Behind the Scenes: Building a Business Empire
Vince Covino joins us to share his insights on scaling businesses effectively while maintaining a heart-centered approach to leadership. He emphasizes that moving from small scale to big scale often requires developing the leaders around you and creating an environment where they can thrive. Vince discusses the importance of attracting top talent and the significant role that compensation packages play in this process. He also highlights the value of listening to your team and being open to growth, both personally and professionally. Tune in as we explore how to navigate the challenges of leadership and create a culture of collaboration and success.
Vince Covino, a prominent figure in business scaling, shares invaluable insights on leadership and growth in this engaging discussion. He emphasizes that the transition from small to large-scale operations often hinges on the leader's capacity to grow alongside their team. Covino explains that many leaders encounter self-imposed ceilings, limiting their ability to scale effectively. To break through these barriers, he stresses the importance of attracting and developing talented leaders who can drive substantial revenue growth. By creating attractive compensation packages and fostering an environment of shared vision, leaders can recruit high-caliber individuals capable of contributing millions to the business's bottom line.
Throughout the conversation, Covino reveals his own experiences with scaling businesses, including the challenges he faced in retaining top talent. He candidly discusses his evolution as a leader, admitting past tendencies toward micromanagement and the necessity of embracing feedback from team members. This journey led him to understand that great leaders are also great followers, open to learning from others. As he recounts his growth from low to high eight-figure revenue, he highlights the critical role of mentorship and the profound impact of listening to his employees, which ultimately transformed his company's culture and retention rates.
The episode culminates in a powerful message about the significance of self-awareness and the willingness to adapt as a leader. Covino's journey illustrates that while business mastery is essential, inner mastery is equally vital for sustained success. His insights serve as a roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs, emphasizing that the path to scaling a business is often a long-term commitment, requiring strategic investments and a willingness to evolve as both a leader and an individual.
Listeners are encouraged to reflect on their leadership styles and consider how they can implement Covino's principles to foster growth and success in their own ventures.
Takeaways:
- Vince Covino emphasizes that a leader's growth is often self-imposed, limited by their capacity to manage teams effectively.
- Attracting top-tier leaders requires understanding how to create attractive compensation packages that align with company vision.
- Listening to employee insights can drastically improve retention rates and cultural dynamics within a company.
- Vince shares the importance of recognizing when to step back as a leader to allow more qualified individuals to take the reins.
- Investing in leadership development, both inner and outer, is crucial to scaling a business successfully over time.
- Growth capital can shorten the timeline for business success significantly, allowing for accelerated impact and expansion.
Links referenced in this episode:
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Warrior Sage
- Amazon
- Sequest
- SeaWorld
- Sea Life
- PETA
- Legacy Wealth
Transcript
Well, hello everybody and welcome to the podcast. I am Jaclyn Strominger, I am your host.
And today as you know on this podcast we love to hear from amazing leaders and their insights and get really key details as the way that we can actually change, grow and become unstoppable in our lives and in our business. And I want to introduce you today to Vince Covino. And let me tell you a little bit about Vince.
He has scaled businesses, he has built amazing, actually amazing businesses and he leads by example where business mastery meets heart centered transformational leadership. He is an he.
As an eight figure scaling expert and visionary CEO of Warrior Sage, Vin combines the hard won lessons of entrepreneurial success with deep inner introspective work and self mastery.
His unique approach equips entrepreneurs to scale their companies effectively while connecting authentically with their teams, families and communities. So Vince, welcome to the podcast.
And even in your, even in your, your, in your bio about you, where, where the, the scaling and bringing all of you know, bringing a company to fruition obviously comes out. So welcome to the show.
Speaker B:Thank you so much, Jacqueline.
Speaker A:So Vince, you've had a great success. And so one of the things that I think a lot of leaders question is how do we go from that small scale to big scale? And so how have you done that?
Speaker B:Well, so I'll define small scale to big scale. There are certain ceilings that a leader hits and in each case the growth is self imposed. So leaders grow to their own capacity.
y good with AI integration in:Very often the next level, let's say that to go from seven figures to eight figures, it requires developing the leaders around you, which means I've got to understand how to attract them. Why would a great leader, that's his whole life been making 2, 300 grand a year?
Incentives of 100 to 300 grand a year, that level of leader, they're paid that much because that's what the market drives. People are paid what they're worth in the market.
If you're making 80 grand a year right now, that's what you're worth according to the economy, right? The economy works.
And so if I want to get someone that is truly capable of adding 3, 5, $7 million in revenue to my company, and let's say that 40% of that falls to the bottom line, a really profitable company, then it's going to bring in $2 million in additional EBITDA into my company. Well, I'm gonna have to pay, if I'm really efficient, 3, 400 grand for that person.
A leader is not able to mentor that person and lead that person to a higher level is not going to attract them. So that means they'll never be on your team.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B: if you're, you know, Fortune:Because you're not going to get a great C suite person at that level unless, unless there's something that makes them believe they're going to be at eight figures.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Exit or otherwise. So, so that's a big piece, is that. And very often it's 3, 4, 5 liters that are just really powerful.
So when we went from a million dollars a month in revenue to 3 million a month, it was in that 18 month period where I received enough growth capital to be able to bring in those $34 million people to two of them and then another three that were in the 150 to 200,000 range. At that level, you can get the cream of the crop, the 1 percenters.
The difference between somebody making 80,000 a year that's doing your marketing and someone that's making 150 a year is the difference between, you know, a 30 growth rate and 80 growth rate and say, so okay, what's the value of that incremental hundred thousand dollars that I add to a chief Marketing Officer's package or the difference of a, a CFO, which CFOs are so misunderstood and misunderstood. Underutilized.
Speaker A:Oh, I would totally, I totally agree with that.
They, yeah, the financial part of it, knowing all those ins and outs and what they can do and I mean there's so much that, that a great CFO can bring to the table.
But something that you just said I think is kind of like quintessential and I think, you know, listeners, you know, as you're growing your business and even as leadership, there's a couple of things that you have said. Number one is, is being able to develop the leaders around you to growth and attract those right leaders. And that's really important.
You know, a lot of times I think we bring people in to a company and listen, this is also what I have seen and what I experienced when I was in corporate. You're bringing people in as leaders and you think that they don't, that leaders don't need to be led, but in actuality, there is.
Everybody has some growth in them. Right.
Speaker B:Jacqueline, this. Such an important observation, is that the best leaders are also followers.
And so I'm attracting people that are great leaders who are also followers. As. As a CEO, I looked at my mentors. One was our chairman of our board, which, by the way, a board of directors helped me tremendously.
That was part of my growing from. From low eight figures to growing from 10 million a year to 35 million a year.
I had two or three other mentors that I believe were leaders in my life that I said, I admire the way they lead, the way they love, the way that they're able to seamlessly give up control. That was something that I really held on to. I was a micromanager and got to.
Speaker A:Have a good observation for yourself to realize that. Right, right.
Speaker B:Yeah. And, And, and, and that was part of my mentorship, is being led by someone that could teach me and then my willingness to lead others.
I can tell you this. In:And with incentives as well, I went through maybe three executives over the course of three years, which is way too high. And I realized, okay, I can. I can attract him here. I can dangle a carrot. I can show them, hey, look, this. Here's our path. This.
This company is going to be worth $400 million. And here's your slice of it. I couldn't at that stage retain them, didn't have the capacity. So that's another part of the formulas.
One thing to bring them on, it's one thing to sell them on the vision, which I was really pretty good at. But six months in or eight months in, I remember a COO who. I couldn't believe I'd got someone at this level. I thought, wow, this is.
This is just incredible. But he truly saw what was possible. And. And because he was such a professional ninja with humans, he said, vince, you're.
You're hard to work for, I want to tell you. And it was my first time I ever.
You know, I heard a thousand people tell me that before, but I had never let it land the level of trust that I had in this person, the respect that I had for his integrity. I thought, he's probably telling the truth. And then I started to realize how to retain and why I was hard and why I needed to be a little bit.
You know, Steve Jobs went through that process as well and had that shift. And very often it comes with, with some of the gray hairs, but it.
Speaker A:A few extra wrinkles.
Speaker B:Comes with a little of that. But that's the. Those are big pieces of it.
And then of course getting alignment of those key depending on the company, the Dynamics, those key 3, 4, 5 people, those key alliances in the company internally and then obviously the, you know, the key partnerships externally and developing those, which is similar principles, attracting those, developing those, retaining those relationships. And that's really it. You really don't need too many.
I found that in my financial planning business I had two people that were paid six figures and then another dozen that were paid, you know, 60 to 90.
And with, with clients, with, with building that business out, a couple of CPAs, couple of attorneys that were just great referral centers, great partners with, with other business owners. And then I found the same principle to be true in my other two businesses that were really successful. And that was a big key really.
It's a team approach.
Speaker A:Yeah, what you just said team approach.
But you also said something that I think that again I really want listeners to really hone in on this, which is you are also open and willing to learn and, and make a shift because you saw that there was an issue like you saw that you could bring people in and you're like oh, I, you know, if I keep doing the same thing, that's obviously and, and I'm not getting the same results. I actually have to do something different.
Speaker B:You know, it's interesting. We started tracking retention and I, and I was shocked because we, you know, we had about 550 people employees.
When Covid hit, when Covid hit, we, you know, the, everything changed for us because we had to, we had to close. We had to go from 150 grand a day in revenue to zero. And that changed everything.
But, but before that and of course after that, as we went back up again, I was listening to a podcast and I, and I realized how valuable retention of employees was and I looked and I thought, oh my goodness, here's our retention rate. That sounds horrible. So I went and did. I had our HR director who was amazing. She was with about eight, nine years.
She started out as a reptile husbandry expert at one of the locations and just moved into hr. Just think fascinating experience.
If we had time to get into that, but had her run the report per department and I found out her husbandry department had sky high turnover. And that allowed me to say what is it about our husband or department that's causing such high turnover.
In many cases, they don't like the practices, our husbandry practices, our enrichment. And so we started to do exit interviews of people who had put in their two weeks notice or leave.
And we'd learned so much about, about how we run our company from our employees. And before that time, it was really, look, this is erring, but I'll say what, what was silently going through my head.
I'm the smartest guy in this room. I'll set the policy, I'll set how this goes. I'll set the checklists.
And somebody would say, well, if we did this or we did this, I said, okay, yeah, okay, thank you for that. Here's this, here's your checklist.
And as I, as I began to listen and study, I would learn why this department or that location had high turnover, higher than the industry average. I thought, how can I be worse than the industry average and possibly be competitive? So that allowed me to see how to shift cultural changes.
I had always read Peter Drucker's I love it. You know, strategy eats or culture eats strategy for breakfast.
But I really didn't understand what it meant and why it, why it was true until I began to listen.
And when I listened, at your point, became open and receptive to what others were saying, then that's when we moved from well below industry average to way above, not way above, but a decent 50, 60% better than our industry average. I thought, wow, better retention, lower. Lower cost of hiring, less, you know, fewer mistakes, safer. All just so many advantages.
And that was a big, big shift, big improvement.
Speaker A:That's huge. And I absolutely love that.
And so basically, not to put words in your mouth, but basically you went from thinking that you were the smartest person in the room to realizing you're not the smartest person in the room. And there's somebody else in this room that's smarter than me or they were all collectively. Collectively, right.
Collectively, there is that brilliance, right?
And to use that brilliance, and that's the key thing, like as a leader, you have to understand, to use the brilliance of your team, like, get there, get their take in on what's happening.
Because, you know, from the person who's quote, unquote, the lowest position all the way up, I mean, that lowest position is, Might have more of an insight into what people are seeing because they might see the customer in a different way than you do.
Speaker B:Absolutely true.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Jeff Bezos, say this, but just listen to your customer, listen to your employees. They will tell you how to succeed.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:And you know, how had I been able to like, like if current 50 year old Vince could go back and, and go into the mind of 35 year old Vince, oh my goodness, what a difference.
Speaker A:Right? But that's why it's so great because you get to share this wisdom with us now.
And so hopefully There is a 35 year old Vince listening and they're going to collect that wisdom, which is so important.
So something that you also said that I think is also really important to, to I, I want to talk about is that you, you shared, in order for you to scale, I mean you had to obviously go out and get, you weren't bootstrapping this off of your credit cards or a loan from the bank.
You actually, you know, to bring in those key C suite people that, you know, leaders that were going to help you, you know, to pay somebody, three, four, whatever, $100,000 a year plus bonuses. That takes capital. I mean, unless you obviously had it saved.
Speaker B:I mean it just takes capital. And an investment in yourself is generally the best move you can make.
An investment in your leadership, your development, both inner and outer mastery. I believe if you have one or the other, you're going to fail.
In other words, you could have great business mastery, which I believe that I had and I believe that I failed in so many levels because I truly didn't have that inner mastery. And I understand that really clearly now. A lot of mentorship and a lot of work on that.
In terms of growth capital, most businesses are on if they don't know it, but they're on a 10 or 20 or 30 year timeline and they're not even thinking that far advanced because they're thinking about next month or maybe next year. But the reality is most businesses that are successful take decades. Okay, so let's start with 95% of businesses don't make it 10 years.
The ones that do make it 10 years, they're in it for 20, 30 years. Well, how do I shorten that 20 or 30 years that I'm not saving and slaving for 20 years and turn that into a five or a seven year timeline.
That's when it dawned on me, hey, I want to build 20 locations that's going to take all their five to $10 million a piece. That's going to take me 30 years if I wait till I get my revenue ramped up. So.
Speaker A:I just, I'm laughing because it's so true, but because it's, you know, you know, we don't, we don't see and I, and I want to say this. You know, so many times in business that we don't see the beginning, right?
We don't see, you know, people, you know, think about Amazon, for example, right? Nobody saw the beginning of him working on that, right?
And there's that 10 years that it took to get to here and net, you know, but then there was capital anyway, so keep going. I was like, capital.
Speaker B:His parents, a couple of his friends, and you know, they've obviously done really well, but it. Without those very fundraisers, it's very probable. And I haven't dissected his well enough.
But there are plenty of deals out there, plenty of big public companies out there that without the growth capital, they would not exist. These people wouldn't be billionaires. They wouldn't employ 10,000 people and serve 10 million customers.
You know, Sequest, my company and other companies that I had were not sequest branded. They served 20 million guests that came to my locations. We estimate that when someone comes, they smile 80 to 150 times. Literally.
I created 2 billion smiles, 2 billion right of these right here. That would not have happened if I had gotten the tracked capital. And by the way, let's just say same principle, retain the capital.
Because I can tell you that my early investors that on day one, put in a million here and 2 million there, later, years later put in 3 million here or 8 million there. So, you know, we raised a lot, a lot of eight figures of dollars from real estate partners, from investors, in a couple of cases, from friends.
ow, in my peak growth year of:In fact, when Covid hit, I was literally a month and a half away from opening Fort Lauderdale. A month and a half. I had water in my exhibits, I had sharks ready to go. I mean, we were so close. It was, it was crazy.
And then there was a big lawsuit between the city of PETA, sued the city of Fort Lauderdale for letting me come to Fort Lauderdale and then covet hit at the same time. It was just, it was just nuts.
Able to build five locations and employ 300 people at those locations that welcome 3, 4, 500,000 guests per year without, in that case, about $28 million. I couldn't have done it. So it's, it's necessary.
And, and, and I suppose I could have done one every two years and, and made this a 20 year endeavor, but I don't have the patience for that and I want to make a big impact, right. In this case it was 2 billion smiles and frankly $400 million for me. My motives have shifted, but that was the ideas is still impact at some level.
And, and so yeah, growth capital is something that in my early career as a, with an investment firm, that's where I started. I built a firm called Legacy wealth up to nine figures and then I sold that.
That now is approaching a billion dollars in assets under management managed by probably 60 or 70 advisors now. And they've really taken it into it. The three businesses that I've had really successful exits with, they've taken them to astonishing levels.
And it's very gratifying to look around and say, wow, look at all the good that this company is doing. And I birthed it. I brought it in through its, you know, toddler years and juvenile years.
And they've taken it and they've done things that frankly I wouldn't have done in. And I say that in positive ways. I mean they've gotten more sophisticated, more calculated and the level of planning that they do now.
I was just on the phone with them yesterday helping some, you know, a guy worth $130 million. It's, it's beautiful to see that and.
Speaker A:Be a part of that, you know, and I think that's actually a really interesting thing to be also to be able to be, to be able to understand yourself as to almost like knowing, you know what I've gone here with this. I know that if it's going to go here, I might need to step out, sell it, what, whatever, so that I can have somebody else bubble it up even further.
And so in that sense, like if somebody has that company or is in that position, what was the t, what was the sign for you that was like, this is the right time for me to.
Speaker B:This is such an interesting question. I don't know if anyone's ever asked me this, but I have quite an experience around this.
I have always thought to myself, even after dilution, my wife and I owned 70% of Sequest.
And we, we always said that whoever is most qualified for the shareholders, myself and five other people who have invested a lot of money, whoever's most qualified to be CEO should leave this company. And when that day comes that it's not Vince Covino, let Vince Covino get out of the way. There's, there's hundreds and hundreds of employees.
There's people that depend. They of all the companies out There they've chosen, they said, this is a company that I'm going to trust to feed my family.
This is the company that allows me to sing my music and do something where I feel like I'm making a contribution and I'm being recognized for the impact that I'm making right here. And when somebody can do that better than Vince Covino, his obligation is to get out of the way. Two and a half years ago that happened.
I, our CFO, I realized six or 12 months and I realized this is an executive at a level that I've, I've not gotten to yet. And I went to the board and I told them precisely that. I said, I think he's better.
backed out in the last hour.:And because he called and said, look, Vince, one of our multi billion dollar investors just called, looked at the deal before we fund it and said, and said his name is Brand. He said, look, we are not going to own SeaWorld, Sea Life, Sea Quest, see nothing, get out of that business run. It's a dead end.
The, the moods are shifting, the worlds are shifting and, and these guys are very hands on as well with animals. That's, that's not going to go. He told me, he said, Vince, here are the things you need to do to, to get to the next level in your business.
And I, and I follow those. One of those was how I had set up my board and even myself as a CEO. I took a vote.
The board took a vote after I told them that and they came back and, and I again, my suggestion was I think Aaron will be a better CEO than me. And they came back and, and they said made the, made the vote. Vince is still the CEO.
And I thought, I was very gratified at this level because I thought they believe in me. Here I am in the midst of COVID It's, it's a shit show.
I mean it's for us to try to feed 50,000 animals, you know, with, with no revenue coming in and plenty of challenges. On the other hand, I thought, I'm not sure I want to be doing this anymore. Every day was a fight.
I felt like Chief Joseph, I will fight no more forever. So another four months went by and I went back to the board and I said, first of all, I still think that our CFO is a better CEO than me.
Second of all, my passion for this is dwindling.
You know, when you're, when you're paying attorneys 800 bucks an hour to fight animal rights activists and just constant, you know, Good Morning America, all just news articles. And you read the new news articles like, okay, look, there's like 4% truth to that. You know what I mean?
And it's so out of, and you just, every day, there's literally three, four, five articles every single day. And so I stepped down.
But, but there's a, there's a great study out of Harvard, the Founder's Dilemma, where the very skills that, that birthed the company into existence took it to the level that it hit, where it hits a barrier are, are not the skills that are needed to take it to the next level. And so very often it behooves. And I've seen brilliant people do this where they've hired a CEO.
And I remember:And I was, I was closely affiliated with him and, and I had a great valuable lesson there that he brought in a CEO that was better than him at it for this big company. And it was a good move. In hindsight, I was going to say, wow, wow, you know, he just had a quarter of a billion dollar exit.
Why put in the right leadership?
Speaker A:Right. You know, I could talk to you for hours about this because I think it's, I think it's, it's, it's.
I think it's so true that again, like there's a season, like when you, and even the, you know, as when you found something and you get it going at some point, it is actually better to take that step back and have somebody else come in. Not because you don't believe in it anymore as you shared, like the passion for it changes.
You want to see it go and keep growing, but your day to day passion changes. And Jacqueline, it could be, could be.
Speaker B:Passion, but it also could be skill set.
Speaker A:Right? Yeah. Skills, right? Yes. Yeah.
I mean, and bringing somebody else in and being able to acknowledge that and recognize that, like kudos to you for like seeing that because I think that's, sometimes that's a lot harder to see and admit. Like I don't have the skill set to do that and to admit that because so many of us don't want to, like so many people don't want to. Right.
Speaker B:I'll give you a quick hack, Jacqueline, you'll like this. I can tell you who, if you spend a lot of time on AI, AI knows you.
And it will tell you what your blind spots are if you ask it and say, be brutally honest with me with all these problems, everything you know about me, give me 20 questions that explore my leadership capabilities. Where am I strong? Where am I weak? Give me the questions. Then go in and answer those 20, 30 questions. And then say, now my AI's name is Valen.
Tell me everything. Tell me what I don't see and don't sugarcoat anything. I want the fucking truth. And it laid it out and it was so spot on.
I can't believe it gave me chills. And I thought, oh my gosh. That's why my mentor told me I'm a 4 out of 10 with leading the feminine. I see it. I connect the dots. Here's why.
In:I call it the Lotus sword, the penetrating truth. Recognizing what's but people in your life that can do that with love in depth. Like the CEO did for me at one point or another employee.
So many times I've had not so many times, but five or six people in my life, which is a lot who can speak truth to me. When I have a blind spot, I've got them. I've got five or six up in my life and they will drop truth bombs right on.
And it's amazing every time we go to a different level in our relationship.
Speaker A:That's awesome. I love it.
I'm gonna have to ask, I'm gonna have to ask my favorite AI that knows me the best because you know you there is one that you always do your whatever I'm gonna have to ask in my blind spots anyway. So Vince, how can people get connected with you and learn more about all the things that you're doing?
And I know pre show you share that you've got this little retreat happening place. So how can people best connect with you? Get more of your wisdom?
Speaker B:Warriorsage.com I've got them on TikTok as well and or Vincecabino.com.
Speaker A:Is is there one place that you hang out more.
Speaker B:If someone's looking for growth capital? Warriorsage.com okay, someone's looking for just a bit more about just the, the content of my experience in my life. Probably TikTok.
Speaker A:That's awesome. Well listeners, first and foremost, I'm sure you've gotten some great nuggets out of this episode. I know that I have.
And Vince is such a wealth of knowledge and a great expert on growing and scaling a business.
So connect with him, go to Warrior Sage, check him out on TikTok, connect with him on all the socials, and please do me the favor of sharing this episode with your friends and colleagues because I think it is vastly important information to be shared. And also make sure you hit subscribe. Jacqueline Scher, your host and thank you for listening and thank you Vince for being an amazing guest.
Speaker B:Thank you so much.
