The Exchanges

Q What made you excited about starting this business and what keeps you excited about this business?

A Funny. I could tell you what got me excited and what keeps me excited. And then I'll share a conversation from From literally an hour ago, I said to my CEO, this excites me. Um, what excited me the first time was, you know, you look at all these big logos, right? You look at geek squad and you look at Dell and you know, you always say, oh, that's so insurmountable. Right. But then what happens is you actually see their work product. And the way that I started my business was a local repair company called the bucket. I'm saying their name cause they're out of business. They've been out of business for a long time. Charged my next door neighbor an exuberant amount of money back in, you know, 99, 2000. It was, they charged like 500 bucks, and guess what? They did not fix the problem. My neighbor called my parents, literally, and said, hey, we, we know your son's good at computers. Can he take a look? No training, no experience, no certification. I fixed that thing in like 15, 20 minutes. And what that meant to me was I could do this. I could go out there and make it happen. So the thing that excited me was I could make a lot more money than I was making, right? I was making 10 bucks an hour at the supermarket. My competitor was charging 120 dollars an hour. For me, 40 bucks an hour seemed great. So that's what I charged. So I was excited for me financially that I could do a lot be…

AI assessment note: “what excited me the first time was, you know, you look at all these big logos”

Q So at what revenue Um, range. Do you start to consider buying a private jet in order to move your people around?

A God, I don't, that, that's a great question. I don't even know because I couldn't imagine what those things cost. I mean, every once in a while, if you flip around on those apps and things like that, just a, um, just a flight from, you know, Jersey to like Florida is like 10 to 12 grand a pop. Um, so I couldn't even, I think you'd have to get to at least a hundred million And it also depends on what kind of revenue because our revenue gets skewed sometimes because, you know, there's labor revenue and then there's hardware revenue. Well, I could, I could move 200 grand in hardware and maybe make 3000 dollars. So, you know, I could, I could pound my chest and go, yeah, we did 200,000 dollars in sales. But at the end of the day, it just made my number bigger. You know, I score some points with Dell and I get some credit card points, but it's not necessarily a revenue producer. It's more of a, it's more of a chest flex.

AI assessment note: “I think you'd have to get to at least a hundred million”

Q kind of has their own idea. So what was, did you have a number when you first started out or did you like, what kind of a, What thing did you have that allowed you to know I have reached a level of success and how has that changed? Does that number, is that if it's a number, does that number keep changing and kind of what is that number?

A Uh, and all that, that's a great question, right? So, you know, thank God I read a lot of Tony Robbins, a lot of other self-help and all this. So I've had a lot of numbers of success, right? Like I remember thinking, wow, when I hit one million dollars in sales, there was going to be fireworks. Yeah, I made it. And what ended up happening was I was sitting at my desk on like a Friday night. It was like 6:07 o'clock at the office. Nobody was there but me. And I looked at QuickBooks and we were just over a million dollars. And it's like, oh, cool. Okay. I guess I'll go to the bar or something. You know, there wasn't that magic moment. Like I really expected that, you know, that was graduation level. You know, then I thought, you know, five million would be great. You know, that didn't seem achievable, right? You know, it took me, took me three years to get to, you know, a million. Well, guess what? Two, two and a half years later, we're at five million. Eh, that wasn't good enough anymore, so let's do 10, let's do 20. Um, employee count, you know, 50 was the mecca, like, oh wow, like if I get 50 people. Then it went to a hundred, then it went to 200. And the reason why I alluded to Tony Robbins, one of the things that he put in his books about being happy is, and clearly I didn't listen to him, right? Um, he said, imagine if you're playing basketball, the net's there, you set the…

AI assessment note: “I remember thinking, wow, when I hit one million dollars in sales”

Q So what does time management mean to you?

A So one of the things that makes time management kind of crucial to me is the fact that there's so little of it, to be frank. I remember when I first started doing TV, right? I remember there was like, hey, two minutes to the segment. And, you know, all the seasoned TV professionals, they're, they're eating a hoagie, they're doing this, I'm like, two minutes, oh my god. Now, when I'm in the TV studio, if someone tells me I have 30 seconds, I feel like I could take a shower. So, one of the things that's important is to realize that every minute that you have is something that's very precious. It's not going to be there, and scheduling your day and making use of other things and other, uh, I'll call it mediums to make sure that your time is good. So what I'll jump right into is, you know, I literally turn driving in a car, the highway, you know, the local road that you drive into time. I created a mobile office called the Tech Tank, So my office has a full computer setup, multiple TV screens, printer, scanner, refrigerator, you name it. So I hired a full-time person to drive me around because I was on the road 3:04 hours a day. You know, not so much with the pandemic, maybe two hours. I'm still out there quite a bit, but I was able to actually convert road time and time that you drive, getting your gas tank filled, You know, anything that you think of, I literally created an offic…

AI assessment note: “realize that every minute that you have is something that's very precious”

Q What made you excited about starting this business and what keeps you excited about this business?

A Funny. I could tell you what got me excited and what keeps me excited. And then I'll share a conversation from From literally an hour ago, I said to my CEO, this excites me. Um, what excited me the first time was, you know, you look at all these big logos, right? You look at geek squad and you look at Dell and you know, you always say, oh, that's so insurmountable. Right. But then what happens is you actually see their work product. And the way that I started my business was a local repair company called the bucket. I'm saying their name cause they're out of business. They've been out of business for a long time. Charged my next door neighbor an exuberant amount of money back in, you know, 99, 2000. It was, they charged like 500 bucks, and guess what? They did not fix the problem. My neighbor called my parents, literally, and said, hey, we, we know your son's good at computers. Can he take a look? No training, no experience, no certification. I fixed that thing in like 15, 20 minutes. And what that meant to me was I could do this. I could go out there and make it happen. So the thing that excited me was I could make a lot more money than I was making, right? I was making 10 bucks an hour at the supermarket. My competitor was charging 120 dollars an hour. For me, 40 bucks an hour seemed great. So that's what I charged. So I was excited for me financially that I could do a lot be…

AI assessment note: “what excited me the first time was, you know, you look at all these”

Q What are some tips and tricks that people can try to employ in their lives when managing their time better? Or how can they start? How can they develop a routine? Something like that.

A So for me is personal accountability, right? So I'll start with my, you know, personal nuances, and then maybe we'll go into anything else. So From a business perspective, I have someone else manage my calendar. I set the parameters. I set what I want, and I joke, but it's very true. So my assistant is Elisa. I say for Monday, every Monday at seven in the morning, she runs my life until about Friday to about four-thirty. Then my wife takes over until four-thirty from Friday until about three o'clock on Sunday. And then, you know, I hang out with my parents. Now my mom used to be both of them on Sunday. You basically need to understand that you can't run your own calendar. We might not all have an assistant. We might not have someone that could do that, but you need to set the parameters then if you can. So you need to be very smart about what you do. So I do all my working out, all my other stuff at five in the morning, six in the morning, but you need a routine. You know, habits are either make you or they'll break you. And I think that's really it. I mean, people look for this, oh my God moment, or how do I do this? And Book the time that you need, whether it's reading, whether it's stretching, whether it's working out, whether it's business planning. Book the time. You know, someone said to me, like, oh, you're too busy, you can't do this, you can't do that. Guess what? I fi…

AI assessment note: “Book the time that you need... If you don't live by your calendar”

Q What's the importance of having a morning routine?

A Basically set you up for your day. You know, people think that, oh, why would you do this? Why would you do that? If you actually have a good morning routine where, you know, whether it's health, whether it's focusing on your finances, whether it's focusing on You know, your core mission, I mean, it's a game changer. You know, the Five A.M. Club, I listened to this book from, uh, Robin Sharma. By the time I got to the end of the book, I was like, hey, you know what? I'm gonna try getting up at Five A.M. every day. It was a game changer. It literally changed my life. I was so much ahead of what I was doing, how I was doing it. It slipped honestly for me during the pandemic because, you know, over here in New Jersey, we're fully locked down. There was nothing going on. Why am I gonna get up at Five A.M.? I can get up at Eight A.M. because No one's doing anything. Well, as the pandemic now is kind of going away for the last 4050 days, I've been getting up at five a.m. My life is much better. I'm more productive. I'm happier. I have a lot more mental clarity. And again, that's more time management because I could just focus on the stuff that I need to do while everyone else is sleeping, quite frankly. So it's been good.

AI assessment note: “Basically set you up for your day.”

Q So what other tips and tricks can you share? Or what else have I not asked you that you wish I'd asked about time management?

A Every minute matters. It's unbelievable what you could get done in a focused five to 10 minutes. I went through something a couple weeks ago, one of the business groups I'm involved with, and I looked through the directory, you know, I was like, mister, like, I'm no COVID. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not doing a Zoom meeting. And finally, I'm like, you know what? You're an idiot. You know, this is the can. This is what you're dealt. I reached out to people in my business groups, and, um, it was unbelievable the response. I picked up a couple deals on a very, very simple email. Hey, we're in the same group. Haven't talked to you. And guess what? Something happened. It's really just like supersizing your time because You know, you don't realize the power of a minute. You don't realize the power of five minutes. You don't realize the power of a quick email. You know, it sounds stupid, but it's really true. You know, you never know who you'll reach out to and who you'll find that connection with by just going first. Just spend that one minute. So whether you're in a LaTip group, a B&I group, a alumni group, we all have cultural things that we're associated with. Guess what? Go through that member directory and just say hi to someone. Just say, hey, how are you? Can I help you? Don't look for anything. Don't, Don't try to get some business deal or, you know, make things happ…

AI assessment note: “Every minute matters. It's unbelievable what you could get done in a focused five to 10 minutes.”

Q What has been the hardest decision you've had to make so far?

A That's a good question. Um, couple hard decisions. Um, one definitely buying the building, uh, didn't have the cashflow or really the, um, really, you know, the, the, The, uh, reserves, I should say, but turned out to be a great decision to do that. Um, and then always, um, you know, even after all these years, even letting, letting go of team members that, you know, necessarily aren't pulling your weight. So I guess my, my worst decisions are the fact that I feel like I could fix people. Uh, there's times when, you know, someone's consistently not doing the right job. They're going to change. You're going to change. You know, we all think we're superheroes. So I think that's some of the, that's some of the worst decisions there that I've done.

AI assessment note: “one definitely buying the building”

Q Before we get into the topic a little bit deeper, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about your backstory and what it is you do right now that makes you a good person to talk about time management?

A So, I'm kind of an interesting person in a, in a weird way. I'm a computer geek, right? So, I like video games, I like the computer, I like all that stuff, but You know, when I grew up, my parents were bar and restaurant owners, right? Which is the exact opposite of a computer person, video gamer, right? So I grew up in the most social business. I'm talking tips, serving people, restaurant waiters, waitresses, all that. I made the switch, I'll call it. I mean, in college, I started out as a communications major. I was radio, TV, film. I wanted to be the next Howard Stern. I ended up becoming a computer geek doing different things, and what my company does is We support businesses, nonprofits, government entities, kind of small on the government entity side. Anytime you work with government, pain in the butt. But what we do is we take over the technology for all these companies. So we run their help desk. We run their engineering. We run their infrastructure. And basically we make sure that their technology is running very well. So it's, it's literally a 24 seven operation. You know, we're doing stuff all across the US. We're doing stuff internationally. You know, we have clients in London, Barcelona, uh, you name it. I literally walk in the office and it makes me proud seeing all the push pins we have around the world. So while the globe is a very big place, it's also a very sm…

AI assessment note: “what my company does is We support businesses, nonprofits, government entities”

Q I convinced the team to move on to a digital program. And they were getting the money back in about seven to 10 days. And so the receivables went down to 40,000 and they're like, holy crap, what do we do with all this money? So like. Yeah, absolutely. So with that in mind, then how do you discover potential bottlenecks in your business and how do you handle them?

A So one of the things that's changed a lot from being a small business, you know, with, you know, 10 or 20 people, um, going to where we're at now, you know, you know, I think every business owner, every CEO, you know, has done every job from, you know, the janitor to AR, AP, sales, marketing, and That gives you a feel, right? When the business is small, you can see those bottlenecks because every customer has direct access to you. Everyone's gonna let you know what they're feeling. Um, now the way that we find bottlenecks is we have, um, things that I was always opposed to meetings. You know, I always thought meetings were a waste of time. Um, you know, we have weekly meetings with different levels of leadership here and, you know, we ask the good, the bad, and the ugly. And when you start to see trends, right. You know, a lot of times as people, we tend to react, right. We, we'd rather respond, but we tend to react, which is just quickly. So now with these meetings and, you know, other checks that we have in place, um, The bottlenecks are more discoverable because you have a lot of people looking at them, so there's a lot of auditing, there's a lot of process review, and you know, when things get jammed up, um, obviously it's a bottleneck, so. And I can tell you, you're always gonna find bottlenecks. Uh, you fix one and then another one, another one occurs.

AI assessment note: “now the way that we find bottlenecks is we have... weekly meetings with different levels”

Q So who do you look up to for advice?

A A lot of different people. So You know, what I try to, what I try to do is, you know, people look at, people rate people based on their job title or how much money they make and all that. And I think that's all BS, right? So what I, I look to so many different people for advice, depending on what they're experts in. So for instance, you know, my attorney, obviously he's my Mecca for anything legal or anything that I want to do there. Um, my trainer, right? I'm always asking him advice. You know, we work out together four days a week. So one of the things I'm blessed with, and this is, this is one of the things that I sought out over time, you know, I want to know that someone who's the best at everything, right? And when I say everything, one person's good at this and that, because then I'll have this big pool of people that I could talk to. And guess what? Sometimes it's the most uneducated person on the planet that just has a ton of life experience. So I don't really care about degrees. I don't really care about certification. I really care about the results that people produce in the areas that they focus on. So definitely have a lot of different mentors.

AI assessment note: “I look to so many different people for advice, depending on what they're experts in.”

Q So who do you look up to for advice?

A A lot of different people. So You know, what I try to, what I try to do is, you know, people look at, people rate people based on their job title or how much money they make and all that. And I think that's all BS, right? So what I, I look to so many different people for advice, depending on what they're experts in. So for instance, you know, my attorney, obviously he's my Mecca for anything legal or anything that I want to do there. Um, my trainer, right? I'm always asking him advice. You know, we work out together four days a week. So one of the things I'm blessed with, and this is, this is one of the things that I sought out over time, you know, I want to know that someone who's the best at everything, right? And when I say everything, one person's good at this and that, because then I'll have this big pool of people that I could talk to. And guess what? Sometimes it's the most uneducated person on the planet that just has a ton of life experience. So I don't really care about degrees. I don't really care about certification. I really care about the results that people produce in the areas that they focus on. So definitely have a lot of different mentors.

AI assessment note: “I look to so many different people for advice, depending on what they're experts in.”

Q What is the most important thing you've learned about time management while running PCS over the last, what is it, like a decade or more?

A I'm old. Two decades. Two decades. Yeah, it's crazy. It makes me feel good. I've done it for more than half my life, but, you know, I used to make a lot of mistakes as a lot of rookie business owners and I still think I do sometimes. All of us. We want to be nice. We want to be helpful. I think one of the biggest problems that many people have, aside from business owners, I'm talking to anyone in any walk of life is, you know, we really devalue our time. You know, we say, oh, well, it's only 10 minutes. It's only 15 minutes. But if you actually look at it and put it all together, That 10 minutes here, that five minutes there, that wasted, you know, hey, I'm gonna watch that sitcom, or, you know, I'm gonna just veg out for a little bit. If you actually look at it and put it all together, those small little doses of time, they can make big things. You know, imagine if we all worked out 30 more minutes a day. We'd probably have that six pack that we wanted. You know, when we talked, you were walking. You're doing a great job with that, but you made a commitment to do it. There are certain things in your life where you could take a walk and listen to an audio book. You can have a conversation. So, you know, I think many of us just really miss out on the importance of Time, and I can tell you, guess what? I'm, I'm, I'm a five a.m. clubber. I'm getting up at five a.m. every day, Mond…

AI assessment note: “one of the biggest problems that many people have... we really devalue our time.”