Summary

Robert M. Fojo, VP of Sales at Max Value Processing, shares his journey from being a lawyer to joining a startup in the merchant services space. He discusses his background growing up in Miami as the son of Cuban immigrants and how it shaped his values and appreciation for freedom. Fojo explains the compelling ideas behind Max Value Processing, including transparency and technology in the payments industry. He emphasizes the importance of understanding vertical markets and building relationships with software providers. Fojo also offers advice for career pivots and the importance of consistency and diligence.

Takeaways

• Understanding and appreciating your heritage and upbringing can shape your values and career choices.
• Transparency and technology are key factors in the payments industry, and companies that focus on these areas can differentiate themselves.
• Building relationships with software providers and understanding vertical markets are crucial for success in the merchant services space.
• Consistency and diligence are essential for achieving goals and making successful career pivots.

Sound Bites

"Give it 110% and don't look back."

"Be consistent and diligent in what you're doing."

"Become a wholesale Processor and control all processes."

Links

Robert’s Max Value Processing: https://maxvalueprocessing.com/

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

Tech Startup Toolkit (book): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s website: https://jothyrosenberg.com

The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on disabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

03:04 Living in New Hampshire and Working in Beverly

04:40 Transition from Lawyer to Startup

08:32 The Major Ideas that Will Change the Payments Industry

11:28 Identifying Pain Points and Differentiating from Competitors

13:13 The Similarities Between Sales and Law

15:10 Transition to VP of Sales and Managing a Sales Team

16:37 Balancing Law Practice and Sales Career

19:20 Partner Strategy and Protecting Against Competition

22:34 The Challenges of Developing Payment Solutions

25:47 Expanding into New Verticals and Differentiating from Competitors

28:16 Creating Pull Through Strategies and Displacing Competitors

35:27 The Importance of Grit and Immigrant Mentality

37:41 Advice for Career Pivots and Consistency

38:47 Goals for the Company and Future Growth

41:56 Passing on Values to the Next Generation

And hello Robert, how are you?

I'm good, I'm good, how you doing?

Good, good. I've been looking forward to talking to you after our first short discussion. It's great to have a lawyer who's now a startup person is always an interesting kind of transition. And we'll talk about that. But could you start by talking about, well, first of all, just where you're from and where you live now, but then kind of go back to.

what it was like for you growing up.

Sure. So I am originally from Miami, Florida. I am the son of Cuban immigrants. I'm 104. And I grew up, was born and raised in Miami and I attended college down there as well. But growing up in Miami, it was very interesting. I am being the son of Cuban parents who had recently come over in the 1960s. It was very difficult to disconnect myself growing up in Miami from my Cuban heritage. The country and its politics always

resonated a lot in the Miami community because the Miami community had a lot of Cuban transplants and Cuban immigrants in it. And so there were always a series, there's always some event or whatnot associated with Cuba that would be a topic of discussion growing up. And a lot of those experiences shaped me as I came of age. And not only that, but my parents themselves, they sort of inculcated in me.

very, very specific values that stemmed from their experience in fleeing a communist totalitarian regime. And because of that, I learned to truly appreciate the freedom that we, I think we enjoy here in this country and that we continue to enjoy. I truly appreciate it. I came to want to learn and understand how we assembled this system of government that we had. It is partly what...

what prompted me to want to study the law is to truly understand our system, our system of rights, where those rights come from and how our society and government works.

Do you still live in Miami?

No, I do not. I, after Miami, like I said, I attended college down there. I went to, to law school at Harvard and I eventually ended up back in Miami and started working there, but a series of personal circumstances, led to my moving and relocating to the Boston area. I currently live in Southern New Hampshire and I've lived here for the last about 14 years now. And so this is where I live and work for the time being.

And is your company in New Hampshire also?

My company is located and based in Beverly, Massachusetts. The company is Max Value Processing. And we're based there. We're a merchant services and payment technology company.

So your town is right next to the town where I keep my small sailboat. I keep it in Salem Harbor.

Okay, yeah, we spend a lot of time in that area, Salem, Gloucester, you know, that whole seacoast area.

I was up there putting the sailboat in the water for the season yesterday.

It's just the right time for that now. The sun finally came out. It seems like it takes forever in New England for the sun to come out.

I know, I know. Well, I live in, I live in Wayland. So it's about 55 minutes to get up to Salem. And I would imagine that from Southern New Hampshire to Beverly is a little bit of a commute, but probably not as bad as like down closer to Boston would be.

Mm -hmm.

Well, it is a bit of a commute, but thankfully, thanks to technology, the same technology that you and I can use to record this podcast, I can do a lot of what I do from home. I can do it on my phone. A lot of what I do is I manage, I'm building and managing a sales team. And so I essentially need to be in front of my screen and on my phone accessible to my agents. My agents spend the day calling me and looping me into

conversations with prospective businesses and merchants. And so I usually need to be in front of my screen to do that. Sometimes I'm in the office in Beverly, other times I'm just at home in front of my screen and I can do everything I need to do from there. So thankfully I don't need to commute an hour, an hour and a half every day. I can do it from the comfort of my home.

So you were a pretty high -flying lawyer for 20 years. And I think at the end of it, you built your own law practice, right? And so 20 years as a lawyer, and then you pull up chocks, and you join this fledgling startup in the merchant services space.

That's right.

What possessed you?

Well, it was a combination of factors that led me to, I guess you could say, accidentally falling into the payment space. If you talk to anyone in payments or in merchant services, their story about how they ended up in payments is usually, they ended up in payments by accident. It's not something that you decide you want to do coming out of high school or college. Well, I want to be a merchant services sales representative. It's not what a lot of people strive to do for whatever reason. I...

I practiced law, as you said, for nearly 20 years. And while I enjoyed the purity of the practice, the craft, the writing, the research, the advocacy, there are certain practical circumstances concerning the legal profession that make it very frustrating to practice it. Everything from the way courts rule and apply the law to the nature of the industry itself. It's very difficult to...

high profile cases that made their way into the news and created and attracted a lot of attention. And so all of that combined, it was the combination of sorts that presented a perfect opportunity for me to start to move away from it. I thought it was the right time. I started looking around for other industries in which to work. It was, you know, I have a bachelor's degree in English. It's not something that can easily translate to other industries. And obviously I had income I needed to replace. So,

I started looking around for sales jobs. I happened upon an ad on Indeed for a sales rep position with another company, not the one I'm with now. I got on the phone, interviewed with the person who would become my manager there. I had a great conversation. I started the next day. Over the course of the next year, I did very well at that company. I made Presidents Club. I was tops in not only my team, but in the company.

And I sort of cut my teeth and learned a lot about the industry there. And it was then towards the end of last summer that I began to move away from that company and jump into Max Valley Processing, which is the company I'm currently involved with at the moment.

So whether you're founding something from scratch or are one of the early senior executives at a new company, there's got to be some compelling idea that you and they believe will change the world. I mean, well, obviously change that industry, but.

If it's a big enough deal, you know, it is changing the world. What is that major idea that will change things?

Well, there are two principles or two concepts that I think were truly compelling for me in joining Max Value. The first is in the payments world, transparency is something that's very hard to come by. If you talk to any business owner, about 60 to 70 % of them are very unhappy with their current merchant services provider for various reasons. It can be the software that they're using or the rates that they pay. So,

A lot of that comes from their inability or just the lack of transparency that they get from the merchant services provider. They don't understand why they pay the rates they pay. They can't get somebody on the phone. They can't get the support that they need. And so our goal, one of our goals with Max Value is to fill all those holes, is to be more transparent, have simplified pricing, provide the support that these merchants need, and explain things to them in an easy way so that they understand.

what the arrangement is, what equipment they need, and so they can understand the pricing that we're providing. Another concept that I believe is very, very attractive about the industry right now is technology. 10, 15 years ago, merchant services consisted of placing physical car terminals in businesses, and that's how we did things.

Over the course of the last decade, decade and a half, technology has slowly started to creep into the industry. Now it's not just a card terminal, but a business uses software to run their entire business. And payments is just a feature in that software. A lot of these legacy companies haven't recognized the encroaching nature of technology.

and they haven't really embraced it. And so they don't necessarily have the right solutions, the right software solutions. They're still just selling processing. At Max Value, we've really tried to develop the types of relationships with software providers and to integrate with software providers so we can offer an array of not just payment processing solutions, but software solutions to businesses so that we can focus on specific vertical markets and not lose...

accounts that we just sign up for processing, we can instead provide them with a long -term solution for their business that they can run using the software solution that we provide that also of course has the processing embedded in it.

When you're out talking to people, is there pain with the existing approach high enough, bad enough that you're able to get their attention, that you're able to distinguish yourself? And how do you prove that you're different? Talk is cheap, right? So how do you prove that you're different?

Well, in any situation and maybe 80 to 90 % of conversations that we have with business owners, I can usually find some pain point. I can find some frustration, some issue that they're having. All you need to do is just get them talking for a little bit. And I usually just ask questions designed to elicit that sort of information. I'll ask them something as simple as, what do you like about what you have? What don't you like?

And if they have the time, obviously some business owners can be busy and we'll have to postpone that kind of conversation for later. But if they begin talking, they'll usually will reveal some sort of issuance. So it's almost like I'm a doctor pushing and pushing to see where it hurts. And I eventually get there. And then the way we differentiate ourselves is I just, I've learned so much in this industry. And I think that one of the most important things to do in this industry and frankly, in any space that you work in is to really learn it so that you can.

have an educational conversation when you're selling somebody. I think every cell is an education cell. And so whenever I talk to these business owners and they reveal that pain point, I can start really understanding what it is that they need. And then I can start identifying specific solutions that we have that can address and resolve that need. That's how I can differentiate ourselves. It's not just a lot of people walk in there and they...

They adopt a one size fits all approach. So they'll just kind of, I call it vomiting, vomit all over the business owner and say, we have this, we have that, we can offer this and that. And you overwhelm people by doing that. I'd rather find the problem and then match the solution to the problem.

Would you say that in the, especially in the latter part of your legal career that you were doing selling a lot?

That's all it is. It's just a different kind of selling. Essentially it was a very different kind of training because the way they train you as a sales rep, well, a lot of companies will train reps to sell the old fashioned way. You walk in, you throw all your stuff on the table, it's sort of a volume approach. When I was a lawyer, it was more about...

So that was your training for sales.

nurturing a relationship. It's a longer sales cycle. And so you have to build trust, right? You have to establish that relationship, establish that trust, and then nurture that and grow it. And eventually you acquire that client. And a lot of that is done through networking and other sorts of avenues through which you demonstrate your expertise. I used to put out a lot of content online, videos and stuff like that. And a lot of that is about, I said, every cell is an education cell.

You want to educate people. You want to inform them, provide them with some value. And then naturally they, the ones who need what you offer will eventually find their way back to you. So with, with, with selling with American services, I think it's the same, it's the same thing and it's very effective. Provide value, educate your merchants, and then they will naturally gravitate towards, towards what, what you're offering. If they truly need what it is that you have.

But then that's true of what you did before as a direct sales rep, and now it's true of all the people that work for you. But there was another kind of big step, big jump to become VP of sales.

That's right. It's a very different role than I used to have. I was at my old company, I was a field sales rep. So I got in my car every day, approached 20, 25, 30 businesses, pulled doors, walked in and talked to a business owner cold. Now what I'm doing is what my old manager used to do is sit there in front of his screen and field calls from sales agents.

He trained me and this is the same thing I'm doing with my agents now. I think the best way to learn, one of the best ways to learn in merchant services is to get your manager, your supervisor on the phone and help you with the conversation with the business owner. Because there are going to be a lot of questions, objections you may not know how to handle. And having that second voice on the phone really helps you overcome those objections, answer those questions and facilitate that conversation to move it forward.

And that's what I'm doing now with my agents. I insist that they get me on the phone with these business owners so that I can help them do the exact same thing. And so it is a very different role, but I have found that I truly enjoy it. And it's such a rush when you help an agent close a deal or get to that next step in the sales process with a business owner.

Do you still maintain your status with the bar? Can you still practice law?

I have continued practicing law, very sporadically since, since I transitioned into this industry. It's certainly not something I want to, I want to leave and completely vacate. It's, it's a skillset that took some time to craft and develop and hone. And I certainly am not have no, no desire to leave it, but this is this, this space right now is my primary focus and it will be for the foreseeable future.

So you talked a little bit about the differentiation of what you guys have to people that companies that sound like the way you describe it sound like they're, well, this is not going to sound very, very nice, but they're sort of, it sounds like they're a little bit fat, dumb and happy that they don't recognize that they are in a market that should be changing and they're not changing. It sounds like.

Right, the, and I'm obviously not referring to any specific company. I certainly don't want to bad mouth anyone and I don't intend to, but the shift is what's called, the term is integrated payments. And that's where I mentioned before, when you had payments on just a physical card terminal, it was just, you were just selling processing. Now you're selling a software solution that has payments as a feature in it. So think of a,

a point of sale system for a restaurant, right? They don't just take payments on that. When the server takes your order and runs over to the screen and starts tapping everything on there, there's an order entry flow on that system. It sends a ticket to the kitchen. They can adjust tips on it. There's a loyalty program built into that software that tracks your loyalty points. They can integrate with QuickBooks. They can do all sorts of stuff. Every industry has...

software that is specific to that industry vertical and what the way the industry is shifting, it's shifting towards verticalization. So it's not, again, it's not just processing. It is now you're selling a software solution that's tailored to a specific vertical or sub vertical that has payments embedded in it. And so integrated payments is what's happening. And the companies that aren't focusing on that, or they're not either acquiring solutions that can service specific verticals or aren't partnering with companies.

or software companies that can offer solutions for specific verticals, those companies are going to be left behind because a lot of their merchants are going to experience a lot of attrition from these merchants that move away just from processing to a solution that they can run their whole business on.

So how does your partner strategy work? Do you spend a lot of time with essentially the guys that make the restaurant software so that they know about why they should integrate with your payment solution? Or do you find that you go into a restaurant or whatever and you're ending up?

finding out what they already use and then you're integrating with that. How is the partner part of your business working?

Well, you have the latter example is what we used to do. That's becoming a little more difficult to do because those software companies, close up, close up their processing. They, they, they, they are what we call proprietary. It's a lot harder to do that now. There are fewer and fewer of those software systems that are, ag not, we call them agnostic where you can just, it's just called, we can just integrate with the software. A lot of these software, software companies now instead are, are they either.

partner with specific processors or they have their own in -house processing. And so there are two scenarios. One is we become a reseller for specific software system. Thankfully, a lot of these software companies recognize the value of having essentially dealers, a dealer channel for companies like ours. We understand distribution. We're the ones approaching merchants, and we know how to sell to them. So if they allow us to resell their solution,

You know, we share in the revenue and everybody wins. The other, the other avenue that we're taking is we're finding other software companies, who tend to default to generic services, payment services like Striper square. A lot of these are like app companies and, they don't understand that there are many other options out there besides the, the generic, once I spits all solutions like Striper square or PayPal. And we.

forge a partnership with them. We call it an ISV partnership. ISV stands for integrated software vendor. And we embed our payment solution into their application software, what have you. And again, that partnership includes a revenue sharing model as well, and everybody wins. And then they can focus on developing their software, improving it and optimizing it. And we focus on distribution. So those are the two...

paths, if you will, through which we are embracing technology and the companies that aren't looking at it that way are probably going to be hurting in the next few years as technology really takes more of a hold in the payments world.

So what kind of protections do you have of some of these software suppliers learning how to do what you do as an ISV and shutting you out in the future? I mean, do you have any patents that can block them from doing that?

That's a great question. So to go from a software company, right, to developing your own payments, your own payment solution and having that exclusively in house and sort of shutting out all the dealers and the payments partners like us, that's very difficult to do because if you think about it, your expertise is in software. You can't just jump into payments. I mean, it took...

about a year for our own company to get all of the relationships set up, all of our contracts in place, all this other red tape and crossing our T's, dotting our I's to get our company up and running. And the partners in my company came from a different industry altogether. They came from the mortgage industry and they had to learn this industry as well. And it took them quite a while to do that. So if you're a software company and you're saying, well, we want to develop a payment solution and just have it in house,

It's a lot easier said than done. It's not something that's very easily done. So it only behooves them to develop a partnership with a payments company or several and just share the revenue. And that way everyone who's, we all do what we do best, right? So the circumstances don't really indicate that that sort of thing is going to happen, what you're suggesting could happen.

And the other way to protect ourselves really is just have the right agreements in place. Understand what is in the agreements, these ISP partner agreements that we sign or the reseller agreements that we sign with other software companies and ensure that our partnership is built for the long term and that there's no possibility that we could at any point be terminated or be shut out.

Are some of your relationships on the back end, you know, to essentially the credit card networks and all of the other ancillary connections that you've got to have to banking and everything, are some of those so hard to do? And maybe you just, you know, alluded to that a minute ago, but are some of those so hard to do that they just,

They just can't even begin to think about that. I mean, it seems to me, so I'll ask it a different way. It seems to me that the software company's growth strategy has to be that first, they penetrate one vertical, restaurants, and then they need to really expand there, and there's plenty of space to expand there. But if they really want to

to grow beyond that, well, they should jump to another vertical, not try to take over your turf. But I'm just asking, is that right? Or is there something compelling financially that could draw them to go learn what you guys had to learn the hard way as well?

That's a fantastic question. So I'll preface this by saying that the amount of, I've really come to appreciate software development and how much time and effort goes into that and how much it costs to develop just an add -on feature to a specific software. It can take, you know, it could take many, many hours and weeks to do that. And that costs a lot of money because you're paying developers, you know, I don't know, a buck, a buck 15 hour.

hundred, hundred and fifteen hour more. So that kind of effort is, you know, I would never want to just jump into, if my company wanted to develop a software product, it would cost us easily, you know, six figures just to do that. And I, because we don't know how to do it. So we'd have to hire developers and it would just, it would be such a gargantuan effort. So based on that appreciation, it works the other way. A software company is going to be

find it very difficult to just jump into payments, right? And develop their own payment solution and do all that stuff on the back end that you alluded to. It is an attractive endeavor because it's an additional revenue stream for them. So some have tried to do it, but what they end up doing is partnering with the payment provider and developing a revenue share partnership. It's a lot easier to access that revenue stream if you bring in an expert who knows how to do it.

Mm -hmm. OK, so you don't have to learn a whole lot about each vertical that you get into, because everybody has got to handle payments. And somebody is already an expert on the software for these verticals. So you can focus your attention on making sure that you've got

the relationship with these various software providers, you know, and so for you to move into a new vertical, you find out, well, who are the top five software providers in that vertical and you focus your attention on them. Do you have to also kind of pave the way and essentially create a pull through strategy that says, hey, I'm going to, I want to move into the,

you know, to the bagel shops. And I know that's a silly example, but I want to move into the bagel shops and, and, you know, so in order to really get them to pull us in, because they're all currently using toast. And, and then, you know, and, which is true. I mean, everywhere I

No.

It's funny you mentioned Toast. Toast is just like a thorn in my side. It's a thorn in a lot of our sides and it's a constant battle because in a lot of these urban areas, you see you walk into a restaurant, a quick service, you see Toast and it's like, Toast. Toast is one of those software companies that brought payments in -house. And so I can't integrate with Toast nor do they partner with any other payment providers.

that's interesting. I'm really sorry I mentioned their name. So.

No, no worries. No worries. Yeah. Toast has its own set of issues that I leverage out in the field. But yeah, they've done a great job in acquiring a lot of market share, but they're not by any means invincible.

Their expertise, in my opinion, from the user standpoint, is a very good user interface. That's what they've been working on. But my question was, OK, so let's say you want to displace them, because this is actually, I'm glad you said that they don't even support you. So you go into this bagel shop and you go, listen.

Mm -hmm.

Here's what's wrong with the payments portion of Toast. And by the way, we partner with, I'll just say, okay, it's somebody better, Square. And that's who I happen to use when I'm selling my books at an event. I have these little devices and I can use Square. And so my question is,

Sure.

Pull through strategies are very expensive in terms of number of salespeople you got to have out there to create the pull. But once you got it started, it could really take off. So that is just back to the question, the assumption that I made that you don't have to really learn the new vertical. But you said that you are really going in and building relationships with merchants. So I'm trying to sort of probe a little bit on that.

Sure. Well, you touch on a couple of things that I think are very, that are worth, you know, expounding on. One is whether or not I need to learn, whether or not we need to learn all of these verticals. We don't need, we don't have to become experts in these verticals, but it is tremendously beneficial to know as much as you can about a specific vertical if you're going to sell to it. Just like,

the industry is trending towards verticalization. We as, I call ourselves payment professionals or sales, you know, not just sales agents. I think of myself as a payments professional. We should also focus on the verticals that we're selling to and learn about them because you need to have these initial conversations with business owners. And ultimately the goal is to, you know, when you're selling a software solution, the goal is to sell the demo, get them on scheduled for a demo.

and have someone who does thousands of these run the demo and then they can answer the more nuanced questions that the business owner will have concerning the software product. But at least from initiating conversation to demo, we have to have an intelligent conversation about what this business owner needs or doesn't, what they don't like about what their current situation is, and then get them to that demo. So that requires knowledge and we have to learn the industry to a certain extent.

I have, for example, I've sold to a lot of restaurants, so I can have very, very substantive conversations with restaurant owners about what they need, what they don't have, what they could really benefit from. And same thing with any other vertical, whether it's a medical office or an auto repair shop, there are specific things about that specific vertical that you should know in having those initial conversations. So it does help us to learn as much as we can about the vertical when we're selling to it.

so the, you know, as far as it's company like toast is concerned, when we get to the point where we're competing with a toaster, you know, another company that's fairly entrenched in a specific industry. Yeah. You do need to find those differentiating factors in my mind. And what I have found, is that the, the differentiators that come up a lot in these verticals are pricing.

and service. With a company like Toast, one of the biggest complaints about Toast is the support. The joke with Toast is how to get rid of a Toast rep? Buy the product. You'll never hear from that rep again. If you go online and read all these reviews, one of the biggest issues with Toast merchants is they just can't get somebody on the phone to solve an issue. And that is one area that we pride ourselves on at Max Value.

is I give all my business, all the businesses that we service, at least the ones that I directly sign, I give them my cell phone number. And you know, they don't all call me, but 20 % of them will call with a question or an issue. And if I can't resolve the issue for them, I'll direct them to where I can get that issue resolved. And that sort of access, business owners in this day and age truly appreciate. Because a lot of these software companies, what ends up happening is they outsource a lot of their support overseas, as you might imagine.

and it becomes an 800 number black hole that is just so difficult to penetrate through and to get a live person on the phone that can help you. So service is one of the biggest differentiators. And the other differentiator is pricing. I can't tell you how many toast merchant statements I have looked at that merchants are paying through the nose in fees and other costs. It's so easy to then generate an analysis, a competing analysis that...

that demonstrates all the different ways you can save them money. And you can do that across other industries and across other products because what ends up happening is when one of these software companies really requires a lot of market share in a certain vertical, they then price high and then try to justify all the value that they're providing. But sometimes they lose the force for the trees. So pricing is always a great differentiator as well.

So are you saying that when a company buys their product that that company sort of becomes toast?

I'm going to come back. No, not necessarily. Well, it's funny. That's one of the marketing campaigns from a competitor of toast. They use the burnt toast, an image of a burnt piece of bread as a marketing image. And it's actually very clever.

It was a joke. I'm making a dumb joke.

If you name your company Toast, you are going to get that joke made about you. It doesn't matter. So what advice would you give? Because, OK, anybody listening to this is probably thinking, wow, that was a heck of a transition. 20 years law and now VP of sales at a merchant payment processing.

It is.

company. And you're happy about it. Obviously, it comes out very clearly. What advice would you give for people about a pivot like that in their career? Because it's scary, probably.

it's terrifying. The advice I would give is this. If you're going to do something like that, do it 100%. Dive in and give it 110 % and don't look back because you're not going to achieve anything doing something half -assed, whether it's pivoting into a new industry, preparing for a marathon, or doing anything else that requires some consistency and hard work. Do it 100 % and don't look back.

And the second piece of advice is when you're doing that, when you're pursuing a, you know, a goal, a new, a new career path or anything else, you have to be consistent and you have to be diligent. figure out what your process is. You know, for me, it was getting in my car every day, visiting 20, 25 businesses, handing out business cards, starting conversations, getting my manager on the phone and et cetera. I did that every single day.

Figure out what your process is and then do it consistently. Do it every single day. Don't take days off. Don't say, I'm gonna, I'm, I don't, don't, don't, don't give up after doing something halfway. Do it consistently. That sort of consistency and diligence will produce results. It's only natural. No matter what you do, if you're consistent in what you're doing and you're following that process, you will produce results. And that, that's what happened for me. And that's what I continue to do. So for any sort of decision like that, that's the,

Two pieces of advice that I would give somebody, give it 110 % and be consistent and diligent in what you're doing.

Okay, okay. And what are your goals for you and the company over the next, I don't know, five years?

Over the next five years, I would love for our company to become one of our goals to become a wholesale Processor a wholesale ISO as there is there known and that's where we control all of the processes that we Rely on on our providers to do now most importantly is underwriting So we want to bring all that stuff in house obviously to do that We need to grow continue growing and achieve a certain scale so that we can do that and the more that we control the more Even the more flexible we can be

the more we can control our own pricing and the more independent we can be, if you will. As part of that growth, I would love to get our sales team, right now we have about close to 30 agents under me. I would love to get to a point where we've got 200 reps across the country. I think that would be a fantastic goal to achieve and I don't see any reason why we cannot do that.

Are you already in, I mean, maybe a little more thinly, but are you already spread across the whole country?

Yes, no, we have agents. I have agents in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Ohio, and the Midwest.

If I go into a restaurant, is there any way for me to tell whether you're there?

Probably not. Again, going back to integrated payments, a lot of these restaurants use point of sale systems. So you're probably going to see some indication of the system they're using, but no indication of the processor who's behind it. But if that restaurant is processing using a system that we placed, the name of the person they would give you, if you asked what system are you using or who's your contact, they would probably give you my name.

So eventually, you've got to get big enough that you can do the Intel inside strategy, where it's obvious what is behind the scenes taking care of all the stuff. OK, last question. So doing this pivot that you've talked about and jumping into

Right.

you know, a startup that's growing fast. Learning new industry, learning a whole bunch of new skills takes a lot of grit. I mean, I talk about this a lot, that startup founders all have a lot of grit. And there's almost always a really good story when I say, and where did yours come from?

Mine came from, see I have this concept I reference, it's called the immigrant's mentality or immigrant mentality. My parents came from Cuba when they were teenagers. Their grandparents came as middle -aged. They came when they were my age. They left everything behind, came over here and started with nothing. My grandfather was a pediatric surgeon in Cuba, came over here and...

the most he ever achieved was he became a physician's assistant after many, many tries trying to take an exam because he didn't speak the language. My mom went straight to work at age 17 because she didn't have time to go to school. They all came over here and had to work and provide for themselves. So that sort of culture, I was raised in that and I was taught to fight for everything that I have, continue fighting for everything that you want, don't give up. And those concepts I referenced before, being consistent and diligent.

All of that comes from my culture and my heritage. And I think that the grit that I relied on in making that pivot and transitioning to a completely different career path and succeeding in that path stems from the way I was raised and the culture that I was raised in.

Do you have any kids that you're passing that philosophy onto?

Yes, I have, we have, we have five kids at home, my three kids and then my two stepdaughters. And I, you know, I, I try and, and teach them through, through example. I don't try to hit them over the head with it, but I get up at four o 'clock every morning and go to the gym and, and they can see how hard I work. They can see how I'm constantly on the go and doing things. And I, you know, through school, which is the avenue through which many parents try to, you know, instill these types of values in their children.

I try to ensure that they're doing well in school, that they're applying themselves because those habits obviously translate into adulthood. So I'm absolutely trying to instill those same values in our children.

How old is your youngest?

6.

Well,

She's got some grit, I'll tell you that.

So I wrote a children's book for kids four to nine. And it's about, it's really about grit. And so I was already going to, because to thank you for being on here, I was already gonna send you an autographed copy of that book, but I'm gonna have to send you that one as well.

I appreciate that. And thank you for having me. This was a great conversation. You obviously did some homework and then some of the questions you were asking me. So this was a very, very interesting conversation. And I thank you for the autograph books as well. I think my six -year -old will enjoy that one as well.

I think that you represented yourself and the things you said, I think are going to be very meaningful to the type of audience that is attracted to what we're talking about and everything from pivoting and some of the business concepts, even if they're not in a payment space, it's still the way to think about things.

that you articulate really well that I think are going to be valuable to people. So I thank you as well.

No, I agree and thank you. No, I agree. These values can be applied in any industry, any craft, any task or effort. So completely agree with you on that and thank you.