Zero To A Hundred – Episode 17: Building Business Success Through KPIs And Systems With Bryan Courchesne!

Accelerators! 🚀 Today’s episode brings you the expert insight of Bryan Courchesne, CEO of DAIM and a leader in the financial industry.

Bryan isn’t just the go-to person for crypto investments; he’s also a master at building efficient business systems and leveraging KPIs to grow businesses.

We dive deep into how to streamline your processes, elevate your reviews, and build stronger relationships with referral partners that can truly scale your business.

What’s on the Menu:

• 📊 How to build and implement KPIs that drive growth.
• 🔗 The power of referral partnerships to boost your business.
• 🚀 Proven business systems that save time and increase profitability.

Why Tune In?

Bryan shares practical advice on setting up efficient systems that free up your time while increasing your bottom line. If you want to learn how to scale your business without losing your personal time, this episode is packed with strategies that work!

💬 Gem from Bryan:

“Your business isn’t just about making money—it’s about building systems that make growth sustainable.”

Get in Touch with Brian:

📧 Visit DAIM.io for more insights and business strategies from Bryan Courchesne.

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Building Business Success Through KPIs And Systems With Bryan Courchesne!

On the show, I have a very special guest. We’re going to speak with Bryan Courchesne, who is the CEO of DAIM, who is the first Registered Investment Advisor for digital assets. He is the go-to professional for crypto investments. We’re not going to talk about crypto. We’re going to focus on how he’s built such a large, successful business. How to build out business systems. Create those stellar KPIs for you as a business owner, elevating your reviews and building stronger relationships with referral partners that can truly grow your business. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together.

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Bryan, very excited to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me.

You are a true crypto expert and we’ll talk a little bit about that towards the end. We’re going to focus on something that you have implemented in your business to build massive success. That is KPI or die, as you say. We’re going to talk about building really efficient business systems. Let’s take this from the macro view, boil it down to the micro view, and just give us some insight as a business owner on what you need to look at from the 30,000-foot view to start building out business systems to run an efficient business.

Everybody knows the purpose of a business is to make money. That’s the easy part. When you’re either building a business from scratch or you take over one or buy one, you generally have a business plan, but after a few months, that gets moved to the site. You’re just floating. You’ve got some sales going on, but you’re in no man’s land in tracking this.

The important thing is to have KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. Those are simply built on a spreadsheet. Google Docs, Microsoft, just use whatever you can do and build these. When you have these KPIs in place, then you have a schedule for yourself to routinely check those and hold yourself accountable. That’s when you can see growth in your business. You can get back some more of your personal time and that equals success.

Three KPIs To Prioritize

Let’s talk about prioritization. How do you actually prioritize? I guess it’s going to be different for every business, those KPIs, like are there maybe some basics. You say these are the three things that you need to focus on just to get your business in line to then start really implementing a system.

We look at ours in the main part for KPIs is on the sale side. What are we doing to grow the business on our end? That’s the same for any business. We just manage assets for people, and we bill those assets under management. In order for those assets under management to grow, we need to continuously help people better invest for their future while also making the right decisions while we’re investing their assets. When we look at that broader view, we look at our lead channel, which comes from our personal networks, advertising, and referrals.

Those are the three key components that start our KPI spreadsheet. The personal connections, the advertising, and our referring partners. Just about every business has those three components. You should be advertising on Google and Facebook, what you’re doing, but not overextending yourself. You should have referring partners out there, whether you’re a plumber and your partner with local GCs or emergency service contractors, and then you’ve got to be using your own network. All three of those matter.

If you’re talking about it from the lead generation standpoint, three main KPIs are your network. The referral network you build is how you tap into others’ networks within your ecosystem and have a clear advertising plan.

That’s right. Your network will ultimately be the best ROI and conversion. It might be a little slower, but it’s that personal touch that’s out there. In the KPI spreadsheet that you make every month, you set yourself a minimum goal of clients to reach out to. New people that you meet out in public, let’s say. Make it a goal to meet new people you’ve never met before. The next set of lines below that you’ll have, did you convert any of those?

It’s really important because you’ve got to hold yourself accountable. You have the goals, then you put in the actuals and then you have the variance, like you can see if you’re underperforming or overperforming. Then you just report that. You project it out over 12 months. Each month, you log it as you go, in the mornings when you’re doing your sales or at the end of the week, and then at the end of the month, when the month converts, you look at your totals and you see how you’ve done and you see where you’re going.

That little thing will motivate you to go to that networking meeting and take that dinner. Knowing that you got four more contacts, you have to get out there and do it. It’s the same thing for the other two components. You have the goals of what you want the advertising platform to do, and then are they converting? You have, are you increasing your referring partners and are they converting?

Is there a difference between service- and product-based businesses in terms of building out these KPIs?

On a product side, I would say maybe what you’re doing is switching out your human interaction and reaching people to getting reviews. Reaching out to people. I just bought a product to boost the cell phone signal for our business at a location that we have that’s remote, just so we have backup between the internet, ethernet, wifi, and cell phone. I don’t know where the guy emailed me because you get your email through it, “How’s it doing? Do you need any help with this system? Did you get it set up right?” I was like, “This is a $100 product, but the guy still reached out.” At the end, I got him a review. I think that might be the thing to switch to for people with a products-based business. Those reviews are so key, I hear now, with the algorithms.

Advertising

I’m going to come back to the reviews because I think that’s actually a really critical component. I know if I’m looking at a product or even seeking a service, I want to see what the reviews are. One of the first things that I check after checking their website is what the reviews are. Let’s stay on the lead generation. Let’s say somebody has been doing Google ads or Facebook ads and hasn’t been seeing growth in their business. What should they be looking at in terms of figuring out why that’s happening and ways in which they can drive more business and have more effective lead generation through their advertising?

This has been a pain point for our business for years. I’m not going to lie. It’s something that we’ve actually heightened elevation in. The importance level with our marketing department to increase. I just had a call with the guy. I’ve increased it to a bi-weekly call to try to figure out what’s going on. It is difficult. Google is constantly changing the algorithm and what’s going on behind there. I’ve learned now that I cannot keep up running my business without some help. Now, I believe there are Google-verified vendors out there. We have one.

These guys are not that expensive, but they are valuable. They understand what’s going on under the hood and they’re keeping up with the updates and how to do ads. Instead of using Google’s, you’ll get a pop-up when you do a Google ad that says, “Do you want to speak to an expert?” That’s all fine and good but a third party who understands Google, who’s in the United States, might be better to help you in understanding the platform and what’s going on underneath. We are seeing an increase in conversion in just one month by now using this person.

He knows things that we don’t know and knows how to build things faster than we would do wasting time. We just tell them, what is the object of our business? That’s to help people protect against inflation and devaluing of the dollar. Who do we help? High-net-worth individuals, business owners. From there, he understood some keywords to build, and he built the ads, and those are out and running now. We have seen basically just from a few clicks a month, and we registered nine in just the past seven days.

Working with this Google ad expert, and this is something I want the audience of business owners to really hear and understand. If you want to elevate your advertising game, especially on Google, you need to have a Google ad expert who knows the US marketplace and can help you accelerate your ads, get more exposure, and have ads that are more effective.

Otherwise, you’re just going to spend a lot of money. If you could just increase, you’re going to think you’re going to get more clicks by dumping more money into the system. You’re going to end up being frustrated and you’re going to look at that, it’s going to be a loss for you. What you need to do, start small, $35 a day. Just see if the clicks are converting, then increase it. Everything is week-to-week in marketing with Google. Don’t overdo it. You will see the results. If they’re looking at it and clicking on it, it will show after seven days. Otherwise, move on.

What did you change about your ads? Was it language? Was it imagery? You’re seeing this uptick within a month. What did you change?

It actually wasn’t the language of what we did, it’s actually the settings in the back of Google that this verified Google specialist knew how to set up, from what keywords to put in, how to let the thing use its automated system, how to let it use AI. Also, how to A/B test this stuff that’s out there and then how to follow traffic on businesses that are like yours. He knew how to put this stuff all in a simplistic way. He just shows me the dashboard. I go in our system in the backend to see that the leads really converted. That one’s a no, that one’s a yes, that one looks a little better. Let’s give that one a little more money. I’m not an expert at all.

You’re blowing my mind because you’re giving us the technical stuff that most people don’t give us. They say to invest in Google ads. They say, “If you want to talk to one of our team members, click here.” You talk to their team members. You think you’re getting the information that you need, but one of the key components of elevating that Google ad game is making sure that your settings are right. Everything from your keywords, the automated systems, the AI and using that AI that Google provides the AB testing, and then following other kinds of businesses, what they’re doing to also attract people to your ads.

Closing More Business

That’s brilliant. That’s something I think most of the people in our readers would never have known if it weren’t for you. That’s awesome. If we go beyond that lead generation, in terms of, yeah, someone clicks, someone reaches out. What are the systems you need to have in place with your team in order to convert them? The sales game is one of the most important things to actually close business. How are you closing more business?

On the personal level, let’s talk about that one because that’s in the KPIs. That stuff’s all done on a human level. I make sure we get contacts that goes to the phone and phone calls and texts usually do that. Phone calls are definitely still the biggest leader in our business in AUM growth. It’s really hard to beat, but it’s still an interaction. When we look at our Google ads, that stuff comes through and there’s a backlink tie-in to our lead intake form, which is just a contact page.

That’s just built inside the webpage. We make sure that within the first half of the day of that lead coming in, they get a phone call. As for the referring partners, we’ve built a webpage for them that basically hands them the viewer off to us. If you’re viewing somebody on social media and they talk about the business, there’s a hyperlink in the description of the business.

That hyperlink actually doesn’t come right to our business. It goes to a medium page where the referring partner has their headshots on there. They talk about who they are and how they’re affiliated with this business, which helps the lead understand the flow. On that landing page is another contact form, which, then again, you’ve got to follow up with right away.

I’m going to be super self-serving here because I love what you’re talking about. My business, as a payment consultant, 95% is dependent upon our referral partners. We do very well because our referral partners are compensated very well. Walk me through how you built out the individual pages because I think a lot of our businesses, even if you’re a local liquor store, for instance. It’s one of the clients that we signed up. How are you creating those pages and how is it not taking away from your main page or your main business?

Interesting. We take our homepage that you look at, and you have to make sure, and you just almost make a copy of it. You have your web developer make a copy just so that the language and everything looks the same. You keep it really basic. I would put a headshot of the referring partner on there. There is an intro saying the referring partner’s name and how they’re tied to your business. The contact link, keep it simple. People don’t want to spend much time reading things. As long as the brand colors are there and the person’s image is there and their name is where they heard of you, you should already be starting to build that trust.

I love that. That’s something that I’m going to take under advisement and we’re going to offline and you’re going to tell me how exactly we execute that. That sounds like some real secret sauce there, man. Now you’ve got these leads coming in. They’re warm, if not hot leads. How have you built a system where your sales team is really effective in delivering the same message so you know that they’re able to execute on the close once they have that lead through the door?

Businesses, you got to look at them very simply because when you talk to a new lead, you want to sound very educated and specialized, but there’s really one or two messages you need to convey in just a short elevator pitch to them. That’s the right thing. That just takes time to hone in, but that should be written down. In our CRM, when leads come in, that opening statement that we’ve been using for a long time and just gets tweaked a little bit is always written there. We always see it. You never forget that that’s what you need to say. Now, you might not have to read it word for word, but just the fact that it’s right there below the phone number, it comes to memory. When you go to call them or write them an email or text, it’s right there.

It sounds like you have a pretty comprehensive CRM. You’ve got your scripts in there, you’ve got your KPIs in there. What systems are you using? Is it something you created that’s proprietary? Are you using like a Kajabi, an Asana or a Go High Level? What type of CRM are you using in your business?

On the lead generation, it’s all the web development on the backend. We use WordPress. That helps send stuff. Then it ends up landing in our spreadsheets. That’s a custom build, but there are guys out there that know how to do this. This is not catching an Elon Musk rocket with some fork, with some chopsticks. There are guys out there that your web developers should be able to do it to you. We run on Asana. We use Asana.

Engaging Into The Systems

We think it’s Asana. It’s a great tool in the integrations. You can have a lead in there and set goals and follow-ups that will then alert you so you don’t have to think about when you have to reach out to somebody. It’s got a nice journal log at the bottom that you just keep notes in and you can just review when you need to talk to somebody. You can decide if your whole team needs to see it or just a part of your team. It’s been a great tool for us.

One of the books that I’m reading is Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki and it’s a really interesting book. I’m literally looking at Rich Dad, Poor Dad, one of the best books out there. One of the things that he talks about is that if you don’t have systems in place, you don’t have a business. Beyond just the systems, let’s talk about how you get your team really engaged into the systems and make sure they’re actually using them on a daily basis. How do you, as a leader, not only build them out but get your team to follow through?

We actually use Asana for that, too. There’s a whole section that you can funnel out for lead generation, and then you can make a section in Asana for operations. Having the people in your company incentivized by KPIs makes the company better. It makes me run the business better. I have my own set of accountability KPIs that I’ve got to hold myself to. The ones that we talked about before, me meeting people personally, but there are other ones that I got to do on the ops end. They are scheduled.

There are things that need to be looked at every week. There are things that need to be looked at every month. There are things that need to be looked at every quarter. There are things that need to be done for year-end. You don’t want to have to try to remember these or put them in a calendar. It’s very simple in Asana. When you do this task for the first time or the next time, log it in Asana. What’s important, you can put a hyperlink to the file. You can put a hyperlink to the website and then put a note and then right away assign yourself the task to do it again when you need to do it again.

You’ve got a lot of automation. You have a lot of systems built out. You have a real business and you’re seeing massive progress. How do you keep it from becoming really mechanical or robotic? How do you keep that human touch, even though you have systems that you follow for all of your procedures or interactions, especially with clients?

That’s a great one because we thought that maybe the way the world was going with text and AI, we should text or email a new lead first. We were doing that, and you can have a platform like Mixmax that automatically generates text messages or emails. You just go in and you can tweak it, but it could just send them out automatically. We were trying that and we noticed that our KPIs were dipping. That’s the accountability. What’s wrong? Why are the KPIs dipping?

When you go and you hold your team accountable and you’re looking at your KPIs on your spreadsheet, you’re going, what’s the problem? What did we do differently? You look, get under the hood, and realize your conversions are down. What are we doing? Why were conversions up on a percentage basis a year ago? In between then, we switched to doing things more automated in between.

You really have to use your KPIs, and now we’ve gone back to that human experience. It’s the human contact by phone call or in person, offering a video call right away, as soon as possible. Being there, you can tell, too, when you offer clients or new leads the ability to text with your business. If you’re in your business for a little while and running it, and even if you have somebody new and you’re running a Slack channel or you’re running like Google chats with the rest of your team inside email, you can ping them and say, “This one needs a phone call, like call that guy.”

Just being on your systems and not being afraid of bringing back that human element, and then you could use really as much automation in the background for your middle office and stuff, but you’re always on a human level. Going to have to check your KPIs and figure out why you’re going down in your percentage basis on your variance, or if you’re looking to increase them, that’s a human thing that has to be done. There’s no AI that’s going to solve that one for you.

Implementing AI

It’s interesting that you say that having those and especially Zoom calls when you cannot be chest-to-chest with someone is very important because you need to see someone to understand their body language and whether or not they’re focused. Also, seeing someone helps them focus. One of the things that we’ve been doing when we have a Zoom call is taking that Zoom call, putting that transcript into our AI to be able to get feedback on how we did with whether it’s a pitch or dealing with a customer service issue.

That’s really helped from the payment side, from the payment consulting side, us elevate our game because we’re getting feedback that is far more neutral feedback based on what we expect our sales agent or our account managers to be doing when they’re talking with a customer. That’s been a differentiator. How are you guys implementing that AI into the systems that you’ve built to get better feedback for your business?

I want to learn more about this because I think after I answer that one, I want to ask you a question about what you’re doing and the whole thing that’s going on on Zoom. On our side, there’s not anything using AI on the customer experience. For us on our side, you might have customers that are just completely happy. They may look into their account, but you don’t hear from them. They have no questions. They’re happy with the returns. Even if that’s the case, Asana tells us to reach out to customers at a certain frequency, no matter what. When it comes back to AI, there are things just like Grammarly, which is good to an extent.

When you want to bring a little bit of human emotion to it, and you need to tell all your clients a particular message, well then scripting that out and giving it the the emotional tone that you want it to have. Say, “Write this in an empathetic way but with confidence, this message.” You give it the message and then it spits it back and then you’re getting a spell check, plus making sure that the approach and energy you want to give your clients is in that message through words. Now, on your system, you said that you get a report back from AI on how the call went, if I heard you right.

What is 1 or 2 of the outputs that that system gives you? We use a system called Read.AI, and it’s great because it’s on the back end and it’s recording the video. It is seeing what the interaction is like and what we’re trying to get out of the report. This is something that we actually built a custom ChatGPT for. We want to hear the questions that are asked by the client, if there’s commonality in the words that they’re using, any feedback they give us. The Read AI is great because it tells us what the follow-up needs to be.

It gives us the to-do list. If there are things we need to execute for that particular business owner we’re working with. For us, it is a structure around. What are we talking about? From what we’ve talked about, what are the deliverables? What does the follow-up need to look like? It’s great because I still take notes because I take notes like just us having this conversation. I like the tactile nature of taking notes, but it’s all there for you. It’s something that now your team members, my team members, can see and they can go back and review.

If we’ve had a stellar case where we’ve closed the deal quickly and easily, we’ve had a challenging customer, everybody can go back and review that. It’s more than just the old, but you pick up the phone and you call Chase, and they’re like, this is on a recorded line for customer service improvement, whatever it is, that is the language they’re using. It’s the same thing, but it’s definitely far more in real time because the system’s automatically giving you that feedback. We can take that transcript.

We put it into our custom GPT, and then that gives us a rating on things that we need to improve, what we should be looking out with some challenges that our salespeople might have, or some things we’re missing that all of our customers are saying that we now need to go back to the drawing board and offer a better service or improve our language. AI for me is, and I’ve spent like the last year, part of many of the listeners who know part of a mastermind called ROAI. It has been the biggest game changer in my career ever.

This is only because I’m learning how to input properly with AI. You could take your feedback, you could just put it in AI and expect it to push something out. Unless you’ve given it the right input and told it how you want it to communicate with you, you’ll never actually be able to use AI at a high level. It’s been a massive game-changer for us. We have seen our business increase because of just doing things like reviewing our sales calls.

The sales process with all AI even out there, they might feel like they have more free time. In reality, from what it sounds like, reviewing how calls went and checking AI for the improvements, I took away from that the commonality of questions by clients or leads. Tracking that might actually work well when generating that Google ad.

I need to have you in my life more often. I didn’t even think about having a Google ad component. Here’s the great thing about AI. I could literally go back and take all of our sales calls and that are in the custom GPT because we have the transcripts and I could, say, develop a marketing plan, top of funnel, to tofu, mofu and both who top, mid and bottom of funnel. Give me a marketing campaign for this type of business owner, a restaurant owner has three locations.

They’ve been in business for ten years. They’re doing $2 million a month. They’re in a major city. Give me a marketing campaign to target that type of restaurant owner. It’s going to spit it out. Now, there’s a little bit more complexity, but I didn’t even think about taking my sales calls and using that to develop my marketing campaign. Brilliance. Here is that audience. Let’s go. Record your sales calls, put it in AI and use it to build out your marketing campaign game changer.

That was right here. That’s not something I’m doing comprehensively. That’s something you’re doing. That’s the mesh of this show right here.

How To Get Better Reviews

That is the brilliance that the show is all about. I want to go back to something that’s really important and it could be a make or break to a degree for your business. That is your reviews. Let’s talk about how we up our review game and we get better reviews for our customers. What are you doing right now?

We’re in a challenging spot because, as a Registered Investment Advisor, specifically managing assets, and those assets being cryptocurrencies for clients, our license cannot allow us to ask for a review. You’re talking to someone who runs a company that has a bigger challenge than most people. Just about every other business out there outside of fiduciary capacities can just go out and ask for a review and you’ve got to ask for them. I’m familiar with the review game and how this works.

What I can see from my tools is that you can get an app on your phone. I think it’s called Word Board, where you can store free written messages that you can obviously create with AI. The biggest time waster that people have is unnecessary phone calls with nothing that’s going to generate cashflow and literally typing or just getting distracted. As a business owner and a guy working in a company, you just have to learn to not get distracted and focused. We don’t even need to go down that one.

It’s like if you’re driven to run your business, not to get distracted. If you’re typing or you’re not using voice to text. Voice-to-text can have some errors in it. A thing like Wordboard with a predefined message, “If you had an excellent experience with our service, could you please give us a five-star review with the link on there?” That’s what I envision a company that could get reviews having. It’s a hot button on your phone. When you see that you’re helping a customer, you’ve got to go right there, right after and send that message with the link.

Can we level this up because I love to send the message with the link for them to just push on it and to send the review.

You’re also implying five-star.

Implying a five-star review. I love that. The head of our ROA mastermind, Peter, sent me a text and said, “Will you please provide me a video with a testimonial and do you approve me saying this?” The clone cohort that we went through for the four weeks that we did that was really amazing and helped me do X, Y, and Z. I’ve now actually built a Jarrod Guy Randolph clone with my voice. It’s really freaking frightening because it’s like talking to me.

We’ve used this program called Delphi and I have like 500,000 words from articles I’ve written and interviews from our shows are all on this platform. You can go and talk to it. Like you’re talking to me as a human being. We have not gone live yet with it because there are some tweaks that I still want to make, but he asked for a review and I’m more than happy to give a review, but frankly, it’s going to, and I still haven’t given them the video review. Now he did send it. I will get to it.

You’re accountable now, so you’re on.

Everybody knows if Jarrod doesn’t do it, Peter’s going to watch this too and be like, “Where’s my freaking review.” It is the fact that he said, “Can I post this?” He gave me the review and it’s a thumbs up or thumbs down, or I could change it for him. What he wrote was brilliant. I said, “Yeah, send the review.” I could technically take the meetings that we have, the sales calls that we have when we close a client. Have my AI write a review and send it to them and say, “Do we have your approval to post this as the review for the service that we’ve provided?”

Here’s a suggested one. If you want to modify it, go for it. Otherwise, you can just use this one.

This is the brilliance of AI that I don’t think business owners realize. Let’s take a restaurant, for instance. You have the individual orders in your POS system. Let’s say that at the table, there were six people and three of them ordered the filet mignon. You could send them a text of, “Please rate your experience. You could post this, or you could modify it. Talk about the fact that our new filet mignon on the menu was absolutely brilliant and we really enjoyed having it. “Three people out of our six guests had the filet mignon and it was a thumbs up.”

They could post that. A table where there are two people could be myself and my guest, “I enjoyed the filet mignon and my guest, she enjoyed the fish and it was absolutely amazing.” Through AI, it can be random and unique. If there were 5 tables where 3 people had filet mignon.” Each one of the interviews or each one of the reviews could be unique, building it out through AI because it never spits out the same thing. That, to me, becomes the game changer.

If there’s someone listening about restaurants, I’m not in that business, but I just thought of this because I had dinner Tuesday night. This is a real background, by the way, but there’s a restaurant, a real nice one right here that I ate at for the first time, just on the other side of the building. Stag, give them a shout-out. Beautiful place here in Palm Beach. Just think what you’re saying, and this could be helpful in other businesses, I guess what they call it, the line chef, the head chef, before that plate leaves the kitchen and goes to the table, they probably should be taking a picture of it.

They could probably set up a camera right at the end that snaps a photo of it. They’re going to know what table just for like quality control to make sure that meals are accurate. You could hold everybody accountable by having that snapshot. You can just go through them. You could have AI photos, but when you have that message, go out to that table after you could have it send the picture, too, because you have to have photos. In reviews, I hear you need to have the photos. They’re all watching it.

I love the idea with the photos. The kitchen setup is you have a screen and you have a printer. Sometimes it’s multiple screens, sometimes it’s multiple printers. What you could do is have a camera attached to the screen and the printer. You hold the plate under before it goes out because it all gets pushed up to the same bar anyway. It snaps a photo of that when the server takes it away and then takes it to the table.

It’s tied directly to that receipt, and then that receipt is tied to the customer when they go to pay the bill. That could be tied to the AI following up with you to ask for the review. We literally just solve the world’s problems. If you’re not making a billion dollars in the next three years after this show, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

I thought of something, if we got a little bit of time here.

Move it, let’s do it. It might be for your business. Let’s do it.

If you’re trying, if you’re looking to convert more restaurants that do over $2 million in sales, and you’re going, “Switch to my POS or my service, but I’m also going to help you in an additional way.” Take this idea that we just had and figure it out for him, and just say, “I will also implement this review mechanism for you in our payment system.” We’re just throwing that in. You’ve got to maintain the cost of it or whatever it is because everybody’s afraid of learning new technology and changing something. If somebody says, I’m going to do it for you. Meanwhile, you’re going to pick up the business on their end. You’re going to get them to switch providers. Maybe that’s a smear.

You’re onto something because let’s take one of my plastic surgeons or med spas.

I don’t suggest doing surgery.

Here’s the thing, they have photo-capture technology for all of those businesses. I will admit it. I’m not afraid to admit it. When I go to get my Botox, they take a picture of you before you get your Botox so you can see the before and after. Those systems, building that into a POS system is very easy. That’s not even reinventing the wheel. That is a not-so-new concept and doing in the restaurant industry. You just solved some major problems in terms of getting reviews for restaurants now.

Great idea. That’s awesome. We’re about to wrap up. I want to talk about one other thing with you. I want to hear a little bit about what you guys are doing as a Registered Investment Advisor in the crypto world, but I’m going to start with using the term time management. As we know, no one can manage time. Oprah, me, you, we all get 24 hours in a day. There’s no such thing as time management, but how do you, as a successful business owner, manage your activities?

Time Management

You’ve got to understand that your best energy of the day has got to go to sales. You’ve got to have a schedule that you write for yourself that says, “If you’re the guy that likes to start at 6, well then from 6 to 7, what is that block? Is that catching up on emails or making sure your crews are doing well?” Whatever it is, you’ve got to have that ready. Sometime in the morning, when you’re your freshest and you’ve got your most energy, you’ve got to get right to dedicating a block of time to those sales calls, not being distracted.

You will see that when you do that and you look at your KPIs, whether it’s each week or each month, you’re going to start realizing that I’m just going to focus on what’s making money and customer service in the morning. Obviously, you’ve got to do your administrative stuff in the backend, but if you just have that mentality of, the new thing now is it’s like you’re in so many group texts on your phone that are just really pointless, really. They get stacked in there and the dots are in there and looking at them. The same thing’s happening on Instagram and all that stuff.

You’ve got to understand that if it’s truly important, people reach out to you like a personal life or having fun, they’ll reach out to you multiple times or they’ll call you when it gets really important. Your customers have to be number one priority. When you do that, I find that the afternoons and what it is when people are a little more worn out and people don’t want to be sold or talk about investing in crypto, I can say, “I’ve got that free time now. I’ve done things that will move the needle and move the actual numbers in the KPI system. I feel good about what I’m doing.”

I love that. Everything is based around sales. I have an extensive background in real estate, as most of our listeners know. One of the things that I would always say, salespeople are the most important part of the process. You could build out great systems, but if you don’t have somebody to sell it or lease it, you don’t get to do it again. That’s for every single business. If you’re not driving sales, there’s no revenue. You cannot pay your bills. You literally don’t have a business.

Everyone is selling, whether you’re an attorney or you’re literally selling a widget. Understanding exactly who your client is is the most important thing because here’s what I’ve realized. I used to think that my client was the end user, the restaurant owner. They might be my client, but my customer is not the restaurant owner. My customer is their CPA, their fractional CFO.

I have a relationship with referral partners. We’re offlining this referral partner page because I’m super excited about it. The majority of my business, I spend the first half of my day speaking with my referral partner so I can stay top of mind. Even if I’m getting 2 or 3 referrals on a weekly basis, that’s a hundred new clients. If it comes from their CPA, there’s a high likelihood that I’m going to be closing that business.

I realized that cold marketing and trying to compete against a stripe or a square are not going to work for me. Even though my service is better, it’s not. What works for me is having the right referral partners in tow and making sure I’m starting my day having conversations with that. That is just brilliant advice. Thank you for giving that. Before we go into our rapid-fire questions, I want you to give a little background on what you guys do from the investment advisor standpoint for crypto because it is super unique in the marketplace.

About DAIM

Thanks. 2018, through some difficult challenges with regulators and the SEC, we became the first of its kind registered investment advisor for digital assets. Basically, what that meant was at that time, if you had money or you wanted to put money into the market and buy Bitcoin, you had to go to Coinbase and you were just putting money really on your phone on an app or blindly into a website and you could try to email them for help. There was definitely no phone number. I don’t even think there’s still a phone number there now.

People want to have that human experience, just like you were saying. In the mornings, you talk to these CPAs. The underside of our business is there at any time for our customers for a phone or video call. I mean, that’s a must. You have to. For existing customers, be available. Just saying that that’s what we were going to do, we were going to become a fiduciary to help people invest in this space. That was the premise of it. For the past few years, we’ve been helping a lot of business owners with their excess capital to diversify their portfolio and get into investments like Bitcoin.

The reason that I picked this space with my team, this space, to be such a niche, is that traditional equities have been around for a while. You have the fixed-income market and insurance, and there are things you can do with that strategy, but there was really nothing that was a liquid form of real estate. Going into the real estate side, the greatest thing of real estate is the scarcity in great locations. We obviously know that there’s not a lot of land. You could pump some sand out of the ocean, like they do in the Middle East and make some islands, but truly great places.

If you just look in the United States, they’re already getting clustered and the values will continue to go up because they’re scarce but not liquid. When I came across Bitcoin in October 2014, I saw that the fixed supply was locked at 21 million units on a product that could trade 24/, 3/65 globally. It was completely decentralized. The creator was removed, and its value couldn’t be inflated. I was like, “We’ve got something here. We’ve got something that trades like stocks but has the scarcity of real estate.”

The great thing is that the IRS treats it as property. To us, it’s actually always been clear what regulations and how to help. Look, the government wants one thing. They want to collect taxes. The IRS in 2014 claimed it as property. For us, helping our clients report gains, sometimes we can do a strategy called a tax loss harvest because we can sell the assets right away and buy them right back in kind, because it’s property.

Working with their CPAs, like you do, it’s funny. The CPAs are like the gatekeeper to a lot of things, and really help them get over the hump of why I should invest in this. Not only for the ROI of Bitcoin has the seven, I think the six-year analyze returns a little over 50% per year. You’re looking at a double, even though it has those big drawdowns, as long as you can wait those out, about every two years you can look at a double. That’s another property to it. Really, the other side is you’re taking a percentage of your wealth and you’re becoming self-sovereign. You’re becoming your own bank.

It’s fun.

You can just go right to your Bitcoin and get it.

Bitcoin, within the last few years, has really scared me because you have a lot of these YouTube sensations talking about how to invest in. They literally know nothing, and they’re renting Lamborghini’s, but I digress. I bought Bitcoin back when it was $300 a coin and sold it around like $5,000 a coin.

Nothing wrong with that. That’s a great trade, by the way.

It’s literally, technically, the best investment I’ve ever made. Now, I should have held it for longer. I didn’t know. I should have bought more when I went in and originally did it. This was like in the days of the original trading back when Bitcoin just was maybe like a year old. We went to this really weird obscure trading floor down off of Broad Street and Lower Manhattan. We went through this like side alley entry. This is some weird stuff that you see in a freaking movie that was cardboarded up on the front of the retail space. It’s where the satay hotel is now.

It was super shady. My buddy’s like, “No, you got to do this. It’s the best thing since sliced bread.” I obviously kicked myself that I didn’t go spend thousands of dollars and buy a ton of it. The reality is that I do believe in it. I think a lot of people do. Funnily enough, crypto comes up in conversation when it’s around investments. I speak with a lot of my business owners and I’m sure a lot of the people here who are our audience of business owners and entrepreneurs really want to learn more. When we wrap this up, I want you to give your contact information so our audience can reach out and learn more from somebody who is truly a professional in the field.

We see that we’ll have clients oftentimes send us something from YouTube or TikTok like, “This guy’s saying this is this what’s going to happen?” You look at it and you’re just like. It’s unfortunate for us at our size. We have institutional capabilities. We trade over the counter. We manage money for people that work at prominent crypto firms. We have a good reach in the space. We talked to some of the miners directly in Bitcoin. This helps us manage assets for our clients to give us that ROA. We run the ROI.

We manage a one model portfolio that has outperformed Bitcoin over the six years by a difference of 408%. Now we don’t, they trade. It’s just occasionally seeking alpha on a portion of the portfolio by allocating to a project that we think could outperform or taking some off the table when we think we’re reaching the near peak and then trying to add back in when we think we’re bottoming out something like that we did back in Q1 of 2023. That really helps us manage and watching bigger money flows and being a part of those bigger money flows really helps us filter the noise when someone’s saying, “Look at this chart, the technicals say that.”

If you don’t understand, Bernstein’s out there running a roadshow, pumping Bitcoin. Your technicals can say all they want. The reason why Bitcoin’s up is the institutional guys, the TradFi guys are coming around to adoption and there’s road shows going on and they’re pushing the Bitcoin ETFs. That’s coming into the underlying. Just be careful because we see a lot of fraud.

There are a lot of people that join Facebook message groups or trading groups. If the return is too good to be true, it definitely is. There will be promises of a 1,000% return in a very short amount of time. Those are really unlikely for every one person that you see that’s driving a rented Lamborghini, as you said, that does it. There are 99 others who have lost a lot of money doing it.

Rapid Fire

Let’s jump into our rapid-fire and then we’re going to wrap and you’re going to give everybody your contact information. Cat or dog?

Dog.

Is there a movie you’ve watched or a great television series that you suggest that our readers watch?

I’m starting to watch the Tulsa King for the first time.

I heard that’s really good from two of my friends. I might have to go on my list.

I was surprised.

What is one of your top favorite business books that you suggest our audience reads?

It’s Five Stars. A lot of it is about communication, how to deliver, and giving some stories and what to do. It talks about how Nike went on their campaigns. It’s actually from five stars to great, I believe it’s called. It actually ties back to what we were saying earlier about getting those reviews. It’s a great book. I’ll get it to you after you can put in the show notes.

What is one of the things that you disagree with in your industry?

There’s really a purpose for a lot of these altcoins and mean coins and NFTs. This stuff is toxic. There’s not a lot of substance behind them. The reason that they’re created is that the founders usually look for some payout themselves out of the treasury. That’s a bad thing in the industry that needs to get cleaned up. It is. I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist. I do love Bitcoin. It is a larger part of our portfolios. When we look at allocating, that project needs to have credibility and substance, and it has to be useful. If not now, in the future. We could use a lot. I don’t agree with all the creation of all these NFTs and the meme coins. They’re fun, but the money should be going to Bitcoin to preserve and create long-term wealth.

Thank you for that. What are three money-saving strategies that you would suggest for entrepreneurs and business owners for 2025?

This one might be a little long-winded, but I’ll give them this one.

Go for it.

When you start and try new software that might be incorporating AI, what we like to do is that it might be a little more expensive, but always do the month-to-month trial. You’ve got to test it and know and don’t be afraid to cancel the service. You can let the sales rep know, “I’m going to try this. It’s really got to work for me. Otherwise, you’ve got to understand I got a business to run. I would need to close this if it isn’t a benefit.” Do it on the most minimum level to see if you like it.

If you’re using it and it’s helping you, you’re going to want to pay more for the product. That means that it’s making you money. Otherwise, you’ve got to move on from these products. You’re going to get sales calls all the time to try this platform, do this technology, 3,500 a year. You’re going to get all kinds of things. Try them from month to month, even if they say it’s a year, work out a deal and don’t be afraid to cut it.

Last question. If you are a business owner doing $10 million a year in revenue and Jarrod Randolph walks through the front door and hands you a $300,000 check, how would you advise that business owner to invest the $300,000 to double their profits over the next twelve months?

I would sayto take a third of that and you’ve got to look at a way to improve your operations on the backend and the other two-thirds is going to be on the sales through customer service experience. You need a good backend. You got to be able to serve your existing customers like us. We still have to have investment management meetings.

We need tools to be better managers, protectors, and safekeepers of our clients’ assets. That has a cost to it. If we can spend a little bit in there to make that better, we know that the referral business will be better. I would say the other, a third, would go to the existing customer experience and then the next third is on your sales. The way you do things, taking a course, buying the book, being a better speaker, and just those things. Divide it into thirds.

We like to do things live. Bryan Courchesne, will you please tell the audience where they can connect with you?

Our website is DAIM.io. That’s the main website on there. You will see our phone number and our email. You can reach out to us. Something else that’s great that we give is that every month, we put out a newsletter that really talks about investing in the space from a long-term wealth preservation view. It gets away from TikTok and YouTube. We try to hone in on what’s important and that’s free, so you could sign up and get that and be better educated and maybe something to talk about at nights on the weekends when you’re out to dinner with your friends. It’s some good educational stuff.

Mr. Courchesne, thank you for joining us on the show.

Thanks for having me, Jarrod.

Important Links

• Bryan Courchesne
• DAIM
• Cashflow Quadrant
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great

About Bryan Courchesne

The founder of Newport Beach-based DAIM, is no stranger to managing risk and being on the forefront of innovation as we head into a new digital era and the 21st Century financial landscape.

Impacted by the housing meltdown during the Great Recession, the Florida entrepreneur relocated to New York City to trade options in the pit of the NYSE. Within a few years he was managing a desk of brokers as the head of equity derivative sales at a Broker-Dealer. During that time he became an Options Principal and General Securities Principal holding the Series 4,7,24,55,63, and currently the Series 65.

In 2018 Bryan worked with regulators to create DAIM as the first of its kind Registered Investment Advisor for digital assets. As the CEO of DAIM, he and his team advise and manage digital asset positions for individuals and corporations.