Applying the best tactics in scaling your business should be fundamental, and learning them from the best is necessary. Today, Solomon Ali chats with Vince Guest, the Senior Executive of UnCommon Rezultz, a company that helps leaders of publicly traded and private companies formulate strategies that help their financial conditions. Vince imparts the essentials on achieving business success, beginning by sharing what to look – from what a particular industry demands to how you can apply your skillsets and become an authority.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

 

Maximizing Your ROI and Profitability with Vince Guest

Vince, how are you?

Solomon, I am doing fabulous.

Welcome to the show. I’m glad you joined to talk to the audience and share your experience. I won’t do you justice in introducing you. I’m not going to deprive you of that. I want you to introduce yourself and share with the audience some of the things that you have done in the past and things of that nature, so they’ll understand why this is such a value to them.

My name is Vince Guest. I’m the President of a company out of California called UnCommon Rezultz. We gave it that name because we don’t do anything common. We don’t do anything average. Everything we do has to be great, has to be exceptional for our clients and for our customers. We do things that are uncommon. That’s the result that you’re going to get.

Uncommon results, that’s what you’re telling me. You guys solve people’s problems. You go over and beyond the call of duty to make something work for them that they may not be aware of.

It’s like if somebody goes to a bar and they want top-shelf liquor, we give you a top-shelf service. We don’t give you things that are going to be mundane or ordinary. Whatever we do has to be extraordinary. In fact, whatever you request, we’re going always to exceed your expectations.

I’ve known you for years. Tell the audience a little bit about Mr. Guest.

Our company, UnCommon Rezultz, one of the things that we do is we look at companies and have them grow and expand. If you’ve got a company that’s doing $5 million a year and they want to do $10 million a year, we can help them to grow their revenues, sales, profits. If you’re going $30 million a year, can we get to the $50 million or $60 million? We probably can. There are two components growing the revenue. We also do strategic marketing, consulting, technical marketing. Also, there’s a personal development component. If somebody’s business is doing well from a monetary standpoint, if they’re having some other issues in terms of management and in terms of personal development, we’ll deal with that too. If one area is pulling one area down, we want to be able to look at it from a more holistic standpoint so they’ve got some balance between their work and their personal lives. That’s what Uncommon Rezultz does so you get that result.

I worked for a company called Universal Bioenergy, a publicly-traded company. We’re one of the few minority-owned and operated publicly traded companies. Solomon, we took that company that had been in business for several years that had a lot of expenses. We took it from zero revenue to about $80 million in about two years. Those are the numbers. I also worked as a consultant with another company I had called Aegis Energy International out of the LA area. We’ve been consulting in terms of plant engineering and plant management, energy consulting. All of our clients, Solomon, may have told you, all of them were corporate companies. They were all Fortune 100 firms. We didn’t do any companies at that time, maybe one. They were all Fortune 100 firms. We had firms like City Court, Beckman Industrial. We had firms like DuPont, Amoco Oil, Rockwell International, North of Aircraft, those are our clients. We wanted to feel that they could do that.

Vince, let me say this, I share with people all the time and I want our audience to pay attention to this. Get with people who know their craft. Get with people who are good at what they do. I’ve worked with Vince for years. I first met Vince through one of the MBAs that I had hired to help do financing for one of my companies. I had my first $1 million dollar home that I had bought and I was looking to refinance it back in the day. I didn’t know run-around. I’d go to Mr. Guest, he owned a huge mortgage company back in the day and he gets it done in record time when everybody else was getting run-around, acting like they couldn’t get it done.

I know firsthand the experience that it takes to get things done. Later, when I went through my trials and tribulations and losing everything, even to the point where I wanted to take my own life because I couldn’t pay my bills and things of that nature and I’m living in an 18,000-square-foot home. Mr. Guest was one of the first people to reach out to me and said, “We got this gentleman named Dr. Craven with Universal Bioenergy. If you can raise the money, are you willing to come and help?” I kept saying, “No. I got stinky thinking and stuff like that.”

You need to read books so that you can become proficient, become an expert, and become in demand.

Eventually, Vince got me over there and I watched what he did and putting the business models and the business plan together to grow and I said, “This is a person I want to work with. This is a person that I’ll go raise the money and do this and work with it.” I said all that to say this, “You have to have people who are good, who know what they’re doing.” You have to have people who understand their craft. Vince, I didn’t mean to give you a bigger plug than you gave yourself. Maybe I did do a good job.

I always appreciate the plug, Solomon.

Take it from there. You did the Universal. Tell these people why they should call Vince Guest? What could Vince do for them?

Let me share one more component on my background so they’ll get a little bit of breath to that. As you know before, when I was doing consulting work for these major Fortune 100 companies, I was also a director of corporate facilities in real estate. I’ve managed some of the biggest facilities and corporate assets in the United States. I worked for Trammell Crow. I managed the two million-square-foot plant in Irvine.

You were also the youngest black person or white person that ever took positions.

Let me tell you about that briefly. I used to work for TRW Aerospace Company. TRW Aerospace and Defense so now it’s owned by Northrop Grumman in West LA. At one point their plant facilities there was a total of about 10 million gross square feet. They had about 22,000 people that work there. I managed it when it was about 5.5 million square feet, probably $1 billion-plus asset. I went to work for Trammell Crow Management. Trammell Crow used to be the largest real estate development company in the United States. They were headquartered in Texas. They used to own and operate over 535 million square feet of office space, working space, mixed-use space. They had a joint venture with a company out of New York. They hired me as director of facilities in corporate real estate for a two-million-gross-square-foot facility.

That is huge. That’s larger than a city, some cities anyway.

Two million square feet based on 165 acres, 8,000 people worked there. The interesting thing about that, I’m African-American. Prudential Insurance had their headquarters there. Fluor Daniel, which is probably one of the top five construction companies in the world. Fluor Daniel’s headquarters was there. Everybody before me in that position were all white Americans, they were all men and they’re all about 50-plus. I get that position. I was the first African-American in that position. At that time, the city of Irvine was predominantly white. It’s mixed now, there are more African-Americans, Asians, Indians and so forth. I was the first African-American in that position and I was 38 years old. I was the youngest man ever, black or white, in that job.

That is amazing. You’re from Kentucky.

Born and raised. I’m here in Charlotte visiting. I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. We call it Derby City, home of Muhammad Ali, Churchill Downs and Bourbon.

It doesn’t matter where you start but you have to be professional. You have to read. You have to learn your craft. You have to be knowledgeable. You have to become an expert in authority on the things that you’re talking about, on the things that you’re doing. That’s why Mr. Guest was able to do and achieve what he achieved at 38 years old. When other people, black or white, we’re not going to discriminate, we’re going to try to bring you the best talent so that you can access them and get the help that you need to develop a way to grow your business. Mr. Guest, tell us about this journey because I know it’s a long journey.

Let me tell you a little bit about the journey. You asked about where I was born. I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. I ended up working in Corporate America for some of the biggest corporations in the US, managed billions of dollars of physical assets, real estate assets, financial assets and managed sites with thousands of employees. I get real respect and I had a lot of good mentors but it wasn’t always that way.

 

You had mentors.

I had good mentors. I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, were raised in the projects. My family was raised in the housing project so sometimes people would see me. I’ve been to corporate events and I’ve had meetings with governors, for example, the former Governor Roberts of Virginia. I’ve been in meetings with former Governor Herbert of Utah, ambassadors, cabinet members, senators and congressmen. I came from humble beginnings. I had to work my way up and get help. We were raised in the housing projects in Louisville, Kentucky. There were cotter homes and there was Southwick and we called it Brick City.

You aren’t supposed to make it or achieve any of this.

Our mother told us, “Although we might have been raised poor, we didn’t have a poor mentality.” We had to get out of the projects and one of the ways to do that was education. We all had to go to school or learn some craft, trade, college or something and get some good mentors to help guide us. Once we did that, we were able to little bit by little bit bootstrap with the help and assistance to get out of the projects and get into maybe the working class, the middle class and then upper-middle-class areas.

You might see the founding now and see us maybe in better neighborhoods, but we were raised in the projects. We were poor. In fact, we have a saying in Kentucky, that if you are African-American, if you are black and have a lot of money, you’re a pope. If you have low income and you are white, you are poor. We, as Black Americans, we were pope and we were trying to get promoted up to poor. We came a long way since then.

Minority Business Access, our whole mission is to help people who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs or who are already entrepreneurs, small business managers, and things of that nature. Executives who are on companies that they can understand the process that it takes for a small business to go from its innate stage and what that looks like and what that journey looks like. Can you speak to that?

One of the things that any young person is looking to do, they need to, first of all, determine what it is that the market needs. What sometimes people do, they say, “I like to do this or provide this product or service.” You might have a product or service that you like and love and have a passion for, that’s good, but if you have a product or service that you like but if there’s no market or no demand for it, if no one wants to buy it, you can waste a lot of time and not get anywhere. You want to be able to determine what you like to do. You reverse-engineer that. What does the market need? Where’s the market now? Where is it growing in the next 1 and 2 years? What is your niche? What is the area that you like to do? Who out there needs or wants what you have? You can fulfill that niche.

If you specialize in that niche, you won’t have a lot of competition. Make sure that you do what you do better than anybody else, which means whatever training, education, a podcast you need to probably watch, books you need to read so that you can become proficient. You become an expert and you become in demand, now you reposition the competition and you become the one to go to for that service or that product or skill. Once you do that, competition becomes irrelevant.

Let me see if I can regurgitate some of what you said for our readers. Look at maybe perhaps not what you want to do but also look at what the demand is in a particular industry or market place and then apply your skillset and become a professional, authority or expert right there.

Maybe you might have a certain goal, but goals can change. For example, when you were five years old, you have certain goals when you were five and in 1st, 2nd grade. When you’re ten, the needs and wants change. When you’re fifteen, your needs and wants change. When you get 18 to 20 years old, they changed. What you like to do when you’re five is different when you are 21. A lot of times people come out of college, if they go to college and they’ll finish, they may have had a certain aspiration then but as the needs and wants and the market change, by the time they’re 30 or a little older than that, they might find that they want to do something.

They may have something that they were willing to learn in school and they like to take the test but they may find when they get out the curriculum that they learn in college was good to learn but it may not be what they want to do in life. They might say, “I want a career change or do a career that’s different from what I’ve learned.” Now, it’s a matter of learning the other skills and abilities, perfecting those and providing that service to that niche and continue to learn. Learning is ongoing. I read about 2 to 4 books every month.

Lifelong education is crucial for you to not get behind the times.

That’s 50 books a year.

Learning is going to be a lifelong process. Don’t think that because I got my degree or I’ve taught persons with degrees, persons with Master’s degrees. I have a friend of mine, they teach college at different schools, but I tell them, “Once you get your MBA, don’t stop.” After two years you got your degree, although it has the title of Master’s degree, what have you mastered?

Mr. Guest, I’m reminded when we were in the board room many years ago and we had a doctor there and I won’t say what company he worked for, but it I’ll say the first part of his name. It started with an R. He represented the acquisition, he was on their board representing their acquisition and we were going over constituted accounts receivable. He tried to argue me down and he was a doctor. I want you to understand I have no formal education in finance. I graduated from high school but that was it. Everything else I’ve learned, it was trial and error or hard knocks and reading books and experience of other people. He tried to argue me down and then later he apologized and stuff like that. This man had a PhD.

I have a PhD in getting results.

He had PhD from some traditional school. Why is reading important? Why is trying to learn more about your expertise and things of that nature or what service or business you’re going to be in critical?

Lifelong education is important. The market is a moving target. What we are experiencing in the marketplace in terms of computers, the internet, all these different outlets for media is changing at a phenomenal rate. If you don’t keep up, you’re going to get behind. It’s not like it was years ago when the US economy was more self-contained. It’s no longer insulated. We have a global economy. We’re offshoring services. We’re outsourcing information. If you don’t keep up, you’re going to get behind. You want somebody to say, “When I need someone to do this, these are the guys, this is the gal, this is the guy who can do this.” You want to be an expert in what you do.

There are four major areas of business. There’s management, there are operations, there are marketing and finance. Those are the four major areas of business. Within those major areas of business, they have subsets. Marketing is a major area of the business but below marketing you have subsets, promotions, sales, advertising, distribution, and public relations, those are all subsets of marketing. In terms of financial, you have corporate finance, accounting, managerial finance, those are all subsets of finance, accounts receivable, payable. As much as this learned finance, there are all aspects of finance, and it’s the same thing with management and operations. You have to be able to have a grasp of the fundamentals of all those. My suggestion is one of the best areas to learn is marketing.

I want everybody to read that again because a lot of times a business executive comes out of Corporate America and they think because they were successful in Corporate America, and maybe I’ll pick the field that I specialize in. They were running the finance department, they think they know it. They get in the business and then they fail and don’t understand why.

Here’s the reason why. Let me give you this analogy. For example, you all know who Pep Boys is, it’s the auto repair and parks shop. They’re all around the country. They have that in Long Beach, California, I’m here visiting. You might go to school to become an automotive technician and maybe you’ve been at Pep Boys for maybe 10, 15, 20 years. You might be their top automotive technician. They bring in any kind of car, you could fix any kind of mechanical problem and a pneumatic problem with the car, an electrical problem with that car and all of a sudden you say, “I’ve been at Pep Boys and making X amount of dollars for 10, 15, 20 years. I want to start my own business like Pep Boys.” You go out there and you get some money and you’re about to rent or buy a garage or a retail spot. You open up, you hang out your shingle and you start your automotive repair shop.

Here’s the problem with Pep Boys. Pep Boys ran advertising and marketing and TV ad, radio. They had advertised on the internet. They sent direct mail pieces. All you had to do was show up at work and somebody brought the cars in. You’d have to go out there and market to bring those customers, now you needed parts. On the other side of Pep Boys, they had a warehouse, you walk over there and get somebody else to assist you, “I need these parts for the car.” They brought them over. When those parts get low, Pep Boys orders from the dealership or the manufacturer and so forth.

You start your own little Pep Boys. You got this garage with maybe 5 or 6 bays and you open it up on the 1st of January and you don’t have any customers because you’d have to get them. If you don’t have any parts, you don’t have any filters and spark plugs and engine parts because you don’t have the money to buy. You’ve got to put on your marketing cap and go out there and do some advertising, TV, radio, direct mail, internet ads and maybe junk mail. You’ve got to drive it.

You’ve got to put on your marketing and advertising cap first then when those customers come in, then you’ve got to take off your marketing cap and put on your operations cap and fix those cars. Once those cars get fixed, you’ve got to collect the money, invoice, pay them and then you got the finance. You got the accounting aspects, bookkeeping aspects. You’ve got payrolls, tax system to pay. Pep Boys had people on staff who handled all that.

 

They were proficient.

While you’re sitting there and waiting with your six car bays empty, you’re paying your lease or mortgage on that business and you’re going broke because nobody is driving customers in. You’ve got to put your marketing cap on the do that, put your operations cap on to fix it, you can have your management cap on to do all the management things. You’ve got to take care of the financial piece, accounting, receivables, payables, taxes, federal state. That’s the myth of saying, “Because I’m a mechanic, I can own and run a Pep Boys.” You’ve got to go to school, take some training and management and marketing and finance and operations.

Vince, my audience missed that and that was extremely valuable information. I tell the audience and I tell people all the time, “If you have some money, don’t go out and spend your money on what you think you should be spending it on.” Let’s say, getting that bay so that you can bring those cars and you don’t go out getting the website and the business card. You need to go to a professional who understands, who can help guide you through these other core things that you need to know. Vince said there were four of them. I agree. You may not be an expert in all four but you’re going to need to be proficient in all four if you’re going to be an entrepreneur. If you’re not proficient and you’re not learning and studying and reading, because you can’t read about being a mechanic, you’re going to have to read about doing marketing, read about budgets. You’ve got to read. Vince, I want you to go over that one more time because that was some good stuff.

I won’t give the illustration about Pep Boys again.

Give another one. You got me excited.

I’ll give you another real-life experience. When I worked at Corporate America and I was managing some of the biggest plants and facilities in the United States, in fact, in the whole world. For example, when I was managing the facility, the site, the two million-square-foot facility in Irvine, it was called the Park Place site. It was owned by Trammell Crow management. In fact, it’s right off to Jan Murray and Michaelson off the 405 near the John Wayne Airport, it’s still there. It’s worth probably $7 billion. For example, the mortgage on that property was a $180 million loan.

This was a long time ago.

It was a $180 million loan. It was due in 30. The interest rate was 10%. It was doing $10 million. Here’s the point. Maguire Properties bought out their property a few years back. What I’m saying is this, when you get loans like $10 million, $100 million, I work for those companies as a corporate executive. I decided to leave corporate and start my own business. There were a lot of things I knew, some things that didn’t know. I had to learn fast to get the fundamentals and all the areas. When that $180 million dollar loan became due, I was negotiating that loan on behalf of Trammell Crow. Prudential Insurance Company did that loan. It was syndicated. It was 35 lenders and they were trading that paper on Wall Street.

I didn’t have to have a real estate license or a mortgage license or a finance license because I worked under the corporate umbrella. When I left corporate, I wanted to start my own mortgage company and doing real estate loans or residential loans and also commercial loans. I had to have a license for a broker. I had to go back to school and take all the classes in the State of California, either you have to have a Bachelor’s degree in Real Estate, and my background was Engineering and Management. You’d have to have a Bachelor’s degree in Real Estate or two years’ experience in the business and you have to take all the core courses that it takes to get a BA in Real Estate.

I had the experience and I had to go back to school. I took classes online. All the core courses you need to get a BA in Real Estate, I have to take those classes and you have to submit the transcripts to the Department of Real Estate, State of California. They verify that and then I had to take the time, the effort to pass the class, pass the state exam. I got my license. Here are my other points. I had to get that training. I had some friends of mine who had worked with some banks like Washington Mutual before they went down and some other major banks. They were loan officers. They had been loan officers and doing loans for those banks for maybe 10, 15 years.

I had never done those for a bank. I had done big loans and they had done on the commercial side for corporations. Now I was going to do residential loans and then some smaller commercial loans, I had to learn that. I have to learn how the market goes and I have to learn about real estate finance, real estate economics. I’d learned about appraisals. I have to learn how to pick horses in escrow real estate law because I was in a different arena. I’m like the Pep Boys guy if I didn’t learn how to do the other aspects. If I’ve got to drive people into my mortgage business, if I didn’t learn those and how to manage a real estate mortgage company, I had to take those classes, pass them, and get my license with the state. Now I could drive business in. I have several friends, I won’t say their names, they had been working for major banks for years. They left those companies like the auto technician at Pep Boys. They set up their own mortgage companies and they failed.

No man achieves greatness alone. It takes a team and teamwork to go out and achieve greatness.

Why did they fail?

They failed because they had the Pep Boys technician mentality. They thought, “Because I’m a loan officer with Bank of America or Wells Fargo, I can do loans on my own.” Remember, Wells Fargo runs TV ads, radio ads, internet ads, and BFA. They’ve got a massive marketing machine. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars to drive in those customers. People apply for loans online. As the loan officer would have availed Wells Fargo, somebody hands you a lead. Here’s a qualified lead and here’s an app somebody put online about a home in LA or Chicago, all you do to sit at your desk and they feed you leads. With the guy from Pep Boys, he started his own shop, nobody’s feeding him leads.

When I started my business, the first thing I did was to put together a marketing and advertising plan so I could drive in qualified leads and customers or else I would have had this nice good-sized office, paying rent, gas and lighting operating costs. I would have been out of business. They did not learn the marketing piece. They thought, “Because I know how to take a loan application and go through the underwriting process, I can help loan business.” That’s a small aspect so they started their businesses and they were out of business. In fact, they would come to me and ask me, “How come your business is booming?” We have a boom at some point. We grow our business. We started in Corona, California and we grew it in a matter of a few short years. We were doing business in about 26 states.

That’s huge.

It’s nationwide.

That was about the time that I met you and you were able to do my first $1 million loan on my first property. Everyone was giving me the run-around. It’s been a blessing in my life to know you. I tell people all the time, you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

I appreciate that.

Black or white, you’re also one of the people that I hold dear to my heart and that I love as a person, as a human being. I respect his knowledge. The knowledge he has to share with you, I want our audience to pay attention because there are many people that go out into business and they think it’s easy. I’m going to tell you and I’m going to use this low vocabulary stuff again because some of you might not understand it. There are no rewards for not finishing.

I know a lot of you may have grown up in a society where everybody gets a trophy on the team. Vince and I didn’t grow up where you got a trophy for playing the sport. You had to be the superstar and things of that nature, you have to win. That’s the way business is. You don’t get a trophy or say, “I’m in business,” and show a business card or a website and think you’re about to make a lot of money. It’s hard.

What Vince is sharing with you and some of you out there think, “I’ve got this neat job. I’m making six figures or whatever I’m making and I’m going to leave that job. Place my family at risk and go start this business and I’m going to be successful.” BS, that’s not going to happen. You’re going to fail. I have failed more than anyone because I was that dumb kid that went out and tried to do the business and kept trying to do the business and had to learn the hard way. I was that hard-headed kid. I wasn’t as smart as Mr. Guest where I turned around and said, “Let me read something.” I had to learn it the hard way. Later, I started reading and reading. As I started reading, I started figuring out things a little bit quicker. As I found some mentors, I started figuring out things a little faster. What was your experience in life, in business, the valleys?

One of the things that I did when I was young besides reading was taking classes online. When I was young, there were no online services. Correspondence, they would send you the packet in the mail from the college. Books and mentors. You’re going to have some setbacks. Everybody has setbacks, but that doesn’t mean total failure. You have those setbacks, be ready to bounce back, analyze what happened.

There are things that you will do right. There are things you’re going to do wrong. There are things in the economy that are out of your control that change. There are regulatory issues with your state that might affect your company that might set you back. There might be things in terms of federal regulations that might affect your business. It might be things in terms of competition that might affect your business. Changes in terms of products that are liked until they’re no longer liked, the discarded services.

 

Americans are fickle. What we like this year, some other new little trinket or toy, pet rock, Cabbage Patch doll, they come and go. From that standpoint, you have to be ready to bounce back. When it comes to failures, one of the things that I’ve always tried to do to either avoid it as much as I can when I was a young kid, I always watched people and I looked at people who were successful. Even to this day, if I want to do something in any area of business, I’ll say, “Who out there are in the top 10% in the country or the world doing what it is I want to do?” I don’t want the person in the lower 150%. Who are out there in the top 10%? Whatever it is, their service, craft, industry. What can I do? Who are some of the more admired persons are in my company that I may want not to copy but emulate? What did they do to succeed? How did they fail? I emulate that. I also look at people who failed. I’ve studied people who failed. I looked at businesses that failed. Why did they fail? How can I avoid doing what they did? That narrows the gap.

Having said that, because you asked the other question. When I was young, I had some other little businesses I started. When I had my other company, Aegis Energy International, the business was going well. We had a good little marketing plan. In our business, we used direct mail. We have word of mouth. All our companies for Fortune 100 firms. That company went well. We were making a lot of money. I was a young guy. I was probably about maybe $31,000, $32,000, making about $40,000 a month, living out on an apartment. I was doing wonderful.

Our business was capital intensive, which means the companies that we consulted with, we would do an assessment on their own plants, their businesses. We would go in and out and retrofit their equipment, lighting, HVAC. It comes out they cost some time hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. If they like, we get a contract. A recession came, the economy changed. I wasn’t looking, I didn’t know a lot about economics and how regulatory issues could change. If the government changes the Tax Code, we said, “The deductions you were getting before, you can get it.” The recession came so now what happened was we ended up losing contracts, went out of business. I learned from that and I went way out of business. I lost everything, then I had to come back.

Vince, I went through a recession with you in the last business and we had acquired the company, NDR Energy Group, which I still control. I remember when we were going through the recession and we had acquired this. You were the CEO of the company. We acquired the company and we got them a line of credit. I don’t know what it was for, but a large dollar amount. Because of their, I’m going to use the word ignorance, and you can use a different word. During one of the greatest recessions in 2000 right after 2008 that this country is known, we got them a huge line of credit. Could you speak to that?

We had one that we closed. It was about $8 million, maybe $10 million. It was out of an asset-based lender in Texas. It took us quite a bit of time to get it qualified for. We had funded on that line. Unfortunately, some of the employees that work for us, when you’re doing business, you got to make sure you’re in business with the right people because the wrong people, they’re going to swindle you, lie, cheat. Go and business with people who are men and women of integrity because what they did was we had ranks that line and the line of work we funded but they had contacted that lender and gave them some misinformation and they canceled that line, which costs us potentially tens of millions of dollars. That’s one that we did close on.

There was another transaction, if you remember, we were arranging a $300 million credit line with Wells Fargo. The asset-based lending to buy natural gas. It was a $25 million a month, $300 million a year. They end up costing us to lose that line by doing some things that were not quite appropriate. That cost our business to not achieving, we were looking to take a business from about $80 million to $100 million to about $1 billion but because of what they did, it canceled them.

Being unevenly yoked, that’s what I refer to that. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Unevenly yoked is a terrible thing. If you’re with persons that don’t have integrity, they’re not honest. If they’re lazy, if they don’t want to work, if they don’t have good work ethics, they didn’t have good values. If you’re picking your partners that work with you in business or if you have a corporation, a board of directors, or you’re the limited partnership or an LLC. Whoever you bring on board that’s going to be working intimately with you, you need to make sure their personal and business values are aligned with your personal and business values. If they don’t, you will fail.

Mr. Guest, I need to thank you for coming on the show. How does our audience reach you to get the help that they may need from your company?

I’ll give you my phone number. My direct line is (951)220-2468. We’re on the West Coast in the LA Metro area, you can call me there. The company is Uncommon Rezultz. My email address is VinceMGuest@UncommonRezultz.com.

I want you to understand and everything that you read about, I’m successful and I’m humble about it because I’ve been up and I’ve been down so I’ve been to the mountaintop as Martin Luther King would say. I’ve been in the dang pits with the devil. I’m not in the pits anymore. The devil didn’t get his butt kicked. I bring you these people so that they can help and be a blessing in your lives as they have been a blessing and a help to me in my life. No man is an island. No man achieves greatness alone. It takes a team and teamwork to go out and achieve greatness.

I know a lot of you are trying to figure out what do you do? How do you do it? You call a person like Mr. Guest, Uncommon Rezultz, and you say, “I need a mentor. I need some help in crafting my business, my contracts, things of that nature.” You know that you’re standing on solid ground, a good foundation. Everyone I bring you is going to bring you that so that you can move your business to the next level and not fall in these various minefields. I want to thank you for reading the blog. Our goal here is to help you to become more successful, especially the people of color, minorities out there. If we can get you to become more successful, we can lift up that ship once and for all, and help move our economy in the right direction and do things for ourselves rather than looking for others.

 

Important Links

• Vince Guest – LinkedIn
• UnCommon Rezultz
• Pep Boys
• VinceMGuest@UncommonRezultz.com

 

About Vince Guest

Executive, changing the impossible to the possible and creating dramatic results for start-ups to Fortune 500 firms increasing sales by 10% to 30%+. I specialize in improving your company’s financial condition, creating extraordinary value. Expert at directing and managing all Operations, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Purchasing, developing strategic plans to increase sales and profits, drive growth, improve declining sales and improving investor returns. I will handle your toughest challenges and deliver the outcomes that you want. I am the ROI.

• Successfully managed corporate facilities and real estate assets with a combined portfolio value exceeding $2.5 billion

• Restructured and turned around a development stage company with no previous revenues, limited operations and generated record revenues from $0 to $41.29 million in 9 months and $71.74 million within 24 months.

• Developed initiatives and oversaw the strategy to increase company’s customer contract base by 75%, from 20 to 35 major Fortune 500 corporations, which resulted in revenue increases of 25% to 50% quarter over quarter for over 4 years.

• Created a strategic diversified marketing / sales program for lead generation, customer acquisition, and sales channels that generated new customers with an acquisition rate of 35% to 40% and a customer retention rate of 75% to 80%.

• I have been featured in numerous online news journals, e.g., Wall Street Journal, Market Watch, CNBC, MSN, Reuters, Orange County Business Journal, and talk shows e.g., Wall Street Reporter, Stock House Group, and Law 360” on WGIC Radio in Charlotte, North Carolina. Expert trainer and public speaker, delivering hundreds of speeches on management, marketing, corporate finance, operations and representing company before investors, investment bankers and professional advisors.