Mentorship, Global Talent, Golden Handcuffs, and Hunters vs Farmers with Kasim Aslam

Hello everyone and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Grainsar. So nice of you to join us here today. And with me on the call today is Kassim Aslam, CEO of Solutions8, co founder of Driven Mastermind, co host of Perpetual Traffic and a bunch of other things. Kasim, how are you doing today?

Living the dream. Kuba, thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah. Awesome to have you on the show. Qasim, I wanted to ask you just as a warm up, just so people get to see you. Like I, you know, when I meet with people and I don't, I know that I'm not going to have a lot of opportunities to speak with them. I like to ask about kind of the top experiences of their life. Okay. And I'm not going to go that hard with you, but can you tell me what was the best thing that's happened to you this year? Personal professional.

My business mentor of 20 years is a man named Greg Smith and he took me under his wing when I was 19 years old and I was a, I was quite the project. And what's cool is he and I have gone full circle together. I was 19 when I started learning from him and he started teaching me and then he's in investment banking. He's a very high end ma guy and he helped me sell my business. He got a nice payday out of that, which made me feel 20 years later I was able to, I'll never be able to pay him back for everything, but I was able to kind of give him a token of my appreciation which has really helped. Helpful. He, he wrote a book called no Locked Doors. I wrote the forward to it. That was really cool. And then most recently for the very first time, he and I have gone into business together. So we're full partners in a new endeavor that I actually can't talk about just yet because we're, we're going through discussions with the SEC and until that's done, I can't let the cat out of the bag. But it's so cool to, to move from a student teacher role to pseudo peers. He's still the teacher. I'm still the student. In some ways. I have his book behind me, if you don't mind.

Yeah, sure.

For anybody that's interested. Greg Smith, no Locked Doors. I don't know if you used the video here or not, Kubo, but the subtitle is Master the Keys to Transform Problems into Possibilities. Greg's one of the most amazing men I've ever known in my entire Life. He's bought and sold 35 to 40 banks. He bought and sold Sun Country Airlines twice. He's created one of the largest car fleets in the United States. He's an unbelievable human. And he basically wrote the keys to his success in this really stellar book. And so I'm pretty lucky. I'm lucky to have him. And, yeah, that's been pretty cool for me. So I hope that was an adequate answer.

That's amazing. That gave me chills, actually, to hear about that, because that's such a long story. One thing I'm curious about. I mean, we'll get you to introduce yourself to the audience and all that stuff in just a moment here, but what made you seek out a business mentor at 19? What's the story there?

There's a funny quote. I think it's from the Fast and the Furious movies, but they said that men without fathers collect father figures. And I've always been just really kind of desperate for that paternal influence and oversight. My dad, bless his soul, jumped ship when I was seven. And he came back around, but by the time he came back around, there was the distrust there, you know, it was like you weren't there when you're supposed to be. So it makes you think that I'm gonna, you know, just let you reassume that role. And it sounds like a sad story. I don't mean to get all sappy on you, but to be honest with you, it ended up being something of a blessing because I had. I have had that opportunity to just. I've had a ton of really phenomenal. And I don't even know if I want to use the word father, but, like, influences, you know, Greg might be more of a big brother, and I've had a half dozen or so just amazing humans that have shepherded me through from where I started to where I am. And I think being accessible to that is one of the things that's made me really, really successful. So that's. That's a good note, I think, to take away. If you're listening to this, it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to get help. It's okay to want help. You know, a lot of people, especially young men, I think young women are a little bit better at this. But a lot of young men want to do it by themselves. You know, they want to just do it solo and climb the mountain all by their lonesome. And it's like, man, you can't get to the top of Everest without a Sherpa. Exactly. You Know, like, you just need that, and that's 100% okay. And I don't know why I've got as much ego as anybody else does, but for some reason, that particular problem was one I never had. Like, if somebody was willing to give me a hand, I took it and that shot me forward in some instances, years, and others, decades.

That's amazing. I think we're getting into the deep stuff right off the bat here, which is what I like to do, especially when I get to have a conversation with somebody just once or twice in my life, like I mentioned. Okay. If I'm listening to this, on the one hand, I probably want to know more about you on the other. One question that kind of presses itself into my mind is, even if I do want support, just to finish off this little thread here, even if I do want support, how do I find kind of the support figures? Is there anything in particular that you did that helped you find the people that supported you or helped you decide that, yes, this is somebody that I want to, you know, take help from, or this is a good partnership to enter into. Does anything come to mind?

Yeah, it always comes disguised as work.

Always.

That's the really interesting thing. So here's what I've experienced, and, you know, I'm on the other side of the line now, which is interesting. I've got a. You mentioned earlier, I'm the co founder of Driven Mastermind, which is one of the top masterminds in the world. We call ourselves the Misfit Millionaires. So it's a bunch of wildly successful people that are now trying to figure out what else past just money. And it's about growth and building and cultivating power that allows you to make an influence and impact. And here's my experience with everybody that I've ever encountered that's been successful beyond a certain degree. They all want to turn around and help other people. Almost to a person, very rarely do you meet somebody that's just the dragon hoarding the gold. Usually they want to help others. But what's interesting about that is the people that you want to help are the people that are willing to help themselves. And so Greg is a really good example of this. I'm not the only person that Greg mentored. Greg had dozens of mentees, especially in the very beginning when I. When I had first met him, met him, he was the COO and CFO of one of the largest privately held banks in the world. And there were all these, I'm going to call them kids, all these young People working at the bank that Greg was trying to honestly, very hard to help, mentor. But again, it always came disguised as work. And some of them would pursue Greg a little bit, but they'd stop as soon, as soon as it got hard. And, man, I didn't stop, you know, if Greg called me and said, hey, I have a friend. This is, you know, semi true story that I'm veiling just a little bit because there's more intricacies there. But he had a friend at the bank that needed a mini storage emptied, and he's like, I got a. I got a friend that the bank that needs, you know, is another executive at the bank. And. And they just needed labor, you know, and you think to yourself, like, well, it's like Mr. Miyagi and the wax on, wax off. Like, Mr. Miyagi is making me wax my car, wax his car. What the hell am I doing, you know, just cleaning this old man's car. But I was on that shit like white on rice in a paper plate in a snowstorm, because I just sort of knew. I was like, I know I. I know what this guy's doing. And a lot of people tend to. They get repelled by that. And you gotta humble yourself and be willing to take out the garbage. And there's no shortage of humans that are rooting for you. You know what I mean? Like, everybody wants you to succeed. Everybody that's done it, everybody wants you to succeed. They just want to see that you're putting your foot forward, you know, And I'm not going to jump on the whole, like the whole world is entitled bandwagon, but I do have a sense of that. And I don't think this is recent, I don't think this is generational. I think this is just true of younger people. You know, when I was 16, 17, 18, 19, I kind of had a chip on my shoulder. I kind of thought I deserved more than I did. And when you carry that around, people don't want to help you. So being willing to humble yourself and do the work, and people will come out of the fricking woodwork to give you a hand. It's pretty awesome the way that works, right?

I'm so immersed in that story right now. I'm seeing myself because every story, we kind of insert ourselves into the story.

We're all the heroes.

Yeah. Whether we're watching, I don't know, the Matrix or hearing somebody tell a story. So I'm seeing myself among these kids. You know, I made it through. You made it through Right. Because you weren't resistant to getting through the hard stuff, the hard work. What did you tell yourself to get through the hard stuff?

I'm trying to say this in an elegant way, Kubin. I guess there's no way to say it. My dad left when I was 7. My mom went blind when I was 12. Life was hard, you know what I mean? Like, it was me and my little brother and a blind, single, blind woman in Albuquerque, New Mexico, living off of Social Security, which is effectively welfare. So we're two little welfare babies living in like. I don't know if you've ever been to Albuquerque, but it's a shithole. It's the worst place in the world. That was hard. But what you find out on the other end of that is heart is such a blessing. You know what I mean? Like, hard might be the best thing that can ever happen to you. And so it wasn't really I need to work myself up in order to do this. It was just like, oh, hard is what we do. And I think you can seek that out now. You know, I love cold plunges for that reason. I hate the cold. I hate it. It's just the worst. Even thinking about it, I'm like, so like to go throw myself in 39 degree. And I'm a dumb American, so I don't know what this is, Celsius, but 39 degree water, you know, close to zero. I imagine, like, it's like, oh, God, that's. That's hard, right? Waking up at 4am, that's hard. You know, working with focus, that's hard. Doing the right thing, telling the truth, that's hard. And I don't want to get preachy at all, but I think that especially for young entrepreneurs, go seek out the thing that's hard. Go find it, you know, and then just. And honestly, it sounds maybe a little naive or possibly say domesticistic, but do things for the sake of doing hard things, you know what I mean? Like climbing Everest. Just hard. There's no real benefit to that. You get to see the top of the mountain, you get a pretty view, but it's just hard. Go do that. Go do that for yourself. Like, what a gift. And I think hard is a gift. And I think every trauma you've ever experienced is a gift. And I really mean that. You know, it's super easy to be like, oh, woe is me. This is sad. But, man, gosh, what a. What a blessing. Because I see the other side of that, too. I see the people that didn't have hard. It's my children, my little guys, they're about to be 7 and 9 in April. They're both born in April. And me and my little brother talk about this all the time. They're limited by how easy their life is and is going to be. So part of me wants to inject some trauma into their existence, you know what I mean? Within the confines of what's safe. But I think hard's a blessing. And if you're experiencing hard and you can reframe that and you know, this is pretty Buddhist or Taoist or whatever, they all basically end up saying the same thing. Hopefully nobody takes umbrage with that. But lean into the hard.

That's awesome. Okay, well, we were just like 10 minutes into the conversation, but we went quite deep there. Okay. There's something that I want to just get out of the way before we start talking about the world of agencies and business and everything else that I might mind you for in, in the next 20, 30 minutes or so. Okay. So. Well, we know a lot of your life story and background just from this story that you shared. Just let's to get it out of the way for the people who don't know you. What are you commonly associated with, you know, what's your expertise? Tell me about your business. Says just, you know, as an, as a brief intro.

Yeah, I call myself the world's greatest failure, which isn't self deprecating, I mean it. I'm really good at failing and that's proven to be pretty beneficial for me. I've built four multimillion dollar agencies. I've had two exits, one of them eight figures. So I bring that up because I think, you know, money's how we keep score. And so you have to know like my advice is worth low eight figures and there's an agency owner out there who sold for mid eight figures and his or her advice is worth that much more than mine. But there's an agency owner out there who hasn't sold yet or sold for, you know, high six. And so you can put me on the hierarchical structure based off of how we've all decided we're going to measure the impact. And at the moment the impact is money, right or wrong. So I've made a lot of money and I'm good at that piece and I've done it through agency as a vehicle and I really like that mechanism as well because agency, unlike every other business, allows you to build and scale without massive infrastructure, which means you can bootstrap nearly everything. I've never had more than a couple of grand to build a business. All four of those agencies that I mentioned, including the one that I sold for low eight figures, started with, I mean, close to zero seed capital. Now that I have it, sometimes it's easier to buy. You're buying time, right? You're accelerating the process. But I know as much about anybody does about building and growing agencies to that level. You know, there's. I was talking to Eric Huberman yesterday, who's a friend of mine and somebody I really look up to. Eric has a $500 million agency, Hawk Media. Like, I can't even wrap my head around that. You know, the guy's, I don't know what his valuation is, but he's got to be worth a billion dollars. You know, if you've got a $500 million agency. I don't know what his net is, but I'm sure his margins are at least semi decent. And at that size, his multiple has to be a 13 to 15X, I'd imagine. Like he's got to be worth something approaching a billion dollars. So if I say something and Eric says something, well, then we want to go listen to Eric, don't we? But context dependent too, you know, if you're brand new, if you're a kid in the basement, Eric's solutions are going to be inaccessible to you, and my solutions might be inaccessible to you. So you want to make sure you're listening to people. I like listening to people that are one or two steps above me. Anything more than that, and it's like I can't even lift the weights that you're talking about in order to redeem the value. So I think that's really important. It might be important for you too, Kuba, as you're interviewing people. People get weird when it comes to talking about growth, money, scale, valuations, multiples. Well, dude, that's the scoreboard. You can't play a game without the score showing. So if they're not willing to show their cards, part of me is like, because that's the other thing that I've seen once I got on the other side of the line. So many people that pretend are full of shit. They got nothing. They haven't made a damn thing. They have their, their, their cash poor. They're deeply leveraged. You know, they got an Airbnb millionaire, whatever mansion on the beach of San Diego that they use for their Instagram videos, but they don't live there. They've got a leased for. I, dude, I can, I could I could have a supercar for every day of the week. I could have a Ferrari and a Lamborghini and an Audi A8 and all that horseshit. And it would, it's. It's two grand a month, effectively, you know, plus insurance. Like, there's nothing about that. That's actually an indication of real wealth. So if you want to build and you want to grow and you want to scale, go talk to the people that have actually built real wealth. That got a little preachy. I hope you'll forgive me.

No, no, that's great. And I, and I do appreciate the way you turned it on. Like, even me specifically. Money is how we keep this core. This is the first time I'm personally exposed to that idea. It rings true. And I definitely will be taking that to the next conversations. You're going to love the next question I've got for you, by the way. Just a traditional agency journey question, because you just mentioned something that invalidates it a little bit. But we'll try to make it work either way. My next question to you is, what is your number one tip for agency operators? And as you answer that, you might be thinking, okay, but an agency and what kind of situation, et cetera. Like you just mentioned, you know, the advice you might have to share. You know, it depends on where that agency is. If we need to make it more specific, you can think of, no, I've got the answer. But you know. You've got the answer. Never mind, I'll shut up. Give me the answer. What is your number one tip for agency operators?

People. People are the most important part of your business and always will be. Agencies have three things to sell. They can sell people processes and programs. Processes and programs are both deeply commoditized and commoditizable. Processes are easy to figure out. Programs are all basically buying the same software. If you can develop custom software, then maybe that's a unique value proposition. But even when you develop that custom software, it's easy to come and rip off. Right? Like, and again, very quickly, commoditizable people, processes, programs that. Those are the only things agencies can bill for somebody. Correct me if I'm wrong. Challenge me on that statement. I've thought a lot about this. People are the differentiator and what young entrepreneurs do. What I did is you think about people as cogs in the machine. And it's. And you think like McDonald's is everybody's go to cliche model for a business. It's like, oh, I put somebody on the assembly line and they put the patty on the bun and then it moves down the assembly line. And it's the exact opposite. All of your employees will exist on the Pareto distribution from a scale perspective. And if you look at the Pareto distribution, people think it's the 8020 distribution, which is, it's the, that's the quick way to refer to it. It's 20% of your people are going to do 80% of your work. The real, from a mathematical perspective, the real predator distribution says that the square root of the total participants are responsible for 50% of the output. So if you have 10 employees, that's not that big a deal. That means three people do half. But when you have a thousand employees, you start to see the predator distribution really scale to an unbelievable degree. And it exists at every level of analysis. So like, you know, let's say that you have 100 employees, 20% of those employees are doing 80% of your work. So 20 of those employees do 80% of what your agency does. Well, zoom in on those 20 employees. Of those 20 employees, 20% of them, four are doing 80% of that work. Zoom in again. Of those four employees, 20% of them. So you know, it's basically one of them, 25% is doing 80% of that work. And what a lot of entrepreneurs try to do, which is insane. So we have a hierarchy here, right? You have the one person that's doing a really tax relevant, and then the four people that are doing even more tax relevant and then the 20 people and entrepreneurs, they try to flatten it. They try to put themselves because they think in order to scale, I need a business that scales and I need to make sure that everybody's doing roughly the same amount of work. And what that does is it takes your peak performers and it presses them down and it takes your underperformers and it tries to drag them up and they try to flatten the output. It's the wrong approach. Lean into the fact that you have these predo distributions and that means that you're going to have one or two or three or four or five insanely high performers. And it's a scary place to be because you can become very, very, very reliant on them. You can't live without them. And the thing to do there is make sure you incentivize them to stay. So find peak performers, incentivize peak performers to be peak performers, and incentivize peak performers to stay. Oftentimes that means profit, share, equity, which I believe in very strongly. So if you're trying to keep all the money to yourself, then you're going to have a hard time keeping those people. But if you're willing to be generous, those people are force multipliers and they're not worth 20% more, 30% more, 40% more. They're worth five to 10 times. I had one employee. I sold Solutions 8 in October 2022, I had about 80 employees. By the time that we sold, maybe a little bit more than that, we were just under a hundred. I had one employee who managed 50% of our gross revenue in terms of the clients that he managed. Now, that employee became. Oh yeah, you believe that shit. That employee became a business partner very quickly. So some of the people listening to this know the gentleman I'm referring to, his name is John Moran. John was my employee to start with and he became such an unbelievable asset that I very quickly slapped golden handcuffs on him in the way of equity because I couldn't afford to live without him. But he was responsible for 50% of my revenue, so of course I would do that. Why wouldn't I? And now John's nerd. If he's more famous than I am, he's literally the greatest Google Ads mind on the planet in existence. But if you're building an agency, you're building an agency on the backs of people. Find amazing people, cultivate amazing people, retain amazing people. When they're retainable, sometimes they'll move on and that's perfectly fine too. Don't try to keep them because peak performers are repelled by being contained. But man, people are the most important part of your business by far. By far. All of my successes massively outpace my capabilities. Like when you meet me, you're like, I can't believe that guy did all the shit that he did. Because I look homeless and I'm not really as bright as I pretend to be. And it's not. Again, I'm not self deprecating. It's a fact. My success outpaces my capability because I found other people that were more capable than me. Everybody that works for me is stronger along the level of analysis that I've hired them for than I am, of course, obviously, right. You want your video editor to be a better video editor than you are. Otherwise, why do you have him? So you shouldn't be on your own org chart. You shouldn't be. Entrepreneurship's not fulfillment. You shouldn't be doing the work, you should be hiring for it. People are critically important. And now a listener's thinking like, well, dude, what about AI? AI is going to be able to come in and do all this shit. And that's, again, that's, that's hubristic thinking. People become more important with AI because AI is a force multiplier of people. So if you have a person that's a 10x force multiplier of your business and AI is a 10x force multiplier of your people, then now that person is actually a hundred x force multiplier of your business. But, but it cuts both ways. AI is going to multiply the impact of your good people and multiply the impact of your bad people. So people become more important as AI becomes more important. You may need less of them, but you need more of the good ones. So focus on finding and cultivating amazing people.

I think all of our inboxes right now are seeing the multiplied effect of the bad people with the amount of spam we're getting now. Right. And on LinkedIn too. Okay, so there's a bunch of things that I'm curious about regard with regards to what you just said. One previous episode of Agency Journey comes to mind where one of the guests said, and this is kind of a counterpoint to what you just said, I wonder how you would counter this about people, about hiring yourself out of roles. Actually, what they said was, I'm looking for the people that can save me, let's say five hours a week. And they don't do what I do at the same level, like sales, for example, but they do it at like 8 out of 10, 9 out of 10 level relative to.

Yeah, my rule is 80%. So we're talking about two different things there. I think we're talking about, you know, there's the specific proficiency and skill set and then there's also the fact that nobody's ever going to care as much as you care as an entrepreneur.

So. Okay.

Especially when it comes to your highest level work. What I see a lot of entrepreneurs do is they start, they start holding sales is a really good example. They start holding on to certain roles because they realize that nobody's ever going to be able to perform to the degree that they're going to be able to perform. Now, that might not necessarily mean that somebody can't be a better salesperson than you. I disagree with that. But it will mean that they're not going to work the hours that you'll work or go to the lengths that you'll go or, you know, that's no longer a proficiency issue. That's like a capacity or a depth Issue. The issue with that is if you have to do any of the work, your agency is non scalable. You have a non scalable agency now, maybe that's okay. Maybe you love the shit out of graphic design and you actually want to be the one that designs all the brands because that's what you're passionate about and you love it and you're Wolfgang Puck and you want to cook. Great, Wolfgang Cook. But know that, that academically speaking, it's a flawed model. From an entrepreneurial perspective, as long as somebody's able to do 80% of what you can do, replace yourself. Replace yourself. Get out of the org chart, get off of the assembly line. You should not be necessary to your business. As a matter of fact, until you are unnecessary to your business, you don't have a business. You have a job. A business needs to function without you.

Yeah, yeah, I hear that. So, okay, so that kind of reconciles the two perspectives. They're never going to be as hungry as you, one might say. And that makes perfect sense.

And nor should they. They don't make what you make. Then they don't benefit the way that you're going to benefit. There's such a massive difference between an entrepreneur and everybody else. There's this really amazing book, it's what my mastermind is based off of. There's a book called Driven and he talks about from an epig, epigenetic perspective how 10% of the human population doesn't experience dopamine and serotonin in the same way. And, and he delineates them by hunters and farmers. 10% of the population are hunters. 90% of the population are farmers. 90% of the population experience the, the, the dopamine spike when they achieve a goal or when they get the thing. Those are the farmers. There's 10% of us though, and it's basically every entrepreneur. So it's you, me and everybody listening. It's not getting that spikes us, it's the pursuit, it's the hunt. It's going after it. You can't expect, and this isn't a pejorative, by the way, because we're the broken ones. But you can't expect the farmer to act like a hunter. You can't. And if you build a business, you know, Einstein said if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll spend its whole life thinking stupid. You can't build a business around expecting farmers to be hunters. You have to build a business around farmers because those are the only people that want jobs. Very Rarely you can hire entrepreneurs. I know. You know, that's kind of the new fun phrase. Sometimes you can hire entrepreneurs, but those are the people that want to learn and leave. So there's nothing wrong with an employee. As a matter of fact, they're probably better people than we are. But you have to build the role around what an employee wants. And employees want boundaries, they want limitations, they want a 9 to 5. They want PTO, they want, they don't want the things that entrepreneur wants. There's that fun story that an entrepreneur is the only person that'll work 40 hours or work 80 hours so they don't have to work 40. So you have to build your model around the understanding that people aren't going to work the way that you work. And that's probably for the best. That's probably what you want. I'm sorry, I keep interrupting you.

No, no, no, that's, that's, that's great. And I love what you're sharing here. This kind of connects in my mind to what you were sharing at the very beginning here, actually. You know, the hunters love the pursuit, you might say, you know, they're in love with the, the hard part, the challenge itself. Right. To me, those two things, they go hand in hand. So before we move on to the next part, the next thing I wanted to pick your brain on, one thing that stuck out to me, one thing that you mentioned, I'm kind of noting down mentally as, as a thing to, to explore for the audience is if you've got these high performers, you know, you've identified the people that are bringing an outsized portion of, you know, of the outcomes in your business, you talked about putting, you talked about golden handcuffs, right? That's the label on that drawer in my mind right now. And to open the conversation with them about equity, about bringing them in as partner, and I just wanted to ask you to talk for a minute about how do you actually start that conversation? Is there a way to. On the tactical execution side, is there a way to bring it in a way that either makes them more inclined to say yes or structures it in a way that it's a win, win for both sides? Like, you know, I'm the audience, I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, okay, I want to do that. How do I start?

Yeah, so it depends on the business model. It's model dependent. The benefit I've had is I've had a lot of models where output is easy to measure. So Google Ads is a good example. I built what I think was the largest Google Ads agency in the world. I think we were the largest dedicated Google Ads agency in the world. You know we had 200 clients, near 100 employees. We had a hundred million dollars in ad spend under management. There were other agencies much, much, much bigger than us, but we were Google specific. And what was helpful about that is the value the employee brought to me was the ad spend under management. I knew how much ads and I, because I charged a percentage of spend and so, and I actually didn't do this well I'll tell you what I wish I had done and you know I, I sold and it's fine, it's all water under the bridge now but people should have been paid a percentage of the ad spend under management. I had, I had bonuses tied to it but it should have been a direct pair pursue one for one. So I charged 10% of the ad spend. So maybe I'd pay 2% of the ad spend or whatever it ends up being. And by doing that I, dude, I would have had people that had high six figure salaries, maybe approaching a seven figure salary and then I would have had some people that were basically folks could have worked themselves into wherever their internal thermometer dictated. So if you have a very clear, very specific output time to the output easy breezy lemon squeezy if you don't. The other thing that I'm doing now, I just started a financial services agency and I've got all these, they're all bean counters and I say that affectionately by the way. I love them dearly and deeply but you know, they're economists. And what I've done with my beam counters is and I think I'm going to do this with every business I start in one way or another. But I've made them all effectively 20% partners. So 20% of the net profit gets split among the employees. If I exit, 20% of the sale price gets split among the employees and it gets split among the employees in accordance with their participation. And how do you measure. Participation is what they're currently being paid. So in terms of profit it's where you are in the org chart. You get 20% of whatever your percentage of that is. And when we exit there's an X and a Y and a Z axis at this point and the Z axis being time. How long have you been with the organization? And what I like about this model is with the financial Services agency we help other agencies, we're basically fractional CFOs. Well can A, can a bookkeeper and A financial analyst or Even, even the CFO, can they handle 30 clients, 10 clients, 300 clients? And the thing is, is we're going to find out really, really quickly because if you're getting 20% of the net profit and we're bringing on more clients and I need to hire somebody, that somebody is cutting into your net profit. So now what I think will happen, and this is theory at this point, because I have. This is the first time I've ever done this. But what I think will happen is we'll find the balance where bringing on a new person is. Actually increases the size of the pie instead of decreases the size of the profitability. And it'll happen naturally because it'll be dependent upon the technician to identify like, oh, no, I can actually do more work. Don't bring anybody in, because I don't want to be deluded. And I also plan on paying people according to the number of accounts they manage. So they're tied to the output in two different ways, both in terms of their salary and in terms of their profit share. Some agencies, that's not possible. And you know, you can, you can slice it however it is that you want to slice it, but I think people should see a direct impact to the amount of money they make based off of the work that they're doing.

Okay, Right. That's a very innovative model. I do wonder how that. But, you know, the levers in play here do make sense to me. Right. That you don't want, especially the dilution effect that you to mention here. And so we're rapidly approaching the end of our time here. Actually, one last thing I wanted to ask you about before we go into, you know, where people can follow you, et cetera, for a lot more insights is before the call, I asked you what you're particularly excited about right now and kind of what's, what's the, I think you called it the, the, the drumbeat that you're on right now. And it was all about finding great executive assistants for entrepreneurs. Can you talk a little bit about how did your professional life take a turn towards this particular topic?

Yeah, I think that one of the biggest mistakes that we're making in North America and Western Europe is assuming the only people that are capable of doing high value work are in North America or Western Europe. I don't know if it's as bad in Europe, but I can tell you in the States, they like to outsource, but they only do bpo. They only do grunt work. It's like, oh, you can do data entry, you can do research, you can do cold calling, cold outreach, whatever, whatever. And it's such hubris to think that we're the only smart people in the world. As a matter of fact, it might be hubristic to think that we're. That other people aren't much smarter than us. At this point, I have found the most amazing resources internationally. I hired a young man, he's actually going to school in Poland. His name's Ivan Bunin. I hired him for $1,000 a month. He's my EA and he's now Solutions 8 CTO. He's Ukrainian, he was going to school in Poland. The war happened in Ukraine. We brought him over on an H1B visa and he's one example of many. I hired another gal, Julianne, she's in the Philippines. She was my ea. She's now our director of automations. Our marketing director is from the Philippines. One of the highest ranked Google Ad strategists I have is a young man from India named Unkar. And he. We just lost our biggest client a few days ago, but before they canceled, Unkar was managing our biggest client. Millions of dollars in ad spend. These are resources that are inaccessible to anybody who's close minded in their thinking. I'm going to Latin America right now. I'm obsessed with Latin America. I like it especially for the States because they're on our time zone, they're generally very English proficient and there aren't the same cultural idiosyncrasies. You know, if you hire out of India, the Indians have all the damn holidays and they're juxtaposed to all the American holidays. And so there are those little friction points that make it harder to work with. The Latin Americans are more closely aligned with the US in that way. And time zones are a big, big problem too, if you're hiring internationally. But the financial arbitrage that's available is unreal and the skill sets are as high as they would be in the States and to be honest with you, sometimes higher. Because if you're in the States, you're competing against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook. Like, you know, why would a kid out of school, why would the biggest and brightest want to come work for you? They probably won't. You know, even if you can match their salary and you probably can't, you don't have the pedigree, you don't have the big conference rooms and the $12 croissants and you know, like, they don't get to feel as cool on their LinkedIn but some of these folks in emerging nations, man, you could change their life. You can pay them 3, 4, 5 times what they get paid at home. You let them work from home. Let them work on their own schedule. Roughly speaking, be flexible, be a fun place to work, and you will get insanely high perform. And so I built an agency around doing exactly that. It's called Pareto Talent. And we're starting with executive assistance. We're finding and training executive assistants for people and they'll be the best in the world. They'll also be the most expensive. But I'm going to move in other roles. I want to, I want to, I want to build an assembly line for all of the usual suspect roles that all agency needs. So stay tuned for that because it's coming. I'm pretty excited about it.

Okay, awesome. Awesome. Can you talk for just a minute about the name that feels relevant to what you were discussing just a moment before? Right, that must be.

Yeah, the Pareto Distribution. So we named it Pareto Talent out of the Pareto Distribution. And Pareto was, I think, an economist who identified the fact that and this happens in every organic ecosystem. It's crazy. Like an apple orchard. 20% of the apple trees give 80% of the apples.

Right, right.

You know, like it's, it's, it's just an, it's just this anomaly, you know, it's almost like sacred geometry to where it permeates everything about our reality, but we don't know how or why. And so for the Pareto Distribution or for Pareto Talent, we only wanted the peak performers. We only wanted to hire the 20%. And I've got, I think, one of the best hiring models in existence. I teach this professionally. It's part of what I give away to members of my mastermind and it's how to find and train these people. Because, you know, peak performing talent is very specific in the way that it approaches finding a job or the messaging that it's available and accessible to. And there's, there's fun little fly traps you can use in order to figure out who's a peak performer and who's not. Because everybody's good at interviewing the interviews. I actually don't do interviews until the very. My job is to not do interviews. So like, my whole hiring process is, is rife with these, you know, these little tests that they don't even realize are necessarily tests in order to find out who the real p. Performer is.

I would love to dig even more into that, but our time is running short. Here. So instead I would love to leave some space for you to tell the listeners where they can follow you. And you know what, where should they go? What should they click to get more insights from you?

Yeah, you can go to Kasim me K a s I M dot me and that's my first name. Yeah, that'll go everywhere. So if you want to talk to me, I do some consulting. If you want to join my mastermind. I give away my book I wrote. I actually didn't write it, to be honest with you. I ghost wrote. It was the number one selling marketing book in the world for a very short period until Alex Formosi unseated me. It's called you versus Google. You can check out my podcast, subscribe to my newsletter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's no shortage of horseshit that I'm trying to schlep on the world.

That's that. That is an interesting phrasing indeed. And you know, if you might say last question, and this is also about kind of what you're out to find there. What is kind of the one type of person that you would like to connect with the most right now?

What a great question. I'd like to find people that are looking to really go for the gold. We've been taught that it's almost dirty to want more. And I'd like to reverse that. I want to be a billionaire. I want a liquid billion dollars. And when I get a billion, I want 10. And when I get 10, I want 100. When I get 100, I want to be a trillionaire and I want other people that are, that are. Dude, I drive a 40 year old Honda. Like it's not about the money. It's about the things that you can do with it and the impact and the access and the power and the like, we can change the world. You, me, and everybody listening. But you have to be willing to step into it. You have to be willing to step into your power and kind of like ignore the. There's this weird societal narrative and it's global. It's like money's bad and you know, you need to be apologetic for what, what you're good at. And I don't like that at all. I don't like that at all. So I want to connect with people that are really going after trying to achieve everything they're capable of. Like leave it all out on the field, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, I do, I do. And that's awesome. And I bet somebody listening to this right now is thinking that they're the kind of person and that they should reach out to you and they should go to Qasim me to get all of the links. Dear listeners, don't forget watchers and insurance, I should say, because we do have a video component to answer your question from half an hour ago. So everybody's going to see this conversation and just hear it. We're on YouTube. If none of you podcast people have found out yet, we are on YouTube so you can watch Agency Journey and not just listen. Anyway, watchers and listeners definitely go check out Qasem on all of his socials. I think I like your LinkedIn in particular, so I would direct people for.

What you're good at, and I don't like that at all. I don't like that at all. So I want to connect with people that are really going after trying to achieve everything they're capable of. Like, leave it all out on the field. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, I do. I do. And that's awesome. And I bet somebody listening to this right now is thinking that they're the kind of person and that they should reach out to you and they should go to Qasim me to get all of the links there. And wow, we went places in this episode. I really liked the Journey. Pun not intended here. Was there anything else that you wanted to leave as a final thought as we wind down the conversation?

I appreciate you having me on. If you're listening, I'm rooting for you. And I actually think the whole wide world is rooting for you. Everybody wants you to succeed. You know, this whole underdog story, it's kind of fun to play that game, but I don't think it's true. I think everybody wants you to succeed, even if they don't realize it. Like, your success breeds other people's success and rising tides floats all ships. And what you're doing is.

Dear listeners, don't forget watchers and insurance, I should say, because we do have a video component to answer your question from half an hour ago. So everybody's going to see this conversation and just hear it. We're on YouTube. If none of you podcast people have found out yet, we are on YouTube so you can watch Agency Journey and not just listen. Anyway, watchers and listeners definitely go check out Qasem on all of his socials. I think I like your LinkedIn in particular, so I would direct people.

There's valor to it. There's honor, you know, helping people, solving problems, employing people that's Honorable. It's an honorable endeavor, and you deserve success and just keep at it. You know, so much of this game is just. Just being the last person standing. You know, just staying in the cold tub the longest. You know, it's not about. It's not the smartest or the strongest that win. I think it's the ones that persevere. So keep going.

That's definitely one of my there. And, well, we went places in this episode. My biggest takeaways to Kassen that. What stuck with me was what you said about really, like, the journey. Pun not intended here. Was there anything else that you wanted to leave? As a final thought, as we wind down the conversation, I appreciate you having me on.

If you're listening, I'm rooting for you, and I actually think the whole wide world is rooting for you. Everybody wants you to succeed. You know, this whole underdog story, it's kind of fun to play that game, but I don't think it's true. I think everybody wants you people rooting.

For all of us, for me. But waiting to see you do the hard work, that's definitely staying with me, dude.

I get all these messages like, hey, can I pick your brain? I just need your help. I just need your consultant. And I'm like, no, you can't. You. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the way this works, dude. You can't just, like, suddenly hijack my day and then get. You know, like, you do the work. You do the work, and if I see you doing the work, and there. There are people that I've plucked out of whatever, and I really like to help, but, yeah, you got to do the work first.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I got to pick your brain. Very grateful for it on today's episode of Agency Journey, but it's over. You very, very much watchers and listeners, for tuning into this one. Stay tuned for more in Kasim. Thank you so, so much.

Succeed, even if they don't realize it. Like, your success breeds other people much.

For coming on the show.

Thanks, Kuba. Appreciate you, brother. Success and rising tides floats all ships. And what you're doing is there's valor to it, there's honor. You know, helping people, solving problems, employing people. That's honorable. It's an honorable endeavor, and you deserve success and just keep at it. You know, so much of this game is just. Just being the last person standing. You know, just staying in the cold tub the longest. You know, it's not about. It's not the smartest or the strongest that win. I think it's the ones that persevere. So keep going. Keep going.

That's definitely one of my biggest takeaways, too, Carson, that. What stuck with me was what you said about people rooting for all of us for me, but waiting to see you do the hard work, that's definitely staying with me, dude.

I get all these messages like, hey, can I pick your brain? I just need your help. I just need your consultant. And I'm like, no, you can't. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the way this works, dude. You can't just, like, suddenly hijack my day and then get, you know, like, you do the work, you do the work, and if I see you doing the work, and there. There are people that I've plucked out of whatever, and I really like to help, but, yeah, you gotta do the work first.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I got to pick your brain. Very grateful for it on today's episode of Agency Journey, but it's over. Thank you very, very much, watchers and listeners for tuning into this one. Stay tuned for more in. Kim, thank you so, so much for coming on the show.

Thanks, Kuba. Appreciate you, brother.