A YouTube interview on the Million Dollar Mastermind where host Larry Weidel speaks with Enrico Palmerino (founder & CEO of Botkeeper) about finding strong hires and surviving startup hardships. Enrico emphasizes network-based hiring (meetups, coffees, leveraging influencers), vetting via personal interactions, and resorting to recruiters only as needed. He shares vivid personal struggles: he and a co-founder took on about $1M each in personally guaranteed debt, had ~ $250k in school debt, used Amex gift cards to make payroll when cash was short, and faced a failed fundraising attempt when COVID hit (raise planned for early April). The episode mixes actionable hiring tactics with lessons on perseverance, humility, and surrounding yourself with strong people.
Questions this video answers
About $1,000,000 each (≈ $2,000,000 total between them).
About $250,000 (quarter million).
Buying American Express gift cards on credit and using them to pay employees, then reimbursing/cashing them later.
They were going out to raise at the beginning of April (COVID onset triggered VCs to stop investing).
Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell, and before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.
I'm here with Enrico Palmarino and founder and CEO of Botkeeper, a bookkeeping service for accountants. How, how do you go about finding people, Enrico? You probably learned some tricks and techniques that allow you to save some time in terms of eliminating people that would be time wasters or bad fit, things like that.
A lot of it comes through network. Some of the best people I found new people or new people who knew people that knew me, right? So I did a lot of networking early on. I went to a ton of events, a ton of meetups, organized a bunch of coffees like Mastermind groups with like, you know, movers and shakers and industries or locally, and just started really building my network. And then as that network grew, you know, it became one of those things where I was like, oh, I need to find someone to, you know, had sales and I knew someone, you know, that came to mind that I had met, that I stood out from all the networking as really being someone who's successful. And that's what's nice is like if you get out there and you do enough networking and you start to see the difference between someone who's maybe been able to sell and make a good life or career out of it and someone who's like, got that extra something and it's like, has the data and the results behind them. And so you get to also just call it temperature check or determine where the playing field is in your mind of what's great and amazing and who falls into that bucket. And so through networking form a lot of relationships, you come across people that you feel like could be a good fit, and hopefully you've interacted with them now in like a personal setting or virtually, which helps on the culture side. But then, two, it also affords you, like, a large pool of people that you can reach out to. You can put an email chain together with some influencers or centers of influence or contacts that you know and say, you know, I'm looking for someone to do this in my company. I'm looking to hire someone, or I'm looking to partner with someone. I looking for a head of marketing to be my partner in this venture or join the team, whatever it is, and you can send that to those people, and now you get to leverage all of their networks and who they know, and hopefully the interactions they have. And the people you send it to are hopefully people you vetted as knowing, like, these are a caliber people who likely hang out with other a caliber people and hold a certain standard or bar as well. And that just makes things easier. And then finally, or lastly, resort to, you know, using a recruiting firm if you need to, but always go network first. And it's how I've gotten most of the teammates on my team.
Well, for people that sound like that would listen to you, you do come across as a guy that's never had a bad day, never had a problem, very glib, very just blow through everything. Matter of fact, everything's planned. But I have found life is like that. Enrico, when you started, obviously you started with a bang because you. You had a cocoon there at the college to launch you. But is it possible to launch out of that situation and still.
Not, you.
Know, and not have bumps in the road and problems and traumatic experiences? I sure hope you've had a few, Enrico, because you're gonna have some as you grow. But how seasoned are you?
Have you.
Have you stared fear in the face yet at this early stage of your life and your development? Or is it all roses and lollipops of growth?
Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over 5 billion billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.
No, I think, you know, I think maybe there's some percentage of people out there, and I don't know if I've ever found them that happen to just get everything right and rise up. I think most people that's not the case. And so I think for me, the way I describe my experience in life is I love solving problems because I have more of them than there are time and the day to solve. Um, so more headaches, challenges, fire drills, you know, what have you. And if, like, you don't like solving constant problems and putting out fires and then startup life really isn't for you, and you know, founding a business. But you know, I, in early days, you know, I had to figure out how I was even going to pay for school. So, you know, worked like three jobs while I was also starting that lighting business. Took on over a million dollars in personally guaranteed debt that I was on the brink of, certainly brink of bankruptcy and owing a boatload of money and overcame that, figured out a way to make payroll when we didn't have a means by which or the cash to do it. And that meant buying Amex gift cards because you could buy those on credit and made payroll with gift cards one time and assured people that I would buy the gift cards back as soon as we had the cash and then cash them up. Which meant I lived on gift cards for about a year with my girlfriend now wife and mother of my two girls. I've done. I had stared down the barrel of COVID when we were about to go out and raise after coming off of a really hot, awesome year. Unfortunately our raise cycle timed up with we were going out to raise the beginning of April, which is right when it, you know, Covid started wreaking havoc on the US and all VCS basically said, no, I'm not going to invest. Like we're not investing anymore. We're bailing out our existing portfolio companies. So I had to overcome that. You know, I've seen, you know, I've overcome, yeah, just a variety of obstacles. Nothing like farthest from the truth of anything being, you know, rose tinted glasses and easy, just one obstacle at the next. The key difference though is one, I have no regrets. So I think everything I've done in the past, there's been a mistake. It's been a life lesson to learn from. Nothing I regret because I found most of the situations positive that have come from today have been thanks to the lessons I've learned on those events. So I look at things pretty positively and I don't look at anything and believe I won't be able to figure it out. So I think perseverance, continuous improvement, willingness and humility to ask for help when needed and then just surrounding yourself with the best people. And that's the magic formula to figuring it out one day.
Sometimes following your passion, following your path, that kind of sets itself in front of you and you're racing down that thing causes you to have to do things you never thought you would do, like take out a million dollar and million dollars in personal loans there. What was that like?
So at the time it was like, all right, we're gonna, we're Doing this like the business needs it. It's growing and scaling and great. And then, you know, we made some bad decisions that really hit cash flow again. That caused us to exhaust those loans and then not need to basically go out and get more debt. And my business partner and I looked at each other and we're like, well, we already each basically owe a million in debt and are kind of screwed until like, 40 by the time we pay this thing back because we have no assets to collateralize it with. So what the hell, what's 2 million in debt? And, you know, at that point. So, yeah, I mean, it was. It was definitely tough. It was super stressful because I also had school debt on top of that and, you know, like a quarter million in school debt. So it's like, well, not even 21 yet. And I'll be, you know, trying to figure out, figure my way to climb this mountain or pay it down over who knows how long and what that's going to do to life. But I was just sure that we would. We'd figure it out, whatever I needed to do to get it done. If I had to work more jobs, you know, I figure out ways to, like, compound savings and interest and stuff like that to help.
And if you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellanwinning.com webinar now you can in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, Go.
