Devin Sizemore 4:34
Yeah, so I’ve been in consulting for a decade, through all my different business ventures. And they’ve had, it says to my profile, too, it’s had a lot of names. My friends laugh at me because the emails changed a couple of times. And so it started with this mission of I was a marketer, and I wanted to help people with sales because I realized, marketing leads were great, but people weren’t converting. Well, then I realized, well, the more I help people with sales, their processes and systems started breaking. So I shifted into a system and process kind of focused brand. And then I realized, wait a second, it’s all of it. And so we kind of expanded again. And what happened is, as I expanded, I realized, man, there’s a lot of people that are great at this. And it’s true, there are so many consultants and coaches out there that are just absolutely crushing it. And if you don’t have a coach, you need one. And I realized that the lane again that I’m best at is building this referral connection machine. And so I decided to own that space and just dominate that. And so that’s why I went through five name changes and discovery, as we figured out, what aligns with me and what aligns with my audience.
Chad Franzen 5:38
Let’s talk a little bit about your journey. I know you went to University of Nevada, Reno, you got an English and journalism degree. You’re probably what 18 or 19, when you decided to pursue that degree. What was your kind of goal at that time?
Devin Sizemore 5:52
Yeah, so I declared originally as a dual engineering major, did an internship and realize I didn’t want to sit at a desk and never talked to anyone. And that’s what the engineering firm was doing. So I jumped from super high-tech industry, to the poor journalism. And I love journalism, because I love people. So I ran my high school newspaper, I had a ton of scholarships in journalism, I did the, I can’t remember the name of it. The All Newhart scholarship went to DC. It was phenomenal. And I decided I wanted to journalism because I want to meet people, I want to hear people’s stories, I want to ask deep questions. And I realized as the journey went on, and I had that degree, it sets you up to be a great marketer, a great coach, a great salesperson, and great at building relationships. So that degree kind of laid the foundation for what I do today.
Chad Franzen 6:44
How did you realize that a lot of people in journalism school like, want to hold government officials accountable and things like that, but it sounds like yours was more, I don’t know, for lack of a better word positive or friendly?
Devin Sizemore 6:55
Yeah. So sophomore year, I ended up saying, sign me up for a job as a blog writer at an online marketing agency. That was 2009. And I went into the agency, little did I know I was the second employee hired, there was like an office admin and me. And I ended up working my way up through the company. So I ended up doing SEO, website development, social media, marketing, video marketing, you name it, anything in the online space I did, then I hired two people. And then we fulfilled and so it showed me that this skill set you learn in journalism, from copywriting, to photo to video, to interviews, and storytelling, all applies to marketing. And thankfully, I ended up down the marketing path.
Chad Franzen 7:35
Is that what you did? You did that in school. And you do that after graduating?
Devin Sizemore 7:40
I work for that agency, sophomore year to senior year. And then I launched my company right after graduating.
Chad Franzen 7:45
Tell me about that.
Devin Sizemore 7:46
Yeah, so graduated, I was at a conference with my boss then. And we were doing the typical drinks around after the conference, and they were grilling him because he was a hyper-growing all my marketing business. And I realized I knew the answer to every question, because I had implemented every system and process and so I kind of had this aha moment where I’m like, man, I love working for him. Great guy, great leader, but I should be doing this because I have all the answers. And I’m really good at sales. And so I went to him and said, hey, I know you’ve gone national, are you okay? If I go in the local market and serve our clients and start a business? He said, yes. And I started out of my apartment with one month of rent in the bank and never looked back.
Chad Franzen 8:31
So a lot of kids who were your age at the time would probably be like, well, this is gonna set me up to get a great job. You started your own business, has entrepreneurship always kind of been a part of who you are?
Devin Sizemore 8:41
Yeah, I’ve always hustled from picking up dog poop as a kid to painting the numbers on the curb tutoring in high school photography. I’ve always done something even if I’ve had a job, I’ve always done something else to make money. And I love the entrepreneurial spirit.
Chad Franzen 8:58
So how did that kind of first business end up going for you? Like, how did you exit it? Or how did you move on from it?
Devin Sizemore 9:05
Yeah, so the online marketing agency, the fun part of that story, is in year two, I went and bought the agency I worked for in college, says kind of a fun story. I ended up being the employee, and then owning my own business and then being partners with the guy was an employee for and then I ended up selling the agency to him two years later, and then transitioning into consulting and a bunch of other projects.
Chad Franzen 9:29
What did you take away from that first business ownership experience that you carried with you moving forward? Was there anything that you, you said you knew all the answers when you were not owning a business. Was there anything that you didn’t know while you were owning it?
Devin Sizemore 9:45
Oh, for sure. I mean, the list is hugely long. What I took away is, I had a great mentor and I always participated in masterminds and coaching. And that always gave me something to fall back on when you get hit because as an entrepreneur, we’re all going through the same journey and you’re gonna get punched. So you need someone to look at and say, Hey, I didn’t see that come and help, like, which way do I go? So I’d say that was a big takeaway. And then that business growth journey allowed me to lay the foundation for my strategies for growth, and kind of hone those in over that four-year period.
Chad Franzen 10:18
What is BBSI? And what did you do there?
Devin Sizemore 10:21
Yeah, so BBSI fun. That was my corporate stint. This was me trying to dabble in the corporate world, their national PEO. So they do payroll, HR workers comp. I knew nothing about any of that other than I referred business to them. And so I understood from a client standpoint, why you would use their services, I made really good friends with the area manager in Reno, he wrote the salary and opportunity on a napkin and said, hey, I want you to take it over. When I stepped in, I was one of the youngest area managers to step into that role, I ran the whole region, the best way to explain it is, you’re a franchisee without putting money in. So it’s not a true franchise, but they basically say here, this is the keys go build a market.
Chad Franzen 11:07
How long did that last?
Devin Sizemore 11:09
I was there for two and a half years.
Chad Franzen 11:11
Did you enjoy working in a corporate environment? Or were you always yearning to get back to kind of running your own show?
Devin Sizemore 11:21
Yeah, I’ll tell you what was fun about it. So there’s deeper pockets, which means you can do more on a marketing and entertainment and event front, which means you can have more impact faster. When you’re self-funding, right, you can only do it as fast as your pocketbook allows. And so that was really fun to like, really push some of these strategies and ideas with bigger backing. And it was really exciting to see that it’s exciting to see infinite support. So you can never outsell capacity with that much backing, which was really interesting, super different dynamic than owning your own business. But what I realized is I was so used to hunting, killing getting paid, that I didn’t necessarily enjoy the slow burn to get a bonus at the end of the year. And then I just love being creative, right. And so we built the systems processes, the branch ran itself. When I left, we were the fifth-highest-growing branch in the company. And I just realized man, like I want to impact people the way I want to impact them. And I want to be able to bob and weave and pivot. And then this year, we set the mission to travel 12 weeks next year, it’ll be 16 weeks and having a corporate job doesn’t necessarily play into traveling that much.
Chad Franzen 12:32
Yeah, also you’re a consultant and a speaker. Do you travel a lot for that?
Devin Sizemore 12:38
Some we’re doing so many more virtual presentations now, which is okay, like I love in person. And so yes, I love when I can get on a stage and impact a room and drive as much value as possible. I find myself last week, well, I guess this week, right? I’ve done two presentations, both virtual. And they’re still high impact, but it’s just not as engaging. So yeah, I love, love that. And then most consulting it virtually now, unless we’re doing full team dives, and then getting on-site and really getting face to face with the whole team has a bigger impact.
Chad Franzen 13:08
So when you work as a speaker, what does that look like for you? What do you talk about things like that?
Devin Sizemore 13:15
Yeah, so there’s a few topics. The first is usually the connections referral side. I’m doing a webinar next week on it. And I know this probably won’t be up. So timelines don’t make sense. But I do webinars often on kind of the 10 steps to generate more referrals. And that’s kind of my key presentation. And it’s exactly the system I teach. So I’ve always been transparent with my education, I want you to know everything. And if it helps you run, start running. If you need my help, I’m here. And obviously, we’ll probably have more impact by doing it together. And then I do a lot of sales, presentations, and then just general business. So tools to elevate your business and track and manage your business as well. There’s not much I can’t talk about I do social media presentations as well. So I really like to be able to hone the presentation to the audience with the highest impact that whoever’s hosting the event is looking for.
Chad Franzen 14:05
You’ve had kind of an interesting entrepreneurial experience relatively recently. Tell me the story of the enchanted cat cafe.
Devin Sizemore 14:13
No one has to come up. Tell me some you don’t know about me, right? So yeah, my wife and I, the end of 2021 decided we wanted to do a project together. And we wanted to test our ability to be partners in a business and partners in life. And so I had seen YouTube videos like five years ago on cat cafes, and I loved the model. I love animals in general. I love hosting people. I love coffee. So just like was a perfect social model for we want to try we visited a couple as I was sitting in there, which I do in every business I go to I’m crunching the numbers going well wait, there’s this many people in here and they’re charging 35 an hour. Oh, wait a second, like this is a viable business. And so we came back in, what was that? That was October, we signed a lease November we took over. We opened January 1, we sold July 1 of last year. So six months operating, and then we sold to an employee, super fun business model. I will never do retail again, I will just consult people who have retail businesses. But yeah, it was super fun, very impactful. And then awesome to help a young entrepreneur stepping in run that business as well.
Chad Franzen 15:28
I’ve heard of dog bars, we’ve got those kind of all over the place here where I live in Colorado, what was kind of the vibe in a cat cafe?
Devin Sizemore 15:37
Yeah, so most people that would come in would tell you that it was very, very calming. And so we have three parts of the business, we had a cafe up front that was away from the cats, coffee snacks, things you could eat, and also cat retail, which was a huge business. And then we have the cat lounge just paid by our experiencing out the cats. And when you transition from the cafe to the cat lounge, people will tell you that they just feel relief. And so what we learned about the business that was not in our business plan is that the impact it had on people is amazing. And so we would have people come in after losing animals after losing relatives. We had people who worked for CPS and some like really hard, high-stress jobs would come in on their way home from work. And they would spend an hour detoxing, and then they would go home. And so it was the part of the business that was the most meaningful. I’ll share a story, I’ll try not to cry through. But it was amazing. And I share this because there’s such hidden gems in all business. And so I walked in the cat lounge one day, there was this guy sitting in the corner by himself. I walked up to him introduce myself, again, love meeting people, right? So naturally just asked a bunch of questions. And he said, hey, I’m having a rough day. I’m here because I needed a place where I could just get away. Interesting. So I kept asking questions will come to find out. He was on the verge of very bad decisions. And so we just sat there and loved on him and had a conversation, I went back upstairs, my mom worked for me at that time, she closed the business, and he walked out and she comes up crying and goes, hey, that guy just said that. We saved his life. And we gave him a happy spot. So like, that’s the impact of that business and business in general. And I have dozens of stories like that from that business, and they still happen today.
Chad Franzen 17:29
Amazing. So had you worked in that kind of environment, I mean, like a restaurant or a cafe or that kind of environment before?
Devin Sizemore 17:38
No experience. I’ve consulted people. And I had visibility to it. I know a lot of people in this space, but I’d never run it. My wife had neither, she did work at Trader Joe’s. So she understood retail and consumer experience. But neither of us had done a retail business. And so we jumped into an industry we knew nothing about we opened the business in 45 days, and we cash floated on day one. So cool story.
Chad Franzen 18:02
Yeah, absolutely. So this wasn’t a franchise opportunity. This was a ground-up type thing.
Devin Sizemore 18:09
Ground up, figured out as you go and run as fast and hard as you can.
Chad Franzen 18:12
How and why did you succeed at all?
Devin Sizemore 18:17
Yeah, so everything I’ve learned came together. And so she’s a mural artist. So she was able to get through, my wife as a mural artist was able to get through the design and create this really great environment. Having worked with hundreds and hundreds of businesses, and having a huge network, anything we needed, we could make happen, and we could make it happen rapidly. And that is the inherent value of what we teach in connecting your way to success. Because no matter what you want to accomplish. If you have a value-driven network, you can then tap into it. If you’re a taker, and you never give you can’t tap into that network. So as we were able to launch, I was able to get the insurance, the lease the marketing and merchant processing. I can build my own websites, I already had some of these skill sets, we can do it. It’s such a velocity that even our friends were like, didn’t you just get the keys and literally 45 days later, we’re having a grand opening.
Chad Franzen 19:09
So you sold it fairly quickly. What kind of led to that?
Devin Sizemore 19:13
Yeah, realizing that it’s not where we wanted to play forever. So we kind of accomplished getting it cash positive and getting it to a place that it was very stable. And Haley realized that like, retail is not a thing, and she’ll tell you that. I would say I definitely hit that as well. And we had an employee that kind of raised her hand and said, hey, my dreams has always been to own a cat cafe. So that’s fascinating. Let’s make that happen. And we sat down and penciled it out and she took over and actually stopped by there yesterday. And I mean they’re on pace to have their biggest month ever this month.
Chad Franzen 19:48
Wow. So things are still going well there.
Devin Sizemore 19:51
Yeah, typical business dip you see on a transition. So she felt that the first two months she stabilized. It’s a first-time business owner young entrepreneur. So still providing a lot of mentorship and guidance, but I would say she has found her groove and now she’s going to run real hard this year.
Chad Franzen 20:07
You just told me a great story, but what’s your proudest moment in your business journey so far?
Devin Sizemore 20:13
Oh, man, you didn’t prep me for that question. That’s a good one. My proudest moment is truly every time someone texts me or calls me that I’m working with and tells me they had a win. So great example, I had a client text me we redid his proposal process for his business. It was a very clunky process, his proposal was not clean. And so we redid his proposal template, his processes follow through, and he texts me and he said, hey, I’ve been using your proposal, and I’ve closed everyone I’ve sent it to. And so like all of those little success stories from clients, that’s where I would say, I have my proudest moment. Another one, I just helped a client, we did a two-hour session, she’s on an ongoing client. And from the two-hour session made three connections, one of the connections signed up six-figure deal for her out of a two-hour session. And that’s my why, right? My why is I want to move your needle, and it’s exciting when it happens. And then it motivates me to want to go impact more people.
Chad Franzen 21:16
Nice, good for you. So I was actually just gonna ask you, do you have, like specific goals moving forward? Obviously, you’ve got this mission for 2023.
Devin Sizemore 21:25
Yes, in 2023, this is the mission. I’ve put this everywhere, I’m really standing behind it. The way we get here is through our Mastermind and helping 100 people I think we’ll exceed it based on the traction and energy we’re already getting towards it. At the end of that, we’ll see what the number looks like next year, but it’s probably going to be a bigger number. And we’ll be bringing some coaches on to help facilitate the process. And yeah, I fell in my lane, and I’m excited for it. And we’re just gonna run with it.
Chad Franzen 21:56
Very nice. You’re running your own business? Do you still have a desire to scratch kind of like that entrepreneurial itch in any different ways? Are you just moving forward right now?
Devin Sizemore 22:06
Yeah, so we have a level of our program that we don’t talk about, but it does exist for this reason. So I do have a partner level at your referral partner, where we come in as a business partner of sorts with entities and we do project management, we do vendor management, and we help with some of their marketing and sales services. So it’s more like an agency service model. I do that because it allows me to get deep into very different projects. So I have six SaaS companies I’m working with, an HR staffing company. And then we have contracts out right now for a couple more software companies. And so it allows me once a month to bring on a project like that, that we can dive deep into have the team execute and it allows me to play in spaces that I can push the boundaries of creativity. But I do it all under one brand now and then I do market those brands, but I’m marking them as myself.
Chad Franzen 22:58
Okay, very, very cool. Hey, it’s been great to talk to you. How can people find out more about YOUR Referral Partner?
Devin Sizemore 23:05
For sure yourreferralpartner.com or just you can look me up I’m DP Sizemore on every social platform. I always say the same thing. I’ll have a meeting with anyone. So if there’s something we talked about today, that’s of interest to you, or you have a challenge you’re facing, I’d love to talk to you. You can find my calendar link. It’s not hard to find, and I’d love to get to know you and hear your story.
Chad Franzen 23:24
Right. Sounds good. Hey, Devin, it’s been great to talk to you. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
Devin Sizemore 23:29
Thanks, Chad. Appreciate you.
Chad Franzen 23:31
So long, everybody.
Outro 23:31
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