This is Waste to Wealth, a podcast about turning your waste hauling business into a profitable, scalable cash flowing machine. And now, here's your host, Michael How's it going, Michael? Hey, it's going terrific. How you doing Cooper? I am doing fantastic. It's been a great start to the day so far. So no complaints here. Sweet. I am. Yeah. I'm so glad to hear that. And I'm super glad to be meeting with you. I feel like really honored. Sebastian made that email introduction. I was like, I'm, I get to talk to someone at your caliber. That's, that's pretty fun. So I'm really glad, No, yeah, happy to do so. And also thanks for having me on. I think Yeah, I do too. So I have a bunch of questions that I prepped, so I'm going to put them in the chat. I should have sent them over before, but my apologies for not doing that. No worries. So I'll just put them in the chat. And these are the questions I'll ask you for the podcast. So. Yeah, so I run a podcast called Waste to Wealth. And it's about waste haulers, how they can be successful. Because I came from that industry and I ran a dumpster rental company and then I sold it. And now I'm doing accounting services and financial services for waste haulers. So this is my opportunity to share what I've learned and bring people in that have really Yeah. So I have a bunch of questions, um, that I want to ask you and talk to you about, but we could do it, uh, officially on Let's do it that way. Then like all the golden nuggets, if there are anything, at least they're being captured and, uh, we'll get them done. Right. So I'll just do, um, like, uh, I don't know, a podcast intro, and then we'll put the intro clip on later. And I'll share everything with you that All right. So I'll count down five, four, three, two, one. Welcome to Waste to Wealth. I'm your host, Michael McCall, and we have a special guest with us here today, Cooper Simpson. And we're going to be talking about how to be successful in the business world. Cooper comes to us with a large amount of experience that I'm excited to learn more about with you all, including running Martel Ventures portfolio for Dan Martell. He's also an athlete. He has some AI experience. And welcome, Cooper. How are you doing today? I'm doing fantastic, Mike. Thanks for having me on. Excited to chat. Yeah, me too. So we're in the same world a little bit, but I would say you're at a little more advanced level than I am. So I'm trying to surround myself with successful people. I've had a little success, but it sounds like you've had a lot of success from what I've gleaned. So you do portfolio management, you're involved in AI, and I read that you Yes. So yeah, I mean, don't, don't really recommend it to anyone because it literally is like a full second time job, but yeah, I've done two events kind of for Ironman. I did one last year and then I did one with kind of our whole team. We did a half Ironman this year and then I've got one more scheduled for 2026 and now when I'm actually getting like a full hardcore training block too. So yeah, just like, just like to do fun things basically. Well, that, that sounds fun to me. So I actually, I'm half of an Ironman because I've done a few of those. Now, does it count as an Ironman? If you do it solo, like you don't do I'd say that still counts. Honestly, it might even be harder because if you don't have the aid stations, like that's half the. That's half the ease of it is at least, you know, that aid stations are coming. So if you're doing it self-supported, it's almost like an extra tip in the cab just to be like, okay. Just I might give that a try. Although, I don't want to know what my time would be because it wouldn't know we're nearly as good. So well, congrats. Congrats on becoming an Ironman. You've done two of them. You're going to do a third one. That Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, uh, it's always fun. Especially, uh, my girlfriend loves it on Saturdays when I'm up at 4.00 AM, get back around 11.00 AM noon. And I'm basically brain dead for the rest of the weekend. So those are also fun days, but it's, uh, it's challenging, but very rewarding. Like there's no better feeling than when you finish it. And I think it's the same thing with like business as well. Like if you, you can't learn to enjoy the process, then the finish doesn't really matter at the end of the day anyway. So it's definitely a very good, kind of meditative thing to do. If you, if you enjoy the process of stuff, Yeah. I think there's a lot of translation between being an athlete, being able to focus and being disciplined and the business world. Cause you need those same skills in the business world. Right. I mean, have you seen that, that crossover between, uh, you know, discipline 100%. I mean, it's actually funny. I forget where, I think I must've heard it on another podcast or I was listening to some, I was listening to another guy talking. He's basically saying that they almost exclusively look to hire people who are either former athletes or who are like have hardcore hobbies. Cause it's like, if you can, if you, if you do that for fun, how effective to be a good thing that you're actually focused on for your job. And so I think there is a direct correlation where if you enjoy doing hard things, chances are you have, you just have a little bit more of an ability to enjoy the process, enjoy the suck and just kind of get after it a little bit more. So yeah, I'd say there's definitely a direct correlation. It doesn't mean you have to go do that stuff. It can even just be like, if learning languages is your thing, just find something that is a little bit more, challenging in terms of a hobby, and if you can stick with it and learn to love it, I think there's a big correlation between success in those Yeah, I think you're right. Especially because the business world is full of constantly solving problems that you've never solved before. It's always another challenge. So if you like challenging yourself, then you're gonna enjoy the business world. That's why it's not for everybody. Some people don't want constant challenges. Exactly, exactly. Well, can you tell me about your portfolio? So you manage a portfolio for Dan, is that what you're doing right now? Can you Yes, definitely. So my job currently right now is I'm the portfolio manager for Martell Ventures, which is Dan Martell's AI venture studio, more or less. So essentially, what we focus on is there's a whole world of AI and it's moving at such a crazy fast pace that it's... kind of hard to wrap your head around sometimes just how quickly it's actually like, I found my, I was actually joking with a couple of people in the office. I was getting mad at I think quad because it was taking a little bit longer than I would have liked it to, to complete a task. And then I was like, it's doing like 10 hours worth of like my work in three minutes. And I'm mad because it's not done in two minutes. Like let's get a little bit of a reality check done here. So, but it's just moving at such a quick pace. And so kind of where we carve out our niche is we're not a hundred percent like what they're doing kind of down in Silicon Valley, building these kind of frontier models are what they're called. So that's like the big, LLM. So let's call it OpenAI, Minefropic, Claude, Google, like all those companies that are building like very high tech kind of blockbuster A1 news updated technology. That's all fantastic. We're super happy for them for building that, but we're really focused is on the application layers. So what we focus on is how can you take what these big companies are creating and spending billions upon billions of dollars to create and actually apply it to a real business problem use case. So what we're focused on is how can we find the founders who are building tools and products that actually solve real world problems right now. So then that way we can leverage the distribution and audience that Dan has in order to get those products in front of more founders so that they can start actually using AI in an effective way right now to actually make their business better, as opposed to just hearing all these crazy updates that they don't understand what it actually means, then kind of having this like back of the brain thought of like, well, am I being left behind for not using it? Is it a fad? What is it we're trying to like kind of carve through that noise and find all of these really good application based solutions that people can go use so that way they can actually take advantage of all the Well, that's awesome. So I think that it is a big revolution and it's going to make some big waves and long lasting impacts. I think probably more than the, in the nineties when we had the, the.com era bubble, like that, that was a big revolution. So, so our audience here, they're very interested in, in dumpster, dumpster rentals and junk removal. They, they use software and there's a lot of competing softwares and they're starting to just get into the AI realm just a little bit. But I think they're all testing things out and most of the stuff doesn't work yet. So they're probably going to do like route optimization, where trucks will be going, customer order interface. That's what I kind of see as the first step for AI, at least in this industry. But I don't know, does that sound like the way things will go first? Or do you have any thoughts on application for software in like Yeah. I think the route optimization is a huge one, like I've seen a couple companies were actually evaluating a few that are kind of doing that so once once we become partners I'll be happy to share. But I think there's there's a lot of ways that people can use AI that aren't necessarily like. industry specific. So like a good example of like a couple of tools that we kind of have in our portfolio right now, we have one tool called precision as an example that lets you tie in all the tools that you're currently using. And it takes all like this messy data that you have and turns into like one big, beautiful scorecard that you can actually use to grow your business. So instead of having to log into six different tools that don't inherently speak together. This precision uses AI to basically tie everything together and give you clean data so you can make decisions. So really easy way where it doesn't really matter what industry you're in. If you're using two pieces of software, which I'm sure almost pretty much every company on the planet is using nowadays, then that's a great way to just get a lot better operational insight into what's going on without a lot left. And then another really good one that I always kind of say is, Voice AI is kind of taking over right now and like it's kind of the It's kind of the cool kid on the block for her less because it has so many applications. So like we have one company called Atlas that's in our portfolio. Um, and what they do is kind of a few things, but one of the ones that they're getting the most success with is called speed to lead. So whether you are looking at it from a support perspective or whether you're looking at it from a new client acquisition perspective, what essentially you do with Atlas is you tie it in. And every customer that fills out a form to get in touch with you, or every customer that engages, whether you're running ads, whether you're running, whether you have leads just coming to your site organically, or whether you have people that just want to get in touch with you, they will actually have a voice agent call every single person who requests anything about your business instantly. And so the crazy thing is, let's say you're trying to get more doors for your business, or you're trying to add more clients into your book. Let's say you're running ads right now, or let's just say you've invested a lot of money into SEO and you have customers coming to your page all the time, but you don't have salespeople ready to call them the second the form gets filled out. What you can use Atlas for is it will actually sit there and anytime somebody engages, Let's say in a month you get a hundred leads. If you got a hundred leads that come through, you may only have 15 of them actually book in because like a hundred will fill out a form, 15 will convert, and maybe if you're lucky, 50 to 60% of them show up. So you're getting, let's call it eight actual qualified deals out of that hunt that came through. What Atlas does is it'll make sure that every single 100 of those leads actually gets contacted and it can run them through a whole onboarding process to figure out, are they a client that's worth dealing with? Do they have enough volume? Does the pricing work for them? Is it close enough in a regional area that makes sense? It can do all the pre-qualification work, without you ever actually needing to engage with that customer. And it can book them into your schedule to actually have a further follow up discussion if needed. So that you're only actually speaking with potential customers who have the highest likelihood of becoming real customers. But more importantly, especially in like a home service or kind of like a service-based local service-based business. Yep. Usually I forget where the stat was, but I think it was like 80% of the time, the business that a company or the business that a customer ends up going with is the one that picked up the phone. That's exactly right. You're able to just pick up the phone every time, regardless of if you're available or not, it increases the likelihood of you closing more business. And it's like, there's a couple of really easy things like that that aren't even just specific to kind of like a route based business that are just, in my opinion, kind of like no brainers to implement. And like, we're getting all of our, all of our businesses are starting to use tools like this and everybody that we come across. I'm just like, if you're, if you like getting more, opportunity Yeah, for sure. And so, to apply that right to what we do within the WasteHauler side, if a client calls you, they're calling because they already have a problem. They're not really hunting for a solution. They're not considering it. They want the solution right now. And so, if you don't answer that phone, if you call them back in like 30 minutes, they've already called somebody else. Like they called or they clicked on the website and the form was too hard to fill out until they abandoned it. And then they found someone else's phone number and they called them. So if you don't react that second, you're not gonna get that call. You're not gonna get that work. And sometimes it'll be a customer that ends up doing years of business with you and hundreds of thousands of dollars. You never know when your next best customer is gonna call you. You always have to answer that phone. So I, I didn't even think about how we can have robots call people back. So is that, uh, that's Atlas. So is that something you can actively promote that we can, you know, share with Yeah. I mean, I can, I can get you the link after that. I'll just drop it in the chat right now, but that's one. And for what it's worth, like we've evaluated a ton of these companies, this one, like their, their voice sounds like you can almost not even tell that it's a. That is AI. Well, that's a huge upgrade from outsourcing it to India or something like that, which is a viable solution, but it turns most people off when they hear a non-English accent, I think it's, I think as any country, if you're not, if you, if you're, even if you go overseas, if you have a voice agent that doesn't sound like the national dialect, I think you're going to run into the same thing. So I'm sure you wouldn't want, I'm sure you wouldn't want my voice going on as the support line in India. That probably wouldn't, that Although there are some accents that sound, you know, very intelligent, very good. Like the English accent and the Australian accent, they feel very I don't know, very smart. Yeah. There is another nuance to it, which is where, where I ran my dumpster business, each, the towns didn't, the names didn't match what they read. Like there's this place called Corolla, but it's spelled like Corolla. So you say the word Corolla, they know you're not from around there and they just Yeah, but the funny thing is like with AI like you can train it to say it correct you can train it to say things correctly even with like dialect and it's getting it's getting smart enough to the point where if you say hey we live in this city, it'll actually go do research to figure out what is the pronunciation before you go back so Yeah, it's, it's getting pretty wild. Some of this stuff. And like there there's other application based stuff, like talk about like online form fill outs. There's ways where you can add chat bots onto a website. So instead of being like a clunky form that someone fills out, it's literally just a support agent that sits there and answers questions and get someone progressed through while still capturing all of the information that you need to gather. So it's much. It's a nicer experience than dealing with this online form. There's tons of stuff, tons of ways that you can use AI to kind of make everything That's impressive. Yeah, I was just thinking of the back office, making sure that when you get an order, it processes correctly and dispatches correctly. But yeah, everyone wants more customers, right? So that's a huge value add immediately. Yeah. Well, I, I had some more questions about how you got into this world. So, um, but before I do that, I want to ask, I like to know about what's going on right now. So like this week, you probably have a lot going on. We all do. Right. So I'm curious, like what, if you had a good week and you won the week, what would that look like? If you had a really Yes. Like a typical week for myself is, I mean, I, each week on average, I'll kind of speak with, we get, we get about like a hundred submissions to work with us every single week with like different companies. And it's a, it's a wide array of like quality for those businesses. Um, but then again, we have like a hundred companies that requests to kind of work with us. I usually end up getting on the phone with about 10 companies a week and what, what a successful week looks like for myself is, one to two of those companies end up being opportunities that we would like to explore further so we'll go deeper down the diligence process with them and then kind of like winning on winning a monthly basis is We're, we're very selective with who we work with in Martel ventures. So if we're doing like one deal a month, we're, we're happy campers. So we just, we want to find really cool people or solve a cool problems and want to do it at the highest level possible. So that's kind of what success looks like is just finding, finding those awesome companies That makes sense. That's great. So what does it take to be qualified? Like what, what hits your radar? Is it a certain size profitability, probably Yeah. So for us specifically with Martel Ventures, the biggest thing that we want to kind of see is kind of what I was mentioning before, like, does the product actually solve a real tangible problem? Because right now there's this, there's this whole, there's this whole new world where just because you can build something doesn't mean you should build something. And there's a lot of that out there where people are going and building stuff just because one, the, the difficulty curve of building software has become tremendously lowered with AI coding agents. So like even myself, I'm able to go like, I'm somewhat technical, but I would by no means call myself someone who's able to get a, software tool to production. But with AI, I can. And so like really what we look for when I'm evaluating companies is the most important thing is does this actually solve a real tangible problem right now? If it does, let's talk further. That's kind of the biggest thing for us is just looking for real Right. Well, that makes a lot of sense. So, okay. I had a thought in there related to that, but I was so interested in what you were saying, I lost my thought. So, it might come back to me. But that really makes sense because the automation is great, but if you automate something that There's like layers. Before you automate, you have to do other stuff first, So like make, I think the first thing is just make it so it's a simple, simple solution. So whatever you're doing is simple. Exactly. Well, great. So what inspired you to get into venture venture capitalism? Like this is not, it's not for the faint of heart. Like you get people get burned out on it. I've seen investment bankers and advisors that they look at lots of deals and they get fatigued pretty quick over like two years, they can get burned out. So what got Yeah. So what kind of got me into, it's a bit of a long story, but I'll try and shrink it down. Basically what had happened was, um, about like five years ago, had a, had a pretty successful, uh, agency slash coaching business with the next business partner went up in flames to the tune of, um, basically, I go away on vacation, I come back, all the passwords to all of our tools are changed. And so is the password to the bank account. So that was fun. Had a pretty big, had a pretty big fall from that. And then what ended up happening is I just kind of went back to first principles and said, okay, what do I, what can I control? What do I know I can do? So I went back to just kind of doing a little bit of for about a year, kind of some hired gun work, more or less, where I was just like, okay, let me go find some clients help do the things that I was doing before, but just lick my wounds a little bit, but get back into the ring. And one of the clients who I was working with at the time happened to be a grant writer. And Uh, he was paying me a lot of money for leads, which at the time I was like, cool beans. Like you're going to pay me how much to send you a contact, like done. I'll send you. And then very, very valuable. Right? Exactly. And then lo and behold, he just started saying like, dude, I can't take all the leads that you're sending me, slow it down. And I was like, well, what's the problem? Like I thought you said you wanted as many as possible. I sent you 10 this month and now you're telling me it's too many. And what I found out very quickly was the big bottleneck that he had in his business was he could only write these grants so quickly. Like he could only maybe maximum do 10 grants a month and that was even like pushing it. And I was like, okay, well how hard is it to write these grants? Turns out grants are pretty involved and they're not the easiest thing. And right around this time, this was right when, right when AI kind of like chat GPT was just starting to kind of come on the scene as like a big thing that was like a new toy to play with. And I was talking with a couple of my friends who ended up becoming my business partners and we were looking at it and we said, okay, well, these grant applications, they need to be unique to each business, but plus or minus, they're about like 65, 70% the same overall in terms of like what needs to be put in there. So AI definitely like, this is like, we basically came to the conclusion, this is definitely a task that AI can solve. So we ended up going down the pathway of essentially building an AI grant writing piece of software that would essentially take a, what we were able to do is we would take a one hour call with a client and be able to output like 80 page grant application off that one hour conversation. Wow. essentially like we, we spent out the time to get an application put together from like what was almost two months down to like a week and a half. And so pretty, pretty easy, pretty easy sell long. And then what ended up happening from there is I've known Dan for the better part of like four and a half years. And so as we were growing, we kind of did a deal with Dan where we kind of brought him in, on our cap table as an advisor. He helped us grow pretty quickly in a couple of ways off of a couple of connections and a few mentions to some of his audience. Lo and behold, the business kind of started to take off. And then once both the Canadian and US government decided to shift over their controlling powers about a year and a half ago, surprise, surprise, all the grant programs that we were selling decided to also no longer cease to be in existence. And we kind of very quickly just took a hard look and said, okay, if we run the risk every four years, let's just say at a minimum, everything currently selling and working on, we have to completely put on pause and wait for the next kind of the next inflow them to come out. It's probably not a great business to be in when you have zero control over your product and the person who does control your product has zero incentive to work with you about that. So that's the government. Yeah. We just kind of took a hard look at it. We said, you know what? It's not going to be an easy decision. It's not going to be a fun one, but maybe it makes more sense to kind of go do other things and kind of put our energy there. And right when that was kind of happening, Dan was looking to get Martel Ventures all built out. And he said, hey, I'm looking for people to come help and the opportunity presented Oh, that makes a lot of sense. So you, so you actually check a lot of boxes for like that position. Like that first one sounds like a big heartbreak, you know, your, your, your partnership, your business essentially dying over very quickly. But that, that lesson is, I'm sure you can, you can reflect on that and say, Hey, that was really painful, but it grew me as a person. Right. So, yeah. So that's really encouraging. I know it sounds bad, but if you don't go through those big challenges, then you're really not ready for a lot of other challenges. And then you don't understand the AI side of things. So it positions you well to actually identify real solutions instead of just... I'm sure people try to say Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's, it's very much just being able to look at it and kind of take like a first principles approach and say, is what this person is actually building? Is it? Oh, well, cause the other thing as well as like kind of in the previous, in the, in the AI grant writing software business, one of the things that was also kind of looming over us as a big core component of our product was we built It's still, still is beautiful today, but we had like 90 different prompts that were chained together to get the output the way we want it to be. Wow. That's a lot. So like, but basically what we had done is we built like our own version of kind of like context more or less. So with, with AI, there's this big thing called context where if you're using chat, GPT or Claude, or Gemini, any of the big, like kind of big name tools, more context that you have, the better your output ends up being. But when we were building our tool at the time, context wasn't really a thing. Like the systems would remember conversations from like two, three messages ago. But if you gave it a huge, say call transcription, it would get lost after the first two paragraphs. And then you'd end up talking to, you'd end up writing a grant about how you want to get a new, irrigation system for your farm and the end conclusion that it would come on to is adding a new bakery to your farm is a great way to increase business. And you're like, well, how the heck did we get here? Just drift like crazy. And you're like, okay, we need to figure out how to realize that. And it's like, now though, these tools do that automatically. But back then we had to like build our whole backend system to like be context aware. So, I mean like another big thing that we really look for in evaluating that I kind of scrutinize is are the tools that people building features of a bigger system, or are they actual solutions that are going to be still beneficial two years from now? And that's a really hard thing to kind of evaluate, but that's kind of back where we looked at, at the solution solving problems, as opposed to the really cool tech solutions, because really cool tech solutions run the risk of being. Integrated into a larger tool, whereas there's very specific solution has less of a likelihood of Yeah. I'm not, I'm not envious of that problem in the software world at all. Cause I'm in the services world, the audience here, they're also in the services world and you can copy each other, but you only have so much capacity because human, human, human resources is, is, and equipment are your limiting factors. But in software, if you've got, if you've got a nice program and you see that the competitive program has is better, you can just steal their features, right? There's not really copyright protection on Not really. No. And especially there's not really much you can do either. If one of the biggest billion dollar funded players in the space wants to do it as well. You're kind of just like, well, that sucks. So, and we've seen a bunch now already, like where there'll be a new company that we're evaluating. And then three weeks later, you look, you look on Twitter and Oh, okay. There's a right there. They're gone. They're done. So it's a, it's a, it's an interesting world right So we recently went to a conference for a dumpster rental software called Docket, and they're one of the ones that specialize in dumpster rental. There's other ones like DRS, and there's also trash ones like WAM. But I see with the specializations, even if they could get crushed by other companies with features, Having only what you need in a software seems to be like a really good way to position yourself in the market. Is that one of the ways you see smaller companies competing with these behemoths? Yeah. And it's actually, it's a, it's an interesting concept, but it's, how can you take what bigger players are doing and that are doing maybe like an enterprise, like a full enterprise level and just bring out the core things that people like, but just bring it to a smaller or not necessarily smaller market segment, but just a smaller customer size market segment and just say, Hey, instead of paying 5,000 bucks a month for this tool, we'll get it over like 500. And it's like, yeah, I mean, there, there's a, there's a lot of ways where, uh, that one phrase from like Pablo Picasso, where it's like good artists, copy, great artists steal. Um, Yeah. Well, I appreciate it because the more that gets stolen, the faster our capitalism goes. So, yeah. Well, I might have already asked, this might have already come up in the last question, but you know, on our business journey, we face some serious obstacles. And so, do you have an obstacle that really helped you on your journey, like that you had to overcome and then it shaped you as a I'd probably say it was having kind of like really bad business failure. It wasn't a failure. The business was doing tremendous. We were doing almost like 2 million a year, but, um, it was more of a business breakup, so to speak. And like a really hard one at that, probably that was, that would be one of the biggest ones. I mean, there's a lot of lessons learned in there. I mean, we have a very loose, shaky partnership agreement. I also didn't, I also, looked past a lot of red flags in the person who I was working with that were blatantly obvious in hindsight, but it's just kind of what I, the mistake I made then is I was like, well, I don't want to rock the boat because things are going well. So I don't want to ruffle feathers and risk. upsetting kind of this thing that we've got going on right now. But in reality, it's like, it's, if you don't kind of bring those points to attention, if you don't address the actual problem or the elephant in the room, it says you have to fail or failure further down the line. Right. And there's a lot of aspects within there that just helped, helped give me the insight to know how to not make those mistakes going forward. But also that just helped me become, I would say a stronger person overall, because getting, having that happen where it was a, It was almost the hardest part was just having the thing that I'd been working on for the last three years, no longer be a part of my life anymore, which, and for, for not it being my decision, like that was the hardest part is just kind of having that almost identity crisis of it. Like, what am I going to do now? Right. Um, but being able to get through that, come on the other side and figure out, okay, you know what my value as myself is not a direct. by-product of this business or this thing that I was doing. It's like my value is actually in other places and being able to come to terms with that and realize that I'm more than just the thing that I'm working on was a lesson that you can't really learn without going through it as hard and annoying as that is. But now it's, it's given me a lot more confidence going forward with basically anything that I look to go do. So yeah, definitely, definitely very hard, Yeah, well, I think as humans, and especially as men, I know I, and I think most men, really whatever work we're doing, we feel like it's part of us. Like it's so integrated to our core. And when you take it to something that's really passionate and very entrepreneur-related, like that is really part of you. It's part of your identity. And so when that ends, I've had the same thing. When I've ended something, like most recently with my dumpster business, selling it, Even though that was the right decision and it was very healthy for everybody, I still am sad. And that was my choice. I'm still sad to not have that part of my life, but I knew it was the right thing to do. So, it's hard to separate ourselves from that our work, um, and also still be passionate because there's like that. If, if you, if you separate yourself too much, then it kind of dies and then it's not alive. So I don't know if there's a healthy balance or you have to go through seasons of I think you're going to have to be. delusional about the thing that you're working on when you're in the middle of it, because if you're not, you're never going to get to the levels of success that you want to get. But you always have to kind of, I think, ground yourself and go back to understanding that you are not the business and the business is not you. You can be, it can be your whole life. And there's, there's this one phrase I heard in an event I was at. Um, I think Sal for Scylla said it, uh, he's the CEO of first form, which is a supplement business. He basically just said, be present where your feet are. And it was just that one thing where it's like, when you're in business, all your attention goes there. You're not distracted. You're just in it. But when you're elsewhere, if you're at home or if you're doing something else, be fully present there. And that can kind of, and like, I've been really trying to implement that myself and it really helps to just realign to be like, okay, cool. When I'm not working, I can still be fully devoted to that, but I'm also like Cooper is also Cooper and it just really helps kind of set the stage for, so then that way you just get the most that you just get the most out of life and you feel the most, you Well, if I can steal the, go back to the athlete comparison, like when you're running that race, when you're doing your triathlon or whatever, whatever event you're doing, you have to be a hundred percent there because your focus has to be complete. Otherwise you're gonna, you're gonna quit on the race. Cause I, I've been in that moment. Um, I mean, the full Ironman goes, you know, more than 10 hours, but when I'm five hours into a half Ironman, I'm like, I don't know. I don't know why I'm doing this. Maybe I should stop, you know? So. you Yeah, 100%. And you got to just be, you got to be very attentive to where you are right there. And, um, it's, it's hard, but it's, again, it's once you can kind of learn to start viewing life and start being in your business in that respect, I think it just opens up a ton of doors for how to, how to live a little bit more of a fully congruent life. I can think about, in the trucking world, we deal with equipment that's broken all the time. Equipment that's broken, employees that don't show up, or that quit at noon, and there's still hauls that have to get done. And those are the moments you're like, is this really worth it? Do I really want to do this? And you have to dig deep and have that grit. But then when you do that a bunch of times, it just becomes normal. Yep, this is what happens. Trucks break in the worst places possible. Employees quit at the worst time Yeah. And again, if you enjoy the process and you like, and you can fall in love with the, just the game, it makes everything a lot better and easier. And it makes when you do end up getting to the finish line, you don't have that. You can actually enjoy and celebrate it as opposed to feeling like you just had a piece of yourself removed. It becomes part of the story, right? Those become opportunities to tell stories. Exactly. So, through my journey, my understanding and my belief about how business works and how life works totally has changed in the last five years. It probably changes every couple of years. And I can't even remember what it was like to think differently. And so, it's hard for me to go back to the old mindset I had. And I bet if I talked to myself five years ago, I'd be like, what's wrong with you? You're totally oblivious. Um, so do you have any, do you have any of that, like beliefs that you had at one point and then they shifted and you're like, Yeah. I think one of them, and that's just a by-product of kind of the environment I've been in for the last year, but. it's just think bigger right out of the gate. And so what I always used to do is I would kind of look at an opportunity and be like, okay, cool. Here's kind of what the level one of this looks like. And then here's the little two. And then I was all, but the, the problem with that is you kind of, you will, you lock yourself into these kind of glass ceilings really quickly. Whereas if you look at something right from the get-go and you're like, Hey, I think this can get to 50 million bucks. All of a sudden you start like, it's going to take, regardless of whether you, are aiming for like $1 million a year or $50 million a year, it's going to take the same amount of work no matter what happens. Like you're going to put in the same amount of time, the same amount of energy, just the only difference is you're going to be showing up. If you're aiming for 50 million, you're going to show up a lot different than if you're aiming for a million dollars a year. Right. And so I think the big thing for myself and again, just kind of being surrounded in an environment where that's kind of the norm is just be Be very delusional about where you think the opportunity lies. And if you, if you can pick that large goal work towards it, even if you don't 100% hit it, you're probably going to end up further ahead than if you set a lower more realistic goal for yourself initially so I always would just say is like whatever. obviously not everybody's going to go pick a goal to be the biggest, the best, and the number one, but it doesn't hurt to dream a little bit bigger or set targets a little bit bigger than where you think it's going to be at. And so that's kind of one of the big beliefs that I have right now is stop looking at things from like, uh, what does the 0.1% version of this business look like? And it looked like, what could it actually become? And then start approaching it in, attacking it as Well, that's a big mindset challenge for me. So I like that. Can we dive into that a little further? Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like you're saying like be overly optimistic or at least find where it could be an opportunity. So shoot for the stars. And if you land on the moon, that's still great. Like if you're going for And if you see an opportunity and you say, hey, it could be 50 million, but it turns out to be 10 million, that still could be good. So how do you not sound crazy? Because I say things that are big and people are just like, I don't want to talk to you. We can't even have a conversation. So, I forget who said it might have actually been Dan, but he basically said like, if people don't think you're crazy for setting big targets and you're not setting them big enough anyways, and like the goal of who the goal of somebody who's the leader who's in like the operational role, it's your job to get everybody on board to that mission and I'll tell you what. Most people want them. Almost everybody. I don't care who they are. Everybody wants to win. Whether you could be even the most like down in the dumps kind of person, you still want to win to a certain level. So if you can showcase it, like, Hey, I'm winning. Come along with me. Here's what we're running towards. Even if they go, you're crazy. There's a little inkling in the back of their head that goes, well, If he doesn't do that, I kind of want to, like, I kind of want to attach. Yeah. Yeah. Almost like the mindset shift needs to be, do people think I'm insane? And if they do cool, that's probably signal that we're going in the right direction. Um, and that's kind of the way that I would look at it. There's, I forget who said it. I can actually see when I was listening to the podcast, but it was this phrase that was like, be absolutely delusional about what's possible in the future. realistic about the present and be forgiving about the past. Now what I mean is like, don't beat yourself up if you're not where you want to be right now, because there's no point in dwelling on stuff that's happened or stuff that hasn't happened. So give yourself a bit of grace for that. Learn from it, but don't dwell. Don't expect everything to happen immediately right now. So like, if you're going to set a massive lofty goal, don't, don't make it ridiculous or say, cool, we're going to be there in six months. Cause then you're just going to set everything up for failure. But at the same time, just start screaming about like, Hey, this is where we're going. This is what we're shooting towards. And there's a real thing where if you just put it out in the world, it's kind of funny what starts happening and kind of what opportunities come towards you. If you just start calling your shot and just continually beating that drum. And also what it does is it makes everybody who's with you, kind of started to show up a little bit different. I mean, my girlfriend, she has a jewelry business and we just went through this exercise for her. And because we were like, okay, well, where do you want this to be? And she's like, I want this to be a hundred million dollar a year business. I was like, all right, well, we got a lot of work to do to go get there. But part of the problem was her staff were Like a lot of good things have been happening. Like she just gotten a really big deal in promotional kind of thing with one of the largest influencers in Canada. She just won like gold for an award locally. Nice. We just had like one of our biggest sales. She had just one of like your biggest sales months ever. And it was like, everything was like, good, good, good. So you can see the staff was kind of not like kind of taking a break, but they're like kind of, Yeah, they're starting to kind of post a little bit. And then for us, it was like, Okay, we're stoked that all this good stuff has happened. But let's also re index and say, Hey, the real goal that we want is up here. So actually, we're operating at level one on a game to 100. And instantly, it was like, you kind of saw a shift in everyone's eyes. And she kind of told that to them. And they were like, Oh, Okay, well, I guess, I guess we need to giddy up and get back on the horse because we're not there. We're nowhere close to there. Yeah. But if that's where we're going, let's go. And it was like, let's pat ourselves on the back for what's happened so far. Cause we're not trying to take away from the progress, but at the same time, it's like, let's make sure we're all moving towards that. And yeah, I think that's just a big thing that like for, for everything that I'm looking at and for everything that I'm going to do going forward, it's kind of just that mantra be forgiving of the past. realistic about the present and just delusional about the future, and then tell everyone about what that delusion is so that we can make That might be one of the harder things. I could just imagine some companies that have like 50 dumpsters and they're like, all right, I want to have a thousand dumpsters and just grow it exponentially. That does sound pretty crazy, but I guess it'll push away people that don't buy into your vision and it'll pull people towards you that do, right? 100%. Wow. Well, that's really great to hear about your, you said it's your girlfriend. She's, she's growing this jewelry business. Do you, is that something that you can plug? Is there a, an online store or something? We can get some jewelry for our, our city. Yeah. There's a, if you ever want to get some, some good jewelry, it's called, uh, her, her business is called Mogano, but the online sort of shop Mogano.com. I Oh, good. Shop Mogano. Mogano is M-O-G-A-N-O dot com. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I'll check that out. My wife loves jewelry, I find most, I find most girls do. So it's, uh, yeah. Pretty universal. Yeah. So, so in our business journey, um, we, we have a lot of customers that we come across and, um, there's customers that have, have rubbed me the wrong way. And there's also customers that have impressed me and they've, they've kind of changed my perspective. Um, I can think about a time where. Um, I had to let all my customers know how we were changing our, how we do business. And I, I knew I was going to have customers that were upset, but there were some customers that really. They, they appreciated it. They're like, Oh, thanks for the clarity. Now I know the guidelines and you got to run your business, how you got to run your business. And it actually improved our relationship. But, um, do you have any, you have any customers that have taught you a lesson that Yeah, there's, there's a few there was one I remember going way back into the archives, there's one client who I think it just gave me, it was back when kind of like in that original business, the one that kind of had the bad breakup in but there's one client that I knew that we were giving him great service and that he, that we were doing what we were saying we were going to do. And he just wasn't happy at all. So I remember we ended up forcing it and said, cool, I'm going to do it for you. We got him the results he was looking for and he was still upset. And I was like, sometimes there just isn't a way to. please some people. So I think one of, one of the first lessons I had was kind of like almost a trust your gut kind of scenario. Like if someone, if someone is telling you who they are right off the bat, they're probably telling you who they are. And like, I remember before we even closed this customer that I was just like, he's going to be a pain in the butt. And I was like, I don't think we should do it, but we did it anyways. So like one lesson was if you're kind of getting those signals right away, just, uh, probably best not to go forward. And I mean, there's, there's been scenarios like that when we're evaluating deals right now, Martel Ventures, where we've had some companies that have, I've been in conversations with, and they just go back and forth a million times over like a tiny term detail point, fantastic people, great products, but it's like, Hey, if this is how the relationship is going to start right now, or we can't even have a little bit of mutual trust to get to the next level, it's, probably an indicator of what's going to happen going forward. And if this is how we're, if this is how we're starting the relationship, how's it going to be three months in, if there's a kind of big decision or if there's a process that needs to be changed. So I'd probably say that's one of the biggest ones that I learned early on that I've definitely been applying more recently nowadays, which is take people kind of at face value a little bit. Obviously there's circumstances that are everything, but right in those scenarios where people are really going to try and if they're, if they're showing you, they're going to be a headache, they might be a headache and vice versa. Like if somebody comes in and they're just amazing to work with and there's that mutual respect and there's that mutual care, it's crazy when you can actually get done. Like I'd say a big one right now that I'm learning with some of our portfolio partners is the ones who tend to have the most success or the ones who there are the most open to receiving feedback. And it's like coachability is a real thing. And if you're able to be coachable and if you're able to, and if you're open to hearing feedback from other people, like it's a term that gets thrown around a lot. Like everybody's always open. Like everyone's like, Oh, I love feedback. I love feedback. And then I'm like, do you though? Like when was the last time you asked for it? And at the time, like nobody has a good answer on when they asked for feedback and it's like, okay, well, How can you course correct if you're not constantly getting that information? So I'd say a big lesson I've learned is like from the people who I see that are succeeding the most with us are the ones that are open to receiving feedback and are requesting it and just working are very unattached to the fact that they think they need to be right. And it's like, Hey, what's going to serve, what's going to help serve the business the best. And what's going to help serve me the best. And let's just, let's just cut out all the noise and let's get to Right. Yeah. of sense. And I've seen those red flags in a lot of my relationships. And sometimes I trust my gut on them. And a lot of times it depends on how hungry I am. Like, oh, this is a red flag, but maybe I can put some parameters in place. But it doesn't seem to matter. If you're dealing with someone that you're not a good fit for, Like maybe you can't trust them for whatever reason. It doesn't matter what structure you put in, it's going to fail at some point. So you just have to be okay with that too. Like knowing the relationship's not going to be that long if you do go into it. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Well, that's a good lesson. I think everyone can learn from that. And not just in business, you can learn, like that's a good personal lesson too. Like, do Exactly. It's like, it's, It's funny how everyone's ego always gets in the way on it, but gut feel is a real thing sometimes, and always best The extension of that is how do you protect yourself from bad relationships, or how do you unravel a bad relationship once you get into it? Leave yourself an out. I think Dan has made some really good expectation setters. He's like, hey, we're going to work together. And these are my parameters. And just having high standards for yourself and communicating that is really healthy. Something I struggle with. But I don't know if you've conquered that one yet, just setting boundaries Uh, if I'm maybe I'm not the best at vocalizing it all the time, but I definitely have an internal checklist of it. I mean, with all the deals we do with our portfolio partners, we definitely have like a whole checklist that we run through and we're like, in our diligence process, we're like, Hey, here's everything about us that you can expect. So this doesn't sit well with you. Let's just get over it right now. So then that way it doesn't become a thing later. So just being upfront, being You know, that also makes me think about how I might be willing to deal with a difficult personality. Like if someone's going to yell and scream at me and call me bad names and curse at me, it actually doesn't bother me. I've had a lot of people in my life like that, like former bosses or former customers, maybe some current customers actually. And they yell at me and it's fine, no big deal. It's their problem, not my problem. I'm not going to take it on. But the challenge is, if that same customer yells at my team, I might risk the relationship I had with my team member, and then I might quit. I know you can deal with this customer, but I can't. Or I might not be able to actually do the work when I delegate it to my team. In business, it goes to another level. Can you work with our organization, not just me and my thick skin? Yeah, exactly. What about making mistakes over and over again? So I know a lot of truck drivers, a lot of business owners, a lot of waste haulers that seem to make the same mistakes over and over again, like maybe discounting their prices or being wishy-washy about how they'll do business. Maybe they won't, they'll go to wherever a customer wants them to go. Do you have any mistakes you see entrepreneurs make over and over again, especially because you Uh, there's two that I would say are kind of like the biggest ones. And these kind of like encompass the majority of like offshoot mistakes from there. But the first one is just. People don't actually attack problems or work with enough speed. So there's a lot of, uh, like we, we have a rule in a martial ventures where like, anytime a task, anytime someone has a task, it's got to have like a date when it's going to be done. And. Usually someone will question and be like, okay, well, why does it need to be next? Like, why is it going to be next Tuesday? Can it get done sooner? And nine times out of 10, you can usually get the thing done quicker than you think you can get done. And I think a big mistake that most founders make is they underestimate how long some things are going to take and they don't attack them fast enough with enough speed and with enough intensity. And that goes for businesses across the board. Like, yeah. Like, attack it, work fast. I mean, we work at a pretty blistering pace at Martel Ventures. I mean, I sometimes lose track of how quickly we're going and what I mean by that is there was a conversation I was having with someone and we kind of like ended it. And then for whatever reason, I was thinking like, Oh, when was I talking with that person again? And I was like, God, that must've been like a month ago. I looked up the email and it was only 11 days prior. And I was like, Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, that feels like ancient times. So like, that's kind of the speed we're rolling at. Um, but I think most founders, they don't, Most founders or most business owners don't act like they think they might be working hard or they think they might be working fast. They really aren't. And I think just picking up the intensity level is a really big one. And it's crazy how much more you can get done relative to your competitors, if you're just willing to attack things a bit harder. And then the second one is, just over-complicating stuff too quickly or just adding too many things into a business. Simplicity, simplicity scales is kind of like the biggest thing. And most of the times it's very easy to, If something's not going a hundred percent the way you want it to, to just change it and go do something else. But what happens is you lose all the compounding of that, or it's very easy to start adding. It's very easy to add things into a business. It's very hard to remove things from a business. Like if you can cut something out and your business stays the same or grows, that's actually more impressive than adding something into the mix to try and get it to grow more. And I think what most founders or business owners get wrong is they try to add stuff in when in reality you should be looking to just take stuff away for growth. That's a very kind of hard thing to do because we always want to keep doing new stuff and keeping the ball moving. But yeah, trying to overcomplicate stuff is a big one that I see a lot of founders make the mistake of. whether it's a new offer that you're trying to launch because you think that's what customers want, or whether it's trying to change up an entire product because you think that's what is needed. Nine times out of 10, it's not, you just have to do more of the things you're already doing good as opposed to doing things. And if more people stuck on that mindset, I think they would get a lot further ahead. And then if you, if you stack that with just working fast and going with speed and intensity, you'll, you'll That's really good advice for any industry for probably forever. That's like timeless advice right there. So if you start, so I think the reason, one of the reasons why it's tough for me, especially is because if I understand what you're saying, right, I have to start taking things out of my business. to improve it. And you don't really know what's going to happen when you take something out until you do it. And at some point you're going to take something out and it's going to break the business. And that's when you're like, all right, that, that was something that I have to put back in. That was, that's how you actually know if, if it's something that Yeah. I mean, a good example, like a really easy one is people will bring in new offers all the time. And like, so we'll, we'll use an example. Like, let's say, let's say if someone's doing just commercial dumpster pickup and well, and they're like, Oh, you know, we're, we can grow by just adding residential now. It's like, okay. Maybe, but it's also a whole new business model. It's got a whole new set of things. Why don't we just try and do more of what we're already doing? Well, which is commercial dumpster pickups, right? What happens there before we go add something else into the pile, because every time you add one new thing in, it's going to add complexity that wasn't there before. Whereas. Let's just go dominate commercial. Let's go triple that side of the business. Then let's go look at adding something new. And like, let's have the question asked, like how we figured out what the upper limit of this opportunity is. If you're confident you're at the upper limit, sure. Then let's go start looking elsewhere. But until you get there, and I think most people underestimate how big the upper limit in like any niche or vertical is. So that's what Yeah, well, if I look at the biggest competitors in the waste management space, you have waste management, they named their company after the industry. And so if you're not bigger than them, with their global organization at this point, then there's always more upside. Which is everyone, everyone can get bigger. I actually made that mistake. I was doing temporary roll off is specifically what I was doing. And I had the problem of summertime was actually my slow season. So I wanted to add a service line and I added truck, um, uh, trash trucks. So track tractor trailers that haul trash between landfills between the transfer station and landfill. And I thought, Oh, it was an easy ad. It's going to offset my slow, slower time of the year. And that was like a huge mistake because it was a different kind of truck. I needed a different truck. There was different regulations that I didn't know. My team didn't know him. I had to get different drivers with different licenses. They need to class a instead of class B. And it was like, it was really stressful. We had a lot of mistakes that happened through that. So, um, it distracted us from our main mission, which was the worst. So you're dead on with that advice. So thanks Cooper. We're coming to the end of our time here. I've got one major question for you, which is the future. I'm always interested in the future. I think anyone that's a visionary, they're actually dreaming of the future and trying to bring it to today. I'm looking forward to when my great grandkids are up in outer space and they're changing the galaxy. We're not going to be there, I don't think. You and I probably aren't going to space. Um, where is, uh, you know, maybe a little, little, little less than great, great grandkids. Do you have something on your horizon? Like, where is your journey going to be taking you over the next year, five years? Where Yeah. So for myself, I mean, I'm, I'm absolutely loving what I'm doing right now. So for myself, the next three to five years, I think I'll still be in the same position that I'm at now. And just the impact and the reach is going to exponentially go up. Like we've got some insanely lofty goals here at Martel Ventures. So I want to make, I want to kind of help realize all of those. And then I think the chapter two after that is, I think I'm all like, I'm always going to have like the builder's itch. So kind of like for me, I want to take the next three, four or five years, build out and get Martel Ventures to be kind of like the number one respected voice and, uh, player in kind of the AI venture space and then take everything that I've kind of learned from doing all that. And I mean, if it makes sense, go out and run and kind of run the playbooks that we build out here to find success and just run it on myself for my own, uh, AI software business and rock and roll from there. I mean, the, the fun thing right now is especially with the world of AI, it is changing so quickly. So it's hard. Projecting out past three months is really hard in the AI space. So like this could all be completely like we could wake up a year from now and the world looks completely different. So I'm not 100% sure what that looks like, but all I know is having a ton of fun where I'm at right now, looking forward to keep it, keeping it growing and seeing, but just knowing that everything I'm kind of picking up and doing now, helping support all of our existing portfolio companies will just help support me in whatever my next act is. Can, can you combine your, your Ironman passion for Actually, it's funny enough. I was literally using, um, chat GPT the other day to build me a marathon training plan. Cause like I'm weakest in running by a long shot. So I was like, cool. Okay. Give me a plan. So from now until may of next year, cause there's a race in Vancouver nearby where, where I live, I was like from now until may. Give me a run plan that gets me to a sub three hour marathon. So it put the whole thing together. I was like, give me all the nutrition, give me everything. Like just build me this plan. And then, so I'm getting that kind of thrown in my calendar and going to do a whole kind of. Five months, six months training block just to get ready for that race there. And by, cause I know if I can run a sub three hour marathon. Everything else in that race is going to be easy peasy. So using AI is used to build out Well, you'll have to share that because my friends and I would love to break three hours. I have a couple of friends that can get down to 250, but I'm not there. I would love to be there. So if you want to share that, I'm sure there's a business opportunity because a lot of Definitely. Well, I'll give you like the, the, the, the three second version of how I did it. And also if anybody wants me to go like more deep in it, just shoot me a message on Instagram. I'll send you my Instagram, Michael. Um, and, uh, I can just, just DM me like AI and I'll kind of give you a little breakdown on it. But the biggest thing that I do is I start with what's called like a, a master prompt on myself. So I just spent like three hours talking to AI, telling it everything about me. So I know it's everything about myself, my role. my relationships, everything. And then I eat that and I say, Hey, here's me build me a training plan, catered to myself, given all the details, you know, about my schedule, my sleep, my work, all of it. So that way I can still reach those goals in and around the existing schedule that I currently have right now. And so there's a couple of easy ways where you can really tailor it for yourself. Um, Yeah, that's a great idea. So I'm going to, I'm going to steal that idea. Tell an AI about myself. Everyone should do that. That's a, that's a good advice. Cause it's moving so quick. So how can people connect with you? Like Yeah. Kind of the easiest way is if you just shoot me a message on Instagram. So I'm just going to drop that in the chat there for you or send me an email at Cooper at Dan Martell.com. Those are kind of the two easiest, best ways Perfect. And I see your Instagram handle looks like coop underscore doggy dog. Is that right? Yes. Awesome. Well, cool. All right, Cooper. Well, it's been great talking with you today. I'm really excited to see where your journey goes next. I'll follow you. I'm currently following you on Instagram. So if you post up there, I'll see it. And I encourage everyone else to follow you as well, because it sounds like you have a lot of fun stuff going on. You're at the edge of this AI revolution, Yeah. 100%. It's a fun time and yeah, happy to connect with anyone out there. Sounds great. Thanks, Cooper. You have a wonderful day and Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Waste to Wealth. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you connect with us on social media and subscribe to the show wherever you consume podcasts. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review and tell a friend about the show.