[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. today I'm lucky enough to be joined by Pete Mauro CTO or not CTO. We just talked about this owner, founder. You own a bunch of different things. You're CTO. You've been a million different things. So maybe that's why I got mixed 

[00:00:42] Pete: It is, yes. I have multiple companies today. I've exited and started multiple companies prior to this.

[00:00:47] Jay: Well, there you go. Maybe that's, I think your varied background caught me there. Pete, thank you for joining me, man. How are you?

[00:00:53] Pete: thank you for having me. I'm great. Love talking about all my businesses. Especially my charity which I'll talk a little bit about. A few real estate companies, and of course the bread and butter is my engineering firm, which I just started back over again after a second exit in July December of 21.

[00:01:10] Jay: Okay, beautiful. Well, let's get there. Where'd you grow up? And did that have any impact on your, you know, serial founding career?

[00:01:17] Pete: 100 percent impact, and I'll tell you why in a second, but I'm from the Philadelphia area. I was born in South Philadelphia. Parents moved me over to South Jersey when I was young. So people from Philly say I lived in Jersey. I'm from Jersey. People in Jersey say I'm from Philly. You know, get the best of both worlds. But I've been living in Mullica Hill for the last 16 years. My wife her family's from Delaware County. My family still lives in Washington Township, so it's kind of in the middle. And I say that earlier because if I didn't care where I lived, I'd probably still be a civil servant owning my own real estate company probably my own charity, but not my own engineering firm.

The

reason I started my own firm was simply because I did not want to wait until someone retired or passed away, God forbid or moved on to be promoted. And the government is a great place to work. I was a civil servant for 12 years working directly for the Navy. Nothing bad to say about it.

Industry has treated me tremendous, but I wanted to be out on my own. I wanted to take on more risk and be paid what I was worth versus politics. And how you basically move on there is sometimes dependent on other things other than your value and your upward mobility.

[00:02:25] Jay: Right. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, you did tease a little bit that your growing up had something to do with you, your entrepreneurial kind of journey. What, tell me a little bit more about that.

[00:02:36] Pete: Yeah. So my first 10 years working for the Navy was in Philadelphia where I still have strong ties and a lot of friends. But I got promoted and I went to headquarters. So in the year 98, I was promoted to what's called the GS 13 and then I became a 14 the next year. I was only 29 years old. You know, I had a lot of things I wanted to do in the Navy, but you had to stay in DC and being there almost two years was a struggle for me having a big Italian family, a lot of friends.

I wasn't even married at the time and I was living out of a bag because I was back in the Philadelphia, New Jersey area all the time. And that is honestly what made me come to the conclusion that, you know, as much as I love work and my career path is great staying here at headquarters, you know,

in Washington, D.

C., it wasn't worth my personal happiness, which was being back home around my family and friends. And I went to a startup company called Fairmont Automation. I was like a minority owner. Two friends of mine had started a company. I was their first real employee. We kind of built it up to about 15, 20 people. And at that point, I went out on my own and started my own company in 03 called PGFM Solutions, which just make, I was a consultant and for the first four plus years, I really didn't have any employees. The company wound up having the first employee because I was overextended and I wanted to do good things for my friends, my customers. And that first customer was, you know, people I knew in Philadelphia.

[00:04:01] Jay: Right.

[00:04:03] Pete: And what happened was, I got the company started up, I had to get payroll going because I hired somebody and I was like, that was a real pain in the butt, but you know what? I gave somebody employment, I did something good for my customer, and I made a couple extra dollars. And literally, 2003 to 2007, it was just me.

After that, the company's motto really was, if the shoe fits, wear it, right? If I came across an employee and a need by a customer, I hired them. If I didn't. And I had no interest in growing. The problem was, I became, you know, big family, 15, 10, 15 people, and those people depended on me for their salaries.

And that was very important and serious to me. Not just the job and not just the extra money. And at one point I realized I actually have to grow. So, you know, not getting into too much business acumen. I wound up purposely growing a little bit and we developed a patent with the Navy and that's what led to my first exit.

I was able to well actually second because I did help my predecessor Fairmount they didn't wind up selling totally to the credit of the two primary owners, not me, but you know, it was partially a sale on my part.

And then. I sold to a private equity firm who branded us under Griffin, one of my main prime contractors that I worked under. And I stayed there for three years from 2019 to 21. And we did a lot of good work. We grew the company from when they bought me, I think they might've been at 250 million. I was only a 4 million company, but I had tech. digital engineering technology that this company wanted. It was really the growth area of the military

and industry for that matter. And we helped them grow to a little over 300 billion and we got bought by Mantec, which was a big 3 billion company. And then I resigned in the beginning of 22 and took a nice year off to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.

[00:05:58] Jay: And what was that? What was that? What did you find out you wanted to do?

[00:06:02] Pete: So, if you look on my website, my new engineering company, DT Cubed, doing things that are tough. Not a lot of people like to do the things that are tough. I kind of enjoy it. There's a Venn Diagram on there, like a true engineer. And in the middle of that Venn Diagram is three bubbles. What you're good at, what you can do good for others, and being appreciated. And, I only want to work in the middle of that Venn Diagram.

I'm lucky enough to be fiscally sound, and Had a few exits. I certainly have to work. I didn't make that much money, but I'm happy doing things that I like doing that are good for other people and that I'm appreciated for. And that's kind of what I do.

And the whole purpose of generically naming the company is because I may wind up doing more with my charity and opportunities knocking at one point as money becomes less and less needed and important. And I also have a real estate portfolio and a couple real estate companies. One holding company that is a real estate. And one business model for this very new wave of shared co working spaces.

Flex Space, got a lot of names, but basically it's putting a bunch of like minded business people and entrepreneurs in one spot and they all build off of each other. And we have three locations. We're working on our fourth in Philadelphia right now.

[00:07:15] Jay: So you have nothing going on, is what you're saying.

[00:07:18] Pete: Very few things. Very few

[00:07:21] Jay: yeah, well, I mean, look it's funny because people always think, you know, I'm gonna go sell my company, I'm gonna go sit on a beach somewhere, I'm gonna do whatever, and even if you do have enough money to do that, like, people don't realize, like, People who are able to do that don't want to do that.

Like, you, if you're successful, like, you want to go do more stuff. You want to go build something else. You want to go, you know, help other people. It's a, you see it time and time again, but there's like this misnomer that you're just going to kick your feet up once you've quote unquote made it.

But you're, I think, a living example of, you know, just somebody who wants to keep doing stuff keep reinventing themselves. So tell me about your charity a little bit on Opportunities Knockin

[00:07:54] Pete: Yeah, so, I'll start with a funny tidbit and I'll explain it after. My first customer in the charity is my son.

I'll explain that in a second. So, growing up, have great parents, excuse me, everything I ever needed and a lot of what I wanted. Poor college student though, you know, me and my buddy, Pete Eobbi, his name is, another Pete. We talked about it in college when we met at Drexel in Philadelphia why everyone was unhappy. Whether they had a 4.

0 or a 1. 0 and they were failing out or rich, poor, middle class. We were poor college students. We had to go for engineering. There wasn't a lot of partying for us. We had a lot of studying. And we were still happy. Why are we happy and why are other people not? We wrote on napkins and talked about it until the end of the, you know. Until a time when if we didn't do something about it, our lives were going to get so busy we were never going to do anything about it. So when we turned about 30, 31, started saying, what are we going to do? We focused on kids. We had no interest in making money. We just wanted to kind of give back a little bit of what our mothers, our fathers too, but we always, you know, you always favor that mom. A little bit of what our mothers gave us we would like to give to other kids that, you know, may not have gotten the same exact recipe. And we started by talking in high schools, taking all the career days that our friends and family asked us to go to, and we kind of carved that up and put it into our own Pete and Pete's Principles.

Talking about things like the importance of relationships, especially the one with yourself. The importance of balance in your life, right? Having a 4 0 and no friends, to me, is just as bad as failing out and partying all the time. There's a lot of social aspects to life. Living with integrity, right?

Doing the right thing. Easier said than done, but we would talk to students, high school and college students about this, but as a tandem, and we would do it through storytelling. We wouldn't preach to them, because kids get enough preaching to them in school.

So we would do it through storytelling and look, we were 32 when we started this.

It was a lot easier to relate. We were a lot closer to 18, you know,

17 years old. We bring in some guest speakers now that are younger than us and they help us do the same thing. Although COVID has put a huge damper on some of the speaking we've done. But after that first half year of doing that, we realized you can't really talk about integrity to a five year old. So I basically stole the idea off an old Italian club in the city called Unico. Where my buddy's father, my buddy Frank's father took us when we were young and said, get 50 bucks, meet me in the city and we would meet a young child. They'd have a note card with their family's needs. And you know, back then, 35 so years ago, we 50 bucks was enough to get the kid's family a couple of gifts.

And it was more about the four or five hours you spent with the child and that giving feeling that you kind of got contagious with the kids in the group. And that was awesome. It was better than any physical thing we could really buy. So we did that the first year. And we only did it with ten kids, and my mom was later in her career she worked at a lower income housing development. And the kid I sponsored became more of a little brother to me right after that first time we did it in December of 2002. He was only nine years old. And you know, I met my wife, she had three boys he fit right in the middle of their ages and, you know, they're all great kids and they're all mine, blood related or not, I love them and he's my son, he's 20, he's 30, just turned 30 this year, he has his own trucking business, he did the same thing or very similar to me, he drove a truck and said, why would I let someone else make the money, why don't I just buy my own truck

and I can make all the money, so

he has his own trucking business. And you know, all my boys are successful. My oldest is married with two children. Lives out in Downingtown. I got a six and a two year old granddaughter and grandson. And my oldest works for the Navy. He's actually a government civil servant. Works with some of my old friends at the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard.

[00:11:44] Jay: Wow. Love that story. So, if you had to, I mean it sounds like, you know, I would typically ask if you had to go start your business over again tomorrow with all the things that you've learned, you know, what would that be? But it sounds like you've kind of done that with DTCUBED a little bit, right?

Like your Venn diagram kind of proves that. You learn the lessons that, you know, a lot of people learn over their careers and you apply them to the new business, you know, your masterpiece of a bunch of different businesses. So let's switch gears a little bit.

You talked about this a little bit too, but what were three things, you know, health wise we're all getting older, we all want to be around, you know, you got a big family, I got a big family. What are three things, you know, physical, mental, emotional, whatever you want to pick. Things that you kind of, are your bedrocks for longevity in life.

[00:12:28] Pete: Yeah, so that's a great question. And it is very fitting for me because it is one of the things that made me resign. Resigning from Mantec was not a financial decision. They paid me a lot of money. I thought I did a good job and I thought it would continue. It was a lifestyle decision. There's two ways to be rich. One is to make a lot of money, and everyone thinks that as the traditional one, but the other one is to have a little to no expenses and not have to work. That the definition, the true definition of rich is not having to work. It's

not an amount of money. So if you have enough money to pay limited expenses, then you're rich, even more so than the person who makes a boatload more money, but has a boatload more expenses. And in November, before the sail went through I said I have to change my health habits. You know, working 60 to 80 hours a week, building up a business, growing, it took a toll and I gained a lot of weight. You know, my, I'm still not at my right weight, which is about 2 0 5. I'm down to 2 25 two 30 maybe after the holiday weekend we just had, but I was up to two 50 and it's not healthy, so I put priority. on working out and eating better and prioritizing that over work for the first time in a long time. Money is great, but if your dog or health, as a cliche, but it's absolutely true and I'm living proof of it, I'm a hundred times happier with a heck of a lot less money right now incoming. than I was before, because I feel better, I look better. Definitely didn't do it for looks, although everyone's vain a little bit, right? It's a good thing to look a little better, but I

definitely feel better,

and that, not being so reactive would be my second one, right? You know, everybody wants to answer email, and everybody wants instantaneous answers, and if you realize You can separate the things that are important but not pressing, you can get out of that reactive mode, whether that's in your personal life or your work life.

Keep in mind, I still have five emails. I got a client right now that I work for that has my own email they gave me. I have my charity, I have my real estate, I have DTCUBED, then I have a personal email.

So, I could sit on email all day and

be reactive, but I choose not to anymore. It's just a life choice.

And you know, I don't know that there's actually a third one, but just, you know, prioritizing yourself sometimes over other people even. Even

other people that you love, right? It doesn't have to be all the time, right? But just prioritizing yourself a little bit over everything else sometimes is probably good for the other people in your life because you'll live longer, you'll be happier, and you'll be in a better mood.

[00:15:03] Jay: Yeah. No, I love all those. All three are great. You've done a lot. You've done the business thing. You've done the family thing. You've done a lot of, you know, cool stuff. This question. Yeah. Non business related, so I typically try to steer away from any business answers because people always would go I'll just grow my business as big as possible, but my question is what's one thing you would do if you knew you couldn't fail?

Anything on earth. 

[00:15:28] Pete: My charity is the love of my work and I wish I could do more of it and I did in that year, I explored how I could make that bigger and failure and reality, you know, whether I'm right or wrong, failure and reality were the things that made me kind of tailback and say, I need to do a little bit more. Before I can do that. But if I knew I couldn't fail and I knew I wouldn't waste, you know, my retirement or whatever you want to, you know, talk about fiscally sound decisions, I would 100 percent work in my charity. I feel like we have a really good thing going. We only do something with the children physically once a year. I would do a lot more speaking. I would do a lot more with the program. I've actually in that year of exploration, I actually took. The empowerment that we, I call it empowerment, right? To empower a child to give something to their family at the holidays in December. I took that and I broke it up. That was the anchor. And I have an idea in the summertime, late summer, before the kids go to school, to do like a prepared type event. And that could be anything from buying book bags and clothes to getting housing for a child that either doesn't have parents or you know, is in a really bad situation, a fire or something of that nature that their family is going through.

And then in the fall, the event was all about Enlightenment and having them basically go to a place where people have it worse than them. What I learned in some of the things I did with some of the kids in my charity that have done things for years and years is. Sometimes taking someone to an area, right, from Glassboro, that there's some, you know, tougher areas in Glassboro, but taking them to Chester or Camden to a food kitchen and showing them that they're actually in much better shape than other people and having them help other people.

Really builds your self esteem up.

So, you know, that is a big thing. So I wanted to do a preparedness and enlightenment and then the empowerment and then it's much easier to talk to the kids in the Spring about how to concentrate on relationships and all those other things once their own lives are more settled and balanced.

Now I did meet up with another charity that does something similar, and they are bigger than us, and they have a need to grow and transition from the old founders, due to, you know, no bad reasons, so I am trying to work with them but it's been a little slower than I thought, and it's due to, you know, worrying that I fail.

I mean, I have worked hard my whole life, and if I spend all my time doing that and run out of money at 60 that would be a problem. That would not, to me, be a fiscally sound solution. So,

I need to get to a place where I don't need to work at all, which I'm not there yet, and then I will concentrate on that.

And my new goal right now is within three to five years. I'm 53, so at, between the ages of 56 and 60, 56 and 58 something along those lines, I would like to be able to work, be working full time in my charity and actually growing it.

[00:18:34] Jay: Love that. Great answer. Great answer. Where can people find you or your charity or your business? I mean, we'll obviously put all the links in the bio and stuff, but what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?

[00:18:44] Pete: Sure. Email is always great. Each website, you just click an info at email and it goes right to me for the charity. It's an opportunities knocking. Basically standing for if you know, you go and do things, there's an opportunity for you. It's I N. Yeah, you got me here. I N O P P. K N O C K dot org.

It's A N O P P K N O C K dot org.

And then my business is just D - T 3 dot com.

[00:19:13] Jay: Okay.

[00:19:14] Pete: But either way, it 

[00:19:15] Jay: LinkedIn or anything? Or are you on LinkedIn or are you 

[00:19:17] Pete: I am on 

[00:19:18] Jay: We have five emails. So you got a lot to keep up? Yeah.

[00:19:21] Pete: I do. I'm on LinkedIn, you can find me. Pete Mauro just my name and DTCUBED, it'll come right up.

[00:19:27] Jay: Okay. Beautiful man. Well, I loved having you on. I love your mission. I think, the world's a better place with people like you putting in time to help other people. So,

Love the journey, brother. And let's catch up soon, alright?

[00:19:38] Pete: Absolutely. Thanks, for having me. 

[00:19:39] Jay: See you, man. Have a good one. 

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