Why Consistency Wins: Antonio Vaglica and Landon Archangelo - Consistency Wins

SPEAKER_00 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. Antonio and Landon, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us on, man. Hey, thanks for taking some time out of your day to hang out with us here and uh and tell your story. You guys uh met back in boarding school uh some 10 years, 10 plus years ago, which is extremely fascinating. So uh I want definitely want to dive into how that all came together and how you guys ended up in business. So whoever wants to go first, I don't know if you guys want to, you know, rock paper, scissors or whatever it may be, but Antonio, why don't you kick things off and kind of initiate how this whole story came together when you guys first met, um, boarding school, D all the above. Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

So so Lannon and I, we grew up as athletes, and that's all we were doing. So I I for me personally, I don't want to speak for Lennon, I didn't care about school at all. I got good grades, but really sports and specifically baseball was it for me. And so, fast forward to junior year of high school, where Lannon is initially from Delaware, I'm from New York. We both got uh asked to play our specific sports at this boarding school in North Carolina, very small boarding school, graduated with 40 kids. And he played football, I'd play baseball, but over time, Lannon convinced me to play on the football team. Now, a little background on me, I am slow, like slow to the point where I run like a 5'5, 40-yard dash. And for those of you that don't know sports, that is horrifically slow. Turns out that just because Lannon and I had such a great off-the-field connection, I became his number one receiver. Ultimately, he got a division two full ride scholarship to go play ball at um Shippensburg University. I take complete ownership for that. I'll take the the pride there. But yeah, fast forward a little bit, we both went to college to play our prospective sports. And for four years, we we continued to crush it. For me personally, I was meant to go play in the MLB. Um, went to go play in the uh uh rise the ranks through the minor leagues and was told by teams that I was going to get drafted and didn't end up getting drafted. And for me, I fell flat on my face because I had no backup plan. So everything for me was baseball, and that was it. There was that was plan A, B, and C. And so I'll let Landon talk a little bit about his experience there, and then we could dive a little bit deeper into how we got into business together.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Well, I apologize to the audience for the the shitty audio on my end. Uh, I'm glad Antonio kicked us off uh just because uh of the of the store mic he's got going on over there. But uh yeah, I mean you couldn't have said it better as far as the timeline goes. Antonio and I both played college sports. Uh, both of our careers kind of ended abruptly. Mine ended with a knee injury, like your cliche blew my knee out, type of type of situation. Uh, I dabbled in the coaching space for a year. I considered being a college coach. I did coach for a season um at the division two level and kind of immediately realized like that. I think that my football career had kind of come to a dead end and immediately pivoted into another space. Um, and and so Antonia and I both kind of our athletic careers came to a close around the same time. We ended up in the same, you know, financial services corporate world. We knew that we were in a good industry, but on the wrong teams. And that's kind of where uh I guess we collaborated and went into business together about five years ago um and haven't haven't looked back since.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

So you guys kind of made a decision. Listen, sports career's over. It was gonna eventually end anyway, right? There's only, I mean, there's a shelf life to being a professional athlete unless, you know, it's some rare, you know, rare occurrence on there. But I guess sooner rather than later, right? I mean, it sucks that you got injured and you didn't fulfill your sports dream, but he ended up on a different path, which ended up, you know, you guys ended up in in business. So let's back up. You you you guys, so you guys got recruited to a boarding school. So it wasn't because your parents didn't want to deal with you. You got recruited to the it was a little bit of that. So you got recruited to the boarding school to play ball. Is that how that worked? Okay, cool. And then uh, so when did the realization come about? We're like, hey, maybe we should put a deal together, or you guys have just been buddies ever since.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Yeah, so we stayed in contact, and for me, it was a lot tougher to hang up the cleats because I still felt like I had a lot left on the table in baseball. My career ended relatively abruptly, and I had some uh opportunities to play professional baseball. And I was just like, you know what? The these professional opportunities that are outside of the path to the major leagues are just it's all a dead end. And that was the real first time that I've ever hit adversity in my life. I always say my growing up, my only problem was that I had no problems. Grew up in Long Island, New York, super upper middle class, got anything I ever wanted, super thankful to my parents for that. But also it was a detriment because I never had to work. Uh not that I didn't have to work hard for anything, but I never had to experience true adversity because I always got everything that I wanted. So when baseball ended, that was the first true point of like falling flat on my face. And so, fast forward six to eight months of just massive depression, drugs, alcohol, going back to my ex-girlfriend, which is way worse than drugs and alcohol. Um, you know, we we end up continuing to stay in touch. Land and I, he started his career a little bit earlier than I did. And then I got into the career and we started just having proactive conversations about, hey, what's working for you? All these different things. Over time, we're like, hey, let's start a podcast. And we were like, we didn't know what we wanted to do initially. We're like, oh, let's use the anchor app. And then on our drive to work, we can just film a podcast. And over time, Landon was like, dude, we're 23 years old at the time. Like, who the fuck wants to listen to anything that we have to say in terms of success because we have $50 to our name, right? So we really started to figure out, okay, how are we going to go about making this podcast? And we started to leverage other people to come onto our podcast that were already successful. And we started living vicariously through them. So we started really creating this interview-based model. What that ended up doing, though, was over time, as we became more valuable by applying a lot of the things that we were learning from these folks, we were able to craft a valuable enough value proposition to these folks offline to over time tap into their networks and continue to grow our podcast, but also our business at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

I love that. I mean, that's what we teach here at the podcast launch lab is you know, who can you get in front of to have a conversation with, but also build a relationship with and in turn do business with. So I love how that uh I how you guys made a decision to do that kind of out of the gates. I mean, that was one of the first things you guys decided to do marketing wise, which is fantastic. So, what's the business all about? What do you guys do? What problems do you solve? What's it all about?

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Tony, I'll let you rock, man. You got the better mic.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

Sure, sure. Yeah. So initially we started in the financial services world where traditional wealth management, if you had a pulse, you could become a client. Um, you know, investments, insurance, bugging friends and family. And over time, you burn a lot of bridges, you talk to a lot of people, you fail a lot, but you figure it out over time. And we we ended up figuring out like cracking the secret code by utilizing this podcast. We initially had no idea what it was going to be, but we started merging ecosystems with different people of influence to start sending us a ton of traffic. And over time, it was very mutually beneficial for both parties. So that really started to accelerate things. But we started to realize that okay, the first problem you have to solve when you're in financial services is trying to get people on your calendar. Once you solve that problem, then it's like, how do I get my time back? Because now I'm making money, but I have no time. Um, so we we graduated from self-employment to the business owner world where we started hiring people, automating systems. The one challenge that we started to face, though, was the fact that we really, really loved working with business owners. And the tough thing about business owners and traditional wealth managers is that the wealth managers are constantly trying to compete against the business's rate of return. You, as a business owner, your best investment is your business. I can't confidently tell you that if you invest money with me, I'm gonna out-earn the rates that you're able to make inside of your business. Because if you're only making five, six, seven, 10% in your business, especially in the early years, it's probably not great growth rate and you're probably not gonna stay in too long. Right. So, with that, we started to pivot to more of a consulting model simply because that's what served the stage two growth-oriented entrepreneur the best, in my opinion. So instead of just being able to sell products and get paid, we were able to provide unbiased strategic advice for the sake of the advice only for a flat fee model. So then we met Claudio Gamin, um, who you had who you had met as well, Sebastian. And Claudio had this down to a T. He was crushing it. We ended up selling our wealth management firm and partnering up with him. And now we're just focusing on the consulting world where the four-pillar approach that we're taking with our clients is one asset protection. So, where do you own your assets? How do you own your assets? Are you owning them in such a way that nobody could take everything that you've built after one disastrous event? If you get into a car crash or somebody able to pry your assets inside of your business, making sure that your insurances are done properly, all that stuff. Two is tax strategy. A lot of people are not having proactive conversations with their accountants. I don't know why. Um, they're usually just waiting till the end of the year to give them their books and saying, hey, or here's how much you owe. There's a lot of things you can start utilizing inside of the tax code to mitigate that tax liability starting in Q2, Q3. Then we focus on optimizing your balance sheet. Optimizing your balance sheet has a multi-pronged approach. One, you want to start building liquidity and leverage inside of your balance sheet, but also two, you want to create proactive strategy to increase your cost basis inside of your business over time so that eventually, if the goal is to sell it, you're mitigating your capital gains exposure. And then lastly, is how are we going to exit this thing? Are we gonna hand it off to our employees? Are we gonna hand it off to our family, or are we gonna sell to the outside? And that's a little bit more of the approach that we've taken.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Love it. So, um, and and who's your ideal client? I mean, what what who do what what do you find you guys were? Is it entrepreneurs? Is it large businesses? What seems to be your target?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah, it's it's growth-oriented entrepreneurs, you know, from a revenue standpoint, anywhere from half a million up to 20 to 30 million, uh, 50 million being kind of the capital revenue. But the key piece is growth-oriented, right? Focused on growing, focused on optimization and and really focused on that getting to that next level. Um, I a lot of times our strategies are just help they're they're allowing folks to drive more revenue to their bottom line through through our strategies and a lot of the tools that we're helping them implement.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Love it. So um, and so the majority of the new businesses that come, I mean I know that that that financial world is very referral-based driven. Do you guys find that happening based on the current client you're working on, or what really fuels the ongoing growth of the business?

SPEAKER_02 10:48

Yeah, absolutely. We we're definitely starting to create more organic content to get the reach out simply just because it's not being talked about enough, especially on the tax side. But if I have a client and I'm able to save him half a million dollars on his tax bill, he's a lot more likely to go tell his friends about me, specifically the business owner clients. Right. So we're taking this different approach that the traditional financial advisor world just isn't taking. We're not asking people just, hey, come invest money with us and all this stuff. We're simply just giving unbiased advice and helping them implement that advice. The the solution is great, but the solution's nothing unless it gets implemented. A lot of the times what we found initially was like, hey, here's all these different solutions, go and do it, but they're too busy to go actually do it. So now we created a lot of strategic partnerships in which we're the ones quarterbacking all that stuff to make sure that it gets through the goal line.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Absolutely. And so, you know, I'd be I'd be uh negligent to not, you know, address the elephant in the room that everyone seems to be talking about these days, and that is the US dollar is devaluing at a rapid rate or whatever the verbiage is for that. Um, and you know, we're headed for mass economic destruction and gloom and doom. What is your response to people? I'm sure I'm not the only person that asks similar questions when they call and go, what's gonna happen next? You know, truth is we really don't know what's gonna happen next, other than you know, forecasting what's already taken place um before what history has tell us has told us. But where are we at at the time we're recording this? It's end of the first quarter of 2023. And if you turn on the news, uh you'll be convinced that the world is ending and our economy is completely um just disintegrating. So I know that's a long-winded question there, but uh, I need some answers, damn it.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Yeah, uh I I can start. Um, one, turn off the news. It's very, very simple, right? Because like my world, Landon's world, Sebastian's world, like things are abundant in my life. I don't know about you, but like things are great. The value of my dollar is doing okay. Sure. Right. So, with that though, one thing that you always like, I want to start very foundational. If you don't have a way or a skill set to start crafting your own sources of income, you are fucked. That is the truth. Over time, if you're just nine to five, it's gonna be very tough to thrive um in this new economy that we're we're shifting towards because there are shifts. It's not as dramatic as everyone thinks in the short term, but over time there will be massive shifts. So, first off, getting skillful is recession proof, is inflation proof. If things collapse out of nowhere, what are you gonna do anyway? It's I don't have the ability to influence the macroeconomics of the world. So I need to make sure that I'm skillful enough to be able to pivot when that happens. But two, if you are in business for yourself, the three-pronged approach that we're constantly telling ourselves, because I like I said, we can't control geopolitics right now. So, how can we stay prepared when opportunities do come? Because right now, over the next 24 months, the best opportunities are gonna happen, right? Think about when 2008, 2009 happened. Those who had liquidity to be able to strike when opportunities came were able to get extremely wealthy and set their families up forever. So, one, stay liquid or build liquidity. Right now, cash is doing very well. So hold some cash right now. Um, three years ago, we were telling everyone to go get debt because debt was cheap. Money's expensive right now. Two is to reduce your fixed operational expenses. It's very easy to reduce your variable operational expenses. Like I can just stop going out to dinner tonight, but I can't just stop paying the employees that I hired at too rapid of a pace, or I can I can't just stop paying my mortgage that I fought probably financed too too quickly and made a rapid decision on, right? So reducing your fixed operational expenses anywhere you can to really create a lot more leanness in your balance sheet. And then lastly, staying away from shiny objects. Right now is probably not the time to be um buying the biggest house in the world, especially in this high interest rate environment, or buying a Lamborghini, or shiny objects also come in the form of opportunity, which could be if you are a great podcaster like Sebastian is right now, it's probably not the best time to start a restaurant, right? So making sure that you're staying in your lane and really doubling down on what you're good at. That's my feedback on it.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Two types of dollars that go into your business, right? There's revenue growth dollars and revenue supporting dollars, right? Your revenue growth dollars is going to the marketing, it's going to the the sales team, it's driving direct revenue to your business. And you have your revenue supporting dollars, which is kind of like the back office, logistical, operational, back, you know, background type of things that ultimately allow your revenue growth, your growth dollars to really drive value to your to your to the marketplace. Anything outside of revenue growth dollars and revenue supporting dollars needs to go, right? So staying in your lane, staying vertical, double down, doubling down on your business, which is your best investment, uh, being super efficient and really trimming the fat on some of that opx is really like what we find. And like to be more direct to your question as well, like the US dollar is actually from a like from a tangible when you actually analyze it from an economic standpoint, is not weak. It's very, it's fairly strong. But the sentiment in the in our media right now is is looking at it in a weak light. And so what we will find over the years, our dollar will continue to weaken simply just due to kind of the manifestation of things that are going on globally. However, I I think that there's a lot of fear-mongering going on. The media loves to prey on fear. It doesn't matter what side of the aisle somebody's on. Um, however, just keep keep tight to the fact that you know we've seen worse times in our world. I guess that's debatable, but in general, we have been through tough times and our economy will continue to prevail when you zoom out over the long haul. Um, will the US be the number one dominant economic superpower 10 years from now, five years from now? Maybe not, right? But but in general, I think we'll we'll come out on the other side doing just fine.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Love it. Yeah, I'm gonna stop watching Tucker Carlson. So um that's it.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

Well, you can't you can't watch them anymore.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

You missed the joke. You just missed the joke, Tony. Welcome back to the party, buddy. Sorry. Welcome back. Welcome back to the party. Uh well, that's that is refreshing. I know I constantly, I mean, my mother's the you know, she thinks Lester Holt runs the world, and uh, she's constantly going, Well, you do see what they're you know, she's always got the most recent whatever they're talking about on the news, and then she's texting me about it. Um and uh, you know, it's you know, don't buy crypto because I I heard this one story. So it's interesting. So speaking of crypto, uh, let's touch on that real quick. How is that working into the equation in the whole financial world? Excuse me. Don't mind me over here. The whole the whole financial aspect and landscape of things. What do you what are your thoughts on it?

SPEAKER_02 17:28

Yeah, I mean, cry crypto is pretty cool. I I don't ever claim to be a crypto expert, right? I did a couple years ago when everyone was buying into crypto and we thought we were all making this money, and um, you know, where you could just put as much money as you want into a uh a gorilla holding a banana and it's worth a million dollars overnight, right? Those days are over, right? The marketplace is actually valuabling uh valuing tangible real things that have true value. So I'm not telling you to not buy Bitcoin, but I'm also telling you to not put 50% of your life into Bitcoin at the same time, right? Over time, we're probably gonna see ourselves uh you know transition to this centralized base currency. What that looks like, it's probably gonna have to be centralized, run with regulation through governments and all that stuff. Um, other than that, I don't really know what, like, I don't want to speculate on it. Right now is not the time to be speculating on all these micro cap coins. If you want some exposure to Bitcoin, great. Um, don't throw every single dollar that you own in there and don't listen to all the fear-mongering of saying, oh, the dollar's gonna crash overnight. You have that's why you have to buy Bitcoin. There's usually if you follow the money and you follow the incentive of why a lot of people are saying things, you'll start to understand why they're actually saying those things.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I went ahead and liquidated all of my uh all of my crypto. Uh I went all in with XRP. That's another completely different conversation.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

But the lawsuit, the lawsuit, they're they're having the lawsuit, they're gonna make it a billion dollars.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Yeah, it is. I mean, I'm I'm banking on it. I'm sitting here waiting for that thing to settle. It's been I've been waiting about a year now. Yeah, it's gonna be any day now, I'm I'm told. But I had some some financial guys that are in a master that are in my mastermind group. Um say they were, you know, they were heavily vested in in XRP. Um, and I didn't even know what it was and didn't even make sense at all on there. So uh it'll be interesting to see how it uh how it pans out. Uh well, this has been a great conversation. I know we got a chance to hang in Tampa a few months back. That's when we initially met, and you told me about the podcast and what you guys are doing. Of course, I light up when I see people that have already taken what I teach here and done something with it to drastically impact their business and also get their social media you know content in check. So love that. I know it was on your show uh a few weeks back too. So it's you know, it's again, it's the uh uh podcasting makes the world go round, but it also furthers and builds relationships just like we've had with like we've done here. So I appreciate you guys taking some time out of your day and first time interviewing two people, I think, on a podcast. So I did it. Mom, I did it. So um, and this has been great. I mean, you guys are a wealth of information. And as soon as I'm rich, I'm gonna call you guys and be like, I got a bunch of money, I don't know what to do with it. And you guys are gonna tell me exactly what I should be doing with it. So uh look looking forward to that. Any final thoughts for our listeners?

SPEAKER_02 20:08

No, I I would just revert back to what I had said, and once uh once again, appreciate you for having us on there. It's always good to you know get a get some time with you. But being skillful is recession proof. I say it all the time. So the only thing that you can control is what you can control. So, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis to actually make yourself better and more valuable in the marketplace? Because if the dollar just crashes out of nowhere, America is still here, like the land is still here. We're not getting invaded and all this crazy things that everyone thinks is gonna happen. So, what can I do to make sure that I'm setting myself and my family up for future success? Am I reading? Am I making sure that I'm staying healthy? Am I connecting with people? Do I have a podcast? That's a huge one right now. It really is. It's it's it's a way for you to create a network in ways that you didn't you couldn't even imagine. I promise you. Just start, I promise, and consult Sebastian if you are gonna start there. Uh, but yeah, that's my take on it. Landon, any final thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Man, he Antonio is on point today. Uh no, I I I really think I really think that this was an awesome conversation. I appreciate the time and the interview. Uh, if you haven't checked out our episode with Sebastian, please do uh the Consistency Wins podcast. Consistency Wins is one word. So the Consistency Wins podcast.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Love it. We'll make sure to put a link in the uh show notes of this episode. Make sure to listen, subscribe, leave a review, and definitely listen to that episode. I was on duh. Uh Tony Landon, so great to see you guys again. Thanks again for hanging out for a few minutes here and uh keep doing what you're doing there. And again, I look forward to you know I'm gonna I'm gonna be beating down your door like Scrooge McDuck. Yeah. Appreciate you, brother. Likewise. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.