1:24

Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show. Today we have Kyle Vanvok.

1:26

He's the c e O at Voris. Kyle, welcome to

1:30

Kyle Vamvouris: the show. Thanks for having Kevin Horek: me. I'm excited.

1:32

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the show too. I, I think what we're gonna talk about today, well, let's be honest,

1:39

anybody, any business on the planet basically struggles with this and, and

1:44

hopefully is trying to get better at it.

1:47

And, you know, the teams that actually really figure it out,

1:52

in my opinion anyway, are the ones that are truly successful.

1:55

Totally. But, but maybe before we get into all that, let's get to know you a little

2:00

bit better and start off with where you Kyle Vamvouris: grew up. Sure.

2:02

I grew up, um, for the most part, I was born in New Jersey, but

2:05

for the most part I grew up in, uh, the San Francisco Bay area.

2:08

Kevin Horek: Okay. So walk us through what made you move to the Bay Area?

2:14

Just Kyle Vamvouris: family. Yeah, so I was actually a kid, so I, I was born in New Jersey.

2:18

I probably moved when I was around four or five.

2:21

And, um, you know, my dad, uh, came out here for work and for the most part grew

2:27

up in the, the San Francisco Bay area. I went to high school here, um, and, uh, middle school, elementary school.

2:34

So my whole life, I grew up in this area. Kevin Horek: Very cool.

2:38

So walk us through the rest of your education into your

2:42

Kyle Vamvouris: career. Totally. So, um, I was, you know, going to high school like , most good kids do.

2:48

After I graduated, I went to a junior college and I spent probably about a year

2:52

and a half to two years there before I decided to drop out to do standup comedy.

2:57

That was my real passion. Uh, throughout, uh, high school I did a lot of theater.

3:01

When I was 17, I started doing standup. So at a certain point I was failing most of my classes anyway,

3:06

so I was like, you know what? I don't like this anymore. Um, actually I never liked it so , I'm like, just gonna stop doing it.

3:11

I'm gonna start doing standup full-time. And in order to do that, I got a job at, uh, a gym, selling gym

3:17

memberships and it was perfect cause Kyle Vamvouris_ Building The Future Interview (2022-11-15 12_29 GMT-7): I Kyle Vamvouris: could sell during the day and then at night I could do standup.

3:22

And I can go deeper into the, kinda the story after this, but

3:25

I'll, uh, I'll kind of just tell you how I got into the tech sales.

3:29

Portion here. I was selling gym memberships at this, uh, at this gym in the East Bay.

3:34

And my boss actually left the gym to go work at a company called Intuit.

3:39

They make QuickBooks, TurboTax and sure, he called me up and was like,

3:44

Hey, you need to get into tech sales.

3:46

This is gonna change your life. You can't just sell gym membership your whole life.

3:51

Uh, and I think you'd be really good at this, so why don't you come and interview?

3:54

And the problem was Intuit required a college degree.

3:58

So I was like, Hey, I don't think I can, they ex they need a college degree.

4:01

And he was like, ah, I, I think they'll overlook you cuz you know me.

4:04

It turns out he was trying to get his, uh, his referral bonus for, um,

4:09

referring somebody who gets hired. And, uh, they ended up overlooking it.

4:12

And I did a really good job on our mock, uh, on my mock cold call.

4:16

They took a chance on me and I'm forever grateful for that. I started as a, uh, as an S G R.

4:19

So cold calling. Kevin Horek: That's amazing actually.

4:23

That's, so I, I'm curious before we dive into a little

4:26

bit deeper, how do you think. Kind of public speaking and well, being a standup comedian really helped with sales.

4:35

I get Kyle Vamvouris: asked this a lot and it's not as obvious

4:39

as you would, you would think. Uh, the main thing it helps you with is handling, uh, rejection.

4:46

Yeah, I was gonna say . You get rejected a lot as a comedian and

4:50

you get very, very good at it. And what's really cool about it is when you have a bad show and

4:56

standup afterwards, there's this culture of reflecting, Hey, how

4:59

could that joke have been better? What could I tweak?

5:02

How could I improve it? And that's applied when I started as an S C R cold calling, cuz

5:07

after calls I didn't go well. I would do the same thing and I almost disconnect my.

5:14

Uh, kind of my own person, uh, me as a person from the activity and I can

5:19

start looking at it more objectively. And the same thing is with when you do standup.

5:23

Like I don't get off of a stage if I do a, a perform.

5:26

If I perform somewhere and I do poorly, I don't get off the

5:29

stage and say, God, I suck.

5:32

No. I go, huh, that joke didn't land.

5:35

And then let me work on that. And the same thing applies with cold calling as far as like

5:39

having a good sense of humor. Sure. That's helpful for interpersonal, uh, connections, but there's not anything.

5:45

I mean, I think that's a pretty big one, but there's not anything more than

5:48

that, uh, just from my own experience.

5:50

Kevin Horek: No. Interesting. Uh, so walk us through the rest of your career up until.

5:58

Basically Kyle Vamvouris: Flores. Sure.

6:01

So I, like I said, Intuit start as an sdr.

6:04

About 10 months later I get promoted Okay.

6:08

To, uh, to an account executive. So I'm actually in a sales role and I would still get called back

6:13

to like, work with some of the newer, often struggling SDRs.

6:16

So, and, and I know what it's like to be that I know what it's like to be an

6:19

SDR with, with, uh, inadequate training is trying to be as successful as I can.

6:24

So I, I've always had kind of one foot into that world.

6:28

And what ended up happening, this was around the time if.

6:31

If anybody remembers listening, when Zenz was really blowing up

6:36

another kind of Silicon Valley startup, they were exploding.

6:40

And the word around the, uh, around the office was, Hey, you gotta go to Zens.

6:45

Zens is the best. Uh, the, so I call it getting bit by the startup bug cuz everyone was all excited.

6:51

So I ended up going to a different startup. I didn't go to Zs, but that was sort of the genesis of this idea of like,

6:55

Hey, maybe I should go somewhere else. It's more of a startup and I can catch, you know, the next Zs.

7:00

That was kind of the idea. , um, of course Zs ended up blowing up for anybody who remembers that story.

7:05

But I went to a company called Talkdesk. I was there for about a year, um, an know closing world there.

7:11

Afterwards I wrote, um, a book called Cold Committed, that's

7:14

a book on how to do outbound prospecting for SDRs specifically.

7:19

And a big reason why I wrote that book was because at Top Desk, the s d r team

7:23

really struggled that I spent a lot of time trying to help them improve.

7:27

and uh, I had always thought about writing a book cuz there wasn't a lot back then.

7:31

There was actually no book when I was an SD r Wow.

7:34

That I could find. Now there's, you know, infinite, uh, so I wrote the first version of the book.

7:39

From there I ended up running the sales development team at a company called Fork.

7:45

Was a financial tech company based outta San Francisco.

7:47

Scaled that team from three people to 14 and we went from 120 million

7:52

in assets under management to over a billion in less than 20 months.

7:55

Wow. Very fast. That's huge. Yeah.

7:58

Really hu. Really fast. Um, so I was very fortunate to go through that experience and all of our business

8:03

was generated through our outbound, uh, SD R efforts, or I shouldn't say all.

8:07

We had one person on inbound.

8:10

The vast majority of the business we did was through outbound.

8:13

Uh, after that I went to go repeat the success at a company called Intuit.

8:16

I also rewrote the book called The Committed Around this Time, um,

8:20

cuz of the first version I didn't think was structured very well.

8:23

I wasn't a good writer back then. So I rewrote the book.

8:26

Uh, and then I ran the inside sales team at a company called Bloom Global.

8:29

It's a global supply chain software company. Uh, we did incredibly well there.

8:33

And then Covid hit and it hit the supply chain really hard, right?

8:38

So they laid off my team and they gave me a different role at the

8:41

company and there was a huge pay cut.

8:43

So I took what was a side consulting business, Boris and I started

8:48

working to get more consulting clients, kind of offset the

8:51

reduction in my income and smart.

8:54

It ended up going well and kept getting customers, couldn't manage

8:59

the two and went full-time with Boris.

9:02

A li uh, a little over two and a half years ago.

9:05

Congrats, man. That's awesome. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, it was a lot of fun, really.

9:08

Uh, you learn a lot when you kind of go through each of

9:12

these different experiences. Each job that I've, I've had, um, I've been able to take away something

9:17

and not only do you learn a lot about yourself, but you also learn a lot

9:19

of skills that become valuable later. Kevin Horek: Totally.

9:22

And I love the fact that you basically didn't just like quit

9:26

your job and started something like you were doing it as a side hustle.

9:30

Something unfortunate happened to you and then, you know, you

9:34

just kind of scaled that up. Right. I think that happens to more people than they're willing to

9:39

Kyle Vamvouris: admit. Totally. And one thing I'll add there too is it's okay to do that.

9:47

Totally. Like it's okay to, to work on a couple things on the side and.

9:52

Just have it as something that's on the side until you're ready.

9:55

Like I started the business when it was the right time for me to start a business.

9:58

A lot of people get all fired up and they try to take their side

10:01

hustle and make it their main thing as quickly as they can cause they

10:04

wanna get out of the nine to five. I didn't have that mentality, you know, I had a side consulting business and

10:09

I would do while I was driving to, uh, to work and then I would be in

10:13

the parking lot for the remaining 30 minutes of, um, whatever, you know,

10:18

coaching session that I was doing with. Um, I was mostly, um, consulting with uh, founders and then sometimes they would

10:24

have me do coaching for their managers. An hour, you know, an hour call.

10:28

Half of the driving, the other half would bb me sitting in the parking lot.

10:31

I'd get into the office at seven 30 in the morning cause my clients

10:34

were on East coast and I didn't have a huge desire to try to blow

10:38

up some, you know, other company. I wanted to sell some copies of my book.

10:41

I wanted to have a blog and build an audience and do a little

10:45

bit of consulting on the side. And then when it became the right time, that's when I decided to do it.

10:49

Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's, that's actually really good advice

10:52

and just making it work for you. Right.

10:54

And, and whatever that means, right? Like in your case it was, you know, while you were driving and just

10:58

sitting in the parking lot, right? Like, that happens all the time.

11:00

But like, nobody talks about that. Or not a lot of people talk about

11:03

Kyle Vamvouris: that. Yeah, it's totally true. And, and also you need to be ready.

11:07

Totally. If you're really young in your career, like you probably need to

11:10

get good at something before you start helping on something , you

11:14

know, if that's the route you end up taking just my 2 cents at least.

11:17

Kevin Horek: No, I hundred percent agree with you. So let's dive deeper into Boris.

11:22

What exactly is it and what made you actually decide to start

11:25

Kyle Vamvouris: it? So we work with B2B companies, so this might be a software company or

11:32

service company, but B2B is the, the main focus that we have and we help

11:36

them build a scalable sales process.

11:39

And I started the company because at different phases of the organization,

11:46

As you're growing a company, you hit these weird, uh, plateaus early on.

11:53

Of course it's building the first team. You're like, gosh, this is a lot more difficult than I thought, . And then

11:58

the teams are getting a little bit bigger and you're like, you know what?

12:01

Most of our reps are not performing very well.

12:04

. We have a couple of reps that do, the rest of the reps, reps don't perform

12:08

that great and we don't really know why.

12:10

And then you start solve that problem and then you get a little bit bigger

12:13

and you're like, okay, well our core reps have always done well, but

12:17

the newer reps aren't doing well. So these, these different milestones that you run into issues.

12:21

And it's rare that I find a, uh, company that has a problem with training or

12:26

they have a problem with like, they're. A tool that they should be using often I find it being one of these three things.

12:35

So the first is that the individual reps on the team don't know what

12:38

they have to do to be successful. The second is that the leadership team doesn't know how to use data to figure

12:45

out how to make the team successful. And then the third one, which sometimes is a consequence of the

12:50

first two, is there's a culture where poor performance is tolerated.

12:57

And we work with organizations to help put systems in place, processes, messaging,

13:03

the leadership fundamentals to help them run really successful sales organizations.

13:10

Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting.

13:12

Do you want to maybe dive a little bit deeper into like, like, okay, so I, I'm

13:18

running a company for example, how, how.

13:22

Like, walk me through and I'm struggling with sales.

13:24

Like, walk us through, uh, you know, we have probably an initial call.

13:28

I give you my issues. Like walk us through kind of how I would work with your company.

13:33

Kyle Vamvouris: Sure. So the first thing we'd do is we'd do an analysis of your historical data.

13:36

We'd interview your team, we'd interview the executive team.

13:39

We'd look at any materials you have. We'd do competitor overviews.

13:42

And what we do is we construct a roadmap that's basically

13:46

saying, Hey, you are here today.

13:49

You would like to be over there. And that's usually a revenue target.

13:52

So let me just use a real example. Sure.

13:55

Um, customer comes to us and they're saying like, Hey, we need to do

13:57

2 million in revenue next year, we're probably gonna close out the

14:00

year close to 1 million in revenue. So I'd like to do 3 million, including net new.

14:06

Uh, next year. Okay, great.

14:09

What we're gonna do is we're gonna look at the gaps in your current process,

14:12

and we're gonna model out what it's gonna take to actually get there.

14:15

And we take a very data-driven approach. So we model out the team and we look at some areas that

14:19

you're lacking that have a. A big impact on your ability to hit that revenue target of adding

14:26

2 million in new revenue for this example that we're walking through.

14:30

Once we've constructed that roadmap and we have a very simple, Hey, first thing

14:33

we need to do is we need to actually be tracking the team's performance.

14:37

You guys do a horrible job, making sure that you know, uh, where every

14:41

deal is in the pipeline, or if it's an SDR team, uh, you don't do a great

14:45

job understanding what channels of outreach are most effective for you.

14:50

Once we have our fingers on the pulse of what needs to change, then for the rest

14:54

of our engagement with a, with a company, we're actually helping them implement

14:59

either a better reporting structure or better quotas, or even messaging.

15:05

Maybe the messaging's terrible, maybe their demo script isn't good.

15:08

We actually work with them and co-create those materials to fill the gaps that

15:12

they need to fill in order to get them closer to their revenue target.

15:16

Interesting. Kevin Horek: And then, yeah. Okay. And then it's all backed by data cuz like, , I'm sure you get this all the time.

15:22

A lot of, a lot of stuff in startups is opinion-based.

15:24

And I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, but it can, it can be very right?

15:29

It can be very wrong or somewhere in the middle and it's usually

15:32

somewhere in the middle. Right? Is that fair to say?

15:35

Kyle Vamvouris: Uh, yeah. In the absence of data, so when you have data, you're constructing hypotheses

15:41

based on that data, and then you're measuring the changes that you make.

15:45

So I can tell you what's right or wrong. Now, I can't talk to you right now and tell you based on my opinion,

15:50

what I think would be right for you. Right.

15:52

But give me a month and give me a team. I can tell you, oh, no, no, no.

15:55

This actually is better. So let me give you a real example of this, and I'll go to cold

15:59

calling for this because for some reason this is, things get very

16:03

controversial around cold calling. Uh, one thing that people love to debate is opening a cold call with, how are you?

16:10

It's a common debate you'll read online. Okay.

16:12

Should you say, how are, you know? Uh, hey, uh, hey Ke.

16:16

Kevin, this is Kyle. How's it going? going good.

16:19

And then you go into your normal pitch, right? Right.

16:21

Uh, people that's controversial. Somehow I've tested this extensively.

16:25

It has, has it, it has had no impact on the teams that open with.

16:31

How are you so interesting.

16:34

Why are we debating it? Why don't you just try it and figure out if it works for you

16:37

or if it doesn't work for you. Real quick.

16:39

Just, uh, another example here. More strategic and higher level.

16:43

We've worked with four different cybersecurity companies at Forest.

16:46

Okay. I thought I could copy and paste the strategy cuz they sell the same thing.

16:51

Did not work. Each company had a different approach and sometimes dramatically different.

16:57

Well, how's that possible? It's the same offering selling into a similar market.

17:02

Well, similar's doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that sentence.

17:06

It's not the same market. And honestly, in a lot of cases the offer's a little different too.

17:11

So those variables.

17:14

Change what you have to do on the sales side.

17:17

And people don't acknowledge that sales is a complex organization.

17:21

Well, people act like it's simple because it can be articulated in a very simple way.

17:25

The reality is there's a lot of variables.

17:28

You have sales reps that are supposed to understand the

17:30

challenges the prospects are facing. They're supposed to, uh, help them understand how to solve those challenges.

17:38

They need to position your product or service as a solution to those

17:42

challenges and ask for their money. And then meanwhile, they're getting all this internal pressure from

17:47

leadership and they're you being told, Hey, here's your aggressive numbers.

17:52

Oh, you also need to do this. Hey, we need to change the script over here.

17:55

Oh, we're not converting enough over there. There's a lot of variables that are going on.

17:59

And I think unfortunately, we tend to oversimplify this part of the

18:03

organization and we shouldn't. We should treat it like what it is.

18:06

And fortunately, we can use data to help navigate all of the

18:09

challenges that this function has. Kevin Horek: Interesting.

18:13

Okay, so you probably get this some of the time.

18:18

What if a company doesn't have data?

18:20

And then I guess this follow up question of that is how can they start actually

18:23

collecting that, whether they're, you know, a brand new company or, you

18:26

know, been around for a number of years Kyle Vamvouris: so they're not collecting data well, uh,

18:31

it's a good excuse to start. So you wanna track as many things as you possibly can when

18:36

it comes to your sales teams. Go ahead sir.

18:39

What was that? Okay. Uh, I would, lemme give some examples of like what you would track.

18:42

Sure. Perfect. So for, um, let's say, let's say you're talking about your SDR and your AE team.

18:49

Let's say you're tracking nothing today, which isn't the truth for

18:51

most organizations, but let's just say it is, and you wanted to do

18:54

things perfect off of the bat. Here's what I typically set, typically will suggest there's seven

19:00

metrics that need to be tracked. The first metric is activity, and I'd like to, uh, to track

19:07

that metric across every channel.

19:09

That activity is happening. How many calls are we making?

19:11

How many emails are we sending, how many LinkedIn messages, whatever channels

19:15

you use, how much activity is our team doing in order to generate appointments?

19:20

The next is how many engagements are we getting as a result of that activity?

19:25

And engagement might be a prospect answering the phone, so

19:29

a phone connect as you'd call it. It might be somebody replying to an email or a LinkedIn message.

19:34

How many engagements are we getting? The next one is, how many appointments are we getting now?

19:41

all three of those you should be tracking per channel.

19:44

So if you do call cold calls and you do cold email, we need to know how many

19:48

calls are going out, how or how many calls are happening, how many people are

19:52

answering the phone, how many appointments are being booked through calls.

19:55

We need to know how many emails are going out, how many, uh, replies we're

20:00

getting to those emails, and how many meetings are being booked through emails.

20:03

Okay? So you have those three. Once you then from appointment, the next is deal stage one.

20:09

So what's the first stage in your sales process?

20:13

You want to see what the, um, the.

20:17

Kind of conversion is between an appointment being booked and then

20:21

actually making it to deal stage one. That's a function of show up rate.

20:24

It's also a function of qualification rate. And then from deal stage one to deal stage two, deal stage two, to deal stage three,

20:31

and then deal stage three to close one. You have to adjust that based on how many deal stages you have.

20:37

Um, but that's ideal. If you could track.

20:40

Across all of the deals that are happening, you can do a strong cohort

20:43

analysis and figure out, hey, we did 5,500 activities last month.

20:49

We ended up closing three deals as a result of those activities.

20:53

So how many, uh, engagements did those activities generate?

20:57

How many appointments? And then ultimately how many closed deals?

20:59

And by tracking the percentage drop off across each one of those KPIs, I just

21:05

outlined each one of those seven, what you end up finding are bottlenecks within

21:09

your sales process that you can then start to focus on, build a hypothesis

21:13

around how to fix it, and then ex, you know, run and experiment with a

21:18

new process to see that if it actually does it actually solve that problem.

21:23

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Makes sense. So I, and I don't know, maybe this is like, as somebody that's

21:29

a designer, sales has always been something I'm like so brutally bad

21:36

at and it feels like it's this black.

21:40

Box that I just like can never crack or spend enough time to, to care.

21:45

And I'm sure there's a lot of people that, that are maybe in a

21:48

sales position or a C E O and they don't come from a sales background.

21:53

What advice do you give to them? Like where do they even really start?

21:58

Kyle Vamvouris: So you start with making sure we're doing the activities that

22:02

are needed in order to hit our numbers. Okay.

22:04

So a lot of people are getting a little uncomfortable around this, but

22:07

sales is very much a numbers game. I just gave you a bunch of KPIs, right, that you have to track.

22:12

It's very much a numbers game, but you know, it's same thing with design.

22:15

Like if you're working on a product, you're evaluating

22:18

the usage of that product. Facebook, for example, this is like two years ago.

22:25

They, um, they gave me like a $50 gift card to come do like a UX research thing.

22:30

Okay. And normally I ignore all those, but I was like, you know what?

22:32

It might be kind of fun to go to the Facebook campus and like look

22:35

at different versions of Facebook. So I went totally, and they just watched me use weird versions of

22:40

Facebook that are totally off the wall, crazy, like absolutely nothing

22:45

like how Facebook looks today. And, um, they just would, they videoed me.

22:50

They asked me questions on how I felt about going through certain things.

22:53

You do research and you figure out what's the user's behavior, the exact

22:57

same thing you're doing in sales. It's the exact same process except instead of a user, there's a prospect.

23:03

What are they actually inspired by to take action and do more of that?

23:09

So you evaluate your sales process in the same way.

23:11

So the first step, if you're like brand new and you're just building your first

23:15

sales team, is when you bring on people, make sure they're doing enough activities.

23:19

Should you actually start using the data to be able to tweak the process?

23:24

So your reps are making cold calls, are they making a hundred cold calls a day?

23:28

Great. What's that telling you? Are people booking meetings or are they not booking meetings?

23:32

You know, it's kind of the same thing with UX research.

23:34

Like, are they the button or are they confused and they don't

23:38

realize it's a button or whatever. You know, I'm not a designer, so I I'm not gonna have a great, no, that's

23:42

Kevin Horek: actually a perfect example. You're right. It, it's interesting the parallels between the two,

23:46

Kyle Vamvouris: right? Or here's, maybe this is more, uh, classic example where it's like,

23:50

did the user expect that that would be a dropdown when it wasn't?

23:54

Right? Yeah. And, um, the same thing's happening here, like, oh, did they show up to the meeting?

23:59

And they feel like it didn't align with the expectations

24:02

that were set on the cold call. So it's very, very similar.

24:04

And if you treat it the same way, and this resonates a lot with founders that are

24:08

more, um, maybe they have an engineering background or they're a little bit more

24:11

analytical, uh, because you're treating it the exact same way, just look at the data.

24:15

The problem is everyone feels that.

24:17

Sales is so touchy feely. Oh, it's your personality.

24:20

They're likable, which is all true. Like that's part of it.

24:23

But the numbers tell you exactly what's going on within the organization.

24:28

And just because salespeople are very kind of eq, you know, very good at building

24:35

relationships, chatting with people, have fun personalities, doesn't mean we can't

24:40

be very data driven and analytical about the behaviors that they're doing that are

24:43

driving the result that we're looking for.

24:46

And if you start taking that approach, especially early on, you'll find

24:49

you'll be able to iterate a lot quicker and you'll get to a better result.

24:54

It's more like you're building a its own product than it is your,

24:58

um, you're kind of, then you're just building a sales team.

25:01

It's almost like a product, right? You're trying to figure out what works best and then you're making

25:04

changes based on that feedback. Kevin Horek: Fascinating.

25:08

Yeah. I've never actually heard sales put like that to me, and

25:12

it, it totally makes sense. Kyle Vamvouris: Yeah, I think it's, it.

25:17

Look, it's, is it a super new idea?

25:21

No. Um, large Oracle's been doing this for decades, you know, it's just they

25:26

had more access to data back then.

25:29

Now everybody has access to the same data.

25:32

And you can evaluate your team like this from the beginning.

25:35

Um, people get weird around sales, and I can tell you there's also a

25:41

lot of salespeople that aren't great.

25:45

There's a lot of sales leaders that aren't great, and people

25:48

hire a sales leader, like a VP of sales, or they hire a salesperson.

25:52

It doesn't work out the way they're expecting, and they're like, gosh, this,

25:54

this just isn't working for, for us.

25:57

I doubt they took a very data-driven approach when they were building

26:01

those teams and the people who were leading the team either didn't know

26:04

what they were doing, or they had experience as a sales leader, as

26:08

at an organization that already had somewhat of a process when they started.

26:13

Which is very different than if you're starting something from scratch.

26:17

So depending on what stage you are at in an organization, just

26:20

the approach changes a little bit. Sure.

26:22

Kevin Horek: Well, and then to your point earlier, just, just because

26:25

even if you move companies, doesn't mean your successful sales process

26:28

will work at the new company. It may or may not. It, maybe it's probably

26:32

Kyle Vamvouris: somewhere in the middle. Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah, you're a hundred percent right about that.

26:35

You know, I'm, I'm sure it's the same with design. You know, every, uh, every app looks different.

26:42

, yeah. There's a reason for that. If there was one right way of doing something that worked for

26:46

this specific type of product, all the apps would look the same, but

26:49

Kevin Horek: they don't. Interesting.

26:51

Yeah. No, and that fascinating. So I wanna a little dive a little bit deeper into some of the other kind of

26:58

services and and consulting that you guys

27:02

Kyle Vamvouris: do. . So yeah, our main, our main service or is, um, a six month program where we work.

27:10

Okay. Really hands on with an organization.

27:13

We help them, uh, create a scalable sales process.

27:16

So in some cases, our clients are brand new.

27:19

They've never built a sales team, and they're building their first team, and we help 'em do that.

27:22

Uh, like for example, we worked with a, um, project management

27:26

solution for architects. Uh, they were at 400 k in a r r when, uh, they started working with

27:32

us and they had no salespeople.

27:34

11 months later they had eight salespeople and they were at 1.2 million.

27:39

So they had three x in that in 11 months. Uh, that's the power of having a strong sales function.

27:44

And then other, uh, customers that work with us, they have a team already.

27:47

They're just not meeting the expectations and we take them through, you know,

27:50

the same structure of program. It's just very, um, very different because they already have a team in place.

27:57

And that is similar type of results, like once you put in a culture of one

28:02

data hygiene , but also analyzing and using data in order to make decisions.

28:07

Things typically get better fairly quickly, especially if it's a organization

28:11

that has been tracking some stuff already. They're just not using it very well.

28:15

Um, as far outside of, you know, our core program where we're, like

28:19

I said, working really hands on, uh, with these organizations, we also do

28:23

training and coaching for SDRs and AEs.

28:25

We have a, a group, uh, training program that we've developed for that,

28:29

that all of our customers, uh, for the most part have the reps doing.

28:33

And then we also do, um, some, some sourcing and we really only

28:37

will recruit for our, our clients that are in that six month program.

28:43

But we have, um, kind of a recruiting department here, and we actually look and,

28:47

uh, we'll find really strong SD R and AE talent and we'll place it that will place

28:52

them at our, um, at our clients companies.

28:57

Kevin Horek: Interesting. So with existing sales teams though, and I'm sure you probably get asked this a

29:02

lot, there's obviously gonna be people at the company and on the team that embrace

29:09

you coming in and then kind of are maybe a bit more hesitant or, or less like,

29:13

we don't need consult like consultants. Yeah.

29:16

Like how do you work with teams to kind of, you know, get

29:19

everybody back on the same page? Kyle Vamvouris: So there's what we try to do, and then there's

29:24

sometimes the worst case scenario. Um, so what we do is we explain why we're, we're there.

29:31

Okay. That's usually a good first step. And we have executive approval.

29:35

So like the CEO typically has, or the CEO has definitely signed off on this, if

29:40

they have a sales leader in place, they are, they're usually involved in this as

29:43

well earlier, before they, uh, hire us.

29:46

So you explain to the whole team why we're, why we're there, what

29:48

we're going to be, um, doing, and what impact's gonna have on them.

29:51

At the end of the day, salespeople make commission, the more effective

29:54

I can make a sales rep, the more commission they'll, they'll make.

29:57

So we'll just show 'em that and say like, listen, this is

30:00

what you guys are doing now. you're basically, you're making your base salary.

30:04

I imagine everybody here would like to be making double the amount of money.

30:08

Am I wrong? No, , you're not wrong.

30:10

Okay, great. So let's follow my process that we're gonna get, you know,

30:14

we're, we will get you there. Now that doesn't always work.

30:17

You know, sometimes there's people who've just been stuck in their ways

30:19

and they have a lot of pushback. They like the way they're doing it.

30:22

Um, at the end of the day, it's a performance-based role.

30:25

And if you have reps that aren't hitting their targets and they like doing

30:29

it their way and they're not gonna do it another way, and they're not

30:32

hitting their targets, then they leave. You let them go.

30:35

You can't keep people around who aren't meeting your expectations.

30:39

That goes back to that, that third, um, reason why I see a

30:42

lot of sales team struggling. They have a culture of poor, poor performance.

30:46

And for every poor performing sales rep, there's an average sales rep that's

30:50

getting pulled down instead of pulled up.

30:52

And that's what you want is pulling up.

30:56

But too many people allow folks that they like to sit in the sales role, not perform

31:02

to expectations, and they wonder why their entire sales organization struggles.

31:07

So that doesn't happen when we're involved. And I've told three different organizations to fire their VPs of

31:13

sales because they were the problem.

31:16

And sometimes you're saying, Hey, Sales reps are the problem, and you

31:20

either need to put 'em in a different part of the organization or you need

31:23

to remove 'em from the organization. And it's a tough conversation to have.

31:26

But I can tell you almost every single time I've made that kind of

31:30

recommendation, the c e o or founder has said, yeah, I've been feeling that

31:35

way for a while, and I just needed somebody to kick me in that direction.

31:39

So oftentimes, you know what you need to do when you have these

31:42

kind of sales organization. Uh, you're just, uh, you just don't have the validation you

31:46

need to actually execute on, on what your gut's telling you.

31:50

No, Kevin Horek: that, that makes sense. I, I'm curious then.

31:54

So if you come into, you probably get to ask this all the time.

31:58

Like, well, I want our salespeople to, you know, we're at a

32:01

million dollars in revenue. We wanna be 10, 10 million in revenue.

32:05

Like, make that happen. Like, you probably get these un like, it's not, maybe it's attainable, maybe down

32:11

the road, but like not in a year or Right.

32:14

How do you handle that? And setting, setting expectations.

32:16

Kyle Vamvouris: It's actually super easy. Um, okay, , it sounds hard on the surface, but I have the best way to do it.

32:22

Um, I go, great. You wanna hit, you're at 1 million, now you wanna hit 10 million.

32:25

Perfect. Let's pull out my model and let's figure out exactly how many people you need

32:29

to hire in order to hit that target. And I take their data and I model out exactly how many people they would need

32:35

in order to hit that 10 million target.

32:38

And then I look at them, I said, are you prepared to hire 20 sales reps and 15 SD.

32:42

or whatever the number would have to be, depending on the product size.

32:45

That's probably high, honestly. But, um, and they go, oh, we're not ready to do that.

32:49

Okay, well then we're not heading 10 million next year. And the where this conversation gets the most interesting is when, um, they've

32:55

taken venture money, so right, had a million dollars in a r r and you're

32:59

like, Hey, I need to hit 3 million. Cause we're trying to triple, triple, double, double.

33:02

It's like, okay, great, well you got big goals.

33:05

Welcome to kind of big sales goals too.

33:08

. Now we're gonna have to hire, you know, eight people, right?

33:11

This is probably gonna be five SD and three AEs and we're gonna need to onboard

33:16

those people within the next four months. And you have to be prepared to spend, you know, spend the money it takes to do that.

33:22

And if you raised venture capital, then you have no choice because you

33:25

told the board you were gonna do it. And people still get a little bit stuck on that.

33:29

But the. Tells me exactly what we need to do, and I'm putting your data into a model

33:34

and telling you based on your historic performance, or if it's brand new

33:37

based on reasonable super conservative estimates, this is what we'll need

33:41

to, in order to, to make it happen. And then, you know, let's hold hands and skip along the, the journey together.

33:49

Kevin Horek: Interesting. No, that's, that's cool.

33:52

So, I, I'm curious then, what advice do you give to, you know, maybe

33:58

tech founders or, or other people that aren't traditionally sales

34:02

team or, or salesperson at all?

34:05

Because the, the reality is, is we have an idea.

34:08

We're starting to build something, trying to get our first customers, you know,

34:11

and then hopefully if it takes off, we're, we're gonna build out a sales

34:14

Kyle Vamvouris: team. Yep. So I always, like, I, first of all, the founder has to.

34:20

, if the founder's not selling, there's a problem. People aren't just gonna, you know, this is becoming a little bit more common.

34:25

Cause everyone's like, oh, we're product led with our growth.

34:27

It's like, okay, great. Um, , you know, slack has 200 salespeople right now, so , that's the, the, you

34:34

know, the Golden Child of Product led.

34:37

So, um, it's a lot more complex than that.

34:39

And I'm a big believer in product led growth. But there's also a sales motion that works in tandem with that.

34:46

Um, in my experience, that's most effective.

34:48

So you have to sell as the founder originally.

34:52

And depending on the situation, and I'll give you a couple of scenarios

34:55

here just so people can put themselves in, in the shoes of the scenario.

35:00

Uh, the first scenario is you've raised zero, uh, venture capital or capital

35:04

in general, and you don't have the, um, the resources you need in order to

35:08

ex to build out a real sales function.

35:11

But you can maybe hire somebody that's inexpensive.

35:14

I typically recommend starting by hiring an SDR and having them

35:17

do cold outreach for you, uh, or work some of your inbound leads.

35:21

And then you treat yourself as the founder.

35:24

You treat yourself as the sales rep, so then that SDR is now booking

35:28

meetings for you, and then you're responsible for closing those meetings.

35:31

And then once you get so busy to where you can't really manage.

35:36

Both running the company as well as doing all of the sales calls.

35:40

At this point, you're probably generating a bit more revenue and

35:43

it would make sense to bring on an account executive to take over for

35:48

you as the sales hire the salesperson.

35:52

Got it. So that's the first one. If they didn't raise money, if you did raise capital, welcome . This is

35:58

the fire hose now totally changed the approach and you just do the math on

36:02

how many people you need in order to hit your rev revenue target and you

36:04

hire them as quickly as possible and then you fire people who don't work.

36:08

So, um, it's a little coldblooded, but this is what

36:10

you have to do in the beginning. Um, uh, also depending on how much, uh, money you raise, like that's obviously

36:16

gonna influence what revenue targets are gonna be attainable for you.

36:19

Um, specifically when it comes to how, what percentage of that

36:23

funding you can allocate towards the sales, uh, department.

36:26

So what I'll typically see is an organization is comfortable

36:30

hiring, uh, three to four people.

36:34

Maybe if they raise money, depending on what round it is and

36:36

how, and how much they raised. But let's say it's four people, just to keep things simple, you would

36:42

probably start by hiring two SDRs and two AEs right off the bat, and

36:46

you do that as quickly as possible. Um, if you have to pick which one to start and you're not a sales fan

36:52

founder, I would start with account executives that have them do full cycle.

36:57

So they do their own prospecting and booking their own appointments and then

37:00

bring on the SDRs quickly after that.

37:03

But if you modeled it out appropriately, you can't really delay your hiring.

37:06

So you need to move with urgency here.

37:09

Uh, cuz there will be bumps and challenges along the way and you're

37:11

gonna be at risk of mix missing the, uh, targets that you gave the

37:15

board, uh, because you're being slow.

37:18

So I would hire four people and then I would keep the job open.

37:22

I would keep interviewing people and hopefully everybody works out.

37:26

But because there's enough people, there's some competition.

37:29

Uh, sometimes people don't work out and then you can replace them with,

37:32

uh, new hires if you have to, but hopefully you don't have to just.

37:35

Kevin Horek: Got it. Okay. How is the sales landscape right now?

37:41

Obviously techs all doom and gloom and seems to go over the map lately.

37:45

Is it a challenge to hire decent salespeople?

37:48

Do you recommend going to, you know, in your case, like you got recruited

37:53

from selling gym, gym memberships, like going to the non-tech sector?

37:57

Kyle Vamvouris: Yeah. Which, which I love. Um, for SDRs, I love hiring right outta college here, I, I'm gonna say something

38:02

that's gonna be uncomfortable for people to hear and um, this is just the reality.

38:07

If you're a salesperson, you're getting laid off.

38:09

right now, and they didn't lay off the entire sales department.

38:13

You weren't a top performer. And if you're a startup company, you wanna hire top performers or people who

38:18

have the potential to be a top performer. So that's why I like hiring right outta college.

38:23

For SDRs, for account executives, it's a little bit trickier, and I

38:28

do look for people with experience. Salespeople are very good at selling themselves.

38:32

So if you go to, um, our website, we have a framework that we use to evaluate

38:36

this, that's one of our blog posts. If you just type in, um, like hiring salespeople and

38:41

Boris, it'll pop up on Google. Uh, we, we have a, a strong process for evaluating sales talent, but the

38:47

key is you want the top performer. So yeah, tech is in shambles right now, and if you're talking to a candidate

38:53

from a company that didn't fire every salesperson that they have on staff,

38:57

and instead they hire, they fired. 80, 70, 80% of them.

39:02

Odds are you're not talking to somebody who was a top performer.

39:06

And I don't know if you can afford to hire somebody who wasn't a top performer.

39:11

Maybe you can, maybe you can. It's up for the individual, uh, founder to decide.

39:15

But that's something that makes hiring today a little bit more tricky than it was

39:20

before when there's a lot less layoffs.

39:22

Um, the underperformers were still there, but right now the market

39:27

is flooded with underperformers.

39:29

So you're getting a lot more applications being filled out than you were previously.

39:35

Interesting. Kevin Horek: So why do you recommend hiring people right outta school?

39:40

Kyle Vamvouris: A couple of reasons. Speci, and this is specific for the SD R role.

39:43

Yeah. Um, and I love college athletic background.

39:45

I'll actually give you a couple of my, like criteria here in a minute, but why

39:48

do I like hiring people out of school? Uh, typically they're more driven cuz they're, this is

39:51

their first job in the workforce. They're excited, they're very motivated, they wanna progress in their career.

39:56

So I like that. Um, they're also new.

39:59

so I can shape, um, that candidate or that, uh, that employee into what I want

40:05

them to be based on our culture here. You know, they're a lot more green and they're more coachable and they're

40:10

willing to learn and they, they adjust.

40:12

And I really like that. And I like being around people that are, um, curious.

40:19

And I like being around people who are excited to learn new things,

40:23

and I find that best in people that I hire right outta college.

40:26

A couple of things that I look for is I do not like hiring, uh, pe uh, right

40:33

outta college if they didn't work or play.

40:35

Um, athletic, have a, were in athletics in college.

40:39

Uh, I, I, I don't have an interest in, in hiring people who did not

40:43

work or do athletics in college. I think if, um, I think you should have, if, uh, you went to college, I think

40:49

it's important for the sales role to have somebody who, um, you know, kind of.

40:56

Is able to manage both of those things at once.

40:59

And I, I have a lot of respect for people who did that too. Uh, the other thing that I look for are people who are really naturally curious.

41:05

And this applies to every role. Um, even if you're hiring, uh, people who had a job prior and not just outta

41:11

college, but I look for curious people.

41:14

I think these's a really important trait.

41:16

So there's obviously the normal stuff grid that everybody talks about, but those are

41:20

the two that I, I, I have as a bit of a.

41:24

Kevin Horek: How do you look for curiosity in

41:27

Kyle Vamvouris: somebody? Usually it's by the questions they ask me.

41:29

Uh, so I, a big, big part of my interview process is what questions

41:35

is the candidate asking me? And that just gets me excited.

41:39

If I have someone who's asking me really good questions I don't normally hear,

41:42

and they're invested in our organization and they ask deeper questions after

41:47

they've interviewed with other people, and I'm on a second interview with them,

41:50

maybe, uh, that gets me really excited.

41:52

So that's by far the main, is it the main way that I tell

41:56

if somebody's more curious? The other way is based on their interests.

42:00

So if they have a lot of, I I always say if they have a lot of goofy interests,

42:05

that makes me more interested in them. So for example, I had a rep that I hired who used to compete in competitive

42:14

snow machine races in Alaska.

42:16

So he was born and raised in Alaska. Okay.

42:20

And I was like, that's crazy. Like, how did you get into that?

42:22

And just the way he lit up and would tell me about, about it.

42:25

And then there was like another thing he was really into investing to, and like

42:28

he was telling me about how he found his first, he stumbled upon his first book.

42:32

Cause then his family's had an investing background and then he ended up kind

42:36

of going down the rabbit hole and following Warren Buffet's philosophy.

42:39

Like just you, you, when you talk to somebody who has a lot of unique

42:43

interests and they're unique people, usually they're more curious and, uh,

42:47

especially if they act on their curiosity. Like, I love that kind of stuff.

42:52

Kevin Horek: Fascinating. Okay. Um, any other advice for, for people that, because obviously the job market's

43:02

a little bit kind of, I, I don't know. It, it seems like people are either super busy or they're kind of struggling

43:07

pretty hard and obviously there's people in the middle, but it seems to be kinda

43:11

like a big feaster famine right now.

43:13

what advice do you give for people that that maybe did get let go and

43:16

maybe they knew they were, weren't a top performer or they weren't

43:20

allowed to be a top performer? Cuz I've had that before too, where it's like, I've got hired at companies and I

43:26

was literally not allowed to do my job.

43:28

Right. And you know, we don't need to get into that necessarily, but I think

43:31

you know what I'm asking there, Kyle Vamvouris: you know. Totally.

43:33

I'm glad you asked it too. Cause I should put a little asterisk there.

43:37

Every piece of advice I give is just a piece of advice.

43:40

There's exceptions to everything, right? Like I'm, I'm generalizing here because I'm not talking

43:44

to a specific organization and.

43:48

There are a lot of sales reps that you're totally right where they

43:50

just weren't able to do their job. Like, for example, when I, um, I won't tell you which company it

43:55

was, but when I started, one of the companies that I worked at, uh,

43:58

they just didn't give us any leads. And they're like, oh, the SD Rs gonna book all your appointments for you.

44:02

And they didn't. And I just went rogue and started doing my own outreach, and I booked more

44:09

meetings in my first month doing that than the entire SDR team of 15 people.

44:15

Wow. So I couldn't really do my job, and I got lucky.

44:18

I ended up closing a deal, you know, it worked out, but it was very tough.

44:24

So of course they're gonna be situations like that.

44:27

Now if you're a sales rep and maybe you weren't a top performer or you

44:31

weren't allowed to be good, and as you're kind of in this job market

44:34

right now, there's two things that I think are really important to do.

44:36

One is improve your own skills and should be consuming everything that you can.

44:41

Uh, and then the next one, Is, you should be talking to as many

44:44

companies as humanly possible. You should be interviewing everywhere.

44:48

One, you get better at it. But two, you're also gonna have a lot more opportunities, which gives

44:53

you leverage to negotiate in a world where that's gonna be less common

44:56

moving forward, because there's an increase in talent on the market.

45:00

So if I was a sales rep, especially if I was a good one, I would have as

45:05

many interviews as humanly possible. I would improve some of my own skills, but I would get really, really good at

45:11

interviewing and make sure that I pick a company that I think would do that.

45:15

That is on offense right now versus on defense, which is a lot of what,

45:20

what a lot of companies are at. Kevin Horek: No, that's good advice.

45:23

I also think too, that if you've been in the sales role before, you've probably

45:26

worked with a bunch of people, like start reaching out to your network.

45:29

Kyle Vamvouris: Oh, totally. Yeah. Kevin Horek: It it, that's one thing that I.

45:34

Been kind of just wa just scrolling through LinkedIn and it seems like

45:37

people almost are hesitant to reach out for help sometimes, right?

45:41

Especially when they're struggling if they just got let go, especially if

45:43

the whole team's gotten let go, right? Kyle Vamvouris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

45:46

Absolutely. Absolutely. You have to look to your network.

45:49

That's where you're gonna find a lot of jobs, um, uh, you know,

45:52

throughout your entire career. But I'll tell you, every job that I got, other than the first one, Intuit,

45:58

I applied or I created, if you look at my current job, but I just applied on,

46:03

on, I didn't use my network at all. So interesting.

46:06

You totally tried to use your network. You know, I got interviews through my network, but the jobs I ended

46:11

up taking were not ones that were, um, part of my network.

46:15

And don't underestimate or wait, how should I say this?

46:19

Don't overestimate. , other talent on the market.

46:24

Like if you're, if you're a talented salesperson, you have to realize

46:29

that person, the, the person at the company who's interviewing you has

46:33

spoken to nine other sales reps, so 10 total, and most of them aren't great.

46:39

Most of those interviews are not great. I can tell you, as somebody who's done a ton of interviews, most

46:45

people aren't great at interviews. So if you can be good at that, you'll really stand out, especially

46:50

if you can ask questions and you're very thoughtful and you're also

46:53

self-aware, you will stand out.

46:56

So you should have confidence when you're doing that. And when you stumble upon a sales rep, as a hiring, as somebody hiring, you

47:03

stumble upon a sales rep that stands out, you typically get really excited.

47:08

And remember at the core of the sales role, you give me $5, I'll give you 15.

47:13

Right. We're, we are a, a positive revenue generated part of the organization,

47:19

so you should treat yourself like one and that gives you the

47:22

opportunity to negotiate and, um, you know, ultimately get paid a lot.

47:29

Kevin Horek: I think that's really good advice. We're kind of coming to the end of the show, but is there any other advice

47:34

that you would want to give people whether just depending on where they

47:37

are in their career that you think we maybe haven't covered yet today?

47:40

Kyle Vamvouris: Yeah, take your job really serious.

47:44

If you're a sales rep, I mean, regardless of what job you're in, actually, so

47:47

let me just remove sales from it. Like you should be taking that job incredibly seriously.

47:52

You should be trying to do your best work possible.

47:54

If you're not where you want to be in your career, , if you're exactly where

47:58

you want to be and you want to coast at this level, sure do the bare minimum.

48:01

But I see so much content on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on YouTube of people

48:06

talking about like doing the least possible to get paid the most.

48:11

Yeah, I just feel like that's the wrong approach to have.

48:14

And if you want to be successful, you have to demand excellence from yourself.

48:19

And if you're not willing to do what it takes to become excellent

48:22

in your current role, then you don't deserve to be anywhere further.

48:25

You're not in the position you are because you, uh, Got screwed by somebody else

48:32

or things haven't worked out the way you want, you're where you are because

48:35

that's where you're supposed to be. And if you feel like you need to be in a better spot, then make it happen.

48:40

But it starts with you and too many people preach the message

48:43

that it starts with somebody else. I think ultimately that's the kind of belief system that holds

48:47

people back in their career. Uh, I, I

48:50

Kevin Horek: actually think that's, that's really good advice. I, I also, I'm curious though, obviously, like sales isn't really like a necessarily

48:57

nine to five Monday to Friday type job. What advice do you give to people about kind of a work-life balance

49:03

or even what have you found? Because in my honest opinion, sometimes I'm really good at it and other

49:08

weeks or months, I'm terrible at Kyle Vamvouris: it.

49:11

Yeah. Yeah. But it's also what works for you, you know?

49:14

So, yeah. Fair. Each person's very different. Like, I, you know, I, I've talked about this with burnout a lot.

49:19

Okay. Where people are all worried about burn burnout.

49:22

And if you ever, and some people you talk to, they've never burned out before.

49:25

Yeah. I'm like, what are you worried about? You haven't, you haven't hit the burnout mark.

49:29

How do you know what it takes to burn out? Oh, I wanna make sure I take vacation so I don't burn out.

49:33

It's like, really? Or do you just want a vacation? Like you can be honest about saying, I just want a vacation.

49:37

But if you've never experienced burnout before, you have no

49:40

idea what your threshold is. And I can tell you is somebody who has experienced it, but also has

49:46

had a bunch of incredibly stressful parts, moments in my career.

49:50

What once used to burn you out at some point?

49:54

Won't anymore. Kevin Horek: Yeah, that's good advice.

49:56

So Kyle Vamvouris: figure it out for you, and then focus on trying to

50:00

expand your comfort zone and how should you balance it in the way

50:04

that makes the most sense for you. So are you married with kids?

50:08

No. Okay. You're probably working a bit more than somebody who is.

50:12

Yeah. Oh, you have? You are married, okay, great.

50:15

Adjust your life accordingly. Make sure you're spending time with your kids.

50:18

Make sure you're spending time with your family, but do what's, what's right

50:22

based on your own life circumstances.

50:24

Don't be worried about some my mystical thing, like burnout all

50:29

of a sudden popping in your life because you didn't take an extra

50:32

day off during the holiday season. Like it's ridiculous.

50:35

It's just not how it happens. It's not because you worked too much, it's typically because you're working

50:40

too much at, towards an outcome that you don't feel like the work you're doing is

50:44

actually leading you towards achieving.

50:46

That's more of what burnout is than it is.

50:48

Oh, I just worked too much this week. So I usually encourage people to try to be very, um, self-aware of what makes you.

50:57

Burnout or not be productive and what does, and try to just keep doing more

51:02

of what does, but I can tell you people have been warning me of burnout my entire

51:06

career, and I've experienced it before.

51:09

I can tell you what I do today would've burnt me out five years ago, but I'm doing

51:15

it today and I'm not getting burnt out. We change, we evolve, we get better.

51:19

And every single person who's listening to this, I would hope is on that track

51:23

too, where they're, they're listening to this cause they wanna improve,

51:25

they want to get better, and I would encourage them to stay on that track.

51:29

Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's, that's really good advice.

51:32

And I always hated those like stupid lists of like 20 things

51:36

successful people do every day. It's like some of them might work for you, none of them might work for you.

51:41

Yeah. All of them might work for you. Yeah.

51:43

Depending on where you are in your career in.

51:46

Try some new things and keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn't work.

51:50

And Kyle Vamvouris: Kevin, lemme expand on that real quick. You bring up a really good point.

51:55

Uh, they also talk about like, oh, uh, you know, the average millionaire has

51:58

seven streams of income or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Statistics.

52:01

Yeah. Now, almost everyone who's gotten rich has gotten rich on one stream first and

52:06

then diversified their streams of income.

52:08

Hundred percent. Every millionaire influencer who's telling you about their morning

52:13

routine probably did something different when they were coming up.

52:17

So do what works for you. Try to figure out what you know, what's gonna be best.

52:21

And there are these, these core fundamentals that you should be following.

52:25

And is journaling every day good? Yeah, it is.

52:29

I don't do it . I wish I did, but I don't.

52:32

But what I do works for me. So figure it out for you.

52:36

I totally agree with that, Kevin. Kevin Horek: No, I, I, I think that's really good advice and

52:39

I wish I would've known that.

52:43

A lot sooner in my career than, you know, it took me so long to figure some of this

52:47

stuff out and I, I actually like stopped reading all those types of news articles.

52:53

It's like I just skim past 'em. Yeah. Cause I don't even care.

52:56

It's like, sure. There's like, I probably lose the odd good Tim tidbit of what I should be

53:01

trying, but it's like there's more, 99% of it is just absolute garbage.

53:07

Right. Or it's just like this hype piece. Kyle Vamvouris: Well it's totally a, yeah, it's totally a hype piece piece

53:12

and it's, it's disappointing because Yeah, there's a lot of people, like

53:15

the fundamentals are what works. Yeah.

53:17

And look, you can, if, if you're not where you want to be in your life

53:24

today and, and almost your entire life, you're guaranteed to always want to be

53:27

somewhere better . It's kinda the curse of being a kind of a high achiever.

53:31

But, um, in general, like if your life isn't the way you want it to be, a lot of

53:37

times this stuff becomes procrastination. It's like, oh, I journal every day, but I'm, you're really procrastinating, like,

53:43

what actions do you really have to take?

53:45

And people love doing things that they feel make them better, but don't put them

53:51

in a position to fail, like journaling.

53:54

Like you can, you never, I mean, if you stop journaling, I guess you're

53:56

failing at it technically, but it's not like your whole family's Yeah.

53:59

Uh, laugh at you, but actually trying to grow a business.

54:03

Like, I remember when I first started Boris, I remember getting asked all

54:07

the time, are you paying yourself yet? Are you paying yourself yet?

54:10

Are you paying yourself yet? And the answer was no.

54:13

For 10 months. Yeah. ? I'm not, no, not yet.

54:16

No, not yet. Oh, we have, you know, we have four clients right now.

54:19

Uh, no, I'm not paying myself yet. And then, you know, what happened is I started paying myself

54:24

and everyone stopped asking. Cause they realized, oh shit, this is serious.

54:28

Yeah. He, he, he was actually doing something the whole time.

54:31

And that's gonna happen with everybody else if they start their own business.

54:34

And also if they progress in their career, there's gonna be people

54:36

around who want the best for you. And they're not naysayers, but they're gonna ask you things and

54:41

they're gonna question you in ways that makes you feel like they're

54:44

not confident in what you are doing.

54:47

And the answer is, is because they're not. But eventually they will be.

54:50

But you do that through actions. You don't do that from writing in a journal.

54:53

Not, not that it's not healthy to write in a journal. I think you should, but uh, just in general, your actions are more important.

54:59

Kevin Horek: No, I, I couldn't agree with you more, but sadly we're outta time.

55:02

So how about we close with mentioning where people can get

55:05

more information about yourself? Voris the book and anything else you wanna mention?

55:09

Totally. Kyle Vamvouris: So you, you'll find [email protected].

55:12

That's a V as in Victor, o u r i s.com.

55:15

You find me on LinkedIn too, Kyle Van Voris. I'm sure you'll, my name will be in the title somewhere, so copy and

55:20

paste it in and uh, if you have any questions, never hesitate to reach out.

55:23

I'm more than happy to chat with anyone. Perfect,

55:26

Kevin Horek: Kyle, well, I really appreciate you taking the time outta

55:28

your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you

55:30

and have a good rest of your day, man. Likewise. Thanks so much, Kevin.

55:33

Thank you. Thanks for listening.

55:39

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55:42

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55:47

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