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And about my third year in, I asked a question that kind of changed the trajectory of my life. And the question was this, how much money can I make as a CPA? The tax professor looked at me and he said, about sixty grand a year. And I looked at him and I was like, that’s it? I was like, I make that now part-time as a painting contractor.

What’s the number one piece of advice you would give to a brand new deal maker? These guys would call me up and say, hey, can you go pick up my Bentley and pick me up at the airport, and let’s go have dinner. So I get to spend time with these guys. And one of the things this guy told me, I asked, what would you do differently? He said, a very warm welcome to the Creative Deal Maker podcast. I’m Carl Allen. I’m your host, and I’m going to be interviewing expert guests sharing investor strategies that will completely and utterly disrupt the market when it comes to buying and selling businesses all over the world.

Hi. I’m Carl Allen. Welcome to the Creative Dealmaker podcast. Got a very special guest today. He’s one of my own. It’s Dan Giordano. Dan, how are you doing? And welcome to the show.

Dan: I’m doing great, man, and I appreciate you having me. I know I was on your podcast not too long ago, I believe. I know we were talking about deals and mergers and acquisitions and all that kind of stuff, and I want to get into that. But you’re a special kind of dude, you know, and I really love you. I just want my listeners or my viewers to get to know you a little bit more because you bring a lot of uniqueness to a lot of the things that we’re doing, to the point now where you’re a major shareholder in one of my biggest ventures, and you’re on my board. You’re an incredible resource and partner for us. But just give us the five-minute backstory. Who’s Dan Giordano? Where are you from? And where are you now?

Dan: Sure. Yeah. So, well, I’ll go back as far as, you know, I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I grew up with my father, who worked for DuPont. He always had these weird schedules where he would be off for like four days or seven days. He’s the type like me that can’t sit still, so that’s kind of where I got it from. He started a painting contracting business part-time, and I kind of got roped into that. By the time I was fifteen, I was pretty much running it during the summers and after school. By fifteen years old, I was pretty much running the show. Then, I did like most kids—I went to college, figuring I’m not going to do that for the rest of my life. I’m going to become an accountant. So I went to school for accounting.

And about my third year in, I asked a question that kind of changed the trajectory of my life. The question was, how much money can I make as a CPA? The tax professor looked at me and said, about sixty grand a year. I looked at him and was like, that’s it? I make that now part-time as a painting contractor. So I started questioning my life choices. I really started to look at my third year in and ask, do I really want to do this? I had an interest in a lot of different things, like fitness, and tried a few things after the painting career, but wound up back in what I knew. I took painting, which was my first niche, and went into Victorian historic restoration. There are some big areas in the Philadelphia area and New Jersey with a lot of old historic homes, and I just liked the history of them. So that was my first niche.

By the time I was twenty-one, I had twenty-five employees and was running the largest company doing what I enjoyed at the time. It was a fun run. I was fortunate that in high school I had a college professor, Mr. Swider, who taught accounting and marketing in high school as well. In his marketing classes, he always talked about differentiation. He always talked about doing something different to stand out. When I started my contracting company, my trucks—long before ServiceMaster—were yellow and that bright turquoise color. We stood out. All my guys wore professional polos. We really stood out and did things a lot differently than everybody else. I took that into everything else I did.

In 1998, I had the opportunity to sell my business. I learned what not to do. There was a competitor, right, that I had, who we were kinda friendly with. He would subcontract some work from me from time to time when he was slow. He came to me and said, “Look, I’m moving to Florida, and I’m thinking about selling. There are a couple of other people that are interested, but I want somebody I know that I trust, that’s going to take this over because my name’s on it.” So, long story short, I got some cash at close, but it was also a monthly payment type scenario. Seller financed it. About twelve months in, he made some decisions that kind of cut, you know, I had some big developer work as well. They were buying into me. I would fly back up once in a while and connect with them to make sure everything was on board and everybody was okay. But there were a lot of lessons in that about what I could have done differently and how I could have structured it. It didn’t go totally as planned, but it was my first experience with doing that.

So, once I got through that and moved to Florida, I kinda got sucked right back into the construction industry because that’s what I knew. I happened to meet a decorator at a party I was invited to during my first week there. Next thing you know, I’m working along A1A and all the multimillion-dollar homes on the beach. I was fortunate again to start building another company, hiring employees. Then something magical happened in 1999. We were expecting our first child in 2000, and I started to question my life choices again. I started to say, “I don’t wanna work seven days a week. What could I do differently?” I had a client at the time who had a four hundred million dollar exit. He sold a big construction company in the Midwest. I would always get friendly with the clients and ask for insights like, “How did you get to where you are today?”

And these guys would call me up and say, “Hey, can you go pick up my Bentley and pick me up at the airport, and let’s go have dinner?” So I got to spend time with these guys. One of the things this guy told me, when I asked him what he would do differently, was that he would give it all back if he could get his son back. His thirty-year-old son had died of alcoholism because while he was building this massive empire, he wasn’t home. He wasn’t part of the kid’s life. It really struck me. I was like, “Okay, it doesn’t mean you need to live like a pauper’s life. But what could I do differently?” So I started playing around online and fell into the affiliate marketing world. That’s how I got into the Internet marketing world. And that’s where I started my journey into Internet marketing, lead generation, and eventually became the backbone behind a personal development company for ten years, with partners. I left that in 2011, and then had a few different ventures in the financial services industry, using my marketing experience to figure out the next thing I wanted to be involved in.

You’ve had a big construction home services background, and really, for the last twenty years, you’ve delved into the marketing world. Marketing-related is really your kind of buy box. Let’s start to talk about some of the deals you’ve done. I know you just closed on a really big agency deal. I’ve seen a number of your other acquisitions. I think you did an e-commerce brand in the sports world. Let’s talk about some of the deals that you’ve done and how you actually did them.

Dan: Yes. With the sports e-commerce store, that was an interesting deal. The guy had bought it and did what some people do—they don’t really know how to run it and got distracted with another project. At the time, that business was doing about 1.3 to 1.4 million a year. He let it slowly dwindle, stopped running traffic, and was trying to sell it for a quarter-million to get his money back out of it. I just let it sit. I told him it wasn’t really worth anything aside from the sports vendor relationships and the database. Finally, through another partner of mine, we had several conversations over time. One day, I got on a Zoom call and asked him, “What do you really want? What would make this a win for you?” He said, “I’m just tired. I want to be done with it. I’m tired of paying for Shopify and all these fees. If I can get ten grand for it, I’d be happy.” So I said, “Done. I’ll get my attorney to draw up the paperwork, and we’ll handle that.”

That was the first deal that got over the line. When I look at that, I was watching all these different things in the marketing space. Your famous words are, “Stay in your lane.” I was trying to do everything but a marketing company. I started this journey with you; it was like, I had a coffee company under contract. Everything but a marketing company. But, ultimately, through what I started with the coaching business that I had, I hired an agency. For the first time, it’s like hiring a painting contractor for me. It’s very painful to let somebody else do that work because I’m kind of a stickler with that kind of stuff. I was watching what this agency was doing, and probably about three months in, I said, “Dude, if I didn’t know you, I would have fired you month one. I love you as a friend, but you suck as an agency.” So what it did for me was it drove me to say, “Okay, I’m gonna go fix my problem. I’m gonna go acquire an agency.” And that’s what I did.

I pulled a list, did the direct mail thing, which I resisted because I’m a paid ads guy. I thought, “I’ll just run paid ads.” But I said, “I’m just gonna do what Carl says, send letters, see what happens.” I just happened to catch the guy for this business, and it was a perfect scenario where he was checked out, the number two guy was already running it day-to-day, and it had all the makings of the ideal buy box for me. I was able to get that deal over the line over several months, not without obstacles.

At the very least, you gotta partner with a lawyer that’s part of the bar and can be your person there. But, yeah, as you know, in our KOD roll-up, we’re closing soon on a CPA firm. Can you imagine what we’re gonna do with that business? We’ll seven X that business in one year. Just can you imagine deploying that CPA firm into like, proteges and echelon deals and all the real estate investors we’ve now got as part of our community?

One of the things I said to Jeremy literally last week was, “Jeremy, this business will break.” Seriously, it’s a great business, but we’re gonna break it with the scale we can give it. So we’ve actually found a bolt-on that we can buy very creatively, which can almost triple the output capacity of that, which is really, really cool.

Cool. So what else are you up to right now? I know you bought the agency. You got a bunch of other deals. You’re on my board in KOD. What else is going on for you right now?

Well, I think the big thing for me that I recognize is what’s funny is that the problem I thought I was gonna solve by acquiring this agency—this agency is not built for the world we come from with the coaching space. They’re more of a local marketer, lead gen, and they work with some billion-dollar brands. They work with local mom-and-pop type businesses.

But what’s interesting is, in the first couple of months here, I started to see this come together, and I just call it the Ryan Reynolds model. It is basically, aside from me not being a movie star, what I know is that these guys came in as part of a moving brokerage. We structured a consulting-for-equity deal that’s a multiple six-figure deal where they’re actually paying for us to build everything out, to manage it, and run the entire thing.

We also brought in the online side because these guys are doing some significant numbers nationwide without a website. It’s all call centers. They asked, “What could we do with a website?” and I said, “Well, we can disrupt this industry.” And they were like, “That’s exactly what we wanna do.” So we did a consult-for-equity deal sixty days in.

What’s fascinating is at the Protege event because I sat next to Ilya, who is a developer. We cut a deal with him, and we signed it yesterday. We brought him in to take a piece of the equity as well and have him be the developer on board to run it. I told him I want a team on board that actually has a vested long-term interest. I just don’t wanna hire people overseas to build it, and then I gotta keep babysitting them.

That’s really smart. A lot of people have a limited belief around partnering with other people. I’ve been pounding the partnering drum in Protege for kind of two years now. But what I’m really proud of about the Protege community is there are about eleven hundred people in it now. When I first launched it, you were one of the first people that came in a couple of years ago.

I’d say one in ten deals that would close would be partnerships. Now it’s more than fifty percent. Like, every deal I’m looking at now, whether it’s a tombstone that we send out or people posted in our groups, “Hey, I closed this deal,” they’re all kind of like partnering. There’s a great deal that closed yesterday with Samir. Marali and Samir are both from the tech world. They bought an agency.

It really makes me proud to see these people because it’s a one plus one equals three model. We can’t all be amazing at different things. For me, for example, I’m a visionary. I’m the best in the world at doing deals and raising capital, but I’m not an operator. I know a lot about marketing and numbers, but there are far better people than me in my network that can do that stuff.

So I’d rather partner with those people, give them a piece of the ownership because that psychologically changes them. They’re a co-owner of yours, and they’re part of the team. I think they lean in harder. Is that what you found?

Yeah, definitely. I can say that even working with Steven for the past six plus months, we have a deal under contract now. We’ve had a few here and there that didn’t work out, but just to see how he and I have worked together is incredible. We click on all cylinders. I told him he can get us on a call with any seller, and they all wanna sell to us. Together, we’re this power team that we just kind of naturally fell into.

The Protege event was the first time I met him in person. We were working together for months before actually physically meeting. Steve is incredible. What I love about Protege is that people come in from all walks of life. You’ve got absolute rookies that don’t know anything, but I vet every single applicant that comes into the program because I want to control the quality of the group and the dynamic and the culture.

Often, I look at people that come in, and they may have no deal experience, but they have a solid industry background. They’ve got the hunger, the ability to learn, and they’re a noble capitalist, so I let those people come in. Typically, those people do very well. On the other side, there are experienced individuals like you and Steven who come in at a much higher level.

You’ve obviously got a massive tenure in your business career. You’ve done deals before, and then you have Steven, who was an M&A guy in a large company and has done tons and tons of deals. He’s still learning a lot and benefiting from the community and the partnerships that we’re building.

For me, it’s always been about being in the martial arts. When I got my black belt, one of the masters asked me what I learned. After months of testing, I realized I don’t know a damn thing. There’s always something to learn. So for me, it’s always been about acting as if I don’t know anything because there’s always something to learn.

If I come in with an ego, thinking I know better, it just isn’t gonna work out. You see that with people that come in with more experience and think they know better. In sales, they always say to hire younger, hungrier people for your team because the older guys get set in their ways and aren’t coachable.

I love that about Steve. He’s coming in and doing all this really cool stuff, but he gives so much back to the community. That’s why I get on him a lot when we’re doing these things. One thing I learned about you today is that you did Shaolin Kenpo karate. It took me six years to get my black belt, and I was talking to somebody about this yesterday. I’ve only ever had two fights in my life in the street.

I had thousands of fights in a dojo and was in competitions. I’ve never fought until I was nineteen and went to college. Some guys decided they would beat me up. I didn’t have any skills, so I started taking karate classes. I loved the discipline. My mindset and beliefs have come from doing karate.

For the first three months, my knuckles would be bleeding because they made us do push-ups on our knuckles on a concrete floor. I did my black belt, and then I left college to work on Wall Street, where I didn’t have time for that stuff.

A few months later, I was out with some buddies waiting to go into a bar. Some guys decided to jump the queue, and when my buddy said, “You gotta get to the back of the line,” they came up to him and were gonna start hitting him. In England, when you become a black belt, they give you a card you have to produce if you get into a fight to defend yourself.

If you pull out the card, it shows you’re trained. They wanted to start rumbling, and I dropped those guys in like three seconds. That’s the last time I’ve ever raised my hands on anyone, but I still know I got the chops. It’s muscle memory. If somebody comes from left field and hits you, it’s instinct.

I think martial arts and deal-making are very similar. You do the martial art reps, and those things become part of you. The more sellers you talk to, the more offers you make, the more negotiations you get into, the more pitches you do for capital, you’re building those reps. I have a photographic memory and remember every transaction I’ve ever worked on.

I’ve closed over four hundred deals at this point and probably worked on about ten thousand, remembering all the different nuances. When I found out about your martial arts background, I almost said, “Let’s spar one day,” but I’m a little too creaky now for that.

One of the things you mentioned was getting uncomfortable. I had no intention of going on the black belt journey. I put my kids in karate when they were eight and five, got friendly with the master, and eventually got roped into private lessons. Next thing I knew, I was in group classes.

He always said to me, “Why don’t you teach class tonight?” and I would say I wasn’t qualified. But I finally learned that you learn by teaching and doing. You see how people react and their different approaches. For me, it was a huge lesson of just getting out there and being willing to do something.

A lot of people in martial arts get their black belt and check off the box, but they miss the point. If I had stayed in it, I could be at master level now. The worst thing you can do is look down at your belt and believe it. There’s always someone better than you.

You learn from experience, and that’s why I’m so passionate about this. The number one piece of advice I would give to a brand new deal maker is to get out there. You can get caught up in a lot of material, and while you should definitely go through the training, the faster you can get into conversations and feed your pipeline, the better.

Even if you’re not clear on your buy box, as you start to go through due diligence with different types of deals, you’ll learn something and can decide what you’re really interested in. The thirty-day beast challenge you did last year was where I had a major shift.

Getting into the habit of reaching out and having conversations every day was powerful. It sets you up for the whole year with new relationships, deal flow, and connections.

I really appreciate your time. I know you have a lot going on, so I’ll let you go. Thanks for coming on the show today, and I’ll catch you soon. We have a board meeting on Monday for KOD, and I have some cool stuff to share about what I want us to do next year. Looking forward to seeing you then!