Today's Guest

Deniero Bartolini is a mentor, consultant, and coach to hundreds of small business owners. Born in Rome, he moved to Toronto, Canada and had a successful digital marketing career for a large corporation. When restructuring at the company saw him lose his job, he started freelancing and found he needed to expand with a remote team. Following his success, he founded Remote CEO Academy, where he and his team help business owners leverage the internet to scale their businesses and expand their reach. Deniero has been featured in Forbes, Adweek, Yahoo Finance, and NBC, and he hosts the Remote CEO Podcast.

Resources Shared

• Denierob.com
• The Remote CEO Academy
• The Remote CEO Podcast
• Thryv
  

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:         Hey, hey. This is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, and this week, we're fortunate to meet

Deniero Bartolini. Welcome to the show, Deniero.

Deniero Bartolini:      Hey, Gordon. Thanks for having me.

Gordon Henry:         We were just talking before the show. You're speaking to us today from Rome, Italy, right?

Deniero Bartolini:      From Rome, Italy. That's right. We are based at Toronto, Canada, my wife and I, but we decided to do six months and six months because we work remotely, and why not?

Gordon Henry:         Why not? Very cool. Very cool. And I should mention to our audience, you sometimes go by Deniero B, so they may find you online at Deniero Bartolini, Deniero B. And also, you are often known as the Remote CEO, and we're going to get into that right now. So everybody should listen up. Deniero is a guest who's, as I said, sometimes known as the Remote CEO. His goal is to help you scale your entrepreneurial business with remote teams. Deniero is launching a new book, Smart Business, Better You, and he hosts a podcast called the Remote CEO Show. So lots to get into there. 

                        Deniero's coaching journey started in Toronto where he mentored consultants and small business owners on leveraging the internet to scale businesses and expand their reach. He's been a coach for countless nonprofit and for-profits. And following his successes with his own internet marketing agency, he started offering online coaching services and founded the Remote CEO Academy, which takes you on the path from solopreneur to CEO of a remote business or as he says, remote empire. The academy focuses on six pillars, I'm sure we'll get into that. 

                        And his vision can be summed up with a statement, long gone are the days when you had to be tied to an address to have a successful company. Now you can scale a business and create numerous streams of income from anywhere in the world. Note, he's in Rome today. You can run your morning meetings with your team members joining from multiple continents. You don't have to choose between being a CEO and a digital nomad. You can have it all. You can be a remote CEO.

                        And what should listeners get out of this episode? Simply there are many ways to launch and grow your entrepreneurial businesses. Deniero can offer insights into what's worked for him and what help he can offer you. So, Deniero, we'd love to hear your story. It's a unique one. How did you get started? What stages in life led you to this idea of a remote CEO?

Deniero Bartolini:      Yeah. So we got to rewind about 20 years when I was actually in Italy. As a kid, I was here. And then when I was in my teens, I went to Canada and I started my life in Canada and I went to university there, studied there. But of course, I left a lot of friends and family members in Italy. And so what happened is had a great job in an office, things were going well for me, I found a girl and was about to get married and everything was going in the right direction, but inside, I always felt a bit torn because part of my life, half of my life was actually back in Europe. And for that reason, I went through maybe two, three years of a lot of anxiety, a lot of second guessing my choices up to that point because I thought I either started this lifestyle of the digital nomad and I grabbed a laptop and I worked around the clock maybe in Bali or something, or I'm serious about my career and my business and I build a solid base. And that was during the 20 ...

                        Well, I started in internet marketing in 2012, but by 2015, I had a clear image of how it could build a remote business that was going to really give me the best of both worlds. Being able to be with my loved ones anywhere in the world while still having multiple sources of income and not even have to work those stressful 16-hour days that I used to work before.

Gordon Henry:         So tell us a little bit more. I know you did some interesting things. You sold Pop-Tarts on Amazon. You sold other products on Amazon. You ran an internet marketing agency. What were the jobs you had or the roles you had that eventually led you to this role?

Deniero Bartolini:      All right. So I was working internet marketing, Gold Pyramid partner for a Canadian corporation in 2012. We were cold calling 75 to 300 people day even sometimes. So back then, I was like, "Wow. These companies that we're working for, they're making a lot of money through Facebook and Google advertising." And so from then on, I started looking into Amazon. First thing I did, I was like, well, I found out that if you find a product that is no longer available in stores and then you hold it for a couple of months and then you put it online, now it's something, there's scarcity in the market; you can sell it for more. 

                        And so you brought up the Pop-Tarts story, which is very funny. I bought one of those one-off flavors of Pop-Tarts. I stacked about 400 boxes at home or something. And then when I went to put them online a couple of months later, I realized I couldn't sell them online because it was a gated product, a gated category. You had to have a specific license for it. So that was my first experiment. After that, I got into screen protectors, made a lot of money there, but of course they're pretty breakable, especially if you get the glass ones, and so I got a bunch of one-star reviews. The product got taken down and I was back at zero. And so I had a lot of ups and downs. 

                        Then what I realized that one thing that was actually keeping me afloat was my ability to run Facebook ads and Google ads and even in that case, Amazon ads. And so that's when I said, "You know what? Instead of selling my own products or at least to supplement the sales of my own products, I want to start doing digital ads for other people." And so that's when I started working on a revenue share model. So instead of offering my services on a retainer, I would get 10% of the total sales that were coming from the ads. And so I had quite a few very successful partnerships with businesses that were selling multiple six figures a month just with ads. And so there, you got 20,000 a month from here, 5,000 a month from there, $15,000 a month from there. So the agency scaled pretty quickly and I found myself working around the clock at that point. There is a part in the book where I talk about the fact that I literally just had a little nap really between maybe 2 AM and 5 AM, and then I was back at it, posting, making sure that ads were running properly. 

                        And so going back to trading time for money, money was there, but (a) I had no time to even look at the money, let alone spend it, but that costed my health as well and I ended up at a hospital. And so that's when I went through a process of reinventing myself because as you can imagine, as a freelancer, not being able to work for a few weeks, it really is going to impact the relationships that you have with your clients. As a matter of fact, 75% of my book of business was gone after six weeks. 

                        So that was when I had some money saved up and I said I need to build a team. First thing that I did back then, luckily, I had started my podcast. We're in episode 570 something I believe right now. So we started the journey a long time ago and the podcast led me to really interview, in a way getting mentored, but some of the most amazing entrepreneurs I've ever had a chance to speak with. You have to understand, back then, I was just your average guy making "money online," but I was speaking to eight-figure entrepreneurs, nine-figure entrepreneurs and they were giving me very solid answers to my questions during the interviews. And so I took all that knowledge and I slowly used it to build a remote team then to manage it, and now we're about 15 to 20, it depends if you count contractors or not. They're all over the world, 15 different time zones. 

                        I honestly don't consider my job work, so to speak, but if you really had to count the hours, I don't work more than 30 hours a week. And my wife and I and my kid, we spend a lot of time together, which again, it's the whole idea of building a business around your perfect lifestyle and not the other way around.

Gordon Henry:         Okay. And the teams that you run in these 15 different locations, what is the product today? Are you selling products or services online or are you coaching or is it both?

Deniero Bartolini:      Yeah, that's a great question. So we have still our marketing agency, so we don't do any e-commerce announcements anymore, but we do our marketing services, internal marketing services for our clients. And then I have a coaching program, called the Remote CEO, which you brought up a minute ago, which also is tied to the podcast where we teach entrepreneurs and professionals build remote teams. So that could be sales teams, marketing teams, SEO teams, anything you can imagine, you were able to outsource it, build it and then give you basically the done for you systems to run and manage your team.

Gordon Henry:         Okay. So first, what you're doing personally is you're running a team of something like 15 people all over the world and you are running ad campaigns for clients successfully, and that's providing one stream of income, and then you separately have a coaching program, the Remote CEO, where you're helping clients to develop their own ability to do what you do, right?

Deniero Bartolini:      A hundred percent. That was the idea from day one. I wanted to detach myself, so to speak, from the end result and work with eight players that were interested in doing what I had done up to that point. Anything that's really been a fantastic experience because you don't only get to work on the digital ads but you get to work on so many different aspects like their mindsets, their decision-making, their management skills and everything else.

Gordon Henry:         Okay. So walk us through the Remote CEO program. I know you talked about six pillars. I don't know if we need to go into all six, but tell us basically, what is the system? Let's start there. What is the system?

Deniero Bartolini:      For sure. So the idea is that I went through the different stages that I had to go through myself from when I was on the hospital bed trying to figure out what my next step was going to be from then and to where I got to the point where I'm at today. And the first thing is the mindset and decision-making. Like I said, this is really the foundation of most entrepreneurs. If you don't have a solid mindset and you don't know where you're going, you're not going to be able to make good decisions. And so you need to not only know where you're going but also where you are at right now. And so that's really the first step. 

                        Now the second step is we want to, again, start looking at building a team, a team of individuals. And by the way, here I'm assuming that you already have a business that's bringing in some cash. And so at this point, we're going to look at the tasks that you shouldn't be doing, the ones that you still want to do but maybe you should start thinking about outsourcing them, and I know a thing or two about that. And so building the team is absolutely one of the most important things. 

                        And after that, without having to go into all six, but the idea is that we're also going to help you with branding and personal branding. So if you want to start podcasting, we'll help you build a podcast. If you want to promote your brand on Instagram, we'll help you create systems and content to go there. We have about 50K followers there as well. And so the idea is to first build some brand for yourself before you do any advertising. 

                        I want to bring this back to my agency because as a performance-based company, we don't work with everyone. We have to pre-screen the companies that we think we can start making money with. And one of our biggest factors is history of their sales of course, but most importantly, do they have some either a list or people that are already following them? Because a lot of brands think that they can pay their way to building a brand. Unless you're like a Coca-Cola or something, maybe yeah, go ahead and do it. But if you are your average professional, maybe an accountant, a lawyer, a dentist that wants to build a brand, you need to be present out there and you need to, like Mark Cuban calls it, it's sweat equity. You can't just pay your way to being known in your industry overnight. And so it also takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of even pressure. 

                        And so we help entrepreneurs come out of their shell and tell their story and really be the best version of themselves but still be true to their brand and themselves so that when they do get on the phone with a potential client or they do their webinars, they're not just trying to sell something. They're actually coming from a place of giving value upfront and then being able to reap the benefits in the long run.

Gordon Henry:         Okay. And just to close out on the Remote CEO framework, what is the timeframe? If I signed up as your client, how long do I work with you in a typical situation as a client to become a remote CEO, and what is the cost?

Deniero Bartolini:      Absolutely. So we have several different ways that you can work with us. The first one is we help you really with the entire system, and that's more of a monthly fee that we decide together. It's about $500 every week if you want to get started and then it goes up from there. If you're looking, for example, to just build one team. Let's say you want to only build your social selling team so that you have people sending out messages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Sales Navigator and everything else. So that would actually be a program that lasts about three to five months. It's about $9,800. We have guarantees as well. One of our guarantee is money back, but another one is the success guarantee, which means yes, it's for three to five months, but if there's still things that we need to iron out, we work with you until you get the results that you want, which is generally make your money back at least for the investment. Again, it's something that we send out proposals, and each situation is a bit different. Right?

Gordon Henry:         Got it. Okay. Are your systems relevant to all types of clients and all types of products? What about someone who's a plumber or you said, a dentist or a car mechanic? When I think of most of these typical local service businesses, the idea of a remote team seems, well, pretty remote. 

Deniero Bartolini:      Yeah. 

Gordon Henry:         How am I an auto mechanic with a remote team, how am I a dentist with a remote team?

Deniero Bartolini:      I absolutely love this question. It's in the book actually. One chapter is almost dedicated completely to this because that's one main question that people ask us. You don't have to have a remote team. You don't have to be a remote business. And so now people start thinking about, okay, well, let me think. If I am a physiotherapist, for example, that we've helped in the past. Now she of course, accepts clients in their studio if she wants to, but instead of working five days a week, 12 hours a week in the studio, now she does two or three days a week in the studio, maybe mornings or afternoons. And the rest of the time, she has team members that reach out online to potential clients for services that may not require them to be in person. 

                        Now a dentist, a bit of a different example because a physiotherapist can help you remotely through a Zoom call with posture and everything else. Dentists probably cannot do that. And so what we recommend for professionals that want to expand their business or at least go partly remote, they can offer consulting in their own niche. So for example, if you are a seasoned dentist with over a decade of experience, you could put together programs for new dentists to open their first firm, but you can also help them build chains. Maybe they already have one practice. They can start opening two, three, four in the greater Toronto area, for example. 

                        And so offering this system, it gives them that extra cash to not have to go in the studio or in the practice every single day, but also frees up space. I remember when I used to go to, in Toronto, I used to go to this yoga studio, I had a room, a decent size, maybe it could fit 15, 20 people, but I would say probably a third of the space was taken up by desks and people that were working there and whatnot. And so just as a joke, one day, I was like, I'm kidding but you could probably get everyone to work from home and you could have classes with 25 people and charge literally the same but make a lot more money. As a matter of fact, after six months, we went back and that's exactly what she did. So the idea is that yes, the team can be remote but your business doesn't need to be remote to reap the benefits of a remote team.

Gordon Henry:         Okay. So another piece of your proposal or your plan is not just this idea of being remote but also what sounds like working less or you say maybe finding a lifestyle of freedom. You say, would you rather have a seven-figure business or a lifestyle of freedom? Fortunately, you don't have to choose. In my experience, entrepreneurs work really, really hard and really, really long hours. You say you want to eliminate entrepreneur burnout. I guess my question is doesn't every successful entrepreneur have to work crazy hours to achieve success.

Deniero Bartolini:      All right. It's a great question again. And in my experience, what's important is of course the quality of the work and the things that you work on. As a matter of fact, in the part of the decision-making process in the first pillar, we're looking at what's really one of the most important things in your business. For example, for me as a content creator, the book was at the top of my priority list for 2022 and was able to put it together and write it in less than 40 days with all the ideas that I had accumulated over the years, but it took me about 40 days. Now the book was a perfect example of something to work for upfront, but it's going to help me build my brand and then sell more and even, again, hire more people to help me automate it.

                        Now, when I talk about freedom and free time, there's a lot of misconceptions around it. I am not the type of person that sits around drinking from a coconut, a piña colada on the beach. You're probably familiar with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist that wrote the book, Flow, and the concept of flow. And he talks in his book about the fact that it's actually easier to enjoy work than free time because work already has within it those mechanisms that you have to master and there are goals that you have to achieve every single day possibly or every single week. And so if you own your craft and you become good at it, that's really what makes you happy. A lot of people think that working 20 hours a week or 30 hours a week means that then after the day, you're just going to go to the mall and shop because you have free time and money.

                        I'm a big proponent of building that lifestyle. Actually, the last pillar, the fifth pillar actually is lifestyle design. And so I'm a huge proponent of, okay, what are you going to do with that free time? For example, for me, I absolutely love calisthenics and gymnastics, but to be totally honest, as a lifestyle entrepreneur, it is something that I look forward to doing every single day and it makes me feel more energetic and work better. I'm a better leader. I show up for my team, more excited. And so that's just one example.

                        For those that know me from back in the day, I used to be a music producer, and so part of what I do also with my free time is work on music and do things, whether it's mixes or actual instruments. Being a father is a huge thing in my life right now. So yes, in a way, I'm always busy, but it's not that I'm always busy on the same tasks. I have my team doing, I would say probably 80% of the busy work in my business. I show up for that important 20% to move it forward and to manage, and then I spend the rest of the time mastering other parts of my life.

Gordon Henry:         Yeah. We didn't talk much about your team or how you found them or put them together. For anybody who manages people, managing people can be time consuming and at times a difficult job in itself. So how did you find these 15 people all over the world and how do you manage them with all the time zones and doing it all virtually?

Deniero Bartolini:      Absolutely. So let's talk about the fact that some of them are asynchronous and some them are synchronous. So some people, they have to show up at a certain time, they need to be on meetings. We need to review their KPIs. We need to make sure that things are going as we planned. Some of them don't have to do that. And so for the ones that don't have to do it, we have a tool called Todoist. It's pretty much like a lot of these monday.com or Trello. It's a productivity/operations management tool that we use. And so I have calls with them maybe once a week, sometimes even every two weeks, but everything is managed within that platform.

                        For the revenue generating roles, that's where we tend to get on the phone with them more often. Motivational meetings are absolutely key to keep that mindset, that growth mindset in check. And most importantly, the way that we scout for revenue generating roles is totally different from the way that we scout for non-revenue generating roles. Now if I'm looking for an operations manager or anything else that has to do maybe customer success, I'm okay with going on a website and looking for candidates that way. I think it's a fantastic way of finding them. For revenue generating roles, especially when we're talking about digital marketing that morphs every six months, a platform like Facebook ads, it changes in the backend. Some features are not there anymore. Some features are new. And so for me, the most important thing is not experience, oh, I'm a seasoned digital marketer. What is important to me is show me your latest win, how big that win was and who did you work for? 

                        So I have many coaches and mentors that I work with. So whenever I'm looking for a revenue generating role like a digital marketer or a copywriter, I go straight to them and I ask them for a warm introduction. I think this is very important. It's in the book. I say that the difference between hiring that way and hiring on a website is almost like hiring through your connections, especially if they're coaches or mentors, it's like going to an expensive restaurant and eating an amazing piece of steak. It's great. It's done for you. You sit there and they put it in front of you. It's great, but it's something that it's not scalable. You don't do it every single night. Whereas, if you want to hire for other roles and you go on websites, you do the work yourself so it takes longer. You take a bit more chances. Maybe not all dishes are going to be perfect, but it's definitely scalable because you can run as many interviews as you want and you can hire for those roles a lot, maybe not faster but a lot cheaper even. 

                        Those are the two differences. Like I said, revenue generating, for me, it's absolutely crucial not what school they went to or anything like that, but hey, were you able to build a funnel? Okay, yes. How much did you generate with that funnel? A million plus? Perfect. Let's start working together. So those are the types of criteria that we look for.

Gordon Henry:         Yeah. You mentioned you often lean on mentors. Can you tell us one or two of your mentors and how you found them?

Deniero Bartolini:      Absolutely. So for example, one of the biggest people, I think the biggest mentor at this point in my life has been Craig Ballantyne. He's from Toronto, Canada. And so I used to follow him back in the day when he had his total only fitness ... It was only a fitness mailing list. He worked for Men's Health, I believe. And so that was from back in the day, 2006. And then I started following him when he started making videos about productivity. And really from then on, I just absolutely love the style because he talks about the fact that without productivity, without being productive and really sticking to your schedule, everything is all over the place. You're always going to feel like there's something to do. And so I started with him. And from him, I got introduced to several other people. 

                        And then through my podcast, like I said, every single time that I interview someone, there's something to learn, and most importantly, you build connections. And so someone gives you their phone number, someone gives you their email address or their Instagram, they message you. And so anytime that I have a question, before, for example, when we're looking for an important role like a closer in our business, we always ask our network first, "Hey. Do you know anybody that's been closing at more than 25% or something?" And then if they do, gosh, I'm even willing to pay. Last time, I paid $2,500 just for that introduction to someone that said, "Hey, listen. This person is working for me. Maybe he can work for you for a couple of days but it's going to cost you a bit." I absolutely love that idea because it's almost a guarantee that's going to work out.

Gordon Henry:         Very cool. A lot of what you've talked about in this whole plan of being a remote CEO is about leveraging technology. And I imagine you're very good with technology. What about the person who says, "I'm not tech savvy. I'm great at making pizzas or I'm great at fixing bikes or I'm even a good consultant or a psychologist or something like that, but I'm not tech savvy. I can barely turn on a computer. What do I do?"

Deniero Bartolini:      All right, so that's a great question, and I get that a lot from individuals that don't really have, again, a background in technology. I tell everyone, as long as you know how to use email and a software like Zoom, which most people already do use it anyway for work, you should be good to go. Now that does not mean that you shouldn't try getting better over time because if you want to be an entrepreneur in general, maybe if it's not a remote business, you're not going to leverage technology as much as I do, but there's going to be other things that you need to master. So growth mindset, it needs to be there, with the expectation that in 10 years, you should know a lot more about technology than you know now. 

                        But to get started, as long as you know a couple of websites where you can hire good workers that can do great work and then that you have the ability to show up for them on a daily basis, especially in the beginning, to give them that feedback that they need to say, "Hey, you're doing it right or you're doing it wrong. You don't need to know the software." As a matter of fact, in the book, I talk about if you want to do ads, one of the questions I always get, "Should I learn how to do Facebook or Google Ads?" My question is always no because your competitors are using people that do that full-time. And if you're going to try maybe five hours a week to do this, you're not going to show up in the right spot or you're going to pay a lot more for it. 

                        And so the idea is always, always, always start with delegating things that you don't know how to do. And then as you move along, you want to learn the basics and the KPIs more than anything to make sure that ... You should know, for example, that to set up a campaign with five odd groups and whatever, 30 ads, it should take no longer than five hours, random number. But now you know that. And so next time that someone takes a full day or two days or three days, you should know, hey, there's something wrong. There should be a red flag. But other than that, you should not get very good at the platform because that's not your job.

Gordon Henry:         Yeah. Just like you shouldn't do your own accounting or you shouldn't do your own plumbing. There are reasons people hire people to do things. You do what you're good at and leverage other people's skills and sometimes it's worth paying for. Right?

Deniero Bartolini:      Absolutely. And Gordon, I want to add one more thing about this because when people think about the free time, they think that that's from day one. So it's like you either decide to be a normal entrepreneur and you work 16 hours a day or you decide to be a lifestyle entrepreneur and you work 30 hours a week so in total, maybe five hours a day. That's not the case. I want to make sure that people understand this. To build a lifestyle business actually takes more energy at the beginning because you're not only building your business, but you are build ... So not only your brand and the systems, but you're building extra systems to automate the entire process. So there's that bottleneck idea at the very beginning. There's traffic, traffic, traffic. And then as you get past that point, a threshold where things start running smoothly. 

                        For example, I have some of my staff members that have been copywriting for me for a long time, and they pretend to be me literally my emails. But at the very beginning, it was such a long process for me to teach them my thought process, what would I put first and why I would be there? And then as they slowly got good at it, I could stop having daily meetings with them. And now we speak maybe every couple of days just to say, "Hey. Is everything good?" And so the idea is that a lot of work upfront leads to a more automated business, which leads to more freedom in the long run though.

Gordon Henry:         Right. Got it. Good clarification. Deniero, we're just going to take a quick break here, a word from our sponsor. We'll be back in 30 seconds with more from Deniero B.

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Gordon Henry:         And we're back with Deniero B. Fascinating conversation about being the remote CEO, something all of us probably have fantasized about one time or another. So I have to congratulate you. I guess it seems you were very farsighted. You were doing this or at least thinking about this before COVID, and of course COVID has changed the way everybody thinks about remote work. You and I are having this conversation right now remotely. You're in Europe. I'm in the United States, and the company I work for, we're now a remote company. Remote has gone from being this fringe idea to being very mainstream. So I imagine this has given you a lot of momentum, right?

Deniero Bartolini:      Yeah, absolutely. It was something that when I first started, only two or three people that I knew back in the day from my "old life" that were either doing or thinking about doing. And now the majority of the people that I speak with, even those that work nine to five, are working remotely. There's been quite a few people thinking about or businesses thinking about bringing people back on a Monday to Friday, nine to five schedule. I think that's the wrong way to go about it. I don't think however that the way that remote work is set up right now is the best way. I actually talk about this in the book. Just working straight from your living room or couch all day is not productive for many people. Some people could do it. Some people can't do it. 

                        I think that we will see more and more condominiums that are going to have more shared spaces. A lot of libraries, you're going to get people to work from there, like local libraries. So you can still go to an area where you're not sitting on your couch, but you don't have to travel an hour to go to the office to make things happen.

Gordon Henry:         Right. Interesting. I was curious. You were, as we said, in Italy and then you spent some time in Canada. Does it matter what country either you or your clients operate in? Does it have to be in an advanced industrial country because you have to have a good internet connection?

Deniero Bartolini:      All right. Okay. So this is a great question because the other day, I was talking to my staff members and looking at their expenses because we have this concept of radical transparency that we inherited from Ray Dalio's books about having a company where everybody can say whatever they want and think. So we started talking about expenses. We realized that some of the people that are working for us, we have people in Ghana, in South Africa, we have people in Egypt, Bulgaria, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Mexico, Canada, of course, the United States. In some of these countries, they're really making a lot of money compared to what their peers are making. And so what we talked about, yes, for sure, if your English is not great, if your brand is not great, you're not going to land high ticket clients. That makes total sense.

                        But anybody that has, again, the growth mindset to think I'm going to build a brand no matter where I'm at. I have some of my, not clients, but people that I interact with or engage with on social media that are in India, they have over 150,000 followers. The majority are from Europe and in the United States. And these people are paying "American" fees to get services from a guy that's really making about eight times what we would make here. To make what he's making there, he is probably one of the "richest" people in his neighborhood. And so the idea is, no, you don't have to be, but of course the market rewards people that have exceptional brands. So wherever you are, of course internet needs to be good. But like I said, nowadays with the exception of a few countries, most countries have high speed internet. 

                        I think the bigger problem is not the speed of the internet, but the reliability of the system. Sometimes they have very fast internet and then something happens and they have no internet for a day or two. And so those countries may incur more problems, but as long as those problems are solved from now on, I think even with Elon Musk's internet-

Gordon Henry:         Starlink.

Deniero Bartolini:      ... the satellite internet, there's almost no excuse about not having an internet connection.

Gordon Henry:         Yeah, great point. We're just about out of time. It's been a fascinating conversation. I wanted to give you the last word. If you're speaking to people who may be listening to this and thinking, yeah, it sounds interesting but far out for me. I've never imagined I could really pull something like that off. What would you say to them?

Deniero Bartolini:      I think that the most important thing is look at your life and see how many hours you're spending doing things you love. If you love working at your desk job or whatever you're doing, absolutely don't change what you're doing. But if there is some unhappiness inside, you're like, "80% of my time, I'm spending it doing things I don't like," I think it's time for you to either move on or start looking for other opportunities. And so you don't have to say, "Okay, this is the best opportunity." I think just give it a shot. See where it takes you. Maybe spend about a year trying to make things happen for real and then see it for yourself. At the end of the day, that's the most important thing. I'm not here to tell you it's the right lifestyle for everyone because it's not. Some people that I know would hate the idea that we don't have "an actual home base" because we are traveling every couple of months, but some people like to do that. So I would say give it a shot, for sure.

Gordon Henry:         Fantastic. Deniero, where should people go to learn more about what you're doing?

Deniero Bartolini:      So my website is the hub for everything, and it is www.denierob. I can spell that for you. D-E-N-I-E-R-O-B dot-com. There you'll find my book that's coming out on February 8th, 2023. You'll find my podcast and my blog. We blog about twice a week. So there's a lot of great content there as well. 

Gordon Henry:         Awesome. Well, I want to thank you, Deniero, for coming on the show. It's great to have you here in a fascinating conversation.

Deniero Bartolini:      Absolutely. And I thank you again, Gordon, for having me as well.

Gordon Henry:         Yeah. And the new book is Smart Business, Better You. As you've heard, it's coming out soon. And you can hear Deniero's podcast, The Remote CEO Show. Just look on Apple podcast, wherever you go and you'll find it. And I want to thank our producers, Tim Alleman, coordinators, Diete Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell a colleague, a friend, family to subscribe and leave us a five-star review. Really appreciate it. It helps us in the rankings. Until next time, make it a great week.

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