Lowering the Barrier to Entry: Turning Trade Skills Into Scalable Entrepreneurial Opportunity with Clayton Tomasino

0:01John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by HighLevel, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down, lowering the barrier to entry, turning trade skills into scalable entrepreneurial opportunity. To drop these value bombs, I brought Clayton Tomasino into EO Fire Studios. Clayton is CEO of Scorpion Coatings, transforming a family business into a global platform, empowering entrepreneurs through accessible tools, technology, and systems that lower barriers in skilled trades. And today we talk about humble beginnings, seeing the opportunity, avoiding early failure, and oh, so much more.

0:40John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Clayton and our sponsors. Today's show is sponsored by Strawberry.me. If you're feeling stuck or like you're ready to get to the next level in your career, then finding the right coach can help. Go to strawberry.me slash fire and get 50 % off your first coaching session. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at HighLevelFire.com.

1:22HighLevelFire.com.

1:25John Lee Dumas:Clayton, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. All right. Well, hello, Fire Nation. It's a pleasure to be here and be on today. And thank you, John, for having me. Let's see. Something about being successful that most people disagree with. I guess the easy answer is to say that, you know, being successful is about money or it's about any kind of possession or anything like that. That's probably an antiquated ethos anyway. you know because I guess for me I know that I'm successful when I can do what I want to do now of course the more that you do the more responsibilities you have the more difficult that gets in a way oddly enough but I think that's what success is be able to kind of do what you want to do and for me I'm very much kind of a servant leader sort of guy.

2:29So also, I really, part of me being successful is to help others kind of attain whatever it is they want to attain or what a status or this, that, or the other. I love being part of other people's success. So, you know, I think that whatever, however they define success, I think just being able to help them is also part of what makes me feel successful.

2:55John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, Clayton will be helping us understand how to turn trade skills into scalable entrepreneurial opportunity today. And I do want to start with your humble beginnings, Clayton, because you grew up on a farm and in a family trades business. So how did that early exposure to hard work shape the entrepreneur that you are today? Born and raised here in Indiana, in the sweet Midwest of the USA. Yeah, so as he stated, I think, you know, part of us growing up, you know, we live out here in rural Indiana. We had a 30-plus acre farm. What we mostly did was livestock, so we had horses and cows mainly.

3:40What I learned a lot there, of course, is that, you know, there's joy in the work. You know, for us, you know, we had to wake up. It really didn't matter when it was, but you had to wake up at 6 in the morning every weekend and get out there and work. And we had to – there was always stuff to do at night, even after you get to school and after sports practices and everything. There was always work to do. And there's no escaping that. So you can either be in a mindset of where you fight against it and kind of mentally complain about it or wish you were doing something else. or you can almost roll into all that work and, you know, kind of getting that kind of a Zen mind state of, you know, just thinking about the work, thinking about what you're doing and giving it your all and knowing that, you know, if you slack off here, here or there, you're just going to have to come back and fix it.

4:37So it just takes longer. So it's also better to give it all your effort at once versus, you know, kind of half effort for even longer. So the farming was one aspect of what we did. And then, you know, my dad was also, you know, probably like a lot of people that's listening to this, my dad was also a serial entrepreneur. You know, so I think the first business that I remember was pest control. You know, it might sound a little cliche for Italian, but I think he owned a laundry mat at one point in time back in the day. um and then but the main business oh we had one that was a sporting clays golf business that i remember when i was 12 years old having to like pull all these like shooting traps for people that are shooting guns so you have to pull these sporting clays and carry around boxes and do all that stuff i had to do that when i was 12 you know that's the beauty of uh having family whenever you're an entrepreneur you can you have good workers The main business we had growing up though was asbestos removal.

5:43So that was pretty constant throughout growing up. So yeah, with that it was, I mean, all the glamour of removing of asbestos. So you know, you go to job sites, a lot of times we would be at job sites that were off hours. And the work was tedious. You know, you had to set up containment. A lot of kind of, I guess, cross-cultural people would work there, you know, work on these job sites. And, yeah, it was just tedious, hard work. But once again, I mean, you either accept it or you don't. And you learn to, you know, learn how to do work well and properly and quickly. or like I said, it just kind of, you learn, it just drags on and drags on.

6:36John Lee Dumas:Clayton, I want to jump in here because we have a lot to get to today. And I want to move on to seeing the opportunity, not seizing, but seeing the opportunity because you started in finance before you returned to the family business. So what made you realize that Scorpion could become something bigger? Yeah, well, my wife and I, yeah, we were living out in Hawaii when my dad had to wind down in their specialist removal business for various reasons. And so at that point in time, he had Scorpion truck bed linings, which he had been working on the side, and he was wanting to make that into a primary business.

7:14So, yeah, my wife and I moved back here and started helping him with that. That was about 2007. You know, I think I remember when I came back, you know, there's a lot of different areas where there were kind of room for improvement. I mean, the first thing I did, I remember getting feedback from the customers, see what they like, what they don't like. We redid a bunch of packaging. That was also the market that we were in. People weren't heavily using a digital advertising or anything there. So we were able to do that and grow the business very quickly.

7:52John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about avoiding early failure because a lot of small businesses, they just don't make it, Clayton. They just don't make it. You've seen it. So what would you say is the biggest operational mistake that you see entrepreneurs making time and time again? We had really good fortune when I came back and we took off. We grew fast and fast and fast. You know, even being from an accounting background that I was, a bit of a financial background, I still didn't know at that point in time that net income did not equal cash. So, you know, we grew, grew, grew, and it looked like we were making money, but, you know, you quickly find out that you're not.

8:35You know, when you start spending either, A, that net profit like cash, or if you have a downturn, you find out that, you know, even if you're profitable, you don't have any money. So, you know, that would be the first thing that I would say to any entrepreneur. I mean, because really it's not the car that breaks down most often. It's just that the car runs out of gas. You know, so always kind of develop that system with that in mind, you know, knowing that you'll have to really focus on that cash first. Now, I'm kind of a bootstrapper, so I've never raised funds or done anything like that. But even if you were to be out there building a business to raise money, you're going to do better if they see that you have that cash money and that fiscal responsibility already in your mind.

9:29John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we talked about seeing the opportunity, avoiding early failures. We talked about the humble beginnings of Clayton. We're going to be moving on to the big shift, scaling impact and starting smart when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Today's show is sponsored by Strawberry.me. I've interviewed over 5 ,000 successful entrepreneurs, and one thing they all have in common, they've enlisted mentors, coaches, and people along the way to help guide them. But where do you find the right coach or mentor? Great question. And that's where our strawberry.me career coaching comes in. I speak from personal experience when I say that coaching and mentorship has helped me get to where I am today.

10:07John Lee Dumas:In fact, you might not even be listening to Entrepreneurs on Fire if it weren't for my first coach and mentor, Jamie Masters. I knew that in order to produce the best podcast, I needed to find someone who was where I wanted to be. Here we are nearly 14 years later, and I'd say I made a fantastic investment. So if you're feeling stuck, facing an important career decision, or ready to make your next big move, the right coach can help. Go to strawberry.me slash fire and get 50 % off your first coaching session. That's strawberry.me slash fire. Fire Nation, if you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure.

10:47John Lee Dumas:That is why High Level is Entrepreneur on Fire's featured partner. High Level gives you a website builder and hosting, funnels and landing pages, email marketing, appointment scheduling, payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more. Everything you need to succeed all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business. And their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at HighLevelFire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more.

11:30John Lee Dumas:Visit HighLevelFire.com and start building your something today. Clayton, we're back and I want to talk about the big shift because you transformed Scorpion from a product-based company into this technology-driven platform. What problem were you solving that others were just missing? First thing before we talk about solving the problem, it's kind of being in love with the customer and the customer that we are trying to really help. So, you know, I think for us at Scorpion, even when my dad had started products way back in the day, it was always about kind of lowering that barriers to entry. You know, so when we look at it, you know, we were starting to, we had window film, we We were getting customers, getting new customers, you know, but we were running into a wall on software because some customers really like the film that we have, but they wouldn't move because they'd be locked into these weird contracts of this, that, and the other.

12:40So, you know, there was a limiting factor for us. And then, you know, looking at that and seeing how other companies were taking these people's freedom pretty much. They were keeping them locked in for no reason whatsoever. So there was an opportunity. We also talked to our customers and their biggest issue they had, because we work with very small businesses, like thousands of these micro businesses. So we consider about 3.5 employees per business. You have the primary installer, his main helper, a person up front, and a part-time person. They were always having someone leave, and they were always having to spend all their time training.

13:24And so that was dragging the business down and making it so all of the businesses, these micro businesses, couldn't scale because they were pretty much either always having to do the work themselves or always having to train somebody. So that was another thing with that is how can we help them? How can we make it easier to get people up and going and moving? So taking the low barriers to entry and how can we ease installation and help people with training, we came up with, okay, we're going to take the software that is out there a little bit, but we're going to make it mobile -based so it'll be on everyone's cell phone.

14:04And then we're going to make sure that it hooks up to even the least expensive hardware cutting device that we can. So that has always been the priority from day one. We want to take from a phone via Bluetooth to this printer plotter that cuts out the shape of windows. It cuts out the shape of paint protection foam patterns that they can then easily apply to a car. So that's been the focus. It's all about that small business. How can we make it easier, make it cheaper, make them positioned so that they can compete anywhere?

14:42John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about scaling impact because you've actually set this goal, Clayton, to empower 100 ,000 entrepreneurs globally. So what does that look like in practice? Because that's a pretty darn big number. What it looks like in practice is us being able to reach customers globally just via cell phone. So, you know, we have this opportunity now with what we've developed to really work and enable entrepreneurs anywhere in the world, you know, in that automotive sector. So that's the first and foremost. So we have that figuring out how to make that easier for all these entrepreneurs. And the second thing, we have the actual technology of our software is also going to, in the end, enable our customers to be able to do things in an easy mobile manner, so where they can be anywhere, they don't have to have a shop.

15:40And they'll also be able to use the technology to scan Windows in real time. So it won't be things that are even just on our database. it's going to be if I had a residential window that somebody wanted to quote, I could use my phone, scan the window with my phone, and it would cut out that exact shape and diameter and all that out. And I could install it right now. It doesn't have to be a two-day, three-day process. It can be instant.

16:07John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about starting smart, Clayton, because Fire Nation are entrepreneurs or small business owners. They're thinking about starting a business, a side hustle, They'll fill in the blank, but they have limited resources, or of course, many of them do. So what's one practical step that they can take today to build a more sustainable business, even with limited resources and maybe even limited time? I mean, first you have to examine what your passion is. So if you're going to have limited resources, it's going to be you that's going to be working on it. So don't follow necessarily money.

16:43Follow the passion. Find something that you're really into. first and foremost. Then from there, I would just look at doing your research. How can you get into that market in the least overhead-intensive way possible? So not making a sales pitch, but when we look at it, for us, I kind of developed our system with my 16-year-old son in mind. So, you know, we could get a 34-inch plotter, get that, put it in our garage at our house, and he could get friends to come over and start tinning cars right away. So you'd be invested. Our software is free for any Scorpion user. So really the only thing you're invested in is a$400 plotter and maybe a plotter adapter.

17:36you know so he can get in full business be working out of our garage you know for less than five hundred dollars on something and you're making a minimum minimum hundred dollars a vehicle you know so he's going to be making money after his first role after he learns how to do it and that's just a case in point but you know i i do think uh you know minimizing minimizing your overhead and, you know, not necessarily pushing all your chips in the beginning, but, you know, working up to it, especially in today's day and age where a lot of the marketplaces and battlegrounds are just constantly shifting.

18:17You know, nowadays it's going to be difficult to really kind of stake your ground in a high overhead area and feel confident in it over a long term or even a medium term.

18:28John Lee Dumas:So what's one mindset or action our listeners should adopt today to set themselves up for long-term entrepreneurial success? For me, I would say just do a little bit of it, whatever it is every day. If you have a big project, something that maybe you're intimidated by or you don't know, you just can't get started, start going on it, work on it, Tell yourself to work on it for five minutes, you know, and that'll lead into, you know, a chunk of time into that. But, yeah, just really, you know, don't drag things on. Try to work on it in concentrated bursts. That's what I do at least. You know, if I have all of something, I'll put it all into a time area and really kind of, I guess, for lack of a better phrase, really give it my all, knowing that I'm not going to be able to work on something for a long time, but I can work on something really hard for a short time.

19:29So I try to bundle things up like that. And so that helps me get a lot of progress in different areas. Also, always get, and my wife hates this phrase, but make sure you get in-process items in process first. So if there's something that you need to do that you're a step and then somebody else is working on, try to get those out of the way so that they can be working on them while you're working on something else. You know, it's amazing how a lot of people have their priorities misaligned and, you know, they'll wait to even do the in-process items where you have those in there for sort of like laundry.

20:08If you put your laundry in the washer first thing in the morning, then you go do other stuff, then you come back and, you know, your laundry will go to the dryer, it'll be ready and stuff. But if you wait till the end of the night to do your laundry, now you have to stay up and wait for your laundry to get done. You know, when you could have had it seamlessly tied into your day.

20:29John Lee Dumas:Clayton, if Fire Nation is listening and they want to connect with you or maybe learn more about what you have going on, what is your call to action for our listeners today? I mean, I would definitely, you know, love for anyone to download our software. Even if you're in the automotive industry or not, it's free. you don't have to do anything but just download and check it out it's Scorpion Scan Software S-C-A-N Scorpion Scan Software on both iOS and Apple I think we'd love for that love you to try it out, take a look at it yeah, outside of that also go to any of our websites, we have a lot of cool stuff, or check us out on really any of our socials we have some very cool I've talked a lot about our software here, but I have some smart film products that we're working on.

21:22One's a film that acts as a loudspeaker. One's a film that allows you to control the tint of your window almost on a dial. So we have a lot of really cool products that, yeah, if people go to any of the social medias, everything from LinkedIn to Facebook to Instagram to everything probably, check us out there. yeah because we're really putting out a lot of new products here lately.

21:48John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you've been hanging out with CT and JLD today so keep up that heat and for links to everything we talked about visit eofire.com type Clayton in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up and Clayton thank you for sharing your truth knowledge value with Fire Nation today for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. I appreciate it John appreciate it Fire Fire Nation. Hey, Fire Nation. A huge thank you to our sponsors and Clayton for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world?

22:24John Lee Dumas:If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. So to learn more about becoming a guest, visit EOFire.com slash guest. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Today's show is sponsored by Strawberry.me. If you're feeling stuck or like you're ready to get to the next level in your career, then finding the right coach can help. Go to strawberry.me slash fire and get 50 % off your first coaching session. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support.

23:04John Lee Dumas:Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com.