Ep37 Transcript: Interview with Dennis Yu

Andrea Vahl: Hey Dreamers, it’s your host, Andrea Vahl, and I am joined today by Dennis Yu. A longtime friend of mine who has gone from corporate America to starting a successful agency called Blitz Metrics, and now he’s on a mission to create 1 million jobs. Find out how he is doing that and find out some of the keys to his success.

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Andrea Vahl: Hey Dreamers. It’s Andrea Vahl, your host, and I am here with the amazing, super connected. We were just talking about how amazingly connected he is in the whole world. Dennis Yu, founder of Blitz Metrics, among amazing other things that he’s done.

We’ll get into a lot of the new things that he’s doing, but welcome Dennis. I’m so excited to have you on the show.

Dennis Yu: I’m just happy to be with Andrea Vahl.

Andrea Vahl: You’re awesome. So

Dennis Yu: What an honor.

Andrea Vahl: So tell us a little bit, before we started rolling, you were talking about the arc of what you’ve done. And I love your latest focus that you have. But I’d love to hear in your words the arc of you’ve been doing, and your mission now later in life as to what your goal is and well on your way to achieving. So give us a little of your backstory.

Dennis Yu: 20 some years ago, I was really lucky to be at Yahoo at the beginning, and I was a search engine engineer and built the analytics and built some huge databases. I’m Asian, I’m good at math and programming.

And I left Yahoo and I made a little bit of money. And enough that it, I don’t have to work. And a lot of my friends who work for me that I trained up at Yahoo, they went to go work at Google and then Google IPO and they made even more money than me. And I just love seeing that happen. And when I left Yahoo, I had some great connections. Because I was at Yahoo I would speak at these conferences cuz all these people wanted to know about SEO, today they still want to know about seo, trying to trick Google and whatever. And so we teach all these people how to do this. And I had an agency that did this for some of the biggest companies out there. And then the SEO thing turned into social media, which in my opinion’s the same thing.

It’s just another algorithm. It’s just, video and pictures instead of words instead of just websites. And so we’ve trained up so many different agencies to do that and I’ve been really lucky. That some of these major agency owners and software companies have given me a little piece of their company, and some of them have gone public.

Some of them have been acquired by some really big companies. And I’m just waiting for us to be able to sell the shares so I can cash in on that. And now I’m in this third phase, so that’s what we’re doing, these late bloomers where I’ve decided, with the help of Mark Schaffer and David Meerman Scott and other friends who are way smarter than me, I want to create a million jobs.

I was thinking small. I thought hiring hundreds of VAs was a big deal. But now and my buddy Rehan, who’s one of the most famous people in Pakistan, he said, Dennis, you need to set your sites much bigger because you’re involved with so many agencies and you’re so connected in the digital marketing space, like you, Andrea, with Social Media Marketing World, and Michael Stelzner and that kind of thing.

Why don’t we leverage the things that we have, the connections we have, the voice we have. In the world of digital marketing to create openings for people in the Philippines, in Pakistan and Kosovo and whatnot. My buddy John Jonas started onlinejobs.ph, that’s the world’s largest VA site. He’s got 2 million VAs on his site.

And we were talking about this million jobs mission, and he said together, because we’ve been working on things that I can take credit towards a million jobs for 250,000 jobs. Which is great. So I’m a quarter of the way there in creating a million jobs and I met with the prime minister of IT in Pakistan and other government leaders.

I was there last month. I’ve been there several times. And they want to do the same thing that we’ve done in the Philippines. And they’ve set up a bunch of incubators. They’ve brought money and cell phones and laptops and internet and all these things. You can imagine like when a government really wants to do this.

And our mission over there is to create jobs. Do you know, Andrea, how much the average Pakistani makes in one month?

Andrea Vahl: Oh, wow. I know I, yes, when I traveled to India, I remember it being so low for India, but that was a while ago, so I don’t know if it’s even increased then. But how much is it?

Dennis Yu: It’s $80 a month.

Andrea Vahl: Oh my gosh, I was going to guess higher than that. Wow.

Dennis Yu: And there’s people who make more or less, I know people who are wildly successful, but they’re in that top 0.1%. . But what we’ve said is, Hey, if you can go through our certification and learn how to do digital marketing, we guarantee you a job at three bucks an hour, which is $500 a month.

So imagine, Andrea, not for you, but imagine for these other people. A stay-at-home mom with two kids. $500 a month is life changing money. That’s solid middle class, upper middle class, you can have a house, you can have a car. You can probably even have a servant or two for $500 a month, like you can live.

You’re not going to live like Rich, but you’re going to have a decent life for $500 a month, right? And that’s just a starting point. Then you move up to $750 a thousand dollars a month through our training system and you and I, we speak at these conferences. So I’m speaking at Josh Nelson’s conference in Miami.

He’s seven figure agencies. So he’s teaching all these digital agencies and I said, who here would like to hire a VA to edit your videos, process your podcast, take care of your clients, and repurpose the stuff to GMB and write blog posts And do you know, dollar a day boosting that we teach? Who here would like to hire a VA for $500 a month to do that for you full-time?

Every hand in the room goes up. So I’m just connecting both sides. Now, I’m constantly going back and forth to these developing countries. They don’t like to be called third world developing countries. Then I come back to the United States and we have business owners that just can’t hire enough staff.

McDonald’s pays $22 an hour min wage in California, right? And those people are not even interested in doing work. So imagine these agency owners and these other businesses we are building this conduit to be able to connect these folks together. Because what unifies ’em together, and you know this, Andrea, cause, you have Facebook Ads Made Simple and you have a lot of training on this.

It’s the training and the process that brings both sides together. Cuz these businesses, when they hire someone, they’re hiring someone who is certified and it can fit into an existing process. Yeah. They don’t have to write up a new job description or come up with a new thing or have to supervise people like it’s an existing process.

And these people know exactly when they get certified, they’re going to fit exactly in with what these businesses are doing. And we are just allowing that to happen. But that couldn’t have happened unless I ran an agency and coached other agencies, and then 20 years ago had corporate experience. So now I’m the late bloomer because I want to be the job creator, but it couldn’t have happened unless I had this previous experience.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah, and that’s what I love is that you have got this story arc of experience that is this thread that ties everything together in order to have you achieve this amazing, amazing goal that I know for sure. Hands down, you’re going to, Get probably sooner rather than later. And then it’ll be like let’s go for a billion, So that is awesome. I love that. You know. And I think it’s a good question. What do you think has been an advantage for you in starting this later in life? Obviously your experience is one thing, but are there other advantages that you feel like you have with the years of wisdom you have in being able to do this mission right now?

Dennis Yu: Everything has been relationships. Having someone like you that I can call on when I have a question. or asking Stelzner a coaching question on like, how do you hire a COO and scale up a process? Or other friends that run conferences? I’m asking them, how did you market it? And I think you probably tell me if you agree as you get further along in your career, it’s more about relationships than your own technical expertise.

And I don’t think for this mission that I have on creating jobs. I’m largely just like a bumblebee that’s flying back and forth between east and west kindling these relationships. I don’t, I’m probably, I think you know more about Facebook ads than I do now, right?

But I can make a phone call if I have a question about Google ads.

I can make a phone call to Kasim. . If I have a question about how do you structure agency SOPs , I can call Tony Ricketts. If I have a question about how to write a book and what I should call it, I can contact Mark Schaffer or David Merriman Scott. If, anyway, I don’t, I’m not trying to name drop.

The point is, you probably heard this whole thing about it’s not how but who, anytime you have a problem, the answer is who? , not even fair. So this crazy thing I’m trying to pull off with a million jobs, think about what is required to do this, you have to have the technical expertise to build a marketplace with courses and training and certifications.

Kind of like a fiver and Uber. . You have to have the network to bring in the demand, which is all the business people that want to hire. So an agency. Has enough trouble just trying to get more clients. Now we have to staff up enough demand to power thousands of agencies. That’s hard to do and we have to supply the, do the supply of all the workers and all the stuff necessary to work with the governments in these other countries and entrepreneurship groups to bring that together.

Then, we have to have the financial payroll system to enable the tracking of the tasks and allowing people to level up. If we were to build. An Upwork or Fivver or whatnot, I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but there’s a lot of things that have to happen to build a full two-sided marketplace.

Just even from the software engineering side alone. And there’s no way I would know how to do that, even if I was a super mega genius expert,

Andrea Vahl: which you are.

Dennis Yu: Even if they were like , you’re too kind. But even if they were 10 Dennis’s, let’s say Elon Musk, he releases his cloning technology, right? And there were 10 dennises that were working on this.

I still couldn’t pull it off. So everything for me to pull off my big dreams, I have to somehow convince other people who are way smarter than me to want to… my buddy Darryl Isaacs told me this morning. He’s in London right now, going to the UK game. He said, make your dream so big that everyone else’s dream can fit inside of it.

Andrea Vahl: Oh, I like that.

Dennis Yu: Yeah. So my big dream with creating these jobs is so big that other people, their dream maybe is just to make $500 a month and be able to take care of their family and buy a new car, which is great. Other people, they just started their digital agency and they’re trying to go from 30,000 MRR to 50,000 MRR. That’s great, right? , we can help them. And I just love, like yesterday I was with Justin Breen. I feel like the universe is it’s it’s not even fair. Like I’m getting all these benefits. It’s like cheating. But Justin Breen was telling me that he’s, he has a world class PR agency.

He was on my podcast yesterday. And he said that he’s never selling, he’s not out there trying to convince anybody of anything cuz who wants to be there trying to convince people in selling, he says he’s a buyer. He’s constantly buying services. And then because he’s to scale his agency to help other people grow.

And the more money he makes, the more services he can buy, the more people he can hire, the more impact he can make. It’s the same thing like you and I, like you’re doing this podcast. I don’t think it’s cuz you’re trying to make money. Maybe you are, maybe there’s a backend program, but you’re doing it because you have the expertise and the experience.

To actually tell other people who are late bloomers in their forties and fifties and beyond, that their past experience has led them to this point and it wasn’t accidental. That now is the right time. What? Colonel Sand. I was in Kentucky two weeks ago. Colonel Sanders. What? Started KFC when he was 70?

Something like or 67?

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. yeah, definitely one of the most famous late starters ever. So yeah, it can happen. And so I love that idea of really the fact that the connections have brought you to where you are and helped fuel your dream. You are one of the best connectors that I’ve ever met.

What is your secret to making those connections? How do you approach people? How do you keep those connections rolling? Cuz you do such a great job of that. How do you do that?

Dennis Yu: You’re too kind. If this Chinese search engine engineer who didn’t speak English until he was seven can network, anybody can do a better job than me at this.

Let me tell you. It’s not about memorizing people’s names or having a way to send out gifts or socks with people’s faces on ’em, which is something I do. It’s not like networking tips and charisma and how well you smile, which helps. It’s this and I went through these particular three stages.

I’ve only shared this one time before, so I’m curious to see what you think. So imagine you were me 40 years ago. You didn’t speak English. and you wanted to do well and get good grades like other Asians. So you just studied and studied. So I spent eight hours a day in the library weekends too, just studying for years.

I didn’t have any social skills. I didn’t know how to introduce myself. I didn’t go to cocktail parties. I just, I was a loser. Okay. I didn’t have any friends. But I studied and I gained so much knowledge that then when other people had an issue or a question, I was like a walking encyclopedia. People literally called me a walking encyclopedia, which at that time I thought was cool.

Now I think it’s nerdy cuz I could answer all these questions so people would wa want to have me come along because I could answer questions. So I did tutoring, I did all this math tutoring. People would pay me $500 in high school to sit with them the night before to help them pass the final exam, right? I even did stuff like I helped these sorority girls like write their papers that were due or accounting classes.

I could help balance things. I could help people with their final, I was like known at SMU where I went to undergrad, I was known as like the guy. Who, if it was like super desperate and the exam is tomorrow or the papers due tomorrow, like you call Dennis, like Dennis is a guy, doesn’t matter how freaked out you’re, he’ll help you pass the math test.

He’ll help you pass intermediate accounting. He will help you get through first semester calculus. And I was just good at that because I had enough knowledge that I literally, I could help people with their SAT I did a lot of test prep, so these rich families would have me come in and teach their teenagers how to get better scores in the SAT.

And of course they got better scores in math than the SAT, cuz I know what I’m doing right? . So gaining expertise. Then caused other people to want to reach out to me cuz I built a reputation. It wasn’t cuz I gave out 10 business cards at every meeting. It wasn’t because I sent out a bunch of cold emails and said, Hey, I’d like to get on the phone with you for 15 minutes and see if I can, introduce myself and tell you about my business and see if I can.

I never did any kind of cold outreach. It was all because I developed some expertise other people knew me for that. And then the third phase is then I could start making connections. So if I have a friend who maybe they want to publish a book on Instagram ads, then I could say, you know what? You should talk to my friend Andrea Vahl because she’s got several books on Facebook Ads , and I bet you lemme just introduce you to this other person.

So yeah, my power now in networking is because I built knowledge first, then I executed in practice where people reached out to me. Third phase is now I can make connections. So whenever someone has a question about, hey, my, actually I won’t say this cuz if I say this, more people will ask me for this, but like people would ask me for an introduction to Mark Zuckerberg or they’d ask me for playoff tickets to the Golden State Warriors, cuz they were our client for five and a half years, not anymore.

So don’t ask me for tickets to, oh Dennis years, can you get me tickets to that game on Fri you’re not a real friend and I know what you’re trying to get. I see right through what you. Hey, Dennis, I have this new I new startup idea. I would love for you to be an investor. No, I’m, I don’t invest, I invest, but yeah the need of networking I found was that first I have the knowledge.

So that I can actually provide value. Two, I have the experience where I’ve actually done something and three, I can make in the introduction. So the way I look at it is most people look at it as one of the three things. So if they just want to gather knowledge, then they just end up being a, get multiple degrees and be a university professor.

That’s a dead end, right? Nothing wrong with that, but if you want to be an entrepreneur, don’t be a university professor. You have to eventually start doing stuff. Two is they say, Hey, I just want to hustle. I’ll figure it out. Fire, ready, aim. And so they just like, I’ll hustle and figure it out.

And then that’s why entrepreneurs fail so bad cuz they don’t have the knowledge. They go straight to executing. And the third piece, it’s like a real estate agent or salesperson where they’re like, you know what I’m just going to meet as many people as I can. I don’t need to develop any expertise cuz I can just know these other people who are expert.

And then those people burn out because all they do is they just try to introduce. , but they don’t actually have the knowledge and they don’t have the actual experience having done something, , I believe the most intelligent path, which is, I think your audience is people who have gotten some experience doing something, and now they’re perfectly poised to be able to leverage these connections or start building connections.

In this new industry or for this new venture, because they have that experience.

Andrea Vahl: I think for sure, like that is one of the advantages of, starting something later in life because as we’ve, grown in different communities we know all these super smart people now and it’s great way to get introduced, get connected into something else you want to do. Someone who’s maybe done that and been successful at that. So that’s really great. I’d be interested to know, like the network of Dennis Yu like expanding around the world. I think it’ll be , like a big light up globe right there.

. That’s really cool. One of the things I like about you, Dennis, is that you share lot of people on social media. Sharing their success, which is great, but you are also really transparent about sharing when things are hard or when things haven’t gone well for you. And I think that really draws people into you and helps people see that it’s not always this perfect, smooth road.

Tell us about a time where maybe you’ve had a problem or been overwhelmed. How do you get through that and how do you work your way through that? And what lessons have come out of that?

Dennis Yu: Oh, man. Where do we start ? First offf, on social media, especially Instagram.

I think there’s this thing where you have to present this perfect self. So all these people are pretending, and I feel like you don’t learn anything from your successes, and I’ve just made so many mistakes. I made a tweet on Twitter saying something like, “If failure is the precursor to success, then I’m about to be the most successful guy on the planet.”

And so most of the posts that I make on social media, most people don’t realize this. Two-thirds of the posts that I make are honoring other people and I’m celebrating their success. And so when I celebrate their success about how they just sold their agency, then what they do is they usually reply to that and they’ll say thank you Dennis for coaching me, cuz otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sell the agency without your coaching all the way.

And of course , I want to focus on the success that the other people have, and then when I want to post about myself, I want to post about failure. So I made a post on Facebook this morning talking about how I’ve absolutely failed in relationships because as this entrepreneur, I’ve worked so hard that I forgot about taking care of my health.

I was so busy with other things, like friends didn’t want to hang out with me. Cuz like Dennis said, he just works all the time. He pulls out his laptop at the restaurant. He’s always working. Or I want to get off the phone with him cause I know he is busy and he’s probably just like checking his watch all the time and what can I get off the phone with Andrea?

I don’t want to spend on, I want to get Andrea off the phone because I’m busy. And what an asshole I was because I was going to for good reasons cuz I’m behind. I have these deadlines and I’m busy and I have emails and I have meetings and I’m really important and I have this big thing coming up and, but I realized what an asshole I was

And when I was with Tommy Mellow a couple days ago, I stayed at his house in Phoenix. And we hung out till 1:30 playing Golden Tea, which is a cool video game. And we were doing silly things like this guy’s a grown man and he sold this company for zillions of dollars. And I was there when the money came through, which is crazy.

I was telling you about that before, but I felt like we had all the time in the world. And my buddy Daryl, he texts me like five times a day. He’s got a huge personal injury attorney firm. He does billions of dollars, but he and I like, we hang out. We’re literally just like hanging out. Driving his boat around or whatnot.

And I learned this lesson, so I’m giving the lesson from my mistake as I was an asshole, I was too busy. I was trying to outwork everybody. And then I realized, wait a minute. Those times with other people are actually valuable. They build relationships, they set the right culture for the team.

They just, lots of things like that. And so I’m constantly sharing. I’m like the moon, you’re the sun. Andrea. I’m reflecting your light. I’m always reflecting the light of what I learned from these other people, and I’m a poor reflector , but you’ll see like on social or LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn, I make posts every day about mistakes that I’ve made and what I’ve learned from other people who are doing it the right way. ,

Alex Berman just sold his SaaS company for a lot of money and I’m learning from him about how do you grow a SaaS company. , and he made an introduction to the company that did the engineering and I need a couple more engineers, and now these guys are building software for me.

I’m like, wow, this is so cool. If I didn’t share my mistake that, hey, I was building some software and I threw away a hundred thousand dollars building this prototype that didn’t work and it was my fault and I could blame them. And so Alex saw that and said actually happy to give you my engineering team, but if I didn’t mention that I was struggling with this mistake, he would’ve never reached out and said, actually, let me introduce you to these guys.

Actually, it’s a fantastic networking technique to talk about the mistakes you have.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it also helps people help you. So that’s happened to me too, where I, I. Totally had a terrible speech one time. It was just awful. I just, it was all wrong and it felt completely flat and I just shared how bad it went and people were so gracious when people are coming in and saying, it’s okay. You got this. And so by sharing a mistake, everyone. Is able to help you. And I think people want to help each other, right? People want to contribute and want to help. And being able to receive that help is also another gift that you have to learn how to do. So awesome.

What else do I want to, it is so fun. Oh, so what is an assumption that, no, actually, you know what, I’m going to go an ask this question.

If you could go back and tell your younger self one thing, what would that be?

Dennis Yu: Slow down. I was in such a hurry, .

Andrea Vahl: I was almost going to say that slower. I was like, if you could…

Dennis Yu: People watch my webinars on 2x and they can never get it.

But I was in such a hurry to graduate to achieve the results, to make my first million dollars to do these other things that I was you know, I was an asshole, and I didn’t treat people the right way because I felt like I need to be a millionaire by 25, and I did, but I cause so much damage along the way and I would’ve actually been way more successful personally, financially, spiritually if I just slowed down. And it’s like planting vegetables, right? I love tomatoes. I know all about organic heirloom tomatoes. My previous garden had 14 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Like you would not believe. And the engineer in me would plant stuff and use the right water with the right pH at the right temperature and the right fertilizer.

And I was doing everything. I bought three books on how to grow tomatoes and I would get 150 pounds of tomatoes per tomato tree. That’s how good I was at planting tomatoes. Cause I followed recipe and so I was so fastidious about it that I would literally go back to my plot in the garden every couple hours, and I would check to see whether it grew anymore.

I would inspect the roots. I would dig up the plant and see whether the roots are…two hours later I’m digging it up and another two hours I come back and I’m in inspecting it again. How do you think my tomato plants did when I was pulling up the roots every two hours? and I wanted them so bad.

I wanted these tomatoes to be perfect. I like anytime there was like an insect or whatever, I’d kill it cuz I’d like, how dare you attack my tomato tree. But then I realized, wait, I’m not really in a big hurry. I need to let Mother nature take over and do what it’s supposed to do. So if I just inspected the plants only twice a day they actually did a lot better than me maniacally inspecting my tomato plants 15 times per day. It’s like evaluating your stocks, right? Yeah. If you log into your e-trade or whatever, and you’re like, oh, it, the stock went up 3 cents. It went down 5 cents, it went up a dollar. We’re like you’ll never get there when you’re constantly overworking, working too hard.

I think that going slower, making fewer steps is actually faster.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. I love that. That’s such a patience is so challenging as an entrepreneur or a gardener, right? , you’re growing something either way. , it’s definitely hard.

So I’ll ask this question too.

What is an assumption that people have about you that’s wrong?

Dennis Yu: They love to say that Dennis is a genius and Dennis is like super intelligent and Dennis is some sort of superhuman, like I appreciate that. I understand it comes from a good place, but what they have wrong about this is I’ve worked really hard.

So you’ve heard about the 10,000 hour rule. I have 80,000 hours in digital marketing. And so what happens is that when someone has got a lot of experience in an area and you don’t have much experience at all in that area, that can come off as them being really intelligent when really they’re just smart. They know a lot of facts.

They just have a lot of information from having done it for such a long time. It doesn’t mean they’re more intelligent. . I think this is true of nearly anyone that I know that is successful in their field.

I was telling you, Tommy Mellow, this guy started off doing garage doors back in 2015 and he runs a one garage doors.

He knows everything about garage doors. He made videos about garage doors. He can fix garage doors. He knows like all the parts, all the manufacturers for garage doors like garage door. Garage door. So you might think that he’s a genius. And maybe he is from an IQ standpoint, but what I see is the sheer determination of working on this garage door business and just doing garage doors night and day for 16 years.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah.

Do you think that’s what it takes to be successful?

Dennis Yu: Some people get lucky and they sell their company in 18 months. You see all these Silicon Valley sorts of things, but people that I know that have started companies that they’ve sold for hundreds of millions. And I’m not saying that’s the path we need to take, right?

There’s lots of businesses that don’t have to grow into this wild thing. But the people I know that have been successful, they’ve taken at least 10 years. Like Dustin Moskovitz, who is the CTO of Facebook, people say, Hey, what’s it like being at an overnight success? And he said, if you mean working day and night every weekend for the last 10 years before Facebook IPO’d, then Yes.

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. But I think that, I think like you said, there is still and I think it depends on your definition of success, right? You can have a successful company , it doesn’t have to be this huge thing, right? It doesn’t have to be this crazy big thing. But, if you want it to be, you need to be really intentional about that.

Dennis Yu: Yeah. I find having bigger dreams attracts better quality people. And if your company is growing and it’s making money and there’s nothing unethical or evil about making money, but if your company’s making more money and growing, that creates more opportunities for other people to be able to grow.

And people who are high achievers want to be a part of a company that has a big vision and is growing. . So to some degree, if you want to have the best quality people, you have to be growing and have some big, hairy, audacious. . . .

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Yeah. And you do. So that’s awesome. I already told you I love quotes and I’d love to hear your favorite quote as we wrap this up,

Dennis Yu: Andrea, my favorite quote, which I heard from my pastor, and I’ve said it lots of times, is if you don’t quit, you win. Which is weird because you would think. I’m not smart enough to win. I’m not some crazy genius. I don’t have the connections. I don’t have the charisma, so I don’t, like hitting a home run or scratching the lottery ticket and getting the right numbers.

Like that just seems like a really hard thing to do. But one thing I do know, is that I’m a stubborn cuss. I will keep at it and I know that I don’t quit , every time I make a mistake, I get back up. Look, I’ve run ultramarathons, right? , I’m a professional sufferer, right? , I’ve run like 25 marathons, ran D1 cross country and track, so I know how to suffer.

I think you have a son who’s a swimmer, so he knows something about three hours in the pool about his trip, right? . So I don’t see myself as some kind of amazing superstar who just hits home runs all the time. I see myself as someone who I fail all the time but I just keep learning. So as long as I keep going, as long as you don’t quit, you win.

And I know a lot of people who are, they just keep going and they just keep going. My buddy Woody Marks, he owns 10 Ashley Furniture stores in Alabama. He does a hundred million dollars a year, and he’s the first one to admit that he’s not the most intelligent person, but he’s been at it for a long time.

His family was in the furniture business a long time. and he’s just, he just doesn’t give up. He’s had lots of employees steal from him. He’s had, he’s been sued, but he just keeps at it. And the other entrepreneurs that I know that are just 50 times more successful than me, I hear about all kinds of, like, when we get together, we all complain privately and I see how they just the number one thing is the resilience.

They just pick themselves up and they just keep going.

Andrea Vahl: Right? Yeah. It’s huge. It’s been a huge theme that people have talked about. And there’s another quote that I love too, that failure is an event, not an identity. And it’s just you have to learn from it. And definitely I just admire you so much for what you’re doing out there in the world, Dennis.

And I know that you’re going to get million jobs sooner rather than later. And I’m just excited to be connected to you. You’re awesome. So thank you so much for being on the show.

Dennis Yu: Thank you, Andrea. How long have we known each other?

Andrea Vahl: Oh, that’s a good question. Probably, I met you very early on in my journey. Did I even, I know, I think that you’ve met Grandma Mary as well, obviously. So it’s been a while. It’s at least like 10 years, I would think, at least probably somewhere in there. So that’s awesome.

Dennis Yu: And how’s that resilience, right?

Andrea Vahl: Yeah. Yeah.

And where can people find out about you? Where’s the best way to get connected to you and your mission? Everything like that.

Dennis Yu: You can Google me. So Google, Dennis Yu and I’m on every single social network, even Tumblr, even Rumble, , . I’d love and we’ll have you. I’d love what you’re thinking. Love to see what you’re up to. Andrea’s, fantastic. Learn like anything from her, buy it

Andrea Vahl: and we’ll have all the links to your connections in the show notes as well.

But thank you so much Dennis, for taking the time and I’m sure we’ll talk soon.

Dennis Yu: Awesome. Thank you, Andrea. You’re the best.

Outro: Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide Top Tools for Late Starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.