 Welcome back to the channel. Today I have an awesome guest for you, another amazing story about someone who is able to get a tech sales position in a very short period of time. Thank you so much for coming on the channel, Joseph. I really appreciate it. You coming on, sharing your story. Thank you, shape for having me. I appreciate it as well. Awesome. So let's go ahead and get into it real quick. So let's go ahead and start back at the beginning. Maybe just give me a little bit of a background about yourself and how you discovered tech sales. Sure thing. I mean, I want to start from where most people start from Brooklyn, New York. A lot of people from Brooklyn, New York are very proud to say that I was born and raised there for most of my life with parts of Queens, moved out of the United States for a couple of years as a teenager with my parents. They have actually a home for street children in Guyana, South America, and they do that amazing work. In fact, they're still there to this day. They've been there for about 17 years and they just keep on going. And then I came back for college. I laugh because it's college. I came back for college and I went and got married after college and had kids. And so it led me to this path of basically kind of trying to find my way in this world in regards to providing and being a father and a husband. And so it basically landed me to the point where I am at today where I was looking and searching for something. And I saw Anthony O'Neill's show that he has the table where he had a guest, Cyrus Harbin, who was there and he was telling his story from how he started off basically doing Uber, among other different things. And he in his mind, he was struggling, right? And so he ended up taking a tech bootcamp and becoming a sales engineer and literally night and day story, you know? And so when I saw that out, like most people you see and you say, oh, this is this is pretty cool. All right. This thing's kind of fun. But something was different about this. Something really resonated with me. And so I ended up going and watching what he basically did, seeing all of his videos going through basically any video that he had, I probably saw twice or three times. And so from there, I got introduced to you. I got introduced to Anton Wade. I got introduced to Dressel and others on YouTube who are basically providing an education about this industry that honestly, I wasn't aware of, you know? And just to give you a little bit of background on my actual professional path, you know, it was all over the place from I started off doing staffing agencies right off of college. And then eventually I started working for churches and even I worked in as a patient care coordinator. And then lastly, I worked in inside sales as a solar company here in the Northeast. And so the funny thing is that when I talk to my wife about all my journey, I'm just reflecting. She's like, man, every single thing kind of worked up for this moment. And truly, truly it does. And so after watching that, again, going back to Cyrus Harbin, after watching that, I started to develop a hunger, a desire to say, I have to get into this. I have to get into this. I have to change the trajectory of my life and my family's life. And so that led me to to doing the course. And I literally did it in 45 days. I'll keep in mind, I'm not just working in inside sales and solar from home. I'm working and I'm watching two of our youngest kids at the time. And it was a toddler who's three, four years old at the time. And then was also our one year old. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. And so I literally like, there's times where I'm putting the one putting the baby to giving them a nap and then I'm reading a book or I'm driving and I'm listening to the audio book of how to win friends and influence people. And I'm just like, I'm all overplayed listening to different lessons here and there because of that hunger, which I learned was great. Just having that resilience. That's what I had because it wasn't about me. It's about my generations, generation, my kids, kids. I'm trying to change things for them. And so I did the course and probably I started like the beginning of September and then I finished it in probably about 30 days. And keep in mind, I, we didn't have just one or two kids. We had five kids at this time. So talk about the house being chaotic and crazy, cleaning up, listening to it. I'm cooking. I'm listening to different lessons. And then on top of that, my wife is pregnant with our sixth child. And so what ended up happening was, and this is a funny story, but during the interview process after I finished course careers, I actually had an interview with the company that I am working with today, Frisha. And my wife's about seven minutes away. My wife's like, my water broke and I'm driving. I'm like, what? Oh no. Oh my gosh. And I'm like, what is going on? I'm driving. And then three minutes away from the emergency room, she said, he's here. The baby basically delivered himself. And so I open this. I pull over to the side. I opened the side door. There's there's a person honking behind me saying, what are you doing? I'm like, call 911 call 911. And so they just thought I was crazy. But I ended up grabbing the baby, putting a robe around that baby, putting the baby with the bilica cord and everything on her lap on her chest. Wow. And honestly, it was a little scary because the baby wasn't even like really making a lot of noise at first. I had to kind of like gently shake it. The baby. Yeah. And he eventually started to make some noise. And again, three minutes away from the house, the ER. So we got to the ER. I ran out, said, hey, the baby is here. And so about 30 doctors, nurses and medical students all came to see my wife and I. And thankfully, the baby was fine. Honestly, that was that was my biggest concern. But it was funny because I'm on my way there and I'm like right when I'm leaving, I'm like, I'm sorry, I got to reschedule the babies here for my interview. So it was quite the time. But below and behold, here am I, I'm now in tech and tech sales. And I'm excited to continue this journey. Wow. Well, that is one of the coolest stories I've ever heard. You're basically the ultimate multitasker at that point. You're doing everything. You're cooking. You're you're cleaning, making sure the house is clean. You're taking care of the kids. You're taking sales calls, which I've taken sales calls before. That is that that's tough to take care of kids. At the same time, you're taking sales calls. Oh, man. Good. I can distract them other times. It's like, oh, hey, yeah, I have a guest with me. He's my son and I introduced them to the client and they start laughing with me and they're like, oh, this is mine. Or they're like, this is unprofessional in their mind. And they just kind of say, OK, I'm going on. But sometimes life is like that. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, but you you made the most of it, which is awesome. And that just shows the grit. Like you said, that's that's what it's all about, man, just making the most of the cards that you're dealt, you know. So that's that's awesome. You mentioned college really quickly. I did want to talk about that. Do you think that somebody has to go to college in order to land like a high paying job like tech sales, for instance? No, not at all. In fact, just to kind of quote you or echo what you said, there's a few degrees that you want to if you if you want to pursue a few different careers, engineering, medical, you know, even being a lawyer, you know, these are things that, yeah, you want to go to school for that. I mean, you don't want to be a doctor operating on somebody. You have a medical license. That would be a problem for everybody involved. But for for for sales, not at all, not at all. Got it. Got it. OK. So you discovered course careers through that Anthony O'Neill show, which, yeah, a lot of people have done that. That was massive for course careers. That absolutely blew them up. So that was awesome that that happened. And so you enroll in course careers, took you about a month and a half or so to get through it. How was the curriculum? Like how how was the experience of going through course careers? Can you kind of talk about that a little bit and what your experience was like? Oh, yeah, it was great. It was really good. And the one thing I love, which I think everybody that goes through course careers would say, being that it's self-paced, there's not that pressure on you to have to, you know, attend a class and have to be able to to do this and that, because that's a lot of pressure for me as a father of as a husband and a father to six children now, that would have been that would have been an issue for me being able to sustain that. But because it was self-paced, I could push myself. I said, OK, man, I just did two, three chapters of for that go prospecting, let me do three more, you know, and I could really stretch out that process and the material itself was robust enough where even though I have a background in sales, I felt like I was learning things. I was putting language to things that I was already doing. So, for example, in the position that I had, I did a lot of, you know, cold calling. And so I'm like, OK, in the sales cycle, this is called outreach, you know, or if I was doing a lot of vetting of appointments, I'm like, OK, this is a little bit what I'm doing is actually discovery. And I did not have a language to necessarily put it to that. But it kind of goes to a quote that I have here for Warren Buffett says you should find yourself in if you should find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leads. So, for example, and it's not this is not to speak badly anybody who's in other sales positions, but I was in that position where I was in sales, but the boat itself wasn't necessarily the best boat and I feel like tech sales is truly the best boat. I digress to go back to this. The reason why I say that is because a lot of times you may be dealing and again, you may be selling cell phones, you may be selling furniture, you may be selling vacuums. I mean, you know, that's all great. But sometimes we may be in if we just take those same skills and move it to a different boat, we could experience a whole new world that we never never knew existed. And so that's what that's what I learned from the course itself. And yeah, I totally agree with you. I mentioned this to you like I went to a business conference last month, there was about 500 business owners at this conference. And I kept asking people, what's your biggest problem? What's your biggest problem? What's your biggest problem? And because that, you know, obviously that's how you make money in businesses by solving problems. And their number one biggest problem was was the sales team. It was all about sales. And a lot of them were in SAS, a lot of them were in tech. So it's it's tech sales. This is a skill that business owners who have millions of dollars in free cash when they're going to sleep at night, they're like, oh, my sales team, I have to get another salesperson. All right, I don't have enough salespeople are right. So this is one of those things where if you get good at this skill, they're just going to throw money at you. And this is why you see people like Antoine making 500. I think he's probably going to hit like 700 this year, $700,000 a year is because they've mastered this skill of sales. And in particular, it's it's tech sales. That's where there's the most opportunity is because it's probably the best industry to be in with the best possible skill you could learn. So when you combine those two things together, it's like it's like magic. I mean, there's employees that are making more than most business owners out there. And yeah, it's it's just absolute magic for sure. So you went through the course. It taught you a lot of really good lessons. Can we talk about that that first job offer? It took you about 45 days, which is awesome, about a month and a half. And you're working a full time job. You're you've got you've got six kids super busy. So a month and a half is great. That's a great amount of time to land an entirely new career. How can we talk about the money a little bit? What was kind of the range for that first offer that you got? So it's so funny, as you're talking, I'm like, let me find out exactly what the offer was so I could say exactly how it reads. So I have it right in front of me right here. Basically, the offer was and I'm going to read this to those who aren't familiar with tech and what they could provide. 100 percent remote work from home plus home office expense reimbursements, competitive compensation plus equity grants for all employees. You know, this is unlimited PTO included in this, by the way, plus eight company holidays, monthly allowance for cell phone, internet and wellness. A hundred. This is for me because this is remember, I just had a baby. 100 percent paid 12 week parental leave to all of the US employees as well as a generous parental benefit for those in Canada and variety of insurance coverages for people and pets, as well as they help you to pay for continuing education and professional certification reimbursement. All this is included with an 80 K salary. So I think you kind of went into this a little bit, but what was your lifestyle? I kind of just want to contrast the lifestyle, job satisfaction, work, life balance, all these things people talk about that are outside of the money that you make and that sort of thing, doing solar sales versus tech sales. What could you kind of contrast those two like the lifestyle difference? Yeah, let me let me let me be the first to say because I don't sometimes look at my LinkedIn and try to try to say something negative about the company that I was with. But the solar company I was with, actually, I really do applaud them because they kept us employed during the pandemic. So I can never speak negatively about them. What I would say, though, is because the type of industry that we're in, where we're really in demand, we're actually kind of in a way, a utilities company as well, because if something goes wrong, it's an emergency we have to come out. So so the hours were like I had to basically do like 10 to seven pretty much six days a week, get a day off at a certain point. And then when when the pandemic kind of calmed down, I was back to five days, but it was still later in the day, still working a weekend, one day or another. And so for my family, that was a little bit taxing because, you know, they wanted to do things and go places and they had to go without me sometimes. And imagine my wife trying to, you know, walk around all these kids by herself. She's like, looking at me like, oh, that's a little bit of a problem. But I could tell you right now, working in tech, boy, it's a totally different, totally different experience because it's typically business hours because you're speaking to businesses nine to five, and it's not a culture where they're expecting you to work over time. That's never been kind of encouraged since I've been here. It's always been like, hey, we know how much kids you got. You know, you know, you got a family and stuff. Go home like it's five o'clock. We don't want you to work over over that time. And I really appreciate that because it shows that they really kind of respect and they really cherish their workers in and something that we discussed before is that, you know, you're the ultimate prize, you are the ultimate prize. And so and so you feel that when you are working in tech. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what would you say to somebody who's kind of on the fence right now? They're thinking, you know, should I go into tech sales? Should I use course careers? What would you say to that person? Maybe they're a little bit skeptical about this because, you know, as they should be, right? You don't you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the Internet. But what would you say to that person? I would say look at me, look at others that have gone through the course. There are plenty of testimonials you could find online from students that have gone through the course and say to yourself, is my situation going to get better if I don't do something to change it? Like that quote that we said earlier about from Warren Buffett, you know, the boat is leaking and sometimes it's just best to go to another boat. You know, that I would I would ask you to look at your life and say, hey, what's I need I need to fix something. You know, I was reading the book, how to win friends once people won the books that we do in the course. And before that book, I was stressed out. I'm not going to lie. Well, not going to lie to you, Shane. I was stressed out. But one thing that reminded me is to smile. Yeah. And reading that book, it brought my smile back. It really did. And so when I could I could talk to people on the phone and smile through and they could hear, OK, this person's happy, the person I'm talking to. But it wasn't always there. And sometimes your smile might be gone because you're dealing with a lot of stuff going on in life, let's just be honest, we're humans and go through stuff. So you want to be able to change the directory of your generation to generation. And you could do that through sales, specifically through tech sales. So you have nothing to lose. That's awesome. Did you there is a there's a free course, basically, Troy put together a free course. Actually, it's it's Trent now. Trent does a free course, which it's actually better. They just revamped the course. And it basically is going to be sort of like the entire course in a nutshell. It's going to give you the nuts and bolts of the course. And it's going to tell you the different career paths in tech sales. It's going to tell you what exactly you're going to be doing on a day to day basis in tech sales. It's going to explain all the logic behind why it's such an in-demand skill. And if you want to check that free course out, it will be linked down in the description as well as the pen comment below. And if you choose to buy the full course, I do have a $50 off coupon. It's going to be Shane 50, which I'll put down there as well. Joseph, is there any like last moments sort of tips, tricks, maybe like some pearls, some pro tips that you have for anybody who's watching this? Well, yeah, I would say for me, if you're in that place where you're looking to get into tech sales, obviously, I'm going to say take the course because I went through it and it was dynamite for me. But I'm also going to include that once you get to the end of that journey and you are, you know, about to actually apply, you got to put them through a sales cadence. Whoever you're applying for, you have to find out who that person is. Do research on the company. Make sure that you are being organized in regards to who you're reaching out to what their position is, what is the ICP or the ideal customer profile for this particular company? Like really do your research that when you come to the interview table, you come prepared, you come confident. And I'm going to wrap it up with this in regards to the people. I see a lot of people struggle with this and it's because they lack confidence. It's because sometimes they lack skill and knowledge and understanding. Course Careers provides you that knowledge that you need, right? So Course Careers provides that for you and now it's your job to take time to get the understanding and to develop the skill. Therefore, if you have the knowledge, understanding and skill, the natural where there should be, I should say, you're going to naturally have the confidence to do what you're setting out to do. Gotcha. OK. That's awesome. Hey, Joseph, thank you so much for taking some time out of your very, very, very busy day with the family. And taking some time out of your evening as well as your job. I really appreciate you coming on the channel, sharing your story. I'm sure you've inspired a ton of people out there. So thank you. Well, thank you for having me, Shane. I appreciate the offer. I'm glad I'm here.