Ep. 55- Pablo Gonzalez- Chief Executive Connector

This is the You Winning Life podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence.

Each episode, we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, trainer and certified entrepreneur coach, Jason Wasser. Hey everybody, so welcome back. I am with one of my newest, but also moving his way not only up in the ranks in podcast world, but also in the ranks of our friendship associations, is my buddy Pablo Gonzalez, who is the host of the Chief Executive Connector podcast and also the CEO of Connect with Pablo, which is, in my best way of explaining it, anything that you need to get your branding, marketing, and your social media, and all these other things to get your face out to the world, Pablo is the guy you need to be talking to. So Pablo, thanks so much for hanging out with us today.

Thank you, Jason. I'm glad to be on the You Winning Life podcast. I was practicing that for a little while.

For sure. So, so right off the bat, as, as we get into the billion and one things that we can probably talk about, one of the things that I've learned to, learned to love about you, that I've learned to appreciate about you, that I am loving about you, is just this thing of everywhere you go, you just meet friends. You make new friends, you make new connections. And I know it goes back to our story that we were able— that we met through a mutual friend of ours. So, I don't know if you want to start there.

Yeah, man. I'd be happy to.

Share that little ditty.

Share that little ditty, man. So, I don't know how far back to go with it, right? But I guess it all comes back to Jesse Itzler to a certain extent. And I took his BYLR course. I joined his Facebook group. At some point when I was doing his Monday's Bananas call, back then it was called Bananas with Jesse. Yeah, right before the 10X Conference, he puts in this guy Mike Fikara and goes live. He's like, hey Mike, I'm gonna be down in your neck of the woods. And Mike's like, hey, I'm gonna be there. And he's like, hey, let's meet up. So I'm like, oh cool, man. So I want to meet up with Mike too. So I hit up Mike to say, hey, let's, let's meet up at this 10X Conference also. And I meet him there. He then like a month later invites me to an Instagram like-for-like kind of group. Of which you're a part of. A couple months pass. I don't know how I feel about this group, to be quite frankly. I'm not a crazy like-for-like guy, but you're in there. I put— I throw up the flag. I'm like, who's going to a Podcast Movement in Orlando? You say you're going. I do my usual thing, which is try to get everybody, you know, as many people as I can together the first night to just like kind of get to know each other. And you and I are talking. You show up. We start, you know, the niceties, whatever. We start making fun of each other, which is a crucial step in me bonding with anybody. And then at one point, as like the night goes on, we gather like 16, 18 people. I just went on this app and started just inviting people like, hey man, if you're in town, I was seeing who's ever participating on the app. I assume that that's somebody that wants to connect. I started just kind of like DMing people like, hey, I'm doing this thing where we're all hanging out at the hotel lobby, come on by if you want to meet people. And, uh, I don't know, man, probably like 10 to 12 people show up, and then there's another group of people there. And at some point I look to my right and you got this dude standing on one leg, leaning to his left, and you're like tapping him like right in the kidney. And I'm like, what the— what is Jason doing over there? And from there on out, I've just been fascinated by you, man.

So yeah, so for everybody who's wondering what the heck I was doing with all that weird stuff is my, uh, the neuro-emotional technique. Modality that we'll definitely get into probably a little bit more later. But the fascinating thing was, is like, I almost didn't show up to this thing, right? Because I had this, like, I wasn't staying there, and I'm like, I don't want to go over to the hotel. And, well, you know, I don't want to— my joke was like, I don't want to pay $20 for parking just to meet a bunch of people that I'm probably going to see the next day. And like, you know, joke, yeah, right? I was, I was being on that perspective. And like, you know, I'm glad that everything worked out. And like, we met this whole awesome crew of people, and you were one of them, right? Jeremy was one of those people. Roman Polanski, that we ended up meeting that night as well.

Roman was the guy who you were punching in the kidney?

Right, exactly, right? So all these really incredible people that became part of this network of not just really good people, but also really cool people who have podcasts as well, which is— we're at this podcast movement conference. So I'm going to talk a little bit about family history, because I know that one of the most powerful things for you that are a guiding factor in your life is your family. And I know that a lot of the work and the motivation that you have in your world is not just the belief about how important family is to you, but as a motivating factor of like in order to continue this beautiful legacy that's been started. So, let's get a little bit into that for a few minutes. And I know that on your podcast, one of my favorite episodes is one of the interviews you had with your dad. But for people who have not yet listened to that episode, The Chief Executive Connector Podcast. Can you just give a nutshell of like, you know, just that story of like, you know, dad's background, family background, and why all this ties into being so important for you?

Yeah, for sure, man. I have often said that if Ted Kaczynski had my parents, he would have been Bill Gates, right? Like, I feel like there was no problem that I encountered in my life that I didn't create for myself well into my low 30s. So I was very, very blessed to come from a tight-knit family, right? I often say I'm the most American person in my family, right? So it's just like traditional Hispanic family with multi-intergenerational ties and like 17 cousins that I'm really good friends with. And my father is a guy that at 14 years old immigrated from Cuba, right? Like this is a very common tale in South Florida. But our friend that is listening on the You Winning Life podcast may or may not, may not have heard this tale, but there was, when the Cuban Revolution took over and Castro took over Cuba, there was a lot of people that were, uh, put in jail indefinitely. There was a lot of people that were executed for not agreeing with what's going on. And that led to a mass migration where a guy showed up at my grandfather's house with a rifle on his back and said, hey, listen, this house now belongs to the government. And my grandfather said, Take that rifle out and shoot me. So that guy left, wasn't happy. My grandmother packed up everything. They moved to Miami overnight. And my dad, as a 14-year-old, shows up in Miami. Imagine being, you know, how awkward and terrible being 14, 15 is already. Shows up, leaves this beautiful tropical paradise, which is Cuba, right? A mountainous Caribbean island, and shows up in Miami and they gotta figure it out from zero. Luckily, my dad went to a bilingual school, spoke English, excelled at school, got a scholarship, went to University of Florida, graduated. At that time, my grandparents had moved to Venezuela, so my dad moved to Venezuela with a job for IBM and is teaching English on the side. And at that point, meets my mom and sees my mom's family and sees everything that he's ever wanted, right? My mom is the oldest of 6. My grandfather came from a farm in the boonies of Venezuela, grabbed him and his oldest brother, and said, I'm gonna be a doctor, you're gonna be a lawyer, we're moving to the capital, and just built it up from the ground up, created this family that is very, very closely tied still to this day. I'm still in a WhatsApp group with all my aunts and uncles and my cousins. And, um, and my dad fell in love with this, this idea of family. And at the same time, you know, his tenacity, his drive, whatever you want to call it, got him from IBM, which was essentially got into computing in the late '70s, right? Right when computing started tipping. And, um, he, he then parlayed that into an operational role with one of the richest families in the world, which is the Cisneros family. They, back then, they owned all of Venezuela and, um, worked his way up with them to be their operator, to the point where when they were acquiring companies, they would bring in my dad to be like, this is the guy that's going to run it, whatever. They started doing leveraged buyout in the late '70s, early '80s before that was even a thing. For anybody that doesn't know what leveraged buyout is, it's buying a company at a certain valuation and financing the purchase of the company because you know that operationally, you're gonna be able to turn that company around and sell it at a multiple just based on the appreciation. It's kind of like buying real estate because you know it's gonna appreciate kind of thing. So, they started doing that. My dad started being the guy that brought us to the US when they started getting into personal computing. My dad was in Silicon Valley in the early '80s when, you know, he was talking to like the rival for the compact guy. And then back in Miami, then at some point they bought a business in Spain and they were going to give it to somebody in the family and somebody in the family kind of mouthed off. So they moved us to Spain and my dad ran this giant, it's like if Macy's met Walmart, uh, just like a top-end department store. And they turned that from like a $4 million to like a hundred-something million dollar business.

Isn't that called Target? Yeah.

Well, it's like, man, it's like Target if Target sold Louis Vuitton, man.

Ah, okay.

Yeah. So, it's, but they sold everything, right? Like, if you go to Spain now, it's El Corte Inglés. That's what it eventually evolved into. Back then, it was Galerías Especiales and Corte Inglés. So, but then, got treated as an employee and when they made this huge windfall, really didn't break my dad off anything. So, he decided to be an entrepreneur on his own. And that's what brought us back to Miami. At that point, he got into the world of business. He had another couple of exits. And then on his, what he thought was gonna be his last one, um, he got into the technology distribution industry in Latin America and built the biggest tech-enabled, uh, channel partner to technologies in Latin America, which he like sold a couple of times, then bought a downstream guy that went south. So in his late 60s, he, you know, had his first L and lost a lot of his retirement. At the same time, my brother was getting sick with pancreatic cancer. He passed away at the same time that he, like my dad, had to declare bankruptcy in this business. And, uh, as luck would have it, one of my cousins starts this little burger business while he's in medical school in Venezuela. And it starts doing real well, calls up my dad and they engineer a plan to grow this from like the 12 stores that he had to 100 stores in— not 100 stores, but I think they grew to like 35 stores or something like that and had €150 million exit in like a year and a half. And, you know, that's my old man. So, I don't know, man. That was a lot about my old man, but within it all, right, is a story of growing up with a very nurturing family. My mom is, you know, a family of means, right? Like, I've always had opportunities. I've always had people that looked out for me. I've always felt like I didn't— there was nothing that I couldn't really accomplish because I hadn't seen anything else. So, I believe that that's just given me this very buoyant positivity in life that I like to share with others. And I've just been able to really focus on— all that moving around has allowed me to really focus on how to be somebody that shows up from the outside and becomes an insider. And, and that, that piece, right? Like the idea that I moved around so much as a kid, and I was the only kid in preschool that didn't speak English, and then we moved again, and all these different things has really just made me obsessed with human connection and, and the importance of having a community around me and being part of a village that, that can support you.

One of the things that stands out to me about the time that I've known you is that you really do bring in the heart side of an entrepreneur. And I think that's one of the things that, like, your whole thing is about connecting, it's about making relationships, it's about bringing out the best in people. But the one thing that I've really gotten to know in hearing your family story and then, and, and, and being connected to you over the last almost a year— we're almost at our, our year friend-iversary— is, um, is that you bring heart to the table. And I'm sure, knowing that some of the projects that I know you've been working on and how you work with those clients, that that shows up everywhere. Everywhere you go, because you're trying to bring their heart out so that they can then market and leverage themselves. That makes them stand out from every other competition that may be out there. Um, but I know like one of the things that you and I've talked about, like you just said a few minutes ago, is like growing up, like having to— you're reliving kind of in a way what your dad went through, having to relearn and learn a new language, be a new person in a new school, doing all these things. But I also know that your personality side is the you're going to be the one who's going to stand out, willingly stand out in a crowd, right? You're going to be the one that's going to go on the stage. You're going to be the one. So like, where does that come from? Because a lot of times like entrepreneurs, um, or business owners or just people in general like don't have the bravado, they don't have the, the, the bravery to do that. So where does that come from?

You know, man, I honestly I think it's just good fortune, right? Like, I, I think somewhere, somewhere in the mix of being the youngest, right? So I was enabled to do that stuff, being from a place where I just always felt supported, right? Like, I think I'm the oldest millennial, you know, like, I, I grew up, even though I didn't really grow up in the US until I was 9. And I never really had participation trophies because of that. I still grew up in an environment that allowed me to, you know, expect the best of things. And because I was able to expect the best of things, I think it shaped me in a way that I just never really— and not only did I expect the best of things, I also— and I'm trying to be as honest as possible here, right? Like, I also didn't have a reason to think the bottom would fall out. So in this, in this like really safe environment, it really was just how can my relationships with people be as good as possible, right? Like, I, I just never had any scarcity around me. And, and that, I don't see that, right, from the way you're describing it.

Some people like, oh well, that sounds like entitlement. And I want to just make sure that like this is really clear that like, that's not necessarily entitlement, right? You just have crystal clear clarity of this is how I'm going to operate my life and how I'm going to interact with the world.

Yeah, man. And I try to— I really try to put this out there and I'm glad you're asking me about it because I think that there is this like vilification of growing up with privilege and whatnot. And you know what, man, there's people that grow up in either side of that spectrum, right, with privilege or, or in, in poverty. And it can create great people or it can create bad people, right? Um, for me, it became this really driving force to prove to the world that I deserve what I was given, man. Like, I've been given so much, and, and, and for me to think that I didn't advance what was given to me. And in a really difficult way, I thought at first I had to advance it financially. I thought I had to be as successful as my father. And at some point in my early 30s, I gave up on that. I'm just like, you know what, man? My dad's had a couple hundred million-dollar exits, dude. Like, I don't know if I got that in me, but I know that I can make every single room I walk into a better place. I know that I can make every single person that I talk to feel about themselves the way that I feel about them, which is I have this wonder of when I meet people and I And I always can find something that that person has achieved or that person has learned that I haven't learned and that I haven't achieved. And I'm genuinely curious about it and I genuinely want to add that to my tool belt too, right? So that I can then go out and propel that into other people. So, for me, it wasn't entitlement. For me, it was indebtedness, right? Like, I feel very indebted to the situation that I came up with and the resources that I was given to then be able to move society forward. Quite frankly, I've just never thought that I wasn't supposed to achieve something great because I came from all this great stuff. So I've always just felt this like debt, and that's been a really great motivator. And I think it's also led to, you know, some of the stuff that I really struggle with. So that—

and that's one of the things that I think that in our world of being a business professional, an entrepreneur, whatever we want to call it, is that we we're supposed to always have it figured out all the time, to be always on our A-game, to always, to have that simplicity on the far side of complexity, which is really the end goal for everything. What would you say has been like the biggest resources to you to get you through those really difficult, challenging spaces and places? To, right, we talked about, you briefly mentioned the loss of your brother, from cancer, which was only less than a couple years ago. And knowing that you couldn't— you decided to no longer live in your father's footsteps from the financial perspective and have to compete at that level. So what truly helped you get there, both internally and externally?

Community, man. Like having people around me that I could really go to when I was in serious doubt, and having people around me that I could go to when I was thinking that I knew what was going on, and people could tell me, "You're going down the wrong path." And that, man, that's why I value it so much. I mean, for my brother's passing specifically was community, right? I don't know how I would've gotten through my brother's passing without the outpouring of support that I felt, without the, you know, I say this all the time, man, but 1,200 people showed up to his funeral, man. Like, that was just so uplifting. And I remember, you know, as a pallbearer putting his coffin in the car and turning around and just having this ocean of people behind me. And then I hugged the first person I saw, which is my buddy Alex Younger, who, by the way, bought me this microphone because he's my boy. And and, and, and like crying in his arms, but, but just feeling, feeling so supported. And then the, the following like 2-3 weeks of just like all these people reaching out to me saying, man, you're— but, you know, people that I didn't really know that are now a big part of my life. And, and, and, and the moment where he was about to, you know, in his, in his final moments, when, when my sister felt like she was so sure that she would see him again And she said it out loud that she, you know, even though other people in that room didn't really believe that, she believed enough for all of us. I mean, that she was speaking about me, you know, like the ability for people to be that stopgap for you, to be that safety net has been so real for me my whole life that all I do is add people to that safety net and then try to create that for other people. And, you know, so that's on the emotional side, right? On the entrepreneurial side, it's been the same thing. It's been a little bit different, That hasn't so much been my family because my family wants me to be safe, right? Like, my family's set of incentives are, I want Pablo to not struggle anytime I see him, therefore I'm going to disincentivize his vulnerability and his ability to, you know, to take a step back instead of just taking steps forward. It's been friends like my buddy Justin LaTour who, when I was leaving the construction industry and I was like, you know what, man, I'm just— I'm hoping that I can do something different because I feel like I've left all this meat on the bone and I want to find something that really motivates me. And he's like, whoa, man, chill. You tell me that you're somebody that's left a bunch of meat on the bone. I see a guy that was a consultant to a company, was acquired, that then acquired his company, that was brought in just to be the sustainability guy, that's leaving, you know, as the guy that brought in drone technology into marketing, became a business developer, has done, you know, has landed on the top 20 under 40 in Miami, you know, has done all these things. So, maybe cut yourself some slack.

Um, in the same way as I'm hearing you talk about that, I'm like, you really are honoring your dad's legacy in your own way of creating and instilling and, and revolution— you know, what's the word— revolutionizing, um, the industries in which you're in, man.

I, you know, I've never really thought about it that way, dude. I, I hope so, man. Like, I, I really do. I, I really do want to honor my dad's legacy. Um, to me, his legacy is one of integrity.

Yeah.

And, and, and that's something I really want to honor. And I really want to honor my mom's legacy, right? Like, my mom is— my mom is the person that has really— this personality is my mom's person. Like, my mom's the person that, like, walks into CVS and knows, like, the name of the janitor, um, and, and that type of stuff. Like, she's the social aggregator that I, that I, that, that I really learned this stuff from. So I hope so, man. I appreciate you saying that.

Well, it's a synthesis, right? And it's, and it's as each developmental stage of our life— and you know this from, right, right, Psychology 101 1 is that we go through developmental stages. And each stage of our life is really unpackaging and working on a certain thing from sometimes from our childhood and what are we healing and what are we aware of and that whole scale of self-awareness, which you and I have had conversations about. Every opportunity that I think each of us go through is an opportunity to just unpackage something new if we have the realization that that might be an opportunity for us.

Correct.

Which is what challenges are.

Yeah, man. And that, and that really, man, a great friend of mine told me this, who's my best friend that's over 50, Uncle Mark, my buddy's Uncle Mark Hamilton. He, at his brother's wife's funeral, said something that it was in great sadness. It's like in moments of great loss comes great clarity. And, you know, I look at my brother's passing as that, like, big moment that brought all this clarity to me, like this aha moment of, oh man, community is everything, right? Like, community is everything. And then I started, you know, the reticular activator got activated, and I started seeing it everywhere. And I started seeing, like, that, you know, the religious business model has been a business model of bringing people community, and it's been winning forever. And that all these other brands that create this stuff make it happen. And what I was doing in the nonprofit sector in Miami as a hobby was actually a business model that I could implement into business. And all this stuff just started kind of adding up. So, yes, I agree, man. I agree. It is really that perspective of I can learn something from anything, and the harder it is to go through, the bigger the lesson can be.

Yeah. And in taking those lessons is now twofold what you're bringing into your podcast and into your, so to speak, day job. And part of your podcast is, so to speak, part of your day job, right? Because it's an offshoot of your brand and your brand recognition. So coming from that construction world and then partnering up with these nonprofits, and I know that you're a huge fan of building a community through getting involved with nonprofits, right? So I want to first talk about that and that stage of your life when you were living in Miami before you moved up to Jacksonville, but also now then moving that and leveraging that in your professional world of the Connect with Pablo business.

Yeah, man. So what happened for me was I graduated college in 2003, world's under construction. I got this job as a manager in training for a Fortune 500 company that would assure me that I would be an executive really quickly in my career and manage, nah, nah, nah. Moved me to California. I was running a $50 million branch with 150 employees. I led a couple initiatives. Got really into green building, and in 2008, 2009, as the world was falling apart, I had the bright idea of starting a green building consulting company. And at the time, I was going to start in California, but my dad called me up. He's like, hey man, you can be one out of like 200 Californians that know this stuff, or come back to Miami and be the guy. So I decided to do that, and when I moved back to Miami, I I had the great fortune that my best friend, Eric Gilbert, sent me this email saying that the Habitat for Humanity of Greater Miami wanted to start a young professionals group. So I'm like, "All right, cool. This might tie into business development, right? It's construction. I'm a green building guy." I show up to this living room. There's like 25 people. At the end of it, about 15 people stuck around. We start this young professionals group for Habitat. And that, you know, it didn't lead to business development right away, right? Like, I didn't meet anybody there, but it exposed me to the world of nonprofits, right? So, a year later, I was president of that group. I was on the board of Habitat. A year after that, I was like doing this Leadership Miami program. Come out of Leadership Miami, you know, I get on the board of a couple of other charities. Then, I get on route to get on the board of the Economic Development Agency of Miami. And all the while, I am networking and meeting all these different people that at the very least, right? Like, I didn't have to go back to— I still have my friends that I grew up with in Miami, but I didn't have to go back to that. There was this whole world world of people that, you know, South Florida, right? Like people's number one complaint is how flaky people are, right? Like how like vacuous it is or materialistic. There was this whole world of people that at least cared about something more than themselves, or else they wouldn't be in this nonprofit world. And what we started realizing was working, that worked across multiple young professional models, was you recruit people based on Hey man, it's like $50 for the year and you're going to be volunteering for Habitat, but we meet once a month and we plan either a happy hour, you know, like a networker, a fundraiser, or some kind of volunteering event. And you're going to meet all these people that care about more than themselves, right? If you're new to town or you just want to pivot. But also, when we meet, a member of the board of the charity is going to be there and you're going to get to pick their brain about their, about their career and about what they did right and this and that. And, you know, boards of board members of major charities are usually the most influential people in your city, right? So we started getting access to these like really influential people. And as my profile moved up, it was more and more, right? Like we'd have the superintendent of schools or the CEO of Ryder Corporation, stuff like that. And I started realizing that this way of congregating people, right, where you offer somebody access to information or knowledge or a relationship that nobody— that they didn't have before, in exchange for involvement, right? So, it's like this value-add piece and then, and would attract the right kind of person, right? Like, it would attract the right kind of person that's like, ah, yes, I see the big picture. I'm willing to work on something if it pays me a lot, if it pays off long-term, it's adding value to my life. So, that's like value-driven business development became clear to me. The other thing that became clear to me is that it's much easier to get in front of somebody influential if you have an audience. Right? Reaching out to the superintendent of schools is way easier when I told him 15 of Miami young professionals that are in this for the Beacon Council, you know, we just want to pick your brain. I was never going to get coffee with that guy, but, you know, coming at it from that angle, much, much easier. And as I moved in the world of nonprofits, I got exposure to that, the reps on like networking events. As you start leading committees and stuff like that, you get exposure to public speaking, right? As you get on the board of these charities, you get— you start getting exposed to intergenerational relationships, right? Like, I was often the youngest person in the room and had to figure out how to connect with somebody 25 years my senior that is way ahead of me in my career. And how do you build that relationship? It's the same way you build any relationship. It's add some kind of value to it, right? Um, so that was a big aha thing for me until the day that, you know, at this point I was I told you I had this green building company, got acquired, became director of sustainability. A couple years in, I was like on total autopilot. I was working like 15, 16 hours a week on my day job while like doing the rest of the time doing this networking nonprofit stuff. And at a certain moment, I'm like, man, this is great. But the moment a consultant comes in here, my salary is cut, right? Like, I'm like, my $100 grand a year I'm making here is gone because I don't know what's going on here. So, lucky for me, I had been on a bunch of panels and I had done, you know, a lot of public speaking thanks to the nonprofit involvement. And the CEO of my company got invited to speak on a panel for smart cities in front of the Economic Development Agency of Miami. And he didn't feel like going, so they sent me in instead because I can speak, right? So I get there and unbeknownst to me, I share a stage with like the head of Latin America for Cisco Systems and the head of the smart cities initiative for like the World Economic Forum or something. Two people I did not belong on a stage with. Um, sit up there, I'm totally cool, calm, answer my questions. At the end of the event, this thing happens to me that I'll never forget. I get off the stage and there's like a line of 6 people deep waiting to talk to me. 4 of them were vendors, you know, like 3 or 4 of them were vendors that thought I was a decision maker in my company, which I wasn't, but obviously like, oh, these people think I'm more important than I am. 2 of them were developers are like, "Hey, what's it take to get a guy like you to come work for me?" And another guy was like a young guy that's still a good friend of mine to this day, Will Beckham, that's like, "Man, I'm into this like sustainability stuff. I'm trying to figure out, I'm an insurance guy." But I've become great friends with this guy, right? But the idea that when somebody sees you on a stage, and especially if you're like sharing a stage with other people, they automatically attribute a higher sense of value to what you're saying was something that hit me immediately and the value of that stage. And at that moment, I thought, ah, okay. So, this is something powerful. This is a value-add I can give to people. How can I apply this? And I reached out to this developer that was building this high-density project in a low-density rich neighborhood in Miami, but he was building it on top of the Metrorail. So, like, while all the rich neighbors didn't want it there, I knew that what he was doing was incentivizing public transportation, which Miami really, really needs. So, I reached out to him. I'm like, hey, man, I know that what you're doing is transit-oriented development. I think that more people need to know about this. Can I put you on stage with the politician on the board of one of my charities and the land use attorney that I started Habitat with? And let's have a little event here and I'm gonna invite my young professionals of Miami to learn about the need for transit-oriented development. The guy's like, hell yeah, man, I'm in. This is way better than a city council hearing where I'm just hearing from people saying, get out of my backyard.

Especially in Miami.

Especially in Miami, right? So, he comes in, small event, cost me nothing. Right? Like, it was, it was easy. And, uh, maybe like 15, 20 people show up, just have this thing really easy, connect them. And the next week they're, you know, they're like, hey man, so are you bidding on this $65 million project or what's the deal? So at that point, got us to the table on a major project, changed my paradigm within the company. And that's when my idea of community creation through business, business development through community creation was born. I didn't have the language for it then. But at that point, I started really seeking out where I could apply this, and that's what's led to what I'm doing today in a really roundabout fashion where I became then the VP of Business Development for a startup software company. And I thought that what I was going to be doing is hosting these little types of events around the country and the world for e-commerce sellers to do. But when the company went way south and we lost all our budget, I started doing it online. We started I started a— I didn't start it, but I, I learned the concept of a mastermind, right? I didn't know what that was, but the idea of, you know, bringing 12 people together to just like have a support group and give them some content. And I started really nurturing our 12 highest level clients of that software because at that point they represented a lot of our, our recurring revenue. And within a couple of months they're all like best friends. A couple months later we take them all down to Panama and we have this like in-person meeting where everybody bonds. My business partner at the time, you know, I gave everybody a formula for like how to present their business. And we realized that everybody was really good at one thing. So my business partner came back, implemented that one thing into his e-commerce store, it blew up. So then we created a course around it, sold that for $5,000 a pop, made like close to $100 grand off of that to pay for like software improvements, whatever. Had an event here 6 months later when we invited 8 of them to be on our stage and and, you know, give them the stage and position them as experts. And all the while we're having these recorded calls of troubleshooting stuff with people where we're getting all these recordings of like, "Oh man, I'm having this problem." And then a couple weeks later, "Oh, thank you so much for that advice that you gave me." So that became a digital marketing strategy, right? So like, we started using the content to like attract people with that stuff would come into our Facebook group and then find out there's a cool club at the top of the customer ecosystem and, "Oh, I can go meet the person that I saw in the commercial in 6 months." It just became this very clear customer journey, which has led me to what I'm doing today, which the simplest way that I can put it is content marketing community creation agency, right? Like, it's driving these interactions where you can— so if you're listening closely, I will distill the formula. The formula is find a valuable piece of information or relationship that you can, that you can create with a group of people marry that, right? That was what we were doing for Habitat. That's what we're doing for the New Leaders Council. And then, if you're also recording it, you're creating content around it that you can chop up and distribute in a way that attracts people to your business or to your initiative or whatever you're doing at scale because you're leading with all this kind of value. And it can work as a, you know, recurring revenue tool or a content creation machine, or, you know, in order to network up, right? Like, you can, you can use it to get in front of whoever you need to get in front of. Um, it fills the pipeline of all your social media. So it ends up creating this like receptacle of anybody that comes into your ecosystem that is kind of interested in you can be very interested in you with a million touch points with no friction whatsoever. And that ends up driving them to be your customer. And then it also drives your existing customers into being super fans, right? So, all right, I just—

well, the big component of that, right, is the community aspect. And I think that's one of the things that are missing when it comes to the business draw that a lot of entrepreneurs and businesses leave on the tables, that they're not creating a community around the product that they're creating, um, right? I can say for like, in my example, that like chiropractors, right, are a good example of like, they try to create a community around their business because they also will do wellness work workshops, and they might do speaking engagements at their offices. But in my world, in the therapy world, it's really weird because we have this like extra confidentiality, right? Even though every medical professional has confidentiality, but it's something that's been like so low down on the paradigm that we had to start creating this online presence for ourselves over the last couple years that we still get dogged for that therapists don't do that. Therapists aren't social media entrepreneurs. We don't leverage social media. How dare we go out and look for clients? The clients have to come find us, right? And so the trend has been finally shifting and changing where if we're not leveraging, because you know this, like it's cheaper to recreate new additional financial resources off a client you already have than to go out and find a new client in the marketplace.

Correct.

Right?

Correct.

And a lot of times there's still that old school mentality in certain business models of like, What do you mean? Like, but they already bought something from me. How can I go ask them to buy something again if they already bought my product one time versus trying to go out and get that new client? So like, what are you seeing when it comes to like these old school branding, marketing, relationship-based models that are outdated that you've tried to break through the glass wall?

I'm seeing that the older the school, the higher the return, like the arbitrage is so there, right? Like I have recently gotten into the financial services industry. And man, this thing's a home run there, right? Because like a bank is a bank is a bank. Like nobody cares. But if you as a bank can start saying, okay, listen, we're a bank, you know that you can come with us for a loan, you can come for us for a new account, whatever we need. But if a bank takes the conscious effort of saying, oh, wait a minute, man, as a bank, I sit at the center of all these different entrepreneurs and all these different businesses. And if I know that I've got one really good marketing agency that works with small and medium-sized businesses. And I can bring in the small and medium-sized businesses that are my customers and expose them to this marketing agency, you know, to give them advice on their marketing strategy, right? Like plan a once-a-month call for small, medium— this is a real-life example of somebody, of somebody that I'm, that I'm starting to work with right now, right? Their, their clients are It's a small Miami local bank, small, medium-sized businesses, commercial real estate, right? So like developers, operators, and investors, and international clients, right? So if every first week of the month, this bank brings in an expert in small, medium-sized business operations, right? Like the tax guy, the CPA guy, hey, listen, this is what you want to know going into June right now with all this stuff, or the marketer, hey, listen, this, right? You aggregate those people into a Zoom call, record the Zoom call, have Q&A, everything that people learn, you distribute. The second week of the month, they have a real estate developer, a land use attorney, the head of zoning for Miami talking about this is what's happening, blah, blah, blah. People show up, it's a crowd, you know, it's not unlike any kind of business panel that the Chamber of Commerce does once a month month, but as a business, you can be doing that, right? So, like, you start creating these pillars of content that also create interaction between your customers, that also create a whole bunch of content that now reaches people that aren't just your customers, and it starts driving them together. So, in this, my biggest client is called JWB. They're a rental property turnkey investment fund. So, you give them $40 grand, they give you a cash-flowing rental income property in Jacksonville that is cash flow positive from day one, or you can private land with them. And it's all on land that they acquired within the last 3 years, business buildings that they built, they're totally vertically integrated and they manage everything. We're now in week, man, we're in the second quarter, right? So, we're like month 4 or 5 of what we call the Not Your Average Investor Show, right? Like, that is our, that's where we send all the clients. We bring in bestselling authors to talk about investing or just the president of the company talking about what the coronavirus is having an effect on real estate prices. We now have 5 or 6 people that plan their, they plan their week around making that show. Like, you know how powerful that is, man? That is 5 or 6 just like fanatical ambassadors just like, yeah, man, not only am I, and I was an investor with these guys 7 years ago. I went through one round of investment cash out. I didn't think about it again. Right? But if this show would have been around, I would have been like, "No, man, I'm keeping my money with these guys.

I'm gonna keep investing." It's a long-term relationship. And it's so crazy because what you're talking about isn't like rocket science, right? It's leveraging the community of people you already have around you.

Correct.

And it's funny, right? You know that my family has a third-generation furniture business. And I think they're really good at that because my sister and I always brainstorm these type of ideas together. They did this past year, they did 2 nights. My sister got married, both my siblings both got married in the last year and change. When my sister and her husband went away, they went to Italy and they found this family-owned winery. Apparently, they found that the guy, one of the people from the winery comes over to America and does these events, these wine tasting events to get people to buy and whatever. They did 2 nights at the store, 1 night for their top customers. And one night for all their vendors and, um, uh, which called the, uh, the people who come in and, uh, help them with, you know, um, I can't— the brain— my brain is farting on what they're called, but, um, the interior designers, right? And it was just this like simple giveback. And there I was one of the nights where it was also some of the family that came as well. And they're like, we've— like, the vendors are like, no other company has treated us like this. And it really cost them like nothing at the end of the day, right? The food we cut, right? The COVID So let's say it was, I don't know, $2,000 for 40 people, 30, whatever it was, right? It's nothing. And the return on investment is just so massive. But bringing all those people that then meet each other and to network with each other, even though they might be with competing companies, so to speak, right? In the furniture world or the interior design world, but that's still leverage of like, oh, I don't have this project that's really a fit for me. Let me pass it on to you. Oh, where'd you guys meet? Oh, we met at Wasser's Furniture.

Yeah.

And they're still both getting their furniture from us, right?

Correct. Correct. So, it's a long-term, it's a long-term value proposition, right? And you are describing a live event. I think that is awesome. And I think everybody should do that once a quarter, whatever, right? Because that costs a little bit of money. But having a Zoom call where you're just like, hey man, you know, like, I'm gonna bring all my interior designers and I'm gonna go reach out to the head of Engel Völkers interior design so that they can pick his brain, and then you go out and redistribute, you know, like, so that's a Zoom call that costs you nothing, right? Like, people just show up, you get to establish a relationship with a leader in your industry, and then, you know, the next step is like, all right, cut up all the big pieces of wisdom and distribute it on your social media channel. People are like, oh man, you get to talk to the head of design of Engel Völkers? If I'm a customer with these guys, I'm in, you know, like It's easy.

Right, and it's so simple. All it is is just literally, right, and one of the things that we talk about is mapping out the schedule in advance and plugging and playing and reverse engineering from there. It's one of the things that we did when we put together our retreat. It's like, okay, what are the big things, right? What are the highest priorities that you want to accomplish in each aspect of your life? But I also think that we have to calendar out these type of events— like a year in advance, right? Jesse talks about this, right? The misogys and the planning out the big things and the little things that you want to accomplish. What are some of like right now, especially right, we're in the middle of this pandemic where hopefully, you know, we're at the end of the top half of the curve and hopefully it's going to start dropping down in the next week or so. What are you seeing as some of the advantages and some of the challenges at this point? Of this experience?

Man, you know, I've been saying this for a while. There is some real, you know, stuff people are going through, some serious hardship with coronavirus and what's happening in the business world. I think most of it is a rapid acceleration of trends that were already coming. You know, so like outside of the hospitality industry, man, like, I don't think like germophobia was coming down the pipe., right? And the shutdown of restaurants, I feel terrible for them. But for most brick-and-mortar businesses, the idea that, I mean, Crystal talks about this, right, from our retreat, right? Like the idea that our life is so digital, right? Like the percentage of interactions we have with people are so digital, whether it's a WhatsApp, you know, group, or it's Facebook or whatever it is, Yet, in business, the majority of these establishments are not digital, right? Like, the majority of these establishments have not moved to a virtual communication style and understanding how to communicate at scale virtually and things of that sort, right? So, you know, for me personally, the idea that all these people that used to swear they would never use social media to like make friends or communicate communicate or do business are now being forced to use some of these tools because of COVID That is a huge opportunity, right? Like understanding, I, you know, I believe like Gary Vee says, right? Like we're just in this like phase similar to when radio was the number one method of entertainment and the television came along and people were just like, nah, TV's a fad. It's just going to rot your brain or whatever. But the people that won long-term were the people that became famous on TV. Right? So, so we are now in that same stage of we are, we've moved from a communications medium where we thought we had it all figured out. And now there's these new ways to communicate and communication is always what's going to make you win, right? The better that you get at breaking down what's going on in your head into a way that the person that you are trying to communicate with lands on them and they feel understood by the message and they can process it and feel that that adds value to their life. You're gonna win. And right now, it hasn't been very long since everybody in the world has had the opportunity to communicate via video with like text overlay and a little bit of music and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like whatever Hollywood has been able to do forever, which by the way, is the greatest advertising machine for American culture and a large reason why we win, you know, now everybody has that at their disposal. So, it behooves you to become adept in understanding how these communication methods work, because it is a way to create relationships at scale unlike ever before for the average person.

Agreed, agreed beyond. And here's the funny thing, right? Until 3 months ago, people were giving millennials and high school kids and college kids crap about their use of social media, except those are the people that within the span of 2 weeks are going on a new social media platform, like let's just use TikTok, for example, right? Within the span of a couple of weeks, getting 30, 40, 50, 60, 100,000 followers by making ridiculous, asinine videos. But the attention that they're grabbing for 30 seconds, 60 seconds makes them something that people are either going to continuously follow because they're creating something that is of value. I whatever level it's being perceived, and the people out there who are giving them crap, "Oh, well, this is stupid. Oh, this is ridiculous. Oh, this is—" Okay, but why are you watching it then? Why are you, right? Or there are other people who don't even know about it and they're just kind of, "Oh, I heard about this thing, this TikTok thing," or, "I heard about whatever and it's another way to waste time." Okay, but that, right, the attention, money follows the attention.

Yeah, for sure. Right?

And that's why there are 18-year-old kids who are getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by YouTube YouTube because they're creating content that is being followed and they're now making buttloads of money by doing something that is really a hobby for them versus the rest of us who are out there busting our butts doing a job and not making that money.

Yeah. Yeah. And these are, you know, I think in the example that you're saying, it's just pure entertainment value, right? Like this is, these are kids that are just like, this is the equivalent of like, oh, I want to be a comedian, right? But if you, if you're, if you're a business I mean, attention is currency, right? Like, attention is absolute currency. So, if you can figure out a way to hold the attention of more clients and make it easy for them to tell their friends, "Yo, man, this is really cool," and hop in and create this like frictionless way to get more and more attention, your business is gonna grow. So, you just have to figure out what you have that is valuable to everybody else. And guess what? It's not your product, right? Like, everybody knows whatever your product is. It's you need to entertain, educate, or inspire. In some way around the things that you are doing or the things that you believe or the people that you have around you. And if you can thread that needle, which, you know, at the end of the day, the strategy is part of it, but it's not a far leap, man. Like, if you just take inventory of who your clientele is and what they care about, who do you know that knows a little bit about what these people care about, and bring them together you now are cooking with grease, man. And then the rest is just like figure out how to like edit stuff and put it on social media, man.

Or don't even edit it, just put it up. And so many times I'm hearing an entrepreneur, a business owner who's been in their business 15, 20 years, right? Let's say they're a sole proprietor, they own their company, whatever it is, it's a small business, mom-and-pop shop. And the first words that I'm gonna hear out of their mouth after the technology argument is, "Well, my day really isn't that interesting." Well, if you believe that what you're doing isn't that interesting, how the hell are you going to sell your product to somebody else? Right? And I think that's a lot of things. Like, it's like, think about it, like for me as a therapist, my day is pretty damn interesting. Now I can't share my therapeutic clients. I can talk about stories of without— not with non-identifying markers in those stories. But one of the things that I did, and you know this right from from the BYLR community is I put out an ad in the community. I said, "Hey, who wants to jump on a coaching call with me in exchange for being on my podcast? It's not gonna be a therapy session, but it's about something that you want to accomplish in your life that's been just dogging you for a while. And I will coach you on that call with your exchange permission for me to put it out on my podcast so people can see what it's like to work with me." Right?

Yeah. 'Cause I find that people get so stuck in what they're doing and they don't realize how interesting their thought process behind what they're doing can be to someone else because it's very hard to look outside of yourself. But my buddy that I was just talking about, Justin, right? Who told me this stuff about like, no, you actually overachieved. He goes to conferences and He, you know, he's big in the world of commercial real estate. And he'll go to a conference and he has this like idealized map of just like he shows up 48 hours before the conference. The day before the conference, he hosts a big party. Then he has all these like appointments set at like the different breakout sessions. He invites people to the breakout sessions like, yo man, meet me at this session. I know we want to see it. And that's like a mini like hosting of a party, right? Like, you know, he's just a commercial real estate guy, but the So, you know, thinking of things that way, I, as someone that's always thinking, how do I aggregate value? I'm like, dude, this is brilliant, right? Like, so, for sure, told me that on a Zoom call, we chopped it up and shared it on LinkedIn and it's awesome.

And that's what you did the night before our podcast movement, right? When we met, like, I don't think I would have met the people that we are now legitimately friends with had you not taken that initiative. And it's funny, like, in my own circles, like, I've been teaching for one of my for one of these nonprofit Jewish organizations that I'm very involved with, like I started taking the initiative of like creating a little bit of an external community around doing stuff more so, because they're not in-house, they're not meeting every day, right, all the times that they can do in-house events. And I'm like, well, why aren't we doing this? And why aren't we doing this? And why aren't we doing this? So like, I teach on Wednesday nights, there's a back-to-back group learning. At 8 o'clock someone teaches, and then at 9 o'clock I teach. I decided I'm going to make it more than— it's not going to be a lecture. It's going to be interactive. It's going to be engaged. It's not like you jump on a Zoom call and you know those things of the older people will be the ones with their videos on and the younger people will be the ones with their videos off, right? I'm like, "If you're going to be in this 9 o'clock segment, videos are on. This is not me giving a lecture. This is me engaging. I want you to be involved. I want you to interrupt me. I want you to call me out. I want you to challenge me," and I take a certain on theme of a spiritual topic of the week's Bible Torah portion, and I make it very psychological, spiritual, and leadership-based. It is now known that my average group that comes on for this class— and I now have my regulars— 2 or 3 Wednesday nights ago, we started at 9, we did not get off Zoom till 2 o'clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, and my class finished. Wow. But we're now creating a community of people who— one person's in Mexico City and one's in Toronto and one's in— and two of them are in New York. And I'm like, hey, New York people, you guys are both in Brooklyn right now. Have you guys met? Can you guys connect offline? Right? So I'm really taking this inspiration from you of how do I create a community when we can't have a community in person right now. Totally. And I think it's so profoundly powerful that these— last night I did two things. I did another course on relationships for young professionals, and then I led a speed dating thing for that other organization. And the first thing I want to know is like, everybody on Zoom, if you're like— everybody had their names or whatever. I'm like, okay, why don't you put your first name, your last name, and the city you presently live in. So I'm like, oh, you guys are in Canada. Do you guys know each other offline? Oh, you guys are both in whatever, right? I'm trying to find simple ways on a Zoom call that it's blatantly in your face where people can have a little bit more of an understanding or a connection with each other. It's simple. It's just me asking and making a request, and then taking 15 seconds to like, "Oh, I got to change my Zoom name." Guys, here's how you do it. If you see on your participants thing, hold up, put your cursor over it, and you can see change my name, rename. Can you click that and put your full name in, and then in parentheses put the city where you live? 15 seconds, and then we'll get started.

By the way, super valuable, right? Because now you've also taught them a trick, right? Like, I love walking around conferences and teaching people the whole, like, Facebook Messenger scanner thing or the LinkedIn scanner thing, because people are like, "Oh, cool! Oh, who are you?" You know? So that's great. And another thing that you're highlighting is the idea that I'm not saying that all of our relationships are moving to online. I'm just saying that online is part of our world. So, your ability to create relationships and nurture relationships in either or, right? Like, whether it's you meet someone online, like, for example, I guess technically I met you online, right? Like, technically, we were on like a, on like a text chain, right?

Thank goodness you didn't swipe left on me. I mean, you know.

But yeah, man, you know, like, for me, what works a lot is the fact that I meet a lot of people, period., right? And then, I follow them on, you know, when I meet them, I connect with them, I connect with them online, whatever, and then, they are seeing stuff about me because I'm putting out these little videos and pictures and whatever. I'm just, you're present in their life. So then, the average person that you see once and you don't see them again for another 3, 4 months, during those 3, 4 months, they are still kind of like, it's touchpoints, right? In business, it's called touchpoints. And it's relationship you know, it doesn't have to be sales, right? Like, it's just relationships or touchpoints, right?

In the therapeutic world, we'll call those micro connections.

Yeah, micro connections, man. So as long as they're still keeping up with you the next time you see them, and it's not like, oh yeah, we spoke 3 months ago, what were we talking about back then? It's just like, oh dude, I saw that you, uh, got a new car. Like, whatever, man, you know? Um, so it's just a way to nurture relationships and just— it just adds to the fabric of it, man. It's not mutually exclusive in any way.

Well, one of the facts I taught the group last night when we were talking— the theme on the relationships class was, um, what are some of the hindrances or detractors of a healthy, successful relationship, and I gave them the data research from Dr. John Gottman, and I said, "How many positive interactions versus every one negative interaction do you think you need to have in order for that negative interaction to be wiped out?" And they're like, "I don't know, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, 5 to 1." And I'm like, "Nope, 25 to 1." Yeah, not surprising. Right? 25 positive interactions to 1 negative interaction. So I think just for people to be mindful of that, Are you doing 25 touchpoints for every time that you think that you shouldn't be? I really want to just instill that for whatever the person is, whether it's personal relationships and friendships or business, whatever it is. That's just something that I want to leave as a takeaway. Before we wrap up, I know we only have another handful of minutes before we got to bounce. We did this really awesome retreat together. I know in the next 3, 4 minutes, we're not going to have enough time to really go into it, but I just want to leave that as a teaser for when we hang out again. And do this again in the near future. But we put together this really awesome How I Show Up retreat.

Yeah, yeah, it was awesome.

And that was an example, a living and breathing example of the people that we've connected with in real life, that you mostly have connected with in real life, that we brought together, and me as your partner in this process, to have this really insane, amazing weekend. Yeah, yeah, man.

And that was a couple people from this conference, from that conference, keep up with them online, and then it's like, all right, man, I'm gonna host I'm gonna host 6 people at this mountain house and you know how do we do it? And thank God you were there because you really helped— You were that safety net for me on that one, right? Like we go back to the beginning of what we're talking about when I was lost in imposter syndrome and thinking that I had bitten off too much as I always feel like I do. You were there to just catch me and be like no, no, no, no, no, no! Just re-steer my nervous energy in one direction. And we ended up pulling together what I think is a really wonderful experience for anybody that is either trying to like launch a new idea or thinks that they are not as far along as they should be based on what they're doing right now. Um, or feels like they're being defined by their past more than their future. Right. Which I think is a very common entrepreneurial thing, right? Like who I was last year, I think it's a human thing, right? Like who you are last year, is, or is not who you are at the end of the year, right? If you are, if you're doing it right, like if you're learning and you're growing and whatever. Yet, you know, you often find that like if you move somewhere, when I moved to Jacksonville, I was, I showed up here as like this expert networker that had done all this stuff in Miami. Yet my friends that knew me in Miami, when I got to Miami, some of them still thought I was a green building expert. Like, so, like, how you show up matters, right? And then, like, when you first show up, that's kind of like the biggest impression. But teaching people how to see you in a new way based on the skills and the knowledge and the practice of things that you've acquired in the last year is a big deal. And I thought, man, I thought that what we put together, it just came out splendidly well in order to be able to navigate that.

Yeah, it couldn't have been a more beautiful wonderful weekend. And that was like the last weekend that like, right, right after that, like we came home, we started isolating, right? It was just like, it was just utter chaos of that. And so like to have this weekend in the mountains up in North Carolina, uh, in this beautiful environment and with really wonderful people was really powerful. It really was an incubator of the next steps for a lot of people. And I know that we challenged them to, to each bring a TED Talk that they would want to present. And a lot of beautiful, powerful shifts happened for a lot of people that weekend. And I definitely want to spend more time on, maybe the next time we get together, about how to create, how to have people craft a weekend, a curated weekend like we did, and inspire other entrepreneurs to do that. And I think that's something really profound that we can offer for people. So I know our time is at that point, but Pablo, I really, number one, thank you for being a friend. And I'm glad that we finally got around to this. I know it's been a long time coming. And guys, Listen, I'm very picky with, with, with my suggestions, but go on any platform of choice and Chief Executive Connector is Pablo's podcast. Um, and you can connect with it.

You should @connectwithpablo.com, right? That's how you email address. You should @connectwithpablo.com.

Hit me up. That's it. All right, my man. To be continued.

I was just going to say, so on my website, connectwithpablo.com is a quick 5-minute video of how you can walk into any room and just talk, right? Like, how you can— if you're walking into a networking event, you're walking into a conference, it's like the, you know, 5-minute— like, if you're walking into somewhere, you're feeling like you might be a fish out of water, just listen to that. There's also a downloadable kind of cheat sheet to take with you. So I highly recommend that. I get a lot of good feedback from that, and that to me is like the easiest, like, quick win value I can give to anybody because I know how to walk into a room and be the coolest person.

And I can be a complete testament to seeing that, knowing that, and witnessing that. So again, Pablo, thanks again for spending time. You're the best.

Yeah, I love you, bro.

You too, my man. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life Podcast.

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