IAM1941 – Podcast Host and Gym Owner Breaks Down Dating and Relationships Questions

Transcription:

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Charles DiGisco Teaser 00:00

But one thing that I really picked up on is knowing what to make a priority, knowing what you have to solve immediately versus knowing when you're like I need to get this done, but it can happen after X, Y, Z

Intro 00:10

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you Precisely the information you are in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:39

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners in what I like to call CB Nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focusing on finishing it out, fighting the good fight and closing out the job. I think just as important as it is to start something, it's even more important in how you conclude it or finish it out. So if you think of the different things that you can finish out, it could be everything from a project, it could be from a day, it could also be from a business in and of itself, and it can also of course be for the year. So when you think of finishing out, I want you to really think of these episodes because what we're going to really focus on is the last question that we really ask, which is defining what it means to be a CEO.

All the creative, innovative, and I think truly insightful questions that we received from this question is really what we want to highlight during the show. But of course, we want you to enjoy the entire episode and think about how you're going to finish things out and how you're going to finish things out strongly. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Charles DiGisco of the Lover and the Fighter.

Charles, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Charles DiGisco 02:12

Hey, great to be here Gresh. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 02:14

No problem. I'm super excited to have you on. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Charles so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

The Lover and the Fighter is a podcast discussing all things fighting and relationships. Charles is an MMA fighter, color commentator, and gym owner, owner who has spent countless hours on the mats and in business and has been known among his friends as the resident therapist when it comes to dating and relationships.

He will break down any and all questions he receives on the topic. Charles, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Charles DiGisco 02:44

I sure am, man. I can't wait.

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Gresham Harkless 02:46

Awesome. Let's do it. So I want to kick everything off and hear more about what I call your CEO story. What let you start your business?

Charles DiGisco 02:51

So my business itself is district martial arts, right? So that's the physical gym that I've now owned for coming up on two years, which is pretty cool. And oddly enough, everything is connected, right? So I started training in the sport of martial arts, actually started boxing and then I went to Jiu Jitsu. Grew everything from there about 10 years ago, I was 17, I was in high school.

Over the years, it became a constant in my life, and I was never really good with commitments. So there was always a lot of things that were changing around me and stuff like that. I was moving to new places. I was hanging out with new women, right? That's where the dating comes from. Then sure enough, that just stayed relevant. It just stayed a major part of my life. I got connected with a couple of buddies who, one was fighting UFC at the time. A couple others were professional grapplers, and we all started training together and coaching.

Then when the gym we were at was closing, and they were moving to a different location we just seized the day, and started a business, and we hit the ground running. In six months, we were making money, and a year and a half later, we're now looking to move to a bigger spot.

Gresham Harkless 03:49

Nice. That's completely awesome. And then the podcast just came about from that standpoint too?

Charles DiGisco 03:53

Yeah. So, the podcast was a natural evolution of everything because for my friends, I really did become the resident therapist. I gave good advice. I read a lot, I always had older friends. So I always had these guys, even my fathers were very close, always giving their wisdom. So I had that at a very young age. So for guys my age, they would talk to me and I'd be able to relate to them as a peer. But I'd be able to take the advice I got from somebody who knew much more than I did, especially when it comes to dating and knowing what to look for and knowing what's a red flag and what's not.

I was able to translate that for them and put it into terms they could understand. And then like anything, the more you do it, just like in fighting, the better you get, and I don't want to say develop the talent for it. I really enjoyed helping people and helping them sort out tough situations they find themselves in. And, like dating, it's so tough, like I've taken so many more L's than I could ever hope to have wins.

But it's learning, like learning from those losses and not taking it personally and, getting used to rejection. Rejection is so tough, but just like getting punched in the face over time, it doesn't really affect you as much as you think it would. That doesn't mean you want it to happen every day. But when it does happen, it doesn't quite seem to bother you as much.

Gresham Harkless 04:58

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because there's definitely a lot of like parallels between you know that obviously you talked about MMA and boxing and then half any type of sports or any athletics and then of course business itself because you have to you know, go through those rejections in order to learn from them.

But it's not so much you can control all those things But you can't control like how you look at it or how you approach it and things that happen from there.

Charles DiGisco 05:19

Absolutely. Absolutely You know, you wouldn't expect dating, owning a business and fighting to really be related, right? But at its core, the soft skills you learn from all those things, I got really good at dealing with conflict and having problem solving just from owning a business. Because so many, if it can happen and if it can go wrong, it 100% will, and learning how to efficiently solve that problem, as quickly as possible.

And as resolute as possible to making sure you find the best solution, not just the fastest. I think that goes a long way, both inviting and dating too.

Gresham Harkless 05:51

Yeah, absolutely. I know you touched on a little bit. Did you have any more you can expound upon with your business or your podcast and what you're doing there? Like people can learn from it. And then what you feel is your secret sauce.

Charles DiGisco 06:03

Absolutely. So, the business actually you probably know better than anybody, the business itself, the tangible part, the lessons, I could probably write a book at this point, and there are people who've done it before me who could write an even longer one. But one thing that I really picked up on is knowing what to make a priority, knowing what you have to solve immediately versus knowing when you're like I need to get this done. It can happen after X, Y, Z, the customer service aspects, especially because we own a gym and it's a fight gym, right?

So it's a very high testosterone environment. We have active competitors, I'm still in the mix competing. One of the other coaches is still actively competing, but we have to train with these people who are paying us, but we also have to teach them. So very quickly, you can see that it can easily become a tough environment to that people would want to go to, because I've been to fight gyms in the past where you walk in and you're sweating already, you'll get tired before you can start sparring because you know it's not sparring, you're fighting, you just have headgear on, you got a mouthpiece, you got headgear.

Even when these guys are about to go, it's going to get rough and vile, but what we've done at District Martial Arts is we've created a real, and I want to preface this saying, I always thought it was ridiculous when you hear about like community and environment as a kid. I was like, yeah, whatever. It's just the people you hang out with, right? Now we've hit over, we've got over a hundred members and we have a real genuine environment where people want to just hang out with them. People are just talking and hanging around. And I guess I didn't really see that coming when I first started the gym, right?

When I first started the business, I was thinking. Revenue, training, and satisfaction from life. But I didn't realize this fourth factor would come in, which would be how much I enjoy hanging out with people, right? Like I'm not running a store where I'm selling a product, I'm selling a service, right?

I'm selling my knowledge and everything I know. But with that comes this human nature of understanding how to teach people certain ways, knowing what's going to resonate with one person that might not resonate with another, knowing when sometimes people are just having bad days and you got to just listen, let them talk it out and figure out what kind of training you want to do from that.

When I have a bad day, I want to get after it. I want to bite down. I want to get rough. Sometimes when people have a bad day, they just need to calm down and relax and catch their breath. And now when we have like gym events and parties or, anything like that, Absolutely.

Yeah, like everybody there, everybody's powering around, they're hanging out, it's become, we're just a big group of friends, and the podcast actually came as an extension. I started the podcast just after opening the gym because my group of friends that we have would have these conversations for, I would, give them fight advice because I do commentary and I went to the industry from a business perspective.

So I know the sport. And obviously, the dating advice that we talked about instead of telling, eight, 10, 15 people, I was telling like 40 to 60 people. And I'm like there's gotta be a better way to do this. And Joe Rogan's like my hero besides my father. So I was like let me just start a podcast.

And my girlfriend, Grace is a video and production whiz. So she does like all the cool graphics and she does all the technical editing and stuff. And she'll come on the podcast too and offer a very, a strong female perspective. So, that's just like one more way that it all came together.

You know what I mean? Having her there to put the put the polish, so to speak, on the rough edges that I present was really, really helpful. I couldn't do it without her.

Gresham Harkless 08:59

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I love how things just organically grow because a lot of times you create something and you have a vision for what it is that you want to build.

And, you think it's going to be X, Y, and Z, but a lot of times it just organically happens where, to me, I'm big into like passion and following your gift and listening to that, like quiet voice sometimes. And a lot of times when you do that, you start to build something that's truly phenomenal.

Charles DiGisco 09:21

Yeah. The organic growth is It's like an X factor, right? Like you can't really, predict it. It's, that's not something I put on my revenue forecasting or I put on my business plan, but it's such, it's like one of the best benefits because, I still work a day job. I'm a government consultant for the defense department.

It's a good day job, no doubt. But as soon as I leave there for most people, they'd be like, wow, so you work anywhere from10 to 15 hours a day straight through between work and the gym. And I'm like you know what? The gym, while it is work, it doesn't feel like the same type of work.

It feels like it's an environment that I get to be a part of, and I get a lot of relaxation from it too, maybe not in the sparring and the violence, but everything that comes with it has definitely helped me take the edge off of the day job, which is a little bit more of a grind.

Gresham Harkless 10:05

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, or book or habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Charles DiGisco 10:16

We were just talking about this actually on the last episode, The Lover and the Fighter, and I think. In general, basic project management skills, right? Just being able to keep your things, keep yourself organized and having a process to do things. I originally started doing that at my day job, right? Cause that was my role. But then it quickly expanded to everything. I did gym, training camps, commentary, like the way I go about sending my follow-up emails when I'm trying to get a commentary gig, anything I'm doing.

To further my life in terms of my careers, that's all project management and organization. The, everybody knows that you need to pretty much, it's all about the grid. You don't stop trying. You keep pushing forward. You just, you're the relentlessness, right? There's, I'm not telling anybody anything new there, but the boring part, the project management to keeping things organized that also has such an important aspect to reaching your goals and getting to that next level.

Gresham Harkless 11:06

Yeah. I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget and this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Charles DiGisco 11:15

Oh, man, if I can hop into a time machine I think I'd probably go back to like just right at the end of middle school, you know right when you get out of puberty, but I think when you look back and you look at it from an aggregate you look at it on macro level, it's big picture. It's so easy to talk yourself out of things in the big picture. If I think about like commentary, for example, which is my dream, and that in that third tier, I've taken the most losses in anything. It's amazing that I even get a reject. I'm happy when somebody says no because I'm so used to getting no response. When it's a yes, I'm ready to throw it, throw a fiesta, but the thing is that if I looked at it from how much effort am I going to put into something versus what am I going to get in return?

And again, not just financially, but just in success, right? How many yeses am I getting compared to no's man, I would never have done it. I would never have done it. But when I look at it on a day to day and I say, okay, this is going to be an hour of my day. It's not going to be 365 hours of the year, right? It's not going to be, however many work weeks that adds up to, I don't want to do quick math, but when you look at it on the day to day, it's like I could put an hour towards my dream. I could put five hours towards my dreams and maybe I'm going to get a return and maybe those five hours are going to turn into 500 hours.

Maybe that's going to turn into a new career and maybe it won't turn into anything, but I can't look at it in this long form picture because if I do, you're looking at the mountain, not the step, right? And I actually got that and not the exact words, but effectively an aggregate of it from. I used to read a lot of memoirs and it was one of the memoirs that I read, I'm not sure which one I believe it was the creator of Delta Force, which is a U S army's like top tier unit. He was saying how hard it was that a 40-mile ruck, which is like a 40-mile effective like hike, but you have, 60 pounds of gear and your rucksack, it's a disaster and you just get a compass and a map and they don't tell you where you're going, that you just have points you have to reach where they give you the next compass points.

So you're going wherever they say you're going. And he said it got to a certain point where he just couldn't think how much more he had to go. He was ready to quit. But instead he just said, just take one more step. Just take one more step. Just take one more step.

Gresham Harkless 13:14

Absolutely. I love that and I love that perspective, but looking at it as a step rather than a mountain because you can, lose sight of the process and lose sight of just the small things that you can do every day to get to that mountain, get over that mountain.

So I appreciate that CEO nugget. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Charles, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Charles DiGisco 13:35

So, to me it's pretty interesting. I think to me, it means being just being in charge of my own life, right? Like I'm not a CEO of my day job. The business that I own, I have a couple of partners and commentary. Technically, I'm just a contractor, right? So really what it is, and even the podcast, I have a partner in my girlfriend, Grace. I might not have 100% say in all of these different things I do.

I might not be able to dictate who does what or anyone. Obviously I have my input. But I am a CEO in my life. At Charles DiGisco LLC, I am the CEO, right? So I'm choosing to put my effort and energy into each of these individual things. And in turn, it's up to me to really understand what that return is. Sometimes it's just being able to rest my head on a pillow and be like, wow, I'm really doing some cool things. I'm doing what I need to do, that hit me one time with commentary where I interviewed cowboy, Donald Cowboy Cerrone on air. And if you're an MMA fan, he's a pretty popular guy. So I interviewed him on air and I couldn't believe what was happening.

It didn't really hit me until I laid down that thing. I was like, wow, I'm doing this. Like I did that, right? That was a ground up operation I did to get there. It was constantly harassing this poor guy. Shout out to Brian Hanford, my boss there. I just was relentless. Texting him, calling him, emailing, sending him highlight tapes, whatever I had to do. But from that hour I took that extra step I took, it resulted in one of the biggest moments of my career.

Gresham Harkless 14:53

Absolutely. And I think that's a great reminder and incredible perspective. A lot of why, I wanted to create the podcast.

So I appreciate you for sharing that with us. Charles, I appreciate your time. What I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and our listeners know and then how best they can get a little bit.

Charles DiGisco 15:09

Guys, this is Gresh. First off, thank you so much. This has been such an honor. I just want to hopefully I sound encouraging and not too like inspirational or anything like that, just don't stop chasing what you really want. And if you have to, if you have to keep that baseline with that day job, don't let that talk you out of pursuing your other interests.

In order to get in touch with me guys, if you want to, Hey, listen, subscribe, download to the Lover and the Fighter. It'll compliment this podcast quite well. We talk about a whole host of things from fighting to dating to owning a gym and everything that comes with that and business world. And also you can get in touch with me on Instagram.

It's cgdigisco just go on Instagram. I don't really use any other social media, but I'll actually give out my email as well in case anybody has any personal questions they want to ask me. If they need just like some kind of one on one advice for anything I touched on. And that's the same thing, cgdigisco79@gmail.com.

Gresham Harkless 15:59

Awesome. Awesome. We'll have that link, those links and the information in the show notes as well. So Charles, appreciate you. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Charles DiGisco 16:07

Gresham, thank you so much, man. Same to you, bro.

Outro 16:09

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play at everywhere you listen to podcasts, subscribe and leave us a five star rating. Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co.

This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless.

Thank you for listening.

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