Tell me about your vision.
Yeah, thanks, Jax.
It's good to be with you.
So we have a vision.
I have a vision of creating more space and time
and hopefully money in people's lives through automation.
I'm inherently a lazy guy.
And if I can automate something, that
makes it significantly more beneficial to somebody,
especially if they're running a small business.
I have a soft spot in my heart for small business guys
who work their tails off.
And they get their butts kicked every single day.
And so that's the mission that we have right now.
From a product perspective, it gets a little bit deeper
and wider.
But from a delivery of why I'm here,
it really comes down to how do we help somebody
live a better life.
Very good.
We're going to be going deep and wide, by the way.
Especially this topic.
So one, I appreciate the thorough background
that you have in entrepreneurship.
You've been at this a while.
I mean, I was a young kid with glasses that stands by a car.
I don't know if you own or not.
So that's number one.
Two, everybody and their dog, really dogs,
are learning to talk about automation at this point.
And so the idea is cheap, the implementation of such.
I also have a very strong heart for entrepreneurship.
And with how many are losing at the game,
it's very important that we get the right advice
from the right people.
If you don't mind, tell me, let's let the audience
know about your background.
What all have you been involved in?
I love the vulnerability about the clothing line
and the disaster that was.
I love that you've drawn from different industries as well,
ranging from in-person, it sounds like local businesses,
correct me if I'm wrong, all the way to app development
and the online world of SaaS, which I would
include in the app genre.
Hit it.
And tell me about your background.
Yeah, so I graduated from college
and went to work for a financial firm, which
a lot of people did.
I didn't get a lot out of that in terms
of any personal development, although I
did get a chance to live in Texas, which was a highlight.
Woo!
Well, thank you.
I really found out very quickly I just wasn't cut out
to work for somebody else.
Unless it was an inborn vision that I had,
I had a very hard time executing somebody else's mechanical
process.
So right from the very beginning, I skipped out on that.
I went to work for a guy in New York City
who was an entrepreneur, helped him get his product, which
was taking this is in the 90s.
So I'm really aging myself.
But in the 90s, there were vacant buildings in New York
and owners who needed to figure out how to fill them.
And this guy had the idea that I would fill them
with students who could not find housing that
were going to the university inside of, say, Manhattan.
So we created basically these commercial dorms.
And I didn't like New York, so I didn't stay there very long.
But I hit that nail really hard for him.
And he filled up any building that he
could touch for the next five years
simply because I went out and I had the conversations
with the schools, who all, by the way, dropped their jaws.
Like, what do you mean?
You have a building.
We have a building that we could fill with your students.
And they thought this was just a magical combination.
And so my friend George did very well with that,
which I was happy about.
But I moved back out where I wanted to be into the country
and started to work in equipment leasing, which was a great,
yeah, just a really, it's a very esoteric business.
You combine finance, sales, personal acumen,
and a study of value of assets.
That's really kind of what we focused on.
And I got really good at it.
I did it for about 16, 17 years.
We grew a business.
Tell me a little bit about how you ended up in that.
So it's a big shift.
There you go.
It was my dad.
My dad was very successful.
He was one of the early dinosaurs in equipment leasing
and had a fabulous reputation, a very creative guy with numbers.
And so working inside that operation,
I learned quite a bit about how to solve problems for people.
And also how to develop relationships.
We were focused on really the Fortune 1000 companies,
so really better end credit kind of companies.
And so that wasn't a big part of the picture for us.
But getting creative with the different types of equipment
that they wanted to lease was really interesting.
We did a lot of computers, which was OK.
But when we started to diversify the portfolio
into other assets like machine tools, forklifts, process
and equipment or materials handling equipment,
it was you'd walk into these.
To lease a computer, you need to walk into and sit at a desk
with a guy.
You look at a bulleted sheet of description, and that's it.
When you lease something else, like some of these big things,
it was like you walked into Gulfstream
was one of my clients.
And they had these massive machines
to help bend metal.
And they were on the lease all this stuff.
I was really fascinated with it.
So we got really good.
Yeah.
This is not something you normally are like, oh, me too.
This is not one of those things.
But my grandpa owned McNutt Oil and Gas Tool Rental Company.
That was the largest tool rental company
in the world for oil and gas companies in its time.
So I never met anybody in the tool rental equipment space.
That was before my time.
But I got to know some things about the industry.
And I'm like, what?
How?
So yeah.
It's a very business-oriented way.
How can you help a company figure out
how to use the equipment they want under a structure that
is really beneficial to them and that ultimately is that you
position yourself as we were the owners of the equipment?
How do we position ourselves for a successful outcome
at the end, which was how do we get our money out?
Because these are all investments.
We were in the operating lease.
We were in what they called an operating lease game,
where somebody would identify the equipment that they wanted.
And then we would say, OK, we'll put a lease together for it.
And it needs to be an operating lease
so that they could take the payments as an expense.
And this goes back a long time.
Two major opportunities for the vision pros out there,
especially the ones who are, well,
let's go younger side first.
Get into industries and get experience.
That's what I'm hearing.
Take chances.
Go and go and learn about these opportunities.
If you've got parents with wisdom, too,
or grandparents, don't hesitate to dive into that.
And two, the business owners on the opposite side,
it doesn't sound like they necessarily hired you
because of your degree or because of your experience
in that specific industry.
It sounds like they understood that you were ready to go
to work and you wanted to learn.
And there's a lot of mentorship that took place.
And like you said, you hit that hammer hard.
You didn't say, I shied away from the work.
You helped me late.
You were lazy earlier.
But now you're telling me you worked the tail off in that.
And so I'm putting two and two together
for the audience members who don't necessarily
catch the path and the strength building that took place there.
So let's continue.
Let's go down this route further.
So you had two massive industries there.
What else?
Yeah, so then we took, so we ended up selling the business.
We ended up growing it and selling the business,
which was a terrific thing for my father in particular
because the goal was, how do we get him retired?
And we did a good job of making sure that happened.
And then I stayed on with that company
for a couple more years.
And then we parted ways.
And I took about a year off the dabble
in starting to build apps because at the time,
Facebook was really coming into its own
and building little apps that you could use on Facebook
became the thing.
And I didn't really get very good at it.
But I'd say one of the common themes throughout my life
has been an infinite curiosity.
I'm just not afraid to go try something
if I think it's worthwhile or even if it's just interesting.
And so the Facebook app building exercise
was an introduction to how do you actually construct
a tool digitally that does something.
You tell it to do this and then it does that.
So-
That's the least lazy mind I've heard all week.
So could you, can you show on though?
I'm loving this.
I'm seeing who you really are, man.
Go on now.
And so there was no great like financial benefit from that.
There was just a lot of learning.
It was like a whole nother, it was a whole nother education.
And along that continuum, I was approached
by a couple of guys who,
couple of investment bankers who said,
hey, listen, you're not in the leasing business
but we wanna start another leasing business.
And the product we wanna focus on
are Harley Davidson motorcycles.
And I said, well, tell me more about this idea.
They said, we think that there's a market for a two,
three and four year lease program
for pre-owned Harley Davidson's.
So I said, okay, it's really interesting.
I don't know anything about the bikes,
but we'll check it out.
So we did some research into the values of these bikes.
And if you look at the data of a new Harley Davidson,
a new Harley Davidson month one to month 36,
it drops like a stone like everything else.
But then it just literally stops and goes up a hair
and then it just floats off like a hockey stick
for 20 years.
I mean, it's unbelievable how stable their pricing is.
So I said, well, that's a good asset to lease.
And so we went about the process of getting
the number one Harley deal in the world on board as a partner
and raising a little bit of capital.
And we put together a system
which I basically engineered on the back of a napkin,
like literally.
I said, in my old business,
we had four or five different systems
that every transaction had to be input the same way.
And then those systems, tax, servicing, asset management,
and something else, I forget, payments or something.
Anyways, all four or five of those systems,
they had to have the same data put into them.
And it was so expensive and it was so rife for errors
that the first thing I said about the new,
this platform we called Chrome Capital was,
I want the data to go in one time into one system
and then we can peel it off and we can use it from there,
but no longer we're gonna enter the data more than one time.
And so therein lies the beginnings of automation
because once you have the data in there,
then you can start to manipulate it.
You can do things with it that makes some sense.
So we created an operating platform
for any dealer across the country
to input the things that they knew.
So they know the bike,
they know how much they wanna charge for it.
And then we gave them a tool to go ahead
and find out what the credit of the guy
on the other side of the desk was.
And we rendered a decision immediately,
which allowed him to build a lease in a platform
and in a format that we affectionately referred to as TGM.
Okay, speaking of charging for,
you're gonna have to start charging me
a consultation fee for this episode
because you're crushing it.
And so I'm gonna cut that off.
People need to, they want that value
and that was the amount of you.
We need to bring you back
where I'm not robbing you of your time
or we need to make sure that we're paying you for this stuff
because this is fantastic.
Okay, we're gonna shift gears real fast.
We're gonna go right into
where are you going with this vision,
ProValet.io, I'm gonna dive in on that.
Yeah, so that was started with a personal experience.
I had a difficult experience with,
I live in Florida, so we're fortunate enough to have a pool.
And we had an unfortunate experience
with the pool service business
where there was just this hard lack of communication.
And I didn't really know what was happening,
when it was happening.
Invoices would just simply show up
and I would pay them
because I could see that what they were doing was working.
But I brought them into a room and I said,
listen, we need to figure out a different way to operate
our relationship.
And I told them what I was thinking about.
And my experience in leasing
and the experience of building the leasing platforms
led right into this
where we had basically a three-party relationship.
There's the home office,
there's the guy in the field doing the work,
and then there's me, the homeowner.
And so we built a platform around that philosophy
that if we keep the homeowner informed
and we give the technician the tools to record their data,
they can do a better job.
And then when we feed all that information into the app,
into the admin app,
that somebody can actually look at
and manage their entire universe of activity in one screen.
So that's been the mandate here
is how do we effectively deliver business process automation
to the small and medium sized service business.
So, again, I had some experience building different systems.
And when we first started building this thing,
I originally thought, okay, pools, we'll do pools.
And then as we were building the system,
it became really evident that,
and this is through other conversations
with other different verticals,
but the capacity to create an agnostic system
was far more valuable than simply isolating ourselves
to only a pool proprietary system.
So now that sounds a little bit controversial
based on what you just saw on our website.
Just bear in mind that what we're doing
is we're focusing on pool service business
because like Carly Davidson's,
it was the most complex.
Let me dive in there on that.
Because Peter, our websites, all visionaries out there,
you compliment any visionary on their website,
they're gonna say, oh, well, it's not done yet.
Almost every single time, never heard anybody be like,
oh yeah, no, it's exactly, it's the past reality.
Once you publish it, it's already in the past.
So we're talking about the vision
of where you're headed with this.
It's easy to see the foundation that you've built.
I can also easily see why you guys are so ready
to move into other niches.
The systems are on point.
Somebody keeps going through that.
You feel free to keep going.
But I just wanted to say that,
that anybody who's judging an existing business
and the future of a business based on a website,
you're missing the point.
You need to talk to the visionary
about where they're headed, not what they've already done.
So where we're gonna take this,
I'm not sure that there's an original idea
anywhere out there.
There may be ones that you mashed together
that make it look somewhat unique.
And the vision I have quite candidly
is I want any service business across the country to say,
of course I use ProValue.
Why would I use anything else to operate my business?
Much in the same way that people who have
an e-commerce presence online
say the same thing about Shopify.
And so we have actually modeled this platform
after Shopify, both in terms of architecture
and having open APIs.
The flexibility to grow the business
with this architecture is,
I won't say it's limitless, but it's pretty darn close.
So we're really, really smoking happy about
the performance of the platform right now.
Really happy with the feedback we're getting
from the pool service market.
There are companies that have been out there
for 10, 15 years and we're flipping apple carts,
going into their customers and taking them
because we saw something several years ago
that was the benefit of a lot of,
and I'm not knocking these guys,
these other companies, they're great companies,
but they focused on was how do we help our field staff,
how do we help our company's field staff
operate more efficiently?
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.