Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
Aqil (00:00)
So Garrett, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time today. Could you give us a top level overview about what it is that you're currently working on and your journey so far?
Garrett Blood (00:09)
Thanks, I appreciate it. Good to be here. I have a company called Kajae It's a premium staff augmentation firm and we take brilliant folks from 29 countries. They'll have advanced degrees, master's, MBAs, PhDs, Fortune 500 corporate experience in English like us and find them amazing positions with our clients, whether it's an engineering firm or it's an accounting firm or creative firm and we pay
them five to ten times more than a living wage so they go from here to here so solidly middle class in some cases from poverty to middle class and satisfies a need to change their life ⁓ improves the financials of clients and then it helps us at the same time perpetuate what we do and so our company's Kajae and stands for the names of my kids Kate, Ariana, Jack, Alexa, Ethan and it was a five-letter domain that I got for almost nothing because no one
Aqil (01:07)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (01:09)
owned it and it means gift from God in Jamaican so it was like a trifecta it worked out worked out perfect and so that's what I do and we've been currently working on some AI initiatives as well so we have offshore near shore and now agentic AI as well since that's kind of the way things are going so
Aqil (01:12)
Wow, yeah, it's meant to be.
Okay. Amazing. Amazing. Well, I'd love to go back to the, to the start of your journey, entrepreneurship journey, because I know it started when you're quite, quite young. And so I'd love to get the story there and like what that was like in the early days and what led you into, into this path that you're on now.
Garrett Blood (01:42)
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny. ⁓ When I was younger, my dad owned exotic car dealerships, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls Royces, Bentleys, all sorts of stuff. And he owned a lot of these dealerships. And then he had hotels around the world. He had...
hundreds of condos and just properties. He even had gold mines. so baller type of empire that he had built. I went to school in a limousine, for example, in Orange County in California. just that's what I thought life was like. And as time went on, vices and different issues started to come in and he started to lose his empire to the point where he lost it.
And we went from being up here, Jets, planes, you name it, to super poor, we'd say welfare poor or on the dole type of situation, where we didn't, at one point we were forced out of our house onto the front lawn and grass with all our belongings and removed from our house by the police. And so we had nowhere to go. We would have been homeless if it wasn't for grandparents. And so early on I learned,
Kind of the entrepreneurial journey of just figuring things out so I started a window cleaning business when I was younger and I grew that to about 60 customers from the age of 9 to age of 12 and so residential commercial and industrial customers is who I had and so when my parents divorced ultimately I was forced to sell my business and so I ended up ⁓ selling it to a guy in his 30s and so that was my first exit and
Aqil (03:27)
taxi.
Garrett Blood (03:29)
I laugh about that. So that was the start of my entrepreneurial journey. And then of course other businesses followed after that, that grew and some very, very successful.
Aqil (03:32)
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that's just amazing. Why haven't your first exit that young? Such a cool story. Like how that played out and everything. And it's interesting as well about obviously, you your father having, you know, an amazing empire, but then obviously it coming down as well. I guess what was one of the lessons you've taken from that experience and kind of seeing that play out for, for your father and like, have you adopted from that? then obviously, you know, learn yourself and then move forward with.
Garrett Blood (04:03)
You know, I feel like one of the things for me at the time, it was incredibly hard. ⁓ I was almost of the mentality that, you know, why me? Why is this happening to me? ⁓ You know, this is, just a kid. But just realizing that we are the summation of all our good and bad experiences. And I look back on it, and even though it was hard, I think it was one of those necessary steps in my life.
to allow me to do hard things. And I feel like as people in general, a lot of the different countries in the world, they're constantly doing hard things. Not because they want to, but that they're forced to have to do hard things. Food insecurity or difficulty living somewhere that's in an environment that's safe, for example, or just not having access to the things that we enjoy every single day. Those are truly hard things. But you kind of look at our lives living in
Aqil (04:36)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Garrett Blood (05:03)
countries of plenty, ⁓ haven't done really hard things for a long time. And so I feel like for me it was having to go through those struggles and those difficulties to kind of get me to the next step, if that makes sense.
Aqil (05:20)
Yeah. Yeah.
It makes complete sense. It makes complete sense. And then, so once you've had your exit under your belt, what was the next business that you went into and that you started and what was the story there?
Garrett Blood (05:33)
Yeah, so I actually served a mission for my church in Mexico for two years. And I was there, ingrained in the culture, spoke Spanish only for two years, and that really kind of sharpened a lot of my toolkit, if you will. Learning a language and only being able to speak Spanish instead of English was really difficult. ⁓ Racked my brain regularly because it was a hard thing, right? And then got home.
after two years of being a missionary 24-7 ⁓ and went into the financial markets, found out real quick that I hated Wall Street, I hated what it stood for. ⁓ I'm a conscious capitalist and I felt like that was vulture capitalism. It left a bad taste in my mouth. But I would always crave ice cream. It's funny, I love to go to the gym and work out and I'd always crave ice cream. But the problem is, is if I ate ice cream,
negate everything I just did in the gym. And I thought why couldn't there be like a protein ice cream, maybe a protein shake in an ice cream form. And one day I said why not. And so bought a frozen yogurt machine and started dumping protein into it and tried like a thousand different samples if you will. And I discovered there's a thousand ways not to make ice cream. And finally figured out a way that it was pretty decent. And so we got it.
put it in a frozen yogurt. ⁓
you know, kind of, it was a frozen yogurt to start, and then decided we wanted to put it into a pre-packaged pint that we could put in grocery stores. And so what we ended up doing is we got it into a pint, and it was fat-free, gluten-free, lactose-free, diabetic-friendly, 150 calories, or kilo calories, I can't remember what they say there, ⁓ per pint, and 20 grams of whey protein, eight grams of fiber, and it was all natural, clean, and it tasted good. So it was like everything
to everybody. And so we got it in one grocery store, then a hundred grocery stores, then a thousand, then ten thousand, then eighteen thousand grocery stores. So it was Haagen-Dazs as the number one ice cream in America. Ben and Jerry's was number two, and we were number three. So it was called Arctic Zero. And ⁓ at one point it was on Amazon as the number of five hundred and fifty two thousand food items. It was number fifty seven. And so we
Aqil (07:36)
I hope that you needed.
Garrett Blood (08:05)
filling up trucks every single day, it going across the United States, parts of Canada, and yeah, so that was kind of my entrepreneurial journey nationwide at that point, is getting that product that didn't exist and putting it into stores. And so a lot of marketing fun at the same time, I've got a great story about Jeff Bezos at a certain point too, but I don't know how much time we've got.
Aqil (08:34)
No, I mean,
I'd love to hear that story. mean, it's such an interesting business model as well. And like looking at these last couple of businesses that you've had, is they're in completely different spaces, right? Different industries. like you've seen with your own experience, hey, there's a gap here or there's a problem here. We can fix that. And then you go in and then you go in and build a business and do the thing to get it fixed. So I think that's something that I'm taking away from this is, know, when you spot something like that, even something as different as ice cream, right, that something's not out there.
Garrett Blood (09:01)
Yeah.
Aqil (09:02)
You can actually go ahead and make that happen, right? And you can do the trials that you need to do. And then eventually something can come out at the other, the other end of it. And it's interesting because a lot of people or like my friends that I speak to who are kind of on the edge of, should I start a business? Should I, should I do this and that? the other it's like, just try it. figure it out as you go along. And, know, if you spotted something yourself, you know, probably other people have spotted that as well. And you could create the solution for that, but you just need to go ahead and take a step and try. And it feels like you've got that.
built into you, right? Where you will just try to the thing. Let's see if it works. And then, and then go from there.
Garrett Blood (09:38)
It's interesting you said it in terms of taking the first step. I always tell people, go, can't see the top of the steps unless you take that first step. And you take a step, you go, okay, do I like what I'm starting to see up here? And if so, keep going. ⁓ I've got a buddy who wanted to be an accountant and he didn't know if he wanted to be an accountant until he took that first step. And then took a second step and he started learning more about accounting and he figured out real quick that he hated accounting. But he would have never known.
He would have been second guessing himself for the rest of his life had he not taken those first couple of steps to basically cross that out and say, I'm not gonna be an accountant. I tried it, I hated it, next step, right? And so I think it's the same thing with entrepreneurism. ⁓ A lot of times you just have to take that first step. I think especially for me, I think one of the benefits sometimes is you don't know what you don't know. And so you have to figure it out along the way. And I almost feel like ignorance is one of the best things when it comes to entrepreneurism.
Because if you knew all the barriers to entry a lot of times you wouldn't even approach it Like if I knew all the hard work I was gonna have to put into ice cream to figure out how to get on a shelf I probably would never have attempted it But because I had gone through the journey and I was enjoying it and I was starting to see success I kept going I kept going I kept going to the point where we're competing with companies that were 20 30 40 billion dollar companies in their space and we were disrupting the
Aqil (10:43)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (11:07)
because we had never done what we were doing before. So here's this little guy starting in a very small garage and then a warehouse, kind of like what Apple did, but of course Apple, we know Apple where they're at today, you know starting and then starting to take money and market share away from the big multi-billion dollar companies was pretty exciting. And then we had a huge bullseye on the back of our heads at that point, you know.
Aqil (11:18)
you
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah,
I mean, for sure, for sure. I mean, you are obviously working way up there and competing with these huge brands, which is just, it's an incredible story on how you did that. I guess, what was the outcome of that business then? So where did that lead to, you know, once you were, guess, scaling the business and getting to a point where you were really, really big.
Garrett Blood (11:46)
Yeah,
so we were in about 18,000 grocery stores and at a certain point we had one of our major distributors across the United States, if you're familiar with Nestle. Nestle was doing distribution to all the major, major stores, Wal-Mart, Target, it's a lot of different stores in between. And typically like 95 % of their trucks are...
Aqil (11:58)
Yes.
Garrett Blood (12:10)
their products and the 5 % are the ones that they're forced to carry that they don't want to carry but they have agreements with the stores that they supply to and they have to follow the rules of those stores and so they would start carrying our product but what ends up happening is the 5 % that they're carrying that isn't their product they're watching they can see the numbers they can see how often it's selling on the shelves so they don't have to take our word for it they see it and so when they start seeing that our product is moving fast
Aqil (12:31)
Hmm.
Garrett Blood (12:40)
on the shelf and selling better than their own, they start thinking acquisition target. And so Nestle started looking at our product and wanting it. And so yeah, they started distributing it and buying it. And that's kind of how we got to that point where I was able to basically walk away because Nestle wanted it.
Aqil (13:01)
Yeah. I mean, that's
incredible. So a second exit more or less, right. Under your power, which is, which is really cool. I mean, talk to me about the transition, right. Going from, you're selling ice cream to then coming into the professional services space. So like, how did you bridge that gap? Cause obviously again, two very different businesses in completely different spaces. So how did you get to that point?
Garrett Blood (13:05)
Yeah, yeah.
Totally, different.
Yeah, it's funny that you asked that because I get that a lot and...
It is, they're completely different, right? CPG space, consumer packaged goods space, and then moving into service industry is completely different. So I think a lot of it happened from the fact that I was in Mexico for two years and I saw absolute brilliance and people struggling. And I'm a big believer that brilliance, talent, and strengths and skills are perfectly and fairly distributed around the world, but opportunity is not.
And so my goal was how do I can connect opportunity with people that deserve it, right? And change the dynamic of their lives. And I had worked with a lot of people overseas. had done, I have several patents and I would work with my engineers that I would work with outside the United States. Patent attorneys, trademark attorneys outside the United States because it was significantly less expensive. And so my chief, you know, my assistants and different folks doing stuff and I have an assistant,
my chief of staff now and and working outside the country I thought you know what
there's something here. Talent is perfectly distributed around the world. You've got Elon Musk genius throughout the world, not just in certain places. And I said, how do we reach out to those people and change their life? And at the same time, it helps benefit companies. And I said, let's do it. And so little by little, I started noticing companies were really happy to get a senior accountant for 70 % less of the cost of hiring someone in the United States or a mechanical electrical
or we even have nuclear engineers, for example, on our team. Architects that build vertical construction in the Bay Area, Silicon Slopes, sorry, Silicon Valley, for example. ⁓ so, you you name it, there's talent everywhere. And so little by little I started noticing that my team members' lives were changing, the clients' businesses were changing and able to scale, and we were changing. So it was this virtuous cycle of a triple win.
thought this is fantastic. I love what I'm doing because I can see people's smiles on their faces because their lives are changing. They're buying houses, they're buying cars for the first time. They're able to send their kids to really good schools because they're paid significantly more than they've been paid before. And so it's just, I didn't get that from ice cream. And so this was different.
Aqil (15:48)
Yeah,
absolutely. I think that's such a, perfect business model, right? As you said, everyone wins both the customer, the team, the business, like everyone wins in that scenario, which is why it's yeah, it's such a cool business model and it really solves the problems that people are facing, you know, when it comes down to hiring costs, all these things. And then of course, trying to find good solid talent as well. I'm being, you know, before they were bottlenecked and maybe the area that they were working on before, but now obviously you can go global. So I guess.
From COVID, was that also like an accelerator, you know, when more people are like remote working and more companies more open to those things. Did you also find that the, the offshoring kind of staffing area also, you know, grew during that, that period as well?
Garrett Blood (16:29)
You know, I feel like anytime there's a struggle or a difficulty, there's something that can be gleaned from it. know, there's not everything has to have a negative component to it. And I feel like with COVID as crazy as it was, everything as we know from a telecommunication standpoint got a boost of steroids, if that makes sense. Perfect example, right now what we're doing right now was it's infancy prior to COVID. In fact, it probably didn't even exist. Companies like Zoom, they went
from here to here. Just watch their stock price. If you remember pre-COVID to where they went two years following COVID, it was like, I think it was like a 50,000 % increase and in terms of their stock price. so the same situation, right? We were, our company didn't exist. And then when people were completely moving to remote work, we were poised to be in the right place at the right time. And that really helped us accelerate. In fact, we started in
Aqil (17:07)
Crazy.
Garrett Blood (17:29)
I was in this space in 2020 and then Kajae came to be in 2021.
And we grew exponentially, 1,900 % to be exact over 36 months. So much so that we were highlighted on the Inc. 5000 in the United States. So we were ranked number 204 of the Inc. 5000. We were number eight in our category in the United States and number five fastest growing company in our state here in Utah. And we were the only company to do it without private equity, without venture capital money, and without debt from a
And so we bootstrapped it completely ourselves. And the goal was to grow on our terms.
Aqil (18:07)
Wow. Yeah.
Garrett Blood (18:14)
not someone else's because any other company that invested money would be looking for an exit and they would want to impact negatively our mission, vision, and values. They would want to replace team member with client or themselves basically and I wasn't going to have it. So for me, conscious capitalism is where it's at. feel like companies can do very well by doing good.
Aqil (18:40)
Hmm. Yeah. It's interesting. The, ⁓ the, the difference between bootstrapping versus kind of raising, raising funds and raising money. I recently spoke with a friend who just went through an exit, right? And so he has an agency on the side for marketing site, marketing things, and then also a bit of a SaaS as well. ⁓ and so he bootstrapped the whole SaaS, you know, building out the team and everything. And then obviously went through for the, for the exit. And he was saying that the amount of flexibility you have.
to be able to do what it is that you want to do in the business is insane. Whereas when he was speaking to other people who have raised all these millions of dollars and trying to grow the business, they're under such pressure to have the profitability, the ROI that the funding companies they want to see. And so I think if, ⁓ to a point, if you can bootstrap something, I think you really should. Yeah, it sounds good to get a few checks in to help grow the business, but ultimately...
it's going to make it much harder later on anyway. So you might as well go through the hard stage in the beginning phase to get things off the ground and get things moving and do it yourself. Right. Bootstrap it if you can, I guess in the early days of growing the business. what was, you know, attributing to the success that you had in those, in those early days to get it off the ground, get the first few clients in and then of course maintain or exponentially, you know, maintain that, that growth that you were seeing.
Garrett Blood (19:59)
Yeah, no, it's all in how it's built. ⁓ We didn't have a working capital requirement that we needed. Like for example, we could grow exponentially without having to raise money or take on debt in order to scale. ⁓ One thing that's unique to what we did is we would... ⁓
we charge the client in advance. So for example, they have to pay for the first 30 days upfront. So we would collect that revenue and then majority of our revenue of course is going to pay salaries of the members of the team that doing the work.
but they only get paid twice a month. They get paid on the fifth and the 20th. So we already collected the money in order to pay them, but we were able to float for quite a while before salaries came up. And so we were able to take that money and reinvest it in other components. And so we could grow and add 20 new members of our team, collect the funds from those clients, and scale accordingly because we had the money in the bank in order to scale. And so we could grow as fast as we wanted without it impacting
whether or not we're gonna be able to make it the next month or the next month, that type of thing. And so that's how we built it. We grew on...
Aqil (21:06)
Interesting,
Garrett Blood (21:11)
you know, other people's money basically by collecting it early. We didn't do terms. We didn't do a net 30 or net 60 situation with companies, mainly because we weren't working with major companies, know, these, not the Googles or the Microsofts, you know, and the lesser companies because they typically want terms. They want like net 60 type of situation. And we were too small that we didn't look at enterprise accounts. We were looking at the small and medium sized businesses that allow us to stay nimble.
Aqil (21:13)
Yeah
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (21:41)
basically is what we're focused on.
Aqil (21:42)
Yeah. Yeah.
It sounds like a really good money model, right? Setting up the business in that way, where you're collecting that cash in, know, cash repositive from day one really, rather than, you know, waiting for those, for those payments to come in. So it sounds like, yeah, to a point that that's the thing that really fueled the, the, the machine to keep it growing. I guess from a client acquisition point of view, like how did you get those first few clients? So what are the activities you were doing internally to do, to do that and get those clients? Because.
Garrett Blood (21:48)
Yeah.
Aqil (22:10)
some people that I speak to where they are starting a new business. It's like, how do get my first, you know, my first five clients, you know, or 10 clients or whatever. And so I love to hear from you, like what was working for you at the time and how you guys did it.
Garrett Blood (22:20)
Yeah.
So I lucked out a little bit because the state of Utah is probably one of the most business friendly states of all the 50 states in the United States. It's very built on helping entrepreneurs and founders grow because they know that if we can create businesses that are successful in the state, it benefits everyone across the state and it just strengthens everything in terms of the localized economies in the state. And ⁓ one thing that's interesting about the state of Utah
is everyone wants to help each other succeed and grow. It's a very abundant mindset. ⁓ Many states in the United States, including other parts of the world, have a scarcity mindset. They feel like there's a limited amount of money to go around and so they've gotta get theirs. Whereas in the state of Utah, it's how can I help you? How can I help you? How can I help you? Very service oriented. Like if you do research, it actually, there's more service done in the state of Utah to help other people than any other state in the
country and I think that's one of our secret sauces but ⁓ to answer your question you know we were profitable our very first month and we've been profitable every month since then we're will be five years old this July and ⁓ what I always say is you know the best founders ⁓
typically are the best salespeople. And if you are afraid to sell, you need to find someone that can sell well, because you're not going to go anywhere unless you are comfortable being uncomfortable.
And so I went to networking events multiple times a week, shook hands, talked to people every single day. My friends and colleagues would laugh that I'd be the first one there and I'd be the last one to leave because I would be talking to people. And rather quickly, we had companies that said, I would love to save $100,000 a year hiring one of your people to help us grow and scale. And then they would take that $100,000 that they're saving and then they would be
Aqil (24:08)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (24:24)
able to hire boots on the ground or salespeople or people that they needed at a certain level but they couldn't afford to hire but we gave them the bandwidth to hire more people local because they had more people offshore or nearshore and and so that's kind of how we did it ⁓ is just opening our mouth and having that conversation with companies and realizing that every company has a different need maybe it's accounting maybe it's a creative video editor graphic designer or stop-motion person
Aqil (24:30)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (24:53)
You know, we've got movie studios that have our animators. We have engineering firms that have our engineers. have companies like Harley-Davidson that has our supply chain analysts in Asia, for example. I mean, a lot of different companies in a lot of different spaces. And like I said, it's just a matter of finding the scalpel in the operating room, that brilliant person. And I mean, we interview 200 to 300 people per position, and we hire the best three in the world.
Aqil (25:00)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Garrett Blood (25:22)
And so a company can come, and this is the thing that we'd always ask them, and this is kind of what my sales pitch would be. I said, give me your dream hire. If money was not an object, maybe they're $200,000 per year, maybe they're 250,000 pounds per year, ⁓ in order to hire that person, what do they look like? Okay, they worked at Google, they've got 20 years experience, they got 10 years of experience, whatever it might be. And then we say, great. And that's basically on a Monday. And so we're famous for saying Zoom on Monday, Talent by Friday.
because then by Friday, I always tell them, on Friday we're gonna introduce you to the three best people in the world.
that you didn't know existed. And you're gonna meet them, you're gonna ask them questions, you're gonna give us the thumbs up on who you love, and on Tuesday of the next week, they will be working full time, dedicated to you, 40 hours a week, in the trenches with you, alongside you, pushing forward. And that's been our shtick. That's what we've said from day one, and that's how we do it. We operate, our secret weapon is speed and rockstar talent. That's loyal and grateful.
Aqil (25:59)
Wow.
Hmm.
It's a great pitch. a great sales pitch. mean, it's very clear and it's very obvious, like the value and the benefit. And this is me putting like my marketing hat on, just kind of looking at how you've structured the offer and how you can sell this to other companies. And it's very, very clear what the benefit is to them. So, makes a lot of sense. And it's such a cool business model and it's such a cool store. I can't wait to see obviously how it progresses over time. I know you mentioned at the start about moving into AI and agentic type of workflows and work in that arena. So, tell us a little bit more about.
projects you're currently building up and what does that look like for the business?
Garrett Blood (27:00)
So.
kill this is this is where it gets really exciting right so we've got three different verticals now of course we've got near shore which basically means from the United States down through South America everything's close by same time zones then we've got offshore I call it midnight magic where the teams around the world are working when everyone's asleep here in the United States and then we've got a gentic AI which is awake 24 hours a day seven days a week doesn't sleep doesn't complain zero entitlement it's not
really costing anything it's just it's tremendous and it keeps getting better every single week and we wanted to create that vertical for people that say you know what I want cutting-edge or I want to hire one of your human beings that have feelings and creativeness and it's just it's the human aspect and I want to add
Aqil (27:32)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (27:51)
additional resource you know AI for example to that that person that knows how to use it and I call it you know I look at AI as the clear coat on a car you need the fundamentals and now we're gonna put it and make it even better we're gonna make it glossy and ⁓ and I tell my team you know AI is not gonna take your job the people that leverage AI will
And so the goal is that we need to make sure that the infrastructure is strong and we add to it, right? And so we added agentic AI from a sales customer service ⁓ standpoint where it's gonna get to the point where you and I are talking like we are right now, but you're talking to an AI agent that can think, reason on its own and have this dialogue and basically take sales calls. It's remarkable how fast it's going.
Aqil (28:43)
It's gonna be crazy, yeah.
Garrett Blood (28:45)
with this 12 months ago when it was impressive, today it's scary. And I remember I was talking to Gary Vee one day, if you know Vernecek, and we see each other at different events and things like that, and he's so brilliant, and he says, Garrett, goes, what most people don't understand, and he said this like four months ago. He told me, he's like, Garrett, in about 12 to 14 months, people will not be able to tell the difference at all.
Aqil (28:55)
Yeah.
you
Garrett Blood (29:14)
from AI and real life. He goes, they're not gonna be able to know unless like it's being hosted on someone's account that basically says this is AI or this is me personally. And everything else is like an imposter if it's because it looks so real. And he says, that's the way that it's going right now. so basically to prepare for it. And so that's what we've been trying to do is take that on and being able to be a resource. So a customer might come to us and say, that person that's a mechanical engineer
you're charging $3,500 a month for. That's amazing. What does your AI agent look like?
and that might be $1,700 a month, like half price practically. And they might, okay, great, that's a great option for us. So we would love to hire your human being and this AI agent to complement each other. And that's where we're going. And I anticipate that 60 % of our business in the next 18 months is gonna be coming from those AI agents.
Aqil (30:04)
Mmm, yep.
That's
yeah, incredible, incredible. mean, it's been so interesting to see AI develop over the last kind of four years when it was first, you really announced to us and we could actually start using it and seeing the exponential ⁓ increase of quality and the way it works and all these things like Claude, you know, come out with all these new things as well. and it's just, it's just incredible. And, and to your point about the, you know, the content piece of, know, you won't be able to know if you're speaking to an AI or not.
Garrett Blood (30:33)
Ugh.
Aqil (30:44)
is we're already seeing that now with social media, right? There's certain social media videos and stuff you see, and it looks very, very real, but it's just not, it's AI, right? And it's getting very, very hard to tell the difference. And it's quite funny. I used to tell my dad whenever he used to send me something, I was like, dad, that's AI, like so obvious. And now, and now I'm looking at things and I'm like, I can't tell if it's, if it's AI or not, you know? And so.
Garrett Blood (31:00)
Hahaha!
It's so funny you say that because I do the same thing with my parents. I'm like, no, this is not real. That's fake. That person riding a pig down the interstate is not real. And they're like, really? I go, that's not real. And it's just so funny, these different memes and these videos, whether it's being created with VO3 or copilots putting stuff together, there's so many amazing platforms. It's super fun. It's exciting. Our director of AI on our team has been working with AI for five years.
Aqil (31:12)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (31:35)
So way before anyone else and he's created an AI himself for example that's not built on a platform of chat GPT or say open AI it's not grok. It's not cloud. It's not I mean there's so many other platforms he created his own and it's so smart that it actually dreams and it's it's like such a weird concept. It's like something out of the matrix and the stuff and that's what happens when you've got like another 50 IQ points in the average person.
Aqil (31:58)
It is,
me.
Garrett Blood (32:05)
You can put stuff together that you've never even heard of I have a hard time tracking with him. He's so smart He is the Elon Musk genius of Mexico and he's on my team and I am so blessed and lucky to have someone as smart as he is on our team to help us scale to the next level and He makes he makes things much simpler for me to understand because he can talk to someone like me that doesn't have that expertise and so ⁓ I always say, you know
Aqil (32:10)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (32:34)
If you don't know someone that is an expert in AI, you need to start looking for someone that is an expert to help bring you up to speed on a regular basis. Cause it's changing every single week. It's changing. Yeah. It's impressive. It's just unbelievable. And it's supposed to change. I remember talking to an expert and he said, AI is going to double every six months for the next six years. It's going to double and which is scary to think about. I'm like, basically he saying, he goes, get ready to see robots walking outside your house.
Aqil (32:44)
It is, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely.
Garrett Blood (33:04)
powered by AI that were manufactured by robots in the next 24 to 36 months. I'm like, what? So prepare yourself for that, you know? So, it's exciting.
Aqil (33:14)
Yeah, no, no,
for sure. For sure. ⁓ and it's also interesting with this wave of AI, this, you know, going back to like the professional service space and, and, you know, B2B and all these things, it's going to be interesting to see where the returns with AI starts to diminish as well. Like how can you create relationships with AI, right? Like what's that transition going to look like? And is there going to be a drop off there? I think that's what I'm quite curious to see how.
how the market's gonna react and how people are gonna react. Maybe there's certain generations, maybe younger, which they might have grown up with AI. So it's much easier for them to communicate with AI and have relationships, let's say, whereas slightly older people might struggle with that, right? Because it's a different way of doing things. So it'll be interesting to see what comes up throughout that as well, from a relationship standpoint, because of course, know, go into networking events to get the business off the ground, shaking people's hands.
that's all relationship based. So where does AI fit within the picture? It's going to be an interesting dynamic that's going to be uncovered, I think as well.
Garrett Blood (34:17)
It's funny that you say that because I look at it kind of like you look at millennials that grew up with the internet, right? And then folks like from like Gen X for example like me, ⁓ you know, we didn't, I remember what life was like before the internet. And not that I wasn't fast to embrace it, but I had to learn on the fly and watch it grow. But I also appreciate life before it. And I think a lot of people,
are gonna appreciate life before AI as well, and they're still gonna want human interaction. I feel like we're already starting to see it a little bit where people are like, I'm tired of hearing about AI and that you have AI for your business. That's great, but I also still like to deal with a human being, right? And I still think there's gonna be a lot of people that say, is awesome, but I wanna talk to a flesh and blood human being that wants to talk to me. And so that human connection I think is still gonna be critical.
but at the same time we can't put our head in the sand. I remember my dad early on was saying, I don't know much about this worldwide web taking over. This digital mail thing called email, I don't think it's gonna catch on. And it's like, you either embrace it or you don't. And we have to embrace the AI piece of it. But I look at it kind of like moderation in all things, right? I think there's gonna be a lot of people that gravitate to the human being component. There's a lot of people that are gonna be old school that say, you know what, ⁓
Aqil (35:20)
care.
Garrett Blood (35:47)
great
I use it but I want to do things the way that I've done it all the time and they're gonna keep doing that and so I think there's gonna be a market for everyone they just allowing themselves to differentiate into certain silos if you will
Aqil (36:02)
Yeah,
no, I 100 % agree on that side of it. Okay, amazing. Well, look, thank you so much for taking the time today. I've really enjoyed this conversation. And I'll end it with one of the final things that we always ask guests on the show, which is, if you can go back to your 18 year old self and only take three lessons with you, whether it's some philosophical knowledge, some business knowledge or general advice, what would those three lessons be and what would be those three things?
Garrett Blood (36:27)
Three lessons. So I'm a big believer in patience. I talk about that a lot. ⁓ And I liken it to the fact that a lot people think they're smarter or faster or they're gonna work hard.
But at the end of the day, they still have to put the time in and then make the mistakes and fail. But when they fail, they need to fail fast, fail forward, pick yourself up and keep running, running that direction. I can't tell you how many times that I almost failed and had I only taken that extra step to see the top that I would realize that I was almost there. And by taking that extra step, was now we're cashflow positive and now we're doing it. But I almost quit because it was
so difficult and I see that, I can't tell you how many hundreds of times I've seen that with different entrepreneurs, that they're almost there and they're about to throw in the towel and then something snaps and it moves forward. But ⁓ yeah, patience I think is one of the key components there that people discount and don't actually look at. ⁓ That perseverance, that grit as another one I think is huge. Being able to do what no one else is able to do. Are you putting in the time?
Musk
said it and Mark Rubio once said it. Is it Mark Rubio? I can't remember who it was. No, it's from Shark Tank. Who am I thinking of? Mark, I can't remember, billionaire. Billionaire, anyway. He said, goes, he where you work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40.
Aqil (37:56)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (38:05)
And rather than having a check-in, check-out job at 40 hours a week, entrepreneurs, have to be willing to put in the crazy hours in order to see the success. And most people never see the behind the scenes. They only see the outcome. Maybe that person bought in a huge house or a Ferrari or they've got the lifestyle that someone wants, but they didn't see, like I didn't pay myself along a lot of my companies for sometimes up to two years.
Aqil (38:06)
Yeah, that's true.
Garrett Blood (38:31)
And so when I say patience, realize that entrepreneurism, it's one of those things where you might work two years before you see a paycheck. But that's not the hard part. Convincing yourself is one thing. But if you're married, convincing your spouse the same thing, like getting them on board with it, that's, I feel like, more difficult. My wife was totally, she knew who she married ahead of time. We got married real young. And so she grew with me, right? And I was 20, I was 20.
when I got married and she was like she was 19 right and so we've been married 25 years and you know we've got five kids I've got a 22 year old and I've got a 10 year old so we've got the whole range but ⁓ I think the other thing too is making sure that you marry the right person
Aqil (39:03)
Wow. Yeah.
all spectrum.
Garrett Blood (39:21)
I mean that sounds kind of maybe old fashioned, but you know, one of the things that can affect you the most is who you marry. Can they go along with you for that ride? Are they built for it? And you know, at the same time, if you chose the wrong person, how it will impact your business. They instantly own 50 % of it if you guys divorce. Your net worth goes down by 50 % like that because you married the wrong person. And the difference is,
Aqil (39:29)
Yeah.
Yeah. So true. Yeah. Just like that.
Garrett Blood (39:51)
with a business partner, you know, and you know, because sometimes you're married to people at work on a regular basis, but being married to your spouse is a completely different thing. And so keeping that in mind. ⁓ And then the other thing I would tell my 18 year old self would have been to invest in Google and Nvidia and Tesla at an early age.
Aqil (40:12)
Yeah.
Garrett Blood (40:14)
I you look at you look at how they have just grown. It's just it's mind boggling like if I had put
Aqil (40:14)
It's just crazy, isn't it?
Garrett Blood (40:19)
if I had put it I think they did something like you did the math if you had put a thousand dollars in video when it started and then you had sold it. I think it was six months ago you would that thousand dollars was going to be worth like 18 million dollars or something like that. It's like ridiculous numbers and I could be off maybe it was eight million dollars but it was like it was it was it was so ridiculous.
Aqil (40:37)
Crazy. Crazy. Insane returns.
Garrett Blood (40:44)
It was unbelievable. It's like, you know invent investing in in Apple I remember when the first investors in Apple he gave he wrote a check to Steve Jobs for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and They said had he held on to all his stock with all the dividends From the early, you know when they started Apple computers back in the day. I think that was late 70s when they started it ⁓ To today that two hundred fifty thousand dollars had they just let it ride would be worth one trillion dollars
today and I can't remember where I read that stat and it was unbelievable it just blew my mind is that that that's what that would be worth today and so you never know where things are going but invest when you can at a young age and you'll be great but those are the three things that I would suggest.
Aqil (41:23)
It seems.
Amazing, amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I've learned a lot and some great golden nuggets throughout there and your story is also very, very interesting as well. Your entrepreneurship journey and all the things that you've learned along the way. So thank you so much for taking the time today and hopefully we can do another one in a few months time and see how business is going and go from there. Amazing. Thank you.
Garrett Blood (41:48)
Let's do it. Anything I can do. Love it. Anything I can do. Thanks, Kilp.