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And what about having an idea but you need $40 million to make it come to reality?
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If you do, or maybe need a little bit less, then you might want to listen to this conversation, because I want to talk to Damien Lupo, who is the Chief Investment Officer and founder of a company called Frame Tech.
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Damien and his group of really industrial engineers and innovators are transforming the way houses are being built, so we're going to hear about how they are doing that.
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Damian, welcome to the show.
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Hey, it's great to be here.
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Thanks for having me.
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Well, thank you for coming on, because I know you have a history.
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You've built over 70 companies and you've invested and bought over 150 properties, but FrameTech is taking a really innovative approach to how houses are being built and you're reducing the cost and the time and the environmental impact all of which are great.
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But we're also going to hear about how this company has reinvented an industry, and I think that's really really inspirational for anyone listening, that every industry can be re-engineered, and for good.
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Damien, tell us about FrameTech, the problem that you're solving, and then we can talk about how you're solving it.
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For sure.
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Frametech is solving the housing shortage, the crisis.
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The crisis is that we don't have enough housing.
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We're probably 10 million units missing and we go backwards every year in the United States and other places in the world where there's simply not enough being built.
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Old stuff is needing to be torn down and rebuilt, the population is growing and the problem is there's not enough people able to do it.
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And the technology hasn't changed in 71 years, since the nail gun was invented.
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That was literally the last major innovation.
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And so there was a mad scientist, if you will, named Marvin, and he started off doing the framing of houses back in the 70s and he had an idea to transform how houses were framed, which is the core.
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Once you figure that problem out, once you solve that, then everything else can follow along.
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But if you don't solve that, you're really stuck.
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And he did that and had an idea, and then it was in his brain for 20 years and it finally that idea found us, found the money, and we got together and we had FrameTech babies, and that's where things are today.
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Let's just talk first of all, then, about how it came together, because there's a team of you about six or eight senior managers, all with experience but different skill sets.
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Often companies start and maybe one or two founders, juniors, somewhere beavering away, but you're an experienced group of entrepreneurs and engineers and people in the construction industry.
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How did you come together?
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Because that in itself is a good story, isn't it?
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It's really fascinating when you put the time in, you become a person with experience, then naturally things sort of find their way to you.
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In the beginning people without experience you're trying to force things, you're trying to get things to happen, but what you need is you need the actual experience of doing things.
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And then, ultimately, what happened with FrameTech?
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There's a group of guys that all found each other through a mutual contact and it was like hey, there's a bunch of people with a bunch of brainpower and experience.
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And then there was my side that had a relationship network of people with money that wanted to find a great idea and an opportunity to grow their money.
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And we came together and over an afternoon meeting we said we like each other, we want to do this.
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And I said, all right, you've got your money.
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And these people said, fantastic, You're probably full of baloney, but we love it.
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And they decided they wanted to move forward and we launched this thing.
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So it was really about the timing and it was about people coming together that had had decades of previous experience and everybody was ready.
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And I think what's really really important just to note about that is that, as we get older, that our experience actually does have a lot of value.
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Right, I know that we're worried about AI, but actually experiencing connectivity and staying in touch with people is a really important part of staying relevant and staying active economically.
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And you know David Epstein in his book Range.
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You know he talks about actually, as we get older, the range of skill sets and connections that we bring to situations is part of our value as much as our functional skill set.
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Damien, take us through the innovation that happened.
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Obviously, you mentioned the nail gun, which is 71 years ago, which just shoots nails right, I guess, at high velocity and high speed.
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What's the essence of the innovation that Marvin had?
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Because I think that's also so important to understand that really any industry is open and ripe for innovation.
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It starts off with a question Can we do something different?
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Can we do it better?
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You can do different things.
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So there's a couple of questions Can we do this?
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And then should we do it?
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And to your point about AI AI is giving us a lot of how to do things and can we?
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And it's giving you, but it doesn't really answer the moral, ethical or otherwise the question of should we, why are we doing this?
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And so the innovation Marvin had was saying okay, there's a lot of things that slow a process down of framing and there's a lot of waste.
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Can we speed this up?
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Can we make it better quality?
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Can we do this without all sorts of dumpsters full of waste?
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Ultimately, that turned into the material handling process, which is you take these bunks, these big stacks of boards and in this process, this system that we built that's patented you run your boards through it, check to take out any defects, you cut out the defects and then you have all these different boards that are on a big assembly line and they get stuck together with a finger joiner.
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And when you do that, you end up with all these boards stuck together and it turns into one continuous, infinite board.
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And when you have that, then you take and you cut off the piece that you want, the exact distance, whether it's a six foot or an eight foot or a 14 foot, whatever it is, and once you have that, then you can use that to put into trusses and walls.
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So it was really about giving us perfect boards, the exact size and having virtually no waste, and that's never been done before and that's the been done before and that's the secret sauce here.
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And there's a great video at frametechcom and that's frame, as in F-R-A-M-E and then T-E-Ccom, and there's an explainer video which I'm also really a fan of from a marketing point of view, because Damon's explained these finger joints and it's also then really nicely illustrated on the website for potential investors, potential partners, potential employees and so on.
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So using an explainer video is great and the innovation that you get one continuous board is a really great illustration for me anyway of how he's taken what was a recurring industry problem and thought of it.
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But then it needed your funds, your $40 million.
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What did the money get spent on, Damian?
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So when you build manufacturing, it's incredibly capital intensive, so you need a building.
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And when you do something new, you probably need a building that doesn't exist because you have a certain layout.
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So, building the building $15 million to build the building and then all this equipment that you put in there and the robots it's amazing how fast that adds up and you end up.
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Typically, with most businesses, you have an idea of what things are going to cost and then you start building and you say, oh, what about this?
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Let's make it bigger, let's add this.
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And then your price tag goes up, which it did here, and we were flexible enough to say, okay, yes, we want to have more robotics, more automation.
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From the beginning to the time we actually started producing, which was about two, two and a half years that process we ended up taking our headcount, the labor, down by about 30% because of the innovation.
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So when you do that, we're creating all these jobs, but it's not as labor intensive as it was going to be and ultimately that ends up being more profitable and we're more efficient because of the robotics and we're using technology.
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So you've, as you say, we normally plan on doubling the expense and doubling the time, don't we?
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From our business plan, it always takes longer and more money, but for $40 million got you the first plant.
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I would like to hear the story of how you raised the money, because some people might go institutional one-on-one Just tell us you've got an established industry with a new production process.
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What was the story in terms of raising $40 million?
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So people ask a lot of times how do you raise money?
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How do you make that happen?
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How does it?
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happen so fast.
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And at this point FrameTech has over 100 million that has come into it as it expands and is working on additional plants and locations.
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And none of that was institutional.
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It was all individuals, main Street, not Wall Street.
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And how did that happen?
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It happened because relationships and trust was built over years and when you have trust.
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Stephen Covey has a great book called the Speed of Trust and that has never been more relevant or more true than here, where people that have relationships with us said we like what you do, and it tells you that people really invest with people.
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They don't necessarily invest in the thing, because if they don't really know who's running it and it's all about the team, then it slows everything down and people are uneasy.
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Here this was relatively straightforward.
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People said we like you, we trust you and they wanted to be a part of what we were doing.
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But again, it was built on years, so it wasn't a Google ad and that can work.
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But it's very different than when you have relationships and that there is no hack to that.
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You have to serve people and you have to give.
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And then it's very easy to say I've got this idea and people say we're in because we're investing in you.
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And I think we're so obsessed with young founders and raising money quickly and becoming the next internet unicorn that your story just reminds us that there's a lot of money and wisdom in the connections that people build up over a lifetime and that we should really be really sort of making the most of those Damien as well, doesn't it?
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In terms of the platform, you've raised the money.
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What will be some of the obstacles that you face?
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Because presumably there are sort of entrenched interests in construction as well as there are in any industry, and you're bringing in an innovation that must be good for some and bad for others.
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So what's been some of the challenge there?
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so there there's.
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You run into into when you have something new, you're going to run into skepticism.
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You're going to run into people that don't want you to change the system because they have a vested interest when you're doing something faster, less expensive, more efficiently people that are used to just milking the cow with their old system.
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It's very irritating to them when you potentially take away and even though there's so much opportunity like when you're talking about 10 million missing houses FrameTech alone is not going to solve this.
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We're not taking away business.
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We're adding capacity.
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We're adding supply, but there are people that think it's a zero-sum game.
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If we build something, it takes away from them and that's simply not true.
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Developer who wants, they need more framing.
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They wonder if what we're saying is true, because there's been a lot of companies that say they can do something but they haven't been able to deliver.
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We've moved past that because over the last eight months we've been delivering and the whole world can see our stuff posted online on LinkedIn and they can see our buildings and you can see an old house, like a house that's built in a traditional way, and then there's a frame tech framed house next to each other.
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We have examples of that and it's night and day, because our stuff is precise, it looks like furniture and our stuff is potentially up to four times faster.
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So we'll produce, we'll frame a house from a slab to framing done in one day, and that normally is four to seven days.
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So people are watching it and you have to deliver.
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Ideas are simple, ideas are free and it's all about execution.
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And what's happened is we've executed and now the market believes.
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And when you say you could do it so much quicker, is that because in the factory you are sort of preparing all the lumber to be the right size and it's kind of pre-cut and I don't want to be rude here but almost like an Ikea.
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When you get it it's being assembled on site as opposed to being sort of fabricated on site.
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So is that essentially the difference?
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Anytime you can do something in a manufacturing-contained system you're going to have.
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It's going to be faster, it's going to be better quality, it's it's like the idea of of building a car in your front yard, as opposed to having a manufacturing plant that pushes that thing through with precision and robotics.
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And it's the same thing, which one's going to take longer.
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You can build a Toyota 4Runner in a in a matter of hours in the plants in Japan, and if you try to do that on your own, I don't know how long that would take a year, two years.
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So it's the same efficiencies.
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You build all that stuff and then you bring it out and you basically put it together on site and it's unbelievably more efficient.
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It's not incremental, it's exponentially more efficient, more beautiful, more precise.
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Everything about it is hyper better and, ultimately, when you produce that type of product and it's faster, you start to make things less expensive, because when you're shaving off time, it's saving money.
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When you produce more, which we can faster, more supply economics, it's going to reduce the cost.
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It's solving the problem, it's producing more and it's compressing pricing.
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In terms of the distribution strategy, damian, if you are maybe offering different people different values, are you able to go through the usual supply chain merchants, contractors and so on or are you disrupting the whole value chain in manufacturing and construction?
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In this model.
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I mean, we're going direct to our customers, so it's more like a Tesla model.
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There's not brokers and middlemen, and so what that does is it saves people a lot of money.
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It's sort of like the financial system If you can go peer-to-peer, it's way better than if you have 10 different middlemen, agencies, institutions.
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You want to do that Kind of like how Bitcoin takes out all the Western unions.
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It's direct and there's really nothing in the middle and that's just.
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That's better for everybody except the middlemen, which is irritating because they're like how are we going to get paid?
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And sometimes they have to go away.
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And so ours is very, it's very streamlined, it's very direct.
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And people like that too, because they know they're talking to one party that's going to deliver everything and they're not trying to figure out the 15 different people they have to organize.
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They have one phone call and everything is done.
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And in terms of the material you're using, wood.
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I will just ask that question about sort of sustainability.
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You've talked about reduction of waste, um removing removing off cuts, for example.
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What about the sustainability aspect of a frame tech, damien?
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this is one of the great things when you think about and most people don't realize that I mean, obviously, framing is big with wood.
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92 of housing is built with wood and in the united housing is built with wood in the United States and it changes around the world.
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When you think about wood, what's more sustainable than wood?
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The only question is are these big trees or little trees?
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They're smaller trees, they're the ones that are replanted and grow over and over, not the 100, 200-year-old redwoods.
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Obviously, that's not sustainable.
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But this is incredibly sustainable and you just keep regenerating your forests and it's something that, especially with smaller stuff and we have innovation that we're working on that would make that even more sustainable.
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It's great because it works with a resource that doesn't have an end.
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It's not like there's a certain amount of oil in the ground and we keep finding new technology to be able to pull more out, but there's an unlimited amount of sunlight that's going to grow an unlimited amount of trees, and so we're working with something that is extremely, if not unlimited, sustainable.
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And in terms of the sort of opportunity to provide low-cost housing, but also presumably emergency housing, housing where there's been a disaster of some kind, if you're able to rebuild that's that speed and at scale, do you have a strategy as well with frame tech, to be providing, if you like, sort of emergency housing and those sorts of things, damien?
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are just we're not really set up for emergency housing.
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The cool thing is there are companies like boxable and others that are built to build an entire house or you know these, these structures inside of a plant and that whole thing can literally be put somewhere, can be on a semi-truck, and so that's fantastic.
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We're more set up to be within 100 to 200 miles, where we build it at our plant and then we bring it out on site, and so there's different models.
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One of the things that's important in our business, and really any business, is to know who you are, what you do and who you serve, and not being everything to everybody.
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I've watched people say, oh yeah, we can do that.
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We can do a lot of things that we don't do.
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That's on purpose, because we want to be efficient, we want to be able to give the biggest impact.
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If we say we're going to build custom 25,000 square foot homes, we can do that.
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Are we going to focus on that?
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No, are we going to do it?
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Probably not, but we can.
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It's just being really clear on our avatar and our niche.
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I mean, the riches are in the niches, and that's never been truer.
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You've got to know who you are, and then you can expand.
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Amazon didn't start in everything.
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They started with books and that was the niche, and then it expanded from there.
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So it's the same model here, expanded from there.
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So it's the same model here.
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Yeah, so the first plant was really the test.
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Can this idea be executed?
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And when the answer was yes, we can, then the question is all right, we can solve this massive problem.
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We need more capacity because at this point, we have way more demand than we have the ability to produce, which is a good problem.
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It's still a problem and the question was why are we doing this?
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We're doing this to solve a crisis, and it's not going to be solved with one plant.
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So we're continuing to expand in both Arizona, with additional plants into Texas, and we have on frametechcom you can see the nationwide in the United States, the rollout plans for these plants and in the key markets that we're targeting.
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All over the country there's this is literally a problem everywhere.
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And are you hoping to still have frame tech as the business with these plants, or will you license the technology and have other other companies start to use your tech, cause you could scale more quickly in a way, couldn't you that way?
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A hundred percent and there's there's an opportunity for for outside parties to potentially license our stuff, our technology that we've patented, and build more of these.
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And so, because the vision is to impact society, to build more housing, there's not a really rigid model on how that's going to be.
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It's going to be where we protect the culture and we protect the brand and we build as much as we can to solve as many people's housing issues and drive prices down as possible.
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So it's fairly flexible as long as we don't violate our principles and our moral code and compass.
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And Damian, you've got a long history as an entrepreneur, so let's shift gears a little bit, because you've plainly got a great vision and a trajectory really for frame tech.
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Tell us a little bit about, as an entrepreneur, some of the lessons that you've learned when it comes to framing and I say framing, I'm framing a business, I've used that phrase, but we're going to talk about your book, unicornomics, which we're going to give a link to at the end.
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But tell us some of the lessons that you've learned in growing FrameTech and also some of your other 70 companies.
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One of the things that I've learned is it doesn't matter if you're in the right business.
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It matters that you get involved in something, and one of the things that people do, I see all the time is they're trying to figure out the perfect business, and if I looked back and had that attitude, I probably would never have started with anything, because I've had all sorts of crazy things that I've been involved with.
00:20:39.526 --> 00:20:47.192
I even had an iPad business one time an international iPad business shipping iPads to Sweden, and it was just a learning opportunity for me.
00:20:47.192 --> 00:20:52.195
One of the lessons was don't be in this business, and that can be a great lesson.
00:20:52.195 --> 00:20:55.262
What you shouldn't do is more important than what you should do.
00:20:55.262 --> 00:21:01.507
So it's going and learning different things from each of these businesses, and that's one of the things.
00:21:01.507 --> 00:21:04.500
Really, it's not about picking that perfect thing.
00:21:04.500 --> 00:21:20.871
It's about doing something and keep growing, because FrameTech showed up three years ago three and a half years ago in my world, but it was 30 years of all these previous businesses and experiences that leveraged on top of each other and got us to the point where we were able to do this.
00:21:20.871 --> 00:21:27.929
You couldn't execute something like this because we wouldn't have been the people that we are, with those experiences and the ability to make decisions.
00:21:27.929 --> 00:21:34.712
You're talking about something that requires tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars and the complexity of building manufacturing.
00:21:34.712 --> 00:21:38.662
You need to go through all the simple stuff and then gradually make it more complex.
00:21:39.423 --> 00:21:43.443
It was all those lessons from all those different companies, many of which didn't work.
00:21:43.443 --> 00:21:48.559
They failed, there were meltdowns and tens of millions of dollars that were lost.
00:21:48.559 --> 00:21:50.344
All that was part of the journey.
00:21:50.344 --> 00:21:57.939
Getting attached to the idea of failing is one of the biggest problems, because nobody likes the idea of being told that they're a failure.
00:21:57.939 --> 00:22:04.334
If you actually embrace that and say, oh, this is cool, I'm going to learn something, then it shifts how you move through life.
00:22:04.334 --> 00:22:05.096
You're not afraid of it.
00:22:05.096 --> 00:22:08.396
You're actually looking forward to it because you know you're going to keep growing in that space.
00:22:08.396 --> 00:22:10.542
It's all mental.
00:22:10.542 --> 00:22:14.282
It's the mindset of going into business, more than the actual tools and techniques.
00:22:15.315 --> 00:22:31.384
David, how do you cope with, if you like, the sense that you tried your hardest, you thought you were doing your best but it didn't work, and some of the self-questioning, if you like, the agonization of well, what did I do wrong and can I really?
00:22:39.121 --> 00:22:39.884
can I get it right next time?
00:22:39.884 --> 00:22:41.795
I'd love to hear how you build a robust mental attitude to that.
00:22:41.795 --> 00:22:44.019
Part of it is getting that stuff, those questions, out of your head.
00:22:44.019 --> 00:22:49.474
So one of the things that happened after 2008, after I lost $25 million and started over, I did a process of my lessons.
00:22:49.474 --> 00:22:55.788
It was literally spending time writing down all the lessons and then putting them in front of me, and then I wrote books on it.
00:22:55.788 --> 00:22:57.442
One of my books is called Reinvented Life.
00:22:57.442 --> 00:23:01.125
It was asking the question what just happened?
00:23:01.125 --> 00:23:02.621
What do I need to learn?
00:23:03.035 --> 00:23:10.701
When you get it out of your head one, you're not ruminating on it and it's in front of you and then you can start asking okay, what, what can I, what should I do differently?
00:23:10.701 --> 00:23:22.480
And and so this, this process of getting this stuff out, and one of the ways to do that is you write things down and you ask and you and you get a great coach or therapist that's asking you questions, that pulls this stuff out.
00:23:22.480 --> 00:23:32.164
But a lot of times people don't get it out of them, so they just they stay stuck in their stuff, and that's that's where you're going to get into trouble, because then you're second guessing yourself.
00:23:32.164 --> 00:23:33.465
If you can pull it out.
00:23:33.465 --> 00:23:37.317
Then it's out and it's like getting a virus out of you.
00:23:37.317 --> 00:23:47.103
It's like, okay, you're going to kill it, and sometimes you just need to embrace it, put it in a cage, and then you see it and you're like, okay, good, that monkey is now in a cage and it's not on my back.
00:23:48.263 --> 00:24:09.961
I think the idea that you'd write it down and write a story, however long or short, is a great one, and actually it reminds me of I wrote all the chapter outlines of kind of leaving China and what we had to do to leave there and rebuild in the UK, and I have all the outline but I haven't filled in the paragraphs and the sentences.
00:24:09.961 --> 00:24:15.477
So you're reminding me really of what probably should be a really good project for me to do as well.
00:24:15.477 --> 00:24:20.047
Damien, you've lost 25 million.
00:24:20.047 --> 00:24:27.750
Writing it down is one thing, but how do you recover and help your family to feel safe under those circumstances?
00:24:27.750 --> 00:24:33.207
Because for many entrepreneurs it's the financial insecurity that's the hardest for the rest of the family to bear.
00:24:33.527 --> 00:24:34.329
It's hard.
00:24:34.329 --> 00:24:34.750
I mean.
00:24:34.750 --> 00:24:39.210
I think one of the challenges for a lot of people is they're dealing with a lot of fear from spouses.
00:24:39.210 --> 00:24:44.128
In my case, there wasn't a spouse Without kids.
00:24:44.128 --> 00:24:48.223
It's a different process when you have spouses.
00:24:48.223 --> 00:24:50.146
When you have kids, I got to protect them.
00:24:50.146 --> 00:24:58.787
I look back at my own relationship with my father and he played it safe.
00:24:58.787 --> 00:24:59.869
He was playing not to lose.
00:24:59.869 --> 00:25:06.650
At the end of his life, before he passed away, he literally said there were so many things that I wanted to do and he didn't do them.
00:25:06.650 --> 00:25:08.371
That's not a good model.
00:25:08.371 --> 00:25:09.279
That was more of a warning.
00:25:09.760 --> 00:25:19.051
I think that, as entrepreneurs or just people in general that have ideas, you're really doing a disservice to your family by playing it safe all the time.
00:25:19.051 --> 00:25:28.270
I think it's important to be a good model, to be able to take risks, realizing that you don't have to take risks that are going to make you homeless.
00:25:28.270 --> 00:25:29.984
You don't have to take a risk that's going to kill you.
00:25:29.984 --> 00:25:35.808
It's really about going for it in life, because we're not going to regret what we did.
00:25:35.808 --> 00:25:37.134
We're going to regret what we didn't do.
00:25:37.134 --> 00:25:47.501
That's what we're going to look back on with just frustration, and I would suggest that that's important to think about instead of saying, okay, I'm going to hesitate, hesitate, I'm not going to do anything.
00:25:47.501 --> 00:25:59.405
You're not really doing the world a service and you're probably not going to ultimately make your family really proud of you when you didn't do the things that they're going to be proud of you for being bold and I've seen that over and over again.
00:25:59.405 --> 00:26:01.630
I would suggest that's probably true universally.
00:26:02.352 --> 00:26:04.055
No, I think that's a lovely sentiment.
00:26:04.055 --> 00:26:20.212
My daughter does say, dad, you keep thinking of new ideas, and I'm like, yeah, I know, you know that's the excitement of being an entrepreneur, but also we have to take calculated risks, and you mentioned earlier on about the need to find people to work with.
00:26:20.212 --> 00:26:31.133
Do you want to share with us, damien, your approach now, as we're getting a bit older, to reducing risk and reducing stress and increasing the chances of success?
00:26:31.133 --> 00:26:35.069
And you've got a book as well, unicornomics, which we're going to share a link to.
00:26:35.069 --> 00:26:36.961
Can you just take us through now?
00:26:36.981 --> 00:26:41.462
You've come through all of those losing 25 million, rebuilding, so credit to you for that.
00:26:41.462 --> 00:26:44.163
Frametech is going to be a legacy business, isn't it?
00:26:44.163 --> 00:26:46.333
I mean, you're going to leave a legacy for people.
00:26:46.333 --> 00:26:48.782
You're improving the world through what you're doing.
00:26:48.782 --> 00:27:03.660
What would be some guidance you'd give to entrepreneurs now, who maybe are younger than you and I, who are coming through this, who have said, damien, you're right, I got to go for it, I got to live my life, but can you help me out with a little bit of guidance?
00:27:04.423 --> 00:27:12.588
A couple of things that I've learned, and when I wrote Unicornomics, it was really understanding that there's a foundational piece to business.
00:27:12.588 --> 00:27:30.086
I call it the foundational 15% that gives you an 85% likelihood of success, and what that means is, in business, if you get these principles, if you build businesses, if you have the right team, if you have people, if you get these principles, if you build businesses, if you have the right team, if you have people, if you have a mission, there's this piece of business.
00:27:30.086 --> 00:27:32.859
Most people don't know what those things are, so they have a 99% chance of failure over the next 10 years.
00:27:32.859 --> 00:27:47.369
Whereas if you get this first, this foundational piece, and if you get it done upfront for example, having no capital really a problem, because you're going to make decisions in panic and anxiety that are not really going to be very sound and people go, oh, it's like cramming for a test.
00:27:47.369 --> 00:27:48.701
I just I can figure it out.
00:27:48.701 --> 00:27:56.250
Yeah, but if you, if all your mental energy is in a crisis all the time because you're running out of money, it's not sound, it's not, it's not one of the principles.
00:27:56.250 --> 00:28:10.010
So if you can say, okay, if I get these things right, I have an 85% likelihood of success, then you start asking yourself okay, cool, if it doesn't work?
00:28:10.010 --> 00:28:12.017
Statistically, that means I need two businesses that I launch and one of those is going to work.
00:28:12.017 --> 00:28:15.586
You're really setting yourself in a position of advantage as opposed to I'm going to go try an idea.
00:28:15.586 --> 00:28:19.284
Most of the time it's not going to work because none of those things are put in place.
00:28:19.284 --> 00:28:20.426
I'll tell you.
00:28:20.426 --> 00:28:29.082
It has everything to do with two groups of people One, mentors that are the wiser, balder, grayer, that are around you, that have been through cycles, that have that wisdom.
00:28:29.082 --> 00:28:31.467
Then it's the execution team.
00:28:32.368 --> 00:28:35.625
One of my mistakes early was thinking I should do everything because I'm pretty smart.
00:28:35.625 --> 00:28:47.205
That was one of the dumbest things that I've done is just saying, oh yeah, I can be my own accountant, my own attorney, my own ops person, my own marketer, instead of saying, okay, who are the best?
00:28:47.205 --> 00:28:48.372
I was also cheap when I hired people in the beginning.
00:28:48.372 --> 00:28:49.819
I would get whoever was the cheapest and guess what?
00:28:49.819 --> 00:28:53.086
I got dog crap for a lot of the results.
00:28:53.086 --> 00:28:59.846
So going and finding the best, finding the best people, the best talent those type of people do not cost you money.
00:28:59.846 --> 00:29:00.686
They make you money.
00:29:00.686 --> 00:29:03.553
Cheap people cost you a lot of money and that's a universal rule.
00:29:03.712 --> 00:29:13.820
The cheap, people are actually very expensive to hire is a really great fact, because I have made the same mistake and, in fact, the things that you've just said.
00:29:13.820 --> 00:29:17.432
That could have been me saying the same.
00:29:17.432 --> 00:29:38.028
And I'm also now at the other side, where I'm hiring a coach and saying, at my age of 58 and 25 years running businesses on three continents, I'm hiring a coach for the first time in my life because I've realized that I keep making the same mistakes, because some of the way that we behave doesn't change, regardless of the business we're in.
00:29:38.028 --> 00:29:41.125
So finding a mentor and a coach is essential.
00:29:41.125 --> 00:29:53.191
But also, as you've done with FrameTech, you've plainly got an amazingly skilled and experienced management team, which also must make it a lot more pleasant, to be honest, to do.
00:29:55.342 --> 00:30:09.670
When you have a world-class truly a world-class team, what happens is you're able to let go of trying to be in the middle of things that you have no business being in the middle of, because you trust those people to be able to execute, not just because they have skills, but because they have the resilience and the commitment.
00:30:09.670 --> 00:30:19.105
And if you don't have those world-class people, then what tends to happen is the grinders, the smart people tend to try to get in the middle of all sorts of things and they don't really do it very well.
00:30:19.105 --> 00:30:35.109
I found that with FrameTech it's the ultimate, where these people are execution geniuses in their space and then we come together and there's this incredible trust amongst the people, the leadership, because everybody trusts the other people with their skills and their commitment.
00:30:35.854 --> 00:30:44.993
That's really nice and, considering you're solving such an important problem, it's fantastic that you've really safeguarded the chance of success.
00:30:44.993 --> 00:30:55.903
Damian lupo, I am going to ask you, um, for a, a book or a podcast, because you've plainly lived a lot, accomplished a lot and learned a lot.
00:30:55.903 --> 00:31:00.820
Is there a book or a podcast that you would recommend to people?
00:31:02.124 --> 00:31:03.807
I culminating.
00:31:03.807 --> 00:31:07.962
I mean I I've read, like you and many others, a million books.
00:31:07.962 --> 00:31:17.241
I'm really proud of Unicornomics because it creates in less than an hour an opportunity for somebody to say, okay, what are the things that are going to give me that chance at success?
00:31:17.241 --> 00:31:28.779
And I talk a lot about that on my podcast, fu, Financial Underdogs podcast so people can get a lot more of my brain and just the way that I think on that podcast.
00:31:28.779 --> 00:31:34.221
So it's really those two things Unicornomics and Financial Underdogs I think you can get.
00:31:34.221 --> 00:31:41.604
If you like my thinking, if you like the way that I look at life and the experiences you want to leverage off of those are two places where you can really gain a lot.
00:31:42.325 --> 00:31:53.576
Great, and that's unicornomicsnet, by the way, and of course I'll put the details in the show notes and it says the foundational first 15% to get your billion dollar business.
00:31:53.576 --> 00:32:03.400
And you've got the individual packs of 10 and a pack of 50 as well that people can buy.
00:32:03.400 --> 00:32:05.284
Damien Lupo fascinating story.
00:32:05.284 --> 00:32:15.834
It's always so hard in these situations because you've got a brilliant business to talk about and you've got amazing wisdom to share as well, Trying to blend both If people would like to find out more about you.
00:32:15.834 --> 00:32:19.911
Obviously you've got Unicornomics and you've got your podcast, but what about getting hold of you?
00:32:19.911 --> 00:32:21.324
Can they connect with you somewhere?
00:32:22.086 --> 00:32:34.002
Yeah, best place to just connect with me on LinkedIn and I'm happy to interact with people and they can see what I'm up to and opportunities to do FaceTime and that kind of stuff, if that's something of interest.
00:32:34.143 --> 00:32:35.548
So yeah, definitely reach out to me there.
00:32:35.548 --> 00:32:37.384
And that's Damien S Lupo.
00:32:37.384 --> 00:32:39.210
I think isn't it on LinkedIn.
00:32:43.201 --> 00:32:43.645
That's a good question.
00:32:43.645 --> 00:32:46.467
I think if you just put my name, Damian Lupo, in there, there's only one that you're going to find.
00:32:46.467 --> 00:32:48.207
I don't think I have any impersonators yet.
00:32:49.580 --> 00:32:54.765
No clones, no digital twins, but if there is going to be one, it should be the original.
00:32:54.765 --> 00:32:56.041
They talk to Damian.
00:32:56.041 --> 00:33:03.109
Thank you for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur, sharing so much amazing, positive ideas and also inspirational wisdom.
00:33:03.932 --> 00:33:04.792
Thank you, jim, appreciate it.
00:33:10.660 --> 00:33:16.282
So we've been listening to Damien Lupo, who is the chief investment officer and co-founder at a company called FrameTech, and he's in Sedona, arizona, where it's beautiful but a little bit hot at the minute.
00:33:16.282 --> 00:33:32.506
But it's really some age-old wisdom there about surrounding yourself with people that are smarter and able to work with you and guide you and also to make sure you've got some of the essential elements for success in place before you start your business.
00:33:32.506 --> 00:33:35.240
But the other final point is give it a go.
00:33:35.240 --> 00:33:44.414
You know that being an entrepreneur is a way of life and it carries its risks, but it really also carries a large number of rewards.
00:33:44.414 --> 00:33:50.393
So I really really appreciate Damon saying it's worth going for it because life is worth living.
00:33:50.393 --> 00:33:52.684
So thank you for listening to me.
00:33:52.684 --> 00:33:59.210
Your host, jim James, on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur If you've enjoyed it, please share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur.
00:33:59.210 --> 00:34:06.611
The reviews are great, but it's the sharing that really shows that you care and, until we meet again, encourage you to keep on communicating.
00:00:00.981 --> 00:00:06.993
And what about having an idea but you need $40 million to make it come to reality?
00:00:06.993 --> 00:00:18.643
If you do, or maybe need a little bit less, then you might want to listen to this conversation, because I want to talk to Damien Lupo, who is the Chief Investment Officer and founder of a company called Frame Tech.
00:00:18.643 --> 00:00:30.967
Damien and his group of really industrial engineers and innovators are transforming the way houses are being built, so we're going to hear about how they are doing that.
00:00:30.967 --> 00:00:32.593
Damian, welcome to the show.
00:00:33.299 --> 00:00:34.003
Hey, it's great to be here.
00:00:34.003 --> 00:00:34.625
Thanks for having me.
00:00:35.320 --> 00:00:37.530
Well, thank you for coming on, because I know you have a history.
00:00:37.530 --> 00:00:54.448
You've built over 70 companies and you've invested and bought over 150 properties, but FrameTech is taking a really innovative approach to how houses are being built and you're reducing the cost and the time and the environmental impact all of which are great.
00:00:54.448 --> 00:01:05.290
But we're also going to hear about how this company has reinvented an industry, and I think that's really really inspirational for anyone listening, that every industry can be re-engineered, and for good.
00:01:05.290 --> 00:01:12.721
Damien, tell us about FrameTech, the problem that you're solving, and then we can talk about how you're solving it.
00:01:13.524 --> 00:01:13.905
For sure.
00:01:13.905 --> 00:01:17.451
Frametech is solving the housing shortage, the crisis.
00:01:17.451 --> 00:01:19.302
The crisis is that we don't have enough housing.
00:01:19.302 --> 00:01:28.090
We're probably 10 million units missing and we go backwards every year in the United States and other places in the world where there's simply not enough being built.
00:01:28.090 --> 00:01:36.923
Old stuff is needing to be torn down and rebuilt, the population is growing and the problem is there's not enough people able to do it.
00:01:37.082 --> 00:01:42.201
And the technology hasn't changed in 71 years, since the nail gun was invented.
00:01:42.201 --> 00:01:44.969
That was literally the last major innovation.
00:01:44.969 --> 00:01:59.240
And so there was a mad scientist, if you will, named Marvin, and he started off doing the framing of houses back in the 70s and he had an idea to transform how houses were framed, which is the core.
00:01:59.240 --> 00:02:03.652
Once you figure that problem out, once you solve that, then everything else can follow along.
00:02:03.652 --> 00:02:05.944
But if you don't solve that, you're really stuck.
00:02:05.944 --> 00:02:20.449
And he did that and had an idea, and then it was in his brain for 20 years and it finally that idea found us, found the money, and we got together and we had FrameTech babies, and that's where things are today.
00:02:20.468 --> 00:02:31.032
Let's just talk first of all, then, about how it came together, because there's a team of you about six or eight senior managers, all with experience but different skill sets.
00:02:31.032 --> 00:02:44.265
Often companies start and maybe one or two founders, juniors, somewhere beavering away, but you're an experienced group of entrepreneurs and engineers and people in the construction industry.
00:02:44.265 --> 00:02:45.389
How did you come together?
00:02:45.389 --> 00:02:48.269
Because that in itself is a good story, isn't it?
00:02:49.961 --> 00:03:00.852
It's really fascinating when you put the time in, you become a person with experience, then naturally things sort of find their way to you.
00:03:01.539 --> 00:03:11.430
In the beginning people without experience you're trying to force things, you're trying to get things to happen, but what you need is you need the actual experience of doing things.
00:03:11.430 --> 00:03:12.514
And then, ultimately, what happened with FrameTech?
00:03:12.514 --> 00:03:20.944
There's a group of guys that all found each other through a mutual contact and it was like hey, there's a bunch of people with a bunch of brainpower and experience.
00:03:20.944 --> 00:03:29.668
And then there was my side that had a relationship network of people with money that wanted to find a great idea and an opportunity to grow their money.
00:03:29.668 --> 00:03:36.890
And we came together and over an afternoon meeting we said we like each other, we want to do this.
00:03:36.890 --> 00:03:38.961
And I said, all right, you've got your money.
00:03:38.961 --> 00:03:44.342
And these people said, fantastic, You're probably full of baloney, but we love it.
00:03:44.342 --> 00:03:48.293
And they decided they wanted to move forward and we launched this thing.
00:03:48.293 --> 00:03:54.930
So it was really about the timing and it was about people coming together that had had decades of previous experience and everybody was ready.
00:03:55.840 --> 00:04:03.471
And I think what's really really important just to note about that is that, as we get older, that our experience actually does have a lot of value.
00:04:03.471 --> 00:04:14.008
Right, I know that we're worried about AI, but actually experiencing connectivity and staying in touch with people is a really important part of staying relevant and staying active economically.
00:04:14.008 --> 00:04:16.341
And you know David Epstein in his book Range.
00:04:16.341 --> 00:04:27.382
You know he talks about actually, as we get older, the range of skill sets and connections that we bring to situations is part of our value as much as our functional skill set.
00:04:27.382 --> 00:04:31.918
Damien, take us through the innovation that happened.
00:04:31.918 --> 00:04:39.781
Obviously, you mentioned the nail gun, which is 71 years ago, which just shoots nails right, I guess, at high velocity and high speed.
00:04:39.781 --> 00:04:44.632
What's the essence of the innovation that Marvin had?
00:04:44.632 --> 00:04:52.572
Because I think that's also so important to understand that really any industry is open and ripe for innovation.
00:04:53.201 --> 00:04:56.404
It starts off with a question Can we do something different?
00:04:56.404 --> 00:04:57.127
Can we do it better?
00:04:57.127 --> 00:04:58.565
You can do different things.
00:04:58.565 --> 00:05:02.548
So there's a couple of questions Can we do this?
00:05:02.548 --> 00:05:03.511
And then should we do it?
00:05:03.511 --> 00:05:11.423
And to your point about AI AI is giving us a lot of how to do things and can we?
00:05:11.423 --> 00:05:16.173
And it's giving you, but it doesn't really answer the moral, ethical or otherwise the question of should we, why are we doing this?
00:05:17.319 --> 00:05:26.444
And so the innovation Marvin had was saying okay, there's a lot of things that slow a process down of framing and there's a lot of waste.
00:05:26.444 --> 00:05:27.507
Can we speed this up?
00:05:27.507 --> 00:05:29.596
Can we make it better quality?
00:05:29.596 --> 00:05:33.264
Can we do this without all sorts of dumpsters full of waste?
00:05:34.447 --> 00:05:55.848
Ultimately, that turned into the material handling process, which is you take these bunks, these big stacks of boards and in this process, this system that we built that's patented you run your boards through it, check to take out any defects, you cut out the defects and then you have all these different boards that are on a big assembly line and they get stuck together with a finger joiner.
00:05:55.848 --> 00:06:01.884
And when you do that, you end up with all these boards stuck together and it turns into one continuous, infinite board.
00:06:01.884 --> 00:06:16.211
And when you have that, then you take and you cut off the piece that you want, the exact distance, whether it's a six foot or an eight foot or a 14 foot, whatever it is, and once you have that, then you can use that to put into trusses and walls.
00:06:16.211 --> 00:06:26.841
So it was really about giving us perfect boards, the exact size and having virtually no waste, and that's never been done before and that's the been done before and that's the secret sauce here.
00:06:27.762 --> 00:06:54.105
And there's a great video at frametechcom and that's frame, as in F-R-A-M-E and then T-E-Ccom, and there's an explainer video which I'm also really a fan of from a marketing point of view, because Damon's explained these finger joints and it's also then really nicely illustrated on the website for potential investors, potential partners, potential employees and so on.
00:06:54.105 --> 00:07:09.584
So using an explainer video is great and the innovation that you get one continuous board is a really great illustration for me anyway of how he's taken what was a recurring industry problem and thought of it.
00:07:09.584 --> 00:07:12.827
But then it needed your funds, your $40 million.
00:07:12.827 --> 00:07:16.473
What did the money get spent on, Damian?
00:07:17.757 --> 00:07:22.358
So when you build manufacturing, it's incredibly capital intensive, so you need a building.
00:07:22.720 --> 00:07:27.480
And when you do something new, you probably need a building that doesn't exist because you have a certain layout.
00:07:27.480 --> 00:07:38.675
So, building the building $15 million to build the building and then all this equipment that you put in there and the robots it's amazing how fast that adds up and you end up.
00:07:38.675 --> 00:07:44.935
Typically, with most businesses, you have an idea of what things are going to cost and then you start building and you say, oh, what about this?
00:07:44.935 --> 00:07:46.860
Let's make it bigger, let's add this.
00:07:46.860 --> 00:07:55.336
And then your price tag goes up, which it did here, and we were flexible enough to say, okay, yes, we want to have more robotics, more automation.
00:07:55.336 --> 00:08:09.737
From the beginning to the time we actually started producing, which was about two, two and a half years that process we ended up taking our headcount, the labor, down by about 30% because of the innovation.
00:08:09.737 --> 00:08:18.435
So when you do that, we're creating all these jobs, but it's not as labor intensive as it was going to be and ultimately that ends up being more profitable and we're more efficient because of the robotics and we're using technology.
00:08:18.595 --> 00:08:27.610
So you've, as you say, we normally plan on doubling the expense and doubling the time, don't we?
00:08:27.610 --> 00:08:31.141
From our business plan, it always takes longer and more money, but for $40 million got you the first plant.
00:08:31.141 --> 00:08:45.215
I would like to hear the story of how you raised the money, because some people might go institutional one-on-one Just tell us you've got an established industry with a new production process.
00:08:45.215 --> 00:08:49.484
What was the story in terms of raising $40 million?
00:08:50.691 --> 00:08:53.498
So people ask a lot of times how do you raise money?
00:08:53.498 --> 00:08:55.001
How do you make that happen?
00:08:55.001 --> 00:08:55.282
How does it?
00:08:55.330 --> 00:08:56.234
happen so fast.
00:08:56.354 --> 00:09:02.899
And at this point FrameTech has over 100 million that has come into it as it expands and is working on additional plants and locations.
00:09:02.899 --> 00:09:05.057
And none of that was institutional.
00:09:05.057 --> 00:09:07.856
It was all individuals, main Street, not Wall Street.
00:09:07.856 --> 00:09:09.402
And how did that happen?
00:09:09.402 --> 00:09:15.134
It happened because relationships and trust was built over years and when you have trust.
00:09:15.674 --> 00:09:30.958
Stephen Covey has a great book called the Speed of Trust and that has never been more relevant or more true than here, where people that have relationships with us said we like what you do, and it tells you that people really invest with people.
00:09:30.958 --> 00:09:40.240
They don't necessarily invest in the thing, because if they don't really know who's running it and it's all about the team, then it slows everything down and people are uneasy.
00:09:40.240 --> 00:09:42.962
Here this was relatively straightforward.
00:09:42.962 --> 00:09:48.696
People said we like you, we trust you and they wanted to be a part of what we were doing.
00:09:48.696 --> 00:09:53.519
But again, it was built on years, so it wasn't a Google ad and that can work.
00:09:53.519 --> 00:09:57.452
But it's very different than when you have relationships and that there is no hack to that.
00:09:57.452 --> 00:09:59.537
You have to serve people and you have to give.
00:09:59.537 --> 00:10:04.793
And then it's very easy to say I've got this idea and people say we're in because we're investing in you.
00:10:04.994 --> 00:10:27.932
And I think we're so obsessed with young founders and raising money quickly and becoming the next internet unicorn that your story just reminds us that there's a lot of money and wisdom in the connections that people build up over a lifetime and that we should really be really sort of making the most of those Damien as well, doesn't it?
00:10:27.932 --> 00:10:33.663
In terms of the platform, you've raised the money.
00:10:33.663 --> 00:10:36.397
What will be some of the obstacles that you face?
00:10:36.397 --> 00:10:49.238
Because presumably there are sort of entrenched interests in construction as well as there are in any industry, and you're bringing in an innovation that must be good for some and bad for others.
00:10:49.238 --> 00:10:51.763
So what's been some of the challenge there?
00:10:52.673 --> 00:10:53.275
so there there's.
00:10:53.275 --> 00:10:57.090
You run into into when you have something new, you're going to run into skepticism.
00:10:57.090 --> 00:11:10.817
You're going to run into people that don't want you to change the system because they have a vested interest when you're doing something faster, less expensive, more efficiently people that are used to just milking the cow with their old system.
00:11:10.817 --> 00:11:21.933
It's very irritating to them when you potentially take away and even though there's so much opportunity like when you're talking about 10 million missing houses FrameTech alone is not going to solve this.
00:11:21.933 --> 00:11:23.155
We're not taking away business.
00:11:23.155 --> 00:11:24.236
We're adding capacity.
00:11:24.236 --> 00:11:27.861
We're adding supply, but there are people that think it's a zero-sum game.
00:11:27.861 --> 00:11:30.586
If we build something, it takes away from them and that's simply not true.
00:11:34.652 --> 00:11:37.777
Developer who wants, they need more framing.
00:11:37.777 --> 00:11:43.610
They wonder if what we're saying is true, because there's been a lot of companies that say they can do something but they haven't been able to deliver.
00:11:43.610 --> 00:11:59.839
We've moved past that because over the last eight months we've been delivering and the whole world can see our stuff posted online on LinkedIn and they can see our buildings and you can see an old house, like a house that's built in a traditional way, and then there's a frame tech framed house next to each other.
00:11:59.839 --> 00:12:08.422
We have examples of that and it's night and day, because our stuff is precise, it looks like furniture and our stuff is potentially up to four times faster.
00:12:08.422 --> 00:12:15.892
So we'll produce, we'll frame a house from a slab to framing done in one day, and that normally is four to seven days.
00:12:15.892 --> 00:12:19.539
So people are watching it and you have to deliver.
00:12:19.539 --> 00:12:24.236
Ideas are simple, ideas are free and it's all about execution.
00:12:24.236 --> 00:12:28.212
And what's happened is we've executed and now the market believes.
00:12:29.756 --> 00:12:44.835
And when you say you could do it so much quicker, is that because in the factory you are sort of preparing all the lumber to be the right size and it's kind of pre-cut and I don't want to be rude here but almost like an Ikea.
00:12:44.835 --> 00:12:50.798
When you get it it's being assembled on site as opposed to being sort of fabricated on site.
00:12:50.798 --> 00:12:53.960
So is that essentially the difference?
00:12:56.092 --> 00:12:59.134
Anytime you can do something in a manufacturing-contained system you're going to have.
00:12:59.153 --> 00:13:09.210
It's going to be faster, it's going to be better quality, it's it's like the idea of of building a car in your front yard, as opposed to having a manufacturing plant that pushes that thing through with precision and robotics.
00:13:09.210 --> 00:13:11.899
And it's the same thing, which one's going to take longer.
00:13:11.899 --> 00:13:21.693
You can build a Toyota 4Runner in a in a matter of hours in the plants in Japan, and if you try to do that on your own, I don't know how long that would take a year, two years.
00:13:21.693 --> 00:13:24.000
So it's the same efficiencies.
00:13:24.000 --> 00:13:30.331
You build all that stuff and then you bring it out and you basically put it together on site and it's unbelievably more efficient.
00:13:30.331 --> 00:13:35.202
It's not incremental, it's exponentially more efficient, more beautiful, more precise.
00:13:35.202 --> 00:13:47.753
Everything about it is hyper better and, ultimately, when you produce that type of product and it's faster, you start to make things less expensive, because when you're shaving off time, it's saving money.
00:13:47.753 --> 00:13:54.394
When you produce more, which we can faster, more supply economics, it's going to reduce the cost.
00:13:54.394 --> 00:13:58.011
It's solving the problem, it's producing more and it's compressing pricing.
00:13:58.253 --> 00:14:21.945
In terms of the distribution strategy, damian, if you are maybe offering different people different values, are you able to go through the usual supply chain merchants, contractors and so on or are you disrupting the whole value chain in manufacturing and construction?
00:14:23.432 --> 00:14:24.053
In this model.
00:14:24.053 --> 00:14:27.576
I mean, we're going direct to our customers, so it's more like a Tesla model.
00:14:27.576 --> 00:14:34.301
There's not brokers and middlemen, and so what that does is it saves people a lot of money.
00:14:34.301 --> 00:14:41.140
It's sort of like the financial system If you can go peer-to-peer, it's way better than if you have 10 different middlemen, agencies, institutions.
00:14:41.140 --> 00:14:45.038
You want to do that Kind of like how Bitcoin takes out all the Western unions.
00:14:45.038 --> 00:14:48.451
It's direct and there's really nothing in the middle and that's just.
00:14:48.451 --> 00:14:54.177
That's better for everybody except the middlemen, which is irritating because they're like how are we going to get paid?
00:14:54.177 --> 00:14:56.111
And sometimes they have to go away.
00:14:56.111 --> 00:14:59.096
And so ours is very, it's very streamlined, it's very direct.
00:14:59.096 --> 00:15:06.899
And people like that too, because they know they're talking to one party that's going to deliver everything and they're not trying to figure out the 15 different people they have to organize.
00:15:06.899 --> 00:15:09.259
They have one phone call and everything is done.
00:15:09.610 --> 00:15:12.436
And in terms of the material you're using, wood.
00:15:12.436 --> 00:15:15.943
I will just ask that question about sort of sustainability.
00:15:15.943 --> 00:15:24.654
You've talked about reduction of waste, um removing removing off cuts, for example.
00:15:24.654 --> 00:15:28.846
What about the sustainability aspect of a frame tech, damien?
00:15:29.888 --> 00:15:35.431
this is one of the great things when you think about and most people don't realize that I mean, obviously, framing is big with wood.
00:15:35.431 --> 00:15:42.634
92 of housing is built with wood and in the united housing is built with wood in the United States and it changes around the world.
00:15:42.634 --> 00:15:46.642
When you think about wood, what's more sustainable than wood?
00:15:46.642 --> 00:15:49.518
The only question is are these big trees or little trees?
00:15:49.518 --> 00:15:55.359
They're smaller trees, they're the ones that are replanted and grow over and over, not the 100, 200-year-old redwoods.
00:15:55.359 --> 00:15:56.910
Obviously, that's not sustainable.
00:15:56.910 --> 00:16:08.202
But this is incredibly sustainable and you just keep regenerating your forests and it's something that, especially with smaller stuff and we have innovation that we're working on that would make that even more sustainable.
00:16:08.202 --> 00:16:14.859
It's great because it works with a resource that doesn't have an end.
00:16:14.859 --> 00:16:30.342
It's not like there's a certain amount of oil in the ground and we keep finding new technology to be able to pull more out, but there's an unlimited amount of sunlight that's going to grow an unlimited amount of trees, and so we're working with something that is extremely, if not unlimited, sustainable.
00:16:31.769 --> 00:16:57.567
And in terms of the sort of opportunity to provide low-cost housing, but also presumably emergency housing, housing where there's been a disaster of some kind, if you're able to rebuild that's that speed and at scale, do you have a strategy as well with frame tech, to be providing, if you like, sort of emergency housing and those sorts of things, damien?
00:16:58.730 --> 00:17:01.278
are just we're not really set up for emergency housing.
00:17:01.278 --> 00:17:15.643
The cool thing is there are companies like boxable and others that are built to build an entire house or you know these, these structures inside of a plant and that whole thing can literally be put somewhere, can be on a semi-truck, and so that's fantastic.
00:17:15.643 --> 00:17:25.964
We're more set up to be within 100 to 200 miles, where we build it at our plant and then we bring it out on site, and so there's different models.
00:17:25.964 --> 00:17:34.505
One of the things that's important in our business, and really any business, is to know who you are, what you do and who you serve, and not being everything to everybody.
00:17:34.505 --> 00:17:36.798
I've watched people say, oh yeah, we can do that.
00:17:36.798 --> 00:17:39.490
We can do a lot of things that we don't do.
00:17:39.490 --> 00:17:43.403
That's on purpose, because we want to be efficient, we want to be able to give the biggest impact.
00:17:43.403 --> 00:17:49.141
If we say we're going to build custom 25,000 square foot homes, we can do that.
00:17:49.141 --> 00:17:50.403
Are we going to focus on that?
00:17:50.403 --> 00:17:51.364
No, are we going to do it?
00:17:51.364 --> 00:17:53.567
Probably not, but we can.
00:17:53.567 --> 00:17:56.790
It's just being really clear on our avatar and our niche.
00:17:56.790 --> 00:18:02.140
I mean, the riches are in the niches, and that's never been truer.
00:18:02.140 --> 00:18:03.246
You've got to know who you are, and then you can expand.
00:18:03.266 --> 00:18:04.028
Amazon didn't start in everything.
00:18:04.028 --> 00:18:07.181
They started with books and that was the niche, and then it expanded from there.
00:18:07.181 --> 00:18:14.356
So it's the same model here, expanded from there.
00:18:14.356 --> 00:18:15.038
So it's the same model here.
00:18:15.038 --> 00:18:16.019
Yeah, so the first plant was really the test.
00:18:16.019 --> 00:18:16.601
Can this idea be executed?
00:18:16.601 --> 00:18:22.059
And when the answer was yes, we can, then the question is all right, we can solve this massive problem.
00:18:22.059 --> 00:18:28.153
We need more capacity because at this point, we have way more demand than we have the ability to produce, which is a good problem.
00:18:28.153 --> 00:18:31.796
It's still a problem and the question was why are we doing this?
00:18:31.796 --> 00:18:35.546
We're doing this to solve a crisis, and it's not going to be solved with one plant.
00:18:35.546 --> 00:18:49.902
So we're continuing to expand in both Arizona, with additional plants into Texas, and we have on frametechcom you can see the nationwide in the United States, the rollout plans for these plants and in the key markets that we're targeting.
00:18:49.902 --> 00:18:53.702
All over the country there's this is literally a problem everywhere.
00:18:54.954 --> 00:19:09.742
And are you hoping to still have frame tech as the business with these plants, or will you license the technology and have other other companies start to use your tech, cause you could scale more quickly in a way, couldn't you that way?
00:19:10.265 --> 00:19:19.425
A hundred percent and there's there's an opportunity for for outside parties to potentially license our stuff, our technology that we've patented, and build more of these.
00:19:19.425 --> 00:19:29.586
And so, because the vision is to impact society, to build more housing, there's not a really rigid model on how that's going to be.
00:19:29.586 --> 00:19:39.824
It's going to be where we protect the culture and we protect the brand and we build as much as we can to solve as many people's housing issues and drive prices down as possible.
00:19:39.824 --> 00:19:45.660
So it's fairly flexible as long as we don't violate our principles and our moral code and compass.
00:19:46.923 --> 00:19:57.420
And Damian, you've got a long history as an entrepreneur, so let's shift gears a little bit, because you've plainly got a great vision and a trajectory really for frame tech.
00:19:57.420 --> 00:20:15.692
Tell us a little bit about, as an entrepreneur, some of the lessons that you've learned when it comes to framing and I say framing, I'm framing a business, I've used that phrase, but we're going to talk about your book, unicornomics, which we're going to give a link to at the end.
00:20:15.692 --> 00:20:22.729
But tell us some of the lessons that you've learned in growing FrameTech and also some of your other 70 companies.
00:20:23.875 --> 00:20:26.585
One of the things that I've learned is it doesn't matter if you're in the right business.
00:20:26.585 --> 00:20:39.526
It matters that you get involved in something, and one of the things that people do, I see all the time is they're trying to figure out the perfect business, and if I looked back and had that attitude, I probably would never have started with anything, because I've had all sorts of crazy things that I've been involved with.
00:20:39.526 --> 00:20:47.192
I even had an iPad business one time an international iPad business shipping iPads to Sweden, and it was just a learning opportunity for me.
00:20:47.192 --> 00:20:52.195
One of the lessons was don't be in this business, and that can be a great lesson.
00:20:52.195 --> 00:20:55.262
What you shouldn't do is more important than what you should do.
00:20:55.262 --> 00:21:01.507
So it's going and learning different things from each of these businesses, and that's one of the things.
00:21:01.507 --> 00:21:04.500
Really, it's not about picking that perfect thing.
00:21:04.500 --> 00:21:20.871
It's about doing something and keep growing, because FrameTech showed up three years ago three and a half years ago in my world, but it was 30 years of all these previous businesses and experiences that leveraged on top of each other and got us to the point where we were able to do this.
00:21:20.871 --> 00:21:27.929
You couldn't execute something like this because we wouldn't have been the people that we are, with those experiences and the ability to make decisions.
00:21:27.929 --> 00:21:34.712
You're talking about something that requires tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars and the complexity of building manufacturing.
00:21:34.712 --> 00:21:38.662
You need to go through all the simple stuff and then gradually make it more complex.
00:21:39.423 --> 00:21:43.443
It was all those lessons from all those different companies, many of which didn't work.
00:21:43.443 --> 00:21:48.559
They failed, there were meltdowns and tens of millions of dollars that were lost.
00:21:48.559 --> 00:21:50.344
All that was part of the journey.
00:21:50.344 --> 00:21:57.939
Getting attached to the idea of failing is one of the biggest problems, because nobody likes the idea of being told that they're a failure.
00:21:57.939 --> 00:22:04.334
If you actually embrace that and say, oh, this is cool, I'm going to learn something, then it shifts how you move through life.
00:22:04.334 --> 00:22:05.096
You're not afraid of it.
00:22:05.096 --> 00:22:08.396
You're actually looking forward to it because you know you're going to keep growing in that space.
00:22:08.396 --> 00:22:10.542
It's all mental.
00:22:10.542 --> 00:22:14.282
It's the mindset of going into business, more than the actual tools and techniques.
00:22:15.315 --> 00:22:31.384
David, how do you cope with, if you like, the sense that you tried your hardest, you thought you were doing your best but it didn't work, and some of the self-questioning, if you like, the agonization of well, what did I do wrong and can I really?
00:22:39.121 --> 00:22:39.884
can I get it right next time?
00:22:39.884 --> 00:22:41.795
I'd love to hear how you build a robust mental attitude to that.
00:22:41.795 --> 00:22:44.019
Part of it is getting that stuff, those questions, out of your head.
00:22:44.019 --> 00:22:49.474
So one of the things that happened after 2008, after I lost $25 million and started over, I did a process of my lessons.
00:22:49.474 --> 00:22:55.788
It was literally spending time writing down all the lessons and then putting them in front of me, and then I wrote books on it.
00:22:55.788 --> 00:22:57.442
One of my books is called Reinvented Life.
00:22:57.442 --> 00:23:01.125
It was asking the question what just happened?
00:23:01.125 --> 00:23:02.621
What do I need to learn?
00:23:03.035 --> 00:23:10.701
When you get it out of your head one, you're not ruminating on it and it's in front of you and then you can start asking okay, what, what can I, what should I do differently?
00:23:10.701 --> 00:23:22.480
And and so this, this process of getting this stuff out, and one of the ways to do that is you write things down and you ask and you and you get a great coach or therapist that's asking you questions, that pulls this stuff out.
00:23:22.480 --> 00:23:32.164
But a lot of times people don't get it out of them, so they just they stay stuck in their stuff, and that's that's where you're going to get into trouble, because then you're second guessing yourself.
00:23:32.164 --> 00:23:33.465
If you can pull it out.
00:23:33.465 --> 00:23:37.317
Then it's out and it's like getting a virus out of you.
00:23:37.317 --> 00:23:47.103
It's like, okay, you're going to kill it, and sometimes you just need to embrace it, put it in a cage, and then you see it and you're like, okay, good, that monkey is now in a cage and it's not on my back.
00:23:48.263 --> 00:24:09.961
I think the idea that you'd write it down and write a story, however long or short, is a great one, and actually it reminds me of I wrote all the chapter outlines of kind of leaving China and what we had to do to leave there and rebuild in the UK, and I have all the outline but I haven't filled in the paragraphs and the sentences.
00:24:09.961 --> 00:24:15.477
So you're reminding me really of what probably should be a really good project for me to do as well.
00:24:15.477 --> 00:24:20.047
Damien, you've lost 25 million.
00:24:20.047 --> 00:24:27.750
Writing it down is one thing, but how do you recover and help your family to feel safe under those circumstances?
00:24:27.750 --> 00:24:33.207
Because for many entrepreneurs it's the financial insecurity that's the hardest for the rest of the family to bear.
00:24:33.527 --> 00:24:34.329
It's hard.
00:24:34.329 --> 00:24:34.750
I mean.
00:24:34.750 --> 00:24:39.210
I think one of the challenges for a lot of people is they're dealing with a lot of fear from spouses.
00:24:39.210 --> 00:24:44.128
In my case, there wasn't a spouse Without kids.
00:24:44.128 --> 00:24:48.223
It's a different process when you have spouses.
00:24:48.223 --> 00:24:50.146
When you have kids, I got to protect them.
00:24:50.146 --> 00:24:58.787
I look back at my own relationship with my father and he played it safe.
00:24:58.787 --> 00:24:59.869
He was playing not to lose.
00:24:59.869 --> 00:25:06.650
At the end of his life, before he passed away, he literally said there were so many things that I wanted to do and he didn't do them.
00:25:06.650 --> 00:25:08.371
That's not a good model.
00:25:08.371 --> 00:25:09.279
That was more of a warning.
00:25:09.760 --> 00:25:19.051
I think that, as entrepreneurs or just people in general that have ideas, you're really doing a disservice to your family by playing it safe all the time.
00:25:19.051 --> 00:25:28.270
I think it's important to be a good model, to be able to take risks, realizing that you don't have to take risks that are going to make you homeless.
00:25:28.270 --> 00:25:29.984
You don't have to take a risk that's going to kill you.
00:25:29.984 --> 00:25:35.808
It's really about going for it in life, because we're not going to regret what we did.
00:25:35.808 --> 00:25:37.134
We're going to regret what we didn't do.
00:25:37.134 --> 00:25:47.501
That's what we're going to look back on with just frustration, and I would suggest that that's important to think about instead of saying, okay, I'm going to hesitate, hesitate, I'm not going to do anything.
00:25:47.501 --> 00:25:59.405
You're not really doing the world a service and you're probably not going to ultimately make your family really proud of you when you didn't do the things that they're going to be proud of you for being bold and I've seen that over and over again.
00:25:59.405 --> 00:26:01.630
I would suggest that's probably true universally.
00:26:02.352 --> 00:26:04.055
No, I think that's a lovely sentiment.
00:26:04.055 --> 00:26:20.212
My daughter does say, dad, you keep thinking of new ideas, and I'm like, yeah, I know, you know that's the excitement of being an entrepreneur, but also we have to take calculated risks, and you mentioned earlier on about the need to find people to work with.
00:26:20.212 --> 00:26:31.133
Do you want to share with us, damien, your approach now, as we're getting a bit older, to reducing risk and reducing stress and increasing the chances of success?
00:26:31.133 --> 00:26:35.069
And you've got a book as well, unicornomics, which we're going to share a link to.
00:26:35.069 --> 00:26:36.961
Can you just take us through now?
00:26:36.981 --> 00:26:41.462
You've come through all of those losing 25 million, rebuilding, so credit to you for that.
00:26:41.462 --> 00:26:44.163
Frametech is going to be a legacy business, isn't it?
00:26:44.163 --> 00:26:46.333
I mean, you're going to leave a legacy for people.
00:26:46.333 --> 00:26:48.782
You're improving the world through what you're doing.
00:26:48.782 --> 00:27:03.660
What would be some guidance you'd give to entrepreneurs now, who maybe are younger than you and I, who are coming through this, who have said, damien, you're right, I got to go for it, I got to live my life, but can you help me out with a little bit of guidance?
00:27:04.423 --> 00:27:12.588
A couple of things that I've learned, and when I wrote Unicornomics, it was really understanding that there's a foundational piece to business.
00:27:12.588 --> 00:27:30.086
I call it the foundational 15% that gives you an 85% likelihood of success, and what that means is, in business, if you get these principles, if you build businesses, if you have the right team, if you have people, if you get these principles, if you build businesses, if you have the right team, if you have people, if you have a mission, there's this piece of business.
00:27:30.086 --> 00:27:32.859
Most people don't know what those things are, so they have a 99% chance of failure over the next 10 years.
00:27:32.859 --> 00:27:47.369
Whereas if you get this first, this foundational piece, and if you get it done upfront for example, having no capital really a problem, because you're going to make decisions in panic and anxiety that are not really going to be very sound and people go, oh, it's like cramming for a test.
00:27:47.369 --> 00:27:48.701
I just I can figure it out.
00:27:48.701 --> 00:27:56.250
Yeah, but if you, if all your mental energy is in a crisis all the time because you're running out of money, it's not sound, it's not, it's not one of the principles.
00:27:56.250 --> 00:28:10.010
So if you can say, okay, if I get these things right, I have an 85% likelihood of success, then you start asking yourself okay, cool, if it doesn't work?
00:28:10.010 --> 00:28:12.017
Statistically, that means I need two businesses that I launch and one of those is going to work.
00:28:12.017 --> 00:28:15.586
You're really setting yourself in a position of advantage as opposed to I'm going to go try an idea.
00:28:15.586 --> 00:28:19.284
Most of the time it's not going to work because none of those things are put in place.
00:28:19.284 --> 00:28:20.426
I'll tell you.
00:28:20.426 --> 00:28:29.082
It has everything to do with two groups of people One, mentors that are the wiser, balder, grayer, that are around you, that have been through cycles, that have that wisdom.
00:28:29.082 --> 00:28:31.467
Then it's the execution team.
00:28:32.368 --> 00:28:35.625
One of my mistakes early was thinking I should do everything because I'm pretty smart.
00:28:35.625 --> 00:28:47.205
That was one of the dumbest things that I've done is just saying, oh yeah, I can be my own accountant, my own attorney, my own ops person, my own marketer, instead of saying, okay, who are the best?
00:28:47.205 --> 00:28:48.372
I was also cheap when I hired people in the beginning.
00:28:48.372 --> 00:28:49.819
I would get whoever was the cheapest and guess what?
00:28:49.819 --> 00:28:53.086
I got dog crap for a lot of the results.
00:28:53.086 --> 00:28:59.846
So going and finding the best, finding the best people, the best talent those type of people do not cost you money.
00:28:59.846 --> 00:29:00.686
They make you money.
00:29:00.686 --> 00:29:03.553
Cheap people cost you a lot of money and that's a universal rule.
00:29:03.712 --> 00:29:13.820
The cheap, people are actually very expensive to hire is a really great fact, because I have made the same mistake and, in fact, the things that you've just said.
00:29:13.820 --> 00:29:17.432
That could have been me saying the same.
00:29:17.432 --> 00:29:38.028
And I'm also now at the other side, where I'm hiring a coach and saying, at my age of 58 and 25 years running businesses on three continents, I'm hiring a coach for the first time in my life because I've realized that I keep making the same mistakes, because some of the way that we behave doesn't change, regardless of the business we're in.
00:29:38.028 --> 00:29:41.125
So finding a mentor and a coach is essential.
00:29:41.125 --> 00:29:53.191
But also, as you've done with FrameTech, you've plainly got an amazingly skilled and experienced management team, which also must make it a lot more pleasant, to be honest, to do.
00:29:55.342 --> 00:30:09.670
When you have a world-class truly a world-class team, what happens is you're able to let go of trying to be in the middle of things that you have no business being in the middle of, because you trust those people to be able to execute, not just because they have skills, but because they have the resilience and the commitment.
00:30:09.670 --> 00:30:19.105
And if you don't have those world-class people, then what tends to happen is the grinders, the smart people tend to try to get in the middle of all sorts of things and they don't really do it very well.
00:30:19.105 --> 00:30:35.109
I found that with FrameTech it's the ultimate, where these people are execution geniuses in their space and then we come together and there's this incredible trust amongst the people, the leadership, because everybody trusts the other people with their skills and their commitment.
00:30:35.854 --> 00:30:44.993
That's really nice and, considering you're solving such an important problem, it's fantastic that you've really safeguarded the chance of success.
00:30:44.993 --> 00:30:55.903
Damian lupo, I am going to ask you, um, for a, a book or a podcast, because you've plainly lived a lot, accomplished a lot and learned a lot.
00:30:55.903 --> 00:31:00.820
Is there a book or a podcast that you would recommend to people?
00:31:02.124 --> 00:31:03.807
I culminating.
00:31:03.807 --> 00:31:07.962
I mean I I've read, like you and many others, a million books.
00:31:07.962 --> 00:31:17.241
I'm really proud of Unicornomics because it creates in less than an hour an opportunity for somebody to say, okay, what are the things that are going to give me that chance at success?
00:31:17.241 --> 00:31:28.779
And I talk a lot about that on my podcast, fu, Financial Underdogs podcast so people can get a lot more of my brain and just the way that I think on that podcast.
00:31:28.779 --> 00:31:34.221
So it's really those two things Unicornomics and Financial Underdogs I think you can get.
00:31:34.221 --> 00:31:41.604
If you like my thinking, if you like the way that I look at life and the experiences you want to leverage off of those are two places where you can really gain a lot.
00:31:42.325 --> 00:31:53.576
Great, and that's unicornomicsnet, by the way, and of course I'll put the details in the show notes and it says the foundational first 15% to get your billion dollar business.
00:31:53.576 --> 00:32:03.400
And you've got the individual packs of 10 and a pack of 50 as well that people can buy.
00:32:03.400 --> 00:32:05.284
Damien Lupo fascinating story.
00:32:05.284 --> 00:32:15.834
It's always so hard in these situations because you've got a brilliant business to talk about and you've got amazing wisdom to share as well, Trying to blend both If people would like to find out more about you.
00:32:15.834 --> 00:32:19.911
Obviously you've got Unicornomics and you've got your podcast, but what about getting hold of you?
00:32:19.911 --> 00:32:21.324
Can they connect with you somewhere?
00:32:22.086 --> 00:32:34.002
Yeah, best place to just connect with me on LinkedIn and I'm happy to interact with people and they can see what I'm up to and opportunities to do FaceTime and that kind of stuff, if that's something of interest.
00:32:34.143 --> 00:32:35.548
So yeah, definitely reach out to me there.
00:32:35.548 --> 00:32:37.384
And that's Damien S Lupo.
00:32:37.384 --> 00:32:39.210
I think isn't it on LinkedIn.
00:32:43.201 --> 00:32:43.645
That's a good question.
00:32:43.645 --> 00:32:46.467
I think if you just put my name, Damian Lupo, in there, there's only one that you're going to find.
00:32:46.467 --> 00:32:48.207
I don't think I have any impersonators yet.
00:32:49.580 --> 00:32:54.765
No clones, no digital twins, but if there is going to be one, it should be the original.
00:32:54.765 --> 00:32:56.041
They talk to Damian.
00:32:56.041 --> 00:33:03.109
Thank you for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur, sharing so much amazing, positive ideas and also inspirational wisdom.
00:33:03.932 --> 00:33:04.792
Thank you, jim, appreciate it.
00:33:10.660 --> 00:33:16.282
So we've been listening to Damien Lupo, who is the chief investment officer and co-founder at a company called FrameTech, and he's in Sedona, arizona, where it's beautiful but a little bit hot at the minute.
00:33:16.282 --> 00:33:32.506
But it's really some age-old wisdom there about surrounding yourself with people that are smarter and able to work with you and guide you and also to make sure you've got some of the essential elements for success in place before you start your business.
00:33:32.506 --> 00:33:35.240
But the other final point is give it a go.
00:33:35.240 --> 00:33:44.414
You know that being an entrepreneur is a way of life and it carries its risks, but it really also carries a large number of rewards.
00:33:44.414 --> 00:33:50.393
So I really really appreciate Damon saying it's worth going for it because life is worth living.
00:33:50.393 --> 00:33:52.684
So thank you for listening to me.
00:33:52.684 --> 00:33:59.210
Your host, jim James, on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur If you've enjoyed it, please share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur.
00:33:59.210 --> 00:34:06.611
The reviews are great, but it's the sharing that really shows that you care and, until we meet again, encourage you to keep on communicating.
