Joe Rojas Podcast Transcript
Joe Rojas joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Joe Rojas. Joe Rojas is the Founder of Start Grow Manage based in New York and the author of How Entrepreneurs Thrive. He is a business coach, advisor, and consultant who helps entrepreneurs overcome the challenges of business formation to create profitable growing businesses as a serial entrepreneur himself.
He has faced the challenge of making new and growing businesses work. His career started in the military, where he became an expert in information technology, eventually forming his own managed service company, which nearly failed. Through that experience, he discovered the formula for growing businesses and learned that most entrepreneurs are good at what they do, but often struggle to build a business.
Well, good afternoon, Joe. Welcome to the show!
Joe Rojas: Well, good afternoon, Brian. How are you doing? Thanks for having me!
Brian Thomas: You bet. Really do appreciate that. I know you’re hailing out of the New York area, and I appreciate traversing the globe every day. More importantly, meeting somebody new and having a great conversation over the microphone.
So, Joe, let’s jump into your First question here. Can you start by sharing a bit about your journey from the military and thank you for your service to becoming a support. You bet. You bet. I was in the Marines as well from the military to becoming a serial entrepreneur and what were some of the pivotal moments that shapes your career path.
Joe Rojas: You know, I think I get, I get down on my knees every day. And I thank God for the, for the army, because if it weren’t for the army, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I had a really rough upbringing. I quit school early on. I was 11 years old when I quit school, and I started working full time.
We had some rough things happening in the family. And when I turned 18, I think my 19, I think my GED and I, I enlisted when shield turned to storm and I really got all my technical training in the army, everything. Right. And then that technical training has served me for my whole life. It, I took that technical training and applied for a job at the department of defense, I worked for the DOD for a while and did night vision, thermal viewers, all the cool stuff that the Marines use. We fixed that stuff. And then we went from, from there, I got poached by a biomedical engineering company because I knew how to work on, you know, it, it all, it all started with the M 64 chemical detector. That led to, to learning how to work with, with peristaltic pumps and all that cool stuff that really.
Got me that biomed job, and then from there I ended up working for a glow, a national MSP. And then I started my own managed services company and that jump from. From being an employee to being self-employed really what I saw was, oh my God, these people need help and nobody’s helping them. Right?
And that’s really what prompted me to start, you know, I work for a national MSP and we have big clients at the time, like, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stern, and I’m dating myself because, you know, nobody knows what Bear Stern is anymore, but, but they had like the awesomest cleanest server rooms and everything worked really great.
And then I would go to the smaller clients, and it would be a mess. And I would be, why is this? And then we go, well, those guys don’t pay that much. So, we can’t pay that much attention to them. And I thought to myself, well, somebody has to pay attention to these folks because they’re trying to grow their businesses and they’re trying to do something as well.
And that’s really, you know, I had long fallen in love with technology, and this was like the, the transition point for me, but if it weren’t for the military, never would have happened.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing that, Joe. I appreciate it. And the military brings a breadth of…just a ton of experience and you learned quickly grow up. Obviously, you know that, but I think the military should be a requirement for everybody.
Joe Rojas: A hundred percent, I’m with you!
Brian Thomas: It’s definitely an oversight. I feel some countries require it, but I think it would really help shape this country in a positive direction. So, thank you for sharing that.
And Joe, in your book, how entrepreneurs thrive. What are the key principles you believe are essential for entrepreneurial success? And how do your own experiences influence these insights?
Joe Rojas: Well, you know, I think that, and we’ll talk a little bit more about it, but I think, you know, one of the key principles behind that particular book, and so much has evolved since then, but is, is that you want to find and give good mentoring.
So, you want to find good mentors. And, and give good mentoring because there is a,
it’s, it’s really getting, there’s this, there’s this blind spot that you have. There’s what, you know, you know, there’s what you, you, you know, that you don’t know, but then there’s this whole other area that you don’t know that you don’t know. And what a mentor provides is insight into that area. In a view into that space and lets you see the things that you can’t see yourself, right?
That’s why all the greatest players have coaches. That’s why all the greatest athletes in the world, all the, that’s why it’s because the coach can see something that you can’t see. You can’t, you can’t read the label from inside the box. And so, I think that that’s one of the key principles that drive that. That drive that book.
Brian Thomas: Really. Thank you. And I really love to talk to guests that have written books because. It’s, it’s their way of helping the world, the world get better and helping others learn from their mistakes or the, the path they chose. So, I appreciate that really do. And Joe, the mentor assisted power planning program seems to be a cornerstone of your coaching approach.
Could you explain how this program works and what makes it effective for entrepreneurs at different stages of the business?
Joe Rojas: It’s so cool. Cause I wrote the book in, in 2018, right. And, and map or mentors is the power planning, right. Was like the, the core and now it’s just become a part of like, what we did is expand the model.
Right. And, and I’ve been joined by two really amazing partners, Jeff Lair and Heather Mathis. And Jeff brought some really unique perspective into what we’re doing. And so, what map has become, it’s really become. Two parts of our whole program. And, and in essence, what we say now is that if you want to run in effective business, right?
And, and because when you talk about cornerstone, right, you see, you asked me that question. What’s the, it seems to be the corner. So, the cornerstone seems to be to us anyway, running a human centric business. Right. So, so what the heck do we mean by that? What do we mean by human centric? Well, well, the business models got to make money because if the business model itself.
Doesn’t make money. Can’t support the humans in it. Right. And then oddly enough, the second thing is that it has to put humans first, put the humans first, then it doesn’t work either. And what we mean by that is you really have to start with you. You have to start with, you have to put yourself first and you have to take care of your family.
And you have to be able to pay yourself well. And that if you don’t do that, you’re not going to be happy. And you’re not going to be happy paying other people more money. If you’re not taking care of yourself with the business. So this is one of the keys that we, we see, right? And then after that, the next component of being human centric is you have to know your, why your vision, your mission, how do you keep the bad people out of your company and bring the good people in?
And bad and good being a relative term. It’s really who fits. How do you bring the people that fit into your company and keep the people that don’t fit out? They may be good people. They just don’t fit into your ecosystem. And then you have to inspire rather than manipulate, operate from a perspective of abundance, really respect the environment and both the conversational environment and the environment and be collaborative.
And when you have that, you, you have the core of what is, you know, a human centric company, and that’s really what, what map has evolved to. There are two key components, what we call you. And the people that map has become, right. That is the mentoring part, and we really start with you first, because you’re usually the bottleneck.
You’re usually the thing that slows the business down. Right. And so, we look at all that stuff. So, if you want, I can, I can chat a little bit more about those components, but that’s really where we start.
Brian Thomas: I love that. And I’m glad you just started graded, I guess that MAP, as you call it, the Mentor Assisted Power Planning program.
I think it’s so important for a lot of people. I, you know, just looking at some of the materials that you’d shared with me previously, Joe, I think it’s important that. You know, it’s not just for business owners. I know that’s where you’re probably your bread and butter is and you’re helping those owners, but there’s a lot of leaders that could really use this.
This type of mentorship, I really do appreciate you building something for people to learn from and be successful. So, thank you. And Joe, the last question of the day I have for you, if you’ve helped build a million dollar business from scratch. Can you share your success story of one of the entrepreneur businesses that particularly stands out to you anyway?
Joe Rojas: Well, I’ll give you one short one and one a little bit longer. One that I really, really like is we have this client that came to us and he’d been in business for 19 years when he came to work with us. Right. And he had been a $750,000 annual revenue for 10 years in a row. Right. And that’s painful, right?
Because if you’re in an ER and all you see is, you know, you got a problem, right? People are running into your room with cards and all kinds of stuff. And they’re throwing codes around and clear and all that stuff. Right. So, you know, we’re, we’re now about three years later, they’re at about 3 million now.
And my favorite part is they’re driving the cars that they want to want. They want to drive; they’re building the house that they want to build. And it’s a couple that run this business and they are living the life that they always wanted to live but didn’t have access to. And I think that’s really my favorite part.
And I’ll tell you the second one, the second one. It’s a company that’s been with us. They’re, they’re still with us. They’ve been with us for about almost going on five years now. And when they started, they were, it would be just over a million, just under a million, just over a million, just under a million, just over a million, just under a million.
They were stuck in this cycle, right? Where they would go over a million, then they would go down. Then they would go up again, then they would go down. And it was five people. And the owner worked like a horse. I mean, that guy worked 110 hours a week, easy. With three kids, they didn’t get to see because he was working 110 hours, and last December, not this one that just passed, but last December, you know, so they’re, they’re at five and five and change now 5 million and change, but last, last December, he went away. Right. So, this guy, you know, all my clients are the same. They’re all managed service providers. They’re all IT companies.
And if you’re a managed service provider, what I’m about to say right now may hurt your brain. A little bit. Okay. This guy goes on vacation. For three weeks, right in in Dominican Republic with his family, they go for three weeks and every day he leaves his phone in the hotel room, and he just goes on vacation
and for a man in search for that. That’ll hurt your brain. What? I just said, because you can’t imagine not being connected or somebody not being able to reach you. But that’s my favorite part of running. This business is to have people be able to be with their families when they’re with their families.
He’s now that same guy is coaching his daughter’s basketball team. He’s coaching a men’s softball league. He is part of his city council in his town. He, you know, you can’t work 110 hours a week and do all that stuff. You can’t do it. And so, it’s really getting to that, that place. That’s my favorite.
Brian Tomas: I just really love that. That, that is an amazing story. I mean, it’s, it’s twofold. You obviously helped them, you know, get to their goals that they’ve always wanted to do, but then to establish such a solid foundation around the management of that business that allowed him to take time off for 3 weeks. That’s unheard of.
And Joe, I’ve been a CIO for many years and it is very hard to take vacation. It just. And part of my nature, but yeah.
Joe Rojas: It really is. Isn’t it? Look, one of the other things that I thought was really interesting, not this planning period. So we do annual planning three times a year with our, with our clients, not this planning period to just pass.
But the previous planning period, he got sick on the annual planning day. And his leadership team came and planned the whole year without him. That’s freaking awesome. That’s where he’s home getting better. And the team comes in, looks at the year and says, okay, this is what we’re going to do. This is the, and that’s the plan that they’re doing.
He didn’t have to change anything or say, Oh, that’s wrong. Or because they are aligned. And that’s really the, the, that’s what I think is, is really awesome.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. And it just goes to show what you’ve learned. And again, it goes back to the military, as you know, Joe we were taught in the Marines when the platoon commander is shot the platoon sergeant, and it goes down the line through the squad down to the fire team.
And that’s what we need to teach is, is how to, how to keep businesses you know, make them resilient and sustainable. And …
Joe Rojas: decentralized leadership, baby, that’s the way it is. Bring it on.
Brian Thomas: Well, Joe, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon. I look,
Joe Rojas: I look forward to it too. Thank you for having me on. It’s been a pleasure.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Joe Rojas Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
