S1:E40 | From Waiter To Proven Entrepreneur With Gian-Carlo Torres

Anybody can be a successful entrepreneur given the right mindset. Don Williams presents Gian-Carlo Torres, who went from a waiter to proven entrepreneur. Gianco shares how you need to invest in yourself. Buy as many books and listen to as many podcasts as you can in your industry because when you have the right mindset, you can take an opportunity and do a good job at it! Listen to this episode and be inspired to keep going and never give up.

For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
lease join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

From Waiter To Proven Entrepreneur With Gian-Carlo Torres

Hunger And Being Coachable Helps Gianco Torres Arrive

I’m here with another episode of the show. I have my good friend from Atlanta, Georgia with us, Gian-Carlo Torres. He has a phenomenal story. He is a great entrepreneur. Welcome to the show.

Don, how are you?

I am awesome. Thank you so much for jumping on. You may have noticed his name is Gian-Carlo but he goes by Gianco and the reason for that is his friends refer to him as Gianco. It’s the shortened version of Gian-Carlo. Let’s jump right in. Tell me the name of your business. What does your business do?

The name of the company that I represent is called Immunotec. It’s a company based in Canada but my brand name is This Is Gianco. As Don says, you’re my friend and since you’re my friend, you can call me Gianco. Immunotec is a company that I was afforded to use a research. What we do in our company is we help people do two things. We help people maintain a good immune system with a product called Immunocal and we’ve been doing that for many years. I’ve been doing it for the past few years.

In the gig economy, a lot of people are always looking to have a gig. That could be through Uber or Lyft. With the pandemic, it has been a little lower, or through any business from home. We help people start a side hustle and earn an extra couple of bucks while helping people maintain their immune systems. That’s a general way how I help people.

Let me take you back to the beginning, to young Gianco, school-aged up to high school era. Tell us about your first paying job.

My first paying job was cleaning floors with my father. I’ve been homeschooled since I was fourteen years old. In this homeschool, my dad started a cleaning business. He asked me to support him and I was thrilled. It was hard for me to do an exam but it wasn’t hard for me to wake up at 4:00 AM and go to work. I remember that’s when I started to enjoy work. I love to work and get some money. I cleaned floors for two years.

Something very common that we find in successful entrepreneurs is it’s not uncommon that their parents were entrepreneurial like your father who started his business. Much more common, whether your parents were entrepreneurial or not, was that your parents installed a phenomenal work ethic and got up at 4:00 AM to help clean floors. That’s a pretty good work ethic for a young man in America. What about your first entrepreneurial venture? Was it your company or did you do something beforehand that you would consider entrepreneurial?

I would consider what I’m doing now as my first real business, but I would always do side things when I was younger. I remember a friend of mine who did landscaping needed me to build him a website. I had no idea how to build a website but I partnered with someone else that knew everything about how to build a website. I was the guy getting the deal. I got the deal and he gave us a fair amount of money. My friend did most of the work with the website but I was learning. I remember I was so happy with the whole fact that I could get a deal on a website. That would probably be my first deal but as my first entrepreneurial opportunity, it would be my company now.

I certainly think that qualifies as entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship has been defined as the person who will jump out of an airplane and build a parachute on the way down. Many entrepreneurs said, “I can do that,” and made the sale, got the deal, and then went and figured out, “How are we going to do that?” In your case, you went and got somebody skilled at web development to go ahead and build that website. That’s awesome. You started this company at nineteen. You graduated from high school and went right into this company. Tell us what led you to start this company. There’s a great story there.

Sometimes, there are blessings in disguise. I didn’t know that this was a blessing in disguise in my career. I had always been very entrepreneurial. One whole year after I graduated from high school, I was doing all kinds of work. I was a waiter and I would also do landscaping. In anything that I would do, I was a hard worker but I had not found my thing. In this process and this journey of trying to find what I like the best and where can my talent be used at its max, my mother gets ill.

I’ve been doing volunteer work since I was 12 years old over 70 hours a month. Being in a community, helping people has always been in us. The whole fact that mom got ill was a bad situation for all of us. Since we’re all so close, it got us very depressed. In this process of going to doctors and doing all the necessary things with no results, someone tells us about a good nutrient from Canada. They said, “It’s good for the immune system.”

We were skeptical like 95% of the whole world, but as they say, “One thing is to doubt but one thing is to not investigate.” We did our due diligence. We were in a very bad financial situation but we gave it to her. What I remember was I woke up one Sunday morning and I saw her cleaning and reorganizing the kitchen, things that she had not done in a year. I was like, “What happened?” She puts the box of the product on the furniture and says, “It’s this stuff. I’m not perfect but I have energy, something that I hadn’t had in a whole year.” That was my a-ha moment. I said, “There’s something different about this.”

We all became raving customers of the product because of mom’s story. My grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and everybody in our circle of influence was consuming the product because they saw mom get out of bed. After a couple of months, they tell me, “There’s a side hustle opportunity.” I said, “Is there really?” I probably had $50 to my name. I had no business experience and no degree or MBA but I had two things. I was coachable and hungry.

I realized that with time, that is all you need to be an entrepreneur. Going to the seminar, they explained the product in detail and how everything worked. It made sense. I remember looking at my parents and I said, “This is going to be my career.” After that day in October 2016, I decided to help a lot of people promote this product. That’s the story of how I started.

Thank you so much. You started your business. Most entrepreneurs have ups, downs, twists, turns, stop signs and stumbling blocks. Tell me about a work speed moment where something happened or a couple of things fell into place that accelerated your progress.

The biggest tip I would give to anybody who’s going to start a business is to invest in yourself. What helped me probably have faster progress than most people is investing in myself. I remember in the beginning, I made the decision to buy all the books and listen to all the podcasts possible in my business and industry. I remember listening to it, taking notes and taking action.

Those things created and worked on my mindset. When you have the right mindset, whenever there’s an opportunity, you take it and then do a good job at it. In this case, if I would have not invested in myself, there would have been one million opportunities and I would have ignored all of them because I didn’t invest in myself. Investing in myself has been the key to having faster progress.

With my consulting clients, we begin with if we can change the mindset, we can change behaviors. If we can change behaviors, we can change results. If we change nothing, nothing changes. Mindset is where it all starts. What about a hard lesson? Has something happened in the last couple of years in this business that you were like, “That hurts,” but in retrospect, that was very positive?

Two things happened that I still remember like they were yesterday. I’ll tell you the first one. I have a good friend and my mentor in business. He was the one who showed me the way. When I had no money and influence, he adopted me and said, “I will show you what I did. Let’s go run.” I had it but I still have great respect for him.

He’s an expert on the immune system and everything else. He called me and said, “I want to do a seminar in your area to help you grow your business.” I said, “That’s fantastic. Let’s do it.” This was when we used to live in Jacksonville, Florida. I had a team built and a business. I was expecting a fair crowd. He traveled from West Palm Beach to Jacksonville. Something had happened and people have canceled. Only two people arrived.

What’s hard about that situation is that I still wasn’t making a lot of money. I would love to tell you that I was making great amounts of money so I was like, “That’s no big deal.” With the little money I had, I spent most of it on the hotel. He trusts me, I trust him and he sees that. He still encourages me to keep going but that was the day that I went to bed sad. Nothing would help me get better that day. I asked myself, “Am I cut to be an entrepreneur?” That is the most daunting question any entrepreneur can ask. I still remember that day like it was yesterday.

That was the first thing that got to me. That was my first, “This is tough.” The second situation that happened was not so long ago. We had moved from Florida to Atlanta. We were going through some financial trouble. That’s why we came to Atlanta. We were going somewhere and I remember I had made some bad financial decisions. I had no money to buy something simple, even a sandwich outside.

I remember being disgusted with myself. I was like, “I started a business to be financially free and yet because of my bad financial decisions and lack of skills, I don’t have money even to buy a sandwich.” I was so disgusted that I made the decision and said, “This will not happen again. I’m going to walk the talk and show everybody not only how to maintain a good immune system but how to be financially free.” Since I was so dissatisfied financially, I haven’t had that happen again. It has been the contrary. Unfortunately, I had to be so dissatisfied to make that change. Those would be the two situations in my life that were a breakthrough. It was a failure but I learned how to fail forward.

It’s most of those situations where you rented space in a hotel, invited a bunch of people, had a bunch of reservations, went out on a limb, invited somebody with some status to come, and then it’s only two people. Certainly, it was a normal question to ask yourself, “Am I cut out for this?” That’s very common among entrepreneurs. Sometimes, their itty bitty mind committee gets some doubt on what they’re doing, and then the other about, “I refuse. I am not going to experience this again.” Thank you for sharing. What about a golden nugget? Do you have some secrets to your success story that you can share with us?

It is to enjoy the journey as an entrepreneur. Sometimes, we’re so obsessed and focused on the goal that we forget that the journey has so many lessons that must be learned. It’s not to only learn but to enjoy as well. I once listened to a podcast and he said to honor the struggle. That was a leader shift. That shifted how I was thinking because I was so obsessed with the goal, but I was not focusing on what was happening on the journey. What was I learning in the journey that I had to learn?

I was blind because I was so focused on the goal. Most entrepreneurs now make that mistake. They’re so focused on the goal that they forget that the journey is an important part. Let’s say the goal is to build a $1 million business. You got the skill, hunger and coachability. You get there and then now what? You can be unfulfilled or bored, which most entrepreneurs always have to fight with boredom. That is not a good combination for anybody and more for an entrepreneur.

You value the journey, invest in the journey and focus on the journey. I’m going to give a very big golden nugget. When creating a goal, create more of a growth goal than an actual goal. Let’s say your goal is to go above $1 million in sales in your business. Except saying, “I want to achieve that,” create a growth goal and then say, “How can I get better in certain skills or areas in business that will take me to that goal?”

Once you do that, you’re focusing on growth. Before you know it, you might even achieve that goal or get to $10 million in a year because you’re focusing on getting better. For anybody who is an entrepreneur or wants to be an entrepreneur and whose goal is to focus on getting better, the sky is the limit.

Perfection should never be the goal, it’s progress. You’re a four-year entrepreneur and pretty young. Anybody can do it. It’s a matter of getting your mind right, getting out there and hustling. If you could go back to the beginning of your journey when your mother had first taken ill, you had first found this product and started your entrepreneurial journey, what’s one piece of advice you would give yourself at the beginning of that journey, something that you know now but did not know then?

It is to understand that failure is your friend.

I’m a big believer in the philosophy that you either win or learn. Learning is just a slower winning. That’s the way it is. I can tell you from doing a bunch of these interviews that many of the largest entrepreneurs, people who have billion-dollar companies, have huge failings. The larger their failing is, the larger their wins have been on the other side. Failure is not the opposite of your success story. It’s just chapters in the book. They are not permanent. They are temporary. How can we support you? If you could ask us for anything for you and your business, what would that be?

I love to have conversations with everybody. If you look up my social media accounts and find me, send me a message like, “I listened to your podcast and I loved it,” I would love to meet you and have a conversation with you. In any way that I can help the person that’s sending me that message and see if there’s a need for me to help you, it would also be the best way to help me. You can contact me and I’m going to have a good conversation.

I know you’re on social media everywhere. I’ve seen all your stuff but if you could only give us one, it could be your email address or LinkedIn account, what is the best way to find you?

Through Instagram.

What’s your handle?

My Instagram is @ThisIsGianco, just like my brand. Send me a DM and follow me. That would be the best way.

Thank you so much. It has been awesome having you.

Important Links

• Immunotec
• Immunocal
• @ThisIsGianco – Instagram

About Gian-Carlo Torres

What do I do?

1. I help people maintain their immune system with a nutrient that isn’t in our foods anymore.

2. I help people earn a full-time income working part-time from home.

WHY: Because without a strong immune system, we are defenseless. A defenseless immune system means poor health. 4 years ago, my mother was ill. From being a very active woman in volunteer work & entrepreneurship, to chronic fatigue & pain. We did much of what we were told to do, and it didn’t seem to work, until we figured we had to fix her immune system. And that’s exactly what we DID. A friend mentioned about this nutrient, we investigated it, it made sense, and we gave it to her. The rest is history!

For information on how to work with Don visit Work With Don Williams
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
lease join Don and his businesses in support of St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital in its Mission to cure Childhood Cancers. You can donate to St. Jude at stjude.org/donate