Danny Carpio: 00:00:00

I equate what is going on around us as sort of like a mass democratization, 4 minute mile moment from an operational scale and competing in markets.

What I mean by that is that brand new things are possible.

Before someone ran a four minute mile, doctors would tell you that you would die.

Like, no, that it was physically impossible.

One day someone just barely broke it.

Right.

And like thousands of people have done it.

Someone just did it.

Broke a new record, something like that.

The point being that we're in a unique moment in history where if you just go further, you'll actually do it.

And what I mean by that is that those constraints that were there to execute your vision aren't there.

I think a really challenging perspective shift for most people.

Intro/Outro: 00:00:40

But I am the world's biggest super fan.

You're like a super.

Freddy D: 00:00:44

Fan.

Welcome to the Business Superfans podcast.

We will discuss how establishing.

Freddy D: 00:00:49

Business superfans.

Freddy D: 00:00:50

From.

Freddy D: 00:00:51

Customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially.

Learn why these advocates are a key factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce.

This is the Business Super Fans Podcast with your host, Freddy D. Freddy, Freddy.

Freddy D: 00:01:18

Foreign.

Welcome to episode 226 of the Business Superfans Advantage podcast.

Does growing your business have to mean hiring more people, adding more management, and giving yourself more to oversee?

What if a small team could compete at an enterprise level without building all that complexity?

In this episode, we're joined by Danny Carpio, an organizational architect who has spent 13 years building operating systems for businesses and networks that have raised eight figures in capital and reached nine figure valuations.

His new book, the the New Unit of Scale is you, challenges the assumption that bigger organizations are the answer to bigger ambitions.

Super fans, get ready to rethink how you structure your business and explore what it takes to expand your capabilities, strengthen your small team and compete beyond your size.

Great conversation that we had, Danny, before we started recording.

Welcome to the Business Superfans Advantage.

Danny Carpio: 00:02:27

Hey, Freddy.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm excited to chat.

Freddy D: 00:02:32

Yeah.

So you've got an interesting platform, but before we get into the platform, tell me a little bit about your backstory.

How did you get started way before you came with this idea, this pretty cool platform.

What's the backstory?

I know you said you went to, I think law school and so you've obviously pivoted in a completely different direction.

So what's that story?

Danny Carpio: 00:02:53

Yeah, so I think, I think of it less of a pivot and more of a compounding of skills.

Right.

Pepperdine Law school in, in: 2011

That's 15 years ago now.

That's.

And so I am still a licensed attorney.

But what's.

But I never really.

I never wanted to do the things that they were telling me to do.

As far as a traditional work path, it never really made sense to me that I would go sell my time for 40 years and then maybe have, maybe have financial stability, maybe be a good dad, maybe.

A lot of maybes that I didn't want to roll the dice on.

And you're younger and I didn't have kids or anything.

I was used to kind of just not having money, watching sports and just drinking beer, whatever.

Like, I had not a lot to risk.

I didn't.

This is all hindsight about what I was doing.

I really was just.

I knew what I didn't want.

I didn't know what I did want.

And by God's grace, I got given an opportunity to take over a firm for someone who was retiring, someone that was going to replace him actually passed away as I was presenting the bar.

And so I was given an opportunity to come on and take it over very much trial by fire.

Like, I got almost.

I had a mentor, but I really didn't have training.

Right.

You just had to go end to end, get clients, do things, litigate, go try cases, do the whole thing, grow the business.

And so I, I was able to bring on a partner, Mike Turner.

And we, We.

We ended up just scaling it.

It was very challenging.

But after about five years, I, I got my first taste.

I stumbled into operating leverage.

I stumbled into 20 hours back a week, so to speak.

Right.

So where I was like, okay, well, I can run this and make the same or more, or I can make a comparable amount.

But now I have this time back.

And so it clicked for me that this is.

I should just keep doing this in different arenas that I'm interested in.

And as I went, everything stacked on itself or around itself.

So I had a cashflow engine.

And then I went into retail investing.

I read a lot of 10Ks and quarterly call transcripts.

Maybe like a thousand.

Right.

And then I made my way into crypto and blockchains after sort of exploring like clouds.

And I finally got into a set where I just had this interesting skillset of my legal background, entrepreneurial venturing and scaling, organizational design.

I just collected a bunch of skills.

When you're not going into a system, you have to learn how to do stuff.

Right?

Freddy D: 00:05:10

Right.

And so you'll be Able to be agile.

Danny Carpio: 00:05:12

Yeah, exactly.

So I just stumbled into it because I just knew what I didn't want to do.

And so I don't want to give myself too much credit here.

I really was like get smart, get smart like or whatever.

It's like you're just kind of going, it's kind of a lot of dumb luck.

But you work hard and you get, you get lucky along the way, right?

And so a lot of that and I was able to be in the right place, right time for a trend with crypto gaming.

And so I was able to raise with, with our team $15 million into the largest North American based crypto gaming organization called Ready Player Dao.

And that really exploded my opportunities.

It was really, really hard just to build.

It was my first crack at trying to build a decentralized enterprise before AI was really was consumer facing.

And so it was like one of the hardest things I've ever done.

It was incredibly hard.

But a lot of skills, a lot of thinking differently, a lot of building stuff.

And through that I built networks, built things for people with people.

And I was able to go raise another with another team.

Everything's with my teams of course.

Another I hear over $10 million in an exploratory tokenized fund of funds.

And so that just wrapped and that through all those years and all that experience, everything kind of compounding together on my like Megazord, right?

My like robotic exosuit of skills.

Knowledge failures.

Expertise, yeah, all those things network that I go leverage.

But I just move that around now and everything overlaps.

And vari, which is the platform you mentioned is, is the latest expression of that as far as where I'm allocating a lot of my efforts and that feeds into everything I'm doing as well.

Freddy D: 00:06:38

Wow, what a interesting story.

Cause you've kind of weaved around left and right, up and down, but you've come up with an interesting platform.

Let's talk about this very platform and how does it work and what does it do?

How does it transform people's lives?

Danny Carpio: 00:06:54

So very is what I call a system of self scale.

So I did publish a book called the Unfirm.

The new unit of scale is you.

And a lot of this has to do with how scale is now relevant to people when it hasn't been to them.

And it's also achievable, but it's not easy.

And so what is different now and why is scale necessary for you to care about?

And so what a lot of the stuff I build for myself and from a Product perspective and with my teams are what I call primitives of self scale.

And so very is a self scale platform for content creators to be able to get operating leverage and go punch above their weight, sort of like enterprise class, without getting extracted.

There's a lot of things that systems provided you for in a traditional structure that you'd get through agencies, things like legal protections, things like compliance contracting, and a lot of a lot of agency work that's around you that makes being a professional scaled content creator difficult.

And so our goal is to abstract that away so that a single content creator doesn't have those constraints and can now scale themselves.

Because that is fundamental to how I view what is now possible from an operating reality.

And so Barry is that first expression of that.

And we started off with large content creators with a lot of data who are already feeling the pressure from the operating environment changing for them because they are getting extracted.

So everything they do is on the Internet and the way they make money.

And so the labs are training from them.

People who want to make thumbnails tool are training their stuff.

Everything is being trained off of what they've done and then they're selling it back to them.

And so it's a brand new risk that they've never really faced before.

And so there's an urgency there with that particular class of professional.

And so we started off with that and where we've landed is that we solve all these things.

We have taken a product and platform approach where we personalize models for them based on their data so they own them, so they get the operating leverage of the reduced costs and they don't have to go train other people's AI.

And then there's other issues with like tainted corpus.

There's other issues there.

But for the most part we are a self scale primitive for content creators that's optimized for personalized model and self sovereignty.

Freddy D: 00:08:54

Well, you bring up an interesting point there Danny, and that is that you're really helping them maximize their their knowledge and their skill sets and removing some of the constraints that they've got and so that they can actually focus on what they're really good at.

And the system helps them leverage that in a unique way.

Danny Carpio: 00:09:15

Yes.

Yeah, abso, absolutely.

I equate what is going on around us as sort of like a mass democratization 4 minute mile moment from an operational scale and competing in markets.

And what I mean by that is that brand new things are possible.

Before someone ran a four minute mile, doctors would tell you that like you would die like that was physically impossible.

One day someone just barely broke it.

Right.

And like thousands of people have done it.

Someone just did it, broke a new record.

It was like three minutes and 40 seconds, whatever, something like that.

The point being that we're in a unique moment in history where if you just go further, you'll actually do it.

And what I mean by that is that those constraints that were there to execute your vision aren't there.

And so that's, I think, a really challenging perspective shift for most people.

And the revenue reactor that we talked about offline just before this.

Right.

Is an example of something that eliminates a barrier which is knowledge based on.

And puts it in the, in the fingertips of someone.

And you're delivering something that would have taken maybe 10 years, a couple failed businesses, a good mentor, maybe you got lucky with where you were born and then some capital people were structurally kept out of getting the information that you are delivering them through revenue reactor.

Right.

And so you in some ways have a system of self scale that you are delivering to people in a product that is going to eliminate barriers for people so that they can go compete in markets.

And so I love that.

Right.

I think that that's the coolest.

That's my mission.

That's what's possible.

And so we're just going to keep building those things for knowledge workers and for everyone that we, that we can.

Freddy D: 00:10:44

Yeah.

And I can completely relate.

And I'm going to bring it back a little bit so that our audience can really understand how things have changed exponentially.

Because as I mentioned before, I started a tech space in its infancy and I used to be a draftsman.

You can see so many awards on a little corner there of my drafting days.

And we always design stuff.

spot weld guns that welded a: 1982

There was no robots back then.

It was a big guy with a gimbal and had to go in there and spot weld it.

Then eventually robots came around.

But from doing it on the drafting boards, I got into computer aided design and that kind of started changing things.

When I got into sales, going into companies, talking about how things were changing dynamically and back into software, we got excited because we put out one release a year back then.

Danny Carpio: 00:11:39

Then.

Freddy D: 00:11:40

It became two releases a year, then it became four releases a year and.

But that wasn't overnight.

That took a couple years for that stuff to happen and it started to accelerate.

So now you wait 15 minutes and poof, there's another Update that got sent out because the previous one 15 minutes ago broke something.

Danny Carpio: 00:11:59

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:12:00

And so it's a completely different game, but it's transformed industry and people's lives and business and our capabilities so dramatically over the last 50 years has just been mind boggling what we've accomplished.

50 Years.

Danny Carpio: 00:12:15

Yeah.

No, the thing I thought about when you told me that was I remember waiting for the new AOL CDs.

Do you remember you'd get those.

Freddy D: 00:12:22

Yeah,.

Danny Carpio: 00:12:22

Yeah.

And like I remember specifically the wait for like 3.0.

We had 2.0 for so long and then we got the disc and I was like, oh nice.

I was like, how?

Yeah, we had to wait.

I'm a little younger than you, so that's my version of that is.

I just remember I would put the CD in and then I got so excited when the new version came out.

But that was the cadence.

Freddy D: 00:12:38

I got started with CompuServe.

Danny Carpio: 00:12:39

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:12:40

I'm really dating myself.

Yes.

But that was it.

I had a Mac and I went on CompuServe and then eventually AOL.

And that was a whole new frontier.

Danny Carpio: 00:12:49

Yeah.

And I think that's the collapse of market cycles from the people that are creating the product for an end consumer, whether that's enterprise or whatever size.

Right.

B2B.

However it is, there's a transaction on the other end that's purchasing that.

Right.

What's like really fascinating is that the end user has now become a competitor and market cycles are collapsing now too.

There.

And so that's a fundamentally new thing.

Right.

I think in a lot of ways that the.

Their ability to replicate that and the vendor's ability to maintain and create switching costs is gone.

And so that is such a challenge.

Right.

And so having a fresh look at first principles on what it takes to succeed and identify what is the current operating reality and what are people willing to pay for now People pay for resolution of complexity or friction or time.

Right.

There's a value.

The old way of delivering stuff evaporated what we're used to people willing to pay for.

Because so much is easy and now new things are hard.

And so I think it's really exciting.

It's a really exciting time.

And your product, I think, seeks to do that for people, solving things that are now hard for operating realities for professional knowledge workers, in this case starting with content creators.

Right.

So that they can be defensible and scale in the brand new operating paradigm.

Freddy D: 00:14:07

Sure.

But it still goes back to fundamentals.

Danny Carpio: 00:14:10

Yes.

Freddy D: 00:14:11

And at the end of the day, people do business with People that they like and trust and we get caught up into all these cool, shiny, different things.

But at the end of the day, recognizing somebody on their birthday, recognizing somebody on their life event, taking time out to say thank you.

I scaled a service based business a couple years ago by about a million dollars in a year.

And we implemented technology and all that stuff, but still there was a people skill because it was interpreting services.

So you had to get contractors to go to the hospital and do the interpreting in a given language and all that stuff.

We started treating the contractors as our first line of impression.

So they were the most important asset in the company because that was who was going to the doctor, that was going to the court system, that was going to wherever they needed to go.

And we used all the technology for all the other aspects.

But we can't forget the people part of the conversation.

Danny Carpio: 00:15:16

No, no, absolutely not.

I've always said, and I've not butted heads, but I've had challenges with people who don't view the people as like critical infrastructure.

Right?

Because the book and how I work is oriented around people as essential and their well being and their desires as essential.

Because people are not just cogs, right?

If the people you want or need to do something cannot do it, you can't do it that way.

I've said that a lot to my teams, but I think it's hard because people want, you have to do it 40 hours a week.

But what if that person can't?

Are you just gonna not do it or just try to force them and have them be miserable and then that's the failure state.

And so the number one thing you can do is treat your people right, be a normal human that understands it, be empathetic.

These are like critical skills.

It's the fundamentals, like you said, right?

And that's a series of fundamentals that we have.

And, and other fundamentals include being able to adequately identify the operating reality and then have a feedback loop into what you are doing and how you are doing it and, and go interact with reality at different timescales.

These are the, the fundamentals of how to operate from an economic perspective in society.

We haven't had to really revisit those in some time.

Some people have never had to like for me specifically, 41, even though things have accelerated, they haven't been so fundamentally different.

And so now we have to go further down to our old assumptions about how we even interact with our economic reality and our markets and reassess how we do everything downstack and that's kind of what the book is about too, in a lot of ways is it's called the unfirm.

The new unit of scale is you.

It's fundamentally very challenging.

And so I think people need to be challenged in their thinking.

And it's not something that is prescriptive, that's meant to get rich quick.

It's not hard.

You have to think about it, you don't have to agree with it.

But I've always learned by being challenged.

And then, well, no, that's not true.

But what is true?

Right.

People don't think about that.

We have to reassess what we believe to be true about our economic security and how we achieve that because that markets for exchange of labor are disappearing in the old sense.

And so now we have to first accept that that is true.

And then we have to understand what are we good at that we need to be to succeed in this environment to secure our economic futures.

Right.

Things are just very different.

Freddy D: 00:17:27

Yeah.

I had a guest on the show that was out of Vancouver, Canada and He scaled his SaaS company from zero to 5,000 employees and he cashed out at a billion dollars in a five year window.

Danny Carpio: 00:17:42

Wow.

Freddy D: 00:17:43

And the biggest thing that I got out of that show was that everybody was in the racing rowing boat that I'm talking about the racing rowing boat where you got one oar, not two.

Everybody's got one oar.

So if you think about that, you got to get everybody in synchronization because otherwise you're not going even in a circle, you're combobulating, going no place.

And that's what he did, is he got everybody behind the mission, what was the goals and the objectives.

And just like you're talking about the, the dynamics of everything else were there, but everybody was knowing what their role was, what their objectives were and collaboratively work together to accomplish it.

And everybody benefited out of that whole conversation because he says you took care of everybody quite nicely because of making that happen.

Danny Carpio: 00:18:33

Yeah.

So look, that's fantastic.

And I think it's a good example of, of scale and constraints that people have.

Not everyone could have achieved that or even tried for a lot of reasons.

Right.

If we think about it now was a scaling strategy.

You could probably do that right now with 10 people, 15, which is mind blowing because that's operating leverage without bloat.

And so that moves upstream into your competitors too.

Like with SpaceX.

Right.

I call this sort of like the organizational like reusable rocket moment that people are designing these things and the unfirm is the bottom of the stack, a way for you to pull that up right for yourself.

But if you can do something with 15 people that it took 5,000 people, right?

Freddy D: 00:19:15

Game changer.

Danny Carpio: 00:19:16

Game changer.

Everyone has to compete with you or they die.

And that's what we're seeing at enterprise scale right now.

And those are systemic participants on the labor trade, the employment system that creates that financial security that everyone is so used to, like being funneled into.

That's systemic risk that people are sitting on if they don't really fully appreciate that.

But it's an opportunity.

Because how cool is it that maybe someone who didn't have the training and didn't have the risk tolerance to go try to scale a business to 5,000 like that, or the network to sell it or any of those things, right?

Would it now that person can go try.

It's never been seen before.

This is.

Freddy D: 00:19:51

An.

Danny Carpio: 00:19:51

Incredible game.

It's a.

Freddy D: 00:19:51

Game changer.

Danny Carpio: 00:19:52

It really is.

Freddy D: 00:19:52

Game changer.

So let's get back a little bit more into how does VARI work?

How does it really give the creator competitive edge by utilizing it versus someone that's not utilizing it?

Danny Carpio: 00:20:04

Yes.

It has to do with the respective tooling that's available and how they interact with the data.

So it's a combination of efficacy, so it's more effective.

And so we train a model and we fine tune a model through Allura adapters.

And so we take each one has a particular thing that it's trained for, like voice for scripting, for a particular need that maybe they might be inefficient or not capable to get there on the last mile with a general model.

So general models are not very good at.

At that last mile.

I think if you've used it right, like it messed up that word that's not English or, or whatever.

And so there's.

It doesn't know my face.

It doesn't know a lot.

And so these general models don't know a lot.

And relying on them is a business risk.

You're seeing that with enterprise.

So there's business risk in relying with frontier models and those labs to build any IP of your own.

And so there's a business risk component, and then there's an efficacy component, and then there's a cost.

And so we train models for each component of what a creator's actual needs are where there's a constraint.

So in one, there's a cost or there's an IP like issue that needs to be addressed with your ability to contract.

So in other Words, you need to be able to certify that if you're using AI, that there's no IP taint.

Now that's, that's really challenging with these model companies, if you've seen the lawsuits that they're in with the Frontier Labs.

And so there's, there's, it's an amalgamate amalgamation of things.

But what you get once you train these models right is you get savings on where they might need an agency.

So if you need a clipping agency, you might be paying X amount, you collapse the cost of that, and then you own it and you don't have to hire someone else.

So you have a time savings and you have a cost savings at scale, repetitively, and you have your own enterprise.

And so it's a lot of those little things that collectively create the creator enterprise as we frame it.

Now, the model, the adapter component, the way that we structure it specifically is our first one that we proved up was one that outperformed the frontier model by 27 times in cost and got better results as well.

And so somewhere between 27 times and 50 times cheaper and more effective to get that last mile because it's trained and it's yours, it's owned by the user.

And so we are the reusable rocket.

Right?

In other words, even if people want to compete with you, they have to put margin on that.

You don't have to give them.

And so you end up owning.

You're internalizing the software and your service becomes software instead of renting out software as a service and not being able to get your costs down and get operating leverage.

So basically everything, our core principle is we need to give people operating leverage through how we structure their enterprise so that they can scale themselves.

And so that's at the core of what we do and how we do it.

Freddy D: 00:22:36

Can you share a story, Danny, of how somebody used a platform and how it's really transformed their business?

And more importantly, they became a super fan of you and the platform that they're one of your biggest advocates.

Danny Carpio: 00:22:49

So because of the nature of who we work with, I can't give.

Freddy D: 00:22:54

I don't need the name.

Danny Carpio: 00:22:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, okay.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

So I'll tell you right now that we are one of, one of the adapters that we just worked on right now is a clipping adapter.

That's a content creator strategy that they use an agency for.

A lot of people are scared of AI or they don't fully understand it.

So there's a consumer Education process.

When you're building things that are for the future, that we've assessed what the future is and then we built for that.

Right.

And so getting people to see that it takes a little bit of time.

But in this particular case, we showed him what we've been doing.

We asked him what he pays agencies for and we have a clipping model based on his.

Everything he's ever clipped.

Right.

And his data, it's his that outperforms an agency.

And, and we asked him what the pricing would be that he would be willing to pay for it.

Right.

So we're also discovering pricing power and like what is the new economic relationship with this end user?

Knowing that we're basically killing agencies that stack margin on him.

And he was very happy with it.

We are moving forward with that on the brand side as well because there's a marketplace to ours.

We did just get a large loi after these kinds of conversations.

Once you, you show people what you can do and then how that goes upstream into economic activity.

If you're a brand trying to build campaigns and have attribution and mess around with stuff, having these adapters is ultra cheap way to.

You can kind of test and then pay.

And so, so brands can now interact with this model in a way that unlocks their ability to track and be more efficient with their ad spend.

And so those are the market participants that we're building for that.

We have had very positive reception and sort of evolving economic conversations.

Freddy D: 00:24:32

Yeah.

Because it's really important to track what is taking place and what the ROI is on it.

Because back in the day people were spending money on Google AdWords and stuff like that and most of the time did not do a good job of tracking what really converted out of that investment.

Danny Carpio: 00:24:52

Yes, that's a, that's a huge, that's a huge issue in ad spend.

Just altogether ad tech.

Right.

That's just.

I think the trade desk, one of the biggest players, didn't, I think they just got hammered for a large, we'll call it a good faith like error in accounting or reporting.

But something that was basically kind of what you're saying.

The attribution issue has always been difficult and we, we actually have integrated a blockchain technology into ours both to help content creators stay ahead of their compliance issues.

Like with the eu.

Right.

The EU has brand new,.

Freddy D: 00:25:21

It's got its own set of rules.

Danny Carpio: 00:25:22

You got to be able to prove that what you've trained is verifiably yours.

We call it certified organic and then comply with Local regulations with like watermarking and stuff.

And so everything is kind of baked into it to be able to go forward in any regulatory environment for these content creators.

Again, we're abstracting away scale for people.

Right.

And so for us, we really are focusing primarily on sort of top 1 to 3% content creators.

Because there's power laws, right?

There's just a power law distribution of how revenue is shared within, within content creator economy.

Right.

It's, we're talking like the top 3% make 90 plus percent of the money.

Right.

So that's what's at risk.

That's a class of market participant that's at risk from YouTube, that's training their models.

They're at risk right now at the most.

And so we're finding a good product market fit.

Like you said, you got to know what are, what is hard now, what are people and then how do you build stuff for them?

Things are different.

Things are so different right now.

And so that includes the economic transaction.

So we aren't really going for broad full scope necessarily just yet.

We're really starting with the power law.

Top content creators, we have very large content creators that we're building for right now.

That's who we're focused on and that'll make it easier for us to move downstream.

We can cater to smaller ones.

They just don't have the data or the economics for where we're at as a company.

But we, we are catering to them and they are in our funnel and we want to support them as best we can.

But for the most part, these large content creators, it's a critical need right now they're losing a lot of money.

People can just take their face, name and likeness, go spin up a channel just like them within a day and go saturate the market.

It's incredibly hard for them.

And so we're trying to make that easy for them cheaper so they can scale themselves.

Freddy D: 00:26:53

And they can stay ahead of the curve.

Danny Carpio: 00:26:54

Yes,.

Freddy D: 00:26:55

I mean that's the important part is really staying positioned as being one of the top content creators and maintaining that position and continuing to level up, leveraging the platform that you've created very.

Which will help them stay ahead of that curve by maximizing their time, maximizing the resources and significantly cutting revenue costs.

Danny Carpio: 00:27:17

Yes.

And like you talk about, we're a people first company like at the core is we care about the content creators.

So my co founder is a large content creator and his manager.

So this started off as their approach, but our first principle is we need these people to be successful and what we give them has to be something that does not extract from them or make their lives worse because everyone else is trying to do that.

So we were building counter to what everyone else was.

And so it's been a slower process when you're trying to do it that way because you could just go to market and just scrape everything and do stuff unethically.

But that's not how we roll, right.

We really are a people first company.

It's paid off because you need trust, you need that trust.

Everything you said earlier, now as I think about it, it's coming back.

That's at the core of our fabric, is we are for the content creator.

And with the best validation aside, of course, the product we're starting to fundraise.

And so that's exciting to have the product where it is.

And we unlocked extra credits because we validated our product.

And so we're getting subsidized from a model company, a lab company to a large extent right now to continue producing these adapters.

So that's exciting.

But the best validation is that these people trust us, they're trusting us.

Freddy D: 00:28:22

With their business.

Goes back to like we talked earlier, at the end of the day we can have all the tech, all the gizmos, all the whatchamacallits.

It's still people are part of the equation.

And the most important part of the equation,.

Danny Carpio: 00:28:35

Yes, and you can tell when someone doesn't care about you.

That's just bottom line.

And so that's number one is we, we care about the people and what we build is it expresses that.

And so we're that being validated, that's what can't be replicated in my view either you can't just go sell, you can't make someone trust you.

You have to earn it and you have to actually be trustworthy and care.

And so I think that is probably what I'm more excited about that being validated because I think that that is really the business challenge.

The tech, we're good at that.

But the trust,.

Freddy D: 00:29:04

Well that's what that goes back to what I keep talking about.

And you want to create a business super fan and that's why I call it business superfan versus a sports superfan, because it's same concept, but one is for business.

And it's all about really getting the other person to become a super fan of you and what you're doing it by the way that you're treating them and how you're helping elevate them and reach their Objectives, they'll make sure you get there.

So that's really the one things I've learned over the years is if you help enough people get to where they want to get to, you don't have to worry about yourself.

They're going to pull you along with it.

Danny Carpio: 00:29:44

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I could tell you actually care about people, and I do, too.

And that just comes naturally.

And that's something that is going to be a competitive advantage for people.

If that's a skill set of yours, I think.

Freddy D: 00:29:57

Yeah, I'll just share a story.

I've shared this before on the show, but I'll share it again.

Is when I was running this language services company, there was an individual that was dealing with depression, and there's days that she could not make it into the office, and you can't let them go because then you got all kinds of other issues from a regulatory aspect.

But I completely did the opposite of what anybody would do.

I started giving her more responsibility, and the more responsibility she got in believing in her, her mindset started to change because somebody actually cared.

Somebody was pulling her up, and she started coming up with ideas.

And before I took over the company, people would say that we got this and wouldn't listen to her ideas.

So that accelerated her depression.

I did the opposite.

Hey, bring up your ideas.

Let's take a look.

Let's give a couple of a whirl.

If it's a face plant, so what?

Not the end of the world.

And long story short, she grew that document translation department from doing under a hundred thousand a year to $225,000.

Danny Carpio: 00:31:06

Nice.

That's huge.

Freddy D: 00:31:08

All because of the way I looked at her as an important component of the company and believed in her, which in turn created her superpower to be able to say, wow, somebody actually cares.

And someone's actually recognizing my contributions.

And that's my example of how you create a super fan.

She's still a super fan of me.

We're still friends today, and this is several years ago, but it transformed her life and her outlook on herself.

And that's how we grew that company.

Danny Carpio: 00:31:39

Yeah, look, it's.

People call that culture, but I think that that can be ambiguous and maybe overused to the extent that people don't even know what it means anymore.

But what you just sort of described is sort of like the transitive property of caring.

Right.

When you care about someone on your team, that translates through them into the thing that you're both working on and other people.

And so there's this, like, transitive property of caring in a culture that does exactly that, that's like well established, I think.

And people forget that.

It's easy to forget sometimes I think for people,.

Freddy D: 00:32:08

Right.

Get caught up and we get caught up in our stuff.

Danny Carpio: 00:32:11

Yes.

Freddy D: 00:32:12

But what it really does is it elevates everybody else in the organization because everybody else can see what's happening.

And it's the same thing as somebody chastises somebody in public.

That's the fastest way to pollute a company.

Just like that.

Because everybody's going to say, man, I don't want that to be me.

So everybody now plays, keeps their head down and nobody wants to contribute, nobody wants to create.

And the energy in a company just goes,.

Danny Carpio: 00:32:37

Yeah, a hundred percent.

And the interesting thing is things those aren't like so clearly seen in the P and L. Right.

It's not something that is just like, oh, this was my contribution margin from my culture.

Right.

It's just not a thing that you can easily pull out.

But it's just so important.

And some people just haven't, some people don't.

It's such a leadership thing.

And I think finding people that have that and helping them win and keeping them in orbit is like critical network infrastructure.

Like people that have that real empathy and real capability to understand what actually moves people as a holistic person, not just from an economic outcome standpoint.

Those people are rare.

You find them, you take care of them and you do stuff with them.

And you.

Freddy D: 00:33:21

Know that company will scale and that company will scale.

It'll scale like a rocket.

And that's where I go back to.

For every action there's a reaction and that reaction, your revenue reacts to it.

Danny Carpio: 00:33:33

Yes, a hundred percent.

It's funny, like the things people think they're wasting their time on this stuff.

Right.

But that's a logical fallacy I think in business because if you're only focused always on the revenue, on like more money, you're gonna miss what it takes to get there as a holistic strategy.

Right.

There's a lot more there.

And like we talked about earlier, there's like first principles, there's a whole host of bundled inputs that lead to financial success and scale and operating leverage, the pursuit of operating leverage.

Right.

And what we're talking about is a major component of it.

But everything else that is bundled in there, the inputs for scale, all of those things are also achievable now and different because what was hard that the old structures bundled together so well, like that 5,000 person company, probably a well oiled machine Right.

At the time.

But now if they ran that same playbook, he's not winning in the market.

That's an old playbook.

Right.

So what you're talking about is a module in a broader, like, wrapper of requirements for organizational scale as an individual or as a startup or as a business owner, whatever.

And we have to be able to identify those properly and then have feedback loops into them and update them so that we can succeed.

Freddy D: 00:34:44

Yeah.

So everybody can be in that racing, rowing boat, zipping through the water, because everybody knows the direction that they need to go to and they're all part of the energy making it happen.

Danny Carpio: 00:34:55

That's right.

Freddy D: 00:34:56

So, Danny, great conversation that we've had.

You and I could chat on this for a few hours.

Danny Carpio: 00:35:02

Yeah,.

Freddy D: 00:35:03

We.

Danny Carpio: 00:35:03

Could.

Yes, exactly.

That's why I didn't say anything just now because I'm like, I could keep talking, but I need to just see if you want me to or not.

Freddy D: 00:35:09

Yeah, yeah.

No, we're coming up to the end here.

So how can people find you?

How can people find your book?

All that kind of cool stuff.

Danny Carpio: 00:35:16

Yeah.

So they can learn more about vari@joinveri co CEO.

The book is called the the New Unit of Scale with youh.

It's available online, anywhere you can buy books as an ebook, a softcover and a hardcover.

And if you want to follow along on Twitter, Augmented Things.

Augmented Things is where we.

We post content.

We are pretty experimental.

We don't shy away from our thesis.

And so if you want to engage there.

Right.

Wrong, different.

We'd love to have you.

Freddy D: 00:35:43

Okay.

Make sure that's in the show notes.

What would be the biggest takeaway that you think people should think about and implementing in their business?

Danny Carpio: 00:35:51

I think to think.

And I'm not trying to be like pedantic here.

I think the number one critical skill I bring to teams a lot of times is I'm a deep thinker.

I go all the way down to the first fundamentals, kind of like what you talk about.

And I realize most founders are very good at certain things.

They would be doing it if they weren't or business owners.

But they don't stop to think about what they are actually doing and what the feedback is telling you to do.

And that was risky before, but you could manage it.

It's the number one risk is if you are not properly structured to identify operating reality and then incorporate that into your business.

Up and down the stack, down to how you even do stuff and what you are even doing and how you are going to price it, you will fail.

And so I think number one is you have to think and rethink and update how you think and designed always.

Freddy D: 00:36:36

Okay, great advice.

Thanks so much again for having on the show and we will continue it another day.

Danny Carpio: 00:36:43

Yes Freddie, thank you so much.

God bless.

Freddy D: 00:36:46

What stuck with me from Danny's conversation is how easy it is to stay busy without questioning how we work.

When the tools and possibilities change, an old habit can become a constraint on your business.

This week, set aside 15 minutes to examine one reoccurring task that eats up your time.

Ask yourself, what outcome am I trying to create?

And is there a better way to get there?

That pause could help you reclaim time for the people who need your attention.

Subscribe to the show for more practical ways to build a stronger business.

Until next time, superfans.

Remember, every relationship you strengthen brings you one superfan closer.

Keep cultivating relationships.

Keep creating superfans.

Keep growing predictable revenue.

I'm Freddie D. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you in the next episode.

Freddy D: 00:37:48

We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Super Fan Podcast.

Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.