Find Any Lead Fast With Brandon Bornancin of Seamless.ai

Wes Schaeffer:
Brandon Bornancin, author of Whatever It Takes, founder of Seamless.ai all the way from Columbus, Ohio. Welcome to the Sales Podcast, man. How the heck are you?

Brandon Bornancin:
Wes, Doing great, man. Happy Monday. Thanks for having me and thrilled to be here.

Wes Schaeffer:
"Databases are dead. Connect with your prospects instantly." So I'm going to have you demo this next week on the CRM Sushi podcast, but we're going to get to know about you first, all right? I'm all -- I want this to be like Jerry Maguire, man. I'm going to make you cry. All right? This interview will not end -- it will not end until we see a tear coming down and we're not going to edit that out; okay? I want snot bubbles coming out.

Brandon Bornancin:
There we go.

Wes Schaeffer:
This is how we're going, man. Show me the money. Show me the tears. All right.

Brandon Bornancin:
I love it.

Wes Schaeffer:
So what the heck, man? So Seamless is cool. I see your frickin' ads everywhere. Good grief.

Brandon Bornancin:
Thank you. I'll have to give a congrats to the marketing team.

Wes Schaeffer:
So how did this get started, huh? "Scale your sales with artificial intelligence." I mean, who were you, man? And why should we even listen to you?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, I did. Well, thanks again for having me. And you know, I'm a sales guy that needed to find everyone that I needed to sell to. Now, luckily, I was selling for IBM and Google, so I worked with a lot of really smart engineers. So after spending about $3 to $4 million on sales databases, selling for IBM and Google, I'd plug into these expensive sales databases. They were missing 90 percent of the people I needed to sell to. When I would send emails or make calls, I'd get bounce backs, wrong phone numbers, you name it. And it just drove me insane to the point of like, you know what, hey, I'm going to work with these engineers. We're going to build our own search engine like Google to find every single person in the world that you need to sell to. And then we're going to use AI to research and validate all the direct dial cell phones and insights for these people and use it as my secret weapon. We built it, went from zero to $100 million in sales, insanely fast, became a millionaire in sales. And that's when I realized, like, hey, I want to help everyone in the world accomplish the same. So took all the money I made. Using Seamless is like my secret weapon. And then now we're we're helping roughly over 150,000 salespeople, marketers and entrepreneurs globally. And we've got thousands of people in President's Club, which means that they've generated over $1 million in sales using Seamless. So that's our mission to help the world connect to opportunity and win President's Club, which means you've done over $1 million in sales with our software.

Wes Schaeffer:
Nice. So you were using the tool in your day job?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, yeah. So I built it. I've been an entrepreneur before. I made a lot of money. 18, 19, 20 years old, launching a gambling marketing software, which was awesome, for Party Poker, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker that did like $12 million when I was super young. And then they made online gambling illegal in the US and launched the second company. And I lost $4 million bucks building a text message marketing company. So like I knew how to build technology and how to build failing or successful companies, a little bit of both. So once I quit entrepreneurship after my second company failed, I was a salesperson for seven or eight years and just literally got so sick and tired of copying and pasting and manual this building of who I need to sell to and all the bullshit of getting stuff into your CRM -- you're the CRM Butler, the guru, the Sushi genius there -- a lot of all of that work is terrible. It sucks the lifeblood out of salespeople. And I was like, there's got to be a way to find everyone. He needs to research their contact information in real time, in seconds and then get it into your CRM and built it for myself to to automate all of that work so I could just be pitching and closing.

Wes Schaeffer:
Right. So you make money, you're young, I mean, you lost $4 million. Was it your own money? Was it family?

Brandon Bornancin:
Well, the bad part about it was all -- my all of our own money. I mean, you never want to lose other people's money, but when you lose all of your own money, it's fucking terrible. It just beats you to death. And the tough part was, was all of the gambling money we made from this online gambling marketing software. We didn't -- like, we got to spend a lot of it, but then we parlayed it into this second company and that second company failed because we did -- it was text message marketing. Right. So this was flip phones and we thought text messages for advertisers were going to be the future and literally no one was investing in it. And our biggest failure was actually, again, kind of going back to seems like we didn't have the list of the B2B people, B2B marketers we need to sell to. My first company was in B2C; my second company was in B2B. I didn't know B2B lists; I didn't know B2B sales. And we just got crushed as a 21-, 22-, 23-year-old. And then we quit and sold for IBM and Google.

Wes Schaeffer:
So who's we?

Brandon Bornancin:
So good question. Half My partners went and sold for IBM; the other half just went off to do other stuff. So one of my partners, my VP of product, Jake, who was one of the co-founders of EnMobile when we shut it down, he went to IBM Interactive Resource at the time and he's like, hey, we're selling IBM Watson. It's easy. Everyone knows IBM. You should join us. He was building the products and he's like, you should sell this thing. And I'm like, cool, I'm out of a job. I have no money, I'm broke, I'm poor, let's do it. And joined him, and then we built this really big business unit selling IBM Watson, selling IBM Interactive to all these Fortune 100, 500 companies.

Wes Schaeffer:
How did you ramp up in B2B sales? Because you said you were rusty on that area, but then IBM, especially IBM, Watson, it's all B2B.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, so this is the book. This is Sales Secrets. So I know, you know, this is my newest book, Whatever It Takes. But Sales Secrets, which I interviewed you on, Wes, a lot of my success was by being able to build a list and then studying all of the sales experts on their top secrets and all of these books and things. So I just started reading all the over 250 different sales books, and this was before there was an Amazon. So you got to buy this shit in a Barnes and Noble, Borders -- Borders Books, if you remember what that is -- I forget the other book places that shut down. Half Price Books was another one like one. So I would go to these book places and this is what the book places only had five to 10 books. They didn't have like a thousand sales books like now. So I would just buy all these books, read them and then start executing strategies. And then when a new one came out, just kept by and reading and then you do it with the blogs and everything else. And that's how I learned B2B sales through trial and error and studying and then building the list.

Wes Schaeffer:
I got to imagine, though, IBM had a decent training platform.

Brandon Bornancin:
They did not. It was not terrible.

Wes Schaeffer:
Oh, wow.

Brandon Bornancin:
I mean, so different divisions. Like, there's a lot of different divisions. If you're selling IBM hardware, like the iFrames and the servers and stuff, like boom, you're good to go. But the IBM Interactive and Watson division was new. There was no training. It was literally just like, come in, you're part of a pitch team and you've got to figure it out. You've got to generate a book of business. Very little support. So and that was -- it was like entrepreneurship, like, oh, shit, I don't know what to do. We just got to figure it out. My chief revenue officer knew what they were doing, but they were busy in meetings 24/7. And then you were part of these like you would support a division, like a business unit, a technology business unit, a retail business unit, a manufacturing business unit where you would sell the IBM Interactive and Watson Technologies and Digital Solutions. So you would have to drum up all the revenue. Once you had an opportunity, you would bring them into the deal and then you would have to pitch and close it. And it was tough. I mean, it was awesome, you know, we sold tens of millions of dollars, but it was like they could have created a predictable, repeatable, scalable system. And I started to build that and left to sell for Google because selling for Google is easier than selling for IBM.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah, I can see that.

Brandon Bornancin:
It's just repeatable, like AdWords. That's a lot easier than selling multimillion dollar artificial intelligence software that we create for you. Like, that's one super custom. One is super vanilla, rinse, repeat, pitch, rinse, repeat. And the ROI of Google ads is much easier to correlate to CFO, CEO, C-suite than selling like a new AI technology.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah. So you get to Google; is that when you started working on the foundation of Seamless?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah. So when I was studying for IBM, I built a research team that was building my list for me. Because I didn't -- I couldn't figure out the technology to do it, and I was just killing my quota and overperforming, and then when I went and sold for Google, that's when I realized, okay, let's not use this list building team; let's literally build this technology. And that's what I really understood search engines. I really understood how to build a search engine because I was working with all these smart engineers.

And, you know, the first step was build a search engine to find any title, any company in the world. Second step was use the AI like we used at IBM Watson to research, validate and verify emails and cell phones and then that automated it all. And that's when it was like, okay, [shoooo] you know.

Wes Schaeffer:
So who's this research team at IBM? Were they IBM employees that's just doing this as part of their job?

Brandon Bornancin:
No. This was like a team that I, like, hired and imported myself, just built --

Wes Schaeffer:
So like overseas people?

Brandon Bornancin:
Just built like an offshore research team of anyone that was available to do contact research. Problem with that is it's highly inaccurate. It doesn't scale, it's manual and it relies on people to where it was like, dude, let's automate this whole thing. So it went from like a manual research to fully autonomous.

Wes Schaeffer:
Right. So you build a search engine -- it sounds kind of ironic, you're working at Google and yet you're building your own search engine.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer:
Were they just not focused on at that granular level yet or like, why is that --

Brandon Bornancin:
Well, they were building search for information; like, that was really -- they didn't want to get into a sales search engine. So it's like, okay, I'll build my own sales search engine. You know, and I'm like, he technology is so robust, it --like a search engine can be built for anything and you just got to figure out what you want to find. So I was like, I want to find people with titles on a phone, contacts and find emails. I want to find cell phones. I want to research all that stuff instantly in seconds. And then after creating prototype one, you drive a bunch of sales, you improve it; create prototype two, then you improve it, create prototype three. Anyhow, I was doing this out of my own pocket like every commission. That was the cool part. It was like the best way to fund raise for my company, because every deal that I would close, all the commission I would take and put into building my technology, building the Seamless platform. So then eventually. You know, we sold over nine figures in sales, over $100 million in sales in AdWords, and then it was like, okay, let's go all in on this thing, you know? And it just started getting a bunch of different customers who were my colleagues, who are my peers, who are people in my industry. And that's when I was like, let's go full time on this, this jazz. And then we went full-time building it for a year and then fund raised after that; used Seamless for everything. All of our customer acquisition was from our software. Fundraising was from the software because you can find anyone's emails and direct dial. So like we just used our software to find people to sell to and then sold to them.

Wes Schaeffer:
Very interesting. So you keep mentioning phones; are you saying using the phone to sell B2B today still works?

Brandon Bornancin:
Oh, yeah, 100 percent. All the channels. Yeah. I mean, we booked 200 to 400 appointments a day, from the phone, from email, from social -- you've got to leverage a multichannel approach. But my sales team has a record of over 406 appointments in twenty four hours. We're talking a lean 20-, 30-person sales team at the time. Now it's gotten bigger and they're setting even bigger records, but they're using, you know, primarily the phone with email, with social, like they use it all. I think the best salespeople know how to use the phone; while they're using the phone they're using email; while they're using email they're using social. Like, I've got seven monitors here. I've got different sales campaigns running at all time. Shit. I'm dialing right now while we're on the podcast, Wes.

Wes Schaeffer:
You better stop that. I need all your attention.

Brandon Bornancin:
I'm in the Matrix -- of so, you know, yeah, the phone works.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah, that's awesome. How's it working today, like with COVID? I mean, there's -- you know, like direct mail. I sent something to a lead and two weeks later, almost three weeks later, saying, I got your book, you know, because --.

Brandon Bornancin:
That's awesome.

Wes Schaeffer:
-- only goes -- only goes to the office like once every two -- two weeks, maybe twice a month.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer:
Calls, maybe they're not being routed as --

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, well, that's a problem with the company directories and these these old outdated sales databases. Like, you know, we find cell phones, we find direct files, we find direct emails for people so that that's how we're able to book so many appointments. And we've got 1,000 people that have generated over a million dollars in sales with the product. Like you have to, in COVID world, know when you call a corporate directory, you're done. Like, I don't even think people -- I don't have -- no one's even working our corporate line right now. It's like, I don't even know what's going on with that line. That's how much we pay attention to that. Everyone's remote. You have to find their direct dials and insights and get to people one-to-one direct.

Wes Schaeffer:
They don't mind you calling their cell phone?

Brandon Bornancin:
No. No, I mean. It is the new age of their cell phone call, their mobile call, their direct dial. If you've got a product that is the mindset, you know, this is part of one of the habits of Whatever It Takes, Wes, my new number one bestseller on Amazon. Like, you just got to do whatever it takes, right? If you've got a product that will fundamentally change the life of your customer for the better, you've got a duty to reach out to them wherever they're at.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah, but, you know, I'm more into branding and consultative selling and relationship building, I mean, I don't know, it seems very aggressive and just transactional to me. I'm not sure this is -- I think I should stop listening to this podcast.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, great. Great question. Great roleplay, right? And now you can -- you can sell it -- like I've sold million -- multi-million dollar deals over the phone or via Zoom, never meeting in person. Hell, like we're fundraising a $50 to $100 million dollar deal. And we haven't -- we've been working the deal for six to nine months, zero in-person meetings.

Like, an investor is going to write a $50 to $100 million check. Now, the last requirement of that deal is they have to meet us in person to make sure we're not crazy. But you have to -- like, people are doing deals. You could do, high ticket, low ticket, high consultative, high transaction, you name it, over the phone, over social, over email, over Zoom. You know, it's happening all the time. Consultative just means, like, you're prospecting, pitching a solution that transforms their life. What is the core? What does that even mean, right? If we break down consultative selling? Like that means you're here point A, you want to get to point B. I'm going to figure out what is stopping you from point A to point B, and we will get you from that point to your destination as fast, as cheap, as cost-effective, as efficiently as possible.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah, I tell people, because they're like, oh, how -- how's COVID like, how is it affecting your business? Like, you know, we've homeschooled for 13 years and I've worked from home for 20, 21 now, work for myself from home --

Brandon Bornancin:
You homeschool your kids?

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah.

Brandon Bornancin:
I think that's genius. What made you decide to do that?

Wes Schaeffer:
Hey, this is my interview, man. Who's asking the questions here; one of your seven monitors tell you to do this? Dude, we pondered it for a while. We didn't even -- so our two oldest were not homeschooled because my wife, she had to be on board because she's the one doing it, you know? And so finally so we've done like 13 years now. And my oldest daughter just turned 21. So what's that math? She was around fourth grade, maybe fifth somewhere in there when we started and we homeschooled her all the way through high school. Then my next two daughters, we homeschooled all the way until through eighth grade. And then they decided to go to the high school that their brothers went to. And we've got two more still being homeschooled. So we just don't like the crap going on in schools, you know?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer:
There's not a big selection of private schools here. When we moved in '04, there was one Catholic school.

Brandon Bornancin:
I think it slow -- dramatically slow down your progress.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah, and it's been fantastic. So my -- the two girls, you know, they had to come back home, right, because of COVID and they just -- it was just like being homeschooled again. So they just rolled with it. Yeah. But yeah, it's been fantastic even now; all right? We're leaving for the mountains. My wife's going up today; I'm going up tomorrow. And you know, just the kids can still do class.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah. You have 100 percent freedom.

Wes Schaeffer:
Oh yeah. Dude, we go to the beach, we go -- and we can go off-peak, right? So we have places to ourselves.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, that's epic. That's true freedom --

Wes Schaeffer:
It's just awesome.

Brandon Bornancin:
-- be albe to do and anything you want, whenever you want, wherever.

Wes Schaeffer:
Oh yeah.

Brandon Bornancin:
Amazing.

Wes Schaeffer:
So much better, but you know, me working from home and, you know, all these years, I've sold hundreds and hundreds of customers on Infusionsoft, HubSpot, Ontraports, and man, I've probably met five percent of my customers.

Brandon Bornancin:
Ontraport is pretty bad-ass, too.

Wes Schaeffer:
They've done some good stuff. I've had Landon on a couple of times. And when they came out with their 5.0 a couple of years ago now that changed just like Infusionsoft. When Infusionsoft came out their Campaign Builder around 2011, '11 or '12, somewhere in there, that saved them. They didn't have the Campaign Builder, I think they wouldn't have made it through the tough times. It's just so easy to use. And then Ontraport -- Ontraport was hard to use. And they came out with kind of a Campaign Builder. It looks like everybody else's, honestly. It looks like ActiveCampaign. It looks like HubSpot. But those --they're good. They're good. And I mean, there's only so many GUIs you can create, right?

Brandon Bornancin:
Right.

Wes Schaeffer:
You know, only so many ways you can invent that thing. But, yeah, that was a big change for them.

Brandon Bornancin:
But you were saying, you sell hundreds of customers and you've done it all remote.

Wes Schaeffer:
All remote. I mean, I was using WebEx and Skype and whatever back in the day, but people didn't care. You know, as long as I can meet their needs and solve a problem and take away a pain, send me their money.

Brandon Bornancin:
It's awesome.

Wes Schaeffer:
Piece of cake. And I see too many people, though, especially smaller entrepreneurs, talk about branding, right? And I'm like, you got to sell something. When you're new, you got to sell.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, right.

Wes Schaeffer:
And you build your brand over time by delivering -- delivering the goods, right?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yep, 100 percent.

Wes Schaeffer:
That's how you've made it, you know, deliver the goods.

Brandon Bornancin:
Build and sell the products.

Wes Schaeffer:
So when -- so you're peeling back, throwing your own commissions, your own money back into this new platform; did you -- did you have a vision for it or were you just solving an immediate pain and just see what tomorrow brings?

Brandon Bornancin:
No, it's -- it's funny, that the platform that you see today was always the vision of the product. Like, nothing strayed from the idea that we have like believed in, but it was very difficult to build, took years to build because the technology is so complex. It's easy to have people manually research something. It's very difficult to build a search engine and use AI to do it all automatically. So it just took years to build. I almost died 90 times, trying to build it, trying to sell it. Because before it was built, you're trying to sell something that doesn't exist, so that was tough.

Wes Schaeffer:
So how -- so how -- how does that work? I mean, you're -- the product you have now was basically started when you were at Google, right?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer:
So you're using it for yourself, right. So who's -- who's like the first paying customer? Is it a friend that agrees to pay you buy you buy you dinner for a month? You know, is it -- is it a true cold call, true customer that like signs up for a beta and pays a little something?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, it was these top search marketing agencies. So I sold Google AdWords. These agencies were seeing how successful I was. So they would ask me how I was driving so much new business. Then I would tell them it was because my software; then they would buy the software from me. So it was like, my customers, people in my industry would then try to learn what I was using to drive the new business.

Wes Schaeffer:
Did you have to keep that secret from Google.

Brandon Bornancin:
What's up?

Wes Schaeffer:
Did you have to keep that secret, like on the down low?

Brandon Bornancin:
No, no. I was very public about it. Like, this is being worked on not during work hours, this is being built not during work hours, all that jazz; and I had no issue. And then they became a customer. And, you know, that helped you just validate the power of that. And tried to get the Google Search Agency to invest in it; tried to get a bunch of different people to invest in it. Now, luckily, Sergey Brin and his wife, Nicole, founders of Google, they invested in Seamless.

Wes Schaeffer:
Nice.

Brandon Bornancin:
But it wasn't until years later, after I went full time, years later, they then invested --

Wes Schaeffer:
That's cool.

Brandon Bornancin:
-- which is pretty awesome.

Wes Schaeffer:
How do you decide when to get outside investors versus staying organic and bootstrap?

Brandon Bornancin:
Scale. Like from zero to $20,000 in MRR -- zero to $10,000 MMR is pre-seed capital. That's when you should work with the accelerators like accelerators will invest $50 to $250K to help you figure out your idea, get product market fit; 100 customers or less. And then once you're at $10K in MMR, I would say $10K to $100K in MRR, you go for the seed round. That's like anywhere from $1 to $5 million bucks. And then after that, you know, depending on where you go, you could get the series and above.

Brandon Bornancin:
But I always recommend going pre-seed accelerator, then go seed, and do it based on the number of customers that you acquire. Obsess with building the list, selling to the list and acquiring customers. A lot of entrepreneurs now, they have no customers and they fund raise a shitload of money with no product market fit; like, you haven't sold anything. You've got to build the product and you've got to sell the product. Make sure people want what you have now.

Wes Schaeffer:
Right. Because I know, like, Ontraport -- Ontraport may still be bootstraps. ActiveCampaign was for a long time, I think just last year they went and got some outside money. Is it -- is it a pride thing or is it just you don't want to give up ownership? Like why do what some decide to, you know, to bootstrap it versus take outside money? Because, I mean, if you don't do it right, you could lose your own company, can't you, in raising money?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, I think it's different confidence levels. When you're confident you fund raise. Like when you -- when you've got product market fit, when you've got a lot of customers, when you've got growth. That's when you fund raise to fast-track the growth, fast-track the product features, fast-track customer success -- service like -- you've got to have product market fit, though, and that can be defined anything from 10 customers to thousands of customers. Like, if you're confident in your KPIs, your MRR, your ARR, your cost to acquire customer, your cost per acquisition, your average revenue per user, your MRR growth rate, your profit and loss statements, then you should fundraise. If you know that you've got this, like, flywheel, that's when -- that's when you go and you double down on it.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah. So your people, and they're making these banging out these calls, like, are you very prescriptive? You know, do you have your sales to say, look, here's -- here's what you do, right, run the software, reach out this way, say these things at this time, you know, or do you do you give them a lot -- do you give them a wide berth?

Brandon Bornancin:
We are very prescriptive. But we also -- we believe, like all -- I'm a huge Tom Brady fan, so I believe all of our sales people are our quarterbacks and they're like Tom Brady. So like we'll provide scripts, strategies, plays, right? I call these things plays that the quarterback can run and use to win the game. So we have a set of specific plays that they should run, but we let them customize it as needed to win the game. So like, no, I'm not interested; no budget; it's too expensive; already working with someone; send me more info -- you name it. We've got hundreds of ways to overcome all of these.

But they can change them for themselves. They can customize them, you name it. That way when they come into the game, never played before. They've got everything they need to win the Super Bowl and they've got the freedom to change and adapt and customize based on the prospect, the situation, their personality, their confidence, their knowledge, the skills, discovery, you name it. So I think all of these things are players. They should use the plays to win the game, but they can also go off the cuff as needed.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah, I tell people, do it my way at first until you master it, otherwise they'll use it as an excuse. "Oh, it didn't really -- didn't really quite work, I'm a guy -- doesn't feel right," and like, I don't give a crap out. Feels yeah, everything feels weird. Like, you know, you go to your golf pro; he tweaks your grip. It feels weird because it's new. Right? But your other grip wasn't working. That's why you pay the guy money to go teach you some lessons. It's like, do it my way, do it. Go play for a month, you know, go to the range, go play, you know, with your weekend group four or five times, under pressure, then come back and tell me if it's not working. Don't -- don't change it up first swing just because it feels weird. You don't know enough yet to modify my plays. You know?

Brandon Bornancin:
Hundred percent. Yeah, I think until you're hitting quota, you you're not allowed to change really anything. Like, first 90 days there are -- we've got hundreds of experts now. Like, you've got hundreds of people that have tried everything who have mastered it. And now we're teaching you the best ways, the best ways to win the game and maximize the success of your customers and overdeliver for them and get them on the world's best sales platform. Like, don't -- the people that fail are the people that try to invent their own way. First 90 days, when you go into inventing versus blocking and tackling and just like doing what we tell you to do, the people that just do what we tell them to do and try to do the best they can always are in the top one percent -- the top one percent of our performers.

We had people go from intern SDR to AE director to team lead, shit, in less than a year because that college kid was a football player who just learned to just, hey, coach, tell me what to do; I'm going to do the best in the world and I'll keep practicing. And it just like -- Ryan Feely, this guy went from intern, SDR, SDR team lead, AE, AE team lead to now managing, shit, 20 people. He's like 23. I don't care about your age, your experience, like, if you come in, you can master what we tell you and you could crush it and then you could tackle these new challenges that we throw at you. It's a meritocracy. We've built a very -- like a very exciting meritocracy here. Any one with anything.

Wes Schaeffer:
So before COVID, were you -- did you have an office or is everybody and they always been remote?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, we had an office. It was -- we had two offices, one in Columbus, Ohio, one in Newark, New Jersey, because Amazon and DMV invested in us.

So we had an office in the Amazon building and we had an office in downtown Columbus and I shut down our main office in March when the governor shut down the state of Ohio. I just killed it right away. And then six months ago, we -- we provide 100 percent optionality. So, like, if you want to go into our office, you can; if you want to work from home, you can. It's 100 percent optionality. Do whatever works for you. And we've been super-successful operating at 100 percent optionality.

Wes Schaeffer:
That you - you implemented that after COVID.

After COVID, yes. We ended up not getting a really big office again. We just use this co-working space and pretty much let anyone work out of there any time they want; negotiated a deal with them where we pay per per head. So, like, every time you show up, it costs us money. And it's like pay per use negotiated that deal.

Wes Schaeffer:
Out there locally or in the cities where your people live?

Brandon Bornancin:
I believe only here locally. But ideally, we should negotiate that nationally.

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah. Because a friend of mine has a coworking space. She's got two offices. She always wants me to come in. I'm like, I'm -- I'm set at home. I'd love to support her, but it's like just driving 15 minutes there and back, to me, I wasted 30 minutes.

Brandon Bornancin:
It's like a waste of time. I get too much done -- I'm up at 4:30, 5:00am, working for an hour or two, then I'll go work out downstairs. Got this massive gym that's -- when COVID hit, I used to go to the Lifetime Fitness and then they shut that down. I'm like, fuck, this is the perfect reason to build your own killer home gym. The problem was, was I needed to move to get space to get the killer gym. So we did that and then the -- then the gym.

Wes Schaeffer:
I hope you didn't get your wife a Peloton because then she'd get mad at you and divorce you because that's like, I guess a sexist thing.

Brandon Bornancin:
I did not get her a Peleton. She's building a meditation Pilates studio. She's big into yoga and Pilates. I don't know anything about either, but yeah, she loves it.

Wes Schaeffer:
I know they're both harder than they look.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah. Yeah. Every time I try it after about five minutes, I'm like, I can't focus or concentrate on this, I gotta go.

Wes Schaeffer:
It's all hard, man.

Brandon Bornancin:
And that was the deal though. It was, hey, if you want your golf simulator, then I got to get the yoga studio. I'm like, done deal, easy.

Wes Schaeffer:
Easy peasy, very cool. All right, man. So you've got some books, we're going to link to that, and everything, it's just off your website, right? Seamless.AI.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah. So go to Seamless.AI. You could join my newsletter. I do daily sales, secret strategies, tips, playbooks to help you make more money today. You also, when you join Seamless for free, get hundreds of leads. We get emails, cell phones, direct calls for anyone in the world at Seamless.AI. And then yeah, we've got three books, number one bestsellers. Whatever It Takes is my newest book, All the Habits to Transform Your Business Relationships and Life.

Brandon Bornancin:
So March, when I had to shut down my office, when the governor shut down the state of Ohio, I wrote this book in 22 days. So instead of going to Lifetime Fitness from 5:00 to 7:00am, I wrote 10, 20 pages a day on all of this -- the habits that I wanted anyone I knew to master, to get through COVID to maximize their success, to survive and thrive during this crazy time. And it's been awesome. Like, I was kind of forced to knock that one out sooner than I thought. But all of the habits that I've built and learned from being a serial entrepreneur salesperson, going from zero to $100 million in sales to eight-figure companies; losing everything, lose, losing -- tons of tragedy, tons of success, and getting through it all to try to make something out of this crazy world. All of the habits are in that book. Jeff Blount calls it the most inspiring business book of the year. So pick it up on Amazon. I know about you, Wes; you self-publish everything. I won't let a publisher touch any of my stuff, you know.

Wes Schaeffer:
Well, I'm just too -- I don't know, renegade. I don't know. You can write a book and they tell you everything. Oh yeah. Okay, well, 18 months, two years from now we'll -- we'll -- we'll publish it and -- I don't know. I'll probably do one. It does give you a little different credibility, but it's like every day that goes by I think it gives you less credit, it's less impactful, you know, to have a publisher versus do it on your own. So I don't know.

Brandon Bornancin:
Hundred percent. Well, the thing that I -- why did it self publish with the team? It's like, if this book can fundamentally change someone's life and you tell me it's got to wait two years?

Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon Bornancin:
Like, that goes against everything. We write books to help change people's lives..

And then lastly, yeah, you can pick up Sales Secrets and Seven-figure Social Selling, they're right here, on Amazon as well. Wes was in sales secrets. He shared his sales secret, which is awesome. Check it out. Pick it up. Over 100 experts interviewed. Shit. Six hundred pages, thousand secrets; people like Wes and everyone in the book.

Wes Schaeffer:
Well, and you said, just that download, that one chapter of mine, like, broke all your servers, right? You had to get like a whole new data center, redundant power.

Brandon Bornancin:
Hundred percent.

Wes Schaeffer:
I mean, you had to rebuild it. It was like riots. I mean, I'm sorry. I mean, but I told you, it's always going to be good, but yeah, okay.

Brandon Bornancin:
You gave me the warning.

Wes Schaeffer:
Very nice. And so why the name Seamless? Why -- give me -- give me the lowdown on that and why ".AI"? Artificial intelligence; makes sense.

Brandon Bornancin:
But it's always difficult to connect with people. It's like everything is a pain in the ass, right? And it's just got to be like instant, right>? Like searching on Google is easy, it's quick, it's, it's instant. I'm like dude, it's got to just be Seamless. The ability to find someone that you want to connect with and instantly connect with them like no bullshit. Doesn't matter where you're from, your background, your net worth, like you can find and connect with anyone in the world instantly by getting their emails and phone numbers. So Seamless, just the perfect branding for it. The only tricky part was Seamless, the food company owns Seamless.com. So I tried to buy it from them. And they're like, that's our whole company name. So I'm like, okay, we're Seamless.AI, thank you so much.

Wes Schaeffer:
Well, and .AI makes sense, but is .AI like Antigua or something?

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, yeah. It's Anguilla.

Wes Schaeffer:
Oh, yeah.

Brandon Bornancin:
It's like a Caribbean country. I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone. I don't even know where that's at.

Wes Schaeffer:
That's cool. I mean, but because AI is a part of it, so it makes sense.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah, yeah.

Wes Schaeffer:
That's cool. All right, Brandon, stay warm, my brother. Thanks for coming on the show.

Brandon Bornancin:
Yeah. Thanks so much, Wes, for having me. Audience, would love to connect with you on Seamless and feel free to follow me, connect on LinkedIn, would love to stay in touch.

Wes Schaeffer:
All right, man. Have a great day.

Brandon Bornancin:
You too.

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