Deal Generation for Private Equity Groups With Joe Zanca

Josh
 Hey, good day, fellow dealmakers. Welcome to the deal scout on today's show. We're going to have a conversation about deal, Jenn, Joe, welcome to show. 

 Joe
 What's going on, Josh. Yeah. 

 Josh
 Great. This is awesome, man. Deal Jen, is that , lead gen, but for deals, kind of explain what that is. 

 Joe
 Yeah, that's basically, what is, in a nutshell, our company specializes in going out and finding deal opportunities for investors, private equity companies, helping mergers and acquisitions companies get deals across the finish line. We took the word, lead gen is going out and finding leads for a prospect, prospects for your clients, maybe in some other fields. When it comes to the businesses that we operate, they're looking for deals. That's why we decided to go with deal gen instead of, traditional lead gen. Okay. 

 Josh
 I like it. I like it. Cause in, I've been in marketing, a long time, lead gen is just like, here you go, fellas. Like what, how do you see lead gen being, different than just, tossing over a lead, like, Hey Josh, here's his phone number? What, what do you guys do different? I would love to hear your story, man, on how you got to this place. This is super fascinating. 

 Joe
 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think what we do different, it's lead generation is, it can come from all different places, right? Like you can, run traditional digital marketing where you might get a lead through running SEO campaigns or you might, run some Facebook ads around what you do and, leads might come through your website or, they might come through, referrals who, have like, if you, for example, my background, I used to operate, a moving and storage company. We actually had some specific clients that we would want to work with, but friends and family would just think moving and storage and anytime they knew anybody that was even remotely doing something related to a truck and moving something from one place to another, they would think they had a lead for us. So, while we completely, we're thankful for every opportunity that they thought of us at the end of the day, leads can be kind of misleading. 

 Joe
 That's a interesting thing that I've kind of learned. It comes to deal gen, we're trying to, there's this, there's kind of an art of making a deal. A deal has to be, something that's good for both parties. One party in our world, one party has to want to either make an investment or buy an existing asset. Another party has to want to receive that investment or sell what they have. You have to, understand what the value is for both sides. There's different values on each plate and then create a deal, where there's no winner and loser, right? There's, there's more of like a one side, got a piece of the value that they were looking for. The other side, got a piece of the value they were looking for everybody, hopefully, is mutually beneficial. And, and so we go out and try to find deals where we can understand what our client who is typically one part of that equation wants and what they are looking for, in a deal and then go help them find, the other end of it, where it's someone who's looking to let go of what our client wants, ? 

 Joe
 And, and that's, that's where we kind of take it a step further. 

 Josh
 Yeah. There's almost like a tug of war and I've worked incorporations and PE groups and such, there's almost like a tug of war between sales and marketing will toss up a lead, right? Like I could equate it back in the day when I was doing real estate, I got a lead from work in the floor and it was to sell a, a little grandmothers, mobile home park or mobile home, not even a park, a single mobile home in the national forest, which was like a 30 mile drive from me. That was the lead where my true desire was to work with investors, buying in, doing spec houses, right. There, and, fix and flips as well. That was a big difference between the lead of the mobile home versus what I truly desired. There was always this tug of, and I like how you said it, a misleading lead. 

 Josh
 It wasn't a good deal for me. 

 Joe
 Right. She wants to sell that mobile home, but you don't necessarily want to represent her, like, but there's probably someone else that does. Yeah. If were, if you were our client, and we don't operate in real estate, but let's just say you were our client part of finding you a deal would be understanding that. The understanding that you're not looking for the woman with a mobile home, 30 miles from your house, you're looking to work with investors. We would, craft our offerings and craft our messaging and build our campaigns around the idea that you're looking to target investors and not, the other types of leads that might come through that other people, from the outside, looking in, who don't understand your world and what you do might say, this is a lead, but in reality, it's not what you want. So it's not a lead, 

 Josh
 Lead is not a deal, right? 

 Joe
 They, a lead is not a deal. A deal is definitely a few steps past the lead where a deal is now forming. You know what I mean? Something like you've taken the lead to a qualified prospect and then you've taken that qualified prospect and found out what they want. You've combined the two parties to form the beginning of a potential deal. And we're looking to do the deal. 

 Josh
 Awesome. Yeah. I like deals too. I'm a, I'm a deal guy, Joe, let's go backwards. Let's, let's kind of, how did you get your start in this, kind of give us your entrepreneurial journey as a maker. Like, what did that look like for you? 

 Joe
 Yeah, no, of course. I went to Babson college where my current business partner, Brian also went and while I was there, Babson is a very entrepreneurial school. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I got there. But, I took a bunch of classes about entrepreneurship. I learned a lot from, just actually creating our own business while were in college. It just seemed, it seemed like the only path for me. So, I was never a good employee. I never, I just, I needed to work for myself. A year after college, I graduated, I started a company with two classmates of mine and it was called on-demand storage. Basically we operated, in the moving and storage world, particularly focused on storage of physical goods for, B2B and a lot of B to C clients who were looking to, declutter their garage or something like that. 

 Joe
 It was great, I, it was great in the sense that we built it from literally nothing to, a seven figure business. We learned so much in doing so, not only about we learned a lot about what not to do by, falling on our face and losing money. I've kind of learned myself that oftentimes the only way to learn to truly learn is by doing something and failing or by losing money, what I mean? Cause then you realize, Hey, I don't want to do that again. Let's avoid that trap and let's rethink how to do that. We had many of those instances where we learn those things, but in growing that company, I learned a lot and I tested a lot and work with a lot marketing agencies and learn a lot on my own about how to generate prospects and get in front of clients and market, and position what we had to offer to who we wanted to do business with. 

 Joe
 In doing that, I kind of learned a lot about the tools that, we can use to not only get in front of those prospects, but then make it more of like an automated process where now this is happening every single day, without someone actively having to do it, or it's coinciding with all the active work that we're doing. If I'm a salesman and I'm, or a CEO or president of a company, I'm picking up the phone and sending emails and doing all this stuff, now I'm using some tools to double down on my efforts where I'm going to still do that every day. At the same time in the background, we're going to have all these different engines running to bring more prospects and more potential deals to the table. I learned all about that running my own company. Then, in last year in 2021, I sold that business. 

 Joe
 I did that, I took a step back and I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do next. And, a lot of what I want to do next was doing that, continuing to build out those sales engines and build out those, platforms and use the tools that I had really learned to kind of master and get good at and use them for myself, continue to use it for myself, but also, introduce clients and other businesses to it. We, I joined forces with Brian Scanlon, who, is a good friend of ours and he, he was running his own digital marketing agency called posted social. A lot of what Brian focused on was traditional digital marketing, SEO and Facebook ads, stuff like that for clients. He had this whole other piece of his business where he was running a lot of the same engines that I'm talking about, using LinkedIn as a prospecting tool, using email to not just mass spam people, but to actually really get, in depth and build out the right lists and send personalized emails to the right list of people. 

 Joe
 You know, it's so powerful. And so he was doing that already. When we came together, we've kind of looked at each other and said, Hey, what are we best at? What, where can we add the most value? At the time Facebook was, a lot of people are struggling with Facebook right now because it's just gotten so much more expensive than it was four or five years ago. We S we basically niched down our offering to be pretty much all what we like to call deal gen, which is a combination of, direct marketing. We like to call it direct marketing. It's using LinkedIn using email, using these different tools and them into a sequence that just makes sense. We actually took a step further, after testing it, with our own businesses and, using it for a lot of different clients, we figured out, not only what position, what industry we think it works best in, but what industry we want it to focus on too. 

 Joe
 It was a good, I think both are very important. That's what led us to, this kind of private equity and mergers and acquisition space, along with the fact that Brian had a background in that space for years, so he understood the pain points and what these people, what these individuals who are in that space truly need. We just took a long, hard look at it, combined everything together. And, here we are today with, thousands of clients and it's, it's just been fun to see it all come together. 

 Josh
 Awesome, man. I appreciate you sharing the story, man. It seems like every single college, person somehow ends up in the moving industry right. Or, or moving stuff around. Right. Cause we're young, we're strong, I've worked at a few, you created an on demand storage. Now, how did you think of that niche rather than just a moving company? What differentiated you between a traditional moving company, two guys in a truck and on-demand storage. 

 Joe
 Good question. We wanted the cool thing about storage is that it's recurring. There's a recurring revenue aspect to it where, you get a client and basically the model is simple. You either rent or buy a large space and then you divide it up into, a bunch of smaller spaces and you rent those smaller spaces, similar to an apartment building. You just, it's the same exact model. It's a big building with a bunch of apartments. There's a big warehouse with a bunch of storage units. If you get a client, what we realized before we even dove into that world is that the average storage client actually stays in storage for over two and a half years. We kind of just had to go out and find, as many people who were looking to store, excess stuff and fill up space. That's what we want to focus on because, moving is, there's a lot of people who have been kind of mastered that business and made a living out of it. 

 Joe
 You're kind of only as good as your next client, and it's a really intense business to be in when it comes from like all the different moving parts, the amount of employees you need, the amount of trucks you need, the amount of insurance you need, the amount of new leads and new opportunities you need every single day, versus the storage ended. The peak of the business is more, Hey, we can get this one lead and have the pay us over and over and over again. That's why we branded ourself as on demand storage. Now we would do. The company still to this day, does do some traditional transportation and logistics, but it's very storage focused for that recurring aspect. The fact that we need less people and less trucks to do it. 

 Josh
 Yeah. Well, it's super smart because you mentioned, I worked in the moving industry and you're constantly fighting to get that next deal, but it's how often do people move their house or their office not very often. It's like you spend all this money to acquire a customer, you do the job, and then it's onto the next, whereas you guys would spend all this money to get the customer. The average customer would stay two and a half years on an average storage. It's really brilliant how you guys did that. That seems like a really smart business model. You mentioned that one of the ways that you guys had to learn and grow is by failing, falling on your face and losing money. What are some lessons that you've learned that you could share with us and other fellow makers? 

 Joe
 Well, there's a few, I think being really mindful of your overhead when you're starting a company is something that we learned the hard way. We, I mean, in our business, we had to rent space, right. In order to do what we want to do, we needed space to do it. We would take out, we actually rented the first few warehouses we had and we would rent, and sign these three or five-year leases and then have to fill the, backfill the space with customers. It was really it, wasn't the only way to do that. You know, it really wasn't. To us at the time, it seemed like the only way to do it. You end up sacrificing, a lot of your own personal pay and your own personal, wellbeing for the sake of filling that space. That was one thing that, taking out loans, racking up debt and getting, signing documents to get overhead. 

 Joe
 When you're just getting started is something that puts a lot of pressure on you personally, and the business. What I kind of took away from that is like, we really got to think long and hard before you leap, ? And I always encourage people to leap. Cause that's the only way you're actually gonna get anything done, but think long and hard about like, am I doing this the most effective way before you do, like with our new business, post the social, we've kind of been very mindful of like, yeah, it will be easy to go, downtown. Especially now with COVID like, there's probably so much like office space available, but at the end of the day is like that unnecessary thing for us to get clients and do good work. Probably not. You know what I mean? So yeah, we could go do it. Traditionally businesses do have, this fancy downtown office space with windows overlooking the city, but why would we do that? 

 Joe
 You know what I mean? Like we don't, we're not there yet, nor do we ever really even have to get there after really thinking about it that long and hard. That's something that like kind of really stuck with me is that like, be really mindful of your expenses at the beginning and be really mindful of what you want out of the company to like, a lot of the time, the reason to start a company is because you see more opportunity to, for self benefit, then you would add a traditional job. People forget that, what I mean? Like they start a company and they think, at the beginning, like before they even leave their other business, like, Hey, this is going to be so much better for my life. They just create this job for themselves, that in this stress for themselves, that like, isn't that at all. 

 Joe
 You really got to like, remember, Hey, I'm doing this because it's a better alternative than what I left or what I could be doing for somebody else. Your actions have to like follow that methodology. You should pay yourself from the beginning. If you can, you should be mindful of your own personal expenses and not sacrifice that. You should be mindful if your family and stuff is important to you. Obviously it is to a lot of people, you should be mindful of the sacrifices that they have to make. You know, now that you're doing this. So, I could go on and on, we could do a whole podcast about that stuff. 

 Josh
 Totally, totally. Well, I it's so true, but I see a lot of entrepreneurs, right. That are running from something, right? Like the job they got laid off, or they hated their boss or they want freedom, but then they tie themselves to a, another job, right? It's the whole business quadrants, the KA Kiyosaki's four quadrants where they just created a self-employment for them, not necessarily a business. How did you learn that? The hard way? 

 Joe
 Well, I left the job that was in real estate, which is the field that I love the most coming out of college and still have a passion for it. I got a job in real estate that I thought, I really would love, and then I didn't end up liking it. We have this opportunity to start our own business, just like I had just described, to me, it was like, oh, there is going to be this sense of freedom. I'm going to own my own company. It's going to be, it's going to be, I'm going to do things on my terms. You end up signing, leases and taking on overhead and taking out loans that now your, personally guaranteeing. That freedom goes away really fast when you have to now work tirelessly and endlessly to fulfill and be able to pay those things back. Not only be able to pay those things back, but be able to make enough money to pay your own bills and yourself. 

 Joe
 That's what we did when were, young and dumb and 24 is we, we learn those things the hard way and really sacrifice for like a year or two, like sacrifice hard for a year or two personally, just to make the business, get to a point where it could exceed just its own expenses. So that's a hard lesson to learn. You know what I mean? It's something that like, anytime I have the opportunity to speak to someone who's trying to start a business, a couple of times this year alone, I've had kids from Babson, my Alma mater call me and just to pick my brain and talk about their own businesses. And, I really stressed to them. Like we had a, I had a student call me about, a logistics company he wanted to start and how he wanted to rent warehouse space and stuff like that and buy a truck. 

 Joe
 And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, think about how you can do this differently. You know what I mean? And, and maybe one day you'll get there, but maybe there's a whole nother path that you can take without needing to put yourself through that, ? And, and you should be working long, hard hours at the beginning of your business, but not because you're in like some super stressful place and you signed away your life, it should because you want it to succeed. We kind of did the, like, we w we forced ourselves into making it like stressful. I just wouldn't take that path again. 

 Josh
 You, and I let's just say you and I are starting up another on demand, storage place here in Florida, and we could do it differently from what you've done in the past. Right. What are some key components that you think you would do differently, but same business model maybe here in Florida that you wish you would have done then? 

 Joe
 Well, I do want to point out too, before I answer that question, that the business does still exist, ? And, and so it's still actively going and they are pursuing, kind of more of this less overhead path and doing a really good job of that. I do want to give credit to the company for, we overcame those things, what I mean? We did, but it took us a couple of years to do it and really learning the hard way to get there, and eventually were persistent enough to overcome it and they're still going in the right direction. But, if I were, if were to do that and you had this idea, of, Hey, let's do this again. Let's rent a bunch of space and, get the trucks and we'll get the guys to do the work and stuff. My first question would be, how can we do it? 

 Joe
 How can we, what's the purpose of doing it, right? Like, what is the, it, is it because there's a huge opportunity, in storage and there's massive demand. The reason why I'd asked that is because if there's massive demand, not only on a national level, but maybe a regional level or a regional level national level, we want to be able scale, right? We don't want to limit ourselves to one building. We like, because one building runs out of space pretty soon. We want to be able to scale and take advantage of that demands, not only within like one town, but regionally and nationally, if we can. If the purpose of starting the business is to take advantage of that national demand, then we shouldn't go sign a warehouse. We should think about how we can take advantage of that demand, but use someone else's assets to do it. 

 Joe
 You know? There's a lot of people out there. There's a lot of companies out there that inherently have warehouse space, whether they're moving companies, logistics, companies, manufacturing companies, some of our competitors were using, we're using even like shopping malls and big box stores, and there's so many of these existing buildings that people already rent, and people already need to make, they need to cover that expense on their own. We could take advantage of that demand, but store it at a climate controlled facility that someone else has already renting that they want to make more money off of. Right. If we had a hundred dollars, if every client paid us $200 a month, but we could incentivize someone, Hey, you have 30% of your space that you currently rent is dead space. Can we come rent that for you? We'll give you, I don't know, I, we haven't done the module, but we'll give you 30% of the client. 

 Joe
 Every client that we bring in, would that be meaningful? Cause you're not using that space. You're making money off of it now. In that business model, you could do that locally, where you are, you can do that regionally and you could do that nationally if there's demand for it. The next piece of it would be okay, how are we going to get the stuff to the facility? You could think about it the same way, should we go rent and buy our own trucks? Or should we take advantage of someone that already has trucks that, their business model is to keep them on the road as long as possible. You start to think about it just differently and in doing so, then instead of taking out debt to get buildings and get trucks and all these things, maybe you're raising money because you want to blow up the business model. 

 Joe
 You know what I mean? You want to, you want to make it bigger, but the money that you're raising, isn't going towards, kind of dead assets, it's going towards marketing and creating a brand. You know what I mean? And so that's how I would do. That's how I would go about it differently than we did at the very beginning of doing what we did. 

 Josh
 Yeah. Super cool. You have a, it looks like you have some experience with podcasting looking through your LinkedIn. Now, do you still do podcasting? 

 Joe
 I haven't done it in probably four or five months this year. I kind of took a break from it, but I do have experience doing it. I, I did my own podcast for two years. I did 200 episodes, which is a lot to cram into two years, but yeah, it was called the, get it done podcast. It's something that I would love to fire up again. I just, I want to, I want it to have more of a purpose than it did for just everything. You know what I mean? Like it was a lot of it. I learned so much doing it and I learned how much I loved doing it. Like it's a great exercise, a great way to meet people. It's a great way to express yourself. It's a great way to create content, so I loved it for all those things, but, you can use it for, even more, and that's what I haven't really found what I want that more to be, to put the time into it, because it is a time, you have to, you have to dedicate a lot of time to doing it the right way. 

 Joe
 If I'm going to do it the right way, you're going to take the time to get guests, gonna take their time from them to come on the show. I want there to be like a real reason to do so, which you have, and I think it's great and I love what you do on your show. I, I, at the end of the day, I think podcasting is amazing. And I listened to them. I watched them, I'll even like, instead of watching TV, I'll throw YouTube on and watch podcasts. Like, so I, I look forward to the day I can. I jumped back in. 

 Josh
 Cool, well maybe we'll do something together in the future on that. As your, have you gone through your career and what you guys are doing now you're focusing on putting deals together for dealmakers who are ideal clients that you guys work with to help them find deals, not just leads where it's like, Hey, here's a lead, but the beginning steps of a relationship, the beginning steps of a deal, what kind of groups do you work with? 

 Joe
 Yeah, that's a great question. We work with, a fair amount of our clients are companies with like buy-side mandates. I think that's like the first people that we, that would be like our ideal client, someone who has a fund raised and they are, they know exactly what they want. They've already built out their business model and their thesis around the fond. Obviously they, I mean, they needed to in order to get the money. And, and so they have the money ready to go, and now they need to look at as many potential deals as they possibly can. We worked a couple of people in that space who were looking to buy software companies, but the kind of the main thing is just like, that's a perfect client and it doesn't necessarily matter what type of company they want to buy or acquire. It just matters that we know their strategy. 

 Joe
 Some companies want to buy, failing tech companies, failing SAS businesses, companies that maybe raise money two or three years ago. It just hasn't gone the way they planned. And, our private equity teams we'll give them, a way out and, help them take advantage of something that they built, but want, just want to get out of other companies will look to buy same assets, but they want companies that are on the up. You know what I mean? They want companies that for the last four or five years have showed steady growth and they want to invest in those, grow them even more and sell them. Other companies want to buy e-commerce businesses. You know what I mean? That are in specific spaces, consumer goods. As long as we know, the thesis, we can create campaigns and generate deals based on what they tell us they want to buy. 

 Joe
 That's kind of the key to it. That's one example of clients that we work with. Others might be, mergers and acquisitions deal. Strategic buyers, maybe there's a company that, is you could even work in like the moving space and they want to do a roll-up. They have, they're, they have a competitive advantage and they want to buy, X amount of what say $50 million where the moving and storage businesses around their general region. We can figure out, between Todd, by talking to them, what exactly it is they're looking for, what type of numbers those moving companies need to do, and then go help them generate the opportunities by getting in front of the company owners, the business owners, and doing our own research. And so that's another example. Private equity companies with buy-side mandates, strategic buyers, aggregators, those are our bread and butter. 

 Josh
 Explain what an aggregator is. 

 Joe
 An aggregator is, and the ones that we operate in are typically in the e-commerce space. An aggregator is a company that has either, pulled together their own money or raised money from outside, venture capital raise outside capital and is now strategically buying, individual brands. What, whether it let's use Amazon, for example, there's so many Amazon companies, they might be selling their own brand. They might've taken, let's say something like a, a golf range finder, and plugged a brand onto it and have been selling that successfully on Amazon. Now, so this company will come to them and the aggregator will come to them and purchase that company, that business. At the same time, they might go buy a, a golf club company and they might go buy a golf apparel company. They might go buy, other companies that are in that existing space, or maybe just, generalize it even more, they might be going after sports apparel brands. 

 Joe
 So, or an aggregator might say, instead of buying, brands themselves, they look to buy businesses that are just selling, kind of general products. We have other companies that we work with who, they're not necessarily going out and buying brands, but they're going out and buying products that sell well. Like for example, it might be, certain types of tile flooring, or certain types of, Blake, we have one client that, owns a company that buy, that sells those sheet protectors like that go inside of binders. It doesn't necessarily matter like that as a certain brand, it's more that like, they have that as a product and it's a sturdy, reliable product and they package it well. They package it and, 200, 300, 400, 500 unit quantities. And, but an aggregator to kind of get a little off track is someone who's looking to aggregate businesses. By, take that fund, bring those businesses together under one umbrella and then run, their business model within all of those individual brands that they acquired. 

 Josh
 With this, like why would a private equity group, an aggregator or any of these kinds of groups, why would they need you guys? Why not just do it themselves? Like where do you guys fit in? What's an ideal sweet spot for you guys. 

 Joe
 Well, I'll tell you why there's two reasons why we thought that, why we have now and, and thought at the beginning, our thesis was that this was a good idea. One, because a lot of these mid-market funds see the biggest, multi-billion dollar businesses, they might not be the best fit because they've already, they've been around for 50, 70 years and 40 years, whatever, and they've spent the money to grow out this massive, in-house acquisitions team. At the end of the day, there's a lot of mid-market companies who they might have a small acquisitions team or their acquisitions team might be, one of the leaders of the fund, one of the owners of the fund, one of the people that are also responsibility responsible for raising the money. What we found and what Brian realized, and being in this space for so long is that a lot of the processes they were using are outdated, right? 

 Joe
 It would be, Hey, we have this buy-side mandate and we're looking to buy again. I would just come back to the moving company example, these individuals would be Googling local, moving companies, picking up the phone, calling each individual one, one by one, not getting to the right person. We're going back Googling again and doing that manual process. They'd get through, maybe 10 calls in a day. So that was completely outdated. We took modern processes and were like, this world needs this, they need to be able to cycle through, hundreds and hundreds of potential outreach attempts on any given day. And so that's what we do. We take these modern outreach approaches and apply it to what we thought was an outdated world. Secondly, it's just no matter how much money you have, whether it's a billion dollar fund or, you were, a mid-market company, having an in-house team doing this stuff is expensive, ? 

 Joe
 At the end of the day, you, you gotta really kind of take a look at it as a company. Your, again, coming back to overhead, to hire three analysts, in this space is gonna between their payroll and insurance and, worker's comp and all this stuff, it's gonna probably be half a million bucks to do that for a year. With us, we charge a yearly retainer. We will come on your business and we'll give you that year worth of effort and our yearly retainers, $10,000. The $10,000 essentially allows us to cover our overhead for the year, in a lot of ways in running most of these campaigns and doing it because we found ways to do it really efficiently, but really effectively at the same time. The only other time that they pay us is for success. We've kind of designed our model where, we're in it with you, we become an extension of your team. 

 Joe
 We, when you succeed, we succeed. If you have, a hundred million dollars, you need to go out and spend, you're not paying us to hopefully find, a way to spend it. Like we're not charging you $5,000 a month to hopefully find a way to expand it. Or in that example that I used, that would probably be $25,000 a month to pay three analysts. You're paying us only when we go out and actually find it and you actually make that acquisition. That's the model that we've created and it's way more affordable. Our incentives are completely aligned because again, we're taking a small piece of a big, meaningful, impactful investment that you've made. That's how we've kind of crafted our offer so that, not only are we doing things that you weren't already doing by applying technology, but we're doing them in a way less expensive in more aligned manner. 

 Josh
 Yeah. Awesome. Awesome, awesome. Awesome. Let's let's do this. We'll, we'll give a few opportunities to do this, but for, private equity groups, aggregators people with a buy-side mandate, maybe holding companies, these kinds of groups that are looking to actually go out and acquire and they need some help. Maybe they don't have a massive in-house team, or maybe they just need some help creating more of those deal flow, where it's a good place for them to connect with you and do a deal. 

 Joe
 Absolutely. Well, they can email it. So our website is just posted social.com. We've we've recently, this year, branded it around exactly what we're talking about. So for while Brian was running affairs for the first seven, eight years, again, he was offering more services. We are solely focused on doing this right now and within in this space. That's the best place to go is post to social.com to learn more about what we do. They can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, just Jos ANCA, or email me, Jay's anca@postedsocial.com. And, I'm always, I pride myself and so does Brian, I'm just being responsive. If I see that email come in, I'll get back to you and, and we'll book a call and learn about, what you need and our job is to go try to fix it. 

 Josh
 Yeah. What does future success look like for you? Your dealmaker you've exited a business. You've started a few, like you're, you're a deal maker seemed like he loved the game. How do you know you won? Like, what does a, what's that look like for you? 

 Joe
 Well, that's a great question. I try to, part of like doing business, I think what I've learned, from starting my own business at the beginning is you do have to have an end game in mind, and you don't necessarily have to like, achieve that exact end game when you first getting started, but you do have to like shoot for something and know why you're doing something. I myself want to, I want to be mindful of my, I want to get to a point where I'm very mindful of my time. Right now I'm doing, and working with, a lot of groups who are actively investing, learning from what they're investing in, where the space is to be our, why there, why those spaces to be are important. And, just being a sponge while providing as much value as I can to my clients, because eventually I think my goal would be to be doing what, my clients are doing, which is raising my own funds and buying my own companies and plugging operators into those businesses. 

 Joe
 To me, I thought that, it would be wise to add as much value to those individuals as I can, because it will allow me to learn. By learning and while learning, I'll figure out what I want to do, once I'm at that point in and then go and do that. I kind of am working for who I want to eventually become at the moment. Once I'm there, I think that my first goal would be to, hopefully generate enough passive income for myself where like, my family and me personally could live, our lives and I wouldn't have to work anymore. You know what I mean? I think I'm always someone that's going to be involved in deals and enjoying working and owning businesses and real estate, whatever it may be. I'd love to reach that level of financial freedom. Whereas like, if I, for whatever reason had to take a year off or want to take a year off, I could, and everything would be fine because of what is being generated in the background. 

 Joe
 That's what I'm working towards every day is trying to get there. 

 Josh
 Yeah. During this interview, what questions should I have asked you? Or that you wish someone would ask you that I didn't, it could be business or personal, whatever. 

 Joe
 Yeah, no. I mean, I think that one thing I learned about myself and that you, shouldn't not that you should have asked me, but like, I think you might've asked me in with your last question is like, why are you doing what you're doing? You know? I think that is a question to be that you need to answer first. You almost need to answer it like every day. I mean, 

 Josh
 Like, 

 Joe
 I think you really do need to answer it every day because I didn't answer it for such a long time, ? And, and I thought I was answering it, but I was answering it like so broadly, what I mean? Like, oh, I'm not a good employee, so I'll work for myself. That's not a good answer. You know what I mean? That's not a good answer to that question. Yes. You should work for yourself if you're not going to be fulfilled or good at working for someone else, but like, why are you going to work for yourself? Like, what other benefits is that bringing you? Because if it's not bringing you the monetary benefits that you need to live your life, if it's not bringing you the freedom that you want within your life, if it's not bringing you the satisfaction, like, I don't know. I think that you need to be really happy doing what you're doing, and, and have a real strong reason why you're doing what you're doing. 

 Joe
 It, every day is not going to feel that way. You're going to question yourself still, you're going to question your motive. You, how you, like, if you're going on the right track still. If you wake up every day and understand why you're doing what you're doing, then it allows you to continue forward. It allows you to, it just such a like freedom off your back, ing that like you do have a north star and that you're working towards it. I think the quicker you can identify that like, Hey, why am I doing what I'm doing? You know what I mean? Whether it's, whether you're sitting behind a desk and the answer is, Hey, I'm working this job from nine to, or eight to three 30, because I have kids. After three 30, I want to be able to dedicate the rest of my life to spending time with the rest of my night, to spending time with my kids and never missing a game. 

 Joe
 If that's your why, great, what you're doing, if it's to make a billion dollars, what I mean? You have a different Y but if you understand that, then you're going to be able to set yourself up on a path to hopefully achieve it. I, I didn't understand that for a long time. Now I feel blessed because I do wake up every day with an, with a general understanding of why I'm working on what I'm working on. I think that has helped me personally so much. 

 Josh
 Yeah. Many cool questions that I want to ask you around that I love your description of has, like, we should be asking ourselves this every day. What if one day you wake up and you ask that question and you don't have answer. Like, why am I doing this? And then the answer is Nolan void. Like there, you don't have a strong argument. How do you approach that? 

 Joe
 I think you have to work towards changing that. I really do. I think that, I don't think like, I'll give you an example. I mean, I had someone in my life right. Who they're a teacher and they go to work every day, and aren't necessarily happy with where they're at and for reasons why they like that, they're just completely out of their control. It's not that they don't want to teach stuff that they love teaching, the culture of a school might be, brutal. And, and so, and that's something that they don't have the ability to change. It's kind of making what they're doing in their everyday life, seem miserable and like, there's not really much of an end to that happening. To me, the only option, you got to be able to control what you can control. If you can't control the environment that you're in, then I think you need to leave it. 

 Joe
 You know? I think that my advice for that person was like, Hey, there's a pride, like, yes, there's risk in not having a job. Right? Like, you don't want to not have, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're completely stuck or, you're putting other people at risk if you have children or anything like that. But there's a price. A lot of people don't put, like, they always think money, right? Like, what's the cost of me leaving this, but there's a price to like having peace of mind in knowing like in happiness, what I mean? That like, you just can't see every day. Imagine like waking up every day and not feeling stuck and not feeling unhappy with where you're going to work. I don't know if you can put a dollar figure on that, but it's worth a lot, ? And, and I think that you need to change what you're doing because of that. 

 Joe
 Like, it's worth a lot, you know? And, and a lot of people don't realize like, just because you can't put like, oh, it's not worth a hundred thousand dollars. It's worth a lot. Like, it's worth a lot of your happiness. It's where all your sleep, it's worth a lot of your like sanity and you need to change. 

 Josh
 Yeah. It's, it's the things. I call it like so good, dude, I call those kinds of things like Ralph goes, right. Things that for me and my business revenue and life generating activities, right. 

 Joe
 Life generating activity. 

 Josh
 Yeah. There's on the flip side of that. It's what do I hate doing that? Doesn't really produce a great return for me. Like for menial task, editing audio, or like converting to MP3 and uploading or thrown on an ad bumper. Right. I pay someone to do that, even if it super expensive, right. Like I have to get that stuff off my plate so I can focus on what I love doing and what actually moves the needle in my superpower. Right. I got to focus on that. With that, what are some areas in your life that you think are your superpowers and then as a deal maker, and then on the flip side, what areas that you yourself have to either automate, delegate or, throw away? 

 Joe
 Sure. So I am, I'm like vision guy. I have, I'm able to connect things visually, like, in my head, even with like where I want, the company should go, where I want the next steps to be taken, where, I, I try to work three or four steps ahead of where we're at right now, just so I have an understanding of like, why again, why are we doing this? Like, if I can't understand the next step, then I can't answer that question. I'm always kind of thinking that way, vice versa. I know that with envision need operation. Brian is also, incredibly talented at, doing similar things that like, we're both talented in the same areas in the sense of like, we're both pretty good at, making sales and relationships, but he's an incredibly talented operator, what I mean? We work really well together because I see the next step and he makes he Brit, he builds a bridge to get there, ? 

 Joe
 That's, I think it's really helpful finding that, I've, so I like to delegate a lot of the, bridge-building steps to him, which he actually enjoys doing and does, without me even like, we'll need to pop up a new page for our website. Like it's done, the next morning he just does it. And I couldn't do that. You know what I mean? If I didn't have him, I'd certainly have to similar to, like you mentioned the audio and stuff, I'd have to outsource all those tasks because I don't have the patience for it. It would drive me crazy. It's not where I should be spending my time. Another thing I want to point out too, like talking about what were had, what we had been talking about, in those life building activities is like, you can choose what you want to see, ? That's something that I didn't realize either, like for a long time, like you can choose how you perceive things or what you want to see. 

 Joe
 And, for me, like I was told by so many people, like, Hey, promote yourself on like use Twitter to like, be a promotional tool, use Twitter as like this thing. It just like completely wasn't for me in a drag me down. It always was something that I felt like I needed to spend a couple hours a day on like writing things. I'm not even kidding. Like the day I deleted off my phone, I like had, I just had this like clarity and like this energy, like just, it's almost like I like got all this energy back from like, not looking at it. Like, if something, if you're like looking at something every day, or you're worried about something everyday, like Instagram shares that way for a of people, they're looking at like these models, right. And they're like, oh God. And it's just consuming them. 

 Joe
 You know? Like you don't have to look at it or you don't have to perceive things, just switched away you like perception or just shut it off altogether. You'd be amazed at like what it does for you. 

 Josh
 So true. I, I deleted by Facebook account and I was also an early adopter with Facebook and I had thousands of friends and connections and, yeah. Air quote, friends. Right. I, but I got, I, I found myself getting so caught up in the negativity of, this and that I got on it because I love people and I loved connecting with them. When I saw like, there was a lot of, there was a lot of other stuff that came with it. To be honest, I'm not strong enough to filter out the good and the bad. I got caught up in the bad stuff. The people who were controversial and I went down a rabbit hole and I found my world getting dark. I had to delete it because I'm not strong enough. Yeah. 

 Joe
 Yeah. I don't, I don't watch the news. You know what I mean? I don't watch the news. Like I like to stay up to date with what's going on, but I'll get it through my own methods. You know what I mean? Through methods that I enjoy getting it from. Like, I listen to podcasts, good lot of time to talk about relevant topics, ? And, and so I pick the people that talk about relevant topics that I like to listen to. I, I get my information that way, but I don't watch the news. That's trying to spin everything to be some negative, the world's burning because if you sit down and watch either or any of the mainstream news channels for 20 minutes, like you're gonna get up and be like, what the hell is going on? Like, everything is everything's failing. Like I have no idea. 

 Joe
 Like, are we all right? Like there's, the world's going to burn tomorrow and you just don't need that in your life. At least I don't, you know? That's another thing, like, I'm not someone that's, I don't by any means, try to be like a guru. I just like to say, what's worked for me and like tuning out some stuff that like you don't enjoy seeing is another one of those things where you get back, like so much energy. There's not a price you can put on it. 

 Josh
 Dude. I love these conversations because behind every deal there's a deal maker. If you can learn a lot about the deal maker and how they optimize their mindset and how they approach life and business, then you could see deals a lot more clearly. That's why we started the show is to connect deals and deal makers. We interview people and I think you and Brian, both experiences, you interview people and then you're like, oh wait, I actually like you, we should do a deal together. So. 

 Joe
 Yeah. Yeah. 

 Josh
 Our purpose and mission of this show is connect deals and deal makers. So let me do this. Let me give you guys a plug. You're awesome, Joe, for fellow deal-makers in the audience, private equity groups, aggregators people with a buy-side mandate, holding companies, even corporations, doing strategic buys as always reach out to our guests. If you guys are looking for some help with deal gen reach out to Joe, his contact information will be in the show notes below. You could connect directly with them, let them know that you heard them on the deal scout and you guys should do a deal together. Joe, I think we'll wind up doing some more interviews in the future. You're fascinating. I would like to in the future, just playing tennis seed, I'd like to learn more about the mindset and about, your motive and the purpose driven kind of things of that you're focused on, but we're running out of time today. 

 Josh
 One more time, tell people how to connect with you. 

 Joe
 Yeah, no, I appreciate all this Josh and I you're awesome too, man. I would love to have those conversations and I learn a lot of from what we're talking about right now from other people, I mean, like my own show, I took so much from doing 200 episodes talking to entrepreneurs. It was unbelievable. Like every episode someone would teach me something new about how to look at things or how to, how they perceive things and I'm the same way. That's why I am pretty eager to get back into the podcasting world because that was a huge form to learn. Yeah, if you want to reach out to me, it's, Joe's ANCA on LinkedIn. That's a great place to find me or JS anca@postedsocialdotcomoryoucanjustvisitpostsocial.com and fill out that form at the bottom and Brian or I are always monitoring it. So we'll reach out. Cool, 

 Josh
 Cool fellow dealmakers as always reach out to our guests, say, thank you, find a way to do a deal with them. If you personally are working on a deal, maybe trying to acquire or buy something and you want to chat about it here on the show, head on over to the deal. Scout.com. Fill out a quick form, get you on the show next. Tell them, talk to you all on the next episode. Cheers, everybody.