September 28, 2026 – DJ Self Born Gregg Davis and Curvion Blue Josh Troy

00:00 Intro 1: On the air, broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy who believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion, Jim Beach.

00:17 Jim Beach: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there, riding the roller coaster life of being an entrepreneur, the ups, the downs, the thrills, the twist and the turns. It is the ultimate lifestyle. Got two amazing guest for you today. This is just amazing how good my guests are. And again, I don’t want to take any credit for that. We created a system 12 years ago going out and meeting all of the publicists and they send us these great guests. I have nothing to do with it. First up, we have Greg Davis, better known as DJ Selfborn, a working DJ. I know nothing about his industry can’t wait. And then after that, Josh Troy is with us. He has built his company to 265 employees and he’s going to tell us how he did it.

01:10 Jim Beach: And so what more could we look for than that? And he’s fun to be with and hang out with. Great show. Let’s go ahead and get started right now. Here we go. I’ve told you this before. One of the reasons I love this show so much as I get to meet people doing things I know absolutely nothing about. I’m excited to do that right now. Please welcome DJ Selfborn to the show. He is the CEO of G2 Productions and author of Selfborn: How I Made a Million Dollars as a DJ and Built a System Anyone Can Use. DJ, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

01:49 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): I’m great. Thanks for having me.

01:49 Jim Beach: So your real name is Greg. What do you want me to call you? Greg, DJ, honorable Selfborn?

01:56 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): I like the honorable part. Hey, everybody calls me Selfborn or Greg, your choice. You can interchange them if you like.

02:03 Jim Beach: Okay. What does Selfborn mean to you? Where did you come up with that?

02:08 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So it came up with the idea of stumbling around with passions at a young age and finding my passion. It kind of hit me that anything you do to be successful—to find your happiness, and when I mean success, that’s finding your happiness and finding your space within— It’s gotta, it’s gotta come from within. Nobody can find your success for you or give you your happiness so you you’ve got to lock it all down yourself. So going from that, I said, you know what, that’s going to be my DJ name.

02:41 Jim Beach: I love it. I love it. So for me, music died. Greg, the day that Jerry Garcia died. Like, so what is that? 1980, 1988, 1987 or something like that. Late 80s, yeah. You know, I’m a sad, grateful deadhead still, you know, grown up and everything. And so for me, music, just so so far from my life right now. What kind of music are you dealing with? What is your preferred genre? Tell me more about your your world in your life? Because I don’t I don’t know anything about it. How much can you make it a night?

03:16 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Well, okay, so to start with my my favorite genre, it’s funny. It actually crosses genres. It turned into more of an era rather than a genre. So, at an early point in my career, just before moving to Miami and we can get into that. I uh decided that I was only gonna play old school music, so that’s 70s, 80s, or 90s primarily, and so that’s cross genre. So, you know, everything from Grateful Dead to Biggie Smalls. So, you know, from hip-hop to soul music. Party? [Unclear question about Miami music.] Was that kind of stuff? Absolutely. So, you know, my my favorite. I really love soul music. I really love disco. Um, I’m just an old school guy, man.

03:59 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): You know, I turned 50 in February, and I just really gravitated toward that. Like I said, early in my career I made the decision that I was only going to really spin ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, and what that really means is everything before Kanye.

04:15 Jim Beach: [Brief unclear interjection.] Why is Kanye so significant? You’ve worked with Kanye, I think, right? Yes, you have.

04:21 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Yeah, yeah, we actually, we grew up together, went to college together, and we, we kind of walked a lot of dogs together, meaning we, we, got a lot of mentors, mutual mentors, they taught us a lot of music and, and how to hustle and really grind. So yeah, that he’s the marker.

04:39 Jim Beach: Okay. Did he change your musical tastes? Did you see that coming?

04:44 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): No, he kind of, I would say he reinforced it. Um, it’s funny because when he he put out his first album, which was about 2004, that coincided with me moving to Miami. That was a turning point. I feel like for music in general, and uh, you know, I like to say, of course, a lot of people can argue with this. I like to say that I invented the term old school when it comes to the modern-day way we look at old-school music. Prior to 2004, when you thought old school, you thought about the Temptations, the O’Jays, or anything older—soul music or disco. Then it evolved to include R&B from the ’90s and old-school hip-hop. Now, when you hear old school, that’s what a lot of people think about.

05:35 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So, when he really started putting out his music, which helps him become as big as he was, if you, you think back, he, he, uh, notably reclaimed a lot of the, the hip hop, uh, values that a lot of people had, up until then, it was a lot of focus on, uh, street hip hop and a lot of, uh, what was gangster rap was really pretty big at the time, and so, he being a marker of, of a lot of us, they didn’t grow up. In an environment where that was just primarily what we saw that made a marker and from there on, it was like, oh, you know what? I like this vibe of music, which is related to A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul.

06:19 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): I don’t know how deep you’ll go in the old school hip hop, but even touring with Wu-Tang Clan at around that time, uh, it really helps solidify like, you know what? This is kind of where I’m drawing a line, so to speak, of really where my my interest is and going back from there and really made myself an expert with everything that was older than pretty much 2000.

06:42 Jim Beach: Okay, well I’m right there with all of that. That’s my my genre right there. Those are my years, so I would love it. So, uh, again, I don’t want to ask anything personal. It’s none of my business, but someone pays you thousands and thousands of dollars to play records, right? I hate to demean it, right? But that’s why I don’t understand. You add a whole new show on top of the records and the music, right? I mean, you’re adding your personality to every single song.

07:12 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Absolutely. And it’s not too personal, man. That’s actually why I wrote the book and why I’m here because, you know, to to your point that you may, a lot of people have a major disconnect with something that they enjoy a lot, which is music and really the the agents of giving you that music. So as a DJ, you’ve got. I could, I could break it down kind of easier into category. So at the bottom, you would have your gigging, uh, where, you know, you got bars, restaurants, uh, just venues where you would go and kind of dance and have a good time. You can get paid anywhere from about 150 bucks to go in and do an hour, maybe two, depending on how often you do it and how well you know the venue. Then you have your corporate and wedding DJ work.

08:08 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): We don’t really like to say just wedding DJ, because it was kind of a derogatory term for a while. But doing the corporate/wedding kind of thing, that’s where you step into a couple thousand dollars per gig. Then that other tier would be touring, where you’re getting paid per day and getting a per diem, similar to being an artist on the road. And at the top of all of that, which is really why I wrote the book and what I put in the book, is the hospitality area, which I like to teach a lot of younger DJs that, hey, if this is something you want to do with your life as a career, The route really to be able to go is in hospitality. And what I mean by that is, you got resorts like I’m living in Miami.

09:02 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): You know, you, I moved here specifically because of the density of how many places you can go and become a vendor, not just a DJ getting gigs, but an actual vendor. That you, you can have a living for quite a few years, being at a hotel, which then takes you so many other places, because who comes to hotels, people traveling from all over the world. So, it it does two things. It allows you to have, uh, a safe space financially where you can depend on the, the money and you get direct deposit a lot of times, it, it’s very, uh, very reliable as well as you get opened up to the world and people that come in there, you, I’ve been booked all over the place by all types of people because they came and heard me spin at a hotel.

09:50 Jim Beach: That’s exactly like me, you know, I try to get corporate speaking gigs for a living and you describe my world exactly. So it’s very similar. People come from all over to see top DJs spin, right? I mean, you’re just like having a signature artist come, right?

10:09 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Yes. Yep. I’d say, I’d say a little bit better because, you know, an artist, you, you could see someone, unless you’re talking about Vegas, Macau, you’ve got a few places where, you know, uh, we, I feel like we’re about the same age, we come from an era, like the wedding singer, as well as, you know, that, that, that lounge singer, and a lot of people don’t realize that, you know, when you travel, you go to hotels, you, you’re just on vacation, you’ll see someone playing music, you’ll see someone playing piano, a jazz singer, what have you, and there’s a company that books them, and it’s usually not the hotel directly.

10:48 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So, being able to establish yourself as a DJ, you actually can get a lot more work than just that singer, because if I’m a jazz singer, Well, you gotta only want to book a jazz singer or only want to hear jazz music for me to really have consistent work. But as a DJ, like I said, that really, I don’t pigeonhole myself into a genre, it’s more of an era. I open up myself. Yeah, I saw like clearly where it’s a lot more universal, just like you say, Oh, hey, that’s the music I’m into, and no matter what room I can walk into. I have a good solid idea. You give me about 5 minutes and I can tell you exactly what direction I would go with the music and then that is genre specific.

11:34 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So, I like to think that being a DJ with that artist kind of mentality, open yourself up to a lot more opportunities when you’re able to be flexible, one minute you play disco, another time you can play reggae, another time you can play soul music. You get it?

11:53 Jim Beach: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Again, it’s exactly like my profession. One speech is one thing and the next speech is a totally different one. Depending on what the client wants. So I totally get it. Um, So did Atlanta move to Miami? Atlanta used to be the center of, uh, hip hop and cool, didn’t it? And now Miami is, what did Atlanta move to Miami?

12:14 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): No, I looked at it. It’s funny. I, you know, I’ve always looked at New York was always a foundation for me. I remember really feeling like, hey, New York was it and then yes, as far as modern day hip hop, modern music, once you get past the 2000s and to everything that’s recent. Yeah, Atlanta has a foothold, but I, I still feel like New York is really where it’s at when it comes to a universal sound. You know, you can go to New York right now. Me and you can meet, we can meet at a bar and we could totally hear only disco 70s. We can only hear house music. It, it, it’s a lot more of a diverse and you get it on the same level, no matter what you’re kind of choosing. So, no disrespect to Atlanta—no diss. But I always gravitated towards the New York vibe and being from Chicago.

13:09 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): I mean, we have a healthy knowledge and respect for soul music, classic R&B, and even disco. Coming to Miami was really about spreading my wings and giving that musical knowledge to people. I realized that in a market where it’s primarily commercial and mainstream, you can build a nice foothold by carving out a niche without just being a general jukebox DJ.

13:37 Jim Beach: Right. I love that talk. I’d never heard that term. Uh, what about the most important thing. Though, DJ, uh, What about the women? Where are the women more beautiful? I got to think Miami.

13:48 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Yeah, man. I mean, down here, Miami is like a factory. You think there’s a, you think there’s a factory somewhere like an Amazon or data center and they’re just popping them out somewhere. It’s kind of funny. But it’s, it’s kind of like a competition, like, you know, beautiful people see beautiful people, and then people who are so beautiful will say, wait a minute, I got to become beautiful, and it’s, it’s really like a thing just as important as having your finances in order. Miami. So two things, you want to be, you want to look good and you want to be able to spend good.

14:27 Jim Beach: How did you learn your discipline? How did you get good at this? Great at this.

14:31 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So, and man, it’s, it, it’s like, it goes to what, uh, what, what’s in the book about like, I think everybody’s got to be able to lock themselves in a room and and be able to suck for a while. I remember watching Dave Grohl, who is one of my favorite musicians ever. Like, he’s, he is the embodiment. I feel like of our generation, of all the bands he’s played in. And uh, and I’m sure all the listeners know who I’m talking about. He said, you know, you got to just not be afraid to suck for a while. And the old school way was like, you lock yourself in a room, you put in your 10,000 hours.

15:12 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): You, you just go hard and, and that never ends, you, you practice, practice, practice, you work hard personally, and if you can do something that you feel like, hey, this is good, then you bring it out to the world and, and really like show it off. And so I really made my career that way. I locked myself in my room and I practice practice practice, and then when I went out and it really, I had, had a little bit of a doubt, which I think there’s health, it’s a healthy, healthiness to having a little bit of doubt, but going real confident with your skill set, but maybe having a little bit of a doubt of how people are going to take it. I think you put your best foot forward that way, and so I just did that, and I overpracticed, and then I was able to over deliver.

16:04 Jim Beach: How do you know if you’re good?

16:06 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): The people will tell you fast. Yeah, I think, um, see, now it’s kind of, it’s interesting because you’ve got, Avenues to really put your stuff out there and kind of ignore that public experience. I think you got to go out there. You got to touch the people. You got to really shake hands and put yourself out there physically in front of people, not online, not behind a screen. You really got to see that that result. And I like to relate DJing to stand up comedy. I feel like, It, it’s related in a lot of ways. As a stand-up comedian, it doesn’t matter what you do online, how, how funny your friends think you are, how funny you are, when you’re just hanging out. But when you get up on that stage, you’re going to find out right away if what you’ve got works. So you just got to do it.

16:58 Jim Beach: I think that’s a great analogy How did you learn to become a marketing genius as well and to get your brand out there? And I love what you said about the corporate work. Talk to me about learning to become a marketing person.

17:13 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So it was pretty much out of necessity. Everything started out of, hey, when you’re, when you’re a DJ and you want to get booked and you, you see the venues, you see promoters and all of that. I, uh, it’s the same thing that I wanted to do it, so instead of waiting on somebody, I learned Photoshop. Uh, I learned Photoshop when it like first came out years ago, I’m dating myself. I know, you know, it’s pretty, but, it, it’s really born out of necessity, and it’s like, you wanna work? You got a skill set, you wanna be able to elevate, so I just put myself into all of these areas that I would be depending on someone else for me, including promoting, organizing, branding. I learned early that like, wait a minute, how am I gonna be any different than all these DJs out here? Everybody can play music, especially today.

18:06 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): The only way I could do that is if I understand, I am a brand and how to execute creating that a brand in other people’s minds. So I thought about that quickly and early. Instead of waiting, I’m just a go-and-do-it-myself person. Maybe I’m a little bit of a control freak, but it certainly worked very well. Or do very well.

18:30 Jim Beach: Tell me the Thanksgiving exit story.

18:32 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Okay, so, um, I had, I owned a bar on South Beach called Lohay, and it was a bar that people didn’t think it would really work because I said, hey, this is going to be a bar where we only play old school music. Mind you, this is on Washington Avenue, right, right in the heart of South Beach, uh, where nothing else around it is really, uh, really, in a, in a niche genre like that, where it is old school. And so for years, I was able to really sustain, uh, following people from everywhere, from West Palm to homestead. They would come down because they wanted to get that specific experience. So after the years of really being able to do that, at about 2013, everything on the beach started changing, which it was really kicked off by the real estate pricing. So the values started to go up.

19:23 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): And so that’s one of the lessons I learned, which I put in the book, was renting the space that we had, and you do well as a renter. The landlord can see that as well and then they go up on your rent and it changed the margins like drastically. And so at the time of around Thanksgiving, I decided to close the doors and turn the whole concept and a vibe into a traveling pop-up. So that was where it was bittersweet. Um, you know, after you’re somewhere for years. You know, you especially a bar vibe, you know, it was, it was really known.

19:59 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): I mean, I’ve entertained, you know, all of the Miami Heat, winning games, you know, the dolphins, everyone in the city, all politicians, and people coming from everywhere, and um, a lot of celebrities gravitated towards the bar, because I made it a point that when a celebrity came in, unlike most places you go. I made sure that they didn’t shout out their name right away. That’s like a big deal. A lot of people don’t really know that most people want to be acknowledged when they come to a party, but I made it a point to where, Hey, you can come in here when you’re in here, you’re a regular person. You’re just like the person you’re standing next to and they really appreciated that um, I got a lot of testimonials about that of like, they feel very comfortable to be able to come there.

20:50 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So it was a bittersweet closing around Thanksgiving, and uh, like I said, turn it into a pop up and now travels everywhere.

20:57 Jim Beach: And that was part of your pivot though in 2014 that led to the corporate, didn’t it?

21:04 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Correct.

21:04 Jim Beach: All right. How did you make it through the pandemic? Thank goodness you were in Florida, not a state like Michigan or something, but still it must have hit your business quite a bit. How did you, yeah, pandemic time.

21:16 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Yeah, that story, man, it, it gives me chills, always thinking about it. It’s wild because, so, I, I met my wife now, we, to say it very fast, we got together, and within about 6 or 7 months of us dating, we decided to move in together, and she’s an entrepreneur as well, and she, uh, she’s a, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, so she had a small, a psychiatric practice. Traditional, you know, you come in, lay on the couch, talk to someone about your problems, get medication management, um, and when I saw it, immediately us getting together, and this was 2019. Um, I said, man, this would really be great. If you did this online, you would reach everybody, like you, you reach a lot more people. And so telehealth had existed at a very small scale.

22:04 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Nobody really believed in it because of just anything dealing with medical, people feel safer and uh more comfortable coming into office because that’s how we were doing it. And so, in 2019, I decided to take the whole company. She brought me in, starting really as a consultant, and I ended up being the COO of the business. We took it national and built VirtualPsychiatricCare.com. Now, why that’s important is, mind you, I’m telling you, 2019 is when we started building out the website. And if you know anything about the medical industry, you know, about HIPAA compliance or anything. You can’t just make a website, like if you’re selling t-shirts. We can make a website and start selling shirts tomorrow, but it takes about three to four months to build a website that’s HIPAA-compliant and makes the user interface easy enough for people to feel comfortable having their psychiatric needs met on their computer.

23:04 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So started building that and the funny part about it is the, uh, the goal was to launch quarter two of 2020. So that’s April first of 2020. We started building the website literally in December 2019 and it’s very crazy, right? Started building it, started building it and and and put a, put enough runway there to work out all the bugs. It was really ready by the beginning of March, but we wanted about 30 days to work out all the kinks, then launch the website April 1st. Everyone remembers what happened between March 12th and March 17th, depending on what state you were in: the whole world shut down.

23:44 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): So, that’s, that, it was, it was very crazy, so that’s where I was able to take from branding, everything I studied and learned about branding and and all of the, the principles that I put into my DJ business, we put into the telehealth business, and so we launched virtual psychiatricare.com, and it’s been a great success since.

24:04 Jim Beach: How is the site doing, the platform now? However, you…

24:07 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): It’s great. We just added GLP-1, and we just added weight care as well, as well as peptides. Um, and we’re on the road to 50 states. I think we’re at about 40 about 40 states so far. And uh each state is is almost like its own country with licensing and what you can do and and the laws and so forth so it’s been great man it it’s allowed me to really uh get a a good understanding of myself and know that the things that I taught myself and everything that I learned from Photoshop, everything about branding and marketing is very transferable and it’s a universal principles that I learned, which is once again, that’s why I wrote the book as well.

24:50 Jim Beach: I love it. Greg Davis, you are a really great guy. I’d love to hang out with you and have a beer one time and listen to you spin some for us. How do we find out more about you, follow you online, get a copy of the book?

25:07 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Well, the book is available on Amazon, so you can just search Selfborn. And if you don’t know the rest of the title, which is how I made a $1000000 as a DJ and built a system anyone can use, you go right to Amazon and find that. You can also just find me on all socials at DJ Selfborn. So that’s D as in dog J, S as in Sam, E, L as in Larry, F as in Frank, B as in boy, O, R, N as in Nancy, all together, you’ll find me everywhere, man.

25:39 Jim Beach: Fantastic. I love it. Thanks a lot for an education and we’d love to have you back. Great stuff.

25:46 Greg Davis (DJ Selfborn): Oh, absolutely. I’m ready. Let me know when.

25:50 Jim Beach: All right. And we will be right back.

25:50 Jim Beach: To introduce another great entrepreneur, please welcome Josh Troy to the show. He started off in college and built a business then, and, you know, I just am always so impressed with people who during college go and start a business. He moved on and has since run a company called Curvion Blue, where he is the CEO. They help you get better at sales. They really like the customer who’s like a 1000000 a year and they want to take them to a 100 million, not by having better employees, but by having better systems. They’re also using a lot of AI selling systems right now to help generate revenue, and they have increased revenue by over $200 million for some of their clients. Very impressive. Josh, welcome to the show. How you doing?

26:36 Josh Troy: Hey, thanks so much. I’m doing great and looking forward to a good conversation.

26:41 Jim Beach: Likewise, tell us about college. You were in one of the UC schools, as I remember, uh, tell us about starting a business while still getting good grades.

26:50 Josh Troy: Yeah, there’s actually quite a few interesting stories to share there. I’ll tell you this. When I went to college, I was I was going to college to get a degree in strategic business management. So it’s just a business degree and the emphasis was strategic or, you know, the title was strategic business management. The emphasis was entrepreneurship because I always knew I wanted to own my own business. I had had many entrepreneurial endeavors kind of through high school, uh, with my first my first sort of, uh, business attempts when I was in 6th grade trying to do a recycling company. And, uh, and so I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. What was interesting is, I had no idea what type of business I wanted to have. And so, excuse me.

27:38 Josh Troy: What happened was I was in college and I was really trying to figure out what industry I wanted to go into, and I remember I was in a class. I can’t remember what type of class it was specifically, but we were doing all sorts of case studies, business analysis, SWOT analysis, and they were teaching us about business models. And I remember reading all sorts of case studies on like Chipotle and, um, you know, the fast casual industry and all these kind of popular companies, none of which were appealing to me. But throughout every single case study. I kept hearing about this topic of digital marketing. And this was, you know, back, I don’t know, 2010 or somewhere around there. And so the emergence of digital marketing was still really just starting to come on strong.

28:29 Josh Troy: And so I kind of sat there for a minute and I thought to myself, if every industry is all talking about one industry, maybe that’s where I got to start looking. And so I decided, yeah, it just, it was just kind of an intuitive like, hey, this makes the most sense. It keeps coming up. So I started looking into digital marketing and now to not be too long winded. What happened there was digital marketing is a very broad umbrella. There’s paid search. There’s SEO. There’s PPC, there’s paid social. There’s video marketing. There’s content marketing. There’s so many different things that you could do. And so I, my first attempt was, okay, I’m going to learn PPC. Google—Google paid search. And to be really honest with you, it hurt my head. It was, it was tedious.

29:16 Josh Troy: It wasn’t really my style, but through this, I had discovered that, hey, people need a lot of video ads, video was a really big thing, and video marketing was blowing up, and I thought to myself, hey, I can get my head around that. I’ve always liked creative. I like production. I’ve always loved movies and telling good stories. And uh, the thing about creative is, you could kind of make anything sound good if you know how to sell and you could back it up with a little bit of data. So I liked the freedom that that came with. So my first business was a company called Ironwell Productions. We were a full stack media consulting firm was our positioning there, but it was really just a strategic video production company where we would produce ads for digital marketing campaigns. And so that was really the start.

30:07 Josh Troy: I’ll tell you one more thing, if there’s entrepreneurs listening, I think they’ll appreciate and relate to this. I remember I was in a class. It was an entrepreneur class. And, uh, we had some like big tests. I can’t remember if it was like midterms or final or what it was. And I had landed a really large meeting with a large potential client, the biggest one in my career so far, which had been short-lived, you know, it was only a year in or so, but I started this business when I was still in college. And so I had this big meeting and I remember I talked to the professor and I said, hey, I got this really big meeting for my business. They, the only time they could do it is the time of the midterm. Can I, can I take it at a different time? I’m even okay to take the test earlier, right?

31:00 Josh Troy: I’m able to do it sooner and uh, and she said, no. She said, you can’t, if you can’t make it, you’ll fail. And I thought about that, and I looked at it, and I said, you know what? This is a class to teach you how to own a business. I’m the only one in the entire classroom that already owns one. And so if you’re gonna fail me because I’ve already done the thing that you’re trying to teach people and I have a successful business meeting, then you can go ahead and fail me. I’m not interested in your grade. And so I left and I took that meeting. It ended up being a really big client of ours that made a big impact and to give you sort of a happy ending there. The dean of the college heard about this incident and they allowed me to retake that test and pass it.

31:53 Josh Troy: So that was kind of my experience getting started. That’s an amazing story, man. I love that story. You should drip that into every sales presentation you ever do somehow. You know, just to, uh, you know, for people to get to know you better and to know your character or something. So I have a similar story.

32:13 Jim Beach: I wanted to go to architecture school and I was at the same time starting a business. My very first business, I was 24 and got rejected to Georgia Tech is the only school I applied to. And I had, you know, perfect grades and scores and everything. And so I should have gotten in, except I got a meeting with the dean, and I asked why I didn’t get in, and he said, because you, you know, can’t draw. And I was like, well, I have a computer. You know, these are the modern times. I don’t need to draw. And he was like, yeah, right. So he gave me a book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It’s for math and non-artistic people to learn how to draw. Interesting. And every day, I would sit in the hallway outside of his office, and draw his office floor or whatever, and then cram it underneath his door.

33:08 Jim Beach: And eventually he let me in because the drawings were getting better and such, and I think he was tired of me. And so those sort of persistent stories are important to tell because we need to let younger entrepreneurs hear those stories that, you know, at some point, we worked really, really hard too for many, many hours, you know? Oh, absolutely.

33:29 Josh Troy: Absolutely.

33:29 Jim Beach: And I still, I’m a workaholic. So I work a lot even today, but it’s very different today, right? And I have a decent sized company with a lot of really talented people.

33:40 Josh Troy: And so what I focus on. I could be a little bit more choosy and I, you know, when I work on weekends. It’s because I want to, not because I have to. So, yeah, things certainly change, but back then, it’s funny, even for someone who works as much as me and I’m just kind of a freak of nature when it comes to how much I’m capable of working. Even me, I look back on these days in college where I have a full, so by the way, I was behind in my units for, for reasons we don’t need to get into, but I, you know, I was really behind, so I had to catch up. So I was taking more than a full-time schedule to catch up in college. I had a full-time job that was like uh, that was paying the bills and starting this new, this new company all at the same time.

34:36 Josh Troy: And, uh, I look back on that and I’m just like, I don’t even know how I was able to do that. It was just like, all day long, something was happening, but, yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s what it takes, and I think, for me, every entrepreneur, that, every successful entrepreneur I, I know, uh, they have some sort of similar story they can share. I’m not unique in that sense. It might be a unique set of variables, but everyone has gone through that. And I think it’s unfortunate—and this can be a hot take because not everyone agrees with this—but the whole work-life balance thing… If you want to be a business owner, it’s a 24/7 type of thing, and you’re going to be working way more than a lot of people until you get to a certain level.

35:26 Jim Beach: Are you married?

35:27 Josh Troy: I am, yeah, I got married a year ago, so we just had our first anniversary a couple months back and we had our first baby boy 9 weeks ago.

35:37 Jim Beach: Oh, congratulations. How’s he sleeping?

35:39 Josh Troy: He’s sleeping really, really good. Relative to how newborns and babies sleep. So we’re very lucky in terms of how good he sleeps, but it’s still some really late nights and thankfully my wife is awesome and she’s able to stay up with him most of the time.

35:56 Jim Beach: I have to interrupt. This is one of my obsessions. I have had 4 children or, you know, fathered 4 children. All of them slept through the night by 5 weeks consistently. The book is called Baby Wise, B-A-B-Y, W-I-S-E, and the author is Ezzo, E-Z-Z-O. And it’s incredibly simple. Let me explain it to you, and this is, I’m just obsessed with this. So I’m even willing to let the listeners hear that.

36:20 Josh Troy: Yeah.

36:20 Jim Beach: What do you do right after a big meal on Thanksgiving. What’s the thing you want to do? You want to take it now? All right, so you feed the baby and so the baby’s tired and who wants to take a nap. So the baby is now warm, loved, fed, clean, and asleep. And then the baby wakes up and it’s unloved, cold, dirty, its butt hurts, and it’s awake. And so all of the good things happen when it’s asleep and only bad things happen when it’s awake. What if you reversed the cycle and said, baby, here’s your food. Now we’re going to play, and we’re going to play, and keep you up for a while. And then when we decide that you’re ready to go to sleep. We will walk in and drop you in the crib wide awake. Leave the lights on, make noise because you’ll be so tired that you’ll pass out.

37:13 Jim Beach: And then when you wake up next on our schedule, we will then feed you and then keep you up. You reverse the body cycle from day one. It’s unbelievable how much impact it has.

37:27 Josh Troy: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I’ll tell you this. Uh, I have a wife who’s boss of the household and uh, and this type of stuff is really interesting and I’m going to shoot it straight over to her. I focus on the business and she can handle that type of stuff, but it sounds like a cool structure. I’m 100% in favor of that.

37:46 Jim Beach: Yes.

37:46 Josh Troy: I believe in traditional family and all that. Yeah, so I’m not going to fight against that.

37:54 Jim Beach: But I’m obsessed with getting babies to sleep. And then the appendix, Josh, is the baby sign language, which is the coolest thing on Earth, and has a huge impact because the baby can communicate. It just doesn’t know how to make the words. And so you teach it the sign language for more, please, all done, Thank you. And at 6 months, it can say more and that it can tell you when it’s full and say all done. And that reduces the, uh, uh, because the baby can actually communicate with you. Unbelievable. [Unclear phrase.]

38:26 Josh Troy: Oh there you go. Learn how to run a business and raise a baby in the same episode.

38:33 Jim Beach: There you go.

38:34 Josh Troy: Yes.

38:34 Jim Beach: We go all over the place. All right, so you mentioned that Curvion has quite a few employees. How many employees are you up to?

38:42 Josh Troy: We have 265 somewhere around there right now. Yeah, yeah, it grows fast. So, or it’s been growing fast, I should say, and we’re always adding new headcounts. So it’s exciting. It’s definitely been a fun journey.

38:54 Jim Beach: That’s really impressive. And where did the name come from? What is the meaning of Curvion Blue? Am I saying it correctly and stuff?

39:03 Josh Troy: You are, yeah—Curvion Blue. So Curvion Blue is a rev ops implementation and sales augmentation partner. Say that 10 times fast, I know.

39:12 Jim Beach: I love that.

39:13 Josh Troy: It could be a tongue twister.

39:16 Jim Beach: I love that. I haven’t heard that one. Keep going.

39:19 Josh Troy: Yeah, revenue operations. And so, really, that’s just a fancy way of saying that we do all the, you know, there’s two sides of the business. It’s like systems and processes, and then it’s the people side of the business, which is recruiting, training, and managing. So we help companies that are growing. And that have a sales team. We help them grow a professionalized sales function. So sometimes it’s building their entire tech stack, their playbooks, their SOPs, their scripting—all of these things companies really need and usually don’t have the internal capability to do. And then everything on the other side of the business, which is recruiting, training, and managing the actual sales team for them. So, the way that it’s easy to understand is we’re just like a marketing agency, but on sales. And the same way marketing has all these different marketing related services. We are kind of that one stop shop for sales.

40:15 Josh Troy: If you need talent, if you need systems, if you need, uh, structure, if you need talk tracks, if you need management, anything involved in scaling a sales team and building your revenue architecture, we help with. Now, in thinking about Curvion Blue—and this is where my artistic side comes from—I got really creative from that first business of mine, the video production business. That really opened up my creative mind, and I got really into brand development and things like that. And so, I believe a, a name should be really, uh, really in alignment with and representative of what you do and I, I really like the, the branding and the name to fall into the positioning. Without getting too detailed, the phonetic sound ‘curve’ in Curvion is referring to the inflection point. If you’re looking at a growth curve on a P&L, it’s about how fast a company’s growth trajectory is.

41:14 Josh Troy: And so there’s a term in private equity called bend the curve, which means, you know, that’s when all of a sudden that hockey stick growth of curves occurs and so you see the… Unique name that was a new word. And so we landed on Curvion, which was really combining curve and ion. An ion is like a particle of energy, essentially, right? So it’s like we’re pouring in all of the right energy to be able to grow your business the fastest. It’s all about growth rate, right? Anybody who knows anything about business valuations or really just running a successful business, it’s revenue, EBITDA, and growth rate. That’s like all that matters. Everything else is kind of noise. So we’re the company you hire, if you’re obsessed with growth rates, and then blue, it gave us a really cool feeling where it was a premium brand.

42:07 Jim Beach: Is it like ocean blue?

42:08 Josh Troy: No, no, it feels like a designer brand for a service business when you say it. Curvion Blue. It’s just a name that, you know, I think, uh, you know, we get a lot of feedback to that, it just sounds cool. And what Blue represented, it was the perfect word in color, because it actually means so many different things related to what we do. So blue is the color of the flame at the highest rate of combustion, which means there’s, you know, there’s minimal waste. So it’s like the highest rate of combustion and then blue is the fastest speed of light and then there’s blue is, you know, a blue chip client. It’s representative of the top tier clients and business. Even if you look at social media these days. You have a blue check mark. So there are so many different ways that showed up. Curvion Blue just made sense for all those reasons.

43:03 Josh Troy: I’m sure there are a lot of listeners who are like, ‘We don’t really care that much about why you named Curvion Blue what you named it,’ but I’m passionate about it. So there’s the answer.

43:15 Jim Beach: On this show, we do care about that because we wanted to grow businesses and found, you’ll find out how you did it. And, you know, you’ve got 265 employees. So we have a lot to learn from you, Josh.

43:29 Josh Troy: Oh, and I’ll tell you this. Here’s what I would say to listeners, though, and here’s why I do think it matters. Because I think a lot of people, in my experience, a lot of businesses, they don’t put a whole lot of thought into the name, and the name, what I, the process I like to go through, is you want to start with the positioning. What is your positioning? What is your your unique selling propositions, your your value propositions, your differentiators, and what you do, how you win business? And then the name just has to be representative of that. So I always start with those things. Who do we want to be in the market? How do we want our customers to feel when they see our services and how are we different than everybody else?

44:16 Josh Troy: And so, I think it’s so important that your name is representative of that, because not only do you have that alignment, but I can’t tell you, my full career, people ask me, so what’s the name stand for? And it takes you into a perfect opportunity to start leaning right into what your unique selling propositions are. So I have always felt that a name is actually really, really important in the branding. And the last thing I’ll say on that topic, which I always thought was interesting as a younger entrepreneur, is the word branding, a lot of people don’t know this. It comes from literally cattle branding. And so back in the day, if when you would brand your cattle, the concept was, if another rancher, whatever it was, found your cattle, they would know which ranch it belongs to because just simply because of that unique, distinct mark. That’s where the term branding comes from.

45:10 Josh Troy: So when you think about that, You’re basically saying, how do they know it’s us because we have a very unique and succinct, you know, way of showing up. And so I’m I’m in love with that concept of branding. And so that’s what I do with the positioning and the statements and our, you know, obviously our marketing, our messaging and the name, when they hear it, it instantly feels unique and different because of the branding.

45:36 Jim Beach: Well, well, done, well stated, Josh. We just learned a lot. Go back in time and why did you start this business? What was the, was it a pivot from something else? Give us the birthing origination birthing story stuff?

45:51 Josh Troy: So, Listen, I’ll tell you this. I’m not an inventor. I’m not necessarily even an innovator. I’m a really good salesman who’s learned some great dealmaking capabilities and has figured out how to operate a strong business over time. What I mean by that is, I’m not the guy who’s trying to figure out the next app, the next whatever. I’m somebody that I can turn one to two and I can do that over and over again, right? I could turn $one into two and I know how to scale and replicate something that works. And so my first business that I told you about Ironwell productions. My main focus other than finding the right vehicle. I’m a really, really big fan of, you know, you have to be in the right vehicle and the right model.

46:36 Josh Troy: One of my biggest lessons I’ve ever learned at that first production company, actually, is that I had the wrong business model, which is why it was so freaking hard, and I learned so many valuable lessons through there. But anyways, you gotta be in the right vehicle. You got to be in the right industry. So other than like, the industry was correct. The business model wasn’t. But, um, but, but what I learned through that. Is, uh, I was just a, the, the main reason I started business is I was just really good at sales and. I wanted something to sell. I wanted a service business that played to my strengths and I knew how to sell. And so that’s why I started that business.

47:18 Josh Troy: Well, through that, I ended up getting a bunch of digital marketing agency partners, because remember, we did the video ads, but our clients would need somebody to run the campaigns, which it wasn’t for competency we had. So I would partner with agencies, and we would send them our clients to run ads, and they would send us their clients to produce videos. They would say, ‘We suck at outbound, and our sales process is kind of a mess. Can you help us out?’ Can help us out? So I started consulting different digital marketing agencies on how to build these sales motions. Well, again, to get to the bottom line, what happened is I got to a place in my life where everything I did was sales, that’s what I enjoyed the most, I was constantly surrounded by people that did not have that skill set or core competency internally.

48:07 Josh Troy: And, and, and, and after coming out of the production space. It’s a hard, hard space. And we had companies all the way up to Coca-Cola. You know, so we worked with some large businesses, but it’s a hard company. Everything’s subjective. It’s hard to standardize the production industry because it’s a bunch of artists. There are so many complications and fulfillment that I thought, what if sales, which is the thing I’ve always enjoyed most. What if sales was our fulfillment? I was like, no, that’s a business I would love. So I started doing research and I found out that there was some really large companies that do this. There wasn’t a lot of companies, but there was validation of companies that were doing 100s of 1000000s in revenue a year with this type of business model.

48:55 Josh Troy: So that was enough validation for me, and and this is what I jumped into, and a lot of years later, we’ve just been doing it at a very successful level.

49:05 Jim Beach: Wow, what a great story. And who is your target market? Was I right when I said plus a 1000000 in rev to start sort of?

49:13 Josh Troy: Yeah, well, it’s hard because it’s such a broad market. And our capability is valued by businesses of almost any size. I tell you this. I had a lot of limiting beliefs in who I thought would be our ICP when I first started the business years ago because I thought that our clients would just be people that didn’t know how to do sales. And I thought, well, if they’re successful in business and they’ve done a lot of revenue, they probably know sales to some extent. But man, was I wrong about that? Some of our best clients today know sales extremely well, but it’s because of how well they know it that they know how much goes into it. And so when they’re rapidly growing a business, a lot of the time they see us as a faster path to deployment. You know, they they see us as like, oh, we need an outbound sales team now.

50:09 Josh Troy: Let’s just have these guys come in and build it because it would take a long time to assemble things from the outside and, you know, you have higher fail rates where, you know, you hire somebody and they don’t work out. There’s there’s all of these reasons. And so we have companies all the way up to doing $1000000 a year. Now, what I would say on the B2B service side, our core market is between about $2 million and $20 million, where most of them are, with ambitions of scaling much further beyond that. The faster a company wants to grow, the more they typically value our services. And so recently, we’ve been very focused on this market, which is exciting for us, which is between, call it, it could be as low as 1000000 because it depends on profit margins and things like that. But I’d say [unclear revenue range], where it’s either founder-led or founder-managed sales.

51:05 Josh Troy: And so you’re, the founder themselves, is either doing all the business, all the sales, or they might have a couple reps, but they’re still extremely involved and they don’t have a management here. So they’re managing, they’re involved in the sales process, even if they’re not the only salesperson, they spend most of their time in the sales department. We have a really, really cool offering for this segment called our Curvion Blueprint. And this is essentially how we transition a founder led founder uh, manage sales team into a professionalized sales function where revenue shows up even when you don’t. And so that has been a really, really cool segment for us.

51:44 Jim Beach: Yeah, Josh, we have run out of time and I’d love to have you back really soon so we can learn some sales stuff from you in the systems because I am really impressed with what you’ve done and the way you’ve accomplished it and how articulate you are at explaining what you’ve done.

52:01 Josh Troy: Do you know the Tron ride at Disney? Uh, I think I’m familiar, but I haven’t been to it.

52:10 Jim Beach: It’s the reason I think of it is that it has a blue circle, uh, wheel thing, very futuristic. You should look at that and maybe use it as something to steal from for Curvion Blue’s logo.

52:22 Josh Troy: I’m quite happy with our logo, but I do like the idea of what you’re saying.

52:27 Jim Beach: I’m just thinking, I see that ride. I’m immediately going, ‘Oh, that’s perfect for Curvion Blue.’ So how do we get in touch with you? Find out more. Most importantly, where do I go to see the logo? CurvionBlue.com.

52:40 Josh Troy: Yeah, so you can go to CurvionBlue.com. It’s C-U-R-V-I-O-N, blue like the color, dot com. Um, you could definitely go there. You could find me on social media, whether it’s LinkedIn or Instagram or the main profiles that I’m on, and you could just type Josh Troy. Um, and and you’ll find me there. I also have a YouTube channel for business owners that are looking for some more sales content. You could again just go to Josh Troy on YouTube. There’s a handful of good videos there and we’re going to start producing a lot more, but either way, get in touch with us.

53:15 Josh Troy: What we typically like to do is, we’ll give you some sort of free audit or assessment that, uh, there’s like a, you know, a 27 point assessment that we do to figure out what you’re actually missing in your sales function, and, uh, and that will be very revealing on whether we could help you or not. So reach out to me, get in touch with my team, and we’d love to help business owners scale faster.

53:41 Jim Beach: Josh, great stuff. Thank you so much for being with us and congratulations on a really well done job. Thanks a lot for being with us.

53:50 Josh Troy: You as well. Thanks so much.

53:52 Jim Beach: We are out of time for today, but you know what we do? Right. We come back tomorrow. Be safe. Take care. Bye now.