The Exchanges

Q about his volunteering with Charity and flying his plane, which sounds so cool. I know you're gonna love this episode, and I know you're gonna love Taft. Please enjoy the show. So you were a police officer in the past, and you decided to go into sales. What happened in your life that made you go, one thing doesn't suit me anymore, and I need to do this other thing?

A It's a good question. I think there are a few things. There, there are a few elements that came together here. Uh, the first is my, my mom has been in sales all her life. Um, she was a pharmaceutical sales rep when I was a little kid, switched to selling for a big furniture company and worked her way up to their VP of sales when I was in middle school and, uh, and still today like runs a small furniture company. And that, that CEO job is a lot of selling. So first I watched my mom have, have control over her financial destiny and go from my parents having essentially nothing, um, To being, you know, they're not, they're not wealthy, but they, they do well, and she has control over how much she makes, and I found law enforcement really interesting, and I loved it, but, you know, I was coming up on 30 years old, and I had never made 30,000 dollars in a year, and I was, I was the youngest in my department to make detective. I then went on to join a federal task force, uh, and Had, I did, I did pretty well, and it just didn't matter financially and career trajectory-wise. I was waiting on the people above me in the chain of command to retire or die, and that's how you move up. It's not a meritocracy the way that, that I watched my mom thrive in one, and I thought, somewhat naively, somewhat correctly, that like, hey, I think I can do well at anything you plug me into. I, I think I …

AI assessment note: “I was coming up on 30 years old, and I had never made 30,000 dollars”

Q to say, Pandadoc is not sponsoring this. I, Do use it. I do pay for it. It is a pretty good software. So Panda doc, if you want to talk to me after this, I'm happy to, to consider a sponsorship from you. So it took you a long time to try to find an opportunity. What was that breakthrough moment for you that made it made the switch happen?

A I got a job with secret service. So the, the context here is, uh, even though I was on a federal task force, I still Was employed by my local agency. They essentially lend out and a local detective who has a skill set they want or need for, for their, uh, for whatever the task force is doing, you know, so I was on loan from my, uh, from my department. So I was making no money. I put myself through undergrad and grad school as a cop was making effectively no money. I had a bank of America credit card with like 20,000 in debt from putting myself through school on it. And was losing money just surviving. So I applied for federal jobs because a lot of the guys I work with were, it was FBI, Secret Service, DEA, and IRS. And I was cross-sworn with IRS. And so the Secret Service guys said like, hey, we do a lot of this white collar crime stuff. You should come apply with us. And so I did. And then, uh, Around, I think it was like, 2010, 2011. I can't remember exactly now. I, ah, I finally got through their process. I was essentially guaranteed a job, and then Congress didn't pass a budget, and everything froze. And I threw my hands up and said, I'm gonna go do something else somewhere interesting. I, I lived in a, a wonderful small town and then drove down the road to go to work at a small town that had more tattoos than teeth. And, uh, I was, you know, uh, I wasn't enjoying it anymor…

AI assessment note: “I got a job with secret service. So the, the context here is”

Q were introduced as someone working for a company, Uh, so the fact that you have your own company pre-qualifies you. Um, what's the difference between selling for someone else and selling for yourself? Because you have a consulting company and you've got those clients, and so you have to sell those clients on why they need revenue operations. So what's the difference between selling for yourself and selling for others?

A In the sense of how I think about it, there's zero difference, because even though I, I work for Dropbox, I very much think of myself as the CEO of my teams, and I, the fact that, that I'm not the one, you know, it's not my bank account the money is going into doesn't really matter, uh, That, and that attitude has served me well, so I've really leaned into it, but I tell all of my sales reps, you're the, you're the CEO of your role. If you are anything else, this isn't going to work. So no, I, I don't actually treat them differently at all. Um, and I, I don't sell much iceberg anymore. I, I have a, a CEO who I hired a year ago, once we grew to a point where it was hard to manage two things at once. And so I'm, I'm, Founder slash advisor more than, uh, more than in it day to day, but I still help out with sales here and there. And I'm a big believer in, there was a podcast I listened to years ago where their, their mantra, the thing they said all the time was have a mindset of plenty and be helpful. Those were the two rules for sales. Um, no one deal ever matters so much that you should do anything other than be helpful. And if you do those two things, you will succeed in sales. And it's been true for me. I, I, so I treat both sales exactly the same.

AI assessment note: “In the sense of how I think about it, there's zero difference”

Q But I mean, like, in terms of the amount of money that was being handled?

A Oh, we're talking, uh, dozens of millions of dollars a year across many, many stores across several states. Um, it is a lot of money. And, um, not all of it was this scam. There were other scams they did, but this was the biggest. This made up the bare share of their Sort of, uh, fraudulent revenue, and so, um, there were, uh, we investigated this for a while, and worst name ever, one of the FBI guys, uh, because it's all convenience stores, named it Operation Inconvenience, which, like, he got shit for forever, and, uh, so we, uh, we had, like, a war room for this, because it kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and another Element of this, another thing they did was they paid these people you call the Smurfs, like, uh, if you, if you know about, like, math, Smurfs, Smurfs are the people you pay to go buy, uh, the ingredients for math, but another way that you use the term Smurf is, like, people who go steal things for you, and then you fence them. So they also had a ring of people who would go to hundreds of other stores, Walgreens, CVS, stuff like that, Steal things. And they had a giant warehouse of stuff, more millions of dollars where they're reselling stuff from other stores. They actually started a wholesale business selling into Walgreens and CVS and places they were stealing from. It was really sophisticated. And so one day we come into our war room and, uh, o…

AI assessment note: “we're talking, uh, dozens of millions of dollars a year”

Q about unless they were from Wuhan. And yeah, it was, uh, quite scary, but that's a different conversation. So how long did you end up staying in Korea? I think you said, was it two years, three years? What was the most important thing that you learned about Koreans living there and about yourself? Cause I learned a lot about myself living in China. So I'm curious what you've learned.

A Biggest thing. I don't know if this is going to be a very satisfying answer, but I, I think it's the most honest one is growing up. First of all, growing up in, in a, you know, rural Southern town, there were not many foreigners generally, like everybody was white or black Southern and Baptist like that. That was our community. And so We, uh, and I think from media, I had this, this impression of basically all East Asians as, you know, smart and great students and, you know, things that in hindsight are totally silly, but I had never had any experiences that sort of disabused me of this notion before. And so for me, the biggest thing was, I remember telling my parents a few months into being there and it was like, It's just like America in terms of, like, people are just people and different personalities, and there are kids who are, who fit the stereotype as we see it, and most of them absolutely don't, and some, some people there are assholes, most people are nice, and it's just like the cross-section of Korea in terms of just things other than culture and language are the exact same as, as the U.S.,

AI assessment note: “for me, the biggest thing was... people are just people and different personalities”

Q Was there any truth to it, from the point of view of a federal agent, what you've seen?

A I didn't work any drugs, but, uh, I can tell you, at a local level, there are elements of it that feel pretty true. Like, not the, the sexy side of it, the, the, again, like, the brilliant people running these things, I, I don't really know if that's the case, but It's another place where, like, the level of coordination I found pretty, uh, pretty interesting. And, you know, I, I arrested people who had hookups in other cities or other states for serious amounts of drugs when they had a windfall or finished selling whatever batch they'd had, and it is its own economy. And that is super interesting, and in that sense, I, I think minus a lot of the, like, you know, Hitman stuff, and a lot of the violence is a little over the top, and probably not true to life, but, but a lot of the other stuff feels kind of real.

AI assessment note: “at a local level, there are elements of it that feel pretty true.”