The Exchanges

Q Okay. So how did that end up turning out for you? How was the first year

A So what happened was the first year I did good, you know, I, I made 60,000 dollars and again, this is 25 years ago, um, my first year. So what happened was I, I needed to test the market and this is something that I've done in every single one of my, uh, almost every single one of my businesses, being able to test an idea to see if it's going to work before you, you know, invest a lot of money and, and time into it. And, you know, it's one of the biggest mistakes a lot of young business owners make. They have this great idea and then they don't test to see if, well, does it work? Are people going to spend money on it? So what happened was the equipment for digital printing at the time costed a million dollars each. And, and I've never let money stop me from anything. Um, and so what I did was I said, okay, let me test the market To make sure that this digital printing, which is kind of digital custom printing on demand and customized printing. It was just like this new type of technology. Um, and I said, let me test it to make sure, you know, I can build a market here. And so what I did was I went out to meet with other companies that already had the equipment and I contracted with them to do the printing and do the work. And I went out and I got the business. And then I would bring it to them and my customers didn't know it was being printed somewhere else. So they didn't care…

AI assessment note: “the first year I did good, you know, I, I made 60,000 dollars”

Q companies you are passionately building. Time waits for no one, so let's get started now. Thanks for joining us today, Steven. I know it's early for you over in the States. You were working for Xerox, a well-regarded company that's known for printing. When did you realize that Xerox wasn't ready for the future? And what made you think you could do it better by starting DigiPrint, your first company?

A I mean, the division I worked in Xerox was one of the most progressive companies in the United States. I mean, they had digital printing, laser printing. I mean, they were doing some things with digital printing, which was totally far above what all the other companies were doing, but it wasn't a matter of they weren't being progressive. Uh, it was a matter of, um, like I left when I was 30 years old. I had been there for eight and a half years. When you're in corporate America, which by the way, I loved working for Xerox, and I, I might have even continued to work for Xerox. They treated me great. You know, at the age of 17, the vision that I had had was I wanted to start my own company. I mean, keep in mind, so when I was 17, the two biggest people in business were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You know, and they really had just started their companies. And so for, you know, people in the eighties in the United States, you know, we're known as the money generation, right? And we kind of thought about money a lot. That was kind of like what you aspired to. But anyway, at the age of 17, um, I wanted to start my own company. Uh, like I thought I would at once I, once I graduated from college, what I thought I would do is go work for a big company first, make my mistakes on their time, learn, grow, And then start my own company, and then I got into Xerox, and I really loved my, my w…

AI assessment note: “it wasn't a matter of they weren't being progressive”

Q How did you actually make the decision to take away some of your time from those other businesses so that you could focus on starting the next one?

A One of the problems I didn't like about expert seeker was I was always working in the business and not on the business. When it came to healthcare seeker, I wanted to work on the business, not in the business. So I hired an operations person very quickly. So very similar to what you're doing, Sean, which I think is really, really smart. And that is if you can have either an employee or a partner like that can focus on the internal operations while you're focusing on something else. I think that's really the best way. In fact, you know, I have a business partner right now and he's amazing. I'm so lucky I have, you know, that we work together and he's really good at the working on the inside where I'm really good at working on the outside. I'm really good at the marketing lead generation. In fact, you'll never grow in size past like three million in yearly revenue if you don't have somebody working on the inside while you're working on the business.

AI assessment note: “I wanted to work on the business... So I hired an operations person very quickly.”

Q I'm glad that all of your businesses are going well. What have you learned recently and how do you plan to implement it?

A Where I spend the majority of my time right now is lead generation. So, and what I mean by that is marketing, how to get Prospects to come to us. So the, you know, what I'm always learning is, um, new potential channels on how to get more clients to us. That's where I spend all my time. So, you know, things such as SEO, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, direct mail, uh, advertising, you know, I'm always learning something new in that regard. And so just to, so I want to answer your question more directly. When the recession started in March, I said from my experience, okay, what's the best use of my time right now? How can I use this, uh, recession to get our company better? And our number one best lead generator is search engine optimization, natural searches. And so what I did was, you know, I've always had, um, a, a company that manages that for us. And what I decided to do was to learn SEO from a technical standpoint myself. And so right now I spend a huge amount of my time just trying to make our SEO strategy, our SEO implementation better so that we get more and more and more leads, not only now, but going forward. So everything I'm learning right now has to do about the technical end of SEO. And, and now what I'm doing is after, uh, what, uh, ever since March, five months or more than that, what, seven months Um, what I'm doing now is taking all the th…

AI assessment note: “taking all the things that I learned and delegating it down to other people”

Q So what inspired you to start this company, and what was your decision-making process for how to start it and how to grow it?

A One of the skill sets I've always had, there's two One of them is I, I recognize opportunities very well. And number two is I, I am really good at taking an idea and having it come to fruition to be, to implement it. I'm, I'm really good at that. I'm not afraid of moving forward. And, and I'm really good at like, if there's a brick wall, I'm good at knocking the brick wall down to get through to the other side. Sometimes with not the most great Of political skills, as I mentioned in my days at Xerox. Okay. So I knew DigiPrint wasn't for me, right? It wasn't going to work. Always read a lot. You know, I kind of knew what was kind of going out in the, uh, the, the world, you know, the big thing at the time was a year, 2000 bug, which was, you know, they needed to fix the code. And then there was other things I was reading about called ERP enterprise resource planning. And a lot of companies were implementing big, huge software packages. And so what happened was I went to work for my sister as an independent sales rep. She had started her own business and she was bringing people in from overseas, um, into the United States and H-one B visas to work in technology. And so what I would do is help her kind of place those people into companies. And while I was doing that for seven months, you know, combine that with what I was reading, I saw that there was going to be this huge pent up…

AI assessment note: “I saw that there was going to be this huge pent up demand”

Q So what was the hardest thing about getting started with DigiPrint?

A I want to give you an idea of how intent I was on starting my own business, that I, it was always something I thought about and worked toward. Um, so between the ages of, for example, between the ages of 26 to 30, I went back and I took something called cases from the Harvard Business School at a Local college. And I took that same course for four years because every week you would learn a different business case. And the whole idea why I was taking that class was to become better at being a business owner. Now, the, the thing that was crazy was I spent these, you know, all these years, I wanted to be a business owner and the number one thing I didn't come up with or didn't work on was like a great business idea. So it was like, you know, then my wife and I decide to go ahead and move forward starting my business. And I kind of didn't have an idea for a business I would start, which is really the kind of the screwed up part. What a huge mistake. So what I did was my mentor at the time said, you know, start something, you know, and so I knew a lot about digital printing already. And so, you know, that's the first business I kind of went into.

AI assessment note: “the number one thing I didn't come up with... was like a great business idea”

Q So were you also putting cash into HealthSeeker from ExpertSeeker?

A ExpertSeeker and DigiPrint, they were bootstrapped and it's like I started and I kept reinvesting and it was, you know, it's, it's rough building a business that way. So with HealthcareSeeker, which was, what we did was we placed registered nurses on long-term temporary assignments throughout the United States into hospitals. Expert seeker, I got in on the bottom, and I rode the wave up of demand. With healthcare seeker, I actually got in at the possible, the worst possible time. I got in at the height of the market, and then the market started going down, and then a major, and then a recession hit. And I got in healthcare seeker because I thought it was recession proof. It was, I thought being in healthcare that it was going to be recession proof and, and I was really wrong. So to answer your question, when I got into healthcare seeker, I invested money quicker. I hired people quicker. I hired a director of public relations and lead generation. I hired two recruiters. You know, I put more money into advertising. So, you know, within the first six months, I spent 350,000 dollars and that, that was unlike the businesses I had done before and even the business I had done after. And then we got caught with the recession going down and I was ready to pull the plug on, on healthcare seeker. It took me three years before the company actually started to generate a profit. Certainly th…

AI assessment note: “So to answer your question, when I got into healthcare seeker, I invested money quicker.”