Dave Lorenzo:
Hey, now welcome everyone to the Sunday special. This is the Godfather of Growth, Dave Lorenzo. And I know the last couple of weeks you've kind of heard me by myself on the show, but today I was able to convince the great Nicki G to join us. Good morning, Nicola. How are you today?

Nicola Gelormino:
Good morning, Dave. I'm great. So glad to be here on this special. How are you?

Dave Lorenzo:
I'm doing great. So folks if you're, if you're listening to the show, we kind of take you behind the scenes here as to what we're doing. This is our way of, of documenting the process of the business that we've been working on for a little while now, and, the business that we continue to build that's in its infancy. And as we're recording this, we just finished our second pitch for the Success Lab, and we did our first one earlier in the week. We pitched it to a group of professionals. So I guess it would be, it would make sense to describe what the Success Lab is first, and then talk about the pitch, and then Nicola can share her feedback with me in real-time with all of you. I mean, 'cause why not grade my paper right in front of everyone? I mean, who, who, who doesn't like flying without a net?
So, the Success Lab is a community designed to help mid-market CEOs. So I define mid-market as CEOs who have businesses that do anywhere from, I would say 5 million to, I don't know, 300, 400 million in annual revenue. Those CEOs struggle with the proverbial working on their business versus working in their business. And my job as a business strategy consultant has always been to help them think about the exit strategy they have for their business. 'cause that enables them to streamline all the different aspects of what they, what they're working on. Everything about their business becomes even more streamlined. So if you think about, you know, Michael Gerber and how Michael Gerber has always advised people to approach a business. You know, his, his thoughts were, okay, take your business and now envision it as McDonald's and put a standard operating procedure in place for everything from cooking the fries to welcoming the customer when they walk in the door so that anyone could deliver any type of service to anybody, to any guest at any time in your business.
That's typically what I do. Now, think of that related to an exit strategy. And you've got exactly where I live and work every day with the folks who are the entrepreneurs, the CEOs that I work with. I sit down with them and I say, what does the end of this look like for you? And they say to me, well, Dave, I envision myself selling my business to this type of person, or Dave, I envision selling my business to a private equity fund. Or Dave, I envision joining forces with somebody who does something complimentary and that person buying me out. And then we work backwards. We reverse engineer the process to get them to that exit in the time window they've defined. So they'll say, 10 years, and I wanna have a strategic alliance partner who buys me out. So we develop their business, we take their business, and we make it look exactly like it needs to look to make that happen.
Or they'll say, 10 years and I wanna sell to private equity, or I wanna sell to somebody who is rolling up businesses in my industry. And there's two aspects to that. For me, it's revenue growth that comes organically. So from improved sales and marketing processes, maybe from improved client targeting or segmentation, and then also aligning their business with other people who would be ideal buyers years before or a decade before they're ready to exit. Well, these CEOs, they don't prioritize that stuff. And the reason they don't prioritize that stuff is because there's nobody screaming and yelling at them to think about their exit strategy. The Success Lab is designed to be the community of people that screams and yells at them to think about the things that are most important in their business. So Nicole and I have designed a process where their strategic goals will be a priority that they focus on at least once a month, sometimes more often than that.
And they will be doing it with a community of their peers, and we will provide them with subject matter experts who will educate them and get them ready for everything that's coming down the road. So, for example, we have family office managers who will educate them on how to make your business appealing to a family office. We have people who work in acquiring businesses for private equity funds who will be doing the same thing. Along those lines, we have trust and estates attorneys who will help them think through the implications of leaving a portion of their business to the next generation, or skipping a generation and leaving it to their grandchildren. We have transactional attorneys who will help them think through the proper way to structure their business if someday they want to take their business public. We have litigation attorneys like Nicola, who will help them think through the various types of risk or who will help answer questions if they're faced with litigation without having to hire an attorney.
Just basic questions without having to hire an attorney upfront, and then help them pick the right attorney when they're ready to hire an attorney. So the Success Lab is designed to be a one-stop resource for CEOs who are, who are focused on the strategy necessary to have a successful streamlined exit, whether it's 15 years down the road or two years down the road. So I'm out pitching this to CEOs now, and Nicola and I just began pitching this to professionals this past week. And our focus is to bring these professionals on board first as what we would call beta testers. So we're bringing the professionals in as if they're CEOs, and we're gonna run them through the curriculum that we have, and we're gonna run them through our goal setting and accountability process to help them with prioritizing their most important goals. And the professionals will be doing two things as they go through this process.
They'll be helping us refine the process and make it easier to deliver. And then the second thing will be the professionals will be learning what we're teaching the CEOs so that they can speak the same language where we're speaking to the CEOs. For us, for Nicola and I, the benefit is the professionals are testing the system and providing us with feedback. But secondarily, we're evaluating all the professionals who enroll to see who's going to be a good subject matter expert. Our goal for this is to have a five to one ratio of CEOs, two subject matter experts, a five to one ratio of CEOs to professionals. So if we enroll 100 professionals now and 500 CEOs sign up when we open our doors, then we'll be in good shape. More likely that 100 professional group will become 20 subject matter experts. And then we will let in a hundred and fifty, a hundred and twenty five CEOs, and we'll have those 20 subject matter experts and some of the professionals we may invite to stay on as regular participants, but we will have a bench of people who we can go to, who will be future subject matter experts as we scale this business.
So that's kind of an overview of the Success Lab in a nutshell. Nicole, how did I do in describing that?

Nicola Gelormino:
I think you did great in describing it,

Dave Lorenzo:
. Okay. So we first pitched it to a group of professionals who work in the high net worth space. So these are people who work with affluent families, they work with family offices, they work with affluent individuals, and we pitched it to them on Tuesday. How did you think that, that that pitch went?

Nicola Gelormino:
So I had the pleasure of sitting in on the pitch and watching the reaction real time, and I can tell you that there is a lot of excitement in the reaction. there's, there's folks who already want in and have a lot of questions. So I think that we're on the right track when you receive that kind of reaction from even our initial audience that got to hear this for the first time. So that tells us, you know, we've got something great here, at least we think so. And our, our audience that initially heard this is excited about it. So something that, you know, you and I are now gonna explore a little bit further. something else that that really came out of this for me was folks said, wow, you know, this is a really great focus. And that's something Dave, I I really want you to kind of touch on that is how did we come to the focus for exactly what the Success Lab was going to be? I think that's really important here.

Dave Lorenzo:
Yeah. So the Success Lab came from me just asking CEOs, listen, what's your, what's your exit? What are you planning your exit as? And them giving me stupid looks and me saying to them, you, you know, you don't know what you're working toward. I mean, I understand you're trying to grow revenue and you're constantly putting out fires in your, in your business in the day to day because people get into a business because they're good at something, right? Or because they inherited a business from, from their family. Perfect example, last week I was in I was in southern Michigan and I was sitting in the offices of a gentleman who makes telescopes, okay? And he sells these telescopes to governmental agencies all over the world. He also sells the telescopes to really wealthy people who build these these observatories on their property. And his telescopes sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And he is a master at building telescopes. That's what he does really well. He's not an entrepreneur per se. He didn't invest in a telescope business. Now he now owns a couple of ancillary businesses because he's in a very small town. And like he bought the one restaurant in town because he liked owning a restaurant and he wanted to make sure the restaurant survived. And so he bought the restaurant, which we can talk about is a, is a huge mistake from an investment perspective Anyway, but anyway, long story short, he's a telescope maker. He's not a business owner. So when I sat down with him and I said to him, what's your exit strategy? Who do you sell a telescope business to? He's like, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, do your kids work in the business? And he said, no, my kids don't work in the business.
And I said, do you have any strategic alliance partners? And he said, no, I don't have any strategic alliance partners. I said, is there anyone in a complimentary business to yours who would be interested in what you do? He said, well, actually, he said, we bought the company that we used to buy the telescope mounts from because we were buying so many of their mounts to mount the telescopes on that, it just seemed like it would make more sense. He said, in a year and a half, I received enough of a return on my investment in selling telescope mounts to other people so that, you know, the business paid for itself. And now I don't have to pay for telescope mounts anymore because that company makes 'em, and that company's now part of my company. And I said, okay, so you're on the right track in thinking about how to integrate other businesses into yours.
Now let's think about who would be interested in buying your business, your telescope business down the road. And I use that example because that person doesn't have time according to them, to think about who's gonna buy the telescope business because he's so busy making tele. Like he's the engineer who designs the telescopes. So he gets hit by a bus. There's no telescope business, right? So he's spending all of his, and he goes on sales meetings, he meets with NASA because NASA wants to pick his brain on what they're doing with their telescopes. So he's not thinking about how the telescope business ends. He's just thinking, all right, I sold seven telescopes this month and I'm making $1.4 million profit on selling those seven telescopes. That's all he's thinking about. So to get him to take a step back and think strategically about his business and where his business would fit into a bigger picture, or who would be interested in buying his business and how we can position his business five years down the road, he's not planning on exiting for 10 or 15 years.
He said, never. So in my mind, never is like a 15 year exit window. So what we have to do is we enroll him in the Success lab and we say, okay, your first project is to brainstorm 50 different opportunities for you to partner with other companies. And those partnerships could end up becoming an exit strategy. Also, we're going to create milestones for you to get involved with industry trade associations so that you can take a higher profile in your industry and that will open up doors and opportunities. So basically the Success lab for this particular c e o looks like the beginnings of even thinking strategically. This guy hasn't had a strategic thought since he decided to buy the telescope mount company, right? So that's where Success Lab comes from. Having conversations like this with CEOs who have no idea what business strategy is or means to them.

Nicola Gelormino:
So, and that's exactly why I wanted you to explain that, Dave, because this is how we came up with the idea for Success Labs, because CEOs are, and rightfully so focused on the business that's in front of them, focused on the present. They've already done, you know, great, they've had such, they've had that early success, they're thinking about what's next for me in terms of the, the strategic step for the company, not long term. And so this wasn't just one example of a C E O saying, I hadn't really thought about what my exit's going to be. I've been thinking a lot about what the next year or a few years look like. So we were hearing from multiple CEOs, andI hadn't really had time to sit down and think about that. So we were hearing there's a need for this type of strategic thinking and planning that's out there that we can help fulfill by coming up with a model to do it. So that's really where this idea came from. I

Dave Lorenzo:
Can give you a more a more relatable example. The telescope example is kind of extreme because there's, you know, there's like five telescope companies globally that manufacture what this guy does. think of a hotel owner, right? I work with a hotel owner right now who's got 17 properties. And his focus is, while the economy's good, while there's money available, I just gotta keep opening properties and I'll buy distressed hotels and convert them to Marriott or Hilton Flag properties. And the conversion alone will create a revenue stream because of the reservation system and the new flag that will immediately add value to my portfolio. So when I go to that person and I say, what's your exit strategy? That person tells me, I'm just thinking about opening new hotels before the economy goes south, and I wanna make sure each of my hotels is positioned properly so that if occupancy was cut to 40, 50, 60%, I could still make my debt service and I could survive.
That's the mentality of a typical hotel owner. So I look at that person and I say to that person, well, okay, tell me, tell me how your business is structured and then I can talk to you about how you could potentially exit. And he says, what do you mean? Each property has an individual limited liability company so that I don't, you know, I can, I can mitigate my risk and there's no contagion from one property to the next. And because they're each limited liability companies, I take different types of investors, but I have one company that I use as as an overall management company. And as the overall management company, you know, we have employees, particularly managers who can move back and forth between multiple properties. And I can look at him and I can say to him, okay, so you have individual assets.
So you can have exits from each of those individual assets. And if you have multiple partners in each asset, there's an easy exit path from each of those assets. You could sell to your individual partners in one or more if you wanted to divest yourself of one or all 17 of the assets at once. So that's fine. You have an internal, it's called an internal market. There's an internal market for that particular asset. The management company, however, is something that I find very interesting because that could be an annuity for you to keep paying you into retirement. You could be a passive investor in the management company 'cause you're not managing the hotels on a day-to-day basis. So let's do this. Let's set a goal for you to create to make the management company fully independent. Let's set the goal for you to hire a hospitality expert to be the c e o of the management company instead of you being the c e o.
And then that hospitality expert could pursue management contracts in hotels that you didn't own. So that management company then would throw off incremental revenue. And if you wanted to exit from the individual assets, that management company could be an annuity that you could potentially pass down to your children. But in order to do that, we have to look at the strategy for the individual, for the management company and not the individual assets. So let's make your goal that you're gonna work on in the Success lab, recruit hospitality, c e o so that we can sell the hospitality company or we can take the hospitality company and offer its services to hotels that you do not manage because you have expertise in Marriott branded properties. You have expertise in Hilton branded properties, and you run some independent properties yourself now. So those are three markets that we can pursue to manage those companies and get royalties.
And then if you wanted to, when those companies are ready to sell assets, you can take your investor base and buy the underlying asset with your investor base if you want. But the Hospitality management company could be an annuity that could pay you over time because that could be a passive investment for you. But he doesn't have time to think about that 'cause he's out chasing the next hotel that he's gonna buy and convert. So I force him by enrolling him in the Success Lab, I force him to take a step back and look at this strategically, and then I hold his hand and make it a priority because I beat the living crap out of him every time I meet with him to focus on this. And the way it's structured is we hold Success Lab meetings twice a week every week. So if the c e O tells me my goal is to have a c e O for my hospitality management company in place in the next 90 days, we would set milestones where he would have to check in every week in the Success lab. He, he logs into a Zoom meeting with five of his peers and me, and he talks about what he's done this week to advance closer to achieving that milestone for that long-term strategic goal. Does that make sense? Is that a better example?

Nicola Gelormino:
That's a great example. So we are making sure that you as CEOs are taking the time to take steps towards your ultimate goal. That way while you're off running your business as you usually are, you don't have to be worried about what am I going to do? I don't even have a plan in place. We're helping you put the plan in place, and we're making sure that you are forced to carve out the time to be able to set aside to making sure this goal is still happening. So really it's happening on a parallel track while you're running your business. So you can think of it this way. You business is succeeding and so are the steps towards your future. So you're running on a track to do both.

Dave Lorenzo:
This is taking Michael Gerber's e-Myth his big, his big idea working on your business instead of in your business. And it's forcing you to do that because you meet with myself, with Nicola and with the Success lab members, the community members as frequently as necessary in order to achieve your goals. So right now, our Success Lab sessions are on Mondays and Fridays. So if you have a goal that you want to complete this week, you'll, you'll jump into Success Lab on Monday. You'll you'll fill out the goal sheet that we give you. We'll do we do, we always do education at the beginning of the Success Lab session. So there'll be a little 20 minute education session. You fill out your goal sheet, you announce to the group what your goal is. The group may ask a couple of questions, or the group may have an idea to help you advance toward that goal.
And they will share it with you in that session. And then you will announce the date by which you will either complete that goal or complete that milestone, and then you will log back into Success Lab on that date. You will show up and we will hold you accountable because your goal sheet is, is saved in our system. And when you come back on, we're gonna ask you questions about what you did to get closer to your goal. Now, the question that I get most from people who I talk about this concept with is, Dave, what happens if I fail? What happens if I didn't hit my goal? Well, you need Success Lab even more because what will happen is you will come back and you will say, Hey, listen, I didn't hit that goal. If you didn't hit the goal because you didn't try and you didn't do the work, well, shame on you.
We're the, we're the personal trainer in the gym. So if you didn't work out between your sessions with your personal trainer, your trainer's gonna go, Hey, listen, you're not gonna get the results if you don't put in the work. Let's start fresh and let's, let's recommit and let's start fresh and let's reset your milestones and we'll, and we'll focus on it again. And I may pull you offline and have a little talk with you to make sure that you understand how important it is. But if you didn't hit because you, you didn't hit your milestone because you got sucked back into your business, we have to work with you to to recondition you to get that behavior out you know, out of the way so that you can commit to these goals. If you didn't hit your milestone or you didn't achieve your goal because a barrier came up and blocked you, that's where you really need Success Lab because the other CEOs who are in the se in the Success Lab session at that time can think this through with you and can give you some ideas to get you unstuck.
Nicola, and I can think this through with you, give you some ideas to get you unstuck. The subject matter experts that are in the Success Lab can give you some ideas to get you unstuck. So it's, it's not just milestones and accountability, it's also emotional and tactical support to help keep you moving forward. We are in the business of eliminating excuses. We're in the business of eliminating these barriers so that you can get to the outcome you really want. We are making all these things that you're putting off your number one priority, and we're screaming and yelling and standing on our heads so that you can't forget about them. That's the second benefit, is that the community can help you when there's a barrier. First point of the value proposition of Success Lab is its accountability. It's for you to be held accountable for strategic goals that you haven't thought about.
The second point of our value proposition is when there's barriers. We are the barrier removal company here where we have other people who've been where you are right now, who can make suggestions to help remove those barriers for you. And then the third point in our value proposition, and I've touched on it a few times already, is our subject matter experts are doing presentations. Our subject matter experts are educating you so that you have all the knowledge you need to speak intelligently to people who can help you achieve your goals. So if you've never dealt with a family office before and you wanna sell your business to someone, family offices invest in businesses all the time, you wanna raise capital, family offices are a great place to go, but you don't know anything about family offices. We have experts who can educate you, who can get you up to speed on how family offices invest.
You wanna sell your business to private equity. We have experts on that. You wanna take your business public, we have experts on that. You are blocked because you need to you need to work out a deal with your partner for what happens if one of you passes away. We have estate planning attorneys, we have transactional attorneys who can help you with a buy sell agreement, help, help you think through the buy sell agreement process. We have insurance experts who can fund that whole thing for you or teach you how to fund that whole thing. Some of these ideas that I'm talking about right now, you've never even thought of as a C E O. These are the things we're educating you on every week in Success Lab. So three points in the value proposition are, number one, the education to make sure you're up to speed on everything you need to know so that you have all the options laid out in front of you. Number two is barrier analysis and removing the barriers from you when you can't get your goals done. And then number three, it's the accountability to keep you focused. All right, Nicki, g you got a bunch of questions. You got a bunch of things you want to jump in here and talk about. I've been talking too much. Go for it.

Nicola Gelormino:
Let me use the subject matter experts as a jumping off point, because the one very good question I got after today's presentation on the Success Lab is, but don't you know, Nicola, don't CEOs already have their bench of advisors? And let me give you real time my response to that. This is much different. Of course they do. You're not replacing the advisors that handle their day-to-day business. Yes, they have accountants, yes, they have financial professionals. Those professionals that they have, number one, already have their plates full with running that business. They have already been doing their jobs, they know what they're doing. Two, those professionals are not the subject matter experts that we have here. We are focused on the end goal. We are focused on the exit strategy. Your day-to-day professionals are not thinking that they're not doing that. They may not have some of the capabilities of the bench that we're going to have here.
It runs very deep beyond that. And so this is, you can think of it as these experts are, that's all they're focused on is that exit strategy. How do we get you all of this information to consider to be able to get you there? So two completely different things. And they're really for a targeted purpose, right? The targeted purpose that our subject matter experts are there for is your exit strategy, not the day-to-day. So we're thinking differently, we're giving you different ideas and we're helping you implement them in order to get to the end goal.

Dave Lorenzo:
Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm really glad you brought up that feedback because I've heard that too, where they say, Hey, they already have their advisors. Here's the thing. If their advisors are filling this need already, they're not, they're not talking to us about Success Lab. But my experience in, you know, this year alone, and we're, we're in August of 2023 as as we're recording this, this year alone, I've done 25 different half day seminars with CEOs all over the United States, and I have dozens of conversations with CEOs when I follow up with them after these seminars. And 10%, 10% are thinking about the long-term strategic vision for their business. Nobody is thinking about what they're gonna do with their business five years down the road. The people who are thinking about their exit strategy are people who just had a heart attack, or people whose partners just got hit by a bus, or people who wanna exit their business quickly and be a passive investor so they can invest in something else.
Those are the folks who are, who are thinking about an exit strategy or the folks we introduced this concept to. So if you're a professional out there, you should be having this conversation with your CEOs. You should come to the Success Lab and you should invite your CEOs to come to the Success lab. If you're a C E O and you're listening to this and you don't know how your business ends, that's okay. We're not gonna yell at you. The opposite is true. We are here to help you think through what the exit should be for your business. And I wanna make one more point, Nicola, because there are people out there who are certified exit professionals. There are different organizations that offer certifications in exit planning, right? And then these people go out and they advise business owners on exit strategy. These people are financial advisors.
And while financial advisors are an important, important resource for people who make money, especially people who make a lot of money, financial advisors are not business strategists. They're not people who are out there capable of looking at the horizon in an industry and pointing someone in a direction and saying, go that way. Because that's where the most value is going to be for you and your business. The certified exit planning folks are going to be able to do some sort of business valuation for you based on current market conditions. And then a business broker would help you value your business based on other businesses in the market. What we are doing is something different. We are helping you create a market for your business, and that's where you're going to get the most valued. We offer you business strategy advice so that you can look at the entire spectrum of options and decide, if I wanna get out tomorrow, I can list it with the broker and instead of getting a premium, I can get a one x multiple.
If I want to get a three x multiple, I can sell to my competitor who's happy to pay me a three x multiple because in a year and a half with my market share, he's recouped his entire investment. But if I want a five x multiple, I can sell to my partners and seller finance over a 10 year horizon and with the interest receive a five x or a 10 x multiple because that interest will accrue. I can get that passive income stream and take 50% down, and the 50% that I get down is the same as I would've gotten from the broker in the first place. So we are the people who are giving you the spectrum of options. And because we don't have a dog in this fight, you're member of our community, we can help you look at it objectively. Brokers aren't bad people who are exit strategy experts, these certified exit planning experts, they're not bad.
They're gonna give you a valuation based on today's dollars, but we can help you look at the entire horizon. And then when you're ready to pull the trigger, we can help you make the best decision for you. And our experts are not the people who have a dog in the fight. They're not getting 1% or 2% when you exit. They're just here to advise you. And if you need help, they're here as a trusted advisor for you without the dog in the fight to give you that objective advice. That's one of the real big value propositions we have as a success lab.

Nicola Gelormino:
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I I, I'm glad you mentioned that each, each of advisor that you could put together to form your own team, they're out in the market, but each one has their own self-interest. In the end, they wanna make sure that they're providing you with what's really their objective for you. It's not the, it's not really the overall objective approach. So what we're giving you is that team who has the objective approach for you with far more expertise than were you to go out and to start hiring one professional after another to create your own team. We're giving you the team, they're giving you the objective approach. And what you can't get, even if you built your own team, are the other CEOs in the room who are gonna help you when you run into an issue that, you know, we can basically troubleshoot it with them. You have so much expertise in one room with you to be able to help you figure this out. So that's the, the, the highest, I think, ticket on the value that we're providing by pulling this all together for you.

Dave Lorenzo:
And you know what we didn't even, what we didn't even touch on Nicola, is the value that you and I provide in being connected to a network of 8,500 people, being connected to a network of family offices and folks who are are involved in private asset investments so that I know people who are doing dental office roll-ups right now. I know people who are rolling up solar companies. I know people who are doing AI company Rollups. I know people who are doing cybersecurity business rollups right now. So when A C E O comes to me and he says, what's a realistic multiple for my business, we can go to one of our valuation experts and for not a whole lot of money, he can get a legitimate real market valuation. But then I can go to somebody who's doing a roll up and I can say to them, listen, we got this multiple from this guy.
Here's what his revenue is. Here's how much is repeat. Here's how much is recurring, and here's how much is passive and here's the percentage that's ad hoc. If he increases his recurring revenue by 20%, what would that be worth in a rollup scenario versus what it's worth in the street for a broker investment? And you can get a real objective opinion just from people that we have in our network without having to go out and put your, and put your business up for sale in an m l s with a broker. And here's the other thing. You go to a broker and the broker has a vested interest in getting your deal closed. He definitely has an interest in getting your deal closed for the most money he or she can get because he gets a percentage of the sale. But if he's only got one option for you, he's gonna push you hard toward that one option.
We've got a whole horizon full of options for you. And that gives you the opportunity to do whatever you want to do on your own terms. I mean, that's, that's probably one of the, one of the strongest one of the strongest selling points of this as a whole. Now look, this, this Sunday special, it wasn't meant to be a pitch on on the Success Lab. It was meant for us to tell folks what we are doing, but I, I enjoy talking about it and I'm sure the the people who are listening are enjoying listening to it. So what was your feedback? We pitched it today to to 50 professionals in a room, and we have to do all of our follow-up. I have to immediately after we're done here, I'm gonna send out an email to all 50 of those people. My experience is when we pitched it to 25 people on Tuesday, we got 12 applications for professionals who were interested. That's what we're, that's what I'm waiting through right now. And of those 12 applications, I went through 'em all and 10 of the 12 were qualified. I sent them all invitations to meet with me for a one-on-one consultation, and half of them have already booked their one-on-one consultations. So I think that's positive. What was your experience today? I did the pitch. You were sitting in the room with the participants. What wa what was your, what was your experience While I was doing the pitch today

Nicola Gelormino:
Experience was there's a lot of excitement over this. So I, I had, you know, no less than right after that pitch, half a dozen professionals come up to me and say, I want in. What do I do? I wanna book my consult. You know, of course fill out the application as a response. But there's a lot of excitement. You know, this is now two pitches in a row. There's a lot of excitement. It sounds like. You know, we, we have interest from the right professionals that we're putting this in front of, right outta the gate.

Dave Lorenzo:
Yeah. So what our process is now is we do this introductory pitch. We send out an immediate follow-up email explaining what the success lab really is, the nitty gritty of, hey, expect there to be a presentation from a professional in each meeting. But as part of the beta program, you're gonna go through the program that CEOs will go through. And after you go through that program, you'll give us feedback. We are going to educate you exactly the way we would educate the CEOs based on our strategic view of an exit. And then you are going to share with us curriculum you would share with the CEOs, and we will evaluate your curriculum. We'll give you some feedback on how you would present it. We will have you present your curriculum to other professionals. So it's almost like open mic night where you're doing your act in front of other comics, and we're gonna see what the reaction is. You can continue to refine the process and the people who are the teachers are going to be the students as we beta test this program simultaneously. I'm also pitching this to CEOs to see how their response is to it. And we'll probably do a C e O beta where we'll put the first two or three or four professionals in front of CEOs to see how they react.

Nicola Gelormino:
I will just add that, you know, we wanna make sure that you're committed. So it's not just that you yourself thinks about it the way, the, this way that it's an investment of money for me. I need to make sure I commit. We want to make sure that you're committed to this program. Part of what we're doing here as well is Dave and I are making sure that we are personally vetting every professional that's coming into this program because we want to make sure that we are developing the best subject matter experts for the CEOs who are going to be part of this program. And for the other professionals who are going to be part of this program. That's why we're having them apply. That's why we're having these pre-phone calls with them. That's why we're going to beta test this because we're gonna make sure that we develop an excellent base of professionals to make sure that the success lab is a success.

Dave Lorenzo:
It would be kind of antithetical if the Success lab was unsuccessful, , all right,

Nicola Gelormino:
. And sometimes we do this right to challenge ourselves because that's who we are. We are going to make sure that we are delivering maximum value to you through this program, and we're committed to doing that. And Dave and I have put our reputations into this.

Dave Lorenzo:
I think that's right. I think that's great. So overall, I think a pretty successful week. What would you say?

Nicola Gelormino:
I would say it's a very successful first week

Dave Lorenzo:
Alrighty. Folks, if you're interested in finding out more about the Success Lab, we can read the white paper that we've written for CEOs, okay? Go to: http://SuccessLabsecrets.com
SuccessLabsecrets.com.

That's where you can find the white paper for CEOs, it's HTTP colon slash slash. Don't put the S in there because it's a, it's a Google Doc. So just go to SuccessLab secrets.com and when you go there, you'll see the white paper. You can read through it. If you think you wanna apply, go ahead and apply and I will reach out to you, myself, and vet you. And we'll see if you're a Fit Sunday special. We're here every week where we give you an inside look at our business and what we're doing. Until next week, I'm Dave Lorenzo, and you are Nicki G. We'll see you back here again for the Sunday special folks. Be sure and tune in tomorrow.