From Homeless to CEO & LinkedIn Influencer | Dennis A. Conforto

From Homeless to CEO & LinkedIn Influencer with Dennis A. Conforto. After being homeless and living under a tree for several months, Dennis learned to turn things around and combine his real world visionary experience with his additional skill sets as an industry leader, business executive, spokesperson, author, and motivational speaker.

Episode Transcript

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The show you need to get what you desire byavoiding the mistakes made by others before
you, learn the stories and journeys of whatsuccess looks like to find the freedom you
deserve while thriving with your best eyes.

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Come back to another episode of rapid resultsWeiss.
We have a very special guest today, DennisConforto, and for those who wanna practice some
Italian, that means comforter because Dennis isgonna comfort us with some knowledge today.
We are very excited that how Dennis.
He's a very inspirational story from beinghomeless to being an elite CEO founder working

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with some of the top CEOs around the worldbeing a 2022 LinkedIn top voices influencer and
more.
And I'm very excited to dive into this today.
And so to kick us off, and for those who don'tknow too, Dennis is an author.
He's a motivator.
He's a speaker.
He's a visionary leader, negotiator.
Over 30,000 followers, 15 million views, lovesworking with CEOs on complex situations, and he

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combines his real world visionary experiencewith his additional skill sets as an industry
leader, business executives, spokesperson,author, and motivational speaker.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Dennis.
Dennis tell us what is the biggest and bestbizzle you are most proud of?
That's really a hard question because you youlook at business transactions and you might

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think that the best deal you ever made was thesize of the deal.
The best deal could be who you made the dealwith.
The best deal could be the one that after youleft had the longest run.
And, you know, I've had a lot of businesstrends.
I but I'll I'm gonna give you a very unusualanswer.
The best deal I ever made in my life was thedeal that I made with myself when I decided

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that the difference between being nobody goingnowhere and wanting to be somebody going
somewhere That was the best deal of my life wasthe deal I made with myself that I wanted to be
more than what I was and who I was Andrew thatwas a transaction with myself.
Now independent of that, the real answer toyour question is probably a transaction I did a

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little over 20 years ago with a software firm,basically had a evaluation of close to a
$100,000,000 that I, sold to an investmentgroup in the bay area, which allowed me then to
turn around and by 7500 domain names startingwith the word shop.

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So owned things like shop home, shop loan, shoploan, shop you know, a whole bunch of things
and created a company called shopadc.com whichhad a 0 valuation and what from 0 to about
$575,000,000 in about 18 month period of timebecause the valuation of these domain names.
And at one point, time, I thought, wow.

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This is what I did was really quite smart.
And, of course, things change out in themarketplace.
You can do everything right but the conditionsin the marketplace can change everything Andrew
about the time that I had this high highvaluation was about the time that the dot com
bomb came and blew up all the dot comcompanies, their valuations, and only the

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people who got outside of the bomb who arealready on their way made it.
So those were corporations like Google andAmazon who had just enough growth to get out
Andrew then that created a kind of a vacuumthat unless you were number 1 or number 2 or
number 3 in the marketplace in your category.
You were number nothing.

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You were just number nothing.
And that, by the way, will hold true today.
And that's the kind of an interesting thingabout the internet prior to the internet, you
could be number 1 or number 2 in your hometown,number 1 or number 2 in your state, number 1 or
2 or 3 in the country, with the internet, youliterally had to invent and create at the speed

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of thought to get to be number 1 globally ornationally, and then there were just nothing
out else after that.
So if you think about all of the companies thatcompete with Google, you run out of speed
pretty quick.
You'll you'll get to things like a Yahoo searchor Bing search or whatever, but after a while,
you get to the top 3 Andrew then really you'rejust not using any of the other services.

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So
So you're saying you're one of thoseentrepreneurs who's able to capitalize on the
dot com boom, and that helped you help acompany go from being worth 0 to being worth
you said 580,000,000 or something.
You said within, like, 18 months, are are thosenumbers right?
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Andrew, hopefully, you you got paid instantlyfor that too.
Right?
Or
No.
Not really.

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Thank you.
No.
Well, there there's a big difference betweenthe market value of a company and then being
able to cash in on a, on a company.
And there's a bunch of skill sets that have togo into play to having a market valuation and
then be able to capitalize on the markevaluation because you actually have to go
through a process of where the company isbought out or you have taken the company public

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and you have increased the the value.
So, you know, part of the problem when peoplelook at people who are really wealthy, take,
for example, Elon Musk, you know, you have aperson whose wealth is in paper.
It's not cash.
So people look at that.
We think they have all of this cash Andrew, ofcourse, if they were taxed on the valuation

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that they were at they would be worth nothingbecause they they really couldn't pay for any
of it based on valuation.
So things are only a value when you're able tocash in on them, which is why it's important to
me that if I start a business I try to answerthree questions when I start a business.
What is the problem?
What is the solution?

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And why me?
Weiss do I have that solution?
Those are the three things I have to answer.
The most important thing then after that is howdo I exit the business?
I never get into a business.
I I don't know how to exit.
The number one exit strategy in the UnitedStates is bankruptcy.
And that is a bad exit strategy.

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Wait.
Wait.
Just tell us more about that.
What what do you mean that's the number onestrategy?
Well, it's not a strategy.
It's the lack of a strategy.
In other words, because people don't know howthey're gonna get out of the business, they
just grow the business that they you know, theyget to the point where the business has got
them trapped.
They start a pizza store, and then it's like,now what do I do?
My son doesn't wanna do it.

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My daughter doesn't wanna do it.
My family doesn't to do it.
And so I've gotta be able to sell this thing atsome point in time.
You may or may not be able to to do it sopeople either close the business down because
they have nobody to pass it on to or becauseeventually runs out of gas and and steam
because you know, other competitors come in themarket, and it goes bankrupt.

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So a lot of the strategies of getting into abusiness really has to centers around how
you're gonna exit it.
It's it's an odd thing for a person who viewshimself as an entrepreneur of how do I exit it?
So you exit it by selling it to a competitor, alarger competitor who buys it and says this

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will be great to my portfolio.
In other words, you merge it with anothercompany.
You take it public, or you sell it to theemployees through that program, or you you're
passing it forward to family members Andrewtypically family members don't want these
businesses that you have a passion for, whichis why when you look at a new company that

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starts, most of them go bankrupt.
That's why I said that's the that's ends upbeing the number one exit strategy bankruptcy
and that that you pick depends on how youconstruct the business.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
No.
That makes a lot of sense.
So I know you you've primarily been involvedwith, real estate businesses.
Tell us, I I guess it's kind of I I justrealized it's kinda humorous, you know, from

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not having a home for 4 months.
So now it sounds like you own multiple homes inyour portfolio.
Right?
Well, I did, but now because of what'shappening in the economy, there's two things
that key in the marketplace.
You know, one of the strategies has always beencash as king.
The other king in the marketplace, especiallyfor entrepreneur, is speed as king.

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Speak to whatever it is that you're doing.
So typically most entrepreneurs have a sense ofurgency which is one of the reasons why they're
always pushing for speed.
What they tend not to surround themselves withis people who have the same sense of urgency.
Which is what slows an entrepreneur down.

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They're always trying to get people to likeunderstand the the, you know, the value
proposition of what it is that they're doing.
My entry into the real estate marketplacereally had to do with a strategy around how
homes were really ultimately going to bevalued.
In other words, the condition of the the homes,and it was really a technology a really a

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technology business and a business strategy.
So a lot of people thought I was really in thereal estate business, but then a lot of people
thought I was in software business, and a lotof people thought I was in the retail business,
but really my interest has always been aroundtechnology.
And for my age Andrew for my level, I was aheadof my time back in the seventies when I got

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interested in technologies and in the softwareindustry in the eighties when most people
didn't even know what software, the differencebetween the word software and hardware was.
Interesting.
Andrew
where I am today, you know, right now I'mseventy years old, for being seventy, I'm a
very young seventy year old.
I'm very, all the latest thinking, all thegreatest technologies, you know, I'm a

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ferocious reader every week.
So the people that I talk to, regardless oftheir age span, I am like really truly still at
least in my thinking at the forefront oftechnology and how to view it and how to think
about it.
What?
And I know yeah.
So AI is obviously all the rage in 2023, itseems.
And it was just picking up momentum at the endof 2022, and it's just getting more and more

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powerful.
So tell us, you know, so today's March second,2023, what are some op technologies that every
successful entrepreneur should be using to helpbuild their business faster and better.
Yeah.
It's really an, a really an interestingquestion.
I'm gonna answer it again in a very unusual waybecause I tend to reverse engineer everything.

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So I look at everything backwards fromeverybody else.
So if you want to go forward in your use oftechnology, you gotta go back in time to
understand the way things are.
So most systems really were developed,especially large scale systems were really
developed, believe it or not, back in the 1920s1930s.

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In other words, the way people organized theway that they thought.
So like the yellow pages and the white pages,the way the telephone systems work and the way
that telephone numbers work really are,migration and thought of the past.
The railway system, the rails on the track areas a result of what the Roman Empire did 25 100

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years ago, the distances between them, whichhas to do with why this space shuttle was the
width that it was because of what the Romansdid 25 100 years ago.
So you almost have to go back in in time andlook at industries that are still trapped in
time and try to reverse engineer what it isthat they're doing and how they function and

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then reorganize it.
If you do that, it almost doesn't matter.
There's a plethora of technology platforms thatyou can do.
Any one of those platforms is an improvementover the way that they used to do things.
So you can take lots of small verticalindustries, and I'll I'll I'll tell you what I
like to do is I like to take industries thatare dominated by 10.90 nines.

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People that are small contract businesses andthen try to organize a series of systems around
that to scale it up.
A 1099 business is typically a business thatdoesn't have a marketing structure to it, and
nobody's gone into the marketplace to figureout how to how to dominate that marketplace.
And it's it's kind of interesting to do becauseonce you pick one of those places.

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You can see how archaic it is, and then you candevelop technologies around it.
As far as future technologies that are comingout.
I mean, really large scale.
Obviously, AI is coming out, but AI like alltechnologies has its good Andrew its bad.
For example, Elon Musk, and I agree with himsays that the most dangerous platform in the

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world beyond nuclear warheads is AI.
He talks about all the time.
And a great example of where AI can go is whatHollywood did with AI, which is the Terminator.
Where the machines started taking over, and weare close now to what they call singularity
where the machine no longer needs a human.

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It can think on its own.
It can reason on its own.
It can argue with you on its own, and it canmake decisions that are counterintuitive to
what humans would do.
So a lot of this stuff, we need to be verycareful with just like the technology we use
for combating viruses.
I never understood why somebody in a labsomewhere wanted to make a virus more powerful.

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To me, that doesn't make sense.
That was ridiculous and very unfortunate thatThat all happened.
And then people got censored for it.
It's, all the above.
Yeah.
And that was Andrew that was a that was a virusthat inadvertently or purposely who knows got
re released, but you can imagine what couldhappen to the human race with this technology

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if one that was a 100% effective got loose.
I mean, you could literally really destroy theworld without ever firing a new We're just
Yeah.
The ability to breathe, which is what thisviral stuff does, just the ability to breathe.
So, you know, in all of this, stuff.
We really have to be smart about how weimplement technology.

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So nuclear energy was great, but we ended upwith a nuclear warhead.
Money is great, but money can be used forreally bad purposes.
So really great entrepreneurs really look attechnology and says Andrew think about how does
this speed up the human condition?
So one of the technologies that I was involvedin was the barcode technology, which led me to

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eventually I traveled to Andrew 19 countriesaround the world.
But with that technology, there are key areasin every 300 keystrokes with bar cart barcode
technology, we were able to reduce the errorrate from one error in every 300 entries to 1
earn every 33,000,000 entries.

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That is the difference between quantum changeand incrementalism.
So when an entrepreneur thinks abouttechnology, they gotta think about what is
quantum change versus incremental change.
And if you want to get ahead of the curve, Imean, if you're really trying to build a
magnificent company, you gotta think about whatis the quantum change, not what is the

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incremental change.
And to do that, you gotta be ahead of thecurve.
You almost gotta be on the bleeding edge whichis very difficult place to being an
entrepreneur anyways like putting your face ina meat grinder, right?
That feels that way.
Mhmm.
And when it hurts Andrew you know, it'sstarting to damage you internally.

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You still know you gotta stay there internallyto to get ahead of the meat grinder, to get out
of it, to grow something.
And it's so much about entrepreneurialism hasto do with the team that you select.
All you have to do is select one wrong personin an organization who is focused not on the
organization, but on themselves, and it changesthe entire trajectory of everything that

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happens inside that businesses, and mostbusinesses are human fail, not a technical
fail.
It's a human failure.
Yeah.
I know that's a very good point.
It's just like, recognize the end of the day,like, you could have the best tools, but if
you're not using them in the right way and notaware of the dangers of them, then it could
definitely could be a big detriment to yourbusiness.
Andrew so I'm curious too.
Like, yeah, I know you have your book.

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Looks definitely amazing as well.
Life done right.
You talk about technology or any any anychapters of that book.
No.
And the book isn't out yet.
It's you're looking at the, you know, anexample of some covers.
I'm thinking about life on right.
Which is like done right.
Everything I did wrong to get there is really,you know, kind of the journey of going from my

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birth.
In fact, my story starts like, all of ourstories start a 100 years before I was born.
Because there was somebody there was a seriesof events that led up to the circumstances of
my birth just like there is for you and all ofus Andrew unless you kinda know the backstory,
you don't know why that person was born in thattown at that time Andrew then what happened

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from there to try to figure out how to makelife.
Right?
We're all born into defective families.
They could be horrible families.
They can be good families.
They can be fantastic families, but they're alldefective because we're all defective.
And part of the process of life getting liferight is all the things you had to do wrong to
figure out what was right for you.

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So this is my journey from the time I was bornuntil about my mid twenties, the the art of
just kind of learning life.
And, you know, a lot of just absolutelyhilarious stories, a lot of tragedies, a lot of
the ups and downs of life, from, you know,being in the valley of despair to the mountain

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peaks of hope.
I've noticed in my life that value of despairin the mountain peak of hope that you get just
to, you know, like walking on a level playing,you know, you're not in a valley, you're not on
the mountain, but the reality is is you'realways Andrew down these these hills in your
life because no matter what the fairy talelooks like, from the outside, nobody really has

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a fairy tale life.
You know, we all have to fight for even thefamous who are massively successful you know,
dealing with things that nobody knows aboutdeath in the family and illness, something
that's weighing on their soul.
Some very famous people fight with stage frightand they can't get in front of people and they
Yeah.
You know, and they're performers.

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They're artists.
They, you know, and you think it's no big deal,but, you know, life is a struggle for each of
us and the lack of sensitivity that humanshave, especially as we see in social media that
is reflected towards each other is not verykind, oftentimes.
Anyway, I wrote this book about unkindnessesthat were done to me and why I don't harbor bad
feelings about any of it and how I'm gratefulfor all of the struggles in my life.

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Really grateful for the mall.
Well, and I'd love for you to share, you know,and obviously, you know, one of my favorite
stories of all time is, you know, the story of,like, caddad and his son.
And, you know, I think so, like, the story is,like, a dad, the dad is there with the sun, and
then a random stray horse comes into theiryard.
And the neighbors are like, oh my gosh.

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You're so lucky.
You just got a free horse.
And the dad goes, we'll see.
And then so the sun starts riding the horse,trying to, break it in, and the son falls off
the horse and breaks his leg.
And they're like, oh my gosh.
That's such bad luck.
You're such an unlucky person.
I'm so sorry.
And the dad goes, oh, we'll see.
Andrew then the next thing you know, the townis going to war with another village or

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whatever.
And, because the sun has a broken leg, he'sunable to go to war.
Andrew so the tops, people go, oh my gosh.
So your son has a broken leg that's so lucky.
And so it's always interesting too how, like,said, you know, we think it's ups and downs,
but the the level of playing field is startingto make more and more sense that you kinda just
have to keep going with the flow and trying tokind of trust and connect that it's gonna lead

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to where you want it to go, but also the dotsconnecting backward is always so much easier.
And so I definitely love that example.
Andrew so talking about the, the fairy talethat you're talking about, I mean, so for those
who go on Dennis's website, you can watch avideo that does a reenactment of his life
Andrew the end of the video, it says thatyou've raised 6 kids of your own, 30 foster
kids.

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You're obviously running a successful companyworking with elite CEOs around the world.
So so tell us more about what that's like for,being able to raise all those kids while
running a successful business.
Well, I don't know that I was successful at it.
You know?
I I will tell you, you know, I used to wonderhow good I was as a a father, and it's it's

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hard to run a successful business and balanceout, especially if you're traveling Andrew
you're, you know, you're all over the UnitedStates and you're all over the planet Andrew
you're, you know, you're just always on theroad.
And, you know, then you justify your reasonlike, well, it isn't quantity of time.
It's quality time.
I'll I'll work on the quality.
So every time I'm with them, it's a a richexperience.

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The the reality is it's both.
It's quantity and quality.
If you sacrifice either one of them, you'resacrificing something, and you can never get
that time back Andrew I I've always wonderedhow I did as a father.
I'm sure my kids could say, yeah, my dad couldhave done better.
On the other side of the coin, they're prettygenerous in their compliments to me when I ask

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them how they did.
But the way I measure how I did as a father isnot how my kids turned out, but how my
grandkids turned out.
That's the only way.
Interesting.
It's not interesting.
It's it's it's what they teach.
Not what you taught them, but what they now areteaching to their children.
I have to say I've got some pretty fantasticgrandchildren.

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So I would I I don't know that I would givemyself an a a better than as as a father
because it's a heck of a lot easier being agrandfather than it is a dad, but you know, you
know, ultimate know that your life's journey isending, and you are able to look back in over

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the arc of time, and then you can probably giveyourself a grade about how you did and what
your experience was.
Andrew since I'm not at the end of my journey,at least not that I know of, you know, I don't
know.
I I really don't know how to grade, how I didin the balancing act Andrew still to this day
struggle with, you know, how do I balance mytime?
Because time is the only thing that we have,and it turns out to be the most important asset

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we have.
We have lots of assets we have in our life thatwe can grow.
I could put money in the bank and grow it.
I can grow real estate.
I can grow, you know, all sorts of stuff.
I can grow crops out in the field.
I Andrew do all sorts of stuff.
I cannot grow time.
It is grow life and what we're gonna do withthat time.

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No.
I love that.
And speaking of time too, I'm curious, like,you know, Being on that journey of learning to
not blame others for your fluctuations seemslike people spend all their time Andrew their
whole life doing that.
Like, how did you come to that point oflearning to take a learning not to blame your
life circumstances on people around youessentially and to take that responsibility?

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Like, how did you how did you figure that outfor yourself?
You know, I think today, that's like thegreatest question that everybody should be
asking themselves today because today, we havea culture of victimhood creation.
There are people who love creating victims andallowing people and exploit the victimhood
creation and their large multimillion dollarbusinesses convincing classes of people that

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they are a victim, and victims have a lot ofhate and vitriol with in them because they're
looking for somebody to blame on their lifecircumstances.
I can tell you one time I at one point in mylife when I was homeless, I was on a street
corner walking back to the area where I had allmy stuff hidden in these bushes, and I saw a

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baby blue Lincoln continental and the hood wasdown.
It was a convertible, and it was the first timeI ever saw person on the phone in a car.
This is before cell phone.
And I just looked at that guy, and I thought ofmyself being homeless.
And I my hatred of him, a person I did not knowwas like off the rails.
I thought like, how could you drive in that carin front of a homeless and and feel good about

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yourself.
I'm here because of you.
You took something from me, and I blame mycircumstances on him.
Andrew was in this state of mind.
I'm nobody going nowhere because people areholding me back, and my homeless situation was
really not 4 months.
It was a year to be, homeless, and I hadisolated my self Andrew really didn't talk to

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anybody for a year.
None of my friends saw me.
Nobody knew where I was at.
I was embarrassed.
I was ashamed, but I went for 2 weeks withouteating, and this is when I thought to myself, I
wanna be somebody going somewhere Andrew all myanger Andrew blaming other people who I didn't
know for my fate in life was a waste of time.

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Right?
People who were devious to me and for givingthem right away.
And then spending my life trying to catchpeople doing things right, including myself,
Andrew one of the things I like most aboutmyself is my ability to forgive and forget.
I have a ring on my hand I made.
On one side, it says intelligence, and theother side, it says knowledge.

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So I'm always trying to get knowledge, and I'mtrying to be smart with the knowledge I get,
but in the inside of my ring, I have 2 words.
Forgive and forget gaining knowledge, beingintelligent with the knowledge, forgiving and
forgetting are kind of the 4 cornerstones ofhow I figured out, like, how to be happy every
day.
Regardless of the circumstances and regardlessof the challenges that I face in my life, what

(27:13):
is the most important skill set that you canhave Andrew would say 2 things.
1, how you view yourself and 2, how you viewothers that you work with Andrew so my favorite
people to surround myself with are what I callthe coachable coaches.

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There are some people who are great coaches,but they're not capable of listening or
hearing, and they are themselves are notcoachable.
I like viewing myself as being a coachablecoach.
So in business, there's a concept I call thebig brain.
The big brain knows everything.
They are in charge of everything.
Nobody else's opinion matters.

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And if you want to get anything done or youwant to figure out how to do something, I, have
found that unless you go to big brain, youcan't get anything done.
So this idea of being a coachable coachyourself as an entrepreneur Andrew then
surrounding yourself with people who arereally, really good.

(28:15):
And in some ways, you know, are better thanyou.
But are coachable at the same time, I think isthe key to having a really good business.
The other thing that has been important to mein business is as an entrepreneur, I always
knew what I wanted out of the business and whyI became an entrepreneur.

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And as a result of that, I wanted to have anenvironment where as an entrepreneur, I was
thinking in behalf of the people that I, thatwere employed by me which meant that they also
own part of the company a business that at somepoint in time ownership in the company became

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something that was important, not only to me,but to all the employees.
So okay.
Now, Andrew asking a question.
What is your vision what's your current visionyou're working on Andrew how can listeners be,
contact you.
So the big thing that I'm working on right now,I have 2 passions in my life.

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I love to cook.
You can be my Facebook friend at Dennis photoand see I I try to cook something every day
that I like.
I know it's a horrible thing.
People go like, what the heck?
Why does Weiss why does people think that, youknow, showing your meal that you have today are
so important?

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But If you look at my meals, you'll you'll getit in politics.
Not that I'm interested in politics, but I'minterested in really common sense solution.
So I have a podcast that's going to be comingout yet to be named, and my vision is trying to
get rid of the big divide that I see in thecountry between 2 parties who are really not

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even either one of them are really in controland getting to common sense solutions.
So I will be cooking and interviewing famouspeople while I'm cooking where they have a view
that is different than my own and see from thetime I cook and get it on the table that we
can't come to a common sense solution.

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I'm very excited to to do this, and I'm workingwith some, really big players out in the market
place who were behind, shows like Rush andother talk show hosts that are gonna be helping
me with this show.
So we'll that that's my big vision for rightnow finding a way that I can help get rid of

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all the angst and get to a a reasonablesolution of common sense.
Alright.
That's super helpful.
That's it.
Thank you, everyone.
4 or find me on LinkedIn, which is a greatplace to, see what I'm doing Andrew Facebook
and Instagram are also good places.
So So thank you.
Andrew just said incredible interview.

(31:07):
Well, half the interview was me interviewingmyself, so no wonder it was in in incredible.
I got to be with my favorite person, which isme.
So, Andrew, I'm sorry that our technologydidn't work, and I just kinda had to ramble
along But, hopefully, I carried it enough.
That concludes another episode of Rapidremember to leave a review about something you

(31:31):
learn so others can share the knowledge, keepbeing unstoppable in your pursuit of the life
freedom you desire, and we'll see you nextweek.