kings. I'll take a good person that's trying and try to find a fit rather than somebody who's cocky and not a good team player. Who's competent. You are listening to Gathering the Kings with Chaz Wolfe featuring fellow 78 and even 9 figure business owners who have real battle scars from business and life, but have prevailed as the king that they are designed to be.
We welcome high performing entrepreneurs to the stage in order to reveal the real of the real on what it takes to build a successful business today. We dissect the good and bad decisions they've made along the way Chaz give a true and accurate picture of the journey of success and how you too can get there. Through this dialogue, you will learn the value of growing your network and surrounding yourself with power players and kings like today's guest.
Grab your pen and notebook because we're about to dive in. What's up, everybody? I'm Chaz Wolfe. Gathering the king's podcast. I've got Bob Lovinger here on the king stage. Bob, how are you doing, brother? Hey, Chad. It's great. I'm so glad to so glad to be here. I'm excited that you're having me. I am excited that we're having you as well because you just already made my Monday, man. We were just talking off stage. You said that you got a little curious, and you checked out the pod.
You've been listening to it before you jumped on here, and you just told her I love the podcast. I appreciate that. I love the podcast. I it's such great stories. Everybody has a unique perspective on things, and it's a great a great 30, 45 minutes. Yeah. No. That's good. Good feedback. And we're gonna deliver the same thing today with your story. So I'm excited for that. Tell us what kind of business that you have first. Flexbite is a customer financing fintech platform.
So we provide businesses with a loan platform that they can provide their customers that either can afford to pay or prefer to pay some other way than their cash or credit cards. And our difference that from the beginning that we set up is we provide our service to all size businesses, all, you know, type of selling.
We're we pretty much democratize this industry prior to us, the custom of financing arena was isolated to certain verticals like retail and medical, certain size businesses, And we've and we went in there and said, your small size, the new business, they deserve to have the same kind of weapons as everybody else. And so we have a platform of over 30 lenders in there. And if a business, whether it's an attorney, a home improvement company, it's across all verticals.
Doesn't make a doesn't make a difference. We go up to a $100,000 if they have someone who just Campay. They can turn a Montal platform, put an application in within seconds. They get, you know, they get answers. Yeah. I love that and I'm so useful, especially in today's environment, which you're talking about. Obviously, it doesn't have to be just that they can't pay. It's just that maybe it's more advantageous to pay a different route. I think that They're very uncertain right now.
The between inflation and everything else, people are just not sure how their money is gonna hold up. They prefer to compartmentalize their transactions. And the other side of it is I'm not gonna sterilize it. We're finding our challenges too, is the lenders are pulling back a little bit. They're tightening the ropes. They're they're not as certain that the people that they're looking at is really what they see.
So it's a complicated environment and that's why we just don't provide our clients with one lender. We provide them with 30 lenders because you just never know which ones are gonna be hot and which ones are gonna be cold at any given moment. Yeah. No. I definitely like that approach of, guaranteeing for lack of better terms, and I probably don't guarantee an approval, but Oh, but didn't work. Yeah. Exactly.
But what you're doing is that you're you're throwing the net out wide enough to make sure that if if this person's gonna get approved, we're it's we're gonna find the opportunity And then you're in, like, how can you blame a lender for tightening things up? Because, man, there's a lot of people out there that that don't that don't say and act right. And then they try to be somebody different. We've had this experience inside of our own business.
Well, as as it was explained to me from a lender, when they're looking at somebody's credit score into 700 credit score, which is under most circumstances is a is considered a very good credit score They don't know sometimes if it's a 700 on the way down or 700 on the way up because people are in flux. We saw some of this doing doing the initial outbreak of COVID with the lenders tightened up. My hope is that things will stabilize and lenders will get their footing and and normalize.
The great thing about our platform also is it's all soft credit pulls. So somebody could put an application in No harm, no foul, if they don't like the offers, it's not as though it cost them anything. There's no harm to the credit report whatsoever. We think we have a pretty significant, a solution for businesses to to not only from a practical standpoint, solve a sale, but also pull people in use utilizing financing a lot of people Yeah.
These days that know they they're gonna make a major transaction and know they don't wanna spend their money out there specifically looking for financing. So it's it's very important for businesses, you know, to put it out front. Yeah. I love that. And, actually, I had a guy on my podcast. I don't know. Probably 4 months or so ago, and I think they're doing 25, 30,000,000.
And he said one of the key things that changed everything for them is that they no longer presented cash offers, pay for this HVAC system, pay for this coaching, pay for this, whatever it is, up front, 15 k, 50 k, whatever the number but they presented in financing first. I mean, meeting with that. Yeah. Think about it. How many cars would be sold if the only option was give me $30,000 of your money. And that's and the car companies will lead with this car is in 30,000.
They'll change the paradigm this car is $359 a month because people can wrap their brain around that. Yeah. 100%. Exactly. Good stuff. Okay. I wanna know before we get into the story of how the business started and your history, why at this level? Obviously, you've been successful. We you made it through our interview process. But my question is why? Like, why are you pressing even at this level? What's really got you out there fighting every single day for the next level?
It's because I love it, really. Listen. Everybody. Every business owner has their moments where they hate it. We all have we all have that by about Monday at noon. You say, what did I get myself into? But overall, I really love the business. And I've created an environment which is it it didn't start out this way, but over the last number of years, become a legacy business. My has been with me for 5 or 6 years. He's my he's my essentially my chief technology officer.
My daughter graduated from law school, and I convinced come and join me rather than rather than become a lawyer, and she's my chief operating officer. I made it all in the family, and there's a lot it's a lot more pressure that way too. I have a lot of households depending on it now, but I just love it. And I don't listen. Things can happen. I don't foresee myself retiring ever. Hopefully, I'll cut back a little bit, but I just enjoy it. It's I wouldn't do it otherwise.
I've learned that that lesson the hard way. I resonate. I think a lot of listeners do with what you're saying, but to have you with your son and daughter in the business, I think is a lot of entrepreneur's dream, really. And whether that works out or not for some, it's it, but my my oldest daughter's almost 9, and my youngest daughter is 3 months and 3 daughters and one son. And I'm thinking of every day, it's a growing obsession. How do I build them?
They can build businesses or do real estate deals or whatever the scenario is. And so hearing you, like, doing the thing that I'm over here on Master Mining about is really encouraging. What would you say to a guy like me or a listener out there who's got younger kids and they're dreaming one day that we can do business together because that's really what I'm hoping for. Yeah. It's interesting because my son and I, I have fired him on three different occasions from other businesses. You know?
So we've had We had friction over the years. I'm big into sports and athletics. My daughter was the one that's big into sports and athletics. My son wasn't technology and music, and that's great, but we just didn't see it. But my advice to parents is, you know, don't sweat over those things you think are important when a kid is nine years old because at the end of the day, they're not gonna be that important and just play it out. And now my son and I are friends, and we have a very close film.
He lives right on the block for me. Our daughter lives not too far. I was as bad as anybody as I was out there watching my daughter playing tennis and shit to off the sidelines once because I was too whatever. And I look back at it. What difference did that make? My biggest advice is just teach them what you know and be there for them just don't sweat those small things. Yeah. I appreciate that. It's so simple, but so profound Chaz usually what I end up saying on this podcast, I think, a lot.
I they were kings, the inning out day in and day out working with your kids Chaz grown adults. Just give me 30 seconds on that. Like, I just I that gets me fired up. I maybe was totally weird, but I just I wanna do deals with my kids. I don't know. Oh, there's so I mean, first time my son, it is so cool because over the year, I have an engineering background, and I'll go over Chaz, but I graduated college as as electrical engineer, but Chaz was many years ago.
I've always thought like a a tech person, but I just didn't have the skill set to to do it. And My son didn't came to my company and didn't have that either. He did a lot. He knew a lot of stuff, but he didn't know how to program. And over the last 3 years or so, he's really dove in at taught himself how to program. And it's great having somebody by your side where you come up with an idea and say, you know what? I'd like to see this happen and he goes out and does it.
Well, it's such a it's such a great dynamic. And my daughter and I, she runs she runs the people. And the thing I suggest to business owners know your core competency and to know what you're good at and what you're not good at. And one of the things I'm not that great at is managing people. I'm not good at training. I do it, you know, because I have to, but she has stepped in and taken that off of me and, she else has a marketing background. So it's just been a pleasure.
And not to say you don't have your moments because like you do with every employee with your mother under your breath, but I I like to put I like to put people that I trust and really can rely on around me and what better source than your own kids. Yeah. I love that. Okay. Let's talk about your history a little bit. Was this the first business? Was there a, is there a track record of different businesses here? Give us an idea of your history here. Yeah. There's a go back.
I'm a from my childhood. I'm a an unlikely success story. If a person my my parents immigrants. They were refugees, essentially. My father escaped Wolfe war 2, escaped the Nazis. He lost 2 siblings. My mother a few years later came to the country escaping the communist, and neither one of them had much education. And so growing up, I I had nobody really overseeing me when it came to education. I don't remember my parents ever going to a teacher parent conference or anything like that.
They did their best, but that wasn't in their repertoire. They didn't know that was the thing that they had to do, and I was just a mediocre student And fortunately, though, I grew up in a neighborhood and a block specifically where there were a ton of kids and we were very competitive. And I made a couple of them, my role models, and, By the time I got to high school, even though I was still a mediocre student, I I college was never in question for me.
So I went to my guidance living on my grades and mediocre council council set to me. You should consider a trade school. I said, no. I'm gonna I'm gonna go to college, and I'm gonna engineering school, and I found the only literally, I think the only engineering school in the country that would take me because they weren't yet a they weren't yet accredited So they couldn't, you know, the the students that really deserved to go probably wouldn't have selected them. I got in.
They got accredited during my freshman year. And, He's in. To make a long story short, I graduated in 4 years. I think I was the only one of this beginning class to actually do Chaz, and I had to because My wedding day was on my graduation day, so I had to graduate so I could go to work. And and engineering is a is a bearer of a curriculum that teaches you a lot from the standpoint of problem solving. And Oh, yeah.
I went out and worked as an NGA for two and a half years and to make a long story short the company I was with at the end I joined and they announced that they were gonna move to Arizona. I was in Long Island at the time, and I just saw over a series of a year for HR, bringing boxes over to these engineers that are with the company for 20 years and telling them to pack the box and and leave. And I said, doesn't sound like my story. I'm not really enjoying being an engineer.
I'm not really that good at it. I'm probably a mediocre engineer. So I was looking for other things, and one night I was watching a when I was married already, I was watching late night TV and I saw a infomercial on buying a house with no money down, a little money down, or what the topic was, And, so I went out and said, you know what? I'm gonna buy a house. So I went at the contract to buy a house.
I found a house, and I looked for who to work with, and I found this father and son team The father was a lawyer and the son was a recent Yale graduate who was running the mortgage companies. Chaz you know what? I'll get 2 for the price of 1, and I'll gonna get a mortgage through the guy, and I ended up becoming very close, you know, to the sun. And because I wasn't happy as an engineer when I finally got my walk in, I was, like, literally the last one shut the lights out for the company.
I said, you know what? Can I come work with you and see if I can contribute? I said, I'll tell you what. I'll spend a $1000 a week putting it ad into to the New York Times, and that Wolfe be my leads coming in for mortgages. And I did Chaz, and I ended up 75% of the business coming the leads coming in with my leads. So they ended up taking that away from me and paying for the ad and just defeating me some leads, but I never went back to engineering. I just love service business. I loved finance.
Ended up believing staying friends with him, but I left on my own and opened up my own mortgage company. Wow. And I did okay with mortgages, and I did a few other financial things down the road. And then in about 1995, I opened up a company called Edge solutions.
And what was happening at that time, and I don't know if you you're you're too young to remember the the economy then, but the mortgage industry started to Chaz had really started to tighten up in certain aspects, but the refinance boom was on. And what was happening is a lot of people were trying to refinance their houses, but they had debts because there was a big credit card explosion leading up to that. So they had all kinds of debt some charge offs, judgments, all that kind of thing.
So while I was still doing the mortgages, I was I was I was getting on the phone and negotiating with the tech companies to the debt down so we can close the mortgages because otherwise, you couldn't get the debt down. You couldn't close you couldn't close the mortgages. So opened up this company in, Edge in 1995 with the sole purpose of, you know what? I'm gonna do this for mortgage companies. And so we did that. We started and we started we became a debt tration company, essentially.
Yeah. So you and I built that business. It was growing little by little. It's always I've always had bootstrap businesses, and I went to a trade show in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and sometime in 1997. And 3 or 4 months later, I get a phone call from the senior VP of a bank who says he wants to buy the company. Wow. So I tell him I'm not ready to sell the company. This is what I do. I like what I'm doing. He says, alright. How about this? How about if we invest in the So this was a bank.
They weren't lending me money. They were investing in the company. I said, sure. If you wanna give me $500,000, I'll take $500,000. I took the money. We grew the company. We grew it from $500,000 of revenue, and we almost ran out of the money. We tried every iteration of everything we could possibly do And then at one point, we said, alright. We have this relationship with the bank.
I think I can develop a system that that's mind blowing to this industry Wolfe we can work with people that aren't necessarily getting loans. In other words, work with just the average person that's in debt that wants to get out of debt. So we ended up developing a system with the bank and that passed all state laws and everything else.
And we ended up growing the company in a within a very short time, but rapidly from 500,000 to $6,000,000 a year in revenue, which is a lot of money when you're a service. You know, what Chaz helped us Sibley at that time is 98 was the start of Google. And, basically, we could have had as many leads as I I had a I had about 20 salespeople, and if they couldn't pronounce the name of the person of the lead they got, they would just it up and throw it in the garbage.
We had so many leads and the leads were like almost at zero cost. There was almost nothing. Yeah. So we grew the company. We had over ninety and to make a long story, I'm probably longer than it should be already, but I'm sorry. It's good. In 2007, and we grew it in 2007. I'm in a comp room, and this is gonna be to the ashes part of the story. I'm in the costume. I get a knock on the door from one of my employees. I'm in a meeting. I it's an important meeting or so I thought.
He goes, no. You gotta come out here. I go out there, and there's boxes at my door. Boxes a box of 2 feet pipe. 5 feet wide of boxes. I look in. We Wolfe being sued by the FTC. Oh, man. That's an experience nobody should ever have. No. My heart sunk. And I in a way, I thought, this is a self fulfilling prophecy because I think I knew this kind of thing could happen because we were one of the first in the industry to really open that industry.
And but there's a there was a lot of copycats in that in that industry, and some of them were not good players. They were coming from other industries. And the FTC Chaz started going after some of those companies. And so I said, we're we're one of the more prominent ones. I think we're gonna be a target. And lo and behold, we were a target now companies get sued all the time by the FTC there. The Google gets it. Microsoft has gotten it. All get it.
They pay their 1,000,000 of dollars a fine and they continue on. And my background is I'm a bachelor. I'm competitive. So I said, what can I do to fight this thing? So I contacted through the help of a friend. I found an FTC attorney, and he got go, what Chaz I do to fight this day? I know we didn't I didn't I know we didn't do anything wrong, and he goes, whether you did whether you think you did anything wrong or not, the FTC can probably find something that you did wrong.
And likely they and they likely did. And he said, you'd have to pay as a retainer a $1,000,000 just to stay in the battle. But that was a gut punch. I didn't have a $1,000,000. I was recently working on other projects. I invested my own money into it and everything else and have a $1,000,000. So I had to have the most heartbreaking meeting with my employees I have had to have telling people that they're gonna be out of work, and, this was the end of the road for the company.
It was a twelve year old company. It certainly wasn't a fly by night. Company. And even the people at the FTC, as they're going through their stuff, they're saying, you know what? We shouldn't have come after you because we had overbook. The thing I understand people, and I knew right away, we were dealing with individuals that are in distress at the deep in debt. And I said, yeah. I wanna make sure people never misunderstand what it is that we do.
So the first thing is in the contract, I had a whole one page of bullet points of Chaz just described everything, the pros and the cons of what can happen Chaz part of the strategy. I also had for every person that signed up I had a recording system setups that we had a verification call where we went over those steps and got them verbally to acknowledge it.
At the end of the day, did we have sale people that whenever you pay salespeople commission or vulnerable to people trying too hard, then I have that probably but it was a damn shame because the people were came to us were not were never hurt until the FTC lawsuit because that's really when they lost their money because the FTC just froze all the accounts. And up until then, these people were having services done for them, but it is what it is, but it was I felt bad for the people.
I felt bad for the employees. I felt bad for myself for the first time the day after I had to walk away from that business. I had to figure out what I was gonna do. Yeah. Obviously, it's such a an emotional roller coaster. I'm sure of feeling like you made it, really, at that level. Like you said, 6,000,000 in a service business There's a lot of margin there, and you're helping a lot of people.
And so Yeah. Yeah. For you looking back now, What do you think was whether it was part of that or maybe even in your new, your flex by endeavor? What was something that you did right? Back then. You pointed out that you were crossing t's and dot and i's, but as far as, like, building a business, someone's listening right now. They're not at a $1,000,000 in revenue. They're looking for that one nugget that you're gonna give to him.
What was something that a good decision that you made in the midst of all that? Oh, I made a lot of good decisions. The thing I Because also because we were partners with a bank, I felt like I had to go x the extra mile as far as really covering our butt. So I really did that. When we started selling. When selling really started taking off, I said, you know what? I know every one of these people should not be doing this. There's some people You get applications. Somebody has $3000 of debt.
For god's sake, don't enter into a program that's gonna destroy your credit for $3000. At the same time, you have people that are so upside down, they really need bankruptcy. So I said, I'm I made a rule right out out of the shooting, and it cost us money. I said, you know what? I want to I want to decline 20% of the application that come to us. I wanna decline them.
I want you to find the 20% that don't belong in this program and decline them because I know there's people that don't belong here and we were doing fine. We had no shortage of people that wanted to sign up for our program because people were in such dire straits. We did some good things in in that regard. We did good things far as marketing goes, we had some, like I said, Google week, you know, we Chaz it captured until it wasn't anymore.
And after a while, people caught up to it and leads became more expensive, but we did some great things there. I had great people. I had great employees, and I the thing I like is, at that time, we had a, you know, it's, like I said, at the peak, we had 94 employees.
If I had a good person that just wasn't fitting what they were doing, I would try to find some other department to put them in because I'll take a good person that's trying and try to find a fit rather than somebody who's cocky and not a good team player who's competent because I just felt that was a thing I should do, but we did a lot of things. And it's a good question because when you're in the middle of the rubble, it's really hard to appreciate it.
Right. After it happened, and I say to this day, for the 3 years afterwards, I had probably post the traumatic stress syndrome because it was a really traumatic experience, and what got me through it was my family. And I such I really did have it without being too cliche My wife was great. She was part of the company too, but and she got caught up in it, but she was great.
And so I had a good I had a good support system, but for a long time, it was hard to look at the good things that that we did. You know? But I know we did good things. Oh, yeah. You don't build a $6,000,000 business on accident. No. You can. You know what, seriously? You know, you can because there were other companies that that that weren't doing the right thing. There's Chaz industry, like I said, Chaz become the Wild West.
And Wolfe we weren't the right target, the industry probably was the right target at the time. And they did change the laws afterwards, and I had my own theories as to why they did it. They as you all know, the financial crash was happening was gonna happen the next year. A couple of years beforehand, they changed the bankruptcy laws, making it harder to file bankruptcy. So I think they were cleaning up for the creditors a little bit from that standpoint, but, you know, what?
You don't you can make $6,000,000 and not do the right thing. I definitely believe you I believe that, but you can't stay in business for 12 years and not do the right That that's the thing. So we were not a fly by night. We didn't open the year before the sole purpose of making a killing. We fought our way to the top of that and just and stayed in there for 12 years, and we'd still be in business today, if not for that.
But Yeah. The lesson I also did learn is, and you asked me early in the beginning of this interview, what keeps me going. I said, I love it. I really and this is gonna sound crazy, but after after the dust settled in at my pity party, and I felt sorry for the employees I was relieved because I'd come to realize that I really didn't enjoy that business anymore. And the lesson I learned is and I had become somewhat this engaged from it because of that.
I started other side projects and because I really whether it was the atmosphere of the industry or whatever, I just didn't really enjoy that business. I should have gotten out for, you know, before, and we had ways to get out, but I should have gotten out earlier because if you don't love it anymore, if you don't feel you can stay engaged, you either have to find a way to stay engaged we'll get out.
Yeah. No. That's so good because I even in my own story, the pieces or the businesses that I've been involved with, they either keep my attention or I look I'm looking for the next the next thing.
And I think that part of that is a purpose, and part of that is even early on some of those businesses, even though I may or may not own them currently, or it was a product that maybe I didn't necessarily personally associate with, those were building blocks for my history so that I could do what I'm doing now and then beyond. So I think that the all it's applicable. I'm curious now, like, with your perspective of starting over, like, literally. I literally did have to start over.
Yeah. And it wasn't it wasn't overnight either. It took me a long time to think of my footing, but yeah. Yeah. So I'm not only have you been successful, but then you started over and you've been successful again. And so we've talked about the good decision that you made. What was something that you did that you haven't repeated or that you specifically tried to not repeat to speed up time or what it was a mistake that you made that you learned from that you didn't have to learn again.
That's what I'm looking for. Yeah. I think Chaz I mentioned, I think making sure that I maintain my interest and stay in my lane. I'm from believer and staying in my lane. And when I say that, it doesn't mean you can't work on other things. Sure. It's gotta be towards a common outcome. And the thing that I didn't do was I went off the beaten path and left myself exposed.
And I'm not saying that if I was engaged, I would have things would have happened differently because I think there was an agenda that they would but there were things that did happen while I wasn't fully engaged that I wouldn't have put up with. But other than that, I I try to stay in my lane now. I've had a lot of opportunities of people coming to me and say, hey. I got this. I got that. I got you know what? I'm doing good. Let me stay in my lane when I think that's the most important thing.
Yep. 100%. I agree. What would you say just around decision making? Is a process, or do you have certain steps that you follow now that Chaz the listener can learn just from your your vast experience? Yeah. I'm always been in businesses, and this included where there's no price sheet. There's no standard. You can't go and say, alright. What does it now? If you're an accountant, you can basically see what the market bears and what what pricing to charge.
My whole thing has always been iterate iterate iterate and try to keep on changing and working towards 0, friction because, you know, when you have a business that charges money and out of necessity because we bootstrapped flex by We had to charge a setup fee. We had to charge a monthly subscription fee. We Chaz to charge fees associated with the success and was a necessity. And we some and you have to also charge some fees because you gotta pay salespeople. Right?
So there's your marketing and also we also have independent sales partners that bring us business. So we have to charge some fees in order to satisfy that ecosystem. Right? But anytime you charge fees, if you don't realize that you're creating friction, you're kidding yourself, 0 fees create zero friction. There's downside to that as well. You wanna have people with skin in the game, but 2 high fees will create a lot of fiction friction.
I'm a firm believer in iterating and then testing and iterating and testing until you zero in on on the on on the optimum point. And so the other thing is and I'll probably talk about this later again, but I also believe in establishing demand before you spend too much time on your product. When we started flex by it, I decided I was gonna have a platform I didn't know what the demand was gonna be. Like I said, I was going after a sector of business out there that never had financing before.
I had to educate them. I didn't know what the utilization was gonna be. I said before I spend a ton of time with the on the technology side of this, let me find out the demand. So I had initially, I didn't have a great product. You know, and that was okay. I because I burned through sales, but I didn't have a great product. We literally were like, I had my son entering in applications manually and and, you know, making behind the scene.
But the thing I realized is no matter how bad the product was, I never had trouble selling it. Was demand out there. People once businesses understood and they understood where the competition was, you know, there was a demand for the product. And once I once we had the demand, that's when we built really spent a lot of time on on the product. Yeah. I think that a lot of businesses can learn something from that. I can remember when I built my first sales course, it was version 1. Right?
And I and for a lot of times, I was very self conscious about, you know, how it wasn't flashy or interactive or whatever in comparison to the market and Chaz it's since been rolled into some other products that we do, and I have a buddy actually is a partner in one of my real estate businesses, and we're adding some sales people. And I wanted him to go through some just basic sales training, and he's never done it.
So I gave him the link to the course and he's going through it going, dude, this is incredible. Like, just media information, and it's been years since I've, like, really gone back through the detail of it. And just hearing that years later when I was, like, just so it's version 1. It sucks. It doesn't because and the reality of it is that you're still serving the market.
And, of course, version 2, version 3, you gotta keep you gotta keep, you gotta keep the thing rolling and the experience or the customer journey getting better and better, but get started. What I'm hearing you say first. Yeah. Yeah. And there's listen.
And this when you're in the service business and whether it's doing what I'm doing or doing what you're doing, what we're in the service business, It's either about having information that people other people don't have or providing a convenience to to what other people can do just that they don't have the time or the energy to do it or that we're with all to do it.
So it all it all comes down to that, and I'm sure you were as smart back in version 1, maybe you have you probably have more experience now, but your intelligence level and the way to present was probably there for version 12. And it's funny you said that because I do a lot of live webinars and recordings and things like Chaz, and I can never go back. I hate my voice so much. I won't ever listen to this podcast. I'll never go back.
I never go back and listen to my stuff or or watch my stuff, but I really proofread. I sent it to my daughter just to edit for me, but Yeah. You're right. We all deal with it. The almost imposter syndrome of, I I don't like it or whatever, but the reality of it is that it's delivering to the right people. It's delivering. Right. And so that's the confidence that we have to hold even in in this podcast. There's gonna be people who pass over, and there's been people who were, like, Wolfe, Bob.
Thanks for sharing, and that's why we do it. It's not even Yep. About sharing necessarily. It's the same thing in business. It's like we're not necessarily trying to serve every We're trying to serve the right ones. Like you said, we gotta get we gotta find the 20%. Kick them out. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Right. You gotta find that sweet spot. You have to have thick skin in the business and and and just know that as long as you keep expectations at the right level.
It's like, I've done after I was in between things, after 2 1000 7. I spent 2 or 3 years going to a lot of, trade shows and conferences, really educating myself. I really spent a lot of time just trying to learn about some of the things I haven't been exposed to focusing on my other business. And I usually went to those shows, and I said, if I can learn one thing that makes a difference and meet one person that makes a difference. That's all I really need. I don't need.
Yeah. I don't need every single second to be mind blowing. I just need one thing to make a difference. Yeah. Love that. Okay. I'm gonna transition here to the speed round. First question I wanna know is in this business, is finance helping your clients, finance their clients. What's the one trackable metric? The one thing that you track forever and ever. Yeah. There's so many. I can usually gauge based on loan applications.
And although because of the recent macroeconomic conditions that are out there, that's been a little bit, but I would say loan applications. If there's one if there's one metric I Chaz to look at. Yeah. Pipeline, baby. Either pipeline's full or pipeline's not full. Exactly right. K. Very good. What book would you recommend, Bob, for a 6 figure business owner? Or I know you're a big podcaster, so maybe it's a book or maybe it's a podcast. Yeah. I'm you know what?
I it's been a while since I've read a book, so I'm gonna talk about two books. K. I mentioned a little bit that the lien startup by Eric Reese Right? So I'm not quite sure how to and it really taught me a lot because I had made the mistake before of not going with the minimal viable product. So it taught me a lot. And the other for a total different reason was, PayPal wars.
It's a it's an older book written not too long after PayPal was actually formed and it if you want to talk if you wanna understand the perseverance of a business, the interesting thing about that was how PayPal went in with one idea and iterated to something totally different. It's just a fascinating book. Love that. We'll put both of those in the show notes.
I'm all I'm all about reiterating and iterating and changing and pivoting, and not just for the sake of doing it, but until you find that that place where there it goes. You don't know what you don't know. Until you start taking that journey, you're gonna come across obstacles and the path from the start to where you gotta be isn't a straight line. It's a it's a jagged. It goes forward. It goes backwards. It goes sideways. It goes all different directions. That's right.
What do you think about intentionally networking or master mining with other entrepreneurs? I think it's a great And I did a lot of it. I don't do as much of it anymore. I used to do a lot of trade shows. I think COVID took away some of my chops when it came to live networking, but I'm all for it. I like it, and it's just not a thing.
I get to do I get to do a lot of back in the day when I do a lot of trade shows, and I went back to my when I was working with the mortgage companies, and I looked back one day and I said, I got I got 200 mortgage companies I'm working with and I went back into the origination of them, and 75% of them came from trade shows, came from face to face. So it's hard to and I think we didn't have Zoom back then.
Those kind of interactions make the same kind of inroads, but looking somebody in the eyes and having that kind of discussion cannot be replaced by emails. So, yeah, I think it's a great idea. That's good. The question around operations I'm a throw at you is this. If you only Chaz 1 hour each week to work on your business, Bob, what would you do in that 1 hour to successfully run your business like you do now? Yeah. 30 minutes.
I would check my key metrics and I have a bunch of them between how many new businesses we're bringing in, the applications, the fundings, that kind of thing. And in the next 30 minutes, I would do marketing tweaks to to adjust based on what I just saw, what I just learned in in in the first 30 minutes. Love it. I love it. You gotta know if the pipeline's full, and then you gotta go fill the pipeline. That's 2 10. Exactly right. Spoken like a like a genuine entrepreneur.
Well, that's that's what we care about it is. Is the train gonna continue? But Chaz train also service serves our clients and our teams if it keeps going. So I can appreciate a good sales pipeline. Last question for you, Bob, are you ready? Sure. If you could whisper in the younger Bob's ear, what would you tell him? I would say do the exact same thing you're about because it's interesting because I asked myself that question. Obviously, I went through my family.
We went through a pretty bad time, but we're in such a great place now. If I could have changed anyone if any one of those things would have been different, I don't know if I'd be right here where I am now. I think I'd go through the pain again and just end up where I am. And you always have to ask yourself, you like who you are. And if you like who you are, it wasn't a straight line. There's a lot of things, a lot of good things, probably a lot of bad things have to happen.
For you to get exactly to where you are. Yeah. I love that. Bob, you've been absolutely incredible here today with experience and inspiration and just telling you of the story, man, the rise, the fall, the rise again, so inspirational. How can the listener find you? Of course, if they need funding for their business or for their clients, Or if they just wanna reach out to you and connect with you as well. Our website is flexpy.com. Flexxbuy.com. They could reach me.
My email address is bobl@flexpy.com. They can reach me in on LinkedIn to search for me. I'm there, and those are the best ways. Perfect. I'll put it all in the show notes where my team Wolfe, and so that way they can easily connect with you. And, Bobby, wish you nothing but success and blessing on your family. Again, I'm gonna have to pick your brain over course of time as we get to know each other better about working with your kids and all that fun stuff. I just think that's so cool.
My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for being here. Thanks for listening to Gathering the Kings. We hope you got a ton of value today and learned a thing or 2 about taking your business to 7 figures and beyond. If you desire more and want a community around you to help you get there, I want you to go to gathering the king's dot com. That's gathering kings.com, and I want you to apply for our next becoming a king 90 day intensive.
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