How to Craft Your Today’s Business with Cesar Hasselmann

Kathi: Hi everyone. I am back and I have a very special guest. We're going to talk about how to make your business grow with Cesar Hasselmann. And he is a pro. He's been doing it internationally with multi-billion dollar corporations, and now he is bringing it down to the level that we're on: enterprising entrepreneurs, small businesses. And we're going to get some information from Cesar on how to do it. So, welcome to the show.

Cesar: Oh, thank you very much, Kathi. Thank you for inviting me in. It's my pleasure.

Kathi: Absolutely. So, let's talk about your background. I know you were sky high with some huge corporations. How did you get to that? And why have you decided now to tone down into talking to regular folks like us?

Cesar: No, actually, my first business started when I was 13, and since then I was growing in different ways until we had a big crash in my country that broke the whole industry, in 1997, something like that. And then we needed to start over again from the start. So from that time, I started to work with a corporation that had a marketing company. They had a little company inside them, but little is 20 to 30 million dollars turnover when you talk about big marketing companies, right? And then at some stage I got sick of that, and I said, you know what? I love that little business nobody pays attention to. I will open something similar and try to succeed. In the meantime, they had a big conflict. I made a deal with the industry to be able to work inside the industry. They have seven different industries. They have a bank. And I said, hey, can I be your principal supplier for SAP systems? And from here I can grow. And we made a deal. I started work with them. So from three people working for me, I started to go to the market, and suddenly, 18 months to 25, 28 months, we had a 120-employee company, because we just started to win so many accounts. And of course, the business partner from that business came on board too, because they had broken the relationship with the other group, and once they realized what I was doing, they asked if I could have them as a business partner. And for me, it was just a jump of 10. So it's a mix of doing the right thing, knowing what you're doing, plus opportunity. If you're ready for them, you get there.

It's a mix of doing the right thing, knowing what you're doing, plus opportunity.

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Cesar: So then, in that situation, I had one focus in my way to grow: I want to have the biggest names in each valuable industry. Okay? So then if I find one of them, I will become the reference in my market. Simple as that. And that's what really happened. So I got big accounts. I was working behind the scenes for some marketing companies. I used to win clients for them behind the scenes, because at that stage our main work was SAP systems, but we used to do B2B and B2C marketing, institutional communication for big companies, corporations, online. And the marketing companies at that stage were not aware how to translate offline marketing to online marketing, and my company was in the middle of it. So I became the reference for being a strategist for online. I used to get what they were doing offline and transmute it and add value for it to be online. And online universities were starting, LMS tools were starting. So we started to get all those things, and we just used those tools in a good way, and we started to give all the big companies, corporations, their own university to teach and train their own clients. We call them internal clients. And then once that arrived, I was working between marketing, HR, IT and sales. And when you arrive in that position, a company that can give a solution to those four key stakeholders, you never leave. They are always going to love you. Sometimes one of them is going to hate you, because you need to deliver a project, you need to tell them the truth. But because the other three still love you, you keep yourself there until the other one loves you again, right?

When you can give a solution to those four key stakeholders, you never leave.

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Kathi: Yeah.

Cesar: And that's the way I arrived at that level. Until the day that I was too busy, the crisis was arriving, and I looked around. My professional life was good, but my personal life: I had a six-month-old kid that I had just spent two weeks with. I had four offices and one international trade office and 120 employees. So it was an 80-hours-plus job. And I just looked around. I could not manage my company anymore. There were a lot of things in between. We grew too fast, so a lot of problems happened. I needed to fix so many things in the last two years that I was there, so I was not enjoying it as much. Until the day that I said, the crisis is arriving. We need to cut the loss from the big brands who give us awards and visibility. We cut those guys out and just keep the good clients who pay the bills, because we can keep the same profit in our pocket while the crisis is coming. And the banks and the group didn't allow me to do it, because at that stage it was the second biggest one in South America. And then I said, it's not my kid anymore. It's not my business anymore. So I chose to leave and stay one year on sabbatical in Australia. And if you come to Australia for more than 60 days, prepare yourself. You're never going to leave.

Kathi: That's what you were saying at the beginning. I like a couple of takeaways that I got from that story. I love the fact that you said, let me get the top one in this one, the top one in this one, the top one in this one. Because I think as entrepreneurs, if we set our sights… I've learned a lot. You take the top 100 influential people that you really want to get to know, and you make that list, and then you start plugging on that list: who can I meet, and who knows who? And that way you become influential, which, in your case in point, worked that way. So that's a fantastic story. So when you decided to downsize, what did you do? Did you close your offices and just let go of your staff, or how did that work when you decided enough is enough? I don't have a life. I'm working too much. I can't handle it all. It was a six-month-old, right? A six-month-old baby?

Cesar: Yeah. Six-month-old baby. Now, to arrive at that level, there are a lot of political games you need to face, and you need to understand that no matter what you do, you cannot win. There are a lot of stories that people create at that stage of a company to take benefit for themselves. It was an industry family group, and the person who made the deal with me was the top dog, the boss of the family. So he is the kind of patriarch, you know, the god of the family, and the rest of the whole family hates him because they believe he takes too much off the table. So I was facing things and challenges that I was not happy with, and stories that everyone who works in a big company understands, the political game you need to go through. And that's the reason why I said, you know what? This is going to take me 10 years of my life if I try to face it or fight for it. While I was in Australia, I had just arrived and realized that whatever I have in here, nobody can steal. And because I had already built more than 10 businesses before arriving in Australia, I made a deal with my solicitor and said, "Hey mate, it's 50/50. You look after that. I don't want this to bother me anymore. I want my share of this, and I don't want to talk about it. If you come to talk to me about it, your deal's off the table. I pay you just your fees. If you resolve the problem and get something for us, then that's us. You become a business partner. But I will start my life again." And that's what I have done.

Kathi: Excellent. So now I know that you're working with small businesses. I think a lot of people that are listening to this podcast are perhaps looking at not leaving a large company that they built, but actually leaving a large company that they didn't build, so that they can start building their own company. We do have the great exodus and the great resignation. A lot of listeners of this show, I know, are reinventing themselves. So what piece of advice would you give someone that's starting? They're going to jump out of corporate, jump into becoming their own entrepreneur. What would you think would be their first, second, third steps, or what would you recommend?

Cesar: Okay. I don't know if everyone will understand what I'm saying, but if you do not, please jump on my Instagram or LinkedIn. I'll be happy to answer. But business model is a word, a title, whatever you'd like to call it, that a lot of people use not in the proper way. And we don't have this taught in universities or courses. Business model is what gives you the platform to work from and the vision to go to. Okay? And yesterday I was talking to a guy who is going to turn 60 in two weeks' time. He has a cycle of good momentum in his business at different times, and he always arrives at a place where his business is just all over. And I was talking to him. It was very easy for me, because I've been doing this for many years now. I know what his gap is. His business model is not attached to his solutions, and to his way to think and his way to do things. So he has a beautiful structure that I can see going so much further if he just changes his way to deal with the industry. He's not a box guy. He's not a guy who's going to do the same thing as everybody else, because he doesn't want to be a leader. But he has a lot of knowledge, and he's an entrepreneur, and he can be a business owner. And he just comes with these waves of helping people and being the leader for a while, and then loses them, because he doesn't have that business model properly set up for his way to do things, in the way that he likes to do things. So with time you lose what you build with momentum, because momentum just can't take you that far. If you keep having that power, and if you don't have love, passion and desire behind it, that power goes away, and suddenly everything falls down.

Kathi: So could I ask you a quick question around that? So you're saying, and I think that this is true, a lot of entrepreneurs start because they have an expertise in something. And I did this way back when I started 19 years ago. I'd give all the information away. Give it, give it, give it, just give all my knowledge away, but not really provide the platform to give them a solution as such. I'm not really selling a solution, I'm selling education. Is that what you're speaking of?

Cesar: Kind of, yeah. So at the end, from the leadership point of view, yes. That's what the others take. They take your knowledge, they take your know-how. But if you're trying to build something that could become a franchise, you're going to perceive it as them stealing from you. But they're not stealing from you. Your business model is wrong. You're doing an education model in a thing that's supposed to be a leadership model. So the business platform that you started from was wrong.

You're doing an education model in a thing that's supposed to be a leadership model.

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Kathi: Okay. So a solution model: give me a for instance of a solution model so I can wrap my head around this.

Cesar: Okay. So you need to understand your limitations, what you need to have to be able to deliver what you love to do, right? And then from those limitations, you say, okay, I'm very good at talking to people and selling and bringing people on board, but I'm not as good at keeping them consistent, giving them consistency and leadership. So you need to find someone to do that. You need to pay someone to do that, or you need to find a business partner. If you think about the business model, you have three options. You can try to do it yourself, and then with some time you're going to get tired. You're going to lose it, because you're not going to have that power to keep doing it. You can contract a manager to become the leader that you don't want to be. But then in five years' time, he arrives, looks around and says, hey, I have everything here. That person is not a leader. Why am I still on a wage? I'm going to open my own thing. Make sense?

Kathi: So instead of people leaving, one leaves and takes everyone.

Cesar: Yeah. Yeah. And then you have the smart choice: bring in a business partner, put a very solid agreement on that. Then you share knowledge and make that person do this job. So this is what I call business model. You need to understand that. But it's hard for you to understand the big picture if you don't have the knowledge in business to be able to predict the future. And that's the reason why you need people who have knowledge to come down and say, hey, this is the way you love to work. This is what you've got. This is the information from your business. This is the history that you have. With those things together, what you're doing is not quite what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to do this, because based on that, you're going to arrive at a better place in your life, but also you're going to have a better business. And that's what I do.

Kathi: Okay. Excellent. So it's like finding out what they want long term and then building the business based on that. I love the fact that you said the guy didn't want to be a leader. He wanted to be an information output device, right? So he wanted to just give his information to the world, and someone had to lead. And I've seen that happen over and over, where the leader finally is like, well, I'm doing it all. I'm the front man, or the front girl, so I'm just going to go do it on my own. And that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs are in fear of, quite honestly. So I know you have a book, and you started talking a little bit about it. So talk to us about your book, because I know that it is designed for small business owners.

Cesar: That's right. So because of those ups and downs in business, you have some situations, emotional fights, that as an entrepreneur, a business owner, you fight by yourself. So it's a lonely trip. You don't have many people to share with, and sometimes you don't want to share with people that you love, because you don't want to show weakness or you don't want to make them worry, because you are responsible for the income of the house, or you just feel by your ego that it's too much for you to handle, whatever the reason is.

Kathi: Yeah.

Cesar: So every single business has what I call the intersection base. We have the ups and downs. If you think about the graphic, you have the ups and downs. But if you draw a line in the middle of your ups and downs, you already have the potential to create a platform to work from, if you understand the reason why the ups and downs happen. And that's what I call cycles, right? So business cycles, life cycles, personal life cycles, friendship cycles, family expectations. All those things together are what put pressure on us in how to live our life. So the book actually breaks that down in pieces to show that whether you're Catholic or you have a master's degree or you're a CEO, you are a human being first. And it doesn't matter which color you are, which religion you have, we are all made of bones and muscles, nerves and a soul. And if we could understand that from the start, and start to come from there, to be able to understand our cycles, our life cycles, and what people expect from us and what we make them expect from us, we can take that aside, and then you start to recognize, okay, that's part of what I need to get clear, to be able to stop feeling shame, to be able to stop making decisions based on feelings that are not going to get me through, right? So the book's approach is more or less like that. And we go through business situations, we go through personal situations, we go through industry situations, right? Because every single business has a cycle. If you sell more in summer, summer will probably be almost 60, 70 percent of your revenue for the year. So you need to understand that if you don't have six more months of cash flow when the summer finishes, you might finish the year counting the coins. And this happened for 10 years, and you didn't learn from it. So understand that's normal. Don't get emotional about it. Understand your numbers, then you're not going to be counting the coins anymore. Because if that's been happening every year for 10 years, why are you going to suffer every year at the end of the year, right?

Kathi: Right. Because you haven't taken the time to stop and see what it is. So, I love that. Now, what would you tell your 18-year-old self right now to guide yourself onto a little bit easier journey? Oh, there he goes with the popcorn.

Cesar: I would tell him to listen more to the things that are calling your attention. Don't let those things pass by because you're too busy. Those things actually cost me 20 million in my company, because I was seeing things, and those things were giving me the indication of what was going on, and I was not paying attention because I was too busy with the day-to-day. So listen to your gut, with more intention, is the thing that I'm trying to say. Don't let those little things that bother you a bit go away because you're too busy. There's a reason why they're there.

Don't let those little things that bother you a bit go away because you're too busy. There's a reason why they're there.

Kathi: Yeah. I call it being stuck in busyness. We're so busy doing the busyness stuff that we're not really looking around us or listening to our intuition or listening to cues from other people. We're just not listening, because we're busy. We're doing our stuff.

Cesar: That's right.

Kathi: That's really good advice. Absolutely. So when you have a success… Oh, well, you're going to have your book come out. When's it going to be out?

Cesar: In two weeks' time. The publisher just sent me the whole package approved for printing yesterday. So I believe in two weeks' time I'm going to start to have the printing.

Kathi: Okay, gang. So we're now filming in March, and this interview will be out after he's published. So what I want to ask you, Cesar, is how are you going to celebrate when your book is released? What's going to be your celebration?

Cesar: So yeah, if you want to know that, I need to tell you more. I'm going to have the first printing on my birthday, on the 22nd of March, and I have a social project, my own social project, in Indonesia for the last 11 years. And I'm going there on, I believe, the 9th of April, and I will celebrate my book and my birthday with my social project.

Kathi: Excellent. That's fantastic. I'm glad that you had it right there, knowing what you're going to do. This is my year of asking everyone on the podcast how they celebrate, because I think celebration is so very important, and a lot of people don't know. I didn't know how to celebrate, actually, when I launched my first book. I'm just like, okay, now I have to market, right? And I didn't even stop to say, oh, I published my first book. That was just silly. So I love that you have a plan. So tell me about what you're doing in Indonesia.

Cesar: Oh yeah. I have a social project where we take plastics out of the ocean. It's a small community of 2,000 people. So I just embraced their problems. I was going there 11, 12 years ago, and I had six surfboards. I was surfing. We had a full moon party on the beach, and I saw all those plastics, and I could not enjoy the party. And then I made a big square on the sand and said, if you guys put plastics in those squares, each square that's full of plastic, you guys are going to win one surfboard per square. And I have six; I just need one, right? So I made five squares, and the party became taking the plastic out of the ocean. And since then I started to go there, and it started to get bigger and bigger. Today we educate the school: there are 250 kids there, 32 teachers. And we take the plastic out of the ocean every quarter.

Kathi: That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, there's too much riffraff floating around in the big blue. That's for sure. What an amazing thing. Thank you for doing that. I so appreciate that work, and I'm glad that you're going to tie it in with the trip and the celebration of your book and all that. So happy birthday early. I love that. So, okay. You've been in business a long time. What's your favorite organizing hack or organizing system that you use to keep your life streamlined and simplified? Is there anything that you love?

Cesar: Yeah. I have developed some stuff for myself that I do every November, December for the whole year. And if you're talking about IT or an app, I use Pipedrive, and I customize Pipedrive for me. I record all the calls in and out. I have the cycle of the deliveries for my clients, in the stage that they're in, all divided there, because I customize it. I spent good money on Pipedrive to be able to customize it and have people prospecting from there. When clients call my mobile, they go directly there, so I have all the calls recorded, if I need to go back and have a look at those. My clients receive documentation when we start that I use this system, and that's the way it works. So every single email, phone call, text message or media communication between me and my clients goes to the same place. So if I pop up my client's name, everything goes there together in a history.

Kathi: Yeah.

Cesar: So that's my Pipedrive. But it doesn't come like this. You actually need to customize it for yourself. But you don't need to spend money to make that a simple tool for you anyway. And before that, I have created my own little thing, in the way that I like to work, that I do between October and November. So what I do is I break down my whole year: everything that I believe I achieved and did right in that year, and everything that was wrong. And I break down my big picture. First of all, I break it down into semesters, trimesters, months. And from that, I don't do daily. I believe you need to have room to be able to do things. At the same time, the weeks are not strict. So I do it monthly, which I break down into weeks, and if that takes four weeks, I'm not upset with it. But what I also have is, every quarter… I don't know if you've noticed, every quarter we have one month that has five weeks, right?

Kathi: Right.

Cesar: So that week is mine. I don't sell, I don't trade. That's mine. It's one week that I take off.

Kathi: I love that. I never considered that. Every month that has five weeks, we take off. I might have to implement that one.

Cesar: Yeah. So what's happened is, this is a quarter game. I play a game with myself of quarter achievements, and that quarter gives me the right to that week. I go overseas, right? And that's the week that I do my social project, by the way, because every quarter I go away. But then I started to get fancier, because I discovered that if I work until Wednesday night, people don't feel that I was going away, because I'm still in the brain that week. And then if I take the next week off, which is my fifth week, this gives me 10 to 12 days, right? So if I go overseas on the night of Wednesday, I wake up at the place that I would like to be, and then I have two days to slow down, keep talking to my team, but I'm already there. And no matter what happens, if you go away, you're going to spend the first two days thinking about what you left behind anyway.

Kathi: Yes.

Cesar: So I use that week of work internationally already with my team, right? Then the next week I'm off, and I come back on Saturday, to give me time to spend Sunday organizing my life, getting the time zone right, and have enough time to wake up properly on a Monday. So when I visit my clients, when I'm back at my office, people don't realize that I spent 10 days off, because it was in the middle of the week. Make sense?

Every quarter we have one month that has five weeks. So that week is mine.

Kathi: Right. Absolutely. And I always thought, if you're going to travel far away, I always recommend that people take 12 to 13 days. Always. Because you need three days to get into it, and you need two days to get out of it. And then you have those seven days in the middle where you can actually be there and enjoy.

Cesar: Yeah. Yeah. So I do that, and I teach all my clients to do the same, actually. I have a funny story. I have a client that we came from $900,000, and today, I believe next month, after we do the acquisition this month, he will be a $15 million company in seven years. And the first question he asked me when we were engaging was, when can I have a five-month holiday? And I looked at him and said to myself, do I take this guy on or not? But if he's crazy enough to ask me that, I can accept the challenge, right? But anyway, the last four years, he always has at least 30, 40 days free, in the way that I built his business with him. And last year was four months working from Canada, with his business in Australia. So it's part of not just the way that I live, but also the way that my clients start to live after we get a good time together.

Kathi: I love it. That's great, because that's what people want. They want time away. They want to feel like they're not bogged down by their business. And the more successful their business becomes, the more it turns into a ball and chain, unless it's planned properly in advance. So I love this idea. Five weeks in a month. I'm going to start looking at the months with five weeks and start plotting and planning myself for that.

Cesar: Why not? That's it. You deserve it. Especially, I believe in your country you pay things monthly, right?

Kathi: Yes.

Cesar: So in Australia we pay weekly. So in your country it will make much more sense for you, because all the costs that you have for the month are already covered. In Australia, we take that week anyway. But in my cycle, I don't count on that, because if you cannot make enough money that you can go away at least one week every quarter, then you're not doing the right job. And the other thing that you just said is, people have an illusion. Entrepreneurs have the illusion of building a business to have a job. The illusion is the trap. Not illusion: it's the trap, the entrepreneur trap. You build a business based on passion or need or opportunity. Those are the three reasons why you start something as an entrepreneur. And then, if it's an opportunity, you might not qualify to keep managing it in the right way to grow. If it's passion, you might not qualify to look for your profit and a long-term vision. Opportunity, passion and need. If it's a need, no matter what, you might succeed more than the others, because you're going to be killing every day to try to survive. So if you mix that up in a proper way, you can have a perfect business.

Kathi: Wow. That's a gold nugget right there. You're giving gold. Well, Cesar, speaking of giving gold, I know you have something that people can download or access to you, and I'm going to put the link in the show notes. But why don't you tell us a little bit about what it is that you're offering the audience here?

Cesar: Okay. I believe we have put up content, a wrap-up report from the book. And this is more explanation of how you can really get something sorted, to understand the way you make actions or make your choices, to make decisions for the day. I believe you're going to have a little sheet about it that you can go through and just reflect on.

Kathi: Beautiful. Beautiful. So we'll put the link below. It's been really interesting to talk to someone who's gone really big, to small, to now right into the perfect lifestyle that you want. And the fact that you've figured out a way to give back without effort, without any stress. And it's also tied into celebration. I love what you're doing for the ocean. So I just appreciate you being on the show. I think we've learned a lot. I know I've learned a lot from you.

Cesar: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Kathi: Thank you, Cesar. You have a fabulous time in Indonesia. Happy birthday early, from me and from the audience. And we look forward to seeing what you're doing over there in Indonesia, too. If you want to put a link, if there's anything that we can do on our end, we can also put a link to your project there.

Cesar: Oh, that's good. Yes, I do have a link at Save the Ocean 2020 on Instagram. You're going to see a bit of what we do there, but I do not promote this. It's a kind of thing that I do from my heart. It actually took me 10 years to tell people that I do this. It's a completely out-of-pocket thing, so I don't have an entity that I have created for that. It's passion and investment in that area. I fell in love with them, and they're just extended family that I have.

Kathi: That's fantastic. Well, keep up the good work, and hopefully our paths will cross sometime soon in the future. Thank you, Cesar. I appreciate it.

Cesar: Thank you. Thank you.

Kathi: Okay, signing off for now, gang. We will see you next week.