Apple At Its Core

Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience.

Join?Tim Fitzpatrick?and?Justin Esgar?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

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Apple At Its Core

Tim Fitzpatrick: Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Just before we even went on air, I know that we're going to have a really good time with this conversation. With that, we're going to jump into it. Again, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am really excited to have Justin Esgar from Virtua Consulting with me today. Justin, welcome and thanks for being here.

Justin Esgar: Thank you so much for having me, Tim. I guess I'm the ugly of the good, the bad and the ugly, huh?

Tim Fitzpatrick: No, no, no, no. Before we dig into the meat of the conversation, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions. You ready to rock?

Justin Esgar: Let's go.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Very quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?

Justin Esgar: What do I do? I fix people's problems with technology is really the end all be all to it. We are an Apple consultancy that takes care of businesses who have Macs. We take care of residential people who have Macs. We fix hardware that is Mac. So we do everything there is with the Apple world. I have some side gigs that go with it. We have a conference and other things. We'll talk about that later. But all of it revolves around that Apple world.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's the most important lesson you've learned in running your business?

Justin Esgar: Listen to your wife. Honestly, wow, that's a really good question because I'm not sure. The fact is you're going to get a lot of advice from a lot of people. Most of it is bullshit. So weed out would be one of them. Weed out the stuff. Trust your gut. Your gut usually is right. And the other one that I would say is you have to have grit and determination to be an entrepreneur. People who are real entrepreneurs know that that garbage you see on Instagram of people being like, I'm a baller. So you have to have grit and determination. And if you don't have that, try drugs. I don't know.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You definitely have to have thick skin and you have to be willing to push through roadblocks. Because we all hit them. And gosh, when you think that you've got it all figured out, you're about to drop down the hill again.

Justin Esgar: If you think you're on top, you are not.

Tim Fitzpatrick: None of us have it all figured out. It's a constant work in progress. Okay, so this leads me into my next question, which is, we know that growing a business is tough. When you do hit those roadblocks, do you have any mantra or motivational saying that you say to yourself, share with your team to help push through those times?

Justin Esgar:I don't think I have anything that I say to myself, but to my team, I do try to bring positivity and gratitude and abundance. That's the new thing with entrepreneurship is having the right mindset. It's like a, Come on, let's go team. We can do this thing. But on a bigger, broader scale, that actually means something and it's not just fake. I think for me, the mantra really would be, this is a shit time and we're going to get through this together and I'm going to be here to support you to do whatever it takes to do that. And if that means buying a team member lunch because they're busting through tickets that day or giving someone day off or jumping on something to help somebody else or jump on a Zoom or do three things at once, so be it. So I think my mantra would really just be support your team truthfully and honestly, and not any of that fake old 80s mantra Don Draper stuff that we all learn about.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Do you find yourself sometimes jumping back into doing things that you delegated a long time ago when the chips are down or when you're just short staffed, right?

Justin Esgar: Yeah, totally. So part of our business is we get tickets, which means we get clients who have emailed us, they need help with their computer, we will respond. I have an entire support team to do that for me, so I can be doing things like having a nice conversation with you. But I took four tickets today just because either, one, I'm faster, it's in my wheelhouse, something that maybe my staff members don't know, or two, they're overwhelmed with the stuff that they have and I need to jump in on it. I think one of the things is we're a 10 person company. Even at that size, the owner needs to be involved, not micromanaging. I don't mean being on top of things, but I mean, they need to jump in when they need to jump in. We're not at that size yet where I never have to look at a ticket again. I would love to be there. But at this point in our time frame, the way our staff is broken up and who's doing what, I need to jump in, I'm going to jump in. And I say that to my team all the time, also, going back to the mantra thing, which is I just said to them, Hey, guys, I'm getting on an awesome podcast call. Before I go, Who needs me to look at anything? Are you all good? Let me know if I need to look at anything. I have 15 minutes. And everyone's like, No, we're good. We're good. We're good. But then there was someone who hit me with a DM and was like, Hey, can you just explain this thing to me? Cool. Let's do that. So getting into it is totally fine.

Tim Fitzpatrick: The first business I was a partner in was a wholesale distribution company. And one of the things that I found was as we grew and I continually pulled myself more out of the day to day elements, whenever we were short staffed, I always jumped in to help, and it was always eye opening because the way it used to be is not always the way it is today. As an owner, it brings additional visibility that you may not have. When you don't have your boots on the ground day in, day out, there's a lot of things that you can miss. I don't think it's a bad thing at all to take time to jump back into things and just go, Is this what it used to be? Or maybe not. Maybe we need to improve some of these processes here.

Justin Esgar: What's funny about this is that Tony Shui, the late owner of Zappos, he did something similar to this, just in a little different way. Anyone who started at the company, no matter what your role was, if you were coming in, you were going to be the new CFO, you had to do three months in the call center doing customer service calls before you went to your actual role. And that became the culture there because it allowed whoever was being hired to really understand the crux of what that business was, which was customer service. They're not a shoe company, they're customer service. You can call them and complain about your toaster, and they were going to try to fix it for you. Thought by Amazon, but they would try to fix it for you. That was his thing. And so that ideal of... I luckily got to see him as a keynote at the first South by Southwest venture adventure in Las Vegas back in 20... I want to say it was 2014.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Oh, wow.

Justin Esgar: Actually, really interesting story. This is an anecdote of it. I didn't think I was going to bring this up. But when South by sent out postcards about the event, on the cover, the postcard was like, like Tony Shui, these two women who were staples in the South by community, and me. And I was like, How did that happen?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Kudos to you.

Justin Esgar: Yeah, right? I guess I just looked good back then. So yeah, that model of everything you do is customer service focused, so you need to know what your staff is doing because you need to make sure that they're providing either the proper ways to talk to your customers, or they're getting bombarded by your customers, or whatever that interaction is, you're there because, like you said, the way it was a year ago is not what's happening today. A year ago, this time, we weren't as big as we were. We didn't have acquired the two companies we acquired last year, and we got two new staff members. So things are significantly changing a year, especially for us. So how is it different today? So I jump in and I go, Oh, why are these buttons in a different place? Or why is this looking like this? And I may even have questions for my staff. You would think I would know all the answers, but you don't. No one ever does. I go to them and go, Hey, what's with this change here? Oh, this happened because of that. Okay, cool. Now I can put these two things together and get to the end point for me, and then I can show the staff like the results.

Apple At Its Core

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So you touched on this a little bit. You have multiple companies, but everything is centered around this, for lack of a better term, Apple at its core. You like that?

Justin Esgar: I should use that as my memoir book. Oh, my God. This is why you're in marketing and I'm in tech.

Tim Fitzpatrick: There you go. So Apple at its core. What did tell me how this unfolded. Was it on purpose? Did it just happen? Walk us through that.

Justin Esgar: So all right, I'm not going to give you the whole history because you can look me up and you'll hear the history anywhere. My dad bought an Apple 2C when I was five years old, and then I was really always an entrepreneur, and I was always the Mac kid. I went to college and I did PCs, and then I realized Windows is garbage, so I got back into it. When I finally started virtual computers in 2008, I had already been in the Apple industry for a while. I was working for someone from 2004 through 2008, and I learned a lot about the Apple world and the ecosystem, what it meant to be an Apple consultant, which is a program at Apple, things like that. And so when I finally started my own thing, I became an Apple consultant. I worked for other consultants. I learned everything I could. I got real deep, real technical, learned all this stuff. Then I started to get a little bit more in touch with my entrepreneurial side. So in 2010, 2011, when the first iPad came out, they let out the app store. You can build apps, upload them to Apple, and then they would sell them for you. I was using my iPad in the bathroom, as you do, And I was drawing my name like a third grade girl, putting hearts over the eye and Justin, like that level of drawing with some paint program. I was living in Manhattan. I had a studio apartment. And at the time, I was giving paperwork tickets to clients for them to sign and me take home. When you live in an apartment, it's literally like this big. And I'm bombarded with paper. And I put two and two together here. And I said, Hey, if I could draw my name on this device, this thing, because the iPad was brand new, how can I have my clients sign their name on these paperwork tickets? My wife was working with some outsourcing stuff, so I learned about outsourcing, and I outsourced this design idea, and I created the first ever PDF Signature app called Sign My Pad. It was wildly popular back then. This is pre Echo Sign, pre DocuSign, pre all those guys. That got me on the speaking circuit of Apple conferences and Mac conferences talking about the reverse of the four hours work week. So instead of doing only four hours of work a week, if you do four more hours of work a week, you can make $90,000 outsourcing and building apps. This is the heyday of apps. Remember this. Again, very rarely. Getting on an that, I talked to a lot of other Apple consultants, ones that were outside of my geographic area. My office was in New York. I only knew the guys in New York. This got me to meet everyone else. And I learned so much about how they were running their businesses. I realized that so many of them didn't run the business the same way. A lot of them were just winging it. And so that got me to start my conference called Aces Conference. So here I am now with virtual computers, our software company, which is originally called Autrieve, and now I'm starting Aces Conference. All of these things are Apple centric. So I just climbed this ladder. Then Aces were going into our ninth year. We shut Autrieve down because it didn't cost... It was cost prohibitive to keep making the apps the way we were making them. And then we started, because of Aces, we started getting interest from people who were Apple consultants for us to engage in merging with them or acquiring their businesses, which was a whole new thing for us. So in 2020, we actually acquired a company based in Des Moines, Iowa. That was the first one. In 2022, we acquired another business that's based in Colorado that was a training company. They do B2C training. They teach people how to use Zoom correctly. So that was a whole new avenue for us. And then later in 2022, we acquired an Apple consultant who was also an Apple authorized service provider, meaning they can fix hardware. And I was like, Oh, that's yet another avenue for us. So while I've always been a Mac dude, I've always been laid back, Let's not worry about security guy, I like all of these things fell into place. So much like your Apple at a core thing, which, by the way, genius. I always look at it as a hub and spoke. The hub being Apple and all these spokes being consulting, training, hardware repair, conferences. We now do software again for IT consultants. So that's an offshoot. The conference, I have a Mastermind program offshoot of that. I've always wanted to do aces at sea because there's something about the letters jumbling and making sense. Not that anyone's ever getting on a cruise ship ever again, thanks to the pandemic. But all of these different things that spawn off of it. And they're all related to one another. They all come back to like... Now, granted, I have a lot of things that are not related. I wrote a children's book with my wife unrelated to Apple. I have the funny T shirt store that every entrepreneur has. It has nothing to do with Apple. But at the crux of our company, it's business to business IT consulting, business to consumer IT consulting and training, business to business business to consumer hardware repair, business to business coaching and training. We actually do one on one coaching with other IT consultants, specifically Apple consultants, because that's the world they're in. So all of these things play into one another. My involvement with the program at Apple called the Apple Consultants Network is moving up. All these things that just play into one another. And it all just came down to I really like their product. I thought the Mac when I first got it. I got my first Mac in 1992, I was enamored. This is an amazing thing. I went, true story, I'm Jewish. I got my bar mitzvah. I took my bar mitzvah money. I went to Comp USA. And with the cash that I had, I think I paid like 600 bucks for a 1 X CD Rom, not writer, Rom drive, SCSI, because it came with two speakers and like 10 CDs. And so I could hook that up to my Mac and I was like, This thing was amazing. What do I mean? Us CDs anymore. It was just one of those things. I was always so into technology. I always thought technology would move us forward. Not that it hasn't, but I'm getting off tandem here, but there's so much technology out there that just holds us back. I'm not really big on social media anymore and everything that's going on over there. All that stuff, I don't want to even get into it. But technology should be moving us forward. And no matter whose it is, Apple is moving us. I just think that Apple, and especially during the Steve Jobs era, really changed the game for so much. And it was awesome to be a part of it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Justin, you just dropped a ton of valuable information here. So I want to pull out...

Justin Esgar: I'll pass over. We're done.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I want to pull out a few things here because you touched on multiple areas of growth and revenue acceleration because I think a lot of us fall into this one track place when it comes to growth, and it's really not that way. I want to pull out some of the multiple ways you talked about. One, you've acquired companies.?Acquisition certainly is one way to accelerate growth. Second is niching and?specializing. You specialize in Apple computers. Somebody has a PC, they're not working with Justin. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it, but that's not where you play.

Justin Esgar: I'll send them over here. I'll put a Mac in front of their face.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So niching and specializing, another way. Third, that you touched on is just being open to additional opportunities that are related to what you're already doing. You see this a lot in private equity where they buy distinct but complementary companies and then they leverage the hell out of the audiences for each of those companies to go into others. You're growing and accelerating growth in multiple ways. I want to make sure people didn't miss that.

Justin Esgar: Let's talk about that last part for a second, though. I was asked one time, How did you find the opportunity? How did you find the opportunity to acquire these businesses? Listen to what I had just said where I ramped up these things. I met the people who I acquired by hosting a conference for them. They look at me and they go, This guy knows... I mean, if you ask them, they're not going to say this, but this is in my mind. I'm a little egotistical like this. They look at me and go, This guy knows what he's doing. I want to be a part of that. Or like, He understands all the pieces that I don't understand, whether that's human resources, finance, marketing, whatever. He can grow a business. And so I always say don't say no to an opportunity. But a lot of those times, they're not going to just hit you in the face. You have to find the ways to make those opportunities as weird as it sounds by doing all of these things. All of this started because I made an app because I use an iPad in the bathroom. I tried to make a second app and we blew it and I dropped $80,000 on an app that never came out. But I told a story about it and I turned that into a book, and that book turned into a speaking thing, and that speaking thing turned into me meeting people. And me meeting people turned into a conference, which then met more people than I acquired. It's not one thing and done. There was nine steps. Take a chance.

Tim Fitzpatrick: If you want to acquire Apple Consultants, well, you need to get in front of Apple Consultants. Where the hell are they? Well, they're at conference. I'm going to start a conference. That's certainly one way to do it. But when you have a very clear understanding of who your target market is or who your ideal clients are within that market, it becomes much easier to start to create that list of where the heck they are so that you're fishing where the fish are, not just casting a line out in the middle of the ocean. I love that.

So Many Business Owners Don't Want To Do Marketing

Tim Fitzpatrick: Let's talk a little bit about marketing. We got to talk about marketing on a revenue acceleration podcast. One of the things you said was your chief complaint about marketing was that you have to do it.

Justin Esgar: Yeah. It's always all in the play.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Which I love. Tell me more about that. What's the source of that? Where's that coming from?

Justin Esgar: So look, I'm business first, technology second. I always have been, which is what separates me from a lot of my friends who are in the industry. I understand marketing, I understand management, I understand human resources, finance, whatever. I'm just not great at marketing. For me, marketing is such the lowest part of my business plan. Just because I've never been good enough at it to stay with it. Now, the part of this happens to be that my wife is an excellent marketer. She actually runs marketing for Fortune 500. So anything I do pales in comparison to her. And I've leveraged as much as I can from her, all of our logos and most of our design and stuff like that comes from her. So when we talk about marketing in general, it's like, Okay, well, you need a social media calendar, you need a plan of action, you need to know who your leads are, you need to be able to write an email drip campaign, you need to be able to create YouTube videos. That's a lot. It's a lot for any one person to do. And I go to a lot of these... Everyone pitches me their services. Every MSP marketing company pitches me their service. I'm like, We'll do it all for you for $15,000 a month. And I'm like, No, I'm not going to spend that much money. Put your mouth where your money is, it's all really bad. Get me a client first. Well, we can't do that. Well, of course not, because your stuff isn't necessarily believable. Or better yet, the amount of people who hit me up on LinkedIn who were like, I'll get you 45 sales a week. And I was like, Have you ever worked as an Apple consultant before? And they're like, Nope. And I'm like, Then no. So, it's a tough thing because I personally do not believe... And you and I have not worked together and I mean, zero offense.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I don't take any.

Justin Esgar: I personally believe there is not anyone out there who can do marketing well for an IT company, specifically Apple, but an IT company. Here's why. When would you call for an IT guy?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Me?

Justin Esgar: Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is when I have a problem.

Justin Esgar: Exactly. So if I spent months and months marketing to you, you're not going to look at it at all. It might be something deep in the recesses of your brains, but you're not going to care until the day your thing breaks. And so the key is to be in front of you the day that breaks. Well, guess what? I'm not good enough at being that rigid with my schedule to do that. So I feel like I can't actually do marketing well. Maybe I'm wrong. I've been told by my business coach, I need to stop talking so negatively about myself. And I told her I'm not loading up on this one. But it's that consistency thing. And as a business owner, you need the time to do that. I'm a business owner of multiple businesses with staff. I have two little kids at home. I have an eight year old and a four year old. I make dinner for my family. I want that family time. I don't want to be working all weekend trying to do YouTube videos. I have to come up with content, film the video, edit the video, get it out there, put it on YouTube, make sure it's working right. Then repost it on LinkedIn, make sure the algorithm hits it right so I can actually just repost the link. All of this stuff, on top of which I have to remember how to fix your computer. Just so much. So for me, I don't want to do... It's too much. I just don't want to do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You don't want to do it. I want to pull more out of this because, again, you've dropped a ton of good stuff here. Because look, the reality is a lot of business owners feel the exact same way you are. They're like, Oh, my God. I feel that, Oh, my gosh. He's speaking my language. There's a couple of things that I think are super important. One, so many people are battling information overload when it comes to marketing. There is so many different marketing channels. Our immediate default is like, I have to be in all of these places. And the reality is most businesses do not. You need to be very few places. You need to be in the right places for you to see success. So you don't have to be everywhere. You got to choose what's right for you. And by the way, what's right for you, Justin, may be totally different than somebody else. There is no one size fits all marketing plan. You're starting from a different place, you want to achieve different things. Those require different plans. But we don't have to have a podcast and be on YouTube and LinkedIn and create content and all these things because it's just overwhelming. I think that's one thing that's important to keep in mind is you don't have to be everywhere. When you eliminate that need of feeling like you have to be everywhere, all of a sudden it doesn't become quite so overwhelming. The second thing you touched on about, Hey, when do I need IT? Well, when I have a fricking problem, right? And depends on who you talk to, or I don't even know where the statistic is, but I always default back to anywhere between 5 % to 10 % of your market is ready to buy at any given point in time. So knowing that that's the case, the way I look at marketing is the job of marketing is just stay in front of and top of mind so that when the problem becomes so painful enough that they're looking to change... They may be totally happy with the current IT provider until the wheels come off and they're like, Dude, these people totally screwed up. I need another IT person. And at that point, we want them to think of virtual computers or virtual consulting, whatever the appropriate company you own may be. But if we're not top of mind, I was in real estate for a while, and in residential real estate, same in commercial, they say, Dude, if you're not in your f you're not in the top two people they think of, you're never going to get the business. And honestly, I think that's appropriate to any business. When the problem becomes so great, if they don't think of you in those top two, that's it. The only way you get in the top two is just by being consistent, just by being there.

Justin Esgar: There it is. It's the consistency that for a business owner is really hard to do.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It is.

Justin Esgar: Everything you say is on point. And I 100 % agree with you. If you're a small business, if you're a small to medium business and you have your single thing going on, you should know who your avatar or persona is. You should know where to be hitting them. You should know exactly where they exist in the world, whether that's on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. And you can go after them there. Totally makes sense. The consistency is the hardest part for any small business owner. I'm sure you know this. And that, I think, is a big thing for me. So I've been trying to be more consistent with exercise, for example. I'm now working through that, got that on lock. Now we're going on to the next thing. So literally, in my to do list, it has every day, did you read? Because I need to be able to read it. The next one I have, that is, did you market? It's one of those things where can you keep that consistency? I think for smaller companies, for entrepreneurs who are looking to really grow, put the time in. And it's not that I don't. I do a little bit of marketing. We do have our YouTube channel. We do have our LinkedIn post and whatever it is. And because I have so much stuff, I'm doing times three because I have virtual gravity in my mentor. And there are three distinct audiences nonetheless. But the fact is that you, the listener, can hone in and focus on one thing, and you can totally do it. You can crush me because I'm not doing it. You can do better than me. But have that consistency. Have it on your to do list every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, to post to insert where you're going to post here and do it every day for six months. And the problem... And this is what I hear back from people also, because I do talk to a lot of consultants, they all say the same thing. Well, I don't know what to post. Go on a rumor... For tech people, go on a rumor website and just repost that or whatever. Post a graphic. We're recording this, I think, a month before it's going to come out. I'm going to say that we're recording this, February 28th. March first is National Bad Customer Service Day or something, or Stop Bad customer service days. I don't know. It's one of those holidays. I looked it up, whatever. Cool. It's already scheduled to go out for one of our LinkedIn pages. Stop getting bad service, come use us. I'm putting it on all of our channels because I don't know where our people are yet. But you can pre empt that stuff. I went to Canva, I created a LinkedIn graphic. I wrote some words and done. Content doesn't have to be full form, three hour long podcast audio, whatever. The way some of the big entrepreneurs that we all listen to say it should be.

Tim Fitzpatrick: No, it doesn't. Yeah. Justin, it just goes back to outlining what your priorities are, not biting off too much. If you bite off more than you can chew, then you're going to get overwhelmed. If you focus and hone in on those priorities, it becomes much less overwhelming. And like you touched on, one of the biggest roadblocks with content is what am I going to post? But the reality is once people get in the habit of creating content, the ideas are not the problem. The ideas are plentiful. They're out there. Jeez, in IT, go on to some Reddit forums to see what questions people are asking and answer the damn questions. It's everywhere.

Justin Esgar: You know who James Altacher is?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, yes.

Justin Esgar: So a long time ago, he wrote a book, I don't remember which one it was, but in the book he talks about exercising your idea muscle by literally every day coming up with... Pick a topic and come up with 10 new ideas for that topic. You'll see that you could get through one through four or five pretty easily, six, seven, eight, tough, nine and ten, really hard. But if you do that all the time, even if you're just reusing one through four, that's your idea creation. It's really not that hard to come up with stuff.

Tim Fitzpatrick: There's a ton of stuff. Well, in the IT space, again, you guys have people that are calling up with support tickets. Every single one of those support tickets could be a video or a quick post. There's so much stuff.

Capitalizing on Strengths: Identifying the Top Three Advantages of Owning Multiple Companies

Tim Fitzpatrick: You have multiple companies. What would you say are some of your... Let's just say your three biggest strengths as opposed to weaknesses. I'm not going to go, Justin, you only gave me two. What comes to mind here, man?

Justin Esgar: What are my three biggest strengths? This is the time. Okay. One of them is the ability to see things that a lot of people don't see. So for anyone who knows the entrepreneurial operating system, EOS, also it's been fictionalized in that book, Traction, right? There's the role of the visionary. I fit that role really, really well. I'm really good at coming up with ideas, getting them started. I'm not great at finishing them. That's okay. I know where my place in life is. But I would say my strength is being able to look at a scenario and figuring out what to make it work better. I'm also really good at fixing things. That same scenario situation where I can go and go, Oh, this is what's wrong with it. You need to fix it. I might not fix it, but I can figure out what's broken. And then the last strength, I would say, my third strength would be my ability to do stuff like this. It's not always easy to be able to be a good guest on a podcast. I've luckily been able to do that for a while now. I chalk that up to one being a motor mouth, and two taking comedy lessons and sucking at it. It's horrible at stand up, dude. It's so bad.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I don't know if I could do it.

Justin Esgar: But my ability to talk to people, understand things, and sound like I at least sound like I know what I'm talking about, because I'll tell you, I'm sorry about this in a second. Looks good. All right, so true story. I was doing this. I was on a PR circuit. I got on MSNBC, or no, CNBC, CNBC. And I was down on the stock floor and I was being interviewed. And someone had asked me some question I did not know the answer to at all. They asked some financial question. My answer was like, I owned house and just shrugged it off, and they went to the next person and asked them. And later, a friend of mine who's a financial analyst is like, That's not what they asked you at all. I was like, Whatever. I look good doing it. Who cares? So that ability, which is lend me the ability to talk to customers as well. If I extrapolate this one out a little bit, I have the ability to talk to a customer. I have a customer who's mad, I can talk that customer off a ledge. I can help them through their problem. I can figure out what's going on. A client calls me, Oh, my data is missing. I can't find my stuff. Where's my... And I can recognize who it is, what their personality is like, how do I manage, and how do I balance their personality? Because different customers have different personalities. So I would say that ability to listen and talk has been actually probably one of my greatest strengths. Might be a little bit of a weakness, but yeah, I would say those are my three. Okay, cool. I never thought about that before. Now that I'm done talking about those three, I'm questioning whether or not those three really are.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, dude. No, I think... Because one of the first things that came to mind when I asked that question was how you led with just your ability to see things that other people don't. Again, it goes back to the first question we talked about with Apple, you were open to seeing these other opportunities to branch out, and a lot of people wouldn't think about that. I definitely think that's a big strength.?

Examining The Key Drivers Behind The Growth Of A Company

Tim Fitzpatrick: What do you think has been the biggest driver or had the biggest impact on the growth of your companies?

Justin Esgar: My innate desire to have a lot of money. I hate this because my business coach tells me differently, tells me I shouldn't do this. My wife tells me I shouldn't do this. My wife's famous, I shouldn't do this. I'm literally driven by money. I know it sounds petty and people shouldn't talk like that, but let's all be honest here, folks. The reason you're in business is one of two things. You either, A, want a lifestyle business, one that can sustain your life and put food on your table and give you the ability to go snowboarding on the weekend or whatever you guys do in Colorado. Or you want to get filthy rich or at least partially the way there. I honestly believe that every entrepreneur, and I'm going to ask you this question, should have a large, hairy, audacious goal. I forget which book.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Big, hairy, audacious goal.

Justin Esgar: Before I say mine, Tim, what's your big, hairy audacious goal?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Oh, man. I would tell you, at this point in my life, my big, hairy, audacious goal actually is changing. The first business I was in, I wanted to grow it as big as possible. We sold it and then I got out of it. My goal at this point is to just have a positive lasting impact on the people that I come in contact with. So that's not really a BHAG as much as it is more of a mission or what drives me.

Justin Esgar: Yeah, but it's still valid because you want a positive, inly impact every person, right? Because you never want to leave history. Mine is a little bit more petty. I want a jet with my logo on it. I was thinking about this the other day. I was thinking about this the other day. There's no reason why my job should exist. I can't say that in 10 or 20 years that my job is even going to be necessary with everything like AI and stuff coming up. The question is, what legacy am I going to leave? But if I had a plane with my jet with my logo on it, yeah, that's going to be a legacy. But it doesn't matter what drives the person. I have a list of... And here's my list right here. I'm going to read it right from my whiteboard. I can shoot my eyes blind. Number one, Gulf Stream 280. Number two, two week vacation only only one of which I require to not be doing work anymore. Number two, stop taking this weekly call. Tickets and prompts, start doing more closing deal networking and acquisitions. And number four, save $100,000 in cold hard cash. These are attainable. And those are the driving things to get there. Does that mean that's where I'm going to stop? No, because I'm going to keep going beyond that. But that's where I am in my life. Maybe I should stop watching succession. I don't know. But that's where it's at. Everyone's BHAG is going to be different. And it's okay. What drives you is okay. Gary Vee's whole thing about being driven by like, he wants everyone to know who he is, and he wants to leave a lasting legacy of kindness and cuteness and fuzzy bunnies. Cool. That works for him. But that's not Elon Musk's driving factor. That's not Bezos' driving factor. That's not Brant's. Look at all of these big wig entrepreneurs that we all look up to or listen to or hear from all the time now. And they're all so different. So it doesn't matter, I think, that what you think of my driving factor... If you guys think, Oh, my God. I can't believe this guy wants a plane. Whatever drives you, if your driving factor is, I want to stay home on the weekends and do nothing, cool. Do that. Work towards that. Hustle your ass off Monday to Friday so you can do that. You know what I mean? But I get told a lot, stop saying that money is my driving factor, but I know my place in life. It's cool.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Justin, like you said, there's nothing wrong with that. What you want is what you want. I don't think that you need to justify that or anybody else needs to justify that to anybody.

Justin Esgar: Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick: There we go.

Justin Esgar: Tim says about you.

In Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick: So I want to ask you one more question before we close it out, which is, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently?

Justin Esgar: All of it. Honestly, all of it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It's a tough question.

Justin Esgar: Well, because here's the thing, right? Would I honestly do anything differently to get to where I am? Probably not. If I knew everything... If I knew everything I do now, then I probably would have started certain things earlier. I probably wouldn't have made the mistakes I've made. But those mistakes I've made is what allowed me to do the things that I've done. If I didn't drop 80 grand on this program, I would have never finished writing my business book, which would have never been the catalyst to get me on stage to do the thing, get the conference. None of that would have happened. So I can't say there's anything I would do differently. There's micro things I would do differently. I would use a different piece of software than we use for certain things, or I would have acted on something a day faster, or I probably would have left the company that I was working at and started my company earlier. But had I done that... This is a story. I started my company. My first client ever when I started my company was to fix the hard drive of this world's computer, that girl is my wife now. Had I started earlier, that wouldn't have happened. So it's hard to say I would do anything differently. I think it's just the micro things that wouldn't have changed the overall. But I still would have been here right now on this podcast with you, Tim, talking about these things in the end.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So did you bill your wife for the work that was done?

Justin Esgar: I billed her boss, absolutely. $150 bill to fix the argument.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Oh sude.

Justin Esgar:I have to say I'll have to come back for part two in order for everyone to hear the story about how I traded her business cards for dinner, and I still have the best business cards in the industry.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay, there you go. I love it, man. We never know where our path is going to take us. So I love it. Justin, where can people learn more about you, connect with you?

Justin Esgar: Yeah. So Virtual Consulting is the big company that has everything underneath. Virtual computers is our B2B. Find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Justin Escar. That's not true. I think there's some kid in Texas, but I'm the one you can find me. I'm the one with the North Star. https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/justinesgar/, you'll find me. But virtual computers is going to be probably the easiest way to get to me. If you need help with anything with your Mac, give me a call. And if you need anything help with your marketing, call Tim because clearly I can't do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, thank you for that. And thank you for being here. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I know people will enjoy listening or watching it. So thank you, Justin. Please connect with them over virtual consulting or virtual computers. We'll make sure those links are in the show notes. We've been talking about growth, revenue acceleration. If you want to know which of the nine roadblocks are slowing down your growth, head on over to?revenueroadblockscorecard.com. In less than five minutes, you'll be able to discover and assess which roadblocks are slowing down your growth. You can always connect with us over at rialtomarketing.com as well. Thanks for listening and watching. Until next time, take care.

Connect With Justin Esgar

• Linkedin

Links From The Episode

• Virtua Consulting

?About the author,?Tim Fitzpatrick

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