Jeremy Weisz 20:01
Why car dealers?
Michael Cirillo 20:05
That’s a great question. So stemming from a family business. My dad used to publish telephone books, you remember, anybody remember what those telephone books are? They’re those things you’re using to prop up your computer monitors right now. So he published phone books from 1982 to 1995. He saw the writing on the wall in about 95. I remember he called our entire family, me and my siblings into his home office. He said, watch this. And we’re all standing around his desk, we’re looking at his computer monitor. And he connects to the internet that ping pong, ping pong. You know, that whole thing? We’re sitting there, we’re like, what’s, what’s this all about? And he brings us to one of the five websites that existed back then it was the Encyclopedia Britannica website. And we’re sitting there watching their home screen was a picture of the statue of David. But because the internet was so slow, we like I’ve never waited so long to get a penis to load on a screen, you know, like, that’s what it was like, right? Statue of David. Sorry, mom. And my dad looked at us, I’ll never forget. And he looked at us and he said, This is going to kill the encyclopedia salesperson. Because up to that point, they were going door to door every year. A new volume would come out, they come to your door, they try and sell you the whole lot for 18 zillion dollars. Now we’ve got the whole encyclopedia right at our fingertips. And he said, This is gonna kill the encyclopedia salesperson and he saw the writing on the wall. He’s like, wait, what other jobs will this alter or displace? Vacuum salespeople, the Watkins snake oil sales people coming door to door. Oh, and phonebooks.
So we had franchises of our phone book directory, across Canada, we had sold franchises of it. And he took a couple years off after the sale of that. He was in Washington State on a motorcycle trip, and he stopped in at a gas station. And there he saw this magazine that you could purchase for $1. And it was just a classifieds car dealer magazine. Every page was just nine pictures of a vehicle and the dealer’s logo and phone number, that sort of thing. And he went, there’s no competition to auto trader in Canada. Like nobody is doing this in Canada. So he came back. And he toyed with it and he said, Hey, you’re gonna learn how to sell. And I’m like, What are you talking about? He’s like, you’re going to drive two hours in that direction. And you’re going to stop at every dealership on the way back home. And you’re going to sell this magazine idea. And I’m gonna go two hours in that direction. And I’m going to stop at every dealership on the way home and we’re going to meet back home, and we’re going to talk about what we did. And I’m like, Dude, I’m 17 I don’t know how to sell. He’s like you do today. Because if you don’t, then our family starves. Right sort of thing. Putting on the white shirt to tie the suit. 17 year old Michael sitting outside, completely intimidated by these general managers who by the way, always are named Dave for some reason. And at the time, they were all 65 and I’m 17 and I’m like, uhh? And I would go in and do the sales pitch with the, I don’t know what else to call, it is the you know, the nervous swallow mid word, swallow where you’re like, Hello, sir. My name is Michael Cirillo. And, you know, that sort of a thing.
I hated every minute of that. Every minute. I hated it. We didn’t have a mock up. Jeremy. We didn’t have anything to show them. I was sitting in dealers offices going, it’s going to be about this big and it’s going to be glossy and the graphics are gonna pop off the page and all this. What I didn’t realize now and I don’t even know if my dad realized then what he was doing was teaching me how to sell, was teaching me how to build from absolutely nothing. We had no bank loans, no lines of credit, no investors. It was whatever you sell today goes in the checking account so we can buy groceries. And I know some people might be thinking, Oh, but you just said he sold the whole franchise. He franchised his company and he sold all of it? Isn’t it wasn’t that handsome of a deal? Like, let’s just be clear about that. It wasn’t that handsome of a deal. Who’s buying phone books when they all know phone books are gonna die? And that’s what we did.
So why automotive? My dad saw the opening. We published an automotive magazine. This was 97 we started, all the way up to 2012. And somewhere around 2004-2005 is when we started getting into digital. And so I would legit be designing advertising for the magazine on week one. I would be building websites on week two, going back into production week three on the magazine, going back to building websites we formed. We did that forever and ever and ever until 2012. I basically said to my dad, hey, I need to kill your entire business. Because we know everybody’s talking about websites and we got I gotta kill it and he goes cool, replace the revenue. And that was the very loose way that FLX was born. It was born from okay, my dad had a moment where he saw the writing on the wall for phone books. I had my moment where I saw the writing on the wall for magazine, car magazines. And was it really us being all like Gary Vee intuitive? No, it was just simply us listening to our customers. I’m not going to glamorize it and sugarcoat it. Our customers are saying, hey, what about websites? What about websites? What about websites? And when you hear that question enough, you hopefully at some point go right, what about websites? Right and, and so it’s been an evolution ever since that point, all the way to today.
Jeremy Weisz 27:22
What did you learn from your dad in your experience about sales that you now use with FlexDealer?
Michael Cirillo 27:31
Yeah, there are all sorts of lessons I learned from sales. And I’ll say this about my dad too. I’m sure it was intentional for him. But when you get in the car to get a ride to school and the only thing you hear is Brian Tracy cassettes.
Jeremy Weisz 27:54
What else did he listen to? Yeah, I had all those by the way, audio cassettes. If someone’s of a certain age, it’s these things that you put into the car but either Zig Ziglar ones, the Brian Tracy ones, the Tony Robbins ones, the Jack Canfield ones. Yeah. So yes, it sounds like he is of the same nature and you through osmosis listened to that stuff. What were some of your favorites?
Michael Cirillo 28:17
You don’t realize you do absorb it. I’ll never forget one thing Brian Tracy said. And I didn’t realize this was indoctrinated into my subconscious until I was maybe 35. And it came out and I heard it one when I was 35. And it brought me right back to the wood paneled station wagon, listening to it for the first time. Brian Tracy said, if you want the things in your life to change, you need to change the things in your life. And I was like, as a 35 year old, I was like I remember hearing that. So was it intentional? I’m sure it was intentional for my dad to be like, No, I’m going to let my kids listen to this stuff. That’s the first thing, the second thing is he taught me the importance of urgency. Most people aren’t urgent enough in sales. There are people listening right now that are like, What do I do? What am I doing wrong? How come I’m not closing new deals? How come that deal rotted on the vine? Time kills deals. You’re not feeling urgent enough because maybe you’re not wanting to break out of your comfort zone. What my dad taught me indirectly is that you must become comfortable being uncomfortable. Fast forward to today, sales is so second nature. You heard me say earlier I don’t feel like I’m selling anymore. I’m consulting. It’s very natural but for the onlooker, they would probably see me doing sales, right? I’m picking up the phone, I’m calling people, I’m texting constantly, I’m asking for the next appointment, I’m very direct. Well, those are all things I think my dad taught me, not by sitting me down in a classroom like fashion, but by demonstrating.
And for me, that’s a huge lesson not just in sales, but how I choose to parent my children. I can see I can talk at my kids till I’m blue in the face, what I really ought to do, and by the way, I’m not perfect at it, but I try, is to demonstrate for them. Don’t, don’t talk at me, demonstrate for me. And I think that’s what my dad did. There were a lot of sales meetings where I was sitting next to him. And I would mimic his seating, how he would sit, and he taught me never sit like this. So if you’re going to do that, you always, you know, like, it was just little things. And I realized now as a 41, almost 42 year old man, how many of those things have just become a natural part of how I approach what I do. Urgency, get comfortable being uncomfortable. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t need anything to get started. You don’t need bank loans, you don’t need a business plan. You don’t need any of these things. What you need is your feet held to the fire because if you don’t sell something today, we die. And I’m so grateful for it. I hated it back then. But I’m grateful for it now.
Jeremy Weisz 31:44
Yeah, going back to so I mean, for me, I think selling is a mindset too because the way you talk about it, and that’s the way I think about it too, which is trying to help someone and very consultative. And if our solution’s not right for them, then we point them in another direction. And if someone’s going in, I can see I’ve talked to people where their mindset is selling instead of helping, right. And so I think that’s what I kind of gathered from what you’re saying is like you don’t go in with that mindset of selling. It’s really just helping consultative, trying to help them figure out what the solution is. And if you’re the solution, great. If not, that’s fine, too. And backing up to what you were saying about navigating the increased fees. You know, you talked about authority, differentiation, and then value and all those three things kind of add up to that conversation being easier, and almost seamless, because you’ve kind of set it up from the beginning. So I can see car dealers. Michael now, but I want to go back a little bit. Because in your teens and 20s, what did you actually think you’d be doing? Obviously, were like, I’m going to be an agency owner someday. But what did you actually think you’re gonna be doing? And we could talk a little bit about what sounded like hard times.
Michael Cirillo 33:06
Yeah. As a teenager, this is gonna sound weird. I knew I was gonna be a businessman somehow. Back then, I thought I would own a radio station that played all alternative rock music all the time. We’re talking like Foo Fighters, Bush X, like, you know, stuff like that. It was gonna be called 1500 The Pit, you know, and that was I was like, Man, I fantasized about owning this radio station. I fantasized about owning this radio station with my best friend Dan. And we were not your typical teenage boys. I mean, we were in the sense that yeah, we played video games, we played guitars, we were in a band. But I remember going to, you know, Sunday school and, you know, youth activities and Dan and I would find a corner. And we would pull out a piece of paper and we would draw diagrams for like architectural diagrams of what our office one day would look like. We would take selfies before selfies were cool on the Kodak, we, you know, disposable. We would take selfies and we’d be in our suits. And we’re like, this is the cover of this magazine. We’re going to be featured on this cover of this magazine, like we were putting out into the universe that we would stand out.
Jeremy Weisz 34:45
Is Dan your CTO, currently?
Michael Cirillo 34:49
He’s my business partner. So like we were calling it forward all those years. We didn’t know that’s what we were doing. Some people call it the law of attraction. Some people you know, there’s all we were putting it definitely Putting the vibes out there. And we went our separate ways. You know, he went to university and I went to university and we did separate things. And I, you know, continued building the family business and things just flowed together. Where today you know, he’s a partner in our larger business, he’s bound enterprises, which holds FlexFealer and LiftKit and ARIA. But yeah, he’s actively operating as our CTO today.
Jeremy Weisz 35:35
So talk about some of the hard times in your 20s that you had.
Michael Cirillo 35:41
In my early 20s, I went and did missionary work in the Philippines, which was a tremendous experience. But when I got home from that I became depressed and didn’t know I was depressed because I’ve never been depressed before I just thought I hated started, was just becoming a grumpy person, hated the world hated people hated myself, didn’t know what that was held on to it for a long time, didn’t talk to anybody about it until I realized, at one point that I’m thinking about, I’m looking at the ceiling fan in my bedroom in the morning thinking, Oh, okay, that seems reasonable. Like, let’s go look for some rope kind of a thing. And I don’t want to sensationalize that side of things too much. There’s other people that are way better at doing that than I am. The simplicity of it is yeah, there were lots of days where I felt like today could be the day.
Now, fast forward to today, and certainly not trying to make light of that situation because millions of people are in this situation. But there was this park in West Vancouver overlooking the ocean, where a lot of people go and get their wedding photos like engagement photos, wedding photos taken but like you can legit sit on a cliff unguarded, and look down at the blackness of the Pacific Ocean. And there were many days, I won’t lie, I was going to school. And I would drive over there. And I would just sit on that ledge and I would just cry and cry to myself because I could see in my mind’s eye today being the day. And now, somewhat, humorously, I look back and think, Boy, I must have ruined so many wedding photos. Like before photo bombing was a thing. There’s gotta be people in Vancouver that are looking at their wedding photos today being like, is that somebody crying? And like what is this guy doing? You know? I can say that though, because I’ve overcome, and I’ll talk about it in a minute. Because I believe while that was probably the darkest time of my life, strength has come from it. And I’ll share about that in a minute.
But those were, you know, there’s something I’ve learned. It’s called derealisation. Derealisation is this surreal nightmare feeling that this isn’t real. So my eyes and my ears would be saying, I’m on this podcast, I’m looking at my computer, and I’m looking at you and we’re talking. But everything else about me says this is not real. This isn’t happening. This is fake. It’s like an awake dream state. But when you’re that depressed, it’s like a nightmare. I can remember waking up in the middle of the night. And the first thought in my mind would be do I feel that way? Do I feel that way? Do I feel that way? Yea, I do, I do feel that way. Which is probably why a lot of people sleep, why they’re always fatigued because it is a mental battle that is raging constantly. There was a piece of me through that experience, which I’ve learned now is somewhat unique that the doctors had told me, which is I felt like, Wait a minute. Is life really this bad? Or am I missing something? It’s almost crossroads if you will, like no, no, really? Is this for real? Maybe this is just what getting old feels like and everybody that’s old feels like crap all the time? Or is something missing? Well, I’m not ashamed of it. In fact, I advocated. I went got help. I went to talk to somebody. And for the first while talking to a psychiatrist, I felt like it was nothing. I remember going home to my then fiance, who’s now my wife. I’ll be like, what a waste of flippin time. This guy just asked me stupid questions, I was so angry. I’m what I realized now as it was just a space for me to get it all out, he was just letting me dump everything out into an open pit. And then he was going to teach me how to seal that pit.
So I got help, I was medicated, I did all of the things. What really helped me snap out of it, though. The reason I believe it has become a strength for me all these years later, is going back to some of the principles that were taught all those years earlier on cassette tapes, about the power of gratitude, about the power of positive thinking, about whatever the mind of man can conceive and bring itself to believe it can achieve. All these types of things are flowing through my mind as I’m seeking to get healthy and overcome. And so I decided, okay, well, I’m going to just start a gratitude practice. Every morning, I’m going to wake up, before I get out of bed, I’m going to stare at the ceiling. And I’m going to list off as many things as I can think of that I’m grateful for. I did that for the better part of six months. And I felt absolutely no difference. I was almost ready to give up. I was like, this is the stupidest thing ever. Then one morning, it dawned on me, I was laying in bed. And that morning, I realized, wait a minute, it’s one thing to say what I’m grateful for. It’s another thing to express the reason why I’m grateful for that thing, that’s a harder thing to do. That is a much harder thing to do. I realized how superficial gratitude has become, Hey, man, appreciate you. Why, you know, like anybody can say, Hey, Jeremy, I really appreciate you inviting me on the podcast, why? You’ve given me space to share my story. And you’ve reminded me of things from my past that have empowered me over the years. I’m grateful for the opportunity to perhaps help and lift somebody else, maybe only one person, take something from this, but I’m grateful for that opportunity. In other words, express why.
So I remember laying in bed this morning. And I’m like, Hmm, all of the things I had been saying I was grateful for I could no longer come up with a reason why. And then just out of my mouth came, I’m so grateful for this warm bed because I’ve lived somewhere else in the world where they don’t have this luxury. And in that moment, I’m not going to say I started bawling my eyes out. But you know, when you’re laying down and your eyes just welled up with water enough that tears stream. That’s what happened this morning, I felt something different. It was like I just tapped into the matrix and knew kung fu all of a sudden. And I remember that whole day looking around. I’m sure I look like probably just the biggest tool to my wife that day. But I’d look around and I just be like, Oh, I saw the world through a new lens. I remember it was golden hour for the photographers listening may know what that means. But that time of day when the sun is setting and it casts a golden glow over. And I remember looking out my office window, looking at this maple tree. And the leaves are billowing in the breeze. Each leaf is independent of itself. But they’re all golden and glistening. And I remember looking out the window saying, I’m so grateful for that tree because it’s beautiful. And it’s stimulating a feeling in me. And I love it.
And from that day forward, gratitude has been a regular part of my life as a practice because gratitude quite simply shifts the lens with which we see the world. It’s like needing prescription glasses, and finally getting them you know. And all these years later, what I’m grateful for, ‘m grateful for that experience of going through that adversity and overcoming it because it’s heightened my awareness of others who might be experiencing the same thing. It’s heightened my desire to help lift others which is an undertone to my entire business, to my spirituality, to my family. It has elevated my desire to be a helper and a lifter, not a destroyer. There are enough of those out there in the world. People that will make you feel like you can’t do it, that it’s too hard, that it’s not worth it. Oh, you know, I call them the dream stealers. Hey, Mom, I want to start a podcast. Oh, there’s a lot of podcasts out there. How are you going to be different? Good at it, shut up, right? Like there’s a lot of that.
And I want people to know that because I know we’re great. We were born destined for greatness, to do hard things, to go through adversity and overcome. To struggling your business and get creative and figure it out. To struggle at home and figure it out and become strong from it. To struggle in your spirituality, and come out of it strong. We were destined to do great things.
And I’ll never forget, just as a last thought, here, I was watching. I saw a snippet of Neil deGrasse Tyson. And somebody asked him if he thought aliens or other life existed out in the universe. And his answer, I thought was really interesting to tie this point together, which is, he said, well, in his beautiful voice that he has, he said, Well, everything we’ve been able to observe in the universe is carbon based. Everything, our planet is carbon based, the stars, everything we can observe as a carbon based entity. He said, and including us, the same elements that make up the universe flow through us. So he said, so with that premise, it’s not difficult to ascertain that there could very likely be other carbon based life forms out in the universe. Well what I took from that is, okay, well, if the universe is carbon based, and the universe flows through me, and what we’re able to observe about the universe is that it continually expands, never contracts. Then, as part of that universe, we must also expand, never contract; we must do what the universe that flows through us does, and expand and grow. Never contract, we spend way too much of our lives, Jeremy, convincing ourselves that contraction is the right thing to do. Protect, survival. No, we must do as the universe does and expand continually.
Jeremy Weisz 47:08
Michael, I will be the first one to thank you. So much more to cover so little time. I appreciate you and just sharing your journey and your stories and it’s really motivating and inspiring. So I encourage everyone to check out FlexDealer.com Check out their podcast, check out what they’re working on. And we’ll see everyone next time. Michael, thanks so much.
Michael Cirillo 47:33
Thank you.
