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April 21, 2025 - Fresh & Fit
01:13:27
How To Make Money In The Tech World
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Alright guys, we're back with Fresh and Fit to Recovering How to Make Money in Tech, the Dustin the Tech Guy.
Let's go!
And we're back.
Listen, guys, this one is going to be an awesome show.
My friend Dustin's here.
I've known him for 10 years, actually, in Florida.
And it's funny because he was in tech the entire time, made a bunch of money, but more importantly, we were friends the entire time as well.
Dustin, welcome to the show.
I know you are.
They may not know you are.
Please tell them who you are.
My name is Dustin, the tech guy.
I've been working in tech for about 25, 26 years now.
Worked in retail, worked at IBM, worked my way all the way up.
Now I'm an entrepreneur.
Opened my own business.
And I've been doing that for the last 11 years now.
So we met 10 years ago, actually, in Pembroke Appliance.
We did.
What's the story?
That was hilarious.
We did.
Actually, Walter and I met.
I had a motorcycle at the time.
He was really into motorcycles at the time.
And needed to get rid of it and get it sold.
And he told me he had some contacts.
And I said, alright, that's cool.
We met through a mutual friend of ours.
And he said, hey, I can get this bike sold for you.
I gave him all the information.
We ended up getting it sold.
I tried to offer him some money for doing the sale.
He didn't take it.
And ever since then, I always knew he was a good guy, and we've been friends ever since.
It's funny.
He won't say this, but back then, I was super broke.
I had a Hyundai Elantra, and he paid for lunch.
Beat up all to hell on every corner, too.
Yeah, it was terrible.
But he paid for lunch, and I was grateful because back then I was toasted.
But we survived.
We did, we did.
We talked a lot, and I'd like to think that I was a catalyst to get you where you are today.
Facts. So, Dustin, listen.
I know you've got a bunch of knowledge in you for tech as well, but let's start from the very beginning.
Your childhood, how you came up and got into tech in the first place.
First off, I'm 44 years old, so I'm an old head.
I've been around.
I was born in 1980.
I've kind of seen the evolution of technology happen since the very beginning.
Before the iPhone, before smartphones, before all this kind of stuff, I was doing the tech thing.
As a very young age, we had a couple computers in the house here and there, but I was always intrigued by it.
I was three or four years old.
I was the one that was setting the VCR at the time to do the recordings for the family.
I was the one setting the clocks on the microwave.
I've always kind of had this knack for technology.
It was always kind of in me.
Honestly knew I was always going to do it.
Grew up out in the Midwest.
I was born in Dallas, Texas.
Grew up in Oklahoma in Texas.
Moved down to Miami in the late 80s, early 90s.
And been here ever since.
From a technology standpoint, through high school, I always took computer classes.
I was always involved.
I had a teacher in Sunset.
Actually, I was in Sunset taking some night school there.
It's a local school here.
And my computer teacher got me into a program to get certifications.
And those certifications were really, really, really big at that time.
Can you tell them as well how important?
Those certs are for your career as well?
Certs are very important.
It really dives into the specifics of the career path that you're going to go, whether it's on the engineering side, whether it's on the software side.
These particular certifications were the Microsoft Certified System Engineer program.
And I actually got certified at 16 years old.
I was very young.
I still think I was one of the youngest ones in the state to ever do it.
What was your first job coming out of that?
First job?
First, first job was a peon job, and I won't mention that, but my first half-decent job was working at Best Buy, working in retail.
Really? Yeah, so retail was where I first started.
Always working with some sort of computer.
I was working at Staples for a while back when they had a tech department in there.
CompUSA, which is now defunct.
Tiger Direct, which is now defunct.
I worked at all those places back in the day.
Your parents saw you work with computers a lot.
No, 100%.
I had a lot of support from both my mother and my father.
They pushed me along.
They always kind of hyped me up, and they were very supportive of everything.
They knew it was the future, too.
Both my parents, they really weren't that tech-savvy, so it definitely wasn't in the family.
Definitely one that kind of, I was the outlier of the family as far as tech goes.
But they were both very supportive.
That's good.
So getting to tech, obviously speaking, now it is a little bit harder because competition is fierce, a lot of applicants.
How did you get into it full-time with your, I guess, first big job?
Yeah, so I worked retail for a long time.
At that time, sales was really big.
You know, computers were $3,000, $4,000 back then.
There was a lot more profit in the computers back then.
So on the sales side of it, there was a lot more money.
This is in the late 90s, early 2000s.
We made really good money for that time.
Really, really good money for that time.
On the sales side of it, it obviously fizzled.
The prices of computers went down.
They became commodities.
The profits just weren't there.
What year was that, roughly?
2002-ish, 2003-ish.
Right around there.
After my retail circuit, I worked in retail from 18, 19, 21, somewhere around 22 years old is when I kind of got away from that.
The prices of things just went down.
The money wasn't there anymore.
And I started working for a telco company, a voice over IP company in Fort Lauderdale.
And it was a subsidiary of IBM, so I was with the best of the best at that time.
It was really cool.
It was a really great job.
I learned a lot and took in a lot from there.
But that was my first real serious job, the six-figure salary job, let's put it that way.
How much was that an hour, roughly, back then?
Oh, I don't know.
Because today it would be...
I mean, $100,000 a year back in the early 2000s is probably a quarter million now, I would like to think.
It was really good money at the time.
What was your first car, man?
What'd you buy?
Oh, man, I'm trying to think.
So I was into Hondas at that time.
I was a Honda boy, so I had a couple Civics and a couple Accords back in that time.
I was one of the Ricer boys back in the day.
I remember when I came to Florida, there was a whole car culture here regarding, you know...
Legal racing, and of course, things on the road.
And it's funny because if you know the car scene here in Florida, it's very small, but it's also very big at the same time.
It is.
Because everyone has a nice car, they want to mod it, get new cars as well.
And every second Saturday of the month, they do Supercar Saturdays in Florida, so that's good.
So, in tech, right?
For someone watching for the first time, let's say they want to get into it as well.
How would they start, you would say?
I recommend...
If you're green in the environment and you just see it as a great career path, and, you know, I mean, on that note, of the top 10 careers, every single year for the last 20 years that I've looked, it's always health, tech, and then maybe a sales position and then maybe a little bit of finance, but tech dominates every year.
It's a very, very, very solid career path and choice.
But getting into it, it's not for the faint of heart.
I mean, you're on call all the time.
You're working hard.
It's a lot.
It's a seven-day-a-week job, for sure.
But there's introductory courses that you can take, community colleges, local colleges.
There's online classes.
I recommend highly anyone that's interested in it that's not already working in the field in some capacity to take one of those classes.
And it gives a very broad overview of the software side, the hardware side.
And I think that's the best way to really get introduced to it.
So typically speaking, there's different genres of tech.
There's also software programming.
There's as well as cybersecurity.
There's networking.
Also service providers.
Which one are you in?
So we are actually an MSP.
We're a managed service provider.
And what we do is we go into companies and we take over their whole infrastructure.
We take over their servers, their desktops.
We manage the networks.
We also do websites and search engine optimization and cables and voice over IP.
We have a wide variety of services that we do offer.
But we're a managed service provider at the heart of our business.
So you're like the company's best friend, basically, in tech.
We are.
We are.
I mean, we're kind of like C-level executives in every company, and we go in and we consult them, and we basically tell them what to do.
We tell them how to save money.
We tell them how to streamline their operations.
We tell them how to streamline their bills.
And we look at all that with them.
We work with the office managers, and we make the office managers look really good.
And, yeah, that's pretty much what we do.
What are the requirements to get into?
This kind of work?
Doing a cert, degree, or just experience in a job?
So if you're going to go down the entrepreneurial path like I did, you can be self-taught.
I know there's a lot of sister companies that we have that we work with, we've worked with over the years that we've helped launch, and a lot of those guys are self-taught.
I mean, you can learn a lot of this just with field experience.
You've got to really have it in you.
You've got to be like how I was when I was 10 years old.
It's not something that you're just going to learn off the top of your dome.
But you definitely got to get into a class at some point.
Okay. So let's say I'm starting out.
I just finished school.
What's starting salary for me if I join this career path?
There's a ton of jobs in the 75K a year mark.
There's tons of them.
75 to 125 is kind of the baseline now in tech.
Just about anywhere across the country.
And what do they require?
A degree?
Experience? Most of the entry-level jobs, when you go to work for a big corporation, you're going to need at least some sort of a two-year degree and some sorts of some sort, or you're going to need to know a programming language or something to do with the hardware, depending on what avenue you're going.
You're going to need to have some formal education in order to get one of those jobs.
So let's say I want to fast-track this to get a higher pay.
What cert would I need to get, I guess, from the certifications?
It depends on whether you're going software or hardware.
It really depends.
So once you choose that path, then that'll determine exactly which certification you're going to need to get.
Why didn't you go software?
It doesn't interest me.
It just doesn't excite me like the support side of it.
I also feel like when you're on the software side of it, you're very limited.
A lot of guys will go learn two or three different coding languages and they'll get themselves a job, but they're kind of stuck in that market and they can't really deviate from it.
On my side of it, we're more on the service side of it.
And as the trends change and as the new technologies come in, we adopt those changes and we help the customers utilize those new technologies versus make the technologies.
There's money on both sides of it.
It just depends on the path you want to go.
But the software development side, there's big money in that.
There's really big money.
Because you know what's scary?
A couple years ago, I was told, a lot of people were told that you should get into software development because that's where the money is.
They said, you do programming, they're going to get paid for a long time.
But now, welcome in AI.
You know, it's changing how the game is being done.
And actually, last year, recorded, 3.4 million people, sorry, jobs were outsourced to other countries.
So, how does someone navigate the job market now with all those things happening with AI, jobs being outsourced?
What would you say?
Outsourcing's been a problem since the beginning of time.
It's plagued just about every industry.
Listen, in my market down here...
Hopefully a lot of the listeners are down here in South Florida, but I know we've got some across the United States.
South Florida market's a little different than the rest of the United States.
Job quality down here is not that great.
Mediocre work down here is better than most people's.
So it's pretty easy to get work down here.
In the rest of the United States, that's a little different.
It does change per region that you're in.
You know what's funny about that?
You mentioned it too as well, is that people will work a job here or work for themselves here, but it's low class work.
It is.
So it's like bare minimum.
It is.
If you do even a little bit more.
You're seeing this way better.
You're golden.
You're golden.
And if you do exceptional work, you're never going to have a problem.
And I like to think that that's where we're at.
We do quality work.
We've got a good name for ourselves out there.
And we're a small, big company.
We present big, but we're small.
And, yeah.
So, Dustin, real quick.
If you've got to change one thing from back then to now with tech, would you say, for example, let's say you're going into an industry like this, right?
You want to have, of course, everything ducks in a row before you go apply for this job.
Give us the play-by-play.
If someone's watching for the first time, what they need through and through.
I always recommend and always give suggestions to everybody.
If you're interested in getting into this career, go get a job in the career.
Even if it's at Best Buy.
If you're 18, 20, 22 years old, it's an entry-level job anyway.
You're most likely got something else going on.
You're either in and out of school.
Go get a job working in retail.
Go get a job working for, you know, even if it's the front desk help, it doesn't really matter.
You can get level one support.
There's plenty of companies offering positions.
I mean, I look through Indeed all the time.
There's just thousands of job postings all the time.
Thousands. Everywhere.
Go get a job in the market.
It's going to be an entry-level position.
But keep an idea.
Keep your eyes open and watch how the businesses are being ran and see what they're doing.
Learn from their mistakes so that when you take that into your position later on in another job or if you start your own business, learn from where you're at.
Study what they're doing.
In that job position, I mean, I worked retail and I chose retail because I took advantage of all the customers coming in.
You know, when you're working in retail, the guys that are coming in to buy things in the daytime is me now.
So I'm in there.
I'm going in and out of Best Buy, grabbing things, you know, real quickly now.
I'm a business owner.
I'm looking for tech guys.
I've hired people from Best Buy before.
Really? Yeah.
You see somebody in there with a lot of tenacity, and they're real eager, and they talk well, and they present well, and they've got the right look.
Listen, they're a good candidate for it.
And guys like us, we can tell who's who.
I've hired a lot of people in my day.
I've hired hundreds and hundreds of people at various jobs over the years, and you can tell right away if somebody's a good fit or not.
Do you think that nowadays it's hard to find good talent?
I would argue that a lot of people want jobs, but...
They don't want to put in the work.
Oh man, that's a touchy subject.
Yeah, listen, the generation now is not the hardest working.
It is a little bit of a challenge.
I'm lucky that at this point I've got a good team around me.
I'm not actively searching and I haven't had to hire anybody for a higher level position in a while.
We do hire people to come in and help out run cables.
You know, the monkey work.
You know, you come in, you do the work, and you leave.
It's in-and-out type work.
It's manual labor, basically.
High-level positions are a lot harder.
It is.
You know, people want to work for nothing now.
They think everything comes to them really quickly.
And, you know, this industry is a little tougher.
You've got to get in there, and you've got to grind, and you've got to work for a few years to really build it up and learn.
It's constantly learning.
It's constantly evolving.
It never stops.
It never stops.
And, I mean, that's the beauty of it, and that's why it's not going away.
That's why it's going to be here forever.
It's just never going to go away.
There's always going to be a need.
There's always going to need to be support.
I mean, everything in your life, from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, is a computer or running off of a computer.
Even if you're old and you write checks and you're not even using the technology you want to, you're still going to an ATM and there's a computer behind that.
So the support's always going to be there.
It's just getting crazier and crazier every year.
Yeah, it's not going anywhere.
So every industry has their actual benefits.
And disadvantages, of course.
What are the benefits of getting into tech, you would say, nowadays?
Benefits of getting into tech is stability.
Again, I mentioned a few minutes ago that, you know, top 10 positions every single year, you know, you can look this up.
It's always four or five or six tech positions and then, you know, one, two, three, sometimes four positions in health.
Like you said, then you throw in a finance job and then sales is always one of the top 10 jobs, right?
Sales in anywhere always makes money.
Burnout phases happens in a lot of these jobs.
Finance wears you out, too.
Benefits of working in tech is a stability.
Again, like we're talking about, it's never going to go anywhere.
It's always going to be there.
And you've just got to be willing to adapt.
When I originally started the company, I'm not doing anything that I wanted to when I first started.
We've had to adapt and we've had to mold and change.
We have eight or nine more product offerings now than when we first started.
And this is just the way the industry is.
It just changes.
It's not static.
It doesn't stand there.
And you've got to be willing to change and adopt.
You can't be a person that's a creature of habit, so to speak.
You've got to be willing to change and adopt to the times.
Get some education.
Work for somebody.
Learn the system.
And then if you want to be an entrepreneur, take that information, get your own clients, and move forward in your own way.
100%. And, you know, very early on, get an LLC.
Get an escort.
Start the business.
A lot of guys don't do this.
I made the mistake early on, too.
I did it the first year that I opened the company.
You know, you can source product from a lot of other places now, but when you go to try and get equipment from companies and you're trying to buy a third party, Don't take it serious.
They're not taking you serious because they're seeing you as a month-old company.
And tech is a fly-by-night industry.
So they're not taking you seriously.
It's a little harder to get products.
It's a little harder to source things.
You know, I would say start that now.
And I recommend that to anybody.
I mean, whether you're going to go into tech or any other industry, it's always a good thing to start that up and, you know, get an account and get someone that's good on your books and start writing some things off and save some money.
Okay, real quick, Dustin.
Okay, listen.
I love school.
Just kidding.
I hate school.
What if I hate school?
I don't want to get a degree.
Can I still work this career?
For myself.
Of course you can.
Of course you can.
I mean, if that's the case, then you're going to go down the entrepreneurial path.
That's just the way that you're going to have to do it.
Listen, there's a lot of self-study.
The internet does wonders these days.
There's a lot of information out there that you can find.
But if that's the case and that's the path that you want to go down, just go get a job working somewhere.
Start studying how they're doing things and let it run.
I mean, like I said, you can start in retail.
You can start working at Best Buy and in five years.
Easy, easy, easy, without even trying within five years.
It might seem like a long time initially, but within five years, you can have yourself a very, very good, successful six-figure salary.
Not bad at all.
What's the max you can make, like super max, top level?
I mean, Silicon Valley has a lot of $1 million guys out there.
Sheesh. You know, Silicon Valley has a lot.
I mean, there's a lot.
There's a lot of half a million dollar guys out there.
You know, the thing about this career is it's not, you know, you're not going to make millions and millions and millions and millions every single year.
It's not quick money.
But it's a good stable career.
It's stable.
It's stable.
And, you know, you can raise a family on this.
You know, you can feed.
I mean, I've fed my family all these years and we've all done very well.
We've all traveled.
I've seen, man.
You know, yeah, you have.
And, you know, we're all doing really well because of it.
And it's fed me for a very long time.
So the stability part of it is a good thing.
The people that really get into this, the network of people around me, they've been doing it 10 plus years or more.
And that's the real...
Good benefit of it is that it's good, stable money.
And if you open your own business and you do go down the entrepreneur, it's not hard to make a half a million dollars.
It's really, really, truly not.
You don't need that many customers.
So the possibilities are really limitless.
And then you can scale it as high as you want, or you can keep it simple and small.
You can grow it out.
You can open up multiple offices.
It just depends on the direction that you want to go.
Aren't you scared of AI coming to the forefront?
I was at a meeting, actually, and they spoke about AI becoming a part of every company by 2030.
Aren't you worried about it dominating your industry, like taking over, driving?
No, I mean, AI's been around for a long time.
It's like a lot of these coin terms.
I mean, the cloud was a big thing 10 years ago, and everybody was scared of the cloud, and what was it, and how are we going to push our data off-site, and how is it not going to be here, and everybody wanted on-prem stuff.
Now the cloud is just something that nobody even talks about.
I really don't like a lot of these terms.
AI's here.
It's been here for a while, but it's just going to continue to get better.
On my side of it, I basically use AI as a tool, and I educate my customers on how to use it to make them more profitable and to streamline their processes.
And I'm really getting a lot better about teaching them how to utilize this in a way that suits the customer's needs in the industry that they're in.
And, I mean, AI's in everything now.
It's in Zoom.
I mean, you can see it everywhere.
It's in Adobe now, and it's in your email now.
It's in Office 365.
It's everywhere.
Really, on my side of it, I'm not really worried about it.
On the programming side, I wouldn't be worried about it either.
If you're a developer, I mean, obviously you're doing great right now.
But it is going to become the norm eventually.
And it's going to taper off like a lot of the cloud-based stuff.
And right now it's a trend.
It's big.
It's massive.
It's blowing up everywhere.
But no, I don't worry about it taking over.
I don't worry about it taking our jobs because at the end of the day, somebody still has to program it.
Somebody still has to deploy it.
Somebody still has to support it.
And maintain it.
And no matter what, you know, on the support side of it, which is where we're at, there's always going to be a need.
Because the end user and the customers are never going to be able to really truly understand all this.
Yeah. I think every time there's a new rollout, people are like, oh, what do I do?
Who do I call?
So that's where you come in.
That's where we come in, you know.
Call us up and we go out and we help them out.
All right.
We'll take a little break here for some chats.
Any questions at all?
JosiahV92 says, did you create your own MSP?
Or do you work for, like, Optify, ClaireShark, MSPs, or something similar?
I'm a 1099 core consultant for Splunk.
Worked with MSPs before?
Just curious.
Yeah, we are our own MSP.
We do everything in-house.
We handle everything ourselves.
All right.
We have up next, Amalik Yoaz from Rumble.
Hey, guys, how do you feel about the mass layoffs in tech, despite being thousands of job postings?
Also, my nick is pleat.
Because easy.
Listen, um, every time there's an...
I didn't want to say that word.
Oh my gosh.
The chat, bro.
The chat kills me every time.
I love you guys.
Listen, there's always layoffs, right?
Because as new technology comes in, it's out with the old and in with the new.
So like I was saying before, you've got to be very adaptive in this industry.
You can't come into this industry and think that you're going to be doing the same thing for the next 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.
It's going to change.
Security, cybersecurity has been a big thing here.
There's been a big push on that.
I would say that that's even bigger than AI.
It's just not being talked about as much.
And, you know, cybersecurity is massive, and we've been rolling it out in attorney firms.
Obviously, the medical field has been deploying all sorts of cybersecurity.
You know, it's a really, really, really big field to be into.
So, you know, listen, as technologies change, you know, the big companies are going to, you know, move funds around, and they're going to get rid of some positions, and then new ones are going to spawn up.
So you've got to kind of roll with the punches and, you know, not let it distract you.
I think the biggest thing for me in tech that I didn't realize at the beginning was that it's ever-changing.
It never ends.
It's every six months.
So you have to always learn the best thing.
If not, you're going to be left behind within two weeks, which is crazy to me.
Listen, it's just forever, forever, ever changing.
And, you know, it's basically, you know, we're on a TikTok refresh.
Every six months it ticks, and then another six months it talks back.
That's a good point.
You know, it's just kind of the nature of the business.
It's forever changing.
It's not going to stop.
I mean, it's moving at a pace now that's...
It's hard to really fathom how much it is.
There's charts on this, and you see it go up for the years, and in the last 20 years, it was pretty steady, but in the last five, it's just shot straight up.
And it's really ever-changing.
You've got to be willing to adapt.
Again, it's not for the faint of heart if you're a creature of habit.
Good point.
So real quick, we've got some more here as well.
Double D, 5000, what are your thoughts on Network Plus and CCNA certifications?
Are they worth it, and which one is better?
Network Plus is good.
I mean, that's an entry-level class.
I did the CCNA as well.
I did it a long time ago, so I'm a little outdated on it, but Network Plus is definitely good.
If you're green and you're new, A Plus, Network Plus, it's basically the same class now.
Jump in there, take those.
That's a good introductory.
If you like it, then move forward to the CCNA for sure.
Would you say now it is, Dustin, that getting your cert is better than getting a degree?
It depends.
It depends on how far up you're going to go.
I mean, listen, the Bachelor of Science degree is really, really necessary in a lot of high-level positions.
From a programming perspective, you're going to need to get in and learn those languages.
On a hardware side, you're going to need things like this.
So, yeah, I mean, the certs are not going to hurt.
And you can knock those out pretty quickly.
They're not cheap.
They're a little pricey.
It's especially to get them done at a good school.
But the certs do help, and it does give you very specific knowledge.
Okay. Cool.
All right.
So Dustin, real quick as well.
So normally speaking, right, you go to school, get your degree, get a job, and you kind of like just retire after 40 years and go to your pension or whatever you want to say or 401k.
In tech, how do people manage money, you would say, to retire and get out of the game?
Because obviously speaking, people make a lot of money in tech.
How would you say people manage their money in tech itself?
I mean, that's a great question.
That's a really great question, actually.
You live a pretty good lifestyle.
I do, I do.
And, you know, honestly, in the last...
Three to five years, I've really started diversifying things, and I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket anymore.
I'm very diversified at this point, and you do have to do that at some point.
I mean, as any entrepreneur, you have to do that, right?
And it's not a forever career unless you build a company up and you sell the company off, which is a...
Good possibility, too.
A lot of companies are built just to be sold off.
I've been with a few of those companies.
I did mergers and acquisitions for tech companies for a while.
And that is a thing as well.
Well, isn't it funny?
What happens is it's a small startup.
They get funded.
They get big.
And they're working to be sold, basically.
That's it.
So everyone working there is like, oh, yeah, this is a great company.
And then it's like, oh.
I can make $10 million here, $20 million here.
I'm out.
Happens a lot.
Yeah. Happens a lot.
And it's okay if you're brought in and you're privy to it.
When it's not fun is when you're brought in and they give you a nice title and you're making a lot of money.
You're making a quarter million, half a million a year.
And then six months later, the company, they come in.
Because what happens is when they get merged and acquired, they take the people over.
They get rid of everything.
And they normally just keep the salespeople of the organization.
A lot of the other people go away because they've already got those people.
And that's just kind of the nature of the beast.
It's scary because I used to work at a tech company.
Pretty much everyone there that was there in the past was fired because they got bought out basically.
And it's like, wow.
Imagine if I stayed there for job security thinking, okay, this is great.
And then it's like, oh, well, we moved on.
Sorry. Who's next?
Yeah, that was at, where were you at?
You were at Wix, I think, right?
Yeah, that's right.
You were there for a while.
Listen, I, it's a good, stable, non-volatile career, but you're going to bounce around.
I mean, you're going to have to bounce around.
I bounced around a lot, too.
It really wasn't a thing back then.
People looked down upon it.
You know, I'm a little older, and at that time, people were getting jobs, and they were getting that one career path.
But in tech, you kind of got to bounce around, and it's the only way to really kind of move up.
And it's still that way today.
So you've been, I don't know, for what, 10 years now, Dustin?
Yeah. Should you save money for any of these?
Because obviously, speaking in tech, you can lose your job.
How should you save your money, I guess, to move forward?
So listen, you should always save money.
I mean, you always got to have a rainy day fund, right?
I mean, that's always the case.
And as a business owner, you've got to stash away things.
Listen, we have busy months and we have slow months.
Our late winter, early spring is our slow months and that ramps up.
And it's always the tax season is where we slow down.
I don't know why it's like that.
It's like that every single year, it seems like.
Then we pick up in the summertime and then towards the end of the year, there's another big push.
But the chart is the same almost every single year.
You gotta save some money.
You gotta put some money aside for a rainy day.
Listen, tech people are nerds at the end of the day.
Geeks! There's very few of us out there that aren't doing other things.
I mean, I would gather that everybody in the tech industry has some sort of a stock portfolio.
If you don't, you're not a real nerd.
Or crypto.
Or crypto or something, you know?
You know, something along those lines.
That's funny.
Speaking of, did you see that they spray-painted the crypto bull down here?
Yeah! What's up with that?
You know what it is, bro?
Sorry to interject there, but man, that is frustrating, man.
People are upset at the establishment.
Some people don't like Elon.
They don't like what's happening to crypto.
What's up with that, man?
And I just think people are haters, bro.
I think so, too, man.
It's just like, bro, you didn't buy the right time.
Hey, I get it, bro.
You're mad.
But, hey, some people did.
Yeah, I know.
I saw it the other day.
I was like, damn, man.
What are you doing with the bull?
What'd the bull do?
He's got no balls, but, you know.
You what?
Okay, listen.
So, in the tech world, I was in there for a little bit, dating is never really possible that much.
You kind of just go to work.
Work your 9 to 5 or if you're working on a project, more hours than normal.
You might get married to a chick that you met at one of those Magic the Gathering games or whatever.
And then you kind of settle down.
Have some kids and work.
But more than not, you're spending a lot of time at work.
She may get bored.
She may be like, you know what?
This isn't working out.
Like, you're never home.
And then usually, sadly, it ends in divorce.
How do you navigate dating?
Working tech, because it's a demanding job as well.
Well, I was married for 10 years and then got divorced.
So exactly what you said happened to me.
Listen, it does happen.
And you work hard, bro.
You work very hard.
I do.
I work seven days a week.
I'm on 24 hours a day.
I really don't ever stop.
But I also have the freedom to do what I want.
I'm here right now.
And I can schedule things around.
And when you're the boss and you control things, you've got the ability to set up the free time.
Listen, tech people in general...
The nerds have been ruling for a long time.
Yeah. They work hard, but they play hard, too.
Listen, Silicon Valley parties are good.
I don't know too many of the nerds out there that aren't partying hard on the weekends and out with the girls.
And listen, the nerds always get the girls, too.
They do.
Listen, at the end of the day, we get them all.
You know, it's funny.
In school, people are like, oh, look at these nerds over there.
Now they're on Facebook.
We came back, man.
We came back.
They're on X, YouTube.
So it's like, oh, who was last last now?
We do.
So it's well, bro.
100%. So in terms of actually managing a company in tech, tax-wise, how do you structure a company, for example, a new S-Corp?
Yeah, so listen, I mean, and I'm only going to speak for down here, and every state I'm sure is a little bit different.
Yeah, Florida.
Part of the United States is a little bit different.
You need to get yourself a good tax person.
You need to, you know, S-corp yourself is normally the best way.
The big thing that we have in our industry is you need insurance.
And you need a very, very large policy for data retention.
Because that's really the worst thing that we can do as an MSP is to lose the customer's data.
You know, they get a virus, they get hacked.
Listen, shit happens.
Knock on wood, it hasn't really happened to us in the last 12 years.
But you need to have a really good insurance policy.
We've got a $10 million policy on data and a $5 million policy on all the hardware.
It's a lot.
But listen, we work with very high-profile customers.
We deal with attorneys that...
You know, deal with very, very large clients, and we've got a lot of responsibility.
And, you know, these servers have terabytes and terabytes and terabytes worth of data.
If something were to go wrong, you know, there's a lot of money involved.
So what happens if I work with a company, I've got my S-Corp, but I don't have insurance?
I mean, you don't need it.
It's not required.
It's only going to be required if you're working in a condominium or you're on the cabling side of things.
They'll require insurance sometimes.
But working for smaller businesses, we cater towards that SMB market, which is somewhere 15 to 20 users, up to around 80 users, somewhere in that little sector.
A lot of the smaller companies, they don't even know to ask about it.
We have it there.
Now, if you're doing work in condominiums and you're doing work for contractors and you're doing work in larger organizations, they're going to do it.
Definitely require it.
They're going to require that insurance and they're going to ask you for it.
We've had to give it out to all the larger jobs that we do, especially on the cabling jobs.
Okay. Would you say, well, I guess from your experience, what's a harder career path?
Software or actually hardware?
And why?
Software because it's more difficult for me.
Software is very tedious.
It takes a long time.
I mean, there's millions of lines of code in just a simple instruction set.
And people really don't realize this when they open up an app and they just use it freely and they think everything is, you know, just functioning normal.
There might be a trillion lines of code in there.
I mean, and there's a lot to that.
And somebody has to physically write that in there.
Yes, they do automate some of that, but somebody's overlooking it and checking it and making sure that, you know, everything is good.
So there's a lot that goes into that.
It's very tedious.
Listen, the hardware side, on the front side of it, you get to interact a little bit more.
It's a little bit more instantaneous.
You get that instant gratification.
You go in, you do a network build-out, you plug everything in, everything kind of comes alive.
You start seeing the lights and the people go to work.
So, you know, the instant satisfaction is there a little bit quicker than on the software side.
But it just depends on what kind of person you are.
I mean, some people are more, you know, they want to sit in front of the computer and they want to grind there all day long.
I want to sit in front of the computer and, you know...
Do my AR and get money and then go out and I want to talk to people and interact with people more so.
It's funny because I thought that for me in tech, I would enjoy being behind a computer desk, just programming and doing support.
And I was like, this is cool.
Then I was like, wait, I'm doing the same thing every single day.
Yeah. The burnout phase is really big in our industry and a lot of people get really, really burned out, especially when they're in level one, level two, level three support.
Those are really terrible jobs.
I mean, they're good entry-level jobs, but you've got to get out of there.
You're going to burn out quick.
You're going to burn out real quick because it's just the same monotonous thing.
You're saying the same thing to every customer that calls in.
You're dealing with the same problems over and over again.
And traditionally, whether you're level one, level two, level three, you're...
You're being assigned a specific task.
And that monotony gets old after a while, you know, three, four, five years into the job, you're done and you're like, I don't ever want to go back to it.
So, I mean, just like with anything, though, listen, there's a lot of burnout in a lot of different industries, you know, and a lot of industries have a short lifespan and you got to expand and you got to adapt.
And listen, as a business owner, that kind of changes the dynamic of things because you can kind of do what you want.
Do you think that nowadays, especially with people being outsourced, well, their jobs being outsourced, Are they ever going to come back to America?
For example, Trump wants to bring, obviously, tariffs upon these companies.
Do you think people are going to come back to America to actually go to work and work properly?
I hope so.
I'd like to hope so.
The problem is that building this stuff overseas is just so much cheaper.
A lot of this equipment is expensive already.
I don't know.
It's hard to say what's going to happen with that, but I would love to see a lot more of it built back here.
It's just like with a lot of things.
Because I noticed a lot of the companies are here in the US.
Not in Europe.
They're here in the US.
So I'm like, why don't they just make people jobs here?
But I guess it's cheaper.
It's the manufacturing side of it that's very tedious.
Unfortunately, China's kind of mastered logistics and they've mastered manufacturing.
As much as I hate to say it, they're really good at it in mass production.
They crank out those iPhones every single year by the millions and they do them in a couple months.
So, you know, it'd be really hard to get that here at a mass scale.
But they're trying.
You know, there's a couple big manufacturers that they're looking to bring over here.
I know Apple's coming over here.
The company that manufactures, Foxconn, they're looking to come over here.
We'll see what happens.
What's up with Castle Club, bro?
What is that?
Is that Mo?
What the heck is this, bro?
They've been roasting me on show, bro.
Who's handing it out on your head?
That's Icy's.
Oh, God.
Don't mind the chat.
They're hilarious, man.
Okay. They be roasting me.
That's like a common thing.
They roast me all day, bro.
All night.
I can see, bro.
I can see.
I can see.
All right.
So, Dustin, I've known you for 10 years, bro.
All right?
Obviously, you've made a lot of money in tech.
You want to share what you're spending money on a little bit?
Oh, man.
For a long time, it was cars.
I mean, you saw.
I mean, there was a nice range of cars there for a while.
How many have you had, bro?
I don't even know.
A lot.
I mean, a lot.
30, 40 now?
I don't know.
Maybe more.
Who knows?
I used to buy a new car every year for my birthday, and I did that for years, and then sometimes for, you know, Fourth of July, I'd buy another one.
I don't know.
I had seven or eight cars at one point in time.
It was a problem, but...
Bro, so hold on.
I used to go to car shows with my old Toyota Camry, all the way in the back, walk to the front and be like, hey guys, I'm here!
And they'd be like, here's what a new car, like every other month, bro.
And I'm like, how's this guy making money?
It's a money loss.
It's not making money.
I know, I know, I know.
But you make money in tech, so whatever.
But I was just impressed by the car collection that you had.
Because back then especially...
I've gotten out of it a little bit now.
I'm actually doing a lot more traveling now.
That's what I want to do.
Traveling is where it's at.
I'm getting a little older now, too, so I'm slowing down as well.
Traveling is kind of where it's at, and I've enjoyed that a little more, creating experiences and seeing things a little bit more.
I've been grinding for a long time.
And I've had my head down for a long time.
So now I'm trying to kind of step back a little bit.
Things are very automated right now.
We've got a really good baseline of customers.
We've automated a lot of the things.
And it kind of runs itself now.
We've got a machine.
And that kind of allows me and gives me a little bit more time to kind of escape and get out of the country for a little bit and see what's up.
Have some fun.
So guys, I brought Dustin today because Dustin is actually a guy that has a lot of wisdom.
He wants to actually share with you guys and put you guys in a game of tech because a lot of guys want to make money, but they don't know how to.
They don't know where to start, how to begin.
And industry and tech is amazing because not only is it good for having your own time, having freedom, but it gives you options that you can take.
Now, obviously speaking, we can't answer all the questions today or get everything done today, but we'll do another show pretty soon or a Zoom call if you guys want.
If you guys want, put a one in the chat for a Zoom call.
We got time today or no?
Maybe on Wednesday?
Yep. Wednesday work for you?
Yeah, we can do Wednesday.
Cool. Sure.
So we'll do an actual, like, Zoom call with Dustin to give you more in-detail information and personal questions as well.
But Dustin, this was a great wealth of information here that you give the audience.
Thank you.
Last question from me, at least from me to you.
If you could go back in time, what did you change about your career?
Anything at all or no?
I wouldn't change anything about the career, but I wouldn't have spent most of my 20s working for other people.
I would have started for myself a lot sooner.
And at the time, I had kids in my early 20s, so I was a little scared to jump out there.
I probably would have postponed that a little bit.
But I definitely would have started my own business a lot sooner and not worked for somebody else.
I helped out a lot of people and made a lot of other people a lot of millions of dollars before I finally jumped out there on my own.
So I probably just would have started earlier.
Started sooner?
Yeah, I would have started definitely in my early 20s and not waited until later, in my 30s.
Dustin, if I was your son, man, what advice would you give to me as a young man coming into the world?
Focus on work, focus on money, and stay away from women.
No, it's true, man.
It's true.
But women is hard, bro.
It is.
It's hard sometimes, right?
It is.
You love them and hate them, right?
All right, man.
We've got some more chats here.
But yeah, guys, listen, I'm telling you right now, tech is the way to go.
It's not that hard to break into the industry.
Once you're in, you can maneuver and get some stuff done for yourself as well, different career paths, and at the same time, make some good money because six figures is not that hard to make in tech.
It's not.
It's not.
Listen, you can easily, easily, easily get into six figures very early on.
Listen, you just got to want it.
You got to get out there.
And it's not going anywhere, like I said before.
It occupies four or five of the top spots every single year.
Find your path.
Find where you want to go and make it happen if you're interested in it, for sure.
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Thank you.
Dustin, where can I find you, bro?
And what's next for you?
Instagram. I was off social media for a long time, but I'm back on my personal Instagram, AMBMiami.
You can also check out our website.
You can drop me a line in there.
It's www.goboxtech.com.
And yeah, that's it.
We have some more chats here as well before we head up.
One last question.
All right.
Double D again says, what would be the best way to break into the six-figure salary?
From a level two support position?
Start networking.
Try and pick yourself a couple customers on the side.
If you're already doing level two support, then you've got a pretty good understanding of how to fix things.
Pick up a customer or two on the side.
Work two jobs for a while.
It's the only way to transition out of where you're at.
What's the best way to find a customer or get them onto your...
So, listen, there's networking groups everywhere.
I mean, down here we have BNI.
I know it's everywhere.
You can buy into that.
You know, listen, it's really just a matter of if you're doing Level 2 support, you're probably behind a computer desk, so it's a little bit harder at that point in time.
But there's always a friend or a family member or somebody that's got a business off to the side.
Talk to them, you know, and really the side hustle is really where it's at in the early days.
You've got to have that side hustle.
I mean, man, I worked two jobs for a long, long time until I finally transitioned out.
And that's really the only way to do it.
Alright, we got another one here.
Dame Dolofilm says, what are the best tech events to network in the States?
I'm halfway through my cybersecurity journey.
Oh, that's good.
Congratulations on that.
That'll be a fun one.
Good stuff, bro.
Yeah, so listen, I used to go out to Vegas every single year.
I did the big CES event.
Listen, that's a nerd's paradise.
Go look at some.
Please tell them a Vegas story, bro, because Dustin's the guy that lives a great life.
Tell them one cool Vegas story.
Oh, man.
That's not too bad.
Dustin, how tall are you?
Six foot six.
Guys, this is a six foot six white man that lives life on his terms, bro.
Listen, I'm not going to say too much on it, but I did end up at the Bunny Ranch one time.
Really? One time.
One time.
You what?
One time.
One time.
We'll save that for another one.
Okay, maybe some outdoors.
Alright, so I guess for him, best tech events in the States of the Network.
Pretty much?
Listen, look for a local group.
Like I said, the BNI groups are always good because, and it's not really about a tech network group as much as it is just networking in general, especially if you're looking to find new work.
It's really just about meeting new people that have businesses.
Didn't you find clients at a car show too as well?
Oh, I find clients everywhere.
I mean, no matter where I go, I'm always talking it.
So you just got to find the need and whatever you're specializing in, you know, listen, if it's just building computers or if it's gaming, go hang out at GameStop.
You know what I mean?
Like, whatever it is, you just gotta hang out with the people that are like-minded.
But the B&I groups are always really good.
I always recommend people to do that.
You do have to buy into them.
Most of them are not free.
But there's a lot of, like, high-level people in there.
And it's really, you know, that's really where you can learn, and you'll always get leads from there.
Always. I remember I went to meetup.com, and I was looking at a bunch of groups there as well, for free.
Some are more paid, though, like you said, you gotta buy into.
Yeah. Okay.
Louise, does your...
Do guests have any experience with DOD contracting?
No, I've done very, very little work working for the government.
I did have a little stint around 07, 08. I was doing licensing for a company that I was at, and they were shipping military components to other governments in other countries, and there was some government work there involved, but it was on the tech side of it, and I was applying for licensing,
and I was having to inspect the parts and things like that.
There were a lot of computer parts and things like that that we were shipping, but aside from that, I haven't really done too much with the DOD.
Is it better to have a government contract?
Do they pay more as well?
I know people that have done it.
They put those bids out.
There's a website you go to and you put the bids out.
This is what we're going to do.
They do that for everything.
The government bids out almost all the work.
I never chose that path.
I don't like working for the government.
They normally don't pay too well.
They pay really late.
Maybe things have changed, but I try and steer clear of that.
I like to work with the small private businesses.
I've had better success there.
Makes sense.
All right.
All right, guys.
This is going to be the end of the show here.
Obviously, of course, if you miss anything, watch it back from the beginning.
But we're going to do a show with some girls as well right after this.
And Dustin, again, thank you for coming, bro.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
Thanks so much, man.
Listen, known this guy for 10 years.
Solid guy in tech.
Knows his stuff.
Thank you, brother.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate you, man.
All right, guys, man.
We're out of here.
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