The top 3 biggest financial mistakes I've made in my 20's
In this vlog, Dylan Vergara walks viewers through a typical high‑energy day in his life as a remote high‑ticket sales entrepreneur and community leader. He opens with his morning leg workout, shares lifestyle details (cars, books, coffee), and then shifts to business operations: scouting two downtown venues for the next Because of Sales meetup, outbound‑calling a top business‑podcast producer, and outlining his weekly content cadence (newsletters, videos, community calls). Throughout the video he spotlights community members’ wins, offers hiring advice for high‑ticket sales roles, and explains how people from non‑sales backgrounds (construction, ministry, garbage‑collection) can translate their experience into sales. The core of the vlog is a deep dive into the three biggest financial mistakes that have cost him roughly $377,000. The first mistake was a $40 k loss (actually $25 k agency fee + $15 k ad spend) due to a contract‑less agency partnership and missed opportunity cost. The second mistake was an $88 k tax hit caused by a lost credit‑card, missed bonus depreciation, and a failed private‑equity financing. The third mistake was a $250 k rev‑share client non‑payment stemming from missing contracts and unclear partner relationships, which taught him to implement downside‑protection clauses. Dylan concludes with actionable lessons—always use contracts, secure reliable tax advisors, and embed minimum‑retainer protections—to avoid similar losses, and he teases future content while encouraging viewers to subscribe.
Chapters
Leg day Monday. Can you see Bug back there? She's wondering what's going on. This is the concoction: half scoop of pre, so I can have coffee when I come back. Thumbnail. Shout out Facebook Marketplace, man. 2005 Porsche GT2. It's the same year that I have, just a way crazier spec. Original poster here, Le Mans. Cool. Cool. I feel like a kid on Christmas, just showing y'all the new stuff I got. There's one more thing while we're showing new things. I don't know where it is. Ah, it's right here. It's actually not in English. I think it's German. But it's a whole book of like cool mid-century ads. So this is how you know I'm ChatGPT pilled. I saw the book and I was like, I could take photos of that book and like put community logo, put the Because of Sales logo, put whatever I want, generate images For whatever I want, whether it's a website, a hat, a shirt. Cool book to have. I'm a big fan of the mid-century ads. It's an early morning, gonna hit some legs because I have a feeling I'm gonna be working all day. And if I work all day and don't move my body, it's not gonna be as good of a day as it could be. Big day. Looking at 2 venues for the event. This is really the last one that I've been trying to lock down so I can get a decent idea of price. This is going to be one where we have speakers and food catered and drinks, maybe cigars. Trying to get a downtown central location, so I have 2 lined up. They're not cheap. Gonna take some iPhone clips. Somehow, some way, I sent an outbound message to the producer of my favorite podcast. It's a big podcast. I outbounded this producer, don't know how, booked a call for free. 30 minutes, and I'm gonna talk to her, see how she does what she does. When I look up business podcast rankings, Google just like throws a couple at the top. This one's up there before I even open up anything. It might be number 4. Kind of do a version of what they do but for sales, with Because of Sales. I'll fill you guys in after on what, what kind of game she shares. Tuesday is a heavy writing day. So I write the Because of Sales newsletters on Tuesday, they go out on Wednesday. I'm probably going to go to a coffee shop after I check out these places and just grind. Little bit of an unusual day here, but it'll be fun. One more thing, shout out to Will, community member that joined overnight, also based in Austin. Let's get it, man. So we're looking for a second speaking venue. This one was pretty solid in a really good location, East Downtown. Wanted an arm and a leg for Bar tab, reservation, food, all that. And then I cruised on over just south of the Capitol, went to this second spot that I found, and it's pretty much just like an open venue space, a lot more flexibility. We did select one of these, we signed. You'll find out at the meetup. I would just like to point out this because of sales moment. It's like 8:45 and we're getting ready for a run. Sales is cool, And business ownership is cool because you pick when you want to work. You might be watching this and thinking, damn dude, I wish I could wake up at 8:30 and go work out at 9 and go lift at 10. Yeah, it's pretty cool. You probably can if you structured your day the right way. If you're in like a 1099 remote sales role. Yeah, this is cool. But what I'm not showing is how I was working until like 11:30 last night on my laptop, went down to the coworking spot, came back, went on the balcony, Worked until my laptop pretty much died to get out the newsletter that just came out this morning. It's Wednesday. Patrick William Joyce. This guy was a garbage man who turned into like a sales consultant that was learning behind execs at Salesforce and Microsoft. Went from garbage man, then down the road being a teacher. And once he decided to get into sales, in 4 years he went from not in sales to enterprise business development consultant. That's really fast. If any of you guys know tech, SaaS, B2B, that's super fast. And now he oversees a lot of SDRs and just launched his own thing as well. We're about to go do a little track workout. Got the Apple Watch. I admit it, I bonked. Came out here too late, it's too hot. I did bring water, but I drank it all before I got out here, and there's no bathroom out here. That call with the podcast producer actually got pushed to today, so about to get into that in like an hour here. Just recorded the last video on on employment contracts in the 1099 high-ticket sales space. Go watch it if you haven't seen it. You should definitely be versed in how that exists and how that pertains to you. What else is going on? I'm alone for the next few days. Fiancée's out of town. So I'm probably just gonna work a lot, which is cool. Queuing up a campaign. I haven't told you guys this, but I have a client that we're going on 18 months of continuous retainer and rev share. I do cold email and SDR work for him. He's He's in the B2B manufacturing niche. He found me on TikTok. So I signed a manufacturing lead gen client on TikTok, retained them for 18 months, retainer and rev share. That's pretty cool, right? Let me talk you guys through this real quick. So I had a community member, he comes to me, he's in South Korea, he's about 10 days in, has 2 offers on the table for closing roles. He does not have a sales background. He has a ministry background. He has one offer. They do $400,000 to $500,000 per month. The job posting said $20,000 per month OTE. He basically has it extended to him, but they have 4 closers. says $20K per month OTE. They have 4 closers. If they're doing $400K per month with 4 closers, that's $10K per month each. Not quite there. It's still not a bad gig for his first one. He has another opportunity that's through someone in the community, part of an agency that has a pretty solid reputation. And I asked him, I was like, dude, what's your goal? Like, is it get in today and make cash from the jump? Or is it continue getting connected, still make some cash in a good scenario and like really solidify your spot in this high-ticket niche, especially within in the community. And, you know, a lot of people are just gonna blindly tell you like, hey man, I don't really care much about your specific situation. You'll make more money faster here, go here. And depending on your situation, like you got bills to pay and it's like back against the wall, like go where you are going to make money now. But if you plan on being in this industry for a year or 2 years, the network and the proximity to other people that are like high level at this, you can't put a price tag on it. I have a feeling I know which way he's gonna lean. But yeah, I mean, when you're breaking into this space, And again, this guy is not coming from a sales background. He has 2 closing roles on the table, 10 applications, 4 interviews where he got past the first round on all of them. No sales background, 2 closing roles on the table, 1 setting role on the table. Where else do you do that? It's not in the Facebook groups, man. It's not in the Facebook groups. And he's got me and other members who are doing really well, like, in his corner helping him evaluate these. If he didn't have that, like, who knows where he'd be? In the Facebook groups, probably getting into stuff that's not what he thinks it is. Or maybe he would be settling for a setting role. Another thing that we talked about might be relevant to you is we have some guys with construction background coming into this. And one of them, shout out Austin, I filmed a video on how he's gonna have a big first month, like a couple videos back. But we have another guy, he's like, yeah man, I'm trying to figure out the best way to like position myself on Loom. Like I don't really have sales experience, I have a construction management background. And I was like, well, first of all, like make sure you're applying to things that are not completely out of reach. But then second of all, like showing them how well you can sell, Your past experience to be applicable to what it is you're trying to do is a representation of your ability to do the job. Meaning, dude, construction management, for those of you that have done it, it's not easy. And the job basically relies on you being able to sell all the people beneath you on doing what they should do, how they should do it, when they should do it. Like being able to go and tell a foreman like, hey, you messed this up, we need to redo it, here's why. That's sales. And so in a perfect world, you have sales experience and you can be like, oh, I sold this much, I closed this much at this percent, whatever, whatever. But in this world, the one that I'm talking about right now, we need to bridge the gap on like not having the sales experience. So like, you know, this guy having to sell his employees, his team on following the instructions and getting the job done right. But then also like you want to quantify the impact that you were able to make in this company just as you would in sales. In sales, it's like, oh, I closed $10 million and I was the second rep out of 30. That's impact. But if you don't have the monetary impact in like the upside, maybe you have it in preserving the downside. It's like, hey, I saved this many hours. I saved this many teammates this many hours by doing this, which increased our profit margin by 10, 20%. Like showing how you got put into that role and by being in that role, you made an actual impact in that company. Because if you can make an impact in this department, and you can convince them that you can sell to people, like even if there's not direct money behind it, then why wouldn't they take a bet on you as a salesperson? And again, like we're not talking about top of the top $30K per month closing roles. I'm talking about like a $5K to $10K per month setting role. You know, those roles, a lot of it does come down to personality traits. A lot of it does come down to where are you coming from? Who do you know? How enjoyable are you? Like how much drive do you have to actually get into this, see it through and make it work. And I know from experience with our agency, we're running multiple, multiple teams doing multiple 6 figures per month at the same time. And for appointment setters specifically, dude, we love to hire people that did not have a sales background. Maybe they had customer service, maybe they had retail, but it's those things where it's like you have the soft skills, and as long as they can communicate the value they were able to provide and we can tell they have that, like, that drive and that confidence in their ability to figure this out, honestly, the best hire you can make for a good setting role. So if you're coming from a background that is like totally different, keep that in mind. How do we bridge the gap between not having sales experience? Everything is sales. So how do we bridge that gap? And then how do we show that we were actually good at what we did? Because if we are good at this thing over here, we can probably be good at this thing over here. And that's my TED Talk. Thanks for coming. Bros, I did the big fatal mistake of recording a ton of content and not having the mic plugged in. So I'm going to play some of that footage. I'm going to rerecord some of it. But yeah, this is a few days later. I'm editing the video and not good. So basically what I was trying to show you is how diabolically locked in I was getting. I had the surround sound Bose speakers on either side of the room, ambient lighting. I had the Gorilla Mind cracked open, clean office. And I was trying this thing with the whiteboard where I just listed out bullet points, all the little stuff. Like I've been having all this stuff pile up. It's been weighing on me heavy. So This is the list that I was attacking and I was going to time— well, I did time every single thing down to the minute and second and then crossed it out on the board. And in this clip, I was playing the atmospheric drum and bass. If you don't know what that is, go on YouTube, look it up right now. Pretty much all I'm listening to when I work right now. If you've ever played that game SSX Tricky, the snowboarding game, they're known for that. So I checked in at 1:30 AM and showed you this cool Japanese clock that I had. This is when I thought I was done. I had just put in almost three hours on finalizing the meetup stuff, and if you see CPS on the board, that is not Child Protective Services. That is the city of San Antonio's energy provider. Anyways, I talk about the meetup a little bit. I show how we're giving away a VIP ticket, and then I start kind of scrolling through the community, showing you all the sick stuff that's going on in there. Like how Noah closed two deals in one day for. $2,200 in commission, uh, coming from a blue-collar background, or how Paul met with our boy Jake. Uh, don't let this fool you, Jake is like 6'8. Looks are deceiving, but he's a new member crushing it, gonna be at the Austin meetup. We had Deven hit a $34K cash collected day. Uh, that's $3.4K on the day, in one single day commissions. Inbound leads. Chris is one of the guys that landed straight into closing. And then when it comes to our hiring channel, I think I was counting up in the last 24 hours. I don't know, we can count on the screen here. You can count it if you want. There's 7 offers there. Experienced closer needed. It was like 14 offers. I could be wrong. But if you pair these offers, which is the hardest part about high-ticket sales, with the call structure, the tracking, and all the work that we do in small group or one-on-one setting— like, this is someone's actual application tracking sheet— we can see Exactly what is working, what is not working, so that way we can fix it and get you in your desired situation quickly. And then here's me calculating how much money I blew with the 3 most expensive mistakes that I had ever made. And I was kind of teasing it because I was going to go to bed, but I was like, I'm gonna talk about this tomorrow. And it's a lot of money. So I'm going to talk about it right now. Alright guys, this is actually a pro because I was thinking about after I recorded this, and I wasn't sure if I was happy with it. But it is a pro. And it is actually more than $377,000 just by a little bit. So the 3 biggest mistakes that I've ever made financially. And I know this is kind of random given the context of the video, but I'm going to make this fast because I'm editing. The video is already long, but I said it was going to be in here. So this is what we're going to talk about. I'm going to tell you what the mistake was, why it happened, what I learned, what I'm going to do to not let it happen again. Starting with the least expensive mistake. The least expensive mistake was $40,000. And this is actually the one that upsets me the most because not only was I just straight up out $40,000, but there was a lot of opportunity cost that was missed because of that, because of the $40,000, but also the time 'Cause this was like over a 6-month period. The $40,000, well, it was actually $25,000 spent with an agency, someone who was supposed to provide a service for me and my community, not on like the fulfillment side. It was in ads. It was a paid ads thing. And I had entered into this new offer that they had launched. It was like a hybrid done for you, done with you. By the way, I'm gonna take the blame on all of these because that's the only way I can sleep well at night. But given the $25,000 price tag, I thought it was gonna be a lot more done for you. than done with you. And at that time, with everything going on, I just didn't have the time to wheel this to success, you could say. So it was a little bit underwhelming. It should have been a red flag when they were willing to take payment from me without a contract being signed or like any terms or anything laid out. At the end of the day, like the closer was definitely a closer. Not saying I got closed, but like he made the sale and fulfillment didn't really align in the way that I thought it was going to, which it sucks, man. This is a big name. This guy has a reputation in the space. You would definitely know it if I said who it was. Anyway, so it was $25K on the service and then I put $15K into the ads that they helped me make and we closed nothing. And this was a really long drawn-out process in setting everything up and then running the ads. And I had never run that funnel before. This was on YouTube. But why this one stung so much is I had other funnels that were profitable that if I would have put the $15,000 in ad spend or the $40,000 altogether into that funnel, we would have made a lot of money. That's number one. Lost out on $40,000. This one to me, it stings the most because of the opportunity cost. Red flags going forward, like contracts needed. Don't go solely on reputation. Nobody cares about my business like I do. That one sucks. Second one. The second one is the one where there's a little bit on top. So I calculated $87,000. It was actually $88,000. This one actually came down to taxes in 2024. So I had a financial team that I use for accounting, bookkeeping, tax strategy, all that stuff. And earlier in the year, We had planned to offset taxes with a private equity thing using bonus depreciation to offset taxes. Well, previously, maybe like 4 months prior, I had this stupid repair on my old Mustang that I have, and I went to Firestone. Shout out Firestone. Not really. For some reason, I opened up the Firestone credit card. They gave me a discount on the repair. It was like $1,000. At the time, I was pissed that I had to make the repair. They used like some small bank. I lost the physical card. I could not find the name of the bank. I could not find my account number. Like was stranded on an island, that hit my credit. It like dropped my credit 200 points, which made me not eligible for the financing, for the financing on the private equity deal to offset the taxes. I ended up being able to figure something out. I went into it with a partner versus just solo, but because I went into it with a partner, I could not bonus depreciate as much as we thought we were going to, which left me with an additional $87,000 tax bill. I still pay taxes. I still was able to write off a fair amount, but the first payment I made was more than $87,000. So this was an additional that I was under the assumption that I was gonna write off and it did not happen. So lesson from this one, this one doesn't sting as bad because it hurts, it's frustrating, but I'll be able to use that bonus depreciation in the next year, which is cool. I'm just losing out on the compounding, the time value of money. So lessons here, don't open stupid credit cards. And if you do, don't forget about them and try to remember the bank who the credit card is with. Completely adjacent topic here. You want to know how people get wealthy? They know more than you. They they have people in their corner that know more than you because the stuff that we're doing on the tax side, on the investing side, I've been able yes like I've increased my income but I've been able to keep more and the more you keep at an earlier age, the more that it flourishes into something much bigger than than what it would be otherwise. So anyways, don't open up stupid credit cards. Get a tax person or like get financial people in your corner, not the ones that Just do it for a check, but like get good ones in your corner. And yeah, so well, that one was $87,000. It was actually $88,000 with the repair and I had interest on the $1,000 repair. Stupid. Okay. You know, $88,000 running the numbers in my head, $88,000 plus $40,000, that is not $377,000. So where's the other one? And this is the big one. This is the one. There's a lot of layers to it and I can make a whole video on this. This one was— I don't know the exact number. I, in the calculation, I put $250,000. I think it was like $235,000 to $245,000. Like it was basically $250 grand. And that sounds ridiculous without any context. The first one was money that I had that left my account that could have left my account and brought back more money, but it brought back zero. That one sucked. That, that's the one that actually kind of pisses me off. This other one was, was money that left my account to the IRS, but I will be able to recoup just a year later. I would be further along if it was done last year. Wasn't able to be done last year. I'm not going to cry over it. This one is a little different because we had delivered services. This is back when I had my sales agency. before I got bought out by my partner in February. And we had launched a client from zero to maybe 7— I think it was $700,000, just over $700,000 in month 1 on a big rev share. And we came in, we manned the entire sales team, built it from scratch, all the tech, the team, the training assets, everything went to $700,000 or so in month 1 and continued on for a little bit. And then the actual team that was delivering the service had like some API things break with the software and we paused like the marketing and sales so that way they they could fix this. And then there was like a lot involved. I'm not a techie person, but there was a lot involved where this got drawn out. We basically were sitting in limbo for a long time and eventually just never got paid. So the reason why this, this one is tricky is because the person who didn't pay us was not like— there's some parties here. There's the guy who has the product or service. We were brought in from like a growth partner, let's call it. There's us, there's other people under the growth partner, and then there's our sales team and our team beneath us. So we were actually directly working with the growth partner or the affiliate guy or whatever we want to call him, who was working with this other guy. We didn't have a contract with our boy because we had done projects with him and we had trust, but he didn't have a contract with this guy who he didn't know. And that's kind of why we got messed up. We couldn't go after that guy because we didn't have a contract with him. We weren't hired by him directly. It's the same thing with our sales reps, our sales manager, and our team. It's— we knew the setters, closers, managers knew that we did not get paid. We knew that the growth partner did not get paid. And because there was like a strong relationship there and our sales team was working on other accounts, had made a lot of money with us in other I mean, it was just kind of easy to, to take it across the chin and focus on what was working right in front of us, which was other accounts. It sucks though, because, you know, I say $250,000, my cut of that was maybe like $40,000. And then, you know, I have a partner and then we have a full team. We had managers and closers, multiple, who were expecting $30,000+ checks, $20,000-$30,000+ checks, and none of us got paid. Could we have sued? Probably. Would we still be in court trying to get that money and be tens and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees right now? Today, about a year later, yeah, we probably would be. So we figured just best to cut ties. And luckily, dude, we had— we have an awesome team who was understanding of that and continued to work with us. One of those guys, shout out, just accepted a $30,000 to $50,000 role. I was going to edit this into the video, but now that— now that I'm just rerecording, I could just show it. So this is one of the dudes that did really well on this team before it shut down. Screenshot here, and I blurred it out for the sake of his Private information. Hey brother, I'm going to make a post sometime next week. It's a win. But just want to say grateful to have joined Serial Sales. You changed my life. I accepted this role you posted. Long interview process but made it through. OTE is $30K to $50K. That team does multiple 7 figures per month and this guy has gone on to make $20K, $30K per month consistently. He'll be at the meetup. Solid dude. But yeah, the $250K, it just was just frustrating, man. The one that stings a lot is the first one. But if you total all these up, that's $377K. What I learned from this: contracts. Again, have contracts. Don't work with sketchy people that are anonymous online and despite them seeming super legit, they're being anonymous and cryptic, then it's probably a red flag. At this point we were full rev share, but then this is when we started implementing the downside protection of like rev share or, you know, a $5K, a $10K per month retainer, whichever is more. So that way, at least at a minimum, we're getting $5K a month if that client doesn't want to do what we need them to do. All that being said, you guys, I mean, I don't want this to be a pity story by any means, I do all right, and I'll tell you what, there's no better way to learn a lesson than to lose money. That shit sucks. And I guess we'll just rip an outro right now. Little bit of an interesting video. Obviously, I'm still learning how to do all this stuff. You see like a bunch of blurry clips. I don't have audio in some. I was able to piece it together pretty well. But yeah, I appreciate you guys watching, man. I had a dude come up to me at the gym today, and he's like, "Are you serial sales?" I was like, "I am." I didn't know if he was wanting to fight or wanted to be friends. You never know. This happens not super frequently, but it'll happen here and there in Austin. And he was like, I love the content. I was like, sick. Are you in sales? He said, yeah, I'm an SDR. I'd actually talked to him a little bit in the DMs. That's great feedback. But I really appreciate, you know, likes, comments, messages that I get or, you know, feedback that I get on our community calls. It means a lot. And, you know, I'm trying to create a good flow of content here. Sunday videos are more like behind the scenes lifestyle of the week, building businesses. I always say Wednesday, it's Thursday. Thursday videos, I usually film them on Wednesday. Thursday videos are like high-ticket sales, strategic deep dive, how-to style videos. If any of that interests you, be sure to subscribe. I'm gonna be doing this for a long time. This video is long enough. I'm gonna cut it off here. See you guys in the next one.
