TAKING ACTION: Find Solutions That Could Mean the Difference with Brandon Bornancin

I could have sat there and weeped for a day, a week, a year, a decade, and said, woe is me. I'm a victim. Life is over. Or I could look at the situation and appreciate and be grateful and realize all of these different gifts. Like, dude, life is short. Leverage every second. Finding solutions, not problems, is like finding the answers and being grateful and happy that you're alive because there's a solution for everything as long as you're positive and you're looking for that opportunity.

And what I want people also to remember about virtues and values here is they're all intertwined, right? Because Brandon's not talking about taking blind action. It's taking action with the premise of the other values. Are you taking action that's aligned with thinking bigger? Are you taking action with whatever it takes? Are you thinking action of doing, like, what's right by our customers? The virtues guide each other. It's not about blind action, but if they're all working together, that's where it comes through. So we got six of them. You got two left for me. What are the last two?

Yes. And what was up there? Real quick box. So this is a big one. Find solutions. So this is something that I try to coach our team on a lot. Like, you got to be positive with everything, you know, Quick story for everyone. So I pitched 300. I prospected thousands of venture capitalists and angel investors to fundraise cold outbound prospecting using Seamless with the list, cold emailing with outreach IO, cold calling literally every angel investor in venture capital that you could find on LinkedIn, that you could find on AngelList. I built the list with Seamless, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and I start cold call prospecting because I'm like, okay, to really build this search engine that finds everyone in the world their contact info. Like, I need some money and I need a shitload of engineers. So I'm going and I'm pitching all these investors. And that what happened was I literally a week before demo day, we the venture capital firm, I went through an accelerator in Newark, New Jersey. Part of the accelerator accelerator was I had to live in downtown Newark, New Jersey, and I was pretty much in the ghetto with gunshots and people in my backyard, gangsters in my backyard. Newark, New Jersey. And no offense to Newark, New Jersey, because I'm Italian and there's tons of Italian people out there and I fucking love New Jersey. The whole state of New Jersey actually invested in Seamless. But long story short, so doing whatever it takes to get funding in New Jersey and We're prepping for demo day, and I'm like, dude, this was my last year. Three years trying to build seamless. We're out of money. Demo day goes bad. We're bankrupt. It's over. Game done. So the. The. The managing partner says for the last two weeks of demo day, no one's allowed to travel. No one's allowed to do anything. Last week, it was the fourth day leading up to demo day. We're on stage at the hockey rink. I don't even know what it's called, the Prudential Hockey Rink. I get a call, my Danielle calls me. She's like, yo, you gotta fly to LA asap. She's like, your. Your mom's on. On the debt bed. And, like, if you don't get out there, like, today or tomorrow, she's gone and you're gonna regret it. I'm like. I was like, I got demo day. I gotta go, though. So I. I called the managing director. I saw him. I'm like, dude, mom's about to die. I got a bowl. So I literally go fly there, see my mom for the last time, you know, get to say my piece. She couldn't talk or anything, but she was. Grabbed my hand and stuff, and it was amazing. And then literally flew back in 24 hours, and I'm on stage presenting to a thousand people like, like, nothing ever happened. And I. This is an example of finding solutions, not problems. I could have sat there and weeped for a day, a week, a year, a decade, and said, woe is me. I'm a victim. Life is over. Like, or I could look at the situation and appreciate and be grateful and. And realize all these different gifts. Like, dude, life is short. Leverage every second. Like, my mom passing at, you know, and she had Alzheimer's since I was 21 years old. Finding solutions, not problems, is like finding the answers and being fucking grateful and happy that you're alive because there's a solution for everything as long as you're positive and you're looking for that opportunity. And I just leveraged so many learnings from the demo day and my mom passing with, like, appreciating life, being grateful for everything. And by the way, that made me go vegan. Whole food plant powered. I changed my diet because I started researching Alzheimer's, cancer, and diabetes. And, like, a lot of why people are sick is because of their. What they eat, right? Like, if you're smoking cigarettes and you get lung cancer, you can't be like, oh, how do I cure lung cancer? Well, guess what, you know, how you can cure heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes. There's one thing and it's, and it's what you eat, you know, so I'm a big proponent of like what you eat to maximize your health. So I just learned all these things and finding solutions during problems, during tough times, good and bad, you name it. And that's, that's the other core value. And then the others real quick just because I, you know, I know we've got a lot of them. Do the right thing. And I think this is a better way to say integrity. You know how you said Enron says integrity? 99 of people don't even know what the that means straight up. I, I actually don't even know what the definition is.

Google it right now because I'm sure it's not Google the definition, but our.

Our way of saying the same thing, I believe is do the right thing. Like, no matter what you're doing, do the right thing. Like what you know is right and wrong. Don't do the thing that you believe is the wrong thing and do the right thing.

Yeah, well, it's funny because. So integrity, right? The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. Because what's funny again, integrity is a belief. It's a characteristic, it's not a behavior. You definitely do something with integrity. Whereas if you just believe in integrity, it doesn't mean anything you have to do with integrity. You have to go through it. And so we, we had our core virtues for our, our sales org and same idea. Ours are all behaviors. Take care of the person and salesperson. Seek perpetual growth. Own your help ytp. Help yourself team and prospect ecm. Every conversation matters. Plan and play to win. Celebrate the process. Those were ours, right? And we defined them. They were documented. We knew what good every single one of those had. Nine or ten examples of here's what it means to plan and play to win. Because that's also where a lot of companies go off with their values, their virtues, their cultures is they define it, but they don't document. Like, what does it mean? Like, what are examples of doing the right thing?

Oh yeah, I love that. And that's what you showed me. You showed me in because Kevin Dorsey's been. We love talking about leadership strategies to maximize people's successes. One of the things that you did where I'm like, oh, great fucking idea is you had examples of all of the values and like, because people can hear one thing and it doesn't resonate, here's another, like Way to train culture, teach culture. I tell the same like, like, thing that I'm trying to teach, but I share it with like 5 to 10 different ways, 5 to 10 different stories, 5 to 10 different examples. But it's the same thing, like, fail forward, don't quit, don't give up. Like, these are different operating principles. But I'll talk about different stories and themes and ways to do it, because one way may resonate with someone and another way will resonate with someone else. And I love that how you had that laid out in the Google Doc.

That's genius. You have to. Because if you think about even something as simple as do the right thing, giving examples of what that means is important, right? So here's the situation. A customer calls in, they are still under contract. They want to cancel because budget's tightening up. What's the right thing? Right. As a company, you need to understand and define, like, what is in a situation like that, what is the right thing? Well, the right thing for the customer might be to cancel. The right thing for me is the rep. A lot of reps might go, well, I don't want to make them upset, so I'll let them cancel. The right thing for the company might to be able to keep them. But the right thing for the customer too is like, wait, wait, wait, you're tight, so you want to take away something that makes you money. So budgets are tight and you want to take away some of that. Like, what is the right thing? And defining that is very, very important throughout all this process. Where I want to go next, because this is really, really important, is most companies don't even take it this far.