Donny Hackett is the founder of VeriDeal.He is launching this with a friend/partner because when he got laid off from AWS, he found his job efforts thwarted by other sales reps who had no problem lying about their accomplishments.So he created a new SaaS platform for sales reps to verify and track their closed deals. We get into Donny's background in sales, the importance of trust and verification in the sales process, and how technology, particularly AI, is changing the landscape of sales. I grilled Donny pretty hard about how he has developed VeriDeal and how it solves the problem he says it does.Whether you need the app or not, you will benefit from listening to how he has balanced a growing family, his day job, and entrepreneurship.He’s excited about the launch as am I, so let’s get this party started.00:00 Introduction to Truth in Deals18:23 Donny Hackett's Sales Journey21:05 The Need for Verideal24:00 Challenges in Hiring and Verification26:49 Building Verideal: The Technical Side29:48 Balancing Day Job and Startup32:33 Preparing for Launch35:28 Future of Verideal and Market ImpactUnlock the secrets of sales success by understanding what makes people do the things they do—access your free training: https://wesschaeffer.com/dailyBecome unstoppable in 12 weeks for free, with the 12 Weeks To Peak™ habit tracker: https://wesschaeffer.com/12wConnect with me:X -- https://X.com/saleswhispererInstagram -- https://instagram.com/saleswhispererLinkedIn -- http://www.linkedin.com/in/thesaleswhisperer/#12WeeksToPeak #SalesTraining #GoalSetting #PersonalDevelopment #GrowthMindset
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Today we have Donnie Hackett. We get into what he has created.
He's launching this right now. It's a SAS program.
I am interested in how it goes. I asked him some hard questions
and you may or may not like the software that he made, but I
want you to pay attention to howhe arrived at the decision to
(00:23):
make this, how he decided how topartner up, how to allocate
responsibilities and how he's going about launching the app.
OK, I hope it's a big success and but there's no guarantee,
right? But he's he's the man in the
arena, right? I'm watching a a Teddy
(00:45):
Roosevelt. It's like a three hour thing on
where am I? I don't even know Amazon prime,
maybe could be Netflix. I think Amazon Prime, but it's
The History Channel and good story.
But you know, we talked about the being the man in the, in the
arena, the critic doesn't matter, right?
Who is jumping in and making things happen?
(01:06):
And so Donnie and his partner, they're young, young families
and man, you know, I've been there, done that.
I've, I've jumped into deals. But for me, it was back in the
day, I didn't have ownership. I, I invested in real estate.
I invested in apartment complexes.
I invested in a in a retail thing, wine and cigar store and
(01:29):
never had true control, right. Once I began investing in
myself, things turned around. Now I've still got investments
with others that I now trust, right, But I've got my fingers
on those. But I remember 2006 I well, it's
the end of O5 and I've told the story, but the class end of O5I
(01:50):
signed up for the course. It started in early O six.
It was a 12 week teleclass back then, no social media, no video
calls, no real private groups for 24/7 chat with other
members. It was APDF and phone calls and
it was $600.00. And Steve Clark took a liking to
(02:12):
me, gave me a one-on-one assistance because things just
weren't clicking. And you know, I see this all the
time. Happens to me in jiu jitsu.
It's always a very simple solution, something that has
literally, you know, stifled me for months.
And the solutions always simple,but it's simple to someone with
(02:33):
experience. You know, the old joke, it's not
really not a joke. It's a true story, right?
You know, a big refinery and then of course is blown out of
proportion for the to make an impact.
But, you know, oil refinery or whatever, it's backed up, you
know, rather it's coming out andthey're losing millions of
dollars an hour and and it couldbe, could back up and destroy
(02:54):
the whole oil refinery, you know, billions of dollars.
And like, who can we call, You know, call, call Joe.
You know, he was the old engineer that built it.
Joe comes out of retirement. He drives up, got a hammer in
his hand. He walks along all the lines.
He listens, says, yeah, right about here.
You know, he's walking around. He says go get my hammer.
Right boy runs, he gets his hammer and whack, he hits the
(03:16):
hammer and boom, everything releases.
It's all fine. He sends him the bill the next
day, you know, for whatever amount, you know, 27,000 and
$11.00, they're like 27,000 and $11.00 for just to, for one hit
with the hammer. I mean, you were here 10
minutes. He said, yeah, it was just one
hit of the hammer and it was just 10 minutes.
(03:38):
So, you know, for my time and swinging the hammer, you know,
that's the $11.00. But knowing where to hit, that's
the $27,000 and you know, the older you get in, the more
things you do. You realize how much truth is in
that guys that I trained with, you know, second and third
degree black belts. My professor, he's a fifth
(04:00):
degree black belt. And these guys have been black
belts longer than I've trained. My professor, I mean, he's good
grief, he's been a black belt, you know, two or three times
longer than I've trained. And so the solution is always
simple. It's a, it's an easy application
and easy adjustment of a grip ofyour foot, of a knee, of an
(04:20):
elbow, your head, right. We take downs, we use our head
and pinning guys and it matters,you know, you do, you pin your
head, you know, pin them down with the right side of your head
or the left side of your head. Well, it depends, you know, or
you're looking at them or you looking away.
Usually you want to look away from them, but sometimes you
want to look at them. So who do you have in your
corner, right, helping you make those decisions, those split
(04:43):
second decisions? And, and I've told this the
story before and I had it on theon the 12 weeks to peak website
for a while, but it's like getting a spotter at the gym.
You know, when I was in high school, my good friend, he, he
ended up playing linebacker TCU and he had a gym in his garage.
His dad had built it. And so we can work out there
(05:06):
literally 24/7. And we did.
And my sister was in town and, you know, I'm, I'm 17 and she's
14 and, and I was a big, strong kid.
And, you know, it's bench pressing.
I said, hey, give me a spot. You know, she looked at the
waist. I can't lift that weight.
And it's like, I don't need you to lift this weight.
What I need you to do is keep aneye on me.
And and when I kind of nod or grunt or yell or whatever, you
(05:30):
know, give me a little bit of help because like with anything,
right when you're working out, you know, you get a few reps in
just to kind of warmed up and you add some weight, do a few
more, add some weight, do do some more.
And you know, maybe lift a failure if you get a good spot
or you can lift a failure a couple of times there, they will
lift more. But for just that one spot, you
know, after, you know, five setsof 10, right, those last two or
(05:54):
three. And with her, I think, you know,
is really just good into that last one.
Like just give me 5 or 10 lbs ofassistance.
Just give me through that sticking point and I can finish.
And knowing that I had a spottergave me the confidence to even
a, do the exercise and B, go up that heavy.
So when you've got a good mentoron speed dial and then I ended
(06:15):
up doing that with Steve. I, I was taking this class.
He, he gave me some extra time, which he did not have to and I
hired him for $10,000 to be a licensee of his content and be
mentored by him. And that was for a year.
And then then I had to start paying monthly $1000 a month
after that. You know who's who's in your
(06:36):
corner, right? Who are you surrounding yourself
with? Who can you bounce ideas off of
at all hours of the day and night?
And that's where I've created 12weeks to peak program.
So I did some switch little switcheroo will change up.
You know, it's been a couple weeks since I've posted a a
(06:56):
podcast and I'm just, I'm deep in the weeds and a lot of stuff
AI, how can the average person use it?
You know, there's so much noise and hype and I just I hate that.
So I'm not going to talk about something to understand it, the
real application of it and starting starting to wrap my
brain around it. I'm going to do microphone, so
(07:19):
trying to keep up in the game, right step things up and moving
the website. So I'm looking at how to
streamline everything, streamline, optimize, expand the
reach in we're it's such a pivotal moment right now in
time. I feel like this is web
whatever, 3 or 4 dot O. I guess web web one was the
(07:40):
beginning and Windows 95 and whatnot.
Maybe that was web 2 point O andthen blogging and whatnot.
Maybe that was 3 point O and I know people say different stuff,
but you know then so high speed smartphones, you know, high
speed cellular that changed the game, social media changed the
(08:01):
game and now you know, AI is changing the game.
So whatever iteration you want to call this web three, web 7,
we're in a big change right now.And So what do I do?
How do I stand apart? How do I bring you value?
Fortunately, it's still human selling to humans.
People talk about you have to have a good prompt, You have to
have a good prompt. It's like, it's like these hacks
(08:25):
online saying you've got to be agood storyteller to to grow your
sales. It's like saying in golf, you
know you've got to be able to hit both a A320 yard draw and a
318 yard high fade if you want to make it in the pros.
OK, it's easier said than done right 'cause cause golf right to
hit it down the middle, hit it close to the pin, have an easy
(08:45):
putt. There you go.
You're now you have, you know everything you need to know
about golf. That's how these people are just
like you need to have good props.
It's true, but what does that mean?
What does it mean in sales? What does it mean as an
engineer? What does it mean in your
processes? And so I guess in a way, I'm
(09:07):
like Apple, right? I always say it.
Apple hadn't invented all that many things.
Look at the iPhone. They didn't invent cellular
phones, smartphones. They they saw something that was
used widely. They saw something that was
implemented poorly and they madeit a lot better.
(09:28):
Oh, I got this turned back on. It got turned off somehow.
I don't know if you heard that or not.
Let me know if you heard that. But I've got my my voice back on
my computer every 15 minutes telling me what time it is.
And I got my watch charging, butI usually have my watch set to a
15 minute timer. I just keep getting repeat just
(09:48):
to remind me to be cognizant, tobe aware, to be efficient with
my time. But I digress.
But maybe I don't because again,tying all that in, right, going
back to what do you do? How do you stand out?
Where do you add value? And you know, I'm not inventing
anything. I'm helping good people be
(10:10):
efficient, be effective, be smart.
Years ago. I'll see if I can find it real
quick. I made a post on on predictive
text on iPhones and Androids do it too.
But I use an iPhone and most people don't use those, right.
So the very first thing when I reboot my computer, because
Apple and Google, you know, are always at odds.
(10:33):
Apple's native predictive text tools don't always work in
Chrome. So I bought an app called Text
Expander. So the very first thing I do is
make sure that is turned on. I kid you not, I have hundreds
of of short codes snippets, you know, they're called in HubSpot,
they're called snippets, but most people don't use those,
(10:56):
right. So now you have AI with these
agents and automations and LLM'sand all this stuff.
People still have 12 O clock blanking on their VC Rs.
People still have VC Rs. So there's an opportunity there
to leverage AI, and I see it kind of in the same light.
(11:20):
I was just texting my son who's in in high tech.
It feels like 2008 when I ran across Infusionsoft.
And people love to poo poo on Infusionsoft, but back in 2008,
nobody was tying together so many tools and automating them
for that price point. That's why they had such a good
(11:43):
run. Now.
They didn't iterate, they didn'tevolve.
They drank their own kool-aid, believe their own press.
The market changed, you know, the financial collapse hit in
O8O9 that kind of hurt them and,and they just never really
recovered. And they got sold last year,
rebranded a few years ago. But regardless, I see, I finally
see the, the light here on how the average person, the small
(12:05):
business owner can leverage AI. So I'll be talking more about
that just to give you a cool ideas.
I'm building some myself. I'll sell them, you know, I sell
some infusions of campaigns. I've sold those for 2012, you
know, prebuilt campaigns, but you can do the same with with
AI. So anyway, that's what I've been
working on, trying to streamlinethings.
(12:27):
I don't like just doing mindlesswork.
My friend years ago, his wife got offended, but I took it as a
compliment. He said I'm going to ask Wes how
to do things. He's lazy.
Oh, you can't say that. He's like, well, no, it's a good
thing, but he's right. It's like I'll work 100 hours to
figure out how to not work 2 hours, you know?
(12:49):
So if it takes that amount of time to figure out a way to get
rid of a stupid two hour task, Iwill double down on that until I
figure it out. And so I think I'm starting to
have that breakthrough with AI and again, it, you know, my, my
super smart son, he's like, oh, I don't see how that'll work.
And you know, it's just changingtoo fast.
I'm like, I always solved very small problems, very small
(13:13):
persistent nagging problems for my clients with Infusionsoft and
Entre port and active campaign and HubSpot.
Because once the nagging stuff is done, A, you're not being
nagged anymore, at least not with the stupid stuff.
And B, it frees up your time, but it also frees up your, your
focus, your energy, your desire,your motivation to then tackle
(13:39):
bigger things with these tools. Because these tools, HubSpot, if
yourself, whatever keep can be super powerful, these AI tools
can be super powerful. But everybody, the geeks, the
bleeding edge people, they try to solve just these humongous
problems that the, the average person either doesn't have or
will never understand, or it'll take too long.
(14:03):
And by the time they understand that the model has changed, new
tools come out, pricing collapses.
So you know, the, these techies,they're, they're right, but
they're early. And that's, it's about as bad.
It may even be worse than being late because they're investing
their time, their energy and their hope.
And, and it doesn't monetize forhim.
So anyway, big, long, big long intro.
(14:26):
But you know, Donnie's a good guy.
He's got his heart in this project.
He is in sales. He is working on a on a thing to
help salespeople, help recruiters help those who are
hiring and and help the good, honest salespeople prove that
they're good and honest and effective because a lot of
(14:48):
salespeople are liars. People lie on their resume and
we talked about that. All right, so, so buckle up for
that. If you're looking for some
mentoring, check out 12 weeks topeak.
You know something about the thechange.
So 12 weeks to peak goes to the VIP page now where there's
nothing for sale. You got a book of time and we'll
talk to see if the program is right for you.
(15:09):
But at the very top, there's a link to the free habit tracker.
OK, so get that if you so desire. 12 weeks, topeak.com.
That's what I'm working on. All right, so thanks for tuning
in. Now get ready for this interview
with Donnie. Donnie Hackett, founder of Avera
Deal Truth in Deals. Welcome to the sales podcast.
(15:30):
How the heck are you? Thank you very much.
I'm very excited, very excited. So are, are you saying people
lie in sales? Why?
Why do I need truth in deals, man?
Aren't they all just open and honest and everybody's just,
everybody loves sales people. They just embrace them.
And fruit baskets at Christmas. I mean, I, I get fruit baskets
at Christmas every year. I mean, that's exactly maybe I'm
(15:51):
unique. All the good fruit, right?
I get the old leftover. I think there's only one
fruitcake in the world and it just gets passed around and re
gifted to everybody. And it's magic.
It's like the 1990s McDonald's fries that never grow mold or
anything. Oh man, truth in deals very deal
(16:12):
is building the first platform for sales reps to publicly track
and verify your closed one deals.
All right, so we were chatting about this and I see a lot of
upside to this. I see a lot of downside of this.
So we're going to let's dive into it.
But like what? What's your background?
Why are you doing this? Or were you in SAS sales?
(16:36):
Sure. Yep.
So started off my career in the Coast Guard and then leaving the
Coast Guard. Coast Guard.
Yep. OK.
It's almost. As good as the Air Force.
But hey, I mean, you know, you got to start somewhere.
You got to start somewhere. I mean, the chair force is good
too, right? Yeah.
Oh, I think there's stuff. Solar flares.
Yeah. We're going to.
Oh yeah. I'm going to have to end this
(16:57):
podcast. So the so after the military, I,
I quickly just, I mean, I knew Iwas built for sales and so I
went into sales right away. I started actually in wine
sales, door to door in Washington DC.
Door to door selling to businesses businesses.
(17:19):
But I was on the street selling to There's a 0.
That would probably work. Somebody say it on people.
Now you just walk out with a case of wine that you probably
sell it door to door. That's actually a really good
point. There's plenty of people working
from them. Better than solar, like good
grill people knock on my door like dude look I got solar white
OK anyway. Exactly.
Yeah. So that's where I started, cut
(17:41):
my teeth in DC doing that and then, you know, quickly
transition within the wine career from wine sales Rep for
DC and then I've managed about 8states for import, export, wine
marketing, P&L and all that fun stuff.
So COVID happened, first son wasborn and then I wanted to kind
(18:07):
of make a change and so I went into tech sales.
So first was Telcom. So I was worked for Telcom for
about two years and then I went to AWS and then I was a part of
their you know 23,000 layoffs and then went back to Telcom and
now back into cloud space sales about 10 years, 10 plus years of
(18:30):
sales experience by now. So what led to this?
Was it in like your transition, like trying to get hired and
rehired? Were people doubting your your
resume, you know, or like, walk me through that.
Sure. So after being laid off from
AWSI quickly took it very, you know, large step backwards and I
(18:55):
realized that I was 1 of 5000 people in sales that was laid
off from AWS. And then you look at how many
open positions there are in the market and there was a couple
100. And then on top of that, within
the past six months of that timeframe, there was another couple
100,000 sales reps laid off. So very quickly I realized if
(19:20):
you want to stand out, you have to be very good and very unique
and very connected. So I did everything that you're
supposed to back then, right? You have a awesome resume,
you've reached out to your network, and on top of that, you
make videos, you send them to the CRO of companies, you do
(19:42):
some creative stuff, you write handwritten notes to hiring
managers. Like, give me a shot, right?
Doing what salespeople should do, right?
Be unique, stand out, try to getnoticed.
So that's when I quickly realized that there might be an
alternative to the hiring process and the search process
(20:06):
as well. So over the past 18 months or
more, I've been thinking about Vera deal and how to bring this
to market. So now I feel confident in our
solution, which is being able toprovide people that are looking
for the next job or the next promotion to be able to showcase
(20:27):
their abilities in a career portfolio public face.
Well, if I'm playing devil's advocate, I'd say, well, I'm
good enough. You got hired without Vera deal.
You know the good ones. The cream's going to rise to the
top. Besides who you know, right?
(20:47):
When you know somebody, they just know you're good.
They don't need to see some verified list deal.
Sure. How do you know how much it
costs to hire the wrong person? A lot a.
Lot of money. Hey, most hiring managers are
(21:08):
not very good. Most, most sales managers don't
have sales management training, right?
They were plucked from, they're probably the top salesperson.
So now they've become manager now, blah, blah, blah.
They get, they get a quick lesson on how to run some
reports in Salesforce as a manager and how to approve
(21:30):
expenses and they're kicked out the door and and then they don't
know how to interview, but they still have to do it.
So yeah, they're terrible, but they don't think they're
terrible. I'm not going to match you.
I'm not going. There.
So, so, so, so. The reason why I bring that up
(21:50):
is because I believe it was RyanWalsh's Rep view CEO, right?
Great company showcasing kind ofwhat people are making in the
market today. But he also showed how much it
cost for not only the sales team, but the company in in
large, how much it cost to hire raw.
(22:13):
You know, I was having a conversation about 2-3 months
ago now with VP of Sales and youknow, he said that he hired
someone and it was based off of his network and the network said
two thumbs up all across the board.
So he offered and this was a big, big hire because it cost a
(22:37):
lot of money. And about 3 months into the job,
he said he had to let this person go.
And the reason was it didn't match up.
The recommendations from his ownnetwork, from his personal
friends did not match up to the performance that this person was
doing. And it was attuned to close to
(23:00):
$1,000,000 that this person, youknow, roughly cost this company.
So when you're talking about, you know, yes, there's LinkedIn,
there's your resume, but then can you actually show and prove
what your resume says? Can you prove and give your
network confidence when they go out and vouch for you?
(23:23):
Verdi will be able to help with that because you can just point
and look. This is what happened.
You know, this is what I've done.
Just like in the military, it's always about not what you did
yesterday, it's what what can you do tomorrow.
And this is what I've done in mypast.
So his network, were those, werethey not clients?
(23:44):
Were they just friends, like howyou had to be producing for
somebody, right? Yep.
So, though from the story that Ido understand, it is, you know,
former colleagues and friends. But not customers.
Not customers. And so these are, you know who
(24:06):
you would want to tell the truthabout, right?
And unfortunately, they were telling a version of the truth
to help a person. So couldn't I just get my
clients to verify me, you know, give me a recommendation on
LinkedIn, you know, and say, hey, Wes has been our account
(24:29):
Rep for three years and he's thebest account Rep, you know, at
ABC Company and we love working with Wes.
You know why do I need a a thirdparty, another third party tool
to do this? Sure, you can do that, but no
one does, no one wants to. That's why very deal.
(24:53):
And on top of that, the the way that we're building it is going
to build it in a way that is sales focused and not I guess
corporate focus. So what I mean by that is
allowing yourself to verify it, right?
And then you're going to also beable to see real time how you
(25:17):
stack rank against other people within this platform within your
industry, whether it's S&B, mid market or enterprise as well.
Will that, let's say, you know, there's Joe Smith, right?
And he's at AWS. Would that give me competitive
information like could I reverseengineer and see where Joe Smith
(25:40):
is selling into and go target his accounts?
Sure. So now there's going to be 0
public facing competitive knowledge.
So when you log a deal, you havethe option to either publicly
show or not you know how much revenue it was in that deal.
(26:03):
But then on top of that, when you go get it verified by the
customer, that data will never be shown to the public.
And so there's going to be levels of security that way
competitors can't poach and figure out, OK, you just sold
this deal to this company, let me go undercut you.
That's not going to happen. I don't know.
(26:25):
What if I'm selling to the government, you know, and these
are all top secret Ndas? You know, if I'm selling, I'm
here in Southern California and I sell to the Border Patrol, you
know, like my brother-in-law does construction.
He's, he's done work for the Border Patrol and, you know,
he's done stuff like, you know, put new cabinets and stuff and,
(26:47):
you know, in the, in the processing center or whatever.
So it's not like top secret stuff, but still it may not be
released. So what do you do in those
cases? We are not going to do
government sales. So sorry for everyone doing
government sales. We do not want to cross that
line so. All right.
(27:07):
Yeah, we don't want to be fed rapper any of that stuff.
Yeah, well, and, and like you, Iwas in tech and I was in the
test and measurement space for telecom, for data centers.
And Google was a big client and dude, they were so secretive.
It's like we, I work for an international company and they
(27:29):
would buy units and we could have shipped them straight to
their data centers, but they hadeverything shipped to them in
Mountain View and then they would ship because they didn't
even want their data center addresses known.
And I, I got to know these people really well.
And are they going to verify anything?
(27:56):
So it like, does the name have to be on?
It would have to be, you know, Joe Smith, you know, director of
data center operations, Google. Yeah.
So for your specific use case, it would be up to that client,
right? If I say Google wants to be a
part of it, 100% would love to that.
(28:17):
But we also understand that theyneed secrecy and they need
verified production. So luckily, my business partner
CTO, he's spent the past 2025 years in building top secret
programs within the United States Army and then, you know,
agencies across different companies as well.
(28:37):
So he understands the need for security and how to build that.
So we are covering as much as wecan over there, but we also
understand and realize that whenwe get to a certain level of
deal, secrecy is really crucial.So you know, maybe this might
(28:59):
not be for those level of sales reps right now in the future
maybe, but right now, you know, maybe those are not the targeted
sales reps that we're looking for.
Right. Yeah.
So how did you go about doing this?
(29:19):
Was this your idea? And you found the CTO, you know,
you bootstrapping this, you know, like who was your first
hire? Yeah, so this is 100% Bootstrap,
which is another fun topic and alot of fun stuff to do.
And so, yeah, so you know, a really good friend of ours was
(29:40):
over one day I was telling her about the idea and she mentioned
we'll have her really good friends.
So we connected and we hit it off real fast.
So his name is Jason. He and I have been working
together for the past 2 1/2 months.
He's been on the dev side and sohe's been fantastic.
(30:00):
So I mean, did he partner with you or did you have to?
OK, so so he agreed and like howdo you draw up a budget?
You know, how do you like did y'all do the work?
Did you find somebody you know, on on up work?
You know VA to start coding? You know how?
Like, what's the first step? The first step is sweat equity.
(30:22):
We both looked at, we both knew that we could handle work given
our history, right? And so he's taken upon himself
to build the application on the web and everything like that and
handle it from the security standpoint.
Because that's the number one, you know, metric that I've said
was one, his security and two, keep as simple as possible
(30:44):
because that is so crucial to meand himself.
So, but that's pretty much it. And then for my side, you know,
doing all the marketing, sales, business development, you name
it, I'm doing it. So it's been a crash course in a
(31:06):
lot of different areas, which has been fun.
Do you remember card scan? Did you ever run across that?
Maybe, maybe job one. No, you're, you're younger.
You, you probably have never hadto use one of these, huh?
You ever, ever have to dial A phone?
I do know what those are. Old school man.
(31:26):
I do. I do.
So card scan, card scan was coolman.
Back in the day, like literally 20 years ago, it was a, it was a
physical device and you plugged into your computer.
And so when you go to like a trade show, you're networking,
you know, you get 10/20/50 business cards.
You could scan it, it would scanthe card and then OCS, right,
(31:50):
optical character or OCR, optical character recognition
and then create the database. You could import it into your
address book or whatever. But then it would send an e-mail
out and I still have in some of my contact record.
I'll run across it every now andthen because it'll show.
(32:11):
It'll just add in the notes section every time you updated
it, you know, change jobs, change addresses or whatever.
So it would like, I think like annually it would send an e-mail
out, hey, I'm just updating my records and, and people were
surprisingly now again, it was 20 years ago before like things
(32:33):
got so crap, especially now withAI and cold e-mail and stuff,
it's just probably a little bit harder.
But yeah, when you truly didn't meet somebody because, I mean,
we, we exchanged business cards that, you know, as you, as you
did back then. And so people were a little more
receptive to that. But is that kind of what you're
banking on though? It's like we did have a
relationship. This was a, a complex sale, you
(32:56):
know, maybe we worked on it for weeks, even months.
And, and is it super simple for the client?
Is it just, yes, I worked with Wes, yes, we did this big deal,
yes, you know, it closed in Q2, you know, 2025.
Is it just like that simple? As simple as possible.
(33:17):
That's my entire motto. So the way that the IT will flow
is a sales Rep closes the deal, congratulations and you have a
good relationship with that customer, hopefully, right.
And so you log into Vera deal, you type in two or it's going to
be 3 to 5, you know, questions and then you type in the
(33:43):
customer's profile, you know, e-mail and company, which will
not be disclosed to the public. It will then be sent in a, you
know, CC e-mail with the sales Rep and the customer.
So there's a three-way and the customer just has two to three
(34:06):
questions to answer and it's right in the extremely simple.
That's the. That's the key.
Yeah. So how long have you been
working on this? The idea about 18 months we've
been you know, my daughter was born Valentine's this year. 2
weeks later I told my wife I'm going 100% in and she said let's
(34:28):
do it so we can. Yep.
So you quit your day job? No.
No, no. So still working the day job?
Yeah. No, still working the day job.
Nights, weekends. Yeah.
You know, I'm awake anyways, so I suppose to hold the baby and
you know, you know, rock the baby while I'm working, right?
(34:49):
Saw this beam, it was, you know,the the young couple, you know,
and the wife's all exhausted. She says I'm so exhausted, you
know, I was up with the baby till 4:00 AM and he's like, you
really shouldn't be taking out the baby.
You know, being out that late. It's very irresponsible.
It's like, but anyway, I get it.I got 7 of them and I got 4
(35:11):
grandkids. It's crazy but grandkids are
easier. It's so so do you have any like
beta clients, you know, proof ofconcept?
This is launching next month. That's great.
So how are you? How are you verifying Vera deal?
(35:32):
Yeah. So we've been working with, you
know, I'd say a handful of people working the kinks out,
understanding, you know, what works, what doesn't, right from
the technical side because it's still dealing with sensitive
information. We are waiting for closer to
(35:54):
launch to start doing the more sensitive, you know,
verification. But I'm from the service level,
talking with customers, talking with sales reps and recruiters,
managers, VPS. So it's been it's been well
received thus far. Well, I could see recruiters,
you know, almost requiring this or bumping, bumping a candidate
(36:18):
up higher on the food chain if they've got something like this,
you know, on their resume. Because there's a lot of
creative writing in resume, especially with AI.
Actually with AI, yeah. People are full of crap man.
I mean, it doesn't take you thatlong to take the job
(36:41):
description, copy paste it into ChatGPT, take your resume, paste
that in and then give me a resume that looks exactly.
It's all the keywords. Right.
Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah.
So why? Why August 18th?
Why'd you pick that day? How do you know you'll be ready?
Well my my partner Jason gave meAugust 15th so launching on a
(37:03):
Friday is not never that good. So I figured launch on a Monday.
All right. Pretty simple.
So what has to be done? So you have basically 5 weeks,
maybe six weeks. Six weeks, yeah.
What's happening in these in these last few weeks?
Sure. So from my side, you know, I'll
reach getting the word out, getting people understanding
(37:24):
what and how this is useful. From the technical side, we are
pretty much halfway, you know, to the finish line of the final
polished side of it, if that makes sense.
So Jason's been working extremely hard because he also
has a day job and three kids as well.
(37:45):
So, but you know, if you want something done, you got to do
it. So that's the, that's the one
lesson I've learned from this isif you just take action, things
happen, which is really fun to see.
So a lot of people listening to this are in your shoes, right?
(38:06):
They're salespeople. They're entrepreneur.
They're salespeople with an entrepreneur idea.
You know, how how do you balanceboth?
You know, how do you do that dayjob?
I mean, we're doing this recording.
You know, it's 11 for me. I mean, we started, you know,
1045 Pacific. Where are you?
East Coast. East Coast, so 2:30, yeah.
(38:27):
So how? How do you carve an hour out of
your day to promote your side hustle?
Sure, so I took PTO today so. Oh, OK, yeah, we can't do that
for every interview, no. Definitely not so interviewing.
I've been actually scheduling them for eight o'clock 9:00 at
(38:49):
night so the two older kids are asleep and the baby's halfway
asleep. So I help with bedtime, but to
any reps out there that are thinking about this, it's not
easy. I mean, you're working your day
job, you're hitting your quota, you're hitting your numbers, and
(39:09):
then you take one step that thatnight you do one thing and then
you do another thing the next night.
It's all about consistency. And I, and it's funny that you
bring this up because, you know,I would say for the past two
years, ever since I really had this idea, I've always been
hearing especially like Tim Ferriss or anyone in those
(39:29):
realms, right? Talk about you just have to take
action. And I know Jocko's on a podcast
tour right now and just talking about just take action, whatever
it is, just go. I will 100% say this without
doubt, as long as you take one step every single day, things
(39:49):
will just fall into place. You'll have a conversation with
someone that you've never thought that would help and then
it did. So my advice is do something
tonight and then tomorrow night do something.
Even though it's July 4th, maybedon't go out drinking and do
something or do in the morning and then do it, you know, July
(40:11):
5th at night so that way your brain isn't too foggy.
But do something every single day.
Don't stop. Yeah, yeah, people want to live
a life you know, that that nobody else has, but it means
you got to start living your life in a way nobody does, you
know, at least the average people because you're right,
(40:33):
it's you know, so I got 7 kids and.
And seeing my wife, she's been staying home on for 30 years
and, you know, owning a businessis the closest thing men will
ever know to childbirth, you know, and rearing a child, not
necessarily childbirth, but I mean it, it is hard, it's
(40:54):
stressful. I've lost sleep, you know, I've
I just, you know, stay up till 2:00 AM, you know, wake up at 2,
AMI can't go back to sleep. You start grinding, you know,
you're worried about stuff and, you know, so same thing she's
nursing children. They're, you know, up with
she's, she's tended to them right when they've got a fever
and a throw up bug and I've got to work the next day and, and
(41:16):
she's up at 2:00 AM. So that, that ongoing worry and
concern, you know, not everybody's cut out for it, but
it can, it can be rough. So, and I've always told people
build up some those rainy day funds, right?
(41:39):
Live, live below your means. So you have the option and the
ability to jump on an opportunity and, and try it.
Have y'all hit your like timeline milestones like when
y'all both said, OK, let's do this.
Did you kind of map it out, say,OK, this is going to take 18
months or that was it like, oh, let's just see where it goes
(42:02):
and, and try to get just get it done as quick as possible?
Yeah. So it's never been about as
quick as possible and we're not going to wait.
Personally, you know, from a sales side, I always want things
done as soon as possible, but from the technical side and the
security side, building something proper, it needs to
(42:25):
take time. And so I asked Jason, Jason give
me a hard date. And so I said that's the day
that was taking the August 15th.So I'm, I gave him three extra
days because of the weekend, butthat's it.
And so the comforting thing thatI do have is, you know, he was
former military, I'm former military.
(42:45):
So when we have a date set our mind, we're going to get things
done. We're going to not sleep, and
we're just going to make sure things are done properly as
well. And we're not going to cut
corners. That's the biggest thing, yeah.
So is he local to you? About 45 minutes away, so not
yeah. All right, so if y'all have to
(43:06):
meet you can. Hop down there.
See. Yeah.
Interesting. And so do you have other
developers or, or is he just doing the whole thing?
Just doing the whole thing. Wow, yes.
Very impressive person. Interesting.
Yeah. All right, how is he stress
testing this? I wish I could go further into
(43:29):
detail. I have full faith in what he's
able to do all right, given his background, given his technical
abilities. Because, you know, like I said,
I came from the test and measurement space and you know,
it, it was, it was interesting because when you, when you think
about it, you know, when Google,you know, back in the day wants
(43:51):
to turn up, you know, we were going from Gigabit Ethernet to
10 gig to, to 400 gig and and above.
I think we, it's a long time now.
I think I sold the 1st 100 Gigabit Ethernet testing
platform, you know, 'cause when you, when you turn up systems,
(44:12):
you're like, can it handle it? Can these switches handle it?
And so same thing with yours, right?
You turn that thing on. OK, we got an order.
Does it work right? You know, do they go to our CRM?
Does it trigger set the right permissions?
You know, is the, are the tutorials correct?
And there's a lot that goes intoit.
(44:33):
Sure. And so we we're building 100%
native on AWS, We both have understanding there.
So we're doing serverless, and so that should be very helpful.
When it does turn on, right? It can turn up and turn down as
fast as possible. All the other tools, you know,
he's building as well. So it does build and scale.
(44:57):
Auto scaling is #1 criteria, right?
Yeah, yeah, very. Cool.
All right, August 18th, we'll bewatching.
So it's Vera deal. So it's VERI right DEAL Vera
deal dot IO dot IO that is correct.
(45:17):
Yes, and YY dot IO. Dot com was taken.
Jerks. I know.
Jerks I know. Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah, now the the websites. Up, give a little bit of
description and then a little sign up page as well to be
notified beforehand in the know.Yep, Yep.
(45:37):
Exactly get home about. How it works coming?
Soon. All right, I like it.
All the fun stuff. Log a deal.
Verify deal. Verified and more.
Sounds good. All right.
Did I miss anything? No.
I. You know, I think, I think once
people log in and see what we'redoing, I think they're going to
be have a little bit of fun as well because we're going to have
(46:00):
a little competition, yearly competition as most people are
familiar with in sales. And so that's going to be fun.
We're going to break that down into different markets.
So that should be exciting when people start seeing that.
And then, you know, from the business standpoint, you know,
it's not only helping reps tracktheir career progression, it's
(46:25):
helping recruiters understand who they're poaching and hiring.
And then it's going to help the hiring managers and the
companies itself to understand, like if I hire this person, if I
hire this team, they're going tobe a players, all all six of
them, all five of them. So we're excited.
I like it. Well, good luck.
(46:46):
Thank you very much. Thank you.
We're from the. East Coast.
Man, founder of Verdeal. Here's come the show.
It's great catching up with you.Thank you very much.
Go kiss those babies. Oh, and go sell something.
Today we have Donnie Hackett. We get into what he has created.
He's launching this right now. It's a SAS program.
I am interested in how it goes. I asked him some hard questions
and you may or may not like the software that he made, but I
want you to pay attention to howhe arrived at the decision to
(00:23):
make this, how he decided how topartner up, how to allocate
responsibilities and how he's going about launching the app.
OK, I hope it's a big success and but there's no guarantee,
right? But he's he's the man in the
arena, right? I'm watching a a Teddy
(00:45):
Roosevelt. It's like a three hour thing on
where am I? I don't even know Amazon prime,
maybe could be Netflix. I think Amazon Prime, but it's
The History Channel and good story.
But you know, we talked about the being the man in the, in the
arena, the critic doesn't matter, right?
Who is jumping in and making things happen?
(01:06):
And so Donnie and his partner, they're young, young families
and man, you know, I've been there, done that.
I've, I've jumped into deals. But for me, it was back in the
day, I didn't have ownership. I, I invested in real estate.
I invested in apartment complexes.
I invested in a in a retail thing, wine and cigar store and
(01:29):
never had true control, right. Once I began investing in
myself, things turned around. Now I've still got investments
with others that I now trust, right, But I've got my fingers
on those. But I remember 2006 I well, it's
the end of O5 and I've told the story, but the class end of O5I
(01:50):
signed up for the course. It started in early O six.
It was a 12 week teleclass back then, no social media, no video
calls, no real private groups for 24/7 chat with other
members. It was APDF and phone calls and
it was $600.00. And Steve Clark took a liking to
(02:12):
me, gave me a one-on-one assistance because things just
weren't clicking. And you know, I see this all the
time. Happens to me in jiu jitsu.
It's always a very simple solution, something that has
literally, you know, stifled me for months.
And the solutions always simple,but it's simple to someone with
(02:33):
experience. You know, the old joke, it's not
really not a joke. It's a true story, right?
You know, a big refinery and then of course is blown out of
proportion for the to make an impact.
But, you know, oil refinery or whatever, it's backed up, you
know, rather it's coming out andthey're losing millions of
dollars an hour and and it couldbe, could back up and destroy
(02:54):
the whole oil refinery, you know, billions of dollars.
And like, who can we call, You know, call, call Joe.
You know, he was the old engineer that built it.
Joe comes out of retirement. He drives up, got a hammer in
his hand. He walks along all the lines.
He listens, says, yeah, right about here.
You know, he's walking around. He says go get my hammer.
Right boy runs, he gets his hammer and whack, he hits the
(03:16):
hammer and boom, everything releases.
It's all fine. He sends him the bill the next
day, you know, for whatever amount, you know, 27,000 and
$11.00, they're like 27,000 and $11.00 for just to, for one hit
with the hammer. I mean, you were here 10
minutes. He said, yeah, it was just one
hit of the hammer and it was just 10 minutes.
(03:38):
So, you know, for my time and swinging the hammer, you know,
that's the $11.00. But knowing where to hit, that's
the $27,000 and you know, the older you get in, the more
things you do. You realize how much truth is in
that guys that I trained with, you know, second and third
degree black belts. My professor, he's a fifth
(04:00):
degree black belt. And these guys have been black
belts longer than I've trained. My professor, I mean, he's good
grief, he's been a black belt, you know, two or three times
longer than I've trained. And so the solution is always
simple. It's a, it's an easy application
and easy adjustment of a grip ofyour foot, of a knee, of an
(04:20):
elbow, your head, right. We take downs, we use our head
and pinning guys and it matters,you know, you do, you pin your
head, you know, pin them down with the right side of your head
or the left side of your head. Well, it depends, you know, or
you're looking at them or you looking away.
Usually you want to look away from them, but sometimes you
want to look at them. So who do you have in your
corner, right, helping you make those decisions, those split
(04:43):
second decisions? And, and I've told this the
story before and I had it on theon the 12 weeks to peak website
for a while, but it's like getting a spotter at the gym.
You know, when I was in high school, my good friend, he, he
ended up playing linebacker TCU and he had a gym in his garage.
His dad had built it. And so we can work out there
(05:06):
literally 24/7. And we did.
And my sister was in town and, you know, I'm, I'm 17 and she's
14 and, and I was a big, strong kid.
And, you know, it's bench pressing.
I said, hey, give me a spot. You know, she looked at the
waist. I can't lift that weight.
And it's like, I don't need you to lift this weight.
What I need you to do is keep aneye on me.
And and when I kind of nod or grunt or yell or whatever, you
(05:30):
know, give me a little bit of help because like with anything,
right when you're working out, you know, you get a few reps in
just to kind of warmed up and you add some weight, do a few
more, add some weight, do do some more.
And you know, maybe lift a failure if you get a good spot
or you can lift a failure a couple of times there, they will
lift more. But for just that one spot, you
know, after, you know, five setsof 10, right, those last two or
(05:54):
three. And with her, I think, you know,
is really just good into that last one.
Like just give me 5 or 10 lbs ofassistance.
Just give me through that sticking point and I can finish.
And knowing that I had a spottergave me the confidence to even
a, do the exercise and B, go up that heavy.
So when you've got a good mentoron speed dial and then I ended
(06:15):
up doing that with Steve. I, I was taking this class.
He, he gave me some extra time, which he did not have to and I
hired him for $10,000 to be a licensee of his content and be
mentored by him. And that was for a year.
And then then I had to start paying monthly $1000 a month
after that. You know who's who's in your
(06:36):
corner, right? Who are you surrounding yourself
with? Who can you bounce ideas off of
at all hours of the day and night?
And that's where I've created 12weeks to peak program.
So I did some switch little switcheroo will change up.
You know, it's been a couple weeks since I've posted a a
(06:56):
podcast and I'm just, I'm deep in the weeds and a lot of stuff
AI, how can the average person use it?
You know, there's so much noise and hype and I just I hate that.
So I'm not going to talk about something to understand it, the
real application of it and starting starting to wrap my
brain around it. I'm going to do microphone, so
(07:19):
trying to keep up in the game, right step things up and moving
the website. So I'm looking at how to
streamline everything, streamline, optimize, expand the
reach in we're it's such a pivotal moment right now in
time. I feel like this is web
whatever, 3 or 4 dot O. I guess web web one was the
(07:40):
beginning and Windows 95 and whatnot.
Maybe that was web 2 point O andthen blogging and whatnot.
Maybe that was 3 point O and I know people say different stuff,
but you know then so high speed smartphones, you know, high
speed cellular that changed the game, social media changed the
(08:01):
game and now you know, AI is changing the game.
So whatever iteration you want to call this web three, web 7,
we're in a big change right now.And So what do I do?
How do I stand apart? How do I bring you value?
Fortunately, it's still human selling to humans.
People talk about you have to have a good prompt, You have to
have a good prompt. It's like, it's like these hacks
(08:25):
online saying you've got to be agood storyteller to to grow your
sales. It's like saying in golf, you
know you've got to be able to hit both a A320 yard draw and a
318 yard high fade if you want to make it in the pros.
OK, it's easier said than done right 'cause cause golf right to
hit it down the middle, hit it close to the pin, have an easy
(08:45):
putt. There you go.
You're now you have, you know everything you need to know
about golf. That's how these people are just
like you need to have good props.
It's true, but what does that mean?
What does it mean in sales? What does it mean as an
engineer? What does it mean in your
processes? And so I guess in a way, I'm
(09:07):
like Apple, right? I always say it.
Apple hadn't invented all that many things.
Look at the iPhone. They didn't invent cellular
phones, smartphones. They they saw something that was
used widely. They saw something that was
implemented poorly and they madeit a lot better.
(09:28):
Oh, I got this turned back on. It got turned off somehow.
I don't know if you heard that or not.
Let me know if you heard that. But I've got my my voice back on
my computer every 15 minutes telling me what time it is.
And I got my watch charging, butI usually have my watch set to a
15 minute timer. I just keep getting repeat just
(09:48):
to remind me to be cognizant, tobe aware, to be efficient with
my time. But I digress.
But maybe I don't because again,tying all that in, right, going
back to what do you do? How do you stand out?
Where do you add value? And you know, I'm not inventing
anything. I'm helping good people be
(10:10):
efficient, be effective, be smart.
Years ago. I'll see if I can find it real
quick. I made a post on on predictive
text on iPhones and Androids do it too.
But I use an iPhone and most people don't use those, right.
So the very first thing when I reboot my computer, because
Apple and Google, you know, are always at odds.
(10:33):
Apple's native predictive text tools don't always work in
Chrome. So I bought an app called Text
Expander. So the very first thing I do is
make sure that is turned on. I kid you not, I have hundreds
of of short codes snippets, you know, they're called in HubSpot,
they're called snippets, but most people don't use those,
(10:56):
right. So now you have AI with these
agents and automations and LLM'sand all this stuff.
People still have 12 O clock blanking on their VC Rs.
People still have VC Rs. So there's an opportunity there
to leverage AI, and I see it kind of in the same light.
(11:20):
I was just texting my son who's in in high tech.
It feels like 2008 when I ran across Infusionsoft.
And people love to poo poo on Infusionsoft, but back in 2008,
nobody was tying together so many tools and automating them
for that price point. That's why they had such a good
(11:43):
run. Now.
They didn't iterate, they didn'tevolve.
They drank their own kool-aid, believe their own press.
The market changed, you know, the financial collapse hit in
O8O9 that kind of hurt them and,and they just never really
recovered. And they got sold last year,
rebranded a few years ago. But regardless, I see, I finally
see the, the light here on how the average person, the small
(12:05):
business owner can leverage AI. So I'll be talking more about
that just to give you a cool ideas.
I'm building some myself. I'll sell them, you know, I sell
some infusions of campaigns. I've sold those for 2012, you
know, prebuilt campaigns, but you can do the same with with
AI. So anyway, that's what I've been
working on, trying to streamlinethings.
(12:27):
I don't like just doing mindlesswork.
My friend years ago, his wife got offended, but I took it as a
compliment. He said I'm going to ask Wes how
to do things. He's lazy.
Oh, you can't say that. He's like, well, no, it's a good
thing, but he's right. It's like I'll work 100 hours to
figure out how to not work 2 hours, you know?
(12:49):
So if it takes that amount of time to figure out a way to get
rid of a stupid two hour task, Iwill double down on that until I
figure it out. And so I think I'm starting to
have that breakthrough with AI and again, it, you know, my, my
super smart son, he's like, oh, I don't see how that'll work.
And you know, it's just changingtoo fast.
I'm like, I always solved very small problems, very small
(13:13):
persistent nagging problems for my clients with Infusionsoft and
Entre port and active campaign and HubSpot.
Because once the nagging stuff is done, A, you're not being
nagged anymore, at least not with the stupid stuff.
And B, it frees up your time, but it also frees up your, your
focus, your energy, your desire,your motivation to then tackle
(13:39):
bigger things with these tools. Because these tools, HubSpot, if
yourself, whatever keep can be super powerful, these AI tools
can be super powerful. But everybody, the geeks, the
bleeding edge people, they try to solve just these humongous
problems that the, the average person either doesn't have or
will never understand, or it'll take too long.
(14:03):
And by the time they understand that the model has changed, new
tools come out, pricing collapses.
So you know, the, these techies,they're, they're right, but
they're early. And that's, it's about as bad.
It may even be worse than being late because they're investing
their time, their energy and their hope.
And, and it doesn't monetize forhim.
So anyway, big, long, big long intro.
(14:26):
But you know, Donnie's a good guy.
He's got his heart in this project.
He is in sales. He is working on a on a thing to
help salespeople, help recruiters help those who are
hiring and and help the good, honest salespeople prove that
they're good and honest and effective because a lot of
(14:48):
salespeople are liars. People lie on their resume and
we talked about that. All right, so, so buckle up for
that. If you're looking for some
mentoring, check out 12 weeks topeak.
You know something about the thechange.
So 12 weeks to peak goes to the VIP page now where there's
nothing for sale. You got a book of time and we'll
talk to see if the program is right for you.
(15:09):
But at the very top, there's a link to the free habit tracker.
OK, so get that if you so desire. 12 weeks, topeak.com.
That's what I'm working on. All right, so thanks for tuning
in. Now get ready for this interview
with Donnie. Donnie Hackett, founder of Avera
Deal Truth in Deals. Welcome to the sales podcast.
(15:30):
How the heck are you? Thank you very much.
I'm very excited, very excited. So are, are you saying people
lie in sales? Why?
Why do I need truth in deals, man?
Aren't they all just open and honest and everybody's just,
everybody loves sales people. They just embrace them.
And fruit baskets at Christmas. I mean, I, I get fruit baskets
at Christmas every year. I mean, that's exactly maybe I'm
(15:51):
unique. All the good fruit, right?
I get the old leftover. I think there's only one
fruitcake in the world and it just gets passed around and re
gifted to everybody. And it's magic.
It's like the 1990s McDonald's fries that never grow mold or
anything. Oh man, truth in deals very deal
(16:12):
is building the first platform for sales reps to publicly track
and verify your closed one deals.
All right, so we were chatting about this and I see a lot of
upside to this. I see a lot of downside of this.
So we're going to let's dive into it.
But like what? What's your background?
Why are you doing this? Or were you in SAS sales?
(16:36):
Sure. Yep.
So started off my career in the Coast Guard and then leaving the
Coast Guard. Coast Guard.
Yep. OK.
It's almost. As good as the Air Force.
But hey, I mean, you know, you got to start somewhere.
You got to start somewhere. I mean, the chair force is good
too, right? Yeah.
Oh, I think there's stuff. Solar flares.
Yeah. We're going to.
Oh yeah. I'm going to have to end this
(16:57):
podcast. So the so after the military, I,
I quickly just, I mean, I knew Iwas built for sales and so I
went into sales right away. I started actually in wine
sales, door to door in Washington DC.
Door to door selling to businesses businesses.
(17:19):
But I was on the street selling to There's a 0.
That would probably work. Somebody say it on people.
Now you just walk out with a case of wine that you probably
sell it door to door. That's actually a really good
point. There's plenty of people working
from them. Better than solar, like good
grill people knock on my door like dude look I got solar white
OK anyway. Exactly.
Yeah. So that's where I started, cut
(17:41):
my teeth in DC doing that and then, you know, quickly
transition within the wine career from wine sales Rep for
DC and then I've managed about 8states for import, export, wine
marketing, P&L and all that fun stuff.
So COVID happened, first son wasborn and then I wanted to kind
(18:07):
of make a change and so I went into tech sales.
So first was Telcom. So I was worked for Telcom for
about two years and then I went to AWS and then I was a part of
their you know 23,000 layoffs and then went back to Telcom and
now back into cloud space sales about 10 years, 10 plus years of
(18:30):
sales experience by now. So what led to this?
Was it in like your transition, like trying to get hired and
rehired? Were people doubting your your
resume, you know, or like, walk me through that.
Sure. So after being laid off from
AWSI quickly took it very, you know, large step backwards and I
(18:55):
realized that I was 1 of 5000 people in sales that was laid
off from AWS. And then you look at how many
open positions there are in the market and there was a couple
100. And then on top of that, within
the past six months of that timeframe, there was another couple
100,000 sales reps laid off. So very quickly I realized if
(19:20):
you want to stand out, you have to be very good and very unique
and very connected. So I did everything that you're
supposed to back then, right? You have a awesome resume,
you've reached out to your network, and on top of that, you
make videos, you send them to the CRO of companies, you do
(19:42):
some creative stuff, you write handwritten notes to hiring
managers. Like, give me a shot, right?
Doing what salespeople should do, right?
Be unique, stand out, try to getnoticed.
So that's when I quickly realized that there might be an
alternative to the hiring process and the search process
(20:06):
as well. So over the past 18 months or
more, I've been thinking about Vera deal and how to bring this
to market. So now I feel confident in our
solution, which is being able toprovide people that are looking
for the next job or the next promotion to be able to showcase
(20:27):
their abilities in a career portfolio public face.
Well, if I'm playing devil's advocate, I'd say, well, I'm
good enough. You got hired without Vera deal.
You know the good ones. The cream's going to rise to the
top. Besides who you know, right?
(20:47):
When you know somebody, they just know you're good.
They don't need to see some verified list deal.
Sure. How do you know how much it
costs to hire the wrong person? A lot a.
Lot of money. Hey, most hiring managers are
(21:08):
not very good. Most, most sales managers don't
have sales management training, right?
They were plucked from, they're probably the top salesperson.
So now they've become manager now, blah, blah, blah.
They get, they get a quick lesson on how to run some
reports in Salesforce as a manager and how to approve
(21:30):
expenses and they're kicked out the door and and then they don't
know how to interview, but they still have to do it.
So yeah, they're terrible, but they don't think they're
terrible. I'm not going to match you.
I'm not going. There.
So, so, so, so. The reason why I bring that up
(21:50):
is because I believe it was RyanWalsh's Rep view CEO, right?
Great company showcasing kind ofwhat people are making in the
market today. But he also showed how much it
cost for not only the sales team, but the company in in
large, how much it cost to hire raw.
(22:13):
You know, I was having a conversation about 2-3 months
ago now with VP of Sales and youknow, he said that he hired
someone and it was based off of his network and the network said
two thumbs up all across the board.
So he offered and this was a big, big hire because it cost a
(22:37):
lot of money. And about 3 months into the job,
he said he had to let this person go.
And the reason was it didn't match up.
The recommendations from his ownnetwork, from his personal
friends did not match up to the performance that this person was
doing. And it was attuned to close to
(23:00):
$1,000,000 that this person, youknow, roughly cost this company.
So when you're talking about, you know, yes, there's LinkedIn,
there's your resume, but then can you actually show and prove
what your resume says? Can you prove and give your
network confidence when they go out and vouch for you?
(23:23):
Verdi will be able to help with that because you can just point
and look. This is what happened.
You know, this is what I've done.
Just like in the military, it's always about not what you did
yesterday, it's what what can you do tomorrow.
And this is what I've done in mypast.
So his network, were those, werethey not clients?
(23:44):
Were they just friends, like howyou had to be producing for
somebody, right? Yep.
So, though from the story that Ido understand, it is, you know,
former colleagues and friends. But not customers.
Not customers. And so these are, you know who
(24:06):
you would want to tell the truthabout, right?
And unfortunately, they were telling a version of the truth
to help a person. So couldn't I just get my
clients to verify me, you know, give me a recommendation on
LinkedIn, you know, and say, hey, Wes has been our account
(24:29):
Rep for three years and he's thebest account Rep, you know, at
ABC Company and we love working with Wes.
You know why do I need a a thirdparty, another third party tool
to do this? Sure, you can do that, but no
one does, no one wants to. That's why very deal.
(24:53):
And on top of that, the the way that we're building it is going
to build it in a way that is sales focused and not I guess
corporate focus. So what I mean by that is
allowing yourself to verify it, right?
And then you're going to also beable to see real time how you
(25:17):
stack rank against other people within this platform within your
industry, whether it's S&B, mid market or enterprise as well.
Will that, let's say, you know, there's Joe Smith, right?
And he's at AWS. Would that give me competitive
information like could I reverseengineer and see where Joe Smith
(25:40):
is selling into and go target his accounts?
Sure. So now there's going to be 0
public facing competitive knowledge.
So when you log a deal, you havethe option to either publicly
show or not you know how much revenue it was in that deal.
(26:03):
But then on top of that, when you go get it verified by the
customer, that data will never be shown to the public.
And so there's going to be levels of security that way
competitors can't poach and figure out, OK, you just sold
this deal to this company, let me go undercut you.
That's not going to happen. I don't know.
(26:25):
What if I'm selling to the government, you know, and these
are all top secret Ndas? You know, if I'm selling, I'm
here in Southern California and I sell to the Border Patrol, you
know, like my brother-in-law does construction.
He's, he's done work for the Border Patrol and, you know,
he's done stuff like, you know, put new cabinets and stuff and,
(26:47):
you know, in the, in the processing center or whatever.
So it's not like top secret stuff, but still it may not be
released. So what do you do in those
cases? We are not going to do
government sales. So sorry for everyone doing
government sales. We do not want to cross that
line so. All right.
(27:07):
Yeah, we don't want to be fed rapper any of that stuff.
Yeah, well, and, and like you, Iwas in tech and I was in the
test and measurement space for telecom, for data centers.
And Google was a big client and dude, they were so secretive.
It's like we, I work for an international company and they
(27:29):
would buy units and we could have shipped them straight to
their data centers, but they hadeverything shipped to them in
Mountain View and then they would ship because they didn't
even want their data center addresses known.
And I, I got to know these people really well.
And are they going to verify anything?
(27:56):
So it like, does the name have to be on?
It would have to be, you know, Joe Smith, you know, director of
data center operations, Google. Yeah.
So for your specific use case, it would be up to that client,
right? If I say Google wants to be a
part of it, 100% would love to that.
(28:17):
But we also understand that theyneed secrecy and they need
verified production. So luckily, my business partner
CTO, he's spent the past 2025 years in building top secret
programs within the United States Army and then, you know,
agencies across different companies as well.
(28:37):
So he understands the need for security and how to build that.
So we are covering as much as wecan over there, but we also
understand and realize that whenwe get to a certain level of
deal, secrecy is really crucial.So you know, maybe this might
(28:59):
not be for those level of sales reps right now in the future
maybe, but right now, you know, maybe those are not the targeted
sales reps that we're looking for.
Right. Yeah.
So how did you go about doing this?
(29:19):
Was this your idea? And you found the CTO, you know,
you bootstrapping this, you know, like who was your first
hire? Yeah, so this is 100% Bootstrap,
which is another fun topic and alot of fun stuff to do.
And so, yeah, so you know, a really good friend of ours was
(29:40):
over one day I was telling her about the idea and she mentioned
we'll have her really good friends.
So we connected and we hit it off real fast.
So his name is Jason. He and I have been working
together for the past 2 1/2 months.
He's been on the dev side and sohe's been fantastic.
(30:00):
So I mean, did he partner with you or did you have to?
OK, so so he agreed and like howdo you draw up a budget?
You know, how do you like did y'all do the work?
Did you find somebody you know, on on up work?
You know VA to start coding? You know how?
Like, what's the first step? The first step is sweat equity.
(30:22):
We both looked at, we both knew that we could handle work given
our history, right? And so he's taken upon himself
to build the application on the web and everything like that and
handle it from the security standpoint.
Because that's the number one, you know, metric that I've said
was one, his security and two, keep as simple as possible
(30:44):
because that is so crucial to meand himself.
So, but that's pretty much it. And then for my side, you know,
doing all the marketing, sales, business development, you name
it, I'm doing it. So it's been a crash course in a
(31:06):
lot of different areas, which has been fun.
Do you remember card scan? Did you ever run across that?
Maybe, maybe job one. No, you're, you're younger.
You, you probably have never hadto use one of these, huh?
You ever, ever have to dial A phone?
I do know what those are. Old school man.
(31:26):
I do. I do.
So card scan, card scan was coolman.
Back in the day, like literally 20 years ago, it was a, it was a
physical device and you plugged into your computer.
And so when you go to like a trade show, you're networking,
you know, you get 10/20/50 business cards.
You could scan it, it would scanthe card and then OCS, right,
(31:50):
optical character or OCR, optical character recognition
and then create the database. You could import it into your
address book or whatever. But then it would send an e-mail
out and I still have in some of my contact record.
I'll run across it every now andthen because it'll show.
(32:11):
It'll just add in the notes section every time you updated
it, you know, change jobs, change addresses or whatever.
So it would like, I think like annually it would send an e-mail
out, hey, I'm just updating my records and, and people were
surprisingly now again, it was 20 years ago before like things
(32:33):
got so crap, especially now withAI and cold e-mail and stuff,
it's just probably a little bit harder.
But yeah, when you truly didn't meet somebody because, I mean,
we, we exchanged business cards that, you know, as you, as you
did back then. And so people were a little more
receptive to that. But is that kind of what you're
banking on though? It's like we did have a
relationship. This was a, a complex sale, you
(32:56):
know, maybe we worked on it for weeks, even months.
And, and is it super simple for the client?
Is it just, yes, I worked with Wes, yes, we did this big deal,
yes, you know, it closed in Q2, you know, 2025.
Is it just like that simple? As simple as possible.
(33:17):
That's my entire motto. So the way that the IT will flow
is a sales Rep closes the deal, congratulations and you have a
good relationship with that customer, hopefully, right.
And so you log into Vera deal, you type in two or it's going to
be 3 to 5, you know, questions and then you type in the
(33:43):
customer's profile, you know, e-mail and company, which will
not be disclosed to the public. It will then be sent in a, you
know, CC e-mail with the sales Rep and the customer.
So there's a three-way and the customer just has two to three
(34:06):
questions to answer and it's right in the extremely simple.
That's the. That's the key.
Yeah. So how long have you been
working on this? The idea about 18 months we've
been you know, my daughter was born Valentine's this year. 2
weeks later I told my wife I'm going 100% in and she said let's
(34:28):
do it so we can. Yep.
So you quit your day job? No.
No, no. So still working the day job?
Yeah. No, still working the day job.
Nights, weekends. Yeah.
You know, I'm awake anyways, so I suppose to hold the baby and
you know, you know, rock the baby while I'm working, right?
(34:49):
Saw this beam, it was, you know,the the young couple, you know,
and the wife's all exhausted. She says I'm so exhausted, you
know, I was up with the baby till 4:00 AM and he's like, you
really shouldn't be taking out the baby.
You know, being out that late. It's very irresponsible.
It's like, but anyway, I get it.I got 7 of them and I got 4
(35:11):
grandkids. It's crazy but grandkids are
easier. It's so so do you have any like
beta clients, you know, proof ofconcept?
This is launching next month. That's great.
So how are you? How are you verifying Vera deal?
(35:32):
Yeah. So we've been working with, you
know, I'd say a handful of people working the kinks out,
understanding, you know, what works, what doesn't, right from
the technical side because it's still dealing with sensitive
information. We are waiting for closer to
(35:54):
launch to start doing the more sensitive, you know,
verification. But I'm from the service level,
talking with customers, talking with sales reps and recruiters,
managers, VPS. So it's been it's been well
received thus far. Well, I could see recruiters,
you know, almost requiring this or bumping, bumping a candidate
(36:18):
up higher on the food chain if they've got something like this,
you know, on their resume. Because there's a lot of
creative writing in resume, especially with AI.
Actually with AI, yeah. People are full of crap man.
I mean, it doesn't take you thatlong to take the job
(36:41):
description, copy paste it into ChatGPT, take your resume, paste
that in and then give me a resume that looks exactly.
It's all the keywords. Right.
Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah.
So why? Why August 18th?
Why'd you pick that day? How do you know you'll be ready?
Well my my partner Jason gave meAugust 15th so launching on a
(37:03):
Friday is not never that good. So I figured launch on a Monday.
All right. Pretty simple.
So what has to be done? So you have basically 5 weeks,
maybe six weeks. Six weeks, yeah.
What's happening in these in these last few weeks?
Sure. So from my side, you know, I'll
reach getting the word out, getting people understanding
(37:24):
what and how this is useful. From the technical side, we are
pretty much halfway, you know, to the finish line of the final
polished side of it, if that makes sense.
So Jason's been working extremely hard because he also
has a day job and three kids as well.
(37:45):
So, but you know, if you want something done, you got to do
it. So that's the, that's the one
lesson I've learned from this isif you just take action, things
happen, which is really fun to see.
So a lot of people listening to this are in your shoes, right?
(38:06):
They're salespeople. They're entrepreneur.
They're salespeople with an entrepreneur idea.
You know, how how do you balanceboth?
You know, how do you do that dayjob?
I mean, we're doing this recording.
You know, it's 11 for me. I mean, we started, you know,
1045 Pacific. Where are you?
East Coast. East Coast, so 2:30, yeah.
(38:27):
So how? How do you carve an hour out of
your day to promote your side hustle?
Sure, so I took PTO today so. Oh, OK, yeah, we can't do that
for every interview, no. Definitely not so interviewing.
I've been actually scheduling them for eight o'clock 9:00 at
(38:49):
night so the two older kids are asleep and the baby's halfway
asleep. So I help with bedtime, but to
any reps out there that are thinking about this, it's not
easy. I mean, you're working your day
job, you're hitting your quota, you're hitting your numbers, and
(39:09):
then you take one step that thatnight you do one thing and then
you do another thing the next night.
It's all about consistency. And I, and it's funny that you
bring this up because, you know,I would say for the past two
years, ever since I really had this idea, I've always been
hearing especially like Tim Ferriss or anyone in those
(39:29):
realms, right? Talk about you just have to take
action. And I know Jocko's on a podcast
tour right now and just talking about just take action, whatever
it is, just go. I will 100% say this without
doubt, as long as you take one step every single day, things
(39:49):
will just fall into place. You'll have a conversation with
someone that you've never thought that would help and then
it did. So my advice is do something
tonight and then tomorrow night do something.
Even though it's July 4th, maybedon't go out drinking and do
something or do in the morning and then do it, you know, July
(40:11):
5th at night so that way your brain isn't too foggy.
But do something every single day.
Don't stop. Yeah, yeah, people want to live
a life you know, that that nobody else has, but it means
you got to start living your life in a way nobody does, you
know, at least the average people because you're right,
(40:33):
it's you know, so I got 7 kids and.
And seeing my wife, she's been staying home on for 30 years
and, you know, owning a businessis the closest thing men will
ever know to childbirth, you know, and rearing a child, not
necessarily childbirth, but I mean it, it is hard, it's
(40:54):
stressful. I've lost sleep, you know, I've
I just, you know, stay up till 2:00 AM, you know, wake up at 2,
AMI can't go back to sleep. You start grinding, you know,
you're worried about stuff and, you know, so same thing she's
nursing children. They're, you know, up with
she's, she's tended to them right when they've got a fever
and a throw up bug and I've got to work the next day and, and
(41:16):
she's up at 2:00 AM. So that, that ongoing worry and
concern, you know, not everybody's cut out for it, but
it can, it can be rough. So, and I've always told people
build up some those rainy day funds, right?
(41:39):
Live, live below your means. So you have the option and the
ability to jump on an opportunity and, and try it.
Have y'all hit your like timeline milestones like when
y'all both said, OK, let's do this.
Did you kind of map it out, say,OK, this is going to take 18
months or that was it like, oh, let's just see where it goes
(42:02):
and, and try to get just get it done as quick as possible?
Yeah. So it's never been about as
quick as possible and we're not going to wait.
Personally, you know, from a sales side, I always want things
done as soon as possible, but from the technical side and the
security side, building something proper, it needs to
(42:25):
take time. And so I asked Jason, Jason give
me a hard date. And so I said that's the day
that was taking the August 15th.So I'm, I gave him three extra
days because of the weekend, butthat's it.
And so the comforting thing thatI do have is, you know, he was
former military, I'm former military.
(42:45):
So when we have a date set our mind, we're going to get things
done. We're going to not sleep, and
we're just going to make sure things are done properly as
well. And we're not going to cut
corners. That's the biggest thing, yeah.
So is he local to you? About 45 minutes away, so not
yeah. All right, so if y'all have to
(43:06):
meet you can. Hop down there.
See. Yeah.
Interesting. And so do you have other
developers or, or is he just doing the whole thing?
Just doing the whole thing. Wow, yes.
Very impressive person. Interesting.
Yeah. All right, how is he stress
testing this? I wish I could go further into
(43:29):
detail. I have full faith in what he's
able to do all right, given his background, given his technical
abilities. Because, you know, like I said,
I came from the test and measurement space and you know,
it, it was, it was interesting because when you, when you think
about it, you know, when Google,you know, back in the day wants
(43:51):
to turn up, you know, we were going from Gigabit Ethernet to
10 gig to, to 400 gig and and above.
I think we, it's a long time now.
I think I sold the 1st 100 Gigabit Ethernet testing
platform, you know, 'cause when you, when you turn up systems,
(44:12):
you're like, can it handle it? Can these switches handle it?
And so same thing with yours, right?
You turn that thing on. OK, we got an order.
Does it work right? You know, do they go to our CRM?
Does it trigger set the right permissions?
You know, is the, are the tutorials correct?
And there's a lot that goes intoit.
(44:33):
Sure. And so we we're building 100%
native on AWS, We both have understanding there.
So we're doing serverless, and so that should be very helpful.
When it does turn on, right? It can turn up and turn down as
fast as possible. All the other tools, you know,
he's building as well. So it does build and scale.
(44:57):
Auto scaling is #1 criteria, right?
Yeah, yeah, very. Cool.
All right, August 18th, we'll bewatching.
So it's Vera deal. So it's VERI right DEAL Vera
deal dot IO dot IO that is correct.
(45:17):
Yes, and YY dot IO. Dot com was taken.
Jerks. I know.
Jerks I know. Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah, now the the websites. Up, give a little bit of
description and then a little sign up page as well to be
notified beforehand in the know.Yep, Yep.
(45:37):
Exactly get home about. How it works coming?
Soon. All right, I like it.
All the fun stuff. Log a deal.
Verify deal. Verified and more.
Sounds good. All right.
Did I miss anything? No.
I. You know, I think, I think once
people log in and see what we'redoing, I think they're going to
be have a little bit of fun as well because we're going to have
(46:00):
a little competition, yearly competition as most people are
familiar with in sales. And so that's going to be fun.
We're going to break that down into different markets.
So that should be exciting when people start seeing that.
And then, you know, from the business standpoint, you know,
it's not only helping reps tracktheir career progression, it's
(46:25):
helping recruiters understand who they're poaching and hiring.
And then it's going to help the hiring managers and the
companies itself to understand, like if I hire this person, if I
hire this team, they're going tobe a players, all all six of
them, all five of them. So we're excited.
I like it. Well, good luck.
(46:46):
Thank you very much. Thank you.
We're from the. East Coast.
Man, founder of Verdeal. Here's come the show.
It's great catching up with you.Thank you very much.
Go kiss those babies. Oh, and go sell something.
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