Hamed Mazrouei: Thin Margins Are a Lie

0:00This is crazy. Right now, most restaurant owners are using AI to write Instagram captions. That's like hiring a Michelin chef to microwave a Hot Pocket. You've got the most powerful marketing tool ever built, and you're using it to punch up a post that nobody even asked for. Stop underutilizing AI. It could become a full marketing machine for your restaurant. And in this month's five-day restaurant marketing masterclass, I'm going to show you exactly how, step by step. I'm going to show you how to use AI to bring in guests on schedule. I'm going to show you how to turn a first visit into a fourth and how to fill seats on repeat without living inside of your phone.

0:41We're going to use the same tools you already have and create a completely different result. It's going to be five days. There is zero cost associated with it, but seating is limited. So I want you to go to restaurantbusinessschool.com to register your free spot today. Now here we go. I believe every entrepreneur that has been successful has been successful because they've been able to master one thing. And that one thing is simplification. They've been able to simplify their entire business into a simple sentence. Welcome to Full Comp, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry. featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators.

1:29Served up on the house.

1:35What if the thin margins crushing your restaurant aren't the restaurant industry's fault at all? Hamed Mazrui came into restaurants as a total outsider. He built Vavant, the managed network company that keeps thousands of restaurants online, and he refuses to accept the belief that operators treat as gospel. In this conversation, we get into why the thin margins we blame on the industry actually come down to volume, why guest retention is the highest leverage metric almost nobody fixes, and why simplification is the one trait every successful founder shares. If you've been blaming the business for numbers you have the power to change, this one will make you rethink everything you assumed was fixed.

2:22I started back in 2008 with the guys from Genghis Grill actually. I remember being in their leadership calls every Monday 7 p.m. sometimes until like 2 a.m. and I got to see firsthand the pain points of running a restaurant. Obviously it's a very complex industry. Everyone says thin margins, high food costs, high labor costs. That stuff is true. Those things happen. And when you've scaled to 50 plus units, those problems become bigger and bigger. So for me, it started there. And I'm very thankful to those guys because they allowed me to be part of their team. They allowed me to attend these leadership meetings every Monday and see their pain points from inside out.

3:11And that gave me an unfair advantage. That gave me a viewpoint from top down on how a restaurant brand needs to be ran and how those problems are solved in the leadership level. And that's how it got started. That's how I got started and then came into the industry. I want to start killing all these limiting beliefs that everyone has. So like as you're sitting there in these meetings with the guys from Genghis, I'm sure that you heard them. I'm sure that you heard these limiting beliefs around, you know, well, we can only do this and we can only do that. But again, you came at it from first principles because you were a total outsider.

3:47So what were those limiting beliefs that you heard that ultimately you were able to question and challenge and overcome? I think the same that everybody else says, that restaurants have thin margins. Like I think that is a limiting belief. Like you don't have to have thin margins. You go back to any business. I use these examples all the time. If you're a lawnmower company and you do 500 ,000, like average restaurant today does 750 ,000 a year in sales. So if you're any business doing 750 ,000 a year in sales, guess what? You have thin margins. Is it a business problem? Is it the industry? Or is it just you, right?

4:27So everybody just says, well, restaurants have thin margins. Well, they don't. They have thin margins because the average restaurant sales is$750 ,000 a year. Talk to someone that's doing$1.5 million,$2 million,$3 million a year in sales, and they're not saying they have thin margins. They have a pretty healthy margin, right? So you have to cross-reference the percentages with the dollar signs. So sometimes a 10 % profit margin at half a million a year in profit, it's very healthy. And sometimes a 30, 50 % profit margin at$150 ,000 a year business just doesn't do anything. So one of them was that.

5:09And then the other one is their food costs. Like 35 % food cost is too much. It's too high. Well, that's your core product. People come into the restaurants for great food, great service. So if you're going to cut down on the food cost to a point where the food is just not as good, they're not going to come back. And then lastly is just labor. Like, hey, our labor is too expensive. Well, labor and food cost has always been a percentage of top line revenue. Like food costs, totally understood. That can vary and it does vary. But labor, not really. because if you go from a million a year in sales to 1.2 million, that extra 200 ,000 is like 500 bucks extra on a daily basis.

5:56Labor doesn't have to shift that much. You're not increasing your labor. So the percentages don't really add up as well as they should. In fact, if you go from a million in sales to a million two, your labor percentages drop because you use the same labor. if you were 30 % of 1.2 million, now you're at 25 % of that 1.2 million, same dollar value. So I think those limiting factors still exist. And a lot of these successful people, that's what they do. Like Elon Musk is notorious for breaking everything down to first principle. I believe there was a story of him that's like they were putting this thing in a Tesla, this part, I don't remember what it was.

6:38And he went around and asked everybody, What is this and why is it there? Where so-and-so said it. And he just kept going around. Nobody gave him an answer. And the thing was, well, let's just remove it totally. So you don't want to really fine-tune a broken process. You want to break it down and rebuild it from grounds up. Well, and I think that Vavant is actually a beautiful example of this and a beautiful example of first principles. I think that of all of the technologists I talked to, Like everybody is so excited with these new shiny things. That is not Vivant. Vivant is easily one of the most boring businesses ever, ever.

7:19This competitive set, this vertical in the industry is already helmed by companies that have been in it since the invention of the telephone, 50, 100 years. Like the stalwarts in there are the ones that get most of the business because that's just two people think about. So I want you to talk about the single problem you were trying to solve with Vivant and how you went about solving it. 100%. So at the core, you're absolutely right. Vivant is the absolute most boring business, but we have billions of dollars that run on our network. Billions of dollars that if we were to go down, there would be several billion dollars of sales that would be impacted.

8:02were the core infrastructure layer that powers the restaurants. Especially now, prior to 2020, obviously, online orders, phone orders, like those things weren't that big of a deal. There wasn't a huge 40 to 60 % of revenues being online over the phone, etc. But now today that is. So when you lose infrastructure, meaning internet, phones, switch, firewall, Wi-Fi device, any of those core infrastructures that go down, guess what? It's immediate revenue loss. It's immediate increase in labor percentage, because remember, labor is always a percentage of your sales. So sales plummet, but labor doesn't go down because you still have to have staff there because the Internet may come back online in an hour, three hours or five hours.

8:49So you're just going to have to keep people there. So we're that core infrastructure that protects that revenue and ensures that when Hamid goes to order online or places a phone call or goes to Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc. And wants to hand over money to you, that you're able to accept that payment. And then same thing with in-store transactions, that you don't use offline transactions. Typically offline, 5 % to 7 % decline, etc. Why deal with all that? We built an infrastructure around what we refer to as high availability. So no matter what happens, we've looked at it again. We're talking about first principles.

9:27So that's what we did internally. We looked at it from first principles. What can go wrong that will impact that business negatively, meaning I either lose money. So there's internet as a single point of failure. So what do you do? We used to add a single backup. Now we have two backups, AT &T and Verizon, of course. we monitor the primary internet. We fill it over to one of the carriers. If that doesn't work because there's a 5G upgrade or if there may be like low service maintenance, whatever, we fill over to the next one. Then we have the next single point of failure, which is the firewall that goes in the store.

10:05So when that goes down, what do you do? So we challenged every single step and we put a solution in place to prevent that from happening. And by the way, like everybody is aware, like Dave's Hot Chicken is one of our big customers. We built this infrastructure outside of the restaurant industry and then brought it in because of Dave's. It took us, what, 13 months or so working closely with the Dave's team, Leon, and the Dave's team to bring costs down so that it's actually manageable for the restaurant. And we looked at every single point of failure, and we said, okay, if this happens, what are the negative complications?

10:40Is the revenue loss worth the risk or not? if it wasn't worth the risk, we just put in a solution in place. Well, it's interesting because it's not something anyone ever thinks about, right? Until it's Saturday night at 8 p.m. And you've got to pull out the knuckle dusters to process all of these credit card transactions because your internet went down. It's just something you take for granted, kind of like your health until you don't have it. What's interesting is, as a protective layer, one would think that it would be more expensive than all the solutions that are out there today. But that's not the case.

11:16So how are you able to offer a guarantee that it's never going to go down with a zero outage guarantee and price it competitively against everyone that everyone else has already been using? Absolutely. So great question. So we do a few things. One, we guarantee uptime. So no internet outages, no phone outage, no Wi-Fi outage. We guarantee that. Then the second part is consolidation of providers. So instead of using five or six different providers, we bundle everything in one. That gives us a little bit more room. Again, going back to our original point, thin margins. If you look at our deals, we have thin margin on every single deal.

11:56Because we bundle it in and we price it so competitively that it's just at that edge. But we're still profitable. Why? Because we just do so many of them. The volume makes up for the thin margin. And nowadays, it's just you don't find a lot of businesses that you get to triple your price and have an 80 % gross profit, right? Software, things like that, yes. But in our side, like we're infrastructure layer. It's just expensive to run it. So, again, thin margins on each deal. But we aggregated, we bundled everything in, and then we allowed the volume to make up for the difference. and then we just keep doing more and more of it.

12:37And at some point you cross over that tipping line. Again, even, you know, we're comparing restaurants to my own business, Vivant, and we're essentially the same. We have thin margins, we have high labor costs, we have high product costs, all of that. And the way that we overcame that is by growing to a million. That was a big milestone. Then growing to 5 million, now growing to 10 million. And then we're aiming for 20 million next year. So how do we overcome that? Sheer volume. So we bundle everything in, kind of going back to answering your question before I got sidetracked, but bring in everything under a single umbrella, avoiding all these outages, and then eliminating those finger pointing and then just competitively pricing it so that the deal still remains profitable.

13:26But as we continue to scale, it adds all into that bucket. So yeah, it's not typically we're actually, in fact, I was looking at a deal before this, 62 locations. The customer is switching over to us. They have internet phones and PCI, internet phone service and PCI through somebody else. We're adding the backup internet. We're adding intrusion detection prevention, et cetera. And we're still$3 ,700 a month cheaper than the solution that they have in place. And again, like a lot of people just don't know. So that's why we do what we do. We go in, we gather all the invoices, we do a full cost analysis, and then we'll put the solution in.

14:10And by the way, when I say$3 ,700 cheaper, that's$3 ,700 cheaper, but we also added our security services, our backup internet, our firewall to the mix. So after those expenses, additional expenses, quote unquote, we're still$3 ,700 cheaper. How do we do that? Again, we shop it around, We find the best available provider. We bundle it all in. And then we try to be super competitive in pricing. What I hope people listening don't ignore is the conversation we were having kind of at the top of this, which was you were quoting all these statistics related to the industry about like the average revenue of a restaurant and all of that.

14:48To be transparent for the audience, like you and I are friends, like we're friends in real life. And what we connected on was industry and love of this industry. And I think it's hard to love something without understanding it deeply. And you are someone that has invested a lot of time and a lot of effort and really digging in, really trying to understand the industry from all angles across multiple tiers of dining, across multiple regions. What inspires that level of curiosity? And how do you learn? I believe so much in the industry. I deeply wanted to help the industry. and I think, by the way, to a tune of millions of dollars, not one or two millions, like millions of dollars in investment in this industry.

15:36I think restaurants are amazing businesses. They're difficult, but so is everything else. If I give you a car wash, I guarantee you someone's going to complain that car washes have all sorts of problems. It doesn't matter what type of business you're in. If you're a technologist like me, I deal with the similar problems as you are in a restaurant. But I'm so bullish in the restaurant space that I invested millions of dollars trying to solve one problem. Kind of going back to that statistic that you mentioned. From 2008 until like 12, 13, the problem even today is the same. The customer retention side.

16:11I said we have thin margins and we price everything super competitively. We bundled it, da, da, da, da, da. But what I actually left out is our average customer right now has been with us for eight years. Our longest paying customer has been with us for 23 years. So that customer for the past 23 years has been mailing a check every single month for the past 23 years. So restaurants haven't figured that out. 70 % of the customers that go into the restaurant for the first time, they don't go back. Why not? So I started asking those questions. Well, why don't they go back? And I started talking to restauranteurs.

16:49Why aren't they coming back? Well, we don't know who they are. We don't have their contact information. We don't know how to send them a message or whatever, etc. It all boiled down to we don't have their data. We don't have their contact information. We don't know how to reach out to them to bring them back in. Therefore, we just are okay with this fact that we only have to operate with 30 % of our customers. So I notoriously built a company around that concept. I'm still super passionate about the topic and I'm helping other people now bring that to market because I kind of veered off of that and I've stepped away from that because it was just I did that twice.

17:33The first time was in 2014. I was way too early. Imagine I was trying to solve the problems that everybody is solving in 2025, 2026 in 2014. In fact, there was an article of me, I couldn't believe it, but in 2014, there was an article on Fast Casual website that quoted me saying, back then there was no AI, we called it customer intelligence. How do we gather the customer intelligence data? How many kids do you have? How often do you eat? Are you vegetarian? How much money did you spend? Which locations do you visit? And then how do we use that data to drive more retention? So we tried to solve that back in the day.

18:13We were way too early. Technology wasn't available readily and the company failed. And then I restarted in 19. And then the second time it didn't go as well either. But now everybody's waking up. In the last couple of years, you've seen a lot of customer data platforms that are gathering the data. But there's still a huge gap. The gap between, again, when I go back to my own experience, when I was talking to the restaurateurs, one, they don't have the data. I think that problem is fixed. But then the next step is, what do I do with the data? How do I put that data in place? So my love for the industry comes from solving that one problem.

18:56And I'm still trying to, again, help anybody and everybody who's got a horse in that race to help them figure out a way to help the restaurateurs be able to monetize and turn that customer into a long term customer. where the frequency will outpace everything else. And by the way, that one change. So when I look at something, I'm looking at what's my highest leverage, meaning least amount of input, highest amount of output. And the one thing in the restaurant industry that has an absolutely unfair advantage and unfair leverage is guest retention. Get that customer and the difference in numbers is monumental.

19:40mental you get an existing customer bump everybody to their next level so if you are coming once only if i get a if you get me to come back in twice or if a customer comes in twice to come in three times just bump everybody up one level the difference goes from a super unprofitable i need to close a restaurant and go do something else to this is a very profitable restaurant i need to open another one. So my passion around the whole restaurant industry comes from this one key metric that everybody seems to either have missed and the ones who have tried to solve it weren't able to solve it, including truly yours.

20:22But I think it brings up a great point. And I would say that my greatest lessons in the restaurant industry came from learning from outside of the industry. I think that there are a lot of people listening today that are sitting in a similar place to where you were with Milagro and where I was with so many projects over the years where maybe you're wrong, maybe you're early, but it's like we're trying to build this thing outside of the thing that everybody loves us for. I think that entrepreneurs by nature like to solve problems, that we're problem solvers. But I think so often we would all be best served by looking at what's working in our businesses and doubling down on that.

21:04Because I think as an outsider, it's really easy to see it in someone else's business. I did it with you. I was like, everybody loves Vavant. Like you've got insane traction and all of this retention. There's no churn. People love you. You're cheaper and better than everyone else. We don't focus on that. We focus on the next problem to solve or what the next thing is. But the opportunity that I see for all of us, for you, for me, for everybody listening, is this audit to really double down on what's working. There's nothing in the world harder, and I think you would agree, than going from zero to a million dollars.

21:39That is nearly impossible. But from a million plus, it's very much formulaic if you follow the formula. And I think what is most interesting about Levant and about your career as an entrepreneur is that when people look at you saying, you know, we're going to hit 10 this year and we're going to do 20 next year, it just seems so far away. But the truth is, as long as the company has been around, you really only started to scale a few years ago. And the gift that you gave yourself was this opportunity to focus. Can you talk about that? Yeah, 100%. It's really, really, really difficult to go from zero to one.

22:22A lot of people had told me that as well. It's like, look, you've gone from zero to one. Now you got to go from one to five, five to 10, 10 to 20, etc. Why would you climb the ladder back down and then go back to zero again and try to start something brand new and then try to go from zero to one again? It takes a huge toll on an entrepreneur. it's a very difficult journey to go from zero to one but once you go from zero to one from one to five and then five to ten etc it becomes so much easier in the last five years we've gone from a million to like 10 million and most of the growth has been in the last three years mostly right and i looked actually into like we follow the same people probably like alex or mosey has been a great eye-opener for me.

23:12And I'm looking at the metrics. Like why? Why is it easier now? So the framework that I built for myself revolves around four things. Products, having exceptional products. If you don't have exceptional products, it's a non-starter. For us, we're in the PLG mode, product-led growth. That means our products are so exceptional that they sell themselves without us having to convince somebody that they should use us. It's like, hey, do you want cheaper, better internet that never goes down? It's obvious, right? That's PLG. That's products. Then it's people. You've got to have the right people in the right position to be able to take the products and present it properly, like scale, train, da-da-da-da-da.

24:00Then the next thing that we started doubling down on a few years ago was processes. Every single thing that we do now that is more than like four or five steps is documented in a knowledge base. So we have amazing products backed by great people, backed by amazing processes so that we don't miss anything. And we just keep rinsing and repeating. It's the same thing over and over again. And then lately, those three only. And then we added a fourth one. And that's ongoing training. So now I call that PPPT. amazing products amazing people amazing processes that are very clear and then training to ensure that everybody stays up to date and executes on everything else so that's what enabled us to go from not from zero to one zero to one was just do anything and everything at any cost at any process like you just had to figure it out like there was there was no sop there was no yeah Like literally, you knock on the door, you make a call, you send out an email, you did whatever you have to do to just go from zero to one.

25:04But after going from when we went from one, I think we went from like one to like 1.9 and then went from like a couple of million to like 4 million. And then at that stage, it's like, all right, like we've got to figure these things out. And considering that we have a lot of we've got a team of about 100 people now, 40 of us are developers. first so we just keep building the things that were missing in the business in order to fill the gaps and we always bought the solution first again crawl walk run buy the product first figure out do we use the whole thing do we not is it worth the cost if it's not can we build it can we improve it can we do it better than what everybody else is doing it and then the thing that really really helped us scale is having a single source of truth we brought everything that we're doing from our CRM opportunities, HR management, time tracking, projects, tickets, automations to billing, invoicing, auto pay, everything that we have, our knowledge base articles, even client access, we centralized that in one software that we have built called Utilico.

26:08And that helped us not have to deal with 10 different logins, multiple sources of truth, tons of duplicate entries, different solutions for different pain points that we had. And that also helped us grow. So it wasn't one thing. It was just a combination of all of those things that helped us scale and helped us be where we are today. But again, I think the biggest thing is that PLG mode, that exceptional products and backed by amazing people. Everybody's doubling down on AI. We're doubling down on humans today because I think the relationship is, again, that's also another, maybe that's another indication of why we have such a long customer tenure and they just, they don't go anywhere.

26:52Because when, first of all, things don't go wrong because of, again, exceptional products, right? And when things do go wrong, we put an SOP in place to ensure that it doesn't go wrong again, which feeds back to exceptional products, right? When things don't go wrong, people aren't actively looking to change because they don't have any problems. They're looking to change because they do have problems. It would be crazy for me to have you on the show and not talk about AI. I know that you follow it closely. I know you utilize it aggressively. My favorite quote of yours ever is that you put AI in a mediocre business and it just gives you mediocrity at scale.

27:30So what is your approach to AI? How do you think that the folks listening should approach AI? For the people that you serve, how are you using it in your business to serve them better? And how do you think restaurants should be approaching AI? Absolutely. So we'll start with junk in, junk out. That's the most important thing. So for us, we have an unfair advantage relative to our competitors. We have a single source of truth, that Utilico platform that houses everything. So all of our customer data, all of our knowledge-based articles, support tickets, projects, everything's in one place. So now I don't have to cross connect 10, 12 different tools just to get data across multiple avenues within my business.

28:16How is support doing? How are our projects doing? Are we on budget? How is the lead system doing? How are the opportunities? Are we collecting revenue? Not all of that. so the first thing is junk in junk out so i really believe that if you put ai in a poorly not organized not structured environment it's just gonna feed you a whole bunch of garbage and what happens is you're like well this system doesn't work well why does it work for everybody else why doesn't it work for you and by the way i ask myself all the same question like we've done a lot of PPC and we've failed at it multiple times. But we don't give up because if it didn't work, there wouldn't be trillions of dollars poured into advertising like Facebook and Amazon and Google.

29:05These guys are making so much money on advertising. So clearly it does work. So that's one. How to implement it into the business. This is the framework that I use. we look at our internal data we start with metrics first what's wasting a lot of our time let's just review that first and then how do you use it to improve customer experience so three things does it increase revenue number one will it decrease cost and then three will it improve efficiency so those are the three things that we're looking at and those are our metrics So we looked at our ticketing system and we looked at the amount of hours that was wasted by our team contacting Internet service providers and saying, hey, is there an outage or not?

29:54And that we've now automated that entire process where automation kicks in and we monitor all of our devices. And we also monitor all of the Internet providers that we use for our customers. So you're a Hamed's Burger joint, or you're a Dave's hot chicken. Primary internet comes in, whether it's AT &T, Comcast, Cox, whoever, plugs into our system. We monitor from outside, from inside, just to ensure that circuit is healthy. That circuit goes down, automation kicks in, creates a ticket in our system. And then we used to hand it off to a support agent. But today, that ticket gets created, gets handed over to the AI.

30:33AI looks at the customer's account number, address, name, phone number for the ISB, picks up the call, calls the ISB, gives them the relevant information, says, hey, is there an outage? If there's an outage, it automatically documents the ticket and it checks back in like six hours. And then it starts the process all over again until it's restored. And by the way, like that was our phase one. we always also do things in like break it down into small chunks so that you don't try to climb mount everest in one go right it's just very difficult and it's not feasible so now that we've got this in fact this rolled out about a week ago and now we're going to start testing and figuring out is it working how well is it doing fine tune it and then go to version two where, hey, there is no outage.

31:25The ISP just needs to be rebooted. The modem just needs to be rebooted. And then our system has access to go on the backend and just reboot that device and get the customer back online using their primary. So that's the impact that it's going to have on our customers. And that's how we're utilizing it. That's like one specific case. I know with AI, a lot of people are saying, oh yeah, we use AI. Well, what do you do? Oh, I just ask it, hey, what's the score game between Portugal and England today, right? It's like, well, that's not AI. That's like you just replace Google with your AI engine. AI needs to be used at more sophisticated levels because the functionality, the capability is already there.

32:06I was trying to figure out how to end the conversation. And I was thinking about how unapproachable you might seem helming this$10 million company that is trudging towards 20 million and all of that. And it just doesn't feel very David and Goliath. But for a lot of independents, it feels that way, right? Like they feel like they're this small, single unit place competing against all of these huge stalwarts. And I thought it would be valuable to call out the fact that Vavante is going to do$10 million this year, which is amazing. AT &T's market cap is$143 billion. You're tiny. And I always go back to it.

32:49It's because I love you as a human. But like I always go back towards like you are an American immigrant that came to this country and decided to take on billion dollar publicly traded companies with your idea that you could offer more value for less money. It's so beautiful. You know, it's it's you know, we're coming off July 4th and this country's been around for 250 years. And I just I think what you've done is so special and so amazing. And I think that it wasn't always beautiful, especially in the first couple of years. And so for the people that are going through what Seth Godin would call the dip, right?

33:32What advice would you have for them? What advice would you give yourself? Year one, year two, that would have served you well based on what you know now. Yeah, and by the way, it was an overnight success. I mean, I got fired from Best Buy in 2003 and I didn't really hit the million dollar mark until like 18 or 19. Yeah. So it took an awfully long time. But people say it's easier to grow from 1 to 10. That's absolutely true because you have everything else figured out. The hard work is 0 to 1. So if I had to start over again, man, I would take all my frameworks and just like everything I've learned from Hormozy, Dan Martel, like all these different legends that are in this space and just condense it down.

34:20So like a few key things that I think I would absolutely implement from day one. These are the things that I've implemented in my own company and I still use today. Like the Dan Martell's 131, it's super powerful. One problem, three solutions, one recommendation. So that's how we, by the way, you could use that with your employees. You could also use it with your customers. Your customers don't care how big you are. They don't care about the house. What they care about is the benefit of it. So, hey, Mr. Customer, you've got internet outages that are costing you tons of money. Here are the three options.

34:58You do nothing. You put in a backup internet. It's going to cost you more money. Or you do X, whatever that third option is. This is my recommendation. Which one fits you best, right? So that's one great framework. The other one is the home OZs, like why people fail. I haven't given it a name yet. But ensure that you have clear expectations. ensure that when you're talking to somebody this is what i want you to do do you understand what i'm expecting then do you know how to do that job do you know when you need to deliver advice set a clear deadline and then have a roadblock so when you hit a roadblock what do you do and then the fifth thing that he says is do you have the motivations to do that and for me my team members like i've had a pretty interesting journey through entrepreneurship obviously starting the company in 2003 going from video surveillance to like telecom to software i still like don't know how to code when i went to school i went for biomedical engineering so i was supposed to be sitting in front of a computer and designing an artificial heart or a ct machine but look at where i am today right and then throughout the whole journey i also learned how to trade and made a lot of money lost a lot of money but it taught me another thing like it's just And it's self-regulate that emotion and then be able to learn the mistakes, pick up, and then just go to work next day.

36:25So the one, three, one, the expectation and just being resilient, being so greedy. And my employees were asking me for a while. It's like, look, what's the key to success? In fact, funny story. So my former partner that I started the first version of Milagro with back in the day, I was having a conversation with him. and he asked me the same question. How do you just take a punch in the face and then just show up next day as if nothing has changed? And I'm like, well, I mean, like, what other option do you have? And now he's like, every time I run into a hard problem, I ask myself, what would Hamid do?

37:00And then I just, that's what I do. So I started writing things down. Why are people that are around me and myself, like, how did we become successful? and it boils down to these seven things. The core foundation of all the people that I know around me that have been successful, they share these traits. One is they're very structured. Two, they're very organized. Three, they're able to prioritize. Four, they're able to set clear deadlines. Five, they're able to communicate effectively. And by the way, that's very important. And then six, they're persistent, they're consistent, and they're proactive.

37:39And lastly, they all execute. whether it's a good or bad, they just execute. And they just get a lot more reps and they make a lot more mistakes and they learn a lot from those failures. So those seven things, if I had to go back and start over again, like that would be a framework that I would give to my younger self and say, look, once we've on this Homo Z5 thing and then put the seven habits and just master it and just go all in. That's Hamed. To learn more about Vivant, visit VivantCorp.com. Hey, it's Josh. I wanted to take a hot minute to thank you for listening to today's episode and to ask that if you are getting value from FullConf, please like and subscribe and be sure to leave a review.

38:25Those reviews matter and they help other independent owners and operators find the show. Also, if you want to take the stuff that we're talking about in these episodes from idea to execution, head to joshcopal.com. There you will find a ton of free templates and tools and all of the details on upcoming learning events so you can keep building momentum. I know you're busy, and so I don't take your time for granted. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.