Vincenzo Guzzo, CEO of Cinémas Guzzo | From Movie Theatre Magnate to Dragon's Den Investor

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Today my guest is Vincenzo Guzo, aka Mr Sunshine. He's an entrepreneur, philanthropist, television personality. He serves as CEO of Cinema Guzo, a group Guzo construction, Guzo medical, Guzo hospitality. He also has a chain of pizzerias and Montreal. He has a foundation, the Guzo family foundation. He was a recipient of Queen Elizabeth II, Diamond Jubilee Medal. He was knighted by the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He's a member of the Order of Malta. He was also an investor and a dragon on Dragon's Den. He has built an empire across multiple industries. We spoke about his early days as a single child building one cinema from Cinema Guzo into the largest private cinema movie chain. We spoke about how he diversified, got into construction, got into real estate, got into medical hospitality, all these different businesses that he's built successfully. We spoke about risk. We spoke about him navigating the pandemic things he had to do, doubling down the opportunity of the pandemic. Then we spoke about some political things, some things that he has observed through the two years that we've navigated this pandemic with the political environment, decisions made, people that have been making the decisions. He had one point was even thinking about going into politics and we spoke about how politics and business sometimes could be married up and why some people that are excellent in business maybe would make incredible politicians and some reasoning behind that, some logic behind that. Then we finally spoke about business marketing for brick and mortar, how he navigated the marketing for brick and mortar through the pandemic, how he drives conversions in his actual movie theaters, how he measures conversions and add dollars spent from online offline marketing, some of the most successful marketing tactics that he's used in his theaters to scale them to again the largest private movie cinema organization in Canada. So some great business ideas, some great business conversation, entrepreneurship, insights, marketing ideas for brick and mortar. We covered a whole gamut of things. Let's jump right into it. This is Benchenzo Guzo, serial entrepreneur and dragon. Well, so I'm Canadian. I'm born in Montreal. Born, raised in Montreal, went to school, London, Ontario, my first university degree in economics and then came back to law school. I was actually planning on moving to New York and being a Harvey Spector before a Harvey Spector even existed. The guy with the relationship issues and childhood issues and so forth. I'm an only child so God knows I have issues if I want to have them. But I guess the old man had a different plan and he said, look, give me a year. Let me, you know, come with me in the movie business, see what you think of it and so forth and so forth. And then I realized that, hey, you know, within a few months, I realized there was more litigation for me in the movie business than there was probably in New York City, you know, getting other people's problems. And then from running movie theaters, you know, we open construction division to build our own theaters and then to build our own real estate from construction. We went into owning real estate and so forth and so forth. And, you know, through this pandemic, if anything, you know, we bought another shopping mall that we have a theater in and we're looking at other real estate. I mean, I would tell you today, you know, if we look at the books, most of the value of, you know, the whole Gutsal family comes from the real estate division, the movie theater, you know, when they work and which they haven't done in the last 24 months that much. But when they do work, they're a great source of cash flow for, you know, the real estate division and so forth and so forth. And so from there, we've gone into the restaurant business and now we're going to go into the retail food business. I mean, you know, me being on dragons then on CBC's dragons, then, you know, there's a great opportunity to bump into up and coming entrepreneurs and help them expand their business, but also be part of that success and also have a, you know, share of the equity and so forth. You know, one of the, one of the, I guess, one of the most fun deals I did was with Rudy Ladd, which is a T-shirt company, but then, you know, there's a hidden gem in there, which is called the Good Pantry, which the pandemic has done everything to prevent us from launching that even bigger than it is. But, you know, that's a revolutionary icing product, which, you know, you'll see if you follow me on Instagram, you'll see I often post or repost some of their stuff. But that's, I suspect that, that's going to end up being a 50, 60 million dollar company within the next 12 to 24 month. Amazing. And all this came from, it's funny. I've seen this play a few times actually, what you did with your theaters and then you moved into real estate. This is like the traditional McDonald's play and I've seen it a few other times where you actually have a great business. So, I'm still curious about the movie industry and how you built that up, like, you know, you probably started with one theater and now I think you're the largest independent movie theater owner. So, you're not competing with like the, you're not like the AMC's, but you're the largest independent, right? Well, that's right. So, by independent, what it really means is we're not a publicly held company. We're one of, you know, a homegrown theater circuit, right? So, AMC is a monster, so it's in a world, so it's in a black, so on a, on a, all, all, all types, you know, mixed in. We're Canada's third largest movie theater operator. We're actually Canada's privately, largest privately owned Canadian owned operator. I believe the last time I checked in North America, we were either 25 or 26th in size. So, you know, we gradually grew it from a one-screen complex to a three-screen complex to a multiple-screen complex and then, you know, in 1998 is when we said, okay, let's, let's try and take this over. Our complexes are often associated to, you know, the AMC complexes because they are these large 18, 16, 14, 12-screen complexes. The big difference between our complexes and I'd say other people's complexes, while food is, you know, a cornerstone of the business, you know, popcorn, pop and so forth, we chose in 1998 not to go with the extended restaurant experience, but we chose to go with the entertainment experience, meaning what you see today in the U.S., where you'll have a 90,000 square foot 10-screen complex, but there's 50,000 square feet that's really amusement space. So, we did that, but we didn't, you know, so our entertainment section is roughly 15, 20,000 square feet out of a 40 or 60,000 square feet footprint. So, that's where the difference is, we felt you can eat anywhere, but you really can't have an entertainment arcade experience or virtual reality experience anywhere, just because cities were shutting down the whole amusement sector, you know, they've always associated those sectors to negativity, they didn't want them near schools and so forth in Canada at least. I know in the U.S., it's a little different. We now have redemption that, you know, has appeared in Quebec for the first time in a lifetime. I mean, it's probably the last territory in North America that allowed for redemption. So, we expect that. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? For redemption is when you actually, where you can actually play and make get back points for, oh, and generally you play or so forth and then you can exchange that for prizes or for movie admissions or for concessions stand products, which is something Quebec was never liked. I mean, they associated too much to gambling, so now they've accepted it, so we're going to head that way. And so, we still believe that going to the movies is more than just, you know, watching a movie. It's actually an outing, so we have full-fledged bumper cars, we have full-fledged marigold rounds in our theaters, you know, everything to try and let. So, in other words, you don't have to go to a six flags or to an amusement park, you can actually go to the theater. I'm not sure. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode Athletic Greens. Now, I'm super happy that I partnered with Athletic Greens because I literally used them every single day. Now, I've known about Athletic Greens for a little bit only because I tried them about two years ago, way before they decided to sponsor the show. And I noticed that in winters, when I didn't take Athletic Greens, I would get sick as a dog when I did take Athletic Greens, I wouldn't get sick at all. So, it turns out that when you take one scoop of Athletic Greens, you're taking an absorbing 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole food source, superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens. So, this is incredible for your immune system. And the special blend of all of these ingredient supports your gut health, your nervous system, your immune system, your energy, your recovery, your focus, your agent. So, I take it one scoop every single morning. It's lifestyle-friendly, meaning whether or not you eat keto, paleo, vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free. It's going to fit that diet, which is important for me because sometimes I like to go a little bit low carb. If you're already taking a multivitamin, this can completely replace that. It's important to choose a high-quality vitamin with ingredients that your body will actually absorb. Athletic Greens definitely takes care of that. And it's way cheaper than actually getting all the different vitamins, supplements, ingredients if you're going to buy them separately. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is giving you a free one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com slash success. That's right. That's a special URL they put together just for success story podcast listeners. Again, that is athleticgreens.com slash success to take ownership of your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. I mean, that's where people are going. They're going for entertainment. Actually, this is a great point because through pandemic, obviously, this is an elephant in the room for especially for your business. This is a major thing that impacted you, of course. Let's talk about the industry. Let's talk about how it's evolved. Let's talk about some of the things that you've had to navigate. Let's talk about the fact that that social component that you've built up that you doubled down on, like previous to the pandemic and then doubled down on again during the pandemic. Let's talk about that because I think that future of movie feeders, what you've done, what you believe, what you've predicted is all so relevant to somebody who is trying to navigate where they're going to take their business in the future. How to future proof, how to figure out if this should ever happen again, what do I do with the brick and mortar? You have a playbook for what you did over the past two years, which I think is exceptional. I'd love for you to break it down and just talk about that. Yeah, well, you know, look, one of the things, you know, pre-pandemic, I was a brick and mortar guy. I didn't, you know, I always love to say online shopping is convenient, but it's not sexy versus, you know, brick and mortar is sexy. There's an appeal to it. There's an experience side to it. And I remember Michelle Romano telling me, what do you mean by online is not sexy? And I said, well, think about how most people are going shopping, right? They're in their dirty t-shirt and probably a pair of, of either pajamas or boxes, short, there's turned around one time too many. And they're in their room and so forth. So the fact of the matter is we had started the construction of a new theater, the fourth, COVID, and we opened it on the 17th of December this year, only to see it close down three days later. So, you know, that's a $12 million investment on our part in the middle of COVID, which was a cash flow draining experience. But at the end of the day, that is what I think a lot of people who are successful in a crisis period is they will live on a string-shoe budget because they know investing during the crisis is when, you know, when times are cheapest to do it, and then it's after the pandemic that everything explodes, right? So, for example, you know, we have real estate that now we're going to not build a theater on and we're actually going to build some industrial space on it because industrial has become so hot. And we know we have anywhere between 24 and 36 months to make that happen to take advantage of the hotness of, you know, of industrial space. So, it's illusionary to believe, you know, in everybody thought at the beginning of the pandemic that this was the nail in the coffin, you know, for movie theaters, right? People were going to get used to staying home and people were going to get used to streaming stuff and so forth. You know, I think everybody's got to realize that not everybody lives in a 14,000 square foot home. Nobody lives in a mansion by the sea in Barbados, right? Not not everybody does that. And so, the average person lives in a 600 to a thousand square foot home. They don't have room for live theater space. They don't have room for a streaming, you know, room that's dedicated to streaming. And the truth of the matter is, if I work 9 to 5 in an office, the last thing I want to do is recoup myself up and close myself up again, you know, when I go home. And vice versa, if there is a reality that we will be, you know, I guess, working from home more, well, if I'm going to work from home 9 to 5, then the last thing I want to do is entertain myself from 5 to 12. Again, at home, right? I mean, 5 feet that way, you know what I mean? That's right. I mean, people need to. And so, in a very awkward way, when we close down the first time for roughly, I'd say three months, when theaters reopened, the go back to the theaters wasn't as strong. And in fact, and that worried a lot of bankers and a worried a lot of people in the industry. But in reality, it was just a question of analyzing what was going on, properly, right? And so, we reopened in, I would say July 2020, and business opened at 5, 10%. And so, everybody's saying, oh, my God, what's going on? Well, you know, California was still locked down. New York was still locked down. Those two markets represent 20% of the North American market. Studios were not releasing their hot, you know, AA rated movies. So, I mean, why would people go to the movies, right? And three months is a vacation. Well, what happened after that is when they re-closed theaters in October, and we didn't open to May of 2021. Well, now you're talking about eight months. Now, eight months, as I like to say, is a jail sentence, right? And nothing better to appreciate freedom than to go to jail for eight months. And so, I think when we reopened in June, it took three weeks for us to be back at 70, 80, 90% of business. And if it wasn't for, you know, our government asking for vaccine passports and re-confusing the play game or the playbook sometime in early September, I think business would have been back to 100% already. In fact, when we opened our new theater on September, on December, sorry, 17, with Spider-Man, that weekend, we were at 108% of regular business of 2019. So, the business was back. And I think the fact that people missed going to the movies and the fact that most people got through every single possible episode of whatever was worth watching on Netflix or whatever other platform exists out there, I think everybody said, hey, you know what, enough is enough. I mean, we need to socialize whether it's socializing in a distance way, in a distancing way, right? And going to the movies, as I will always say to the public health authorities, is socializing with dispensation before dispensation was even a word, or even before we made it a word in our vocabulary that everybody knew, right? So, you go to the movies, you sit down in a dark room, you don't sit next to anybody unless you're forced to, unless you got 100% full auditorium, everybody's, like, you know, I was like to say, I walk into a 300-seat auditorium and if there's 50 people there and anybody comes and sit right next to me, he's going to get a stare and I'm going to look at him and say, seriously, you have nowhere else to sit. 100%. The guy has something wrong with him if he does. That's great. It's not nothing to do with COVID, right? So, I think social distancing is just the element that was always there in movie-going experience. And so, we've seen it. We re-open theaters, you know, on the 11th of, I'm not sorry, on the 8th of February. Yeah. And I mean, we didn't have any new movies, all the movies were all the Christmas movies we never got to play and we ended up at about 70% of business. That's all bad. At a season? Older movies. Yeah. That's right. You know, and like I said, it's at a time where it's traditionally, you know, Q1 is traditionally the weakest Q of the year. So, that we're back to 80% with, you know, government authorities still always talking with these subliminals and these these underlying threats and fear factor and fear mongoling and everything. It's just insane, right? I mean, I think everybody's had enough of our politicians and I think we're ready to move on with or without them as I like to say. How did you? Okay. Is there anything that you learned with your business? Anything you tried differently, anything that you optimized and proved, did differently, launched new projects, like during COVID that you were just like, let me just try this. Let me see if this is going to keep us afloat. Even if movies don't open for the next five years, I still have another thing to go down or another path to go down. Anything you tried that stuck? Well, we never, look, we never had the, we never believed that the closed down, the shutdowns were going to last longer than, you know, then they, in fact, they've lasted longer than we had ever predicted, right? That's that's the truth of the matter. Most people would be with you there. Yeah. So, you know, we did launch our own popcorn line or own concession line of chocolates. You know, part of that is for retail. Part of it was for our theaters. You know, we worked a lot on stuff that we worked part time on. All of a sudden, it became, you know, full time work on, right? So, I suspect 2022 and 2023 will be a big year for us on the retail food side. There's a whole bunch of projects coming out of dragons then that, you know, we, we didn't have that much time to work on, but now we did, right? Because all of a sudden, the movie theater wasn't taking 24 hours of our time and our way of thinking. We also took a chance, like I said, on buying other real state that was, you know, retail based and entertainment based. And so, we expect to see, you know, fruititions from that come up. So, you know, the truth of the matter is if you're in a business that you believe in, you know, I guess you double down on it. If you were in a business that you knew was a sort of a temporary, well, that means you should have already planned, you know, to have gone in something else, right? Invested in something else, which wasn't necessarily our case. I think in our case, when we invested in the restaurant business, when we invested in the food service business, it was more of a complimentary business and then it became the forefront of our business. Now, I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode, Grin. Now, Grin is the number one creator management platform, helping e-commerce brands connect with their audience through the power of creator partnerships. Now, influencer marketing, it's easy to get lost in the spreadsheets and busy work, coming through a messy web of communications, looking for content, wondering about campaigns. Are they delivering where the data points? Have you shipped the creative yet? Have you shipped the product yet? Have they billed? Have they invoiced all of the headache that comes with managing creators and influencers? That's where Grin comes in. So, Grin is an all-in-one software that allows you to treat your creators like your brand revolves around them, even though you're actually saving yourself a ton of headache. Grin helps you find and recruit the perfect ambassadors for your brand, streamlines of communication process, collects all the creator content in one spot, tracks ROI in real time so you can create smarter campaigns that drive sales. With Grin, one person can do the work of an entire team. 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That's right. That's how you got into construction. That's how you got into real estate. That's how you got into owning shopping centers and commercial real estate. You said this before and I want you to sort of build out on this but I think it's a really smart point. When there is this uncertainty, when there's so much during a crisis for example, that's opportunity and that's opportunity and you took it. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about mindset. Talk to me about your mistakes. We've made mistakes like everybody else. I mean, had I known this pandemic was going to last as long as it was going to last, I mean, I would have gone into medical supply business. I mean, for sure. It was a no-brainer. The problem is, I think a lot of people got laid into that game and it blew up differently because I don't think anybody thought this was going to last this long. If anything has really come out of this pandemic is how better of a job we all need to do when it comes to electing our public officials. I mean, it's a joke. I mean, you know, we've been lied to. We've been, you know, not necessarily and I want to correct this because while we've been lied to, I don't think we've been lied to because there's a big conspiracy, a big reset. Any of that, you know, meeting other minds or the illuminatis that you know decided to conquer the world and hear that crap. I mean, I know offense to the politicians. I know, but, you know, I know way too many politicians and none of them have the IQ to have ever come up with a conspiracy theory. You know, I've always said the same shit. It's like, you know, we got to do, you know, we got to do, we got to find, we got to have maximum ages, force retirement and we got to have, we got to have better salaries and incentives to go into politics. You have all the guys that go to SF going into politics. I don't know how the hell we're going to do it, but that's what I think we have to do. Look, today I was giving an interview and somebody said to me that we needed to invest more in the, in the, in the educational space, you know, the, the, the reactors of all of the universities in Canada got together and are complaining to both Ottawa and their provincial governments that they need better funding. And I said, well, you know, while we're on the subject, I'd like to know why a reactor of a university that makes $800,000 between salary and expenses in a, in a premium of a province or the prime minister of a, a Canada only makes $250,000, right? I mean, it doesn't, doesn't give us very much incentive to attract the best talent possible in politics when we're paying such measly dollars. And, and, and look, you know, I'm all for, you got to do it for the cause. But if you really want to attract the best talent, start making it worthwhile for everybody to forget their private sector jobs at half a million dollars and at a million dollars and start looking at the private sector and the public sector. And then you'll get better results. I mean, it, you know, look, it was a bit of a, and I'll use the word even though, you know, it may be beeped out. I mean, it was a bit of a shit show where, you know, decisions were made. I mean, we have public health experts being paid $300,000 and we weren't listening to them because we felt that the general public wasn't going to understand, right? So in all intents and purposes, we need to remember that the people we elected didn't even have respect enough for us to actually tell us what was going on or not going on. And at the end of the day, if you, if you really look at it in Quebec, at least, it's a, it's a, it's a health care issue. It's more, our hospitals could not take the flow of people falling sick. But it's 30 years that, that were over capacity in our, in our hospitals. And why we, why have we done anything about it? And then we have a premier here who 30 years ago was a minister of health and he seemed as confused as anybody else, right? So I think ultimately, you know, we should, and I think while I don't want to, you know, throw too many flowers to the, to the trucking protest in Ottawa, you know, I think, I think they did light up a flame. And I think that, you know, there's a bit of a, how can I say? I think there's a reminder there that people have a breaking point. You know, if there's anything we can learn is that enough is enough. We can push only so much until people break. And what's sad is that, you know, I would only like for people to understand that, you know, protesting in Ottawa is great. But you understand, there's people that live there. And the politicians, we were trying to annoy, or the politicians, we were trying to get their awareness. They weren't even at work. They were hiding, you know, our prime minister was hiding somewhere in one of his country places. You know, some were, living beside the noise, yeah. That's right. They were living beside the noise. And I think we, that we need to understand that when every time we protest, while we are protesting for a great cause, I think somewhere along the way, we are creating inconveniences for people. And eventually, like every, you know, like every government, you know, that goes too far, even protests just happen to go too far at a certain point. And so far. So, you know, I think we need to remember that everybody has a breaking point. So you're obviously, you know, you're the, you're the successful business leader. I've seen this with, with you and with Kevin O'Leary at 1.2, you know, just to quote, to reference another, another Shark Tank Dragon, then person, you were both looking at politics. You were looking at politics. You're both looking at conservative leadership and running. Why does that not happen? Why did not happen for you? Why did you not make that transition? I think I haven't made the transition yet for the simple reason that I, you know, maybe I feel that I haven't done everything I need to do yet on a, on a private sector level, but also because, you know, I think there's, there's, there's a time and place for private sector people to go into politics, right? And this time around, I know that I didn't say it the first time around in 2019 and 2020, but this time around, I had the opportunity to say it, which was, you know, the first thing that happens when somebody like me throws his name in the, you know, in the ring is, but he's got no political experience. Well, after two years of COVID, I can say, are we really looking for somebody with political experience? Really? After the two years of political experience that we've had is what we're looking for, another politician to run the country, really? If that's what it is, I mean, then we, then it is true that we just never learned, like, or we like the abuse as a, as a general population, we just like to be abused, right? And I think that somewhere along the way, you know, people need to realize that when we're putting aside the money we could make in the private sector and willing to go into politics, it isn't because we only think we could do better. It's because I think we can do better for everybody. And you know, at the end of the day, you know, you can think what you want, a Kevin O'Liri, you have to remember that Kevin O'Liri is, as much as as Shark Tank or Dragon's Den is a reality show, you know, there is a bit of dramatization there, right? So when he's, when he says he's going to squash you like a cockroach, it may not be what you want to hear from a future politician, but you have to remember that that's a show and there's got to be some soap opera side to it. Yeah, some dramatics to it, right? And so, and I mean, but ultimately people need to understand that, you know, we're business people and business people cannot be mavericks and and and and renegades and also be bipolar and crazy. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, why is it that in the private sector, we shine in our employees, you know, get great salaries and some of our employees become our partners through stock options, et cetera, et cetera. Why couldn't the people benefit from that? Right? I think that the biggest people blocking successful business people from going into politics isn't the general population. I think it's the politicians, you know, and I'll call and career politicians. I mean, you know, I have, you know, the first guy who announced his, you know, his candidacy in the latest conservative leadership race is somebody who's never had a job apart from being a politician, right? So it's very hard for me to explain to that person what it is to be a business person. When he's got no empathy, he doesn't, he doesn't know what it's really like to be a business person. And he can surround himself with the people he wants. You know, there's nothing better than feeling the pain yourself. And and and if only we can put, you know, the truth of the matter is, if only somebody could really put the sentiment of the pain that entrepreneurs went through during COVID. I mean, a lot of people don't realize that I may have lost, you know, I posted this recently on Instagram. I said, I said the post said something like politicians didn't save our lives. They actually wasted two years of it. You know, in other words, there was no life to be so to be safe. I mean, the people who, you know, the people who didn't die, it's not because the politicians did a great job. It's because the circumstances just didn't call for those people to die because ultimately our system wasn't in place. We look, you know, I mean, when when COVID started, we had pass-dated medical supply. It's hard to believe that we had millions of dollars of outdated, expired medical supply. So it's as if we never even saw this one coming, right? And then somebody's going to say, but how, how would you have seen it coming? Well, look, for one thing, we always have a float. We always, you know, expect the unexpected. It's just, yeah, I mean, you know, did we expect a nuclear war if we can compare it to that on a medical sector? No. But then again, that's not my sector. So I wasn't supposed to be privy to that and be aware of that. But, you know, I think ultimately what business people need to face on a regular basis is adversity every day. Politicians don't. And so, you know, if I had to choose an elected official for the future, I would not choose a peace time president or prime minister. I would try and elect somebody who's a wartime prime minister or a wartime president because if you can govern during a crisis of a war, you can govern during peace. It's easy, right? And just so you realize, I mean, the analogy that I've done is basically tells you something. If you look at the United States of America, every president who has had wartime experience when they became president never went to war. They managed whatever they did not to go to war because they knew the casualties of a war. Every president who has taken us to war was one that never saw a day of war. And so for them, there was no pain. It wasn't their pain. Maybe the cost of doing business call it, right? Business people go through regularly wartime pain, right? I mean, bankers aren't happy with business people these days. If it wasn't for potential PR disasters, most banks would have called back a lot of loans and a lot of business people would be in trouble today. You were negotiating some of your buildings, right? You were negotiating, you were calling people. I heard, you know, you put a stop payment on everything. You were stopping the payments going through like, and it's sad that only the only reason why they negotiated was because of a PR disaster, but that's it is what it is. I'm a landlord and I had to, you know, the expression is put some water in my wine or dilute my by my alcohol because I knew that if I was too strong and too hard on the people, they would go belly up and that didn't serve me as a businessman. It didn't serve the property well to see people, you know, close businesses there. It did not inspire anybody. And what did it give me to put somebody into bankruptcy, right? But not everybody sees it that way. Some people, you know, and unfortunately, I have to live with the fact that being on dragons, then, and sometimes being hard-nosed on the show, you know, some people think, oh, you know, I'm going to show him, you know, and so, you know, we bought a heads and let me tell you, when I bought a heads, I bought a heads and then there's no reason for me to accept to be bullied in any way. But, you know, that experience, that reality that we went through for the last 24 months, prepares people. It prepares you for the hardship. It prepares you for the empathy. I don't know what our politicians did during two years, right? I mean, I have, we have opposition politicians who wrote books, you know, during the two months, two years, sorry, and they released memoirs. I don't know what the hell you're releasing a memoir in the middle of a pandemic. Others got their full salary. I mean, it's easy to be in politics and get your full salary and tell people we're almost out of this. And then it lasts another 18 months, right? So, you know, it's sad that, you know, sometimes guys like I or guys like, you know, Kevin get judged for a bit of a character we play sometimes on reality TV, but at the end of the day, I mean, you know, I've always said that some countries don't appreciate their own success stories, but those success stories are appreciated elsewhere, right? When you have movie producers and directors leaving Quebec and going to Hollywood and being success stories, but yet, you know, we weren't willing to invest in and in them says a lot about, you know, the knowledge and the intelligence of some of our politicians. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode, Trade Coffee. Now, I'm a coffee lover and I just found out a really unnerving stat and fact about coffee. 90% of coffee that you buy from a grocery store is actually stale. You heard that right. It blew my mind. 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That's drinktrade.com slash success story, get $20 off your first three bags. I'm curious about, I'm curious about Dragon's Den too. I need to understand your story and how you got there because there's a funny story behind that as well because you don't strike me as somebody who would just jump on TV and look for the spotlight. You know, you've built up the infrastructure, you've built up the screens, you haven't been chasing after the fame. So tell me the story about Dragon's Den. What happened there? Well, you know, I mean, I'm a character, right? So, you know, I was always a character. You're fun to talk to. Yeah. You know, I'm the kind of guy that, you know, because I'm an only child and because, you know, I have my issues like Harvey Spector had, you know, I always debated my stuff. And I knew that, you know, some debates were better had publicly than, than in private. And so that opened up the door to Dragon's Den wanting a character. They needed somebody who gave a different perspective than, you know, the traditional. And so, you know, it's been, it was an ongoing discussion. You know, they wanted a certain point. There was discussions in me being on the French Canadian Dragon's Den. And I said, well, I don't know if French Canadians, you know, like my English humor once in a while. And then when I got on the English Dragon's Den, it's, I don't know if they like my quirky Italian humor sometimes, right? So it is what it is. But I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, you know, I'm a, I'm a numbers guy. I mean, you know, it was funny. You know, as, so you know, I got on Dragons Den in 2013. So it was season, season 13 in 2018. And so over the years, you get to know the Dragons a little better. And it was funny because last year, during one of the pitches, man, jeet was sort of looking over and looking at what I was writing. And I looked at it and says, what the, what are you writing? And it's about the numbers. And she says, you know, it's unbelievable. How quickly you come to the numbers and how you can easily validate, you know, the contradiction or or the validity of the numbers, the people. And that's one of the, you know, I always like to say that when you're dyslexic, you're weak and one thing, but other senses develop quicker. And the numbers one got developed very quickly. So I can usually come up to the numbers and smell somebody who doesn't know their numbers really quickly, right? And so I think that, you know, every show needs that kind of a person. So we need, you know, the bitchiness of, and I'm using bitchy with a small B of, you know, man, jeet, you need sometimes the toughness of Michelle, you know, and so forth. So they were looking for somebody who just said it as it was, right? And every once in a while, who make them a politically correct mistake, you know, I don't know if you remember there was one of the bitches where Lane swinging a baseball bat with a towel on it. And they said, no, you got to swing the bat like, you know, this way. And I'm trying to, and he says, why don't you come and show me and say, look, I don't have to show you nothing. I'm a thine. I know to swing a bat trust me on this one. So, you know, it's scandalized. Everybody's, oh my god. Then you just like, oh, what a stereotype call there, right? But let's be honest. I mean, you know, I'm a thine origin. So I'm allowed to make a thine jokes. Okay. The same way Jewish people are allowed to make Jewish jokes and nobody else is allowed to. I can make a thine jokes. That's it. And so I don't really, because of my independence, I guess, in my own life, I really don't feel I owe that political correctness that much. So I become a funny character. You know, I was chased to be on dragons then because of the fact that I didn't hold anything back. You know, in the nice thing my concern was when I got onto dragons and my concern was that I used to use the F word way too often. And I said, you guys are never going to be able to get a full sentence out of me without the F word in this. It's okay. It's an edited show. We'll cut it out. We'll find a way. But over time, I got used to not using the F word all the time. And so it actually made me a more polite person, I guess. Do you? Now, when you you mentioned you're a numbers guy and that's important, obviously, but when you work with businesses, what do you look for in entrepreneurs? Is it because I know that people are numbers focused, but they're also founder focused too. So a lot of people invest in the founding team, even if they haven't quite figured it out yet, they feel like the right people are going to get it done. So what do you look for? I actually look for somebody, you know, I always say to people, partnerships are business partnerships are like a marriage. So you've got to have the same, you know, the same goals in life, the same vision in life. You can't be just about the numbers. And sometimes the numbers issue is more, you know, when I, when I sometimes realize the numbers don't match, it's more to make the person realize, okay, you realize you're losing money, right? Like because everybody comes to it then and tries to say, oh, you know, we make lots of money, but the problem is when you do the math, you're negative. Now why you're negative? Maybe just because you haven't applied the energy at the right place, right? I mean, the cost of goods may be off because of various reasons or et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of people don't do the accounting properly in the sense of if you're reinvesting and basically capitalizing expenditures, you'll actually make money on an accounting level, but you still have a cash flow burn. And that's okay, because all businesses need to reinvest and so forth and so forth. So at the end of the day, I mean, what's most important to me is is the person who I'm going to invest with going to be somebody that the marriage, the business marriage can last. Where am I going to just be in a short term relationship, which is we got different visions of life, right? I mean, if somebody sees my presence in their life as a business partner, just as the guy who's going to throw money to it, I don't, I'm not a guy who likes to just throw money at a deal. I actually like to go in, try and help the management team, try and see how they can restructure and how they can be lean. I mean, the worst, the worst deals or the deals that I have the hardest time with are the, you know, the tech deals, right? Because they're the ones who have $25,000 a burn rate per month. And I really don't know what they've done. And I try and figure it out. And many times, I look at Michelle and sort of try and gauge her interest in it and say, like, this isn't make any sense, right? I mean, just I don't get it. And we see it. The hardest thing we have, you know, in our business is selling online, right? When we look and try and promote online, yeah, I mean, I can spend the money. But how do I actually trace it back from spending the money to an actual sale, right? When you spend it online and when somebody walks in your store, you're saying it's always about the walks in your movie. I got it. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Because at the end of the day, my businesses are brick and mortar. Yeah, right? So it's fine that I promoted something. But how do I get, you know, how can I validate that actually that $50,000 ad purchase on Google or whatever? How do you do that? You know, how do you do that? Well, little, but that's the biggest problem we have on a continuous basis. So what we need to do every time is try and compare one, you know, movie to another movie. And then we got to try and find the same type of movie, right? Try and generate, you know, so for example, we know that when we, we went out and said, we'll do Chippy Tuesday every day for the healthcare workers. So we saw the organic growth of the ad. We saw that, you know, and now we can actually quantify it because we know we see how many seven dollar, you know, healthcare worker admissions we have. So we can actually monitor that, right? But if you don't create a distinction, it becomes very complicated in our business, right? So unless I can track back either a coupon or something, it becomes very, very complicated. So the tech side of the business is always very hard for me to evaluate. But you know, I'm part of a, you know, I'm partners in a company called AutoPromo, which uses text messaging couponing. And you know, so I use it for my theaters and I try and push it to try and increase the data that we have and try and find a way to better, you know, so for example, we use AutoPromo for the theater opening and to give away invitations to come to the theater opening. The problem was we had a really hard time even geo locating or geo blocking, who were we giving the coupons to because 514, 514. So that's Montreal, greater Montreal when it comes to cell phones. How do I know I'm giving it to a specific area, right? Those are all the issues that we have with the tech. So sometimes I need to feel that the founder isn't only looking for a quick building cell or, or, or, you know, I'm building a technology which is going to be bought out, you know, and then I'm out of the business, right? But they are so, but that that founder is so emotionally involved in the problem that they're solving that they're going to figure out a way to fix it. Actually, that's right. We got it. We got to connect offline because I do know a guy that I had on this show that's building a piece of tech that sits in Wi-Fi routers in a brick and mortar, tracks the person back to their home computer so you can measure. I don't know if you ever heard of stuff like this, but there's stuff out there that's starting to solve that problem. Yeah. So we have, we have companies. So when we have to justify the pricing for on-screen advertising, what we, what we did is we, there's a company that monitors people coming in and out of your premises. Yeah. And they actually connect with the cell phones. So they can't really tell you who the person is, but they can tell you how many cell phones walked in and out of your premises. And so they can do the math and determine how many single users walked in and saw the ad, didn't see the ad, and, you know, and it's a more, you know, concrete way of validating the whole the whole traffic in a movie theater. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now the new year might have you thinking ahead to what you want out of your career. So when you think about your success story, what do you actually picture? Is it retiring early with a beautiful view of the skyline? Is it leaving a legacy with your name on it, or maybe it's helping influence and change some of the world's most pressing issues? Whatever it is, writing your success story starts by working smart. Because when you work smart, your success story writes itself. A HubSpot CRM platform helps your marketing campaigns work harder and smarter. With intuitive visual workflows and bot builders, you can create scalable, automated campaigns across email, social media, web, and chat. So your customers hear your messages loud and clear. Are you tired of your content not adapting to mobile, making it difficult for your customers to absorb your message? A HubSpot CRM platform optimizes your content for multiple devices so that you can reach your customers wherever they are, which is just smart. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM at HubSpot.com. If somebody was going to, do you mind if I know that I told you 45? I just want to ask a couple more questions if you're cool. If you have something, then we can get it soon. Yeah, we'll do one more. I got other meetings to go to. I know you do. You're a popular man. I know. I know. Okay. So just one last piece of advice because you've built such a huge brick and mortar franchise establishment empire, whatever you want to call it. What's the number one thing that you would tell somebody in terms of marketing, measurable marketing that you would do if you're just starting off a brick and mortar, a restaurant, a movie theater, a cafe, a gym. What's the thing that moves the needle the most for you? I would tell you that still today, when we do TV ads, it's very awkward because you know, everybody's going to someone who watches TV still, right? But believe it or not, whenever we run a TV campaign, we see an automatic reaction to that TV campaign within one week of running that campaign. So if we open a new theater and we advertise that that theater is open, we have an automatic, quicker reaction going to the theater versus online versus paid newspaper versus radio, TV is still a very, very captive audience. And I think that nothing beats a 30 second visual of what's going on. I mean, you know, when we sell movies today, studios will still invest in TV. They will not invest in newspaper, but they will in TV. So TV is still very hard. You can actually, you can actually show an experience through TV. I don't think you can feel an experience of going to a restaurant or to a theater through radio or through a static ad. Yeah, very smart. Okay. Let's close this up. I want to do rapid fire, but like, you could do rapid fire. There's just a couple of quick questions about insights at a year career. But most importantly, before I ask those questions, where do people connect with you? Where do people go check you out? What's your social? What's your website? Anywhere you want to send people? Well, I think, look, you can go on Instagram at Lord Gutsu. You can go on Twitter at Gutsu Vincenzo. I mean, I'm on Facebook. You know, I'm almost everywhere. I just signed up to TikTok. I haven't done any TikToks yet, but I mean, you know, I guess those will be coming. You know, God knows what what my people are preparing for me on that level there. And then, you know, I mean, you can reach me on LinkedIn as well. So, you know, I'm on all those platforms. Awesome. Okay. We'll link all those in the show notes. Okay. So rapid fire. The biggest challenge in your life, personal professional, professional, excuse me. What was it? How'd you overcome it? I think I still go through it. There's way more things that I'd like to do in a 24 hour span, but I haven't found a way to get 48 hours worth of work in 24 hours. All right. Good. One person, there's been many, but one person's had to impact on your life. Who was it? What did they teach you? My dad, and I think he still teaches me that, you know, no matter how crazy times are, those storms will always pass and they'll always be sunshine at the end. It's my, a book podcast, something you'd recommend people go check out. Well, I mean, your podcast for sure. Thank you, man. Do you have any others? Any of your, any other favorites? Well, you know, look, I do a lot of podcasts. One of them that I enjoyed doing the most was the the drive by with freeway Frank. I saw that one. Yeah. That was a good one. It was a long one. I had a great time doing it with him. Freeways of friends. So, you know, we know each other. But, you know, I also think one of the, one of the books that everybody should read. You know, find a condensed version and find a vulgarized version of the prints. You know, it'll teach you, you know, what politicians think they know and what you should know. Very good. I've got to tell you, 20-year-old self one thing, what would it be? Don't waste time. Start earlier. You know, I'm last question. Oh, go ahead. It's all right. Yeah, I wasted too much time sometimes on things that I shouldn't have wasted time. So, if I can get back time, I'd pay a lot of money to get back time. Last question. What does success mean to you? Success means being able to do whatever the hell makes you happy.