The 15+-Year Overnight Success | College Hunks

One thing I'll say is, however many years, 16, 17 years of being business partners, we fought about a lot of things. But the one thing we tend to never disagree about is the vision, which I think was probably a rarity that best friends and business partners can sort of make it this long. I think it's a credit to having that alignment of vision.

Hey, this is Mark C. Winners, co author of Rocket Fuel and expert EOS implementer. Welcome to the Rocket Fuel podcast. We're visionary and integrator duos from entrepreneurial companies share a behind the scenes look at their relationship. These amazing leaders blend their unique skills to create what we call rocket fuel. I'm really excited to introduce today's three guests to you. Together they have built a thriving business. College hunks hauling junk and moving. Omar Salman and Nick Friedman are the co founders and visionaries. And Roman Cowan is the brand president and integrator. Together they have built a thriving business that has grown incredibly fast. In this episode, they share their knowledge and passion for implementing the visionary and integrator roles in their business. We're going to begin the show today where Omar and Nick describe how their business got started and what led them to find and hire an integrator. Let's dive in. All right. Welcome to the Rocket Fuel podcast. Today my guests are Omar Salman, co founder and visionary, Nick Friedman, co founder and visionary, and Roman Cowan, brand president and integrator, all from college hunks hauling junk. So welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah, great to have you here. And so people that have been listening to me for any amount of time are already scratching their heads and going, wait a minute, did Mark just say that there are two visionaries at that company? He's always told us that there should only be one visionary. So we'll get into all of that momentarily. So just to kind of tease ahead a little bit, but before we get into it, I would love it, Omar or Nick, if one of you would kind of give us a little bit of the genesis of your company. So how did this thing get started?

So Omar and I went to high school together. We actually met in 10th grade in detention of all places.

Perfect.

Brought up to follow the more traditional career path. Work hard in school, get good grades, get a job. And it was actually the summer before our senior year of college. Omar's mom had this beat up cargo van from her furniture store and said, you know, why don't you go out and do something with the van? And we Credit her not just with the van, but actually the name. She was like, you know, you guys could be like college hunks who haul junk. And we all kind of laughed about it at first. And then Omar said, you know what, let's put that on computer printout, flyers, stuck it in mailboxes. The phone started ringing. People had a need for the service. They thought the name was catchy. We ended up winning an entrepreneur. Omar ended up winning an entrepreneurship competition our senior year. And then when we graduated after a brief stint in the corporate world, we said, you know what, let's make business full year round venture. So we always tell the story. When we first started, Omar and I were the college hunts. We were doing all the work ourselves. So we were driving the truck, answering the phone, hauling the junk. We had the 800 number on the back of the truck routed to our cell phones. And people would call to complain about erratic driving. And we'd be the one in the driver's seat answering the phone, you know, apologizing, you know, firing ourselves. You know, we don't condone that driving. We'll tell those guys to be safer. Probably fired ourselves at least three or four times that, that first summer. So eventually learned how to work on the business, not in it. And then of course, we discovered that the traction in Eos and rocket fuel tools, and now we're a 15 plus year overnight success.

Right? 15 plus years overnight success. People don't see those first hard years always, do they? So Omar, tell me a little bit from your experience in those early days. I'm really kind of curious about. There's the two of you trying to do everything by yourself, right? And then you kind of start to get some folks to help you. What was sort of the thing that made you see, you know what, we really need to start building a team. We really need to find some way to be able to grow this thing even bigger because we're just not going to be able to carry this all ourself.

Yeah. So, you know, before eos, there was a book called the E Myth, as I'm sure you're familiar with Michael Gerber. Someone handed us that book kind of probably after one of those days that Nick described where we were driving the truck and getting yelled at while taking phone calls from clients. And so I think Nick read the book and then he's like, hey man, you gotta read this book. It just spoke to us. It was exactly the predicament we were in. We were in the business, not on the business. And it was gonna Be all about people and then also all about systems. So that was like the aha moment for us where we're like, okay, if we spend the time and effort to create these processes and systems and can work on the business, you know, we can actually have two trucks, five trucks, 10 trucks, and you know, one day hopefully open up locations in other cities. And that's what happened. I mean, we were able to get off the trucks and, you know, it was literally one truck at a time. You know, it's not a tech business, so we don't scale the same way Facebook or Google does, but it was one truck at a time. And we quickly kind of grew from 05 to 08 in the DC area and then started franchising in 08.

So how big were you when you started franchising? How many trucks did you have?

I think we were ahead about 12 in D.C. nick. I don't remember. I think we were about 12 trucks in D.C. and we're doing well over a million dollars in sal sales. It was still premature, there's no doubt about it. I mean, it was our third year of business. I think we started franchising. So we were new to business and then decided to become new to franchising.

When you had 12 trucks. So I kind of get how the scaling works when you, you add a truck and you've got a, you know, a person or a group of people or whatever that work a truck. I kind of see that piece of it. But then the back office, right, the back end of this thing, all the stuff that's got to happen there. How many people were kind of working administratively when you had 12 trucks on.

The road at that time? I think we had kind of an operations manager and like a call center agent who was picking up the phone because we didn't want to be the ones answering the phone while driving. So we got ourselves off the truck. We got sort of an ops manager to open up and close and meet the crews in the morning. And then I think we had like a part time administrator slash bookkeeper. And that was sort of the origin of having any form of org chart or accountability chart. There's still a lot of just overlap and uncertainty and blurred lines, quite frankly, in accountability and responsibilities. And as Omar mentioned, we always had this sort of glamorized view of what franchising would be. We thought it was like, oh, this is so hard work running a business. If we franchise the company, we can make passive income as royalties and everybody else would go out and do it. But it's far from the reality of franchising. A very steep learning curve, a very long path to scale and in franchising. So we kind of became students of entrepreneurship and began attending conferences like the International Franchise association and then obviously, again, plug for the EOS tools that we discovered and ultimately try to start putting rhythms in our morning huddles and rocks and things of that nature to just kind of institutionalize and put some more structure around the business. I would say before we knew about the visionary integrator relationship, I was kind of the de facto integrator, because even though I'm skewing more of as a visionary on the personality profile, I feel like I was capable of trying to tackle the structure. And I'm a little bit more obsessive compulsive about details. Omar was a little bit more what I would describe as pure visionary. Just sort of like, things will fall into place. I've got all these different ideas. Let's try to tackle them all at once. And I was trying to do things out of the book, like, no, this book says we've got to do it this way. We've got to follow this process in protocol.

You agree with that, Omar?

Yeah, no, I agree with that for sure. I mean, I'm definitely not an integrator. I'm not a good manager of people, and I'm not organized. So there is no doubt in my.

Mind he's owning it. That's great.

I'll own it. That's why I love this model, because it sort of recognizes the things that you can do and the things that you can't. And, you know, it's not a bad thing to not be able to do certain things, and it's good to be good at other things. So, you know, I think we were naturally, I think, a little bit inclined to those two, even though we both RVs, I think we both. That's why we were good partners, you know, up until Roman came on and then beyond that. But, yes, I do think that that's an accurate assessment.

So I want to bring Roman in here in just a second. But so, you know, what I'm hearing is, you know, you sort of naturally, you were able to kind of gravitate towards, you know what? This isn't necessarily stuff I love, but I can handle this for us, and I can handle this other stuff for us. And so you kind of worked it out and kind of made it work. And I've got to believe there was a lot of trust in each other to be able to do that. Right. And not let the egos get in the way and whatever. As you're kind of working through that before we went and identified somebody like Roman.

Immensely. Immensely. I mean, look, so the fact that Omar and I were friends in high school, the same kind of arguments we had as friends were the same kind of arguments we had as business partners. And we never let that impact our friendship when we'd be arguing over stuff in high school. And so we never really let that impact our friendship or business relationship when we'd be arguing, arguing over it as business partners. And so I think you hit the key on it. The trust and ego were two things that 100% had to be foundational and kept in check. Never took things personally. If one of us was mad at the other person, we would let it be known. But then it was right back to the business. It was never any sort of resentment or harboring frustrations under the surface that weren't bubbling up. And I think the fact that we had that relationship and had the business as our, you know, collective priority had shared vision and values that allowed us to keep the business as a priority and the results as a priority.

Yeah. I hope you guys realize how special that is, because there's so many, you know, companies I've worked with, folks I've had the experience around that it just didn't work out that way. They were friends, sometimes best friends, you know, or even, you know, family members. And the business, the, you know, the crucible of pressure, just stuff that goes on when things get tough and crazy and weird and all that. It just couldn't stand it. They didn't have a strong enough foundation there to be able to make it through. So that's really cool and really special that you two did. And so anyway, so the story continues, and you guys, you keep growing, you start learning about franchising. You do all that. I know now you sort of have a hybrids where you've got some franchise, some corporate locations. Is that true?

We've got about 200 franchisees. We currently operate four corporate locations. So it's a small.

So it's a small piece.

Okay.

Okay. So then as you're really growing, you start to build out some help in the team and talk to me about what triggered, you know, what we need. We need this thing called an integrator that ultimately led you to identify Roman as that person.

Yeah. So I'll backtrack to first how we met Roman and then. And then how the intersection of needing an integrator came into place. So when we first started franchising, we moved down to Tampa, Florida. This was right around the time of the housing crisis. So our business wasn't lifting off as fast as we thought it might. When we started into franchising and we submitted our business to the University of Tampa, they were doing a marketing case study competition. So Roman was actually a senior at University of Tampa undergrad at the time, and his team came in, like, third place in this competition. But I can remember like it was yesterday. It was one of those, like, surreal moments where Roman was giving the presentation. He goes, you know, one day I'm going to be CEO of college hunks, and Nick and Omar are going to be sitting on the beach drinking pina coladas.

Nice.

And I remember having this, like, almost like out of body experience as he said that, like, that's exactly what I want. That sounds amazing. We were farthest away from ever reaching that point in our business. We didn't have two pennies to rub together. But I was like, that sounds incredible. So Roman really wanted to work with us, but we didn't have the position for him or the resources to hire him out of college. So he went off to do his own thing, got his cpa, his mba, got real world work experience. And this is a testament for following up. He sent us like a LinkedIn message three or four years later. And I don't often respond or read, even read my LinkedIn messages, but he had mentioned that he was in finance and was looking at, you know, still interested in working with us. And literally, like three months after he sent that message, our controller at the time left to take a new job. His LinkedIn message kind of popped into my head and I reached out to him and he was actually on his way to put an acceptance letter in at a public accounting firm. So we kind of intercepted him. And at the 11th hour of this acceptance letter, and he joined as our financial controller. So still, you know, kind of young and green, but again, we use the word humble, you know, was always very clear, like, hey, you know, I know I can do a lot for you guys, but if you ever want to hire people over me or a CFO or, you know, VP or whatever, I'm never going to be offended. I'm not going to purport to know more than I know. And at that time, we were pretty, pretty. I was pushing the EOS model pretty heavy onto the team. Like, you know, I was reading the books. We would bring in an implementer periodically to help us, you know, with an L10 meeting rhythm. And so I think we decided that we needed an integrator that Omar and I were starting to burn out as the founders. I had been kind of playing this role as de facto integrator, but it wasn't my nature. So I was like, I was doing things in the column of, you know, good at, but really don't enjoy doing, so burning my fuel pretty heavy. And we did a whole external search for an integrator. And as I started reading down the checklist of what an integrator does, I came to Roman. I was like, roman, do you realize that you already do all of these things for the company and for us as founders, even though you don't have this title and you're not in this senior leadership position, so you're already integrating the company. You're the one putting the scoreboard in place and taking Nick and Omar's crazy vision and running it through a metric process and helping us prioritize and put stuff back on the shelf and giving us an outlet to. To get our ideas on the table. So. So, you know, we made Roman the integrator, and, you know, haven't looked back since. I can trace back. You know, like, if we were to show you guys a chart, the exponential growth curve, it really is like pouring rocket fuel on. On the fire as the exploded. We were doing maybe like 10 million in revenue at the time, and now we're doing over 200 million in annual sales. And you know what? It's been six or seven years as integrator since. Since that time took place.

All right, so, Roman, let's get you into the. Into the story here. So I want you to back up a little bit, though, from. Go back to when you were that working on the project at University of Tampa, right? And you're first getting exposed to the company and kind of what did it look like to you then? What was your impression of where these guys were headed and what this company was all about and going to be able to do?

So, first of all, Nick definitely flatters me, so I think he makes me look better than I certainly am. I think it was a big team effort that gave that hockey stick growth. So, first of all, I'll say that the second piece is when I met Nick and Omar. Nick, Omar and a gentleman, Stephen Nichols. They walked into the room wearing my two favorite colors, orange and green. So that was kind of cool. At the time, even though I was a senior in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

Right.

I had studied accounting, but I Didn't quite think that I wanted to go in the public accounting world. I heard about the long hours and just somewhat of a boring life. And I was like, I want to do more. I want to help people. And in comes these two entrepreneurs talking about their literal, sole purpose is to help entrepreneurs be successful in business. And at the time, they were talking about struggling entrepreneurs. And I always gravitated towards folks who were struggling because I have this, like, obsession about helping others and trying to, like, say, okay, I was able to help someone get better. And so when Nick and Omar shared their stories, it really resonated with me, just them talking about struggling franchise partners. Nick already told you what type of time we were in the recession, and they were new to franchising. And I kind of fell in love with the guys, their enthusiasm. And I told my group after they walked in, and I'm talking about just the passion on Nick and Omar's face is something I kind of truly fell for. You know, it was like love at first sight, the brand. And I told my group that day, we're meeting this Friday to go over this project, and we're going to be in the top five. There were about 60 groups that got the. The project. And I was like, I need to be in the top five, because I want to make a great impression to these two guys that it means that much to me. So that was. That's the first thing that I noticed with Nick and Omar.

They were.

They were humble, and they cared more about others than themselves. The franchisees. Now, I know selfishly, you got to care about the franchisees because that's how you benefit. But at the time I bought it, I ate it all up, and I. You know, I haven't looked back since. I was very persistent, like Nick said, and I. I'm grateful that they took a chance on me.

Yeah. So you. So you come back into the organization after you go, you know, continue your learning curve. Right. Your own path, and you come back in a slightly different role. So you're not the integrator yet. And then talk to me about how you learned what this integrator role was and how you began to process, thinking about, you know, is this something that I want to do and that I would be good at?

Well, as Nick said, Nick's one of my mentors, and he's big on books. He's big on processes. He reads a lot of books. To Omar's point, he's brought back quite a lot of books for me to read. If he goes off to a conference, he'll come back with notes. It's something I really love and appreciate about Nick. And he brought EOS to us. And as he gave us books to read, I would identify that I think I was similar to this role that was being described. But I never went to Nick and Omar and said anything about. Wasn't like I applied for the role or anything like that. We truly went out looking for an integrator. And while I feel like I am always, I have a pain in my stomach when I see things being done inefficiently or if there's no process or if you have to reinvent the wheel every single time. So I knew the role resonated with me. But at the time it wasn't about self doubt. It was about a matter of to Nick's point, I think I'm a little humble at times. And I said to myself, I would love to see somebody come in here so I could learn from them and hopefully one day I could potentially play that role for Nick and Omar like I told them back in 2009. So that was kind of the position that I was in. But as Nick was introducing the role to us, I found that I checked a lot of the boxes internally and I internalized that. And it wasn't until Nick and Omar came to me and verbalized that is when I realized it's not only me that observes that others seem to feel the same way, which is great.

So talk to me a little bit about the search. Okay, so before we say, okay, Roman, we think this is you. So you're out in the market, you're looking for somebody. What did that process look like? Did you get somebody to help you? Did you approach it just like you would hiring any other, any other position?

You know, I don't think we had a lot of experience hiring for executive leadership roles back then. We still, I think, struggle a little bit with that process. And so at the time, I think we had talked to a few recruiting firms, it was still, this was probably in like the 2000, I want to say, 15, 16 timeframe. So the integrator recruiting nomenclature wasn't as prevalent, I think, as it is today. I think we talked to a few folks from LinkedIn that knew the EOS model, knew the rocket fuel model, and knew sort of kind of how to look, go out and look for integrator specific positions. But we just didn't feel like we were finding something that felt like it hit the nail on the head. It was there were people that had relevant experience leading companies or VP of Ops type titles. But the one thing that I think was we kept finding coming back to with Roman was he had the finance and numbers down, but he also had sort of like the people relationship soft skills. And that was sort of a hard dual skill set that we were finding. It was like we would find people with numbers, but they didn't have quite sort of the logic or people relationship, you know, communication skills. We'd find people that were really gregarious and charismatic, but they weren't as data driven as Roman was. So it started to become more apparent that he has this sort of unique skill set of being numbers and data driven and logic based, but also having a really charismatic way of relating to people and helping them see the other sides of the coin. And I'll say that Omar and I as founders have a tendency to have very knee jerk emotional reactions. You know, you call our baby ugly, we're going to call you ugly. And whereas, like with Roman, it's like if somebody calls the baby ugly, he's going to try to unpack that and be like, okay, well, let's talk about that. You know, let's talk about the baby and let's look at is the baby really ugly or is that a perception of how you're seeing things? You're in an emotional state of mind. And so when we started realizing how he was able to sort of diffuse conflict with franchise owners or employees while also, you know, communicating Omar and Mai's vision and taking a lot of the weight off of our shoulders, you know, it started to feel like that entrepreneurial nirvana that, you know, the rocket fuel model.

I love that you kind of sense that need for both the detail orientation and the soft skills of being able to, you know, lead people really, and manage people, hold them accountable. Omar, I'm curious, as this all kind of started to become real and it sounds like Nick was kind of beating the drum for eos, and Nick's probably kind of beating the drum for, hey, let's get an integrator. And meanwhile, you guys have sort of had this, you know, this co founder relationship and now we're starting to bring some different kind of structure here with a different kind of a role, the integrator role coming into play. How are you thinking about that? I mean, early on, were you a little bit nervous or uncertain about how that might play out, how that might change things or what was your view?

No, I mean, I think, you know, it was sort of the same. If you just fast forward from when Nick handed me the myth to, you know, he handed me this book and again it just spoke to me. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's, that's exactly who I am. That's exactly all my problems. So if you are telling me, I always thought that just wasn't like not something that you talk about, you know, you had to do it all or you had to figure it out. And I was like, oh, there's that actual platform and a channel where that allows you to be this visionary and bring someone in that can then you know, hold people accountable and manage people and actually get things finished, not just started, which is something that I also have the, you know, I can start 100 things but I won't be able to finish them all or probably not finish one of them. So it was just for me it was like a breath of fresh air. I mean it took some time from the first same page meeting, you know, and then sort of fast forwarding to now. I mean it's evolved but it's just really to Nick's point is you can trace the success. Like that exponential growth curve really hit sort of right when those meetings started. And obviously it's not all because of that but you know that's, it was a big part of it and it just created the outlet for us to take the big chances 10x the business, look for the big elephants, look for the big marketing ideas and then really kind of carry the vision and the culture of the brand as public figures.

I think I'll add that I used to yell at Omar on certain things because there'd be certain follow through of things that he and I were sort of taking ownership of. But in some cases when you're trying to push a visionary into more of a management type role, it's like squeezing a square peg into a round hole. It just wasn't his natural inclination. So it's like Omar, you know, did you follow up with that report?

Did you finish this?

And I didn't like doing those reports. I just knew they had to get done. So it was like I was doing them and I was upset that Omar wasn't doing them. And then the. I think the other thing is that we hesitated a little bit. We, I think at least I felt a little bit of founders guilt of like hey, if we're not as involved in the day to day management or the employees aren't seeing us as much, people aren't reporting directly to Nick and Omar. If the franchisees aren't picking up the phone and calling us first, are we going to be viewed as like, hey, we're just sitting back drinking pina coladas, or do people think that we're still adding value? And so there was a little bit of that. So Omar and I actually even wrote. I think we took turns writing letters to the franchise owners and to the team members of the. Our evolved role. Like, what does it mean that we're moving from founders to visionaries? And what does it mean that Roman is going to be the integrator? You know, we took just a lot of descriptions of what those roles are to. To share that with the team so that it was almost cathartic for us to be able to put that on paper and then eventually send on that email.

That's a cool way to handle.

And, Mark, I'll just add one. One bit. What you're hearing from Nick and Omar, that introspection, that willingness to embrace our differences and awareness of your strengths, that's not typical. I talk to a lot of other folks in my seat, and sometimes the visionary isn't quite as introspective and isn't quite as willing to let go of the vine.

Right.

And so that leadership that they're demonstrating here during this interview just tells you why I was able to be successful.

Right.

Because we can trust each other. And I get the respect level that I think is required for this relationship to work, especially in a 2v1 situation.

Yeah, I can see why, Roman, why they really like and appreciate you. I've already seen you sort of defer when they were trying to give you credit for the big, you know, jump in the curve, and you're like, no, no, it's team effort. Right. And now you're giving them credit for how, you know, how introspective and how real they are, which is. You're right on both points. Right. And so that's just being honest and calling it like you see it, and that's super valuable, and that's scarce in its own right. But, you know, visionaries, I see again and again going through this on their own, they'll typically think of it as some version of being put out to pasture. Right? And it's kind of like, well, I don't feel like I'm doing anything. And the aha that they get to at some point, you know, y' all wrote letters, right? That was your way to kind of process this and try to communicate it. Eventually, what they'll get to maybe six months, maybe a year later, is they'll realize, and usually it's through the interaction with a really great Integrator that, you know what? Just because it doesn't feel like work to me doesn't mean it's not super valuable for the company, right? And the reality is, because Roman was able to take a bunch of this stuff and give you space and energy, right? So, Nick, all that energy, you're burning up doing that stuff that you had to be done, even though you didn't like doing it, right now, all that energy is kind of freed up to think and look out and kind of all this big stuff, right? Omar, you're talking about the big elephants, right? The biggest. The big things that are out there that we can kind of go take on. That's all part of unlocking the power that's in this thing. So it's really, really cool to hear how you kind of get to that place. So now let's get into the. One of the things I'm really curious about is, all right, so y' all have this really, to my eye, unusual structure with two visionaries. I get people that will come to me all the time and ask for this and ask if it's okay. And consistently, what I've seen work and what I've coached people into is, no, you want to have one visionary, you want to have one integrator. And the reasons why I teach that are it's about clarity of vision is one, and it's about where the integration happens. So think about this. When you have two visionaries and the integrator is reporting into the two visionaries, now, all of a sudden, it's a little bit squirrely because who's the integrator report to? Right? And when we teach about accountability, we always try to have that eyeball to eyeball accountability. So we get that integrator accountable to one person. And in effect, what the integrator has to do is they have to integrate that vision. So they have to kind of bring it back down into one thing and then push it back out to the rest of the organization. And then the other tricky part is for the two visionaries to stay on the same page, right? And stay aligned so that we can do this. So I'm really curious, how is this working? How are y' all doing it? Let's deal with first. How are you staying aligned? How are you staying on the same page? First, Omar and Nick. How did Omar and Nick stay on the same page?

So we do a monthly same page meeting, which, you know, if we're, I guess, thinking of it from a pure EOS standpoint, maybe this would be described More as like an owner's box meeting where Omar and I, we're coming together as what we're calling ourselves co visionaries, but we're kind of coming together and sitting in the owner's box. And then Roman is coming in as the integrator. And Omar and I have. Call it 100 ideas. We've come up with the past month on a spreadsheet. We're going down one by one. We're either talking through it or we're putting it as a to do for Roman to follow up with somebody on the team to follow back up on or leaving it as a parking lot item or a future rock. Or we're putting no action needed. We just needed to talk about it. And Omar and I and Roman are on a group text string where from time to time, if an idea pops into our head, we'll send a text and then one of us will remind the text string, hey, save this one for the same page. Let's not get spun up in this. Every now and again, Omar or I will do an end around and text one of the team members and throw them way off course. Roman will remind us, hey, save those ideas for the same page or go through me before texting. So and so to start working on this side of the website when that's not a priority right now.

So let me stop you there. So. So when that happens, so good on Roman for, you know, calling it out and trying to get you back on path. But when that happens, so when you do that, and I don't know which one to use, which one to use, the bigger offender, Nick or Omar? Omar.

I mean, it's not. I'm not. It's not a full 100%.

All right.

I'll say it's like 60, 40. It's like I want a little bit heavier. But Nick's not, you know, so here's.

Here's what I want to hear. Omar, you go first, is when. In that moment, when you're doing it, what are you thinking? Why do you do it?

I think it's just. I don't know if it's impulsiveness or speed. I operate, I think a higher speed level than it even should because it can be too fast for just too quick. And so I think it's probably impulsiveness and.

Or just so you're moving before thinking. You're just moving before thinking. Okay, Nick, when you do it, what's going on there? Why do you do it?

It's similar. I mean, I have a tendency to have Knee jerk reactions or if an idea hits my head, I think I'm going to forget about it. So I want to send to the person because I want to see it resolved or feel like I'm getting it off my chest. But one thing that did occur to me as we were talking through this is before Roman came along, I was sort of the de facto integrator and Omar was the pure visionary. That's kind of how we were operating. Even though we didn't call ourselves that. That's kind of how we were operating. And now I would say I'm almost kind of like. Because I'm very married to the EOS model, I'm kind of like this integrator visionary buffer. Like, I'm more of a visionary. I skew that way. But, you know, I'll try to remind Omar from time to time if he gets upset that Roman was calling him out to calm, you know, to calm down with rattling the team. I'll remind Omar, hey, look, we got to both chill out because it's attracting the team. And so I think that has worked well also, you know, from a dynamic standpoint. And then, look, we argue on the tech string as well from time to time, but that gets back to the way things were in the early days where no matter what we call ourselves or call each other on that text string, sometimes Roman's just a calm observer to Omar and my, you know, married arguments.

Well, I was gonna say that Roman's always got in a tough position because it's either 2v1, me and Nick started ganging up on him, or he's gotta be like the middleman with the in between, right? Fighting with each other. So he's got a thankless job sometimes.

I'll say, actually, to Nick's point, I think Omar is a pure visionary. And I think Nick sometimes does a really good job of seeing the bigger picture. And he will actually sometimes in reflection, will say, you know what? Or actually. But they're both guilty of the same stuff. And I think it's because I put up a lot of red tape, right? I know what limitations our team has, obviously more intimately than Nick and Omar do. I realize the bandwidth concerns, resource constraints, and quite frankly, just, you know, prioritization. So they will be like, to Nick's point, he's knee jerk. I want it done and I want it done now. And that's this thing in this moment. And then he'll have 10 other things he wants done now. The team might just feel like they're on fire. So for Me, I'm gonna put red tape. I'm gonna go sit down and talk to the team. And something that Nick and Omar might want done now might take two months if I get involved. So, like, at some points, they get frustrated with that, with me, right as this red tape, you know, and to Omar's point, he moves at a higher velocity, and I think it's a balance. I think there are many times where Nick and Omar have gone around me and it was fewer than. It's not the typical situation, but, you know, in the rare moments, that was the right thing to do because it was something that I probably would have put too much. I'm not going to say paralysis, but, you know, analysis by paralysis, but I probably have slowed down something that was a huge opportunity. And so the visionaries do sometimes take. They try to be good about when they do it. I don't think they do it quite as much as they think they do, because one of the things they do is they invest in me. They sent me to the COO alliance and I met with other integrators. They sent me to an EOS training program, and I talked to other integrators. And their visionaries are way more, in terms of seagull management, so much more distracted by shiny, shiny distractions. So I credit Nick and Omar for our success as much as myself and my team.

Yeah, love.

Yeah, Mark. We do an exercise where we map out our vision when we're doing the vision, the VTO stuff, because you kind of asked, how do we stay aligned from a vision standpoint? So Omar will actually write down vision, I'll write down vision. But then we'll have sort of as part of our same page, you know, figure out, where are we aligned, where are we divergent collectively? Where do we want to make sure we're all committing to? You know, the go forward approach here. So.

And what I'll. I'll just add to that. I mean, the one thing I'll say is, however many years, 16, 17 years of being business partners, we fought about a lot of things. But the one thing we tend to never disagree about is the vision, which I think was probably a rarity, that best friends and business partners can sort of make it this long, I think it's a credit to having that alignment of vision.

Yeah, no, that's. It's. It's special. It's special. All right, so one last question here that I'm really curious about. Are there anything that Nick and Omar talk about that Roman's not a party.

To No, I mean, it'd be more personal. Like, you know, we're still buddies, so, you know.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, business. Specific to business, but is there any business stuff that's kind of you carve off that's not part of this triad thing that you got going?

There's really not. I mean, it would be something very inconsequential or just not even like.

I mean, sometimes it might be impulsive stuff that we just forgot to include Roman on. And I'll give you an example. This is actually maybe an example of something where we jumped the line on a visionary idea, but it was timely. So a year ago, when the whole NCAA was getting ready to allow athletes to be paid, Omar jumped in his car, drove down to Miami and signed the quarterback of the University of Miami at 1201 in the morning to be. To be the very first company to sign a college athlete to an nil deal. Barely discussed it with me. He texted me about it on his way down to Miami. As he's going, he's like, hey, we're going to sign the quarterback at 12 midnight tonight. We're going to be on ESPN and it's going to be this great news headline. And sure enough, it was a national headline. Our company is still mentioning any news conversations around college athlete nil deals. And Roman kind of found out about that one after the fact, but it ended up being a great outcome for the business. But to answer your actual question, no. We did a more significant transaction in our business a year ago where we took on some private equity investment. Roman was the first person in our organization to be involved in the discussion that we were thinking about moving in that direction as founders and as the sole shareholders was intimate in what that would look like and very involved in the conversation. So from a strategic standpoint, there's really.

Ben. I looked at our text message, Nick. You didn't have Roman on. It was about a T shirt.

The last text message I sent Omar, which Roman wasn't copping on, was about a college hunks T shirt that said, you got me curious.

I'm like, what college? So I started looking.

So Roman, you know they've got this side text, right?

Of course.

I imagine every now and then they probably vent about me putting up too much red tape here, here and there.

Oh, wait, there's one more. There's the. The wrapped RV there.

Oh, yeah, Omar. Yeah, Omar's wrapping. Omar's wrapping his RV with college hunks. Kind of like the college game day RV from espn. So those are the kind of silly things that we end up talking about without because we just. We don't want to bother Roman with those distractions. Those are silly.

The visionary fun zone. I love that. Excellent. All right, Well, I tell you what, I really appreciate what you guys have done and what you're doing, and I admire, again, the two close friends being able to have that trust foundation and let the egos be to the side to grow, to get to a point you bring in, find somebody, identify somebody like Roman, that I can tell is a really special person here that I could probably guess that humility is one of your core values. I kind of hear that in the way that you guys talk to each other and give credit to each other. And so it sounds like you're making a big difference out there in the world. Anything before we kind of wrap this thing up, anything else that we got to talk about before we get out of here?

I mean, I just want to share a great deal of gratitude to you and Gino and the whole EOS family for putting this material out there for small business owners and entrepreneurs to have a framework to find follow that's simple, that makes perfect sense, and that actually works and is not impossible or difficult to execute or implement. So huge.

You saved my life.

Literally, literally, literally huge. Huge credit to you guys. And this is a surreal experience for us to be on this podcast to share our story and how you've been able to impact it and the thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of customers that we've touched. And so you've done that with so many small businesses, so it's really cool. Thank you.

Wow. Well, that means the world to me. Thank you guys. You're the whole reason. Frankly, I believe the entrepreneurs make all the difference and all the good we want to see in the world. Entrepreneurs can do a lot of it, so appreciate you living that out. And if our listeners want to get in touch with you all, what's the best way to do that? They find you somewhere.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or like a College Hunks or. Well, CollegeHunks. What's our website? Collegehunks.com Roman?

Yes.

Integrator.

What's the website spoken to you? A true visionary. Collegehunks.com, they both go to the same place and then we're all on LinkedIn and Instagram and any of the social media sites. Happy to connect with folks and applaud everyone listening for continuing on the entrepreneurial journey.

Fantastic. We'll put all that stuff in the show Notes. And again, thanks so much for being here and we'll see you next next episode.

Thank you.

Thanks so much Mark.

Take care. Bye bye.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I really hope you were inspired by our guests. If you're interested to discover how your current visionary integrator relationship compares to the relationship you'd like, I invite you to go visit rocketfueluniversity.com and take our free crystallizer assessment. You'll get both your visionary and integrator indicator scores and that's going to help you figure out your your next step. Chances are you've read Rocket Fuel but have you read the rest of the books in the Traction Library? From Traction itself to others like Get a Grip and how to Be a Great Boss, there's an EOS book for everyone in your company. Company. Order them now. To help all your people understand their roles and be better equipped to drive your business forward. Go to eosworldwide.com traction library to get started.