Brad Johnson: Welcome back to Do Business. Do Life. Today’s gonna be a fun one. I have Nico Pesci here with me today. Welcome to the show, Nico.
Nico Pesci: Thanks for having me.
Brad Johnson: So, I’m going to just kind of hit some mile markers in your journey and then let’s kind of unpack this a little bit. So, 2014, and your dad was actually in financial services. We just put that in there.
Nico Pesci: Yeah. Yeah. Way back.
Brad Johnson: Was he part of the reason that you got into financial services in 2014?
Nico Pesci: Heavens, no. He was the reason I stayed away from it. So, I got into the business in 2009, and I got into it with an assumption to be more of like consulting because there was a transition I made for some stuff that was going on with my family, and so I wanted to try and do something. And I met this gentleman who was in the business, and the way that he talked about it, he’s like, “We work with business owners and do consulting and this and that.” And I was like, “That sounds amazing.” Because in my head, you know the movie Groundhog Day?
Brad Johnson: Oh, yeah. One of my favorites.
Nico Pesci: Needle-Nose Ned. Needle-Nose Ned, right? That, to me, is what anyone in insurance or financial services is. And that connotation is what I assumed anyone so I stayed far away from it. I wanted nothing to do with it. My dad would always talk about, “Get your P&C license. It’s just one more income stream.” But I wanted to follow more of my mom and my brothers, some of their footsteps, being consultants and their backgrounds in organizational behavior and systems theory. But talking to Justin, the gentleman who was a mutual friend, I was like, “Well, that is kind of the same thing. It’s consulting and systems and everything else.”
And then I get into it and it was write 10-term policies, pay 10-term policies, rinse and repeat. And so, I did that for four or five years, just trying to survive. I got my license, November of 2009. I got a phone call in May of 2010 that the company who I parked my license with was getting out of the financial services space to focus exclusively on health insurance. So, from May of 2010 until September of 2010, I had no contracts. My wife was pregnant. Our first daughter was gonna be born in August. I had made $7,000 from January to May. And then from May to September, I had no incomes because I had no contracts. And then partnered with the firm locally, so I had health insurance, I had an office and all that fun stuff. I made another whopping $7,000 from September to December. So, 14…
Brad Johnson: Wife had to be really excited about this season that you’re in.
Nico Pesci: Abby didn’t realize how broke we were, I’ll just say that. I was good at trying to juggle credit cards to make things work. I remember, I don’t share this really often, but my daughter was born in August of 2010. It was our first child. I had not had a paycheck in months. And I remember holding her and I just had tears. I was like, “How the heck am I going to feed this kid? How do I provide?” I have a responsibility as a father. I never had it. It was a whole new world. But I remember I went to some sort of like symposium, maybe a month or two after I got in the industry and there was a speaker. I wish I knew his name because the story stuck with me, but he told this story about coming to this country from East Germany and no need to get into the whole story but the message at the end was basically, options make us weak.
Because if you have an option to get out of something, if you have a plan B, you’ll take it. If you have a way out, you’ll take it. And so, I remember I’m holding my little one and like options make us weak, like you just have to make it work. And so, I focused a ton on life insurance and just talked to family and friends and did everything I could to kind of stay in the business. I started learning about annuities probably 2012-ish. And so, it wasn’t until 2014 that I really started to make it a part of my practice and learn about like events. And there were some great mentors here in Utah that I had learned from who would do, you know, this was back in the day when you could advertise for a dinner with a yellow sheet of paper inside the newspaper and do a dinner at like Golden Corral, and you’d have 50 people show up. You’d spend $300, right?
Brad Johnson: The good old days.
Nico Pesci: So, me and another gentleman who’s at Triad, Devin Choules, one of my best friends on Earth, he and I were doing a lot of work together at the time. And so, we did a couple of those events and we’re like, “This could work.” And then 2014, I got an email from the former FMO offering a free trip to Vegas. And I didn’t really understand what an FMO was at the time but I was like, “Cool. Free trip to Vegas.” And so, I asked Devin, I’m like, “You want to go to Vegas for free? They’ll pay for us, like we both…”
Brad Johnson: That doesn’t sound like Devin at all.
Nico Pesci: Not at all. Yeah, I know it’s a shocker of a story. So, after enough twisting his arm, he said yes. And that changed the trajectory completely. And so, 2014 was the first real year of production with annuities. Got my wheels spinning with the former FMO and just hit the ground running. And grateful that it went really well.
Brad Johnson: Well, so let’s kind of just, I’ll rapid-fire this. So, 2014, so basically from 2014 through halfway through 2020, insurance focus. And I didn’t know this. You actually had your securities license in your early days, it sounded like, from the story you just told, or were you insurance only the whole way through?
Nico Pesci: No. I was insurance only, but I had people who I would use if we had clients that wanted to have securities.
Brad Johnson: People you would refer over that were kind of in the same firm?
Nico Pesci: Yeah. Correct.
Brad Johnson: Okay. So, 2014 halfway through 2020, insurance focused. So, I’ll just rapid-fire this. $1.4 million first year. 2015, $7.7 million. 2016, $20.3M. 2017, $22M. 2018, $28M. 2019, $31M. So, I mean, I’ve been in this space almost 20 years. I grew up also in the insurance side of the world. That’s wild growth that quickly. So, you’re obviously having really good success. 2020, we all had COVID. Obviously, your primary marketing funnel was dinner seminars. Not a lot of those happening in 2020. So, $17 million of FIAs, but what’s wild, was it straight out of the gates, got your series 65, and went fee-based?
Nico Pesci: I passed my test in June, and we had the same thing. At the time, I had an employee who was securities licensed. And so, since 2016, we had someone in-house that we could kind of refer clients to if they had securities they wanted to have with us. But we were probably putting maybe $2 million or $3 million a year max with her because it was just if it fell in our lap. That was really it. Passed my exam in June of 2020 and then just hit the ground running, trying to add that in, so it’s more of an overall planning, not just the insurance side.
Brad Johnson: Well, what’s wild though, you still captured about $10 million your first year where you brought that on, which is pretty quick start. I mean, a lot of guys that have an insurance background, it takes them a little while to figure out, go from selling a product to really building a plan. And so, then I’ll rapid fire and then we’ll kind of come back and unpack this. So, 2021, $36 million insurance side, $18 million AUM. Then next year, I’m just going to give the totals now, $48 million total assets gathered between insurance and AUM. Next year after that, $46M, about the same range, FIA, AUM. 2024, last year, monster year, $75 million total between annuities and AUM.
One thing you shared with me before we hit record here is I was like, hey, where did the kind of… I feel like the group we talked about earlier collectively, there came a point, obviously, we’re doing a lot of seminars, a lot of this was solo advisor-based. You guys were fully responsible for the revenue of the firm, but you said about 2021, for you, was where you started to hit a little bit of burnout. It’s like, “Wait, I’m not having as much fun as I used to.”
Nico Pesci: A lot of it of burnout.
Brad Johnson: A lot of it? Okay. A lot of it. I didn’t want to put words in your mouth, but.
Nico Pesci: No. It kind of goes with what I was saying that small decisions add up and so it’s really easy, especially in this environment where people are competitive. You’re around other high-performing, high-achieving individual, personality types. It’s easy to get lost in the what and not the why. And that was really kind of, so ’21 was my biggest year up until last year and it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t fun. And like, I remember we introduced Fridays off that year in the summer. And then, so we wanted to have kind of more family-focused, have the team. And we had a small team. We had six people total counting me. But I ended up working most Fridays. I mean, I was averaging in the summertime about 45 to 55 meetings a week.
Brad Johnson: 45 to 55 a week?
Nico Pesci: A week.
Brad Johnson: Sometimes do you work on Saturdays too?
Nico Pesci: Monday through Friday. Sometimes it was Monday through Thursday. I mean, it was 9 AM to 6 PM, back to back to back. Like, to the point where like some of my local friends, when they would be like, “Hey, we should grab lunch.” I’m like, “I don’t have lunch.”
Brad Johnson: I don’t do lunch anymore.
Nico Pesci: I have an hour blocked off that turns into phone calls, emails, conversations with the team, but my days were back to back to back. And it just wasn’t fun and I started to notice that what I feel made my growth happen early on was there was a purpose behind why I was doing what I was doing. There was a story to tell about what my parents went through and what I’ve seen with family, and I think clients could feel that. And then you get so burnt out that what ends up happening is that the messaging gets lost and the routine is what kind of takes over. And there were some family stuff that took place. One of my best friends on earth passed away.
Like, 2021 was that wake-up call year where I realized I’m not having fun, but I don’t know how to fix it, right? And so, that was the start of realizing that something had to change. It was my best year ever. I had won three or four belts, is what they call it, with my old group.
Brad Johnson: Does that represent like top producer for the year?
Nico Pesci: So, there was one year I won Top Annuity, one year I won Top Life, one year I won Top Life, and then Top Total between Life and Annuity. And it’s cool, great, kind of almost like what AP talked about. That kind of attention makes me really uncomfortable, so it’s like, “Hey, thanks for this.” I still have them. They’re in my closet. They’re in a bag that they’ve been in since I got them. But it wasn’t rewarding, it wasn’t meaningful, and it’s one of those things where I think candidly you almost start to get to a point where you’re like, I don’t really have the right to complain about this because, number one, I built it. It’s what I asked for.
But down the road, as you keep looking at it, it’s like I’m living a very fortunate life. I go on cool vacations. My family’s well taken care of. Financially, we’re secure. The company’s doing well. And it’s like all these things line up. You’re like, “But I’m not fulfilled. It’s not enjoyable.” And so, then for me, I start to question like, well, I don’t really have a right to complain. I could be home twiddling my thumbs trying to wonder what’s going on in life. But it took a little while for a wake-up call to realize, hey, life is short. And my buddy, Mike, passing away was this realization that, because he is an entrepreneur, super creative, really successful guy, and he and I have been friends for a long time. I introduced him to his wife.
We were roommates in college and he passed away suddenly. He had a heart issue that no one knew about and just one day passed out. And it was this wake-up call that he and I would go back and forth. Like, if he had a really successful thing or a year or whatever, the first thing he come to my house. He got a new car, he come to my house. I got a new car, I go to his house. And it was this realization we’re building towards all this stuff and it’s like, what if it doesn’t come? And so, it was this wake-up call that I’m not going to trade my long-term happiness for short-term success. I’m not guaranteed a single day on this earth.
And so, this idea that I’m gonna run this hard for this long to build a life for my kids so that they can have the things I didn’t, blah, blah, blah. That’s not true either because you may not get to it, right? There’s always a justification, always a reason why you can stay on that treadmill. And Mike passing was that wake-up call that, no, this is not it. And it happened to take another almost two and a half years to kind of figure out what it was that was missing. But that’s really, that’s why you see in ’22, my numbers went down, in ’23 my numbers went down. I pulled back. We went from doing maybe 35 to 40 events, we’d do 20, 25, and we’d work with our existing clients, but I’d stop taking meetings before a certain time. I’d stop taking meetings after a certain time. I scheduled breaks. But then what ended up happening was I traded the 45 to 50 meetings in a week to being booked out six weeks in advance.
Brad Johnson: It just went further out.
Nico Pesci: Right, which actually got, it’s like it’s the same problem. I remember I had a filling pop out and I’m like, “Cool. I have no time to get this.” I literally had a hole in my tooth for like two months because I couldn’t get an opening. And so, you traded one problem, like I’m not taking meetings in the evenings. Okay, well now you’re booked out four weeks and clients are pissed off about it. And so, all these things are snowballing. I realize, okay, the burnout, it wasn’t doing too many events. It wasn’t doing too many meetings in a day. Like, I was doing all the things that I had been told were gonna help me feel less burnt out and have more fun and it still wasn’t there, and I realized I didn’t feel like there was a big purpose anymore. It was just, okay, let’s see if I can be in the top five again this year. It wasn’t necessarily… It wasn’t fulfilling. That’s the easiest way of saying it.
Brad Johnson: You know what you just reminded me of, the filling story? This was the first couple years of Triad and the typical schedules, every six months, dentist, cleaning, the standard. And my dentist called me, and they’re like, “Hey, it’s been 18 months since you came in.” And I’m like, “What?”
Nico Pesci: What? That’s not very long, Brad.
Brad Johnson: I’m like, “What? How did that happen?” But I’ll tell you, here’s this, because the early days of Triad, just like any entrepreneur, it’s chaos. You’re in over your head. There’s not enough of you to go around. I think right there, there’s a symptom of burnout. And it’s like, what stuff in your life is behind schedule? Is it normal like dentist, doctor’s appointments? Is it you forgot to pay the bill because literally you haven’t even had time to check the mail? And I think any entrepreneur that’s been in that season like you’re talking about, if they’re honest with themselves, they’ve had those things that are like little red flags popping up, you know?
Nico Pesci: 100%. I remember bumping into an old buddy of mine who I used to go shooting with. So, he and a bunch of our friends, we’d go and do not competitive shooting, but that kind of stuff, right? We’ve got some friends who were in law enforcement and SWAT officers and military. And so, he kept doing it. I mean, he’d go to these competitions and everything else. I bumped into him and naturally, the conversation came up. He goes, “You buy any cool new guns lately?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I picked up this one and this one.” He’s like, “Which one shoots the best?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I haven’t put a single round through four of them.”
Brad Johnson: And that was something that was kind of a hobby that brought joy to you?
Nico Pesci: It was a hobby. Yeah. Because what it was for me, at least, my realization, there were so many balls you can juggle at one time in the air. One’s going to fall. I’m not going to let my family one fall. That’s non-negotiable. I wasn’t going to let my business one fail. So, that one’s non-negotiable. So, then it came back and forth between hobbies and health. And I was like, I’m not going to let my health fail because I’ve seen that problem before. And so, what ended up happening is that my life revolved around I would get up, have breakfast with the kids, I go to work out, and then I get them off to school, I come have meetings, non-non-stop, non-non-stop, go home, have dinner, rinse and repeat.
And so, the training events became really special because it’s a time to hang out with friends. But I don’t hang out with anyone because I’m just, if I’m not gonna be at work, I’m with my kids. And if I’m not home with my kids, I’m gonna be at work. So, stuff like playing golf or, you know. I love live music, going to concerts, wasn’t doing that, wasn’t going shooting. I just wasn’t doing the things that were fun because I felt like I didn’t have the time to do it because something had to fall off for me to take time for myself. And so, that was another one of those snowball moments of like this is not sustainable. Like, it’s just not.
Brad Johnson: Hey, you don’t have a hat close by, do you?
Nico Pesci: Speaking of, that hat is at home.
Brad Johnson: I actually have one downstairs. Let’s get to the, I’m just going to say it, making shit fun again stage of Nico’s journey.
Nico Pesci: Make shit fun again. Yeah.
Brad Johnson: And there’s an inside joke on that. Maybe we’ll get to it later. So, I want to share one of the cool things, and we had a little group text going between Jordan, Nick, Ryan, Shawn, and I was like, “Hey, obviously I know a lot of Nico’s story, but like give me some insights you guys have because I’ve got the podcast interview today.” And I thought this one was awesome. Because when you got to Triad, now, granted, we’re on kind of this, have the conversation with Anthony. You can’t unsee it. You’re kind of tapping the red line and trying to fight it but it keeps coming back, no matter how you slice and dice the current business model. But when you got to Triad, your name of your company was Pesci Financial.
Nico Pesci: Pesci Financial Group was a badge of honor.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. And you’ve got that strong Italian heritage.
Nico Pesci: Yes, sir.
Brad Johnson: You’d certainly be proud of that. And, by the way, both your mom and dad have really cool background stories. We might get to that later. But there was, I’d love to hear the moment because you’re like I don’t know what clicked but you’re like, “Wait, this last chapter was kind of about Nico and me, go across the stage, top producer, name of the company is my last name.” And you’re like, “I don’t want it to be about me anymore,” and a really cool rebrand came out of that, but I’d love to hear your side of that.
Nico Pesci: I knew we had to change the name, so Pesci Financial, number one, there’s a lot of pride in our family history. My grandparents were immigrants. They didn’t speak English. My father was the first in our family to go to high school, let alone go on to college. My family’s filled now with executives and business owners and lawyers and MBAs. And so, the family name is a big deal. And so, for me, I was like, “That’s a badge of honor. Pesci.” But also the group I was with, when I was looking for names, a lot of them just had their last name financial group. I’m like, “Cool. I’ll do what these guys do because I want to be like them when I grow up,” right? And we had six employees for most of the time. I mean, I was the sole advisor, but I had like a new business person, I had a client service person, a receptionist, an event person, et cetera. But, yeah, it all came back to me.
And so, when I was looking at what was making me not thrilled with where I was in life, I realized, okay, I needed something that was bigger than me so that I can actually reclaim some of my time and my attention and my focus to other things in my life, too. And so, I knew my first trip, like I went to Chicago, we were in AP’s office, I was with Dana Dunkelberger and Devin Choules, and then Shawn was there. Jordan was supposed to be there, but he didn’t.
Brad Johnson: Did he bail on you guys?
Nico Pesci: Yeah. He’s, you know.
Brad Johnson: Should we roast him? We’ll wait until later.
Nico Pesci: We will give him a hard time about that for the rest of his life, so I’m sure he was running with David Goggins somewhere at 3 a.m. when he was supposed to be with us in Chicago. So, we’re there, and I’m taking notes. I’m really quiet, which is odd for me, but I spoke very little the entire time we were there. I just kind of listened to what everyone was talking about. But I remember writing in one of my notes, “The name has to change.” And I didn’t know what it was supposed to be. And so, I thought I knew in that exact moment like what I wanted Pesci Financial to be known for and so I started writing this down. I had clarity on what ended up being our launch, like our mission control. I knew that from my first meeting in Chicago.
And I was like, “We’ll be known for this, we’ll be known for this, we’ll be known for this.” And what it was is I want to be known for giving. That’s a big part of my family, it’s a big part of my family history, it’s a big part of what we believe in. And so, I’m like, “Okay. We’ll give financial. We’ll do something like this. And G-I-V-E could stand for this and that.” I’m like, “That’s stupid.” And so, I tried to come up with all these different names, and I was talking to my wife. My family motto, so my grandfather has passed this to my father who passed it on to all of us, but the English translation is always forward. And I was trying to think, I’m like, how can I come up with something that still pays homage and is honored for the family name?
I’m like, “Okay. Well, Forward Financial, like that sounds stupid.” And I was talking to my wife, we were in our kitchen, and I was like, “I got to figure out a name.” I’m like, “How do I incorporate always forward?” And she’s like, “Well, that’s just, that’s momentum.” And I was like, “What?” And she’s like, “That’s what you’re…” She’s like, “That’s like momentum. That could work.” And I’m like, “That’s awesome.” And so, that was Momentum Wealth. And so…
Brad Johnson: Shout out Abby.
Nico Pesci: Shout out to Abby. She’s the best thing that happened to me times 12. And so, we go with Momentum Wealth. I’m really clear on that. I liked it better than what I had first thought of doing, but I’m like, “We need a tagline, some sort of motto, guiding principle.” And I’m on vacation for New Year’s with Dana Dunkelberger, his family, my family. Our three families have gotten together for New Year’s, literally almost every year since 2017. So, we go on trips with his families all the time. And I’m sitting there telling Dana because this was New Year’s of ’23 going into ’24. And I was like, “Yeah, I’m gonna go with Momentum Wealth.”
And I was like, “I gotta figure out like a tagline or whatever.” He’s like, “Yeah, that’s awesome. Like, momentum is like always forward,” and I was like, “How did I not think of that as our tagline?” So, shout out to Dana. So, I’m the idiot who didn’t think of my own company name or our tagline, but the wonderful people who I’ve surrounded myself with were able to extrapolate from everything I’ve talked about what it would be. So, Momentum Wealth is the name of the company.
Brad Johnson: Love the logo, by the way.
Nico Pesci: Always Forward is our guiding principle. Jordan gets a shout-out for this. He and I worked together on that one.
Brad Johnson: Did Jordan help with the logo? See, he’s making a comeback. So, he ditched you, but then he made a comeback.
Nico Pesci: Yeah. He still hasn’t embraced learning how to hug, but that’s okay. We’ll get to that in another podcast episode.
Brad Johnson: Well, if you’re going to be friends with an Italian, you got to learn how to hug.
Nico Pesci: You got to hug. So, now I just purposely hug Jordan and don’t let go until he gets very uncomfortable.
Brad Johnson: Just pull it in extra tight.
Nico Pesci: It’s my favorite part of any Triad experience is not letting go of Jordan until he kind of sinks underneath my arms to escape. But, yeah, so that’s where it came from. And then we started to tie it all together of what we actually were really trying to do for clients is build positive momentum. I looked at my parents’ story. They were successful, they made good money, they had good degrees, all these different things, but they each faced financial hardships in retirement for different reasons. So, their momentum stopped, and it became this conversation of what someone’s doing getting to retirement is building up momentum, and they’re trying to maintain that throughout their retirement years.
And so, the name Momentum Wealth felt like a natural fit. And then the tagline, the guiding principle “always forward” fit perfectly. And it still allowed me to still pay some homage to the family name. But we have the conversations now with clients of you don’t retire to go backwards. You want your retirement to help move you forward. And every plan and every decision you make should help move you forward towards more confidence or more clarity or whatever it might be. And it’s been an awesome rebrand, but it had to be about, number one, a different name. But then I think probably the most important part is that it took the focus off of me. And that was the hardest transition because the reality is that I can’t run this thing by myself.
And so, I wanted something that didn’t say my name on it, so people realized it’s about more than just me. And what’s been awesome, I’ve been in meetings over the last few months where clients have come in, either new clients or existing clients, and they started asking, “Hey, does Momentum do this? Can Momentum help me with this?” And so, it’s been really fun to watch.
Brad Johnson: Team. Yeah.
Nico Pesci: Correct.
Brad Johnson: Love that. Well, the other thing I’m putting together, think about just the basics of your name, Pesci Financial prior, that’s very much tied to me/I. As one of the things that was getting in the way was also your business was me/I, it all has hints. Hey, I’m not working Fridays. Okay, now I’m booked out six weeks. Basically, it didn’t matter what Nico did. It didn’t change the equation as you changed the rules to the game. Hence, I’m going to be a business owner/CEO now. The name of your company actually transitioned also not about you, but about a team, but also, about your clients you’re serving. That’s right, because I mean, back to the forward momentum you’re trying to create in the planning for them, it was almost like a shift.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but my first chapter was very much a me game, an ego game. Like, I got to get the watch, the car, the things, and this is now about serving. So, have you just felt that shift internally in you as well?
Nico Pesci: 100%. And it’s changed the conversations with clients. It’s changed the interactions and meetings and when the Dunk brothers were on, they talked about Tyler hit the nail on the head. If you really are being honest with yourself, if you are doing the production game, and I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but I am saying that it’s not sustainable because if you’re doing that game, you’re saying, hey, I’m going to bring on $20, $30, $40 million of new assets every year, but I only have one advisor and I’m having my service team, my new business, my client service help manage that stuff, you can’t fulfill the promises you made to your clients. You can’t. Not to the caliber that you should be doing because there’s not enough time in the day and it’s not saying that anything’s wrong with that, it’s being honest with the fact that there are five work days if you want to work only weekdays, and there are eight work hours.
And if you have– I went from very little production and very little clients to, and we did $200 million in annuity business and basically, what is that? From 2015 to 2023, that’s a lot of clients to bring on. And so, at some point, you drop the ball. You either are missing things, you’re not doing the full plan, you’re not providing the service they deserve. And so, it’s funny is that my old mentality was we’d look, you’d hear stories, if you’d look at guys like AP, who’s recognized for doing $200, $300 million, and it’s like, well, he didn’t do that. It’s like, well, yeah, he didn’t.
Brad Johnson: It was almost like you had picked the story apart because he had a team, like where I’m just solo.
Nico Pesci: Correct. And it hit me one day, I’m like, holy cow, the ego isn’t the guy who’s being recognized for the work his team did. The ego is the guy who says, I did everything. I did $35 million. I did the production. I earned the trophy. It’s like, cool, you did. And in return, unfortunately, if you’re being honest, you don’t have the time to take care of your clients the way that we said we would at the front end, unless, and what we started to see is that, well, some firms would hire sub-agents, but not really talk about it because you shouldn’t have sub-agents. And some people would hire service staff, but don’t really talk about it because they should be doing meetings.
And so, it is just being intellectually consistent and saying, hey, to do the things I need to do, it’s bigger than me and step out of the way. And like, I started reading about all these different conversations. I was reading about the founder of LinkedIn, Steve Jobs, you know what I mean? Virgin Atlantic, like, every one of these massively successful entrepreneurs, the common denominator is they say hire people who are smarter than you and get out of the way. Hire people who are good at things that you’re not good at because any guy, I’m good at sales, I’m good at relationships, you know what I suck at? Operations. I suck at operations because that’s not how my brain’s wired and my ops people politely suck at sales because that’s not how they’re wired. Together, we work really, really well, and that’s awesome, right? But you got to just get out of your own way and stop being the bottleneck. And I also realized that if it’s the you show, that’s coming at someone else’s expense and it’s not sustainable for me. I shouldn’t say blanket statement, that’s how it is for everyone.
Brad Johnson: I think that applies to just about every business model. I mean, any brand that’s built to last, we’re all humans, which means we die, which means if you’re going to build a generational business, it means truly you should shift the thinking to– you’re just steering the ship now. You’re the steward of the ship. But if you’re building a generational business, someday you will pass that on to the next person that’s going to steer the ship. And I think a lot, I mean, you’ve unpacked all of it, so I don’t want to repeat what you said, but if it is an I/me ego game, that means your business will die with you.
Nico Pesci: And what’s really interesting, Brad, is I really don’t actually think most people do that because of ego. I really don’t actually. Like, I’m thinking back to some of my people that I felt were very, very close friends in my former life. These guys don’t have huge massive egos, most of them, but it’s a control thing. It’s I can be the person to take care of it, I can do it. And I think there’s this almost limiting belief where if you bring more people on, because I was this way, are they going to care the way you care? Are they going to be as good as you are? Are they going to do it the right way?
The thing I still hear from some of my good friends in other lives is, “Holy cow, what’s your payroll?” I have 15 people now. And I had five when we got to Triad. And it’s like, yeah, my payroll’s higher, but so is our revenue. And our margins are still great. Like, I’m still okay. But also, I could be with my kids for this, I didn’t have to do evenings. Like, true story, when I told my kids that I was leaving my former group, because they knew that dad went to Vegas 9, 10 times a year, and that’s all they knew. Because again, my daughter was born in 2010. I started going to Vegas 10 times a year in 2015, so she was five, four and a half basically. My son was born in 2013, so he was two. So, that’s what they knew.
My oldest daughter literally broke down in tears when I told her I wasn’t going anymore. Not because she was sad that I was leaving the group, but she realized that dad wasn’t traveling 10 times a year to Vegas, and maybe there’d be things I’d miss. I try my best to be home, like if there’s a dance recital or a piano recital or a play, but I was booked out six weeks in advance, which means I did miss stuff occasionally. I had to go to Vegas 10 times a year to help mentor, which I’m grateful I got a chance to do, but there was a price for that.
And so, it’s realizing that, hey, if you can let go of control and get out of the way, you can take back those things. What’s ended up happening is that happiness has gone up, fulfillment has gone up, production has gone up, revenue has gone up, but it’s this self-limiting belief that if you open the door, you’re going to train your competition, if you open the door, your payroll is going to be so big. And it’s like, I had this conversation with AP when I first came over, and because that question got brought up in that June phone call, “Geez, AP, what’s your payroll like?” And AP just laughed. He’s like, “Way less than the revenue,” right? Because like it’s…
Brad Johnson: He just simplified the equation.
Nico Pesci: Yeah, I mean, it’s a really silly question when you think about it in that level. It’s like substantially less. And at the same time though, let’s just say devil’s advocate, it ends up being exactly the same. Let’s say that your margins maybe go down a little bit. Okay, do you have more freedom? Do you have more time? Do you have a better performance for your clients? Do you have more flexibility? Do you have more fulfillment? Like, is there to be…
Brad Johnson: Less stress.
Nico Pesci: There’s a dollar attached to those things. Like, you hear this all the time for people as they reach different levels of success. It’s like the one thing you can’t get back is time, but you can use money to create time. And so, you can leverage your skills to train your team to create time. And that comes with happiness and fulfillment. And it’s like, well, if my margins are down a bit, which they’re not, but if they were, but my time went up with my family, my happiness went up, that’s a pretty good cost to pay. I’m okay with that. And that’s not saying it’s the right way, but for me, yeah, it was the right thing.
Brad Johnson: I’ve got my eye on the clock. This time’s going way too fast. So, I’m going to…
Nico Pesci: I have no idea what time it is, so.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, hey, that’s perfect. That’s how this should be. That’s how great conversations happen. So, one of the things that I recognized with you when you onboarded with Triad, and full transparency, Ryan Sparks said this and I loved how he put this. He said, “Building a business on the red line is hard.” By the way, everything that we did before you started building out the team even more, that wasn’t like that was easy. I mean, you still had to grind and learn and present. And also, building a business on the green line, significance is what we call it, building a business bigger than you, that’s also hard because the rules change.
You could have, I’m guessing, done the rules in your sleep in a prior life. Like, you had that game down. The only problem was, it was just you, right? And now, when you change the game, I know, like, real talk, you had a key team member leave as you shifted. That’s hard, right? And what I appreciated, though, looking back on your journey, you were willing to slow down a little bit and you actually took some time to embrace a new infrastructure, embrace a new sales process that was more tailored toward a planning approach as opposed to selling a product approach.
And where I’ve seen a lot of people get frustrated, we’ll go back to Dr. Henry Cloud, Necessary Endings, old path is not serving them. It’s very clear. I’ve got to get off this treadmill. I got to go over here. But the moment it’s different and you have a failure and you’ve got this game and you could do it in your sleep, there’s this natural, oh, never mind, this doesn’t work. I’m going back to the old way. What in it made you slow down, say, I’m committed, I’m going to build this outright? Production, revenue might suffer a little bit short term, but then once I’m ready, I’m going to build on the new, more solid foundation.
Nico Pesci: That’s a super interesting question. And I think actually, the reason why it wasn’t hard for me to pause because I gave all that thought before. Like I said, I didn’t want to leave. Like, who knows all the different stories that I’ve told, but I did not want to leave. And so, in some ways, I was almost like dragged in the sense that my heart was this is not the right thing, my brain said this is the right thing. So, I had time to reflect, like if I leave, I know what that means. It means the end of this process. It means I don’t use anything that came from a prior group. No conversations, no presentations, no sales processes. Like, I know the rules. When I stop, I stop.
And so, I had to give a lot of thought to that ahead of time. But also, it was this realization of, I tell clients this all the time when it comes to retirement, like, what got you here may not get you there. And that phrase, why it resonated so much when I first heard it was that was my realization with where I was at. What got me where I was is not going to get me to where the next page I wanted to.
And so, like, I was crystal clear that what it would take to build what I wanted, what was worth to me breaking relationships, and the reality is that it’s been a year and a half since I left and there are people who I thought were dearest friends I’ve never heard from, like I’m dead to them, and that sucks, and so I had to give some serious thought to, am I willing to break these relationships for what I want long-term? And if so, I’m going to, like, I have to make that worthwhile. I have to make it worthwhile to cease those relationships, meaning I’m not going to go dabble in something else, like I’m going to go all in, I’m going to do this right because it has to be worthy of ending what was so important to me beforehand.
And so, I didn’t want to market, I didn’t want to do all these events. I knew we’d have a slowdown for a period of time, but what was so interesting, Brad, is that we had a slowdown for four or five months, max. And then, last year, we finished nearly 50% better than our best year ever. And so, it was kind of a testament of like, okay, this was the right call. We did this for the right reasons. We’re going to crawl before we walk, we’re going to walk before we run, and we’re going to run before we sprint.
And I think that made the transition easier for the team. It gave us time to be thoughtful and work on the company in terms of here’s processes we need to develop. Hey, here’s where this is broken, because we had to create all new systems internally, all new processes internally. And you can’t do that if you’re running, right? Like, you don’t have time. And that’s one of the things that– don’t butcher her name, Nico, and Hate…
Brad Johnson: Hiatt.
Nico Pesci: Hiatt, like I said, don’t butcher her name, Brad. So, she talked about how Bezos would take these two, three-day retreats, right? Where he would literally, like she’d go to the hotel ahead of time, she’d remove clocks, she’d remove computers, she’d remove phones, she’d remove TVs. And so, he locked himself in a room for three days just to think. And she was saying that’s where the Kindle came from. That’s where the idea for Amazon cloud services came from, like, literally, two of their biggest things, right?
And so, I took that to heart realizing if I don’t give myself time to really slow down and think because that’s what I didn’t do for the last decade. I ran and it went well, I’m grateful for it, but I didn’t have time to think about like, is this what I want long-term? If you can pause long enough to reflect on what you’re trying to create and then work backwards, you can have a very thoughtful conversation of, okay, well, if I want X, then I need to do Y on the front end. If I need to do Y on the front end, what systems am I missing right now to help me create that? What processes do we need to master? Because we can create all these cool deliverables on the back end, but if we suck on how to implement them correctly, it’s going to fall apart.
And it’s been cool to see because it’s been empowering for the team. I mean, everyone knows their role. They know what they do. They know why they do it. They know where it fits into the process. They know what the client should expect in the first meeting or in the second or what they expect on a 100-day review or a six-month review or a one-year. They know. You walk into the office, here’s who says this, here’s who does this. And me being kind of like a data nerd that I’ve turned into is by knowing all those pieces, if something starts to feel off, you can start to look at it and say, okay, where? And let’s tweak this. And if you don’t pause long enough to create all those systems, you don’t know, okay, well, great, we did $60 million of production. How? Why? How do you get better? How do you duplicate it? If something went wrong, how, where, why?
Brad Johnson: So, I’m not sure if I should bring up Elon on this because that’s a volatile topic these days. But in his book, he talks about the algorithm that he’s used to build every product he’s ever done. And basically, he has delete before he has optimize. And if you think about it, when basically, everything’s on Nico and it’s kind of like, hey, I can just kind of do this because I practice and it’s kind of your charm and your relationship building, that means your whole business is built on your personality and you can’t scale your personality, right?
And so, now that you’ve got these processes when something breaks, it’s just like an assembly line. It’s like, wait, what section broke? Okay, right here, these people booked an appointment but then didn’t show up to the office. Okay, let’s dive into that. Let’s analyze, okay, what’s broken? Does somebody need to be trained up? Are we missing a step? But that’s the beauty of a system.
Nico Pesci: 100%.
Brad Johnson: It’s easy to go and fix and replicate.
Nico Pesci: Well, and also, it makes it fun, because it’s fun to build new things and to say, okay, hey, this is a really cool idea. How do we work backwards and figure this out? And then if we do this, what does it mean to the client long-term? What does it mean to the office? Like, it just makes things enjoyable again because it’s more than just press A, get B, press A, get B. You can do that long enough, but it stops being enjoyable. And so, it’s been a fun process, but what’s nuts, honestly, the part that still blows my mind, by slowing down, we sped up, by trying to do less, we were able to handle more.
And I look, I’m like, okay, well, here’s what we did the last 18 months since this transition. Man, we’re just getting started, like the stuff, I mean, this is a whole separate conversation for their day, like Devin and I were talking this morning and last night, I’m like, well, if we added this, if we change this, if we do this, how much exponentially can we increase efficiencies? And so, it’s fun to have the time to tinker and really be thoughtful about the business again.
And in return, it’s going to make it more enjoyable for me as the owner. It’ll make it better for the team because we’re going to have more success. People feel more ownership in their roles, more career growth. It’s going to be a completely better client experience. And it’s like, I’m having fun again. Like, there’s a reason why Dana said what he said. We wanted to make sh*t fun again.
Brad Johnson: Like, there should be a hat with that on it somewhere. I almost want to run down stairs and grab mine.
Nico Pesci: If I was home, I’d wear mine.
Brad Johnson: Okay, so let’s go to, so launch plan, we’ve alluded to it. I think anybody that’s listened to past podcasts here probably gets an idea, but my simplest, shortest way to define that is we have an onboarding process at Triad. The reason we work with a limited number of members is so we can go super deep. And it’s an extraction process. It’s like pulling the DNA out of the mosquito in Jurassic Park is my best analogy. So, there’s an extraction process. Your launch plan is one of the most thoughtful, eloquent ones that I’ve seen us produce.
Nico Pesci: Appreciate it.
Brad Johnson: I would love to just hear like, what’s the before and after on that? You said a lot of that kind of came to your brain when you were actually sitting out at Anthony’s office. But what, if you don’t mind, like maybe hitting a couple of phrases that you’ve seen really resonated with clients, with prospects, and then maybe the meaning behind it.
Nico Pesci: Yeah, what I knew from day one is that we want to be known for giving, all right? And I had to kind of figure out how to quantify that beyond– most people, when you hear giving, they think, oh, okay, monetarily, charity. And we do a lot. I’m on the board for Make-A-Wish. We’ve granted, I’m going to pat ourselves on the back because I’m super proud of it. Since 2020, we’ve helped grant 79 wishes for Make-A-Wish kids here in Utah. It’s a huge part of our firm. Our clients get involved with it. It’s awesome. It’s one of my favorite things, and our team loves it.
So, I wanted to say, okay, we’re known for giving, but what is it that we give? Because giving is more than just a monetary thing. And I was like, okay, well, we can give people belief in what’s possible, we can give them confidence to go out and pursue it, and we can give them the freedom to actually enjoy it. And I realized that what we’re giving is more than a dollar. You’re giving them a non-tangible, but in their heart core thing that they carry through retirement with.
And so, when Chris and I sat down and go over it, I was like, “I know that these three things are crucial. We have to incorporate it.” And so, that’s what it came into is that Momentum Wealth is known for giving. We give clients belief in what’s possible, the confidence to pursue it, and the freedom to enjoy it. And the entire thought process became basically an exercise in how do we give those things to people? And that became this, like, literally our team, internally, we talk about, hey, does this give our team confidence? Does this give our team belief? Does this give our team freedom? Does this give our clients freedom? And it’s been really fun to watch.
And literally, sharing is caring. When I sit down with clients, the question I always ask them now is, fast forward, you’re 85, you’re 90 years old, whatever you think is the tail end of your time here and you’re looking backwards on your retirement, what is it that a successful plan– we’ve worked together for 20 years, we built the plan, we worked the plan, what is it that plan gave you? When you look back, would you say, holy cow, that was fun, that was awesome, I got to enjoy, I got to travel, do this, like, help me understand, what is it going to give you? And then I shut up, which is hard for me.
But what it does, it takes the client out of their head because for 40 years, all they focused on was how do I get my portfolio bigger? And when you dig deep and try and say, cool, what do you want to do with all that money? I don’t know, I want it to grow. Why? So, it’s there for me. To do what? But when you remove the conversation, the finances, and you ask the question, you look backwards and you see 20 years of a successful retirement, what did you give yourself, right? And I keep going back to that word, give, and they’re like, oh, well, I would’ve wanted to know, I got to go see my grandkids whenever I want. Check, we’ll give you that. I want to be able to actually know that I’m never going to be a burden to my kids. Check, we can give that, too.
And the giving concept became this really powerful tool for people to stop thinking about their money in regards to it as a dollar and started to realize what it was, which is a tool to give them the things that they work so hard for. And so, we always say that the outcome of our work is giving clients the confidence they deserve to enjoy the retirement they’ve earned. And that messaging has been really powerful for clients because it’s not being talked about.
Yes, portfolios grow and there’s income and there’s tax conversations, but all of that is a means to an end. And the end is what does a client want? And how do you give that to them? And so, that messaging, it’s been fun to roll out. It’s been fun to see clients embrace it. It’s been fun to get responses from clients with emails where they say, I have so much more confidence hearing them using our own messaging about, it’s really, gosh, after today’s meeting, I can see what’s possible. Like, I don’t know, it’s been really, really fun.
So, Kristin gets a huge shout-out. She was really good at helping pull that information out, but that, I think, goes back to what I was saying the very beginning of it. All of that is what’s brought more purpose back to the conversation. The more purpose, the more value, the more fun.
Brad Johnson: I love how you future cast that. I think that’s one of the things, just we’ve talked a lot about necessary endings. I think the tough part that I’ve seen for a lot of retirees and obviously, you’re the one sitting down having the conversations with them and your team. I oftentimes hear them secondhand, just like you’re kind of sharing with me now, but it’s almost like, hey, here’s the identity I’ve had for the last 20, 30, 40 years. Maybe they’re a business owner. Maybe they’ve worked in the same job and they’ve got all these work friends, but you’re actually taking them out of, today may be your enemy of tomorrow, right? You’re literally taking them out of today, planting them 20 years into tomorrow, and having them paint a picture back to you of what the ideal outcome would be. I love that framing.
Nico Pesci: Well, simultaneously attaching that outcome to our relationship and our planning for them, right? And so, what’s really fun, number one, I think it helps to get stuff out of the client because no one thinks about what they want their plan to give them, they want their money to grow. But number two, it gives us a road map, right? So, again, we’ve built the systems internally now where if I go to, and I hear this from a client, and I say, okay, for the client to feel like we did a bang-up job for them over the next 5, 10, 15 years, they literally just told us all the things we need to do. Here it is in the CRM. Now we know for our client love department and our client service team, here’s all the checklists that we need to make sure that we’re doing.
And we can fast forward a year from now, two years from now in meetings and say, “Hey, you said you really wanted me to do this, this, this, this. Have you done it, right? What do we need to do?” Like, it’s powerful for them and it’s powerful for us. And I think it gives us the tools to be very different from your average firm because we’re not helping them just grow their portfolio. We’re helping them give themselves a confident and stable retirement. That’s what they want. The industry focuses too much on the what, which is what I focus on, and not enough on the why.
Brad Johnson: All right, we have to hit AI because everybody’s talking about AI these days. And we were in a little mastermind.
Nico Pesci: As they should.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, I agree. Just talked a lot about AI two days up at Orion here not that long ago. So, we were in a private mastermind with Michael Hyatt, and one of the last sessions of the year, I wish it would have been one of the first, but it was one of the last of last year, and he did a little private demo for how he had been geeking out with AI in his business. And I think you, Devin immediately took that and ran with it. And then you took the launch plan, which is a lot of the messaging you just shared, a lot of like, hey, here’s what we want to be known for. You fed that into AI. You started, I mean, to me, you were creating all kinds of amazing things, but what came out of the back end of that?
Nico Pesci: Momentum GPT is what we call it. So, our Momentum GPT, it knows our branding, it knows our mission, it knows our ideal client, it knows our logo, it knows our colors, it knows my tone, how I speak, how I write, and it’s become this amazing tool that we can use if we want to quickly create something. If you want to do a letter to a client about X, Y, or Z, I can go in there and say, knowing what you know about our firm, here’s the letter, ask questions before you generate your output. And it will start to ask and it’s just learned. Who’s this for?
Brad Johnson: Use the letter if they have it prompt to you. Love that.
Nico Pesci: Is it for your pre-retiree clients or your retired clients? Is it this? Is it that? What’s the call to action? And within five minutes, I have something. I’ve been able to take it where utilizing AI with meetings. So, the ability to level up with how well you listen to clients utilizing AI, you can do that, put it into your system, so now it picks up on stuff that, as the advisor, maybe you wouldn’t have picked up before. They’re going on a trip, they’re going on a cruise, here’s where they’re going to go first, and we can tell our client service department, hey, this person, as an example, is having surgery in six weeks. We know that it’s a surgery that she won’t be able to bend, lift, or twist. We know she was a dancer. We know this, we know this, we know this. She went to Juilliard. I want to send some unreasonable hospitality style gifts to her based on all the information that we were able to extrapolate from that meeting, which would have been overlooked in a normal conversation.
Brad Johnson: Are you feeding like a Zocks sort of transcript into that or…
Nico Pesci: Zocks and ChatGPT combined will change your world. So, I can go to our Momentum GPT and say, we upload as an example, I have templates for different emails. Here’s a template for a follow-up email to a prospect after the first meeting. Following that template, take all this data and create an email for the client. And so, in 15 minutes, I can knock out six massively detailed emails that go over the five pillars, that go over their concerns, that go over their goals, and it’s done.
And so, the part that I think that Michael Hyatt opened my eyes to when it comes to AI is not going to replace workers, but it’s going to make you more efficient if you know how to use it, and then there’s a whole separate thing that we can get into another time. But so, now what Devin and I are looking at is creating AI agents, and AI agents are autonomous, can run tasks, and you can create an AI agent that can oversee different AI agents to take the notes from Zocks and put it into Redtail or your CRM to create the follow-up email, and that top one knows.
And so, rather than expanding what we’re looking at now is instead of getting to a point where we have 35 or 40 employees, could we take a team of 15 or 20 people and then utilize these efficiencies to make a smaller company that can handle a larger workload, right? And so, now, we can pay our existing team members more. We have less health insurance things we have to cover. We have less HR issues. We have less days off issues. But you can not replace your team. You can make the smaller team more efficient and more successful. But the firms that aren’t using it, they’re going to get left behind, like no questions asked, they’re going to get left behind. I mean, it’s something I use every single day now.
Brad Johnson: I think Michael’s exact quote that I remember is humans won’t be replaced by AI anytime soon, they’ll just be replaced by humans that know AI.
Nico Pesci: Correct.
Brad Johnson: And to your point, I completely agree. That is one of our top initiatives inside of Triad and it’s becoming more and more clear every day. It’s either that or go extinct, those are your options, long term.
Nico Pesci: And I remember reading an article that one of the founders of Netflix wrote about when they went to Blockbuster to try and get sold to Blockbuster after the dot-com crash. And obviously, they got laughed out of the office and his feedback, because that empowered him to really grab the bull by the horns and they’re going to make Netflix what it turned into be. But he just said, “If you’re not willing to disrupt your business, someone else will do it for you.” And that realization was powerful for me in terms of what I had to redo for my company, but I think it relates to what’s going on with AI as well.
If you’re not using it, and it doesn’t have to be some crazy thing like I just said about AI agents who are running departments, but even something as simple as creating a higher caliber follow-up email to a client or creating a higher, faster, like, not a higher, but a faster think tank. If you want to draft a client letter or an announcement or a marketing tool, rather than spending 15, 20 minutes to get the ball rolling mentally on what you want to say, you can customize this GPT and say, here’s what I want. Help me think through what I should talk about. And you go, brr, what’s nuts? I’ll finish with this really fast.
I took a transcript from one of my recent seminars, uploaded it to my GPT and said, knowing what you know about our firm, how well did I deliver on this messaging? What were the three things that the audience should have gathered from the event? And then of those three things, what should they have known, why should they have known it, and what should they do about it? And rate me on a scale of 1 to 10 on how well to accomplish those things.
And it kicked out all of it and said, here’s what you wanted them to know. Here’s the overreaching message, which was correct, so check, I did that one right. Here are the three topics you wanted them to walk away from. Check, I did that right. These two topics, it was crystal clear, you wanted them to know this, here’s why, and here’s what they should do about it. This topic, though, it’s clear why they should know and what they should know, but I didn’t hear a call to action on what they should do about it. Check, I need to fix that. And so, in five minutes, I had an hour seminar completely analyzed and now, I have changes so that when I do a seminar in two weeks, it gave me a feedback.
Brad Johnson: So good. I mean, it’s crazy the use cases because now you have a seminar coach that you don’t have to pay, they’re just going to, ah, so good.
Nico Pesci: It’s nuts. And what Michael always says is it’s the worst it’s ever going to be today. It’s just going to get better. So, yeah, use it.
Brad Johnson: In short…
Nico Pesci: In short, in summary, which I don’t do, use it.
Brad Johnson: All right, I want to get to Do Business, Do Life, the life side, and we’ve hit all over this, but one of the things Nick shared with me, and by the way, I have to hear the Italian. What you said, it translates to always forward. What’s the Italian?
Nico Pesci: Sempre avanti.
Brad Johnson: One more time?
Nico Pesci: Sempre avanti. Always forward.
Brad Johnson: Love that. Okay, so your dad had this other phrase he shared with you that also has its fingerprints all over, everything we’ve talked about today. Do well, so you can do good. And so, I want to just kind of tee you up. I love just the give behind your company. And obviously, that’s playing out with the Make-A-Wish stuff. But if we were to look at Nico’s definition of Do Business, Do Life, what would that be?
Nico Pesci: I think the simplest way to summarize it is that life is about more than you. And so, if you’re doing life well, you’re blessing others for what you’re doing. If you’re doing business well, you’re blessing others for what you’re doing. And if you can get out of your way and really see how those things work together, so what struck me very quickly with Triad was the concept of Do Business, Do Life, it’s about understanding the blend of your life and your work, right?
And literally, it sounds stupid, but I have these stickers on my laptop in front of me as a reminder that my life is not my work, and my work is not my life. It’s just these stickers that mean a lot to me and it’s just a quick little reminder about that. But by integrating them, you actually magnify both, right? By doing a better job as a father, as a husband, as a friend, that’s going to translate to being a better business owner, a better advisor, a better leader. If you can take the lessons learned from doing business well, that’s going to transfer over to how to be a better father, a better husband.
And so, the integration is actually, to me, it’s a magnification of both. And so, my dad, yeah, he always would say do well to do good. For him, it was the concept that you have an obligation to honor those who came before you. And if you’re fortunate enough to do well in life, you have an obligation to help those who are less fortunate. My grandparents were immigrants. Not a dollar to their name. My dad tells stories all the time about my grandparents saying, do we pay the power bill or do we buy groceries?
And so, that’s ingrained in our DNA of, if you just make a whole bunch of money and you build some successful firm just to gloat about how much you have and you’re not actually magnifying others, you’re missing the boat. And I think it’s easy to get lost in work and miss out on life. It’s easy to get lost in life and miss out on work. And if you can just find a cool little balance for both of them, every single person you come in contact with will be better for it.
Brad Johnson: Dude, preach. Preach. Yeah, I love that man. And that’s great. And by the way, you live it, and it’s not easy some days, but I’ve always seen, you’re always course correcting and you’re trying to find that North Star and that’s what we’re all trying to do.
Nico Pesci: Always forward.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, momentum, momentum.
Nico Pesci: Always forward.
Brad Johnson: Well, with that, my man, I hear my family roaming around. We’re about to go to some state basketball, so we better call this the end of this conversation. But we get to hang in Atlanta here right around the corner, right?
Nico Pesci: I was going to say, we’re what, three weeks out, four weeks out? As long as the hotel is close to a Chick-fil-A, I’m stoked.
Brad Johnson: Hey, Atlanta is the headquarters.
Nico Pesci: This is the home of Chick-fil-A.
Brad Johnson: We are covered.
Nico Pesci: We should be good.
Brad Johnson: We are covered.
Nico Pesci: We should be good. I’m looking forward to it.
Brad Johnson: All right, my man, well, great conversation. Look forward to the next time we get to hang in person, and thanks for sharing the wisdom today. Love the conversation.
Nico Pesci: I appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me on, Brad.
Brad Johnson: All right, bud, until next time.
