Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode here on The Daily Grind. I'm Colin Morgan and today we have an awesome interview lined up for you all. We are joined by Mr. Mo Abbas, who is the CEO and co-founder of Acadium, a remote apprenticeship marketplace for digital jobs.
They help candidates get training, networking, and hiring opportunities for free. These include roles in social media, content writing, graphic design, and much more. Mo is an absolute stud of an entrepreneur. He has an unbelievable story you guys are gonna love.
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Well, Mo, Abbas, welcome to the Daily Grind, my friend. How are you? I'm fantastic. Thank you very much.
How are you doing? I'm good man. Mo, for people being first introduced to you today, if you wouldn't mind kind of sharing a little bit as to who Mo is and what it is that you do. Yeah, my name is Mo Abbas.
I'm the CEO of Acadium. Acadium is a place where people around the world can get networking, training, and hiring opportunities for online jobs for zero cost. So we created a remote apprenticeship marketplace where you can get training with a business owner. It's one-on-one.
It's three months long, 10 hours a week. It's totally free from candidates. For businesses who are providing this mentorship and the apprenticeship, they get help in exchange for that mentorship. So it's a win-win for both sides.
The candidates, these apprentices, they get job training, work experience. They walk away with confidence. They walk away with testimonials. They walk away with experiencing from the resume and businesses.
They get help from their apprentice 10 hours a week for three months. It's unpaid. This is a training relationship between two sides. And when we built Acadium, we saw a world where tens of millions of people are coming out of school every year with no work experience and unable to break into the job market.
And this has actually gone much more aggravated with COVID. So we said, how do we help these people? And from our own experience working with interns at the time, we said, on the job training is the best way to get training. So how do we enable everyone to get on the job training?
And then we looked at what we were doing with small business owners and we were working with these apprentices, helping them launch their career. And then we said, what are we going to enable other businesses to do this? What if these hundreds of millions of small businesses around the world, what if they could provide job training to candidates? And that was like the spark of Acadium.
We built this apprenticeship marketplace. It's for digital jobs, things like social media, content marketing, email, marketing, graphic design. A small business owner who doesn't have a lot of money can get help in these different categories. In exchange, you give feedback, they give guidance, they give the candidate an opportunity to gain work experience.
And it's a life-changing for the candidate. It helps the businesses grow. It also helps them find amazing talent. I hired a lot of our staff in our marketing team who started off as apprentices.
I have an apprentice right now that I'm likely going to end up hiring as well. Because it's a great way to find talent. You get to work with them for three months. It's risk-free.
You're not paying these huge salaries out. They're super talented and motivated. They're here to prove themselves. And it's just a fantastic way to find talent for businesses and a great way of launching a career or switching careers for candidates.
When did you start at Acadium? What year? You know, we're going on our third year right now. And it's been a while, like we're building a marketplace that has a global scale and it's completely free to candidates.
It's very low cost to businesses. And yes, it's about three years now we've been out this. Would you do before this? I'm curious as to kind of your background.
What got you started? I'm an entrepreneur in my whole life. So if you want to get to that background, I was going door to door now. I was 10 years old.
My family came here to Canada as immigrants when I was three years old. We came as war refugees. And Canada was very gracious to us. We had nothing, like literally nothing except a couple of suitcases that we came with.
And my parents didn't speak any English. And they came with four kids and my mom was pregnant. And you know, it was tough. Not going to lie.
Things were, it was tough. We ended up, you know, we first came here. We had a little tiny bit of family. We're staying in a two-bedroom apartment.
And there was nine of us at the time. Yeah. We ended up getting some subsidized housing from the government a few years later. And you know, I was 10 years old, going door to door, selling different services to help my family.
I wouldn't keep any of the money. It would go straight to my parents. But I liked it. I was, I was the kind of kid who was outside all the time.
I was always hustling. I was on the streets. That's where I was. My mom was too busy just trying to make ends meet, you know.
And my dad was working all the time, making minimum wage, just to support us. And so I had a lot of freedom as a child. And I would use that. I was beyond the streets all the time.
So 10 years old, going door to door, got a ton of experience, really liked doing that actually. And to me, there's, I'm going to meet people and like, just have conversations and stuff that's pretty cool for a 10 year old. What were you, what were you going door to door for when you were 10? Yeah.
So I mean, I was selling my own service specifically. I started selling chocolates, which is like, whatever. But not just like door to door. I was also like selling them, you know, strip molds.
And I got really good at it actually. I was really one of the top performers. I really liked sales. It was something I really connected with.
It was like, were you telling me that I could work and I could generate my own income? Like, that was something that was like really, it unlocked a new world for me. Because I didn't like, you make no money. And then all of a sudden you're making like 80 bucks a day, you know, as a 10 year old.
That's a lot of money for a 10 year old. Yeah. Yeah. And I did that for a while.
I ended up, you know, I actually got my first job, like official job at 13, which is slightly below the legal age. I just turned 13. My uncle was managing this pizza hut and he got me the job. And I was by far the youngest person there.
So that's not about work ethic. You know, door to our sales. This is like work ethic. I'm the youngest person.
And you know, that was, I worked for a bit for other people between, let's say, 13, 16, 16, 17. And then I realized very quickly that it just didn't make a whole lot of sense. I had some really ambitious goals in my life. And I wasn't going to get there working in retail or a pizza hut.
And I know it'd be wrong. And retail was actually making a decent amount of money because it was, again, commission sales at that point. And I just, I just really early in my life made a decision that I want to be an entrepreneur super early. And my God has paid dividends.
When, when I was 18, I, this was my, I switched from being employed a bit of a contractor. I actually got to travel to British Columbia into the deep forests in British Columbia as a phone repairman. And the same thing in Miami and Palm Beach. And that was a big eye opener for me, actually, because, you know, I never seen wealth before.
And here I am, I'm 18 years old. I'm a phone repairman at this time. By the way, I don't know how to fix phones. I have no idea what I'm doing.
I literally just sold myself into that position. And it was great. I'm making $32 an hour plus 100 bucks a day, you know. So I'm making about $43 an hour and 18 year old.
And frankly, I wasn't really working very much at that time. It was a lot of, you know, it was after Hurricane Katrina, everything was disorganized. And I didn't even have to fix these phone lines. But what I ended up doing really well, because I'd go meet these homeowners and just have a conversation with them and get to know them.
And they like that more than fixing the phone line. And I didn't even tip me sometimes. I didn't even picture all my like, why are you kidding me? But what that really did for me is it showed me like, these are normal human beings.
They're not any different than I. Like, I'd go to a house that's like 10,000 square foot, got a yacht in the backyard, it's in a gated community. That's like unbelievably like, spectacularly wealthy. And I'm a kid from the hood, you know, like, what is this?
Like, how does this even exist? It blew my mind. And talking with these people that just were normal people, it was nothing really remarkable about them. I just other than, you know, maybe obviously very successful, but it made me realize that I could be that.
And that to me was, you know, I've always been an ambitious person, but there's a difference between like seeing something and experiencing it and then just intellectualizing it, right? And this was like seeing it. And then I came back to Ottawa after that contract. And, you know, I had my parents out, I ended up saving over money and that helped my parents out, essentially gave them about a third of what I made.
And I had two thirds left to start a business. And I was 19 at the time. And that's when I became a real entrepreneur. I had a lot of street hustles, tons of those.
And, you know, I took that. And this inside of like, you know, I could become like these wealthy people. They're not any different than I. And I started a business again, going over to work at this time, I'm a lot better at it.
I set up a crew. I set up roots. I set up a script. You know, it was, we were doing long work in asphalt work at that time.
And it was great. Like, I myself was doing it as well. So I was making my own cash plus cash from my crew. And I was like a $500 a day in cash at that point, right?
And I'm 18 years old. And I mean, a lot of other things happened in my life. I was overweight when I was 16. And I spent about two years just getting incredibly fit, which was actually something I think anybody who wants to change their life, the first thing I would tell them is just change your diet, frankly.
I agree. Change your exercise routine. Because that's going to immediately have cascading impact if you get more energy, more confidence, you know, look better, like you just unlock so many things when that happens. So I did that.
And that was its own journey, frankly. And then boom, I had these landscaping companies going door to door. And it was great. I was making this cash.
But very quickly, I realized that it just wasn't going to get where I want to go. But it was very useful because it allowed me to make more cash. And specifically, what it allowed me to do is in the off season, because it's a landscaping company. So we have a winter up here.
So you can't do it around. In the off season, I would go to chapters, it's a bookstore, a second to go or a bunch of nobles in the US. And I would read every day for eight hours a day. Okay.
And is that because you like to read or is that because someone told you like to be successful, you should read? I used to read a lot of fantasy books. So growing up, I was always a voracious reader, but in fantasy world, which also had a lot of impact on me. Like, you know, the consoles have been big impact.
But I said, you know, there was this thing that happened to me where, and that was a key catalyst, actually, and that was like why I ended up getting in shape. You know, there's something, when I was 17 years old, I gave you a little bit of backstory there. Before I went to these contract, before I got fit, I was overweight. And, you know, I was working fast food, 16, 16 years old, I was 16, I was working fast food.
And I was just lazy. I wasn't doing it, right? And I had this girl that I was infatuated with all throughout high school. And event, I was so persistent.
Like, I spent like two, three years just trying to get with her girl. And eventually I did, like, for like a week. We were at a friend's house and we were having a few drinks, you know, obviously we shouldn't be doing that. But and I'm with her and another friend and her, and she was saying, and I ended up getting this phone call from some people about, I referred them to some other people and that went kind of sideways and they were blaming me for that referral.
And they're like, oh, come at us right now. And I'm like, I can't. It's just making sense. I've sent you a referral while holding me accountable for this.
But they were like really out of us. Okay, I'll have a conversation with them. I'm here to come by and chat about it. So they came by and I ended up getting jumped, beat up.
Yeah, it was crazy. And it was really embarrassing. Because it happened in front of this girl I just spent three years trying to get with. And the next day she dumps me, okay, which is even worse is to add insult to injuries.
It's a rough point hours. I have to see this guy in school. It's like, I got to see this guy. I'm in the hallway.
He's over there. And like, I just got beat up from him. I just got dumped by her and I'm overweight and I'm broke. And I said, this is bullshit.
Man, this is, you know, freaking bullshit. This is not what I want in my life. And then that's what I made a decision. I said, I will not put myself in that position again.
And then I'm going to control the everything within my control. And the first thing that was in my control was my body. So I just started training with crazy. And then I got super fit.
And then from there, once I had that base, I moved on to money. And then I did that contract work and then I came back and started doing the store door work. And, you know, so that's kind of the backstory there. But when I was doing the store door work, and then in the off season, I would go and read nonfiction books.
I learned how to speed read. Again, I had a lot of background in reading, but I learned how to speed read as well. So I read a book of you two, three days. And I did this for about two years.
You're in half to two years. And then I learned a lot. And that was my education. I didn't go to school.
I'm a high school dropout. I didn't go to school. I didn't have to go to school. Why would I go to school?
I didn't go to school. It didn't make any sense to me. Like, I have friends that are in school learning nothing, spending money learning nothing. I have a bone to take with school because, you know, my friends don't know anything, but they don't want to do in life.
And then now they're like taking all the student debt to do something that they're not even sure about, but they're not even learning anything else. I saw it. So I'm pragmatic. Like, for me, like, I have to make everything myself.
So I'm not going to borrow money that I have to pay for. I don't have parents to pay for this. Like, you know, I'm not going to pay for that. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
So I decided to get my own education and chat in this bookstore. And I did that. And then, um, not enough for two years. And then I'm like, okay, well, you know, landscaping, going door to door door.
It's just not going to make you wealthy, right? It's not going to get you a big market. And there's only so much leverage you're going to get that way. So I had a friend who was working out at a gym.
And, uh, at the time, they're looking like, okay, it was like this, like half a million to million dollar project. And I'm like, I'm about 20 years old at this time, okay, like 19, 20 years old. And he's like, he knew my father was a tradesman. He was a Tyler right, right?
He's a handyman tradesman. And he said, came over, do you know anyone that could fix that could do this renovation? I'm like, well, you know, maybe I could do this. But that decision at that time sent me off on a whole, that was hard man, like, you know, on 19, 20 years old.
And all of a sudden, you know, I somehow got this half a million dollar at the time contract, okay, that could be million dollars in the second phase. And I actually read this gym, like it's a commercial project. I'd never picked up a hammer and threw up a piece of drywall before. I didn't know what drywall was by the way.
I was like, yeah, gypsum board, like, yeah, gypsum board, right? Didn't know idea, right? It didn't stop me when I was doing telephone repairs. And certainly it wasn't going to be stopped now.
And although, you know, the stakes are much bigger here. So it was hard. I'm not going to buy that contract. It was very hard.
Like, it turns out that the reason why I got the contract is because the owner was a swindler, who swindles contractors. And here's a spoolish contractor that doesn't have the experience that we're just not going to pay. I didn't know that at the time. I'm new to this game.
And so I knew a lot of my own money to build this person's gym. His premier fitness, you might know who it is in Toronto. John is the owner of a premier. And you completely hustled me, right?
Like, and that could have killed me, frankly. So, but, you know, looking into that, like, here I am 20 years old. I'm in this gym. And I have no idea what I'm doing.
I have no network. I have very little capital. Definitely not enough to fund that whole project. I don't have any experience in the trades.
And I have to do this really complex combination. And I remember, you know, it was like 2 a.m. And I was breaking down the center block wall. And I was full of dust, cake.
Like literally, you can like, it was cake, like a half an inch thick on me. I was sweating by myself. I had like a one light and it was a pitch black everywhere else. It's in a basement.
And my hands were bleeding. And I'm just like, what the fuck am I doing? Why am I here? But I don't quit.
I'm not a quitter, ultimately. And I couldn't quit or I'd lose everything I built at that point. So, I ended up just figuring it out. I didn't really make any money on that project.
But I ended up at least recovering what I spent on it, which is not a situation. I lost, like, maybe about six months of time. And I kind of broke even at that point. And then I said, damn, that was really, really hard.
I probably shouldn't be doing that. And I ended up focusing, I did one more commercial project. That was also really hard, because I had to be able to union on that. I'm like 20 years old, fighting the union.
And this is a carpenter's union. It's like one of the most powerful organizations in the world. Obviously, I lost that battle. And but that taught me a lot at the same time.
I'm like, you know, I'm going to focus on my own skill sets, residential. Because in residential, I was able to work directly with a client. And then you can influence the outcomes that way, right? Like a smaller project.
You can do more of them. It's one-on-one. You can do service. You can, you can just manage things a lot.
Very transactional, very ruthless. And people are there to like rip you off. Like you're dealing with sharks who are not nice and don't care about it. Residential in a relationship base.
You know, I ended up focusing on residential. And then from there, I actually had to do a million dollars. Just focusing on my strength, which is sales and marketing, frankly, and in service. And a million dollars are Starbucks.
I didn't have an office at the time. And so boom, all of a sudden, a few quick moves. You go from losing all this money and suffering, and like not going anywhere to, you figure out what does work. And that led to a million dollars in sales at a coffee shop.
And then it's like, I'm not even an office. It's just getting a little much. And I need to get help. So what I would do is I started getting some of my friends involved and paying them permission only for work.
And it's funny enough, these are all my friends who went to school and can find jobs, right? They're working a lecture or two shops, why not? Hey, yeah, you can work a future shop. You can come and build a career here.
And they came, and we started off with a little basement office, and we ended up taking up the whole basement, and moving to another building very quickly. And we went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars within like five years. Very, very quickly. And early on, we didn't have any money, but we need to go to business.
We'd work with interns. And these were unpaid interns. And for them, they got work experience. They're able to launch their careers.
For us, it gave us a better talent pool. We'd hire from a quarter of my staff started off in this way. And that's where the unique insight for Acadium started. I want to experience that with that.
I've launched the careers of dozens of people who came, and we gave them the feedback, the experience, and mentorship. We hired them. I'm still in contact with a lot of them, right? This is relationships you build.
And it was really magical. I didn't really think anything of it. I was just being honest with you, an opportunistic office. That's pretty much where it ended.
And so fast forward, we built this construction company. And it was really magical. You could imagine it doesn't have your childhood friends. No doubt.
It must be so fun. And we built it across Canada, right? Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver. We had all these locations, and I'd be traveling.
It was hard. It was really wrong. It was very hard. There's a lot of near-death experiences.
Not like any other startup. You just, it's hard. It's a grind. This is what it's all about.
If you're not in for the grind, what are you doing in the 20s? What are you expecting to do in your 20s to build for your future, it requires upfront energy. So when you build a business, it's kind of like kind of body building, frankly. You could.
It's a lot of upfront energy to build a muscle. But when you have that muscle and you want to maintain that muscle, it pays you a lot of dividends later in life, right? I think muscle mass keeps you, and you live longer for it. But if you build it earlier in life and you just eat well and train regularly, like you don't always, you don't got to always, you don't got to look like a body building or something like that.
It pays dividends. That grind you put in in the gym today will pay dividends in your life for the rest of your life. Again, if you don't neglect it, of course. Same with the startup.
And it was hard. It was a lot of grind, a lot of learning. Again, I know, I know experiencing it. I know nothing.
I know networking, nothing. We ended up building one of the largest, it could be one of my not the largest residential design build companies in Canada, certainly one of the largest in North America. And that was really cool, magical experience. I want a lot of words along the way from my business and myself.
I found the board for the Better Business Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce, you know, things that like locally are impactful. But there was a time where, and don't give me like, along the way I had two kids. I came by 25 years old, right? That grind was real.
The real grind. But if you accept that in your life, that's it. It doesn't matter. It's just work.
Work is work, right? If you're working there, I'm okay with work, then that's just, you know, what value you're creating at that point. So I had a lot of success and construction and making a lot of money. Like, you know, I'm in my 20s making a million bucks, right?
And a bunch of real estate and successful by any stretch of the imagination for a 20-year-old. But it wasn't, I didn't feel like I had a lot of impact. I did and I didn't. But it just wasn't, like I looked at my life and I said, if I continue doing this, I could probably make, you know, probably get a hundred million revenue to achieve an idea within my life.
It was kind of realistic. It really hard to take a long time, but it was definitely within vision. But what is the impact of that, right? Sure, I have a nice life and I really have a nice life.
It's like, it doesn't really change my life at all, actually. But it's a lot of work, a lot of stress, and it's not really impactful. I wanted to do something more impact. I don't know.
I've always felt like, you know, at least for myself that if you figure out your mission and your purpose, which to me is usually the most meaningful mission in life is to service other people. It's to create a positive impact, frankly. And that's what I want to do. I want to create a positive impact on a more significant scale.
And I didn't look at some costs. I said, I did this in my 20s. I was no experience on that work. I can do it again.
It doesn't matter. I'll figure it out. Okay. And, you know, I made a decision.
I said, you know, technology is the way of the future. I didn't choose construction that intentionally. It was just like, Oh, it's a big market. It wasn't even happening.
It kind of happened. And that's okay. You know, I have a model which is keep moving. Like, you're better off to move forward than to like sit and stagnation to figure out what your life career path is, right?
So another one is go first, right? So just go first. Like you had the best, just do it, right? You're off just doing something, then not.
And I was happy with that. And actually, frankly, so I still own a significant part of construction company and it's given me great cash flow. And I knew that. I'm like, you know what?
Sure. Like, I'm sacrificing a lot. But I want to do some more practical technology was a way to go. And I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do.
And I started working on a side project with my co-founder and Acadian Richard. And at the time we were building a social media app. And, you know, we were hiring interns for that. It was just like a couple of us, you know, we're friends and we're just working on this technology project.
And Richard turns to me when we bring on intern one day. And he's like, no, like none of these interns have any experience. He said, why are we building a social media app? We have like 200 applicants for this one position.
They're all willing to work on payday to get experience. Why are we doing this? Like, what do you know about social media is unique and impactful. And I was like, ah, Richard, don't worry about it.
We're just being a forensic business owner, just worry about our business, not like this other thing. And he left it alone. And then again, we bought another intern and he saw how that one worked out. And he's like, Mo, like again, like, this doesn't make any sense.
We have, and I'm like, you know what, Richard is right. Because he was right. Like, we were babbling in the social media app. Like, yeah, we had like tens of thousands of users.
But he just wasn't really, wasn't impactful, frankly. It wasn't even sticky as a product. And I had to ignore the sum cost on that. And I was like, you know what, Richard, I didn't want to do that.
Okay. Because I don't know, I'm going to talk with the sum costs from it for a second, actually. I didn't want to do that. But I said, you know what, let me test this.
So I put up a landing page and I started sending some of candidates to that to see if they would convert and be interested in getting work experience in a more, you know, systematic way, and that counted. And then I put up a pay wall. I said, well, what do you charge people for this? We didn't have a product, by the way, you could put on this.
It was just an idea. There's like a landing page website. It was just a landing page website. Now we sent people to and no product, just like a pitch.
And I was like, my worst case is even the money back. No harm, no. Sure. And that's what we did.
People are paying for this. Like, they're paying us to work on pain, which didn't really sit well with me. But I was like, that's not quite how we want to do it. I said, okay, Rachel, it's obviously something here.
So we ended up, you know, building out our courses, which allowed us to get liquidity on one side of the marketplace and the candidate side. And then we ended up creating what we coined as a digital kind of shit. So we had a lot of experience with interns, but we there was a lot of pro under the internships is the problem. It's not a great, like we were doing it well, the vast majority of businesses and interns are, they get taken advantage of, businesses don't know what to do.
It's quite frankly, it's a shit show. It's an unregulated space, two million of these happen in North America. And it's completely unregulated. So we said, this isn't what we want to do.
We want to be in a fair exchange of value. We want to regulate this marketplace. We want to make sure that everyone walks away in a win-win situation. And the first thing we said is we're going to scrap the word intern, because that's a relationship between the human being and a corporation.
And that's not what we're trying to build. We're trying to build a human-to-human relationship. And a partnership model, as it was back in the day, is the most effective way to get trained, frankly, to learn her experience person. And you're back in the day to give you an award.
They wouldn't pay you. It's a little bit unpaid, but they'd give you a place to live. And then eventually it was subsidized wages where the business would pay less than market value for seven years. We actually got a great deal out of that, because they trained you in the first year, and they're like six years of value at a real market.
And we said, the world is very different. But the idea of a partnership, it's still a magical thing. It's still a valuable thing. And so we want to do digital friendships.
And why are we focused on digital jobs? Because what we realized is that's the place where the most pain is. And why is that? Before the internet.
If you're talking about the early 90s, the cost of education was reasonable. But more importantly, the job market and higher education were moving at the same rate. So if you came out of school, you were more likely to be job ready for the job market in the 90s than you are today. And why is that?
Because the internet created a new class of digital jobs. And these digital jobs wasn't a big deal, right? Because there weren't very many of them in the late 90s. They were just coming out, right?
Digital marketing was just coming out. But over time, the internet got bigger and bigger. And these jobs, it changed so quickly that higher education, frankly, can't keep up with this change. And so you end up in a scenario where students are coming out of school and unprepared for the vast majority of jobs with their digital jobs.
And they end up getting crushing an experience gap. And you see this all the time, they come up with a psychology degree and they're just going jobs in psychology. In fact, the amount of graduates in psychology this year, the next 10 years of vacancies in psychology, there's more graduates this year than the next 10 years of vacancies. I believe it.
Right. So we decided to focus on digital jobs. And COVID obviously accelerated that quite a bit. That's a massive step function.
And number one, the need for digital jobs. And number two is higher education is not all remote. And why is this a problem? Why is this such an aggravated problem now?
Tens of millions of people today are unemployed. Tens of millions are more of becoming unemployed. How are they going to get trained for new jobs, specifically digital jobs? Because that's what the future is in going.
How? Three options we have. Higher education can train them. We know it doesn't quite work well.
It costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, has poor health. Okay, pretty clear what's happening there. And the other option is, so we can get a lot of details. I'm not going to do that right now.
The other option is you can build a new infrastructure. So you can iterate the existing infrastructure higher education. That's very unlikely. Although it is the biggest existing infrastructure that could train these people.
It's just you have to iterate it. They don't really change easily. The second one is you create a new infrastructure. And you see this all the time in boot camps, which are becoming more and more popular now, right?
These boot camps will train you in six months a year. You pay them, you know, 20, 30k. And that's how you get trained. And don't give me work experience.
But it's a higher quality training for less than time and money. And then the third option is what we did at Acadium is we said, what if we could plug into an existing infrastructure? Like there's a hundreds of millions of small businesses. We believe on job training is the most effective way to train.
What if we could get them to do job training? There are people going to be hiring anyways. They know what the in demand skills are. And that's what we did.
We built our marketplace to enable that. And it's been growing up quite a bit since then. I've been talking a lot. I don't have some questions.
No, man, it's a great story. I mean, a few things kind of jump out at me, like especially early on, as you had mentioned, you know, doing is better. Like stagnation to me is death. And I think that looking at kind of your path, you just accept like you weren't closed off as to what you could do.
And I think so many people when looking for something to do, they're so focused on what's my passion. And yes, that's important. But oftentimes passion is found through doing, which when I look at yourself, that kind of jumps off the page of me. And that's something that I believe in for people.
I mean, most of them great artists and creators are prolific. How many podcasts have you done? Right? And if you don't care, what do you lose?
It was a little bit of time, six months, right? That's the beauty of a cadium. Is it a apprenticeship? So three months, 10 hours a week, you could go and test whether you like social media or content marketing, or email marketing, graphic design.
And if you like it, great, go ahead and do more. You may get hired by your mentor, but you can use that to get hired somewhere else, right? Such as a way of getting experience and getting out there. But you need to take shots.
When Gretzky says, you miss 100% of shots, you don't have. Right? So highly recommend this. And you just, you can't pick like it's such a hard thing to pick the winner.
And quite frankly, it's the journey will, well, the journey will uncover these things for you, right? Like you're going to figure these out by doing something not where people make mistakes, is they do something, like they get a job and it's a dead end job and they stop moving. That's what the mistake is. It's not in, it's not in going from zero to one.
It's in from staying in one, and not moving forward, right? Yeah, so true. Or staying in six, right? Like, I mean, it's one of those things even, you know, as you were talking, trying to word this in the correct way for people.
But for you, you got to a point where you were fed up with where you were. They were kind of two key points. One where you got beat up, the next day you got to go to school, you got broken up with. And the next is like, you had this great business, but you kind of got to the point where it sounded like, it's just, it's not really what I want.
Like, you want to help people more, you want to serve more, you feel like there's a bigger opportunity. But like, those are probably boiling points where you've been thinking about that for a very long time. It's a decision that you have to make. I think so many people, they want something different.
Like, they want their life to be different. Maybe they want to make more money. They want to be in a different job. They want to move from one to five, five to 10.
But they're not at that point where it's bad enough. Like, they're just comfortable enough where they're like, well, I pay my bills. I get to, you know, play a little bit of sports, hang out with friends. I mean, I live an okay life.
Yeah, complacency is the enemy of progress, if you want to, it happens all the time. Like, they're comfortable, they're safe. They're, they're frankly, they're afraid. A lot of, like, fear is a big deal.
Like, the fear of the unknown versus, so I'd rather be able to bother, like, now, or do walk into this unknown situation where I don't really know. It's just, it's scary, right? When I went from landscape into construction, that was scary. When I went from telecom to landscape, that was scary.
When I went from construction to technology, that was scary. Frankly, going, and you would think it's easier. It doesn't get easier. It was way harder to move from construction into technology.
The pain in doing that, the unknown, the fear. You've got to understand, I was the top in construction. We don't know what, like, everybody do, they still know me. I mean, I'm in another game for a while.
I walk around and I'm like, I'm freaking me, celebrity in that world, right? And I go into, into nothingness. Like, in the technology world, it's your joke. You don't know, you're not an engineer.
You're not a designer. You don't come from a technology background. You have an auto-onterio. Where is that, right?
Like, you are absolutely nothing. And frankly, you don't know anything as well. So I got a, I got a really big ass-caking, I kind of brushed over. And I lost a lot of money, actually, in that pivot.
It was, it was the most painful, difficult thing I've ever had to do so far. I expect more difficult things in my life, only a third or less through my life. But so far, that's been the most difficult. And that's okay, to be honest.
Because a lot of the time, people make a mistake in thinking short-term, without understanding long-term thinking. You got to play the long game. Who cares if you suffered for two years? You got to freaking 60 years ahead of you.
But that's a blink. Like, that's, that's not that relevant. Not a long time thing to figure something out, by the way. But that's what I recommend is, is you budget two years.
And if you got to suffer, I've never met anyone who's suffered and walked away a worse person. So true. So what are you afraid of? Yeah, that's, that's where a lot of new ideas come from.
That's where a lot of entrepreneurs like yourself, right? Like you growing up and you seeing that, like, you go, you having to go door to door when you're 10 years old. So many people are afraid to pick up a phone and, you know, call a pizza place. It's just the reality of like a world we live in.
But, you know, it's like you said, you can't be fearful. You have to be able to do things. And, you know, if you fail, what is the big deal at the end of the day? As long as no one's dying, like, you'll be all right.
Do you do fear settings? You can imagine worst case scenarios. And like, often they're not that bad. Like, if you quit today, like, what?
Oh, worst case, you're like, for another job. You can even just search searching for the job. You have to quit. There's ways of risk managing, frankly.
Like, you don't, a lot of the time you walk through the exercise, like, Oh, wait, no, if I do this couple of things, actually, it's not that bad, right? But they just never get there, ultimately. And I'm looking at the problem with fear is it's a very valuable thing. What they kept us alive for a very long time, especially living the wild.
We have the system that was built into our brain that's part of the animal brain that's inside of us, which is this archaic thing that's very reactive. And frankly, that's exactly what it is. It's reactive. It's not a proactive thing.
Something happens and you're afraid, right? And if you let that dominate your thinking, you're just not going to go very far. Don't get me wrong, there's usefulness to fear. But in today's world, you know, the stakes are not what they used to be.
Like, you could either run mushroom and die. You could, like, be chased by an animal and get killed back in the day. You got to be careful what you do. Like, fear was a very, you know, if you were paranoid, you would survive for sure, like, you know, back in the day.