The Bottom Line: What You Need For Success In Business, Leadership And Life

By Michael Contento

The Bottom Line is the book that tells you how to become successful in life regardless of education level or how much you've messed up in the past. It helps readers develop the elemental skills of business, leadership, and life.

This book is for:

▪ The high-powered executive made redundant by pandemic-inspired cost-cutting, now seeking a refresher course in what made her successful in the first place.
▪ The unemployed teen who aspires to become a wealthy entrepreneur but has no idea where to start.
▪ The recent graduate who just can't seem to find a job in the toughest employment climate in decades.
▪ The burnt-out manager who realized, during the lockdown, that she's dying to change careers, but who is overwhelmed by the challenge of starting over.

Author Michael Contento knows it's possible for them, and you, to become successful because his story is less likely than anyone's. He didn't go to a fancy school. In fact, he didn't even finish high school. And yet, as the CEO of a fast-growing managed-services IT firm and a director on the national board of Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada, among many other ventures, he's successful by any measure.

How did Michael go from being a problem for the boss, to running things for the boss, to being the boss, to owning the holding company that hired the boss? He followed a set of basic principles that can be used by anyone to achieve success.

At the heart of this method is the concept of D2: Deliver simplicity, drive growth. Once you're done this book, D2 will guide every business interaction you have.

But deliver simplicity isn't the only imperative required to achieve success.

Among the fundamental principles that this book will deliver to readers are such insights as:

1. Your time is too valuable for Game of Thrones.
2. Don't say "can't" to the boss.
3. Take the word "kiss-ass" out of your vocabulary.
4. Communicating is about what they hear, not what you say.
5. There's no such thing as a dead-end job.

Finding success difficult to achieve in business, leadership and life? The problem isn't that you went to the wrong school or that you're not smart enough. Instead, the bottom line is that you need The Bottom Line—the primary elements required to win supporters, communicate your ideas, overcome obstacles and sell deals. Read this book—and you'll learn to deliver simplicity, achieve success, and never quit.

For more resources and supplementary materials related to the book, visit deliversimplicity.ca.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228842170

Michael Contento

Michael Contento is the entrepreneur who other entrepreneurs consult for advice, in part because he achieved his success the old-fashioned way. The youngest boy in an Italian family of six children, Contento did not have the benefit of an MBA, a post-secondary degree or even a high-school diploma. Instead, he worked his way up as an hourly worker making minimum wage to his current role as the CEO of My Blue Umbrella, a 30-employee IT-services company with $10 million in revenue and a 15% compound annual growth rate. Today, Contento delivers simplicity in the form of tech management and consulting services to some of Canada's highest-performing companies. His leadership of the Maple Leaf chapter of the Trust X Alliance, Ingram Micro's elite association of IT firms, won the group its first-ever chapter of the year award in 2014. Also the CEO of a chain of pharmacies located across the Greater Toronto Area, Contento owns and manages a large portfolio of real estate. His registered charity, Do Amazing Things, empowers the disadvantaged to fulfill their career ambitions. He is a national director at large for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada. Find him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/myblueumbrella/. or www.deliversimplicity.ca

Book preview

The Bottom Line

What You Need For Success In Business, Leadership, And Life

Michael Contento

The Bottom Line

Copyright © 2020 by Michael Contento

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-4216-3 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-4215-6 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-4217-0 (eBook)

If you have grit, determination, and drive, you can do whatever you want in life. And few people personify that fact more than Michael Contento. I first met Michael in 2016, when I moved to Toronto from the United States. I had just been promoted to run the Canadian division of Ingram Micro, the world’s largest distributor of information-technology products, a multi-billion-dollar business in Canada alone. It was a bit daunting to come into a new country, a new culture, and not knowing anyone, particularly given the fact that I was taking over leadership from a well-liked predecessor who had himself been promoted.

Michael Contento was one of the people who made me feel most welcome in my new role. The month after I started, I attended a meeting of the Trust X community, an alliance of IT companies to which Michael’s company, My Blue Umbrella, belongs. That was where Michael first impressed me. From the confidence and leadership he displayed, I would have thought he was the CEO of the largest business in the room.

If we have new members, it’s Michael who ushers them into the community. At meetings, Michael is the guy leading the conversation. I often see the leaders of bigger companies go to Michael for advice. He’s a go-to person for me as well.

I have a ton of respect for him. He’s extremely intelligent and also comes across as someone with common sense and street smarts. He understands people. He’s achieved great success in life—and he has achieved that the hard way. Michael became the entrepreneur he is today with the experience he gained throughout his career. And with this book, Michael brings the benefit of his experience to everyone.

—Bill Brandel

Country Chief Executive, Canada

Ingram Micro

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - D2: Deliver Simplicity, Drive Growth

Chapter 2 - How to Find Your Why

Chapter 3 - How to Develop a Never-Quit Mindset

Chapter 4 - How to Be on Time

Chapter 5 - How to Be More Productive

Chapter 6 - How to Build the Right Network

Chapter 7 - How to Communicate

Chapter 8 - How to Manage Other People

Chapter 9 - How to Learn and How to Fail

Chapter 10 - How to Achieve Big Things

In Lieu of a Chapter 11

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

D2: Deliver Simplicity, Drive Growth

I had an epiphany when I was eighteen years old and working at Jumbo Video.

Remember Jumbo Video? You do if you’re a certain age. This was the ‘90s. Before Netflix and Disney+ or Amazon Prime. You couldn’t just download movies and TV shows to your nearest screen. If you wanted to watch a movie at home, you had to put on your coat and ride your bike or drive to a store, like Jumbo Video, and wander the aisles looking for the movie you wanted to see.

I started as just another grunt at Jumbo Video, where I confronted something: How would I distinguish myself? How was I going to excel?

None of my coworkers faced this problem. They didn’t take their jobs seriously. But the epiphany that I had while standing behind the counter one day at Jumbo Video was that I did not have that luxury. As a rule, my coworkers had better marks at school, and their parents would pay for them to go to university. Jumbo Video was a way for them to get a little pocket money and keep busy until they headed off for their next thing, to eventually become doctors or lawyers or engineers.

My epiphany was this: I did not have a next thing.

My marks weren’t good enough for me to go to university, nor did I have the money easily available. My dad’s butcher shop, Tony’s Wholesale Meats, generated enough revenue to put a roof over our heads and then some, but my parents were paying for the lives of six children. We didn’t get a weekly allowance. Had I asked for an allowance, my dad would have done three things: He would have cuffed me upside the head, asked me if I was nuts, then put me to work in his shop.

Think Jumbo Video isn’t your dream job? Try an entry-level position in a butcher shop, run by your dad, where your two older brothers also work. As the youngest Contento there, I got all the worst assignments. Processing the poultry, for example, which is a euphemistic phrase that means you spend your entire shift ripping the intestines from hundreds of chickens. Thank God the cows came to us pre-gutted. We also sometimes processed rabbits, goats, and sheep. By shift’s end, our white smocks were covered in blood and various other smears that I preferred not to examine too closely.

Let me tell you, compared to working at my dad’s butcher shop, Jumbo Video was a breeze.

Therefore, unlike my coworkers, who were basically killing time, I realized that I needed to distinguish myself at Jumbo Video. So how did I do it? With my attitude.

Take Sundays.

If you worked at Jumbo Video, the Sunday morning shift was the worst. We opened at noon, because who was going to rent a movie on a Sunday morning? What many people liked to do, however, was to return their movies on Sunday morning. The employees who worked the Sunday shift couldn’t just insert a VHS tape and watch Home Alone for the fifty-first time. Instead, you had to process several dozen returned movies. That meant making sure they were rewound or having to rewind them, and then returning the tape to the proper shelf. You had to remember that Top Gun was in a special section for Tom Cruise movies, not in the action movie aisle with Rambo 2. You had to pay attention and avoid returning Gremlins 2 into the sleeve for Gremlins, the original and vastly better film.

I volunteered to work the Sunday shift. And when I did, I made sure to clear the returned videocassettes as soon as possible so that I could move on to cleaning up the tape racks. There was a time, at 2 p.m. or so on those Sunday afternoons, that I would wander the store, keeping an eye out for tape containers that were set backward on the aisle, or sections of the racks that weren’t in alphabetical order. And I wouldn’t find anything; the racks were orderly, and the returns were processed.

The store was perfect.

It was only then that I would take a breath.

Soon, the manager of the Jumbo Video noticed how easy I was making her Sundays, so she made me her assistant manager. Then she joined Jumbo Video’s biggest competitor, Blockbuster, as a regional manager. She was going to oversee numerous different stores and wanted me to run one. At the age of nineteen, I had my own Blockbuster Video to manage.

So how did I do it?

I’ve already mentioned my attitude. But it wasn’t just that. It was also the fact that I made things easy for my bosses. I never told them about a problem unless I had already thought through the solution. I showed up on time. I actually did the things I told them I was going to do—within the timeline I had given. In short, they didn’t have to worry about me. I achieved all that because of a set of skills that distinguished me from my fellow employees. It would be years before I recognized how important these skills were, and how easy they were to grasp and develop. The bizarre thing is that many people never develop them. This is why I wrote this book: The Bottom Line is my attempt to help others develop the simple foundational skills that made me the success that I am today.

*

There is never a wrong time for a self-help book. But now, in an era dominated by the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic, is arguably the best time ever to pick up a volume like this one.

The problem with many self-help books that feature business themes is that they’re written for executives who have already figured out the key parts of success. If you boil these books down to their essences, you find they contain window dressing—the extra five or ten percent that’ll provide that extra edge. And that’s great. I love those books.

But there’s a whole market out there that isn’t being serviced in the business self-help section. These people, these readers, this market—they haven’t yet figured out the basics. So the window dressing isn’t useful to them. And even the highest performers out there can benefit from being reminded of the little things that made them successful in the first place.

This book is for:

•The CEO who used to be punctual as she was working her way up the corporate ladder, but now that she’s running the company, she’s so busy that she can’t manage to get to the conference room in time—which means she’s forgotten the things that made her successful in the first place.

•The unemployed adolescent who aspires to become a wealthy entrepreneur, but feels discouraged trying to enter the toughest job market in decades.

•The recent graduate who has a degree in hand, but who can’t seem to find a job worthy of his time or effort.

•The burnt-out manager dying to change her career, who is overwhelmed by the challenge of starting over in a brand-new gig.

I know all of them can become successful because, in many ways, my story is less likely than theirs. I didn’t go to a fancy school or get a university degree. I don’t have any post-secondary degree at all; in fact, I didn’t even finish high school.

And yet, based on any standard, most would consider me to have all the hallmarks of success. As a young man in my early twenties, I used to walk my dog in Toronto’s beautiful, well-treed Kingsway neighbourhood and dream about being able to afford to live there among the bank presidents and high-powered politicians. Now, that’s where I live. Not to brag, but I also have a vacation place in Florida, my wife and I drive matching luxury SUVs with matching personalized license plates (NVRQUIT and MRSNVQT), and I run numerous different businesses—a chain of pharmacies, a real-estate holding company, and even a shoe-repair shop. The one that takes up most of my time is a fast-growing IT-services firm, My Blue Umbrella, with $10 million in revenue and a five-year goal of $50 million annually. I also try to give back to the community as a director on the national board of Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada and with my own charity, Do Amazing Things, which supports education for disadvantaged Toronto youth.

And perhaps more importantly than all of the above, people look to me for advice.

Me! A high school dropout! How did an average sad-sack high-school dropout go from being a problem for the boss to running things for the boss to being the boss to owning the holding company that hired the boss? I followed a set of basic principles. None of them are rocket science. But together, they add up to advice I believe can be used by anyone—and I mean, anyone—to achieve success.

At the heart of this method is a single concept that I call D2. It guides every business interaction I have. The concept has helped me become a successful employee, has motivated me as a manager, and has been critical to my success as an entrepreneur.

*

I developed the concept years ago with the help of one of my bosses, a man named Jeremy Scarfe. He has a come-up story that, in many ways, is as impressive as mine. Scarfe isn’t Jeremy’s birth name. For years, all he knew about himself was that he was born in Europe and that he came to Canada as an orphan made a refugee by the Second World War until a wealthy Ontario woman named Helen Scarfe adopted him.

Jeremy began his career in advertising and eventually founded an investor relations business, known as Creative Direction Group, that would handle investor relations for many of Canada’s biggest publicly-traded companies.

That’s where I met him. He hired me when I was twenty-three to help with the technology and audio-visual equipment required to produce annual shareholder meetings. I can remember running to him with a problem with only minutes to go before a meeting was supposed to start. Breathless, I launched into a complicated explanation of the networking issue that threatened to scuttle the presentation at the heart of the shareholder meeting. I was in the exhibitor room setting up the seminar when the client’s communications director came in and created a huge problem, I explained, but Jeremy held up his hand about an inch or two from my face.

Shhh, he said.

At the time, it seemed like the rudest thing anyone had ever done to me.

Did he just shush me in front of a dozen other people?

My face grew red. Honestly, I contemplated doing something drastic. My Italian hot-bloodedness nearly got to me. But I was so astonished that I lost the power of speech.

"Don’t make it so complicated," Jeremy said.

I took a deep breath, thought for a moment, and said, We don’t have the right cord for the slide projector. I proposed asking whether the client had one. (Remember, never present a problem without also having thought of the solution!) But Jeremy wouldn’t hear of it.

"Our job is to make things simple for our client, he told me. You’re making things complex for them. We’ll have to solve the cord issue on our own."

The precise details of how we solved that problem have faded from my memory. Did someone dash to a computer store near the hotel where the shareholder meeting was happening? Did we send the proper cord by taxi from our office to the conference room? But the general strategy of delivering simplicity to clients remained with me and will continue to remain with me for decades. It has become the defining guideline for the way I run my business.

Jeremy used the deliver simplicity mandate in two ways. The banks, mining companies, and software firms didn’t have to employ Jeremy and his team to create their annual reports and produce their shareholder meetings. They did it because Jeremy made it easy for them. Creating these reports was an art. Securities regulators required them to have a specific format. Theoretically, the banks and mining companies could have hired graphic designers, writers, audio engineers, and studio camera people to handle their investor relations. But they would have required training, and maybe the banks wouldn’t have had much for these employees to do the rest of the year. It would have been complicated for the banks to acquire the skills required to produce these annual reports and shareholder meetings. It was easier—simpler—for them to hire Jeremy to do them.

Plus, Jeremy delivered simplicity in another way. The banks and the mining companies were constantly giving him language for these reports filled with incomprehensible financial jargon that no shareholders would understand. Jeremy could go over three paragraphs of heretofores and notwithstandings and provide the same meaning in three short and succinct sentences.

You have to make it simple for people, he’d say after he did it, shaking his head. And he didn’t care whether he was talking to the most powerful CEO in the country. He would tell them their reports were poorly written and would suggest cutting them in half to get their points across better.

Jeremy died in 2018 at the age of 81. By that point, he’d tracked down his birth mother and discovered that his heritage was Jewish and Moroccan. I went to the memorial service and was struck by the remarkable number of people who had learned key lessons from him. He had numerous ways of saying, Don’t make it complicated. You have to make it easy for people. I’ve restated that into my own iteration: A concept that I call D2. It comes down to four words that amount to an if/then statement:

Deliver simplicity, drive growth.

If you deliver simplicity, then it will drive growth for your business, as well as