Damion Lupo’s Story of Reinventing Retirement and Housing Through FrameTech and EQRP

Pamela Bardhi: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Underdog podcast. Today I have an incredible guest here with me. Damon. How are you, my friend?

Damion Lupo: Great to see you. I’m doing great.

Pamela Bardhi: So great to see you, so funny, we were just getting on. You’re like, you know what the name of my podcast is? I’m like, no. And you financial m underdogs, I’m like, yes. I adore you already, this is amazing. This is so amazing.

Damion Lupo: I think there’s something everybody can kind of relate to the underdog. Because most people are truly underdogs compared to a system that they seem. Sometimes it, or oftentimes it seems like it’s stacked against us and we’re trying to figure out how we win. And so I think there’s a relatability to the whole idea of the underdog. So it’s a perfect space for us to be in, in talking about these things.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love it, Damon, I absolutely love it, and I can’t wait to get into your story. You’ve done some really badass things in your lifetime. And so I can’t wait to hear about all the things that you’ve done to what you’re up to now. Just literally everything in a nutshell.

There’s this shift that’s going on. Of what you can do now has completely changed

But before we get into all that. I always like to reel it back because there’s always an origination point at some point, right? So as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Damion Lupo: You know, it’s funny because back then, I wanted to be an astronaut. Which meant you would go to NASA, and now you just start a company and you make rockets. So, you know, there’s a. What I wanted to do and what the reality of what you can do now has completely changed. And that’s like a lot of things. There’s this shift that’s going on. Wherever impossibilities or things that were only dreams are now more practical. Then things that we thought were very certain are going away because of robotics and AI. Everything is getting inverted, which is really important for people to think about.  Because maybe what you thought was impossible is now just a choice, and what you thought was certain is going to be gone. It’s a good time to open your mind for what’s real and what’s changing.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that, I love it. And it’s so true. So you wanted to be an astronaut as a kid.

Damion Lupo: That was the thinking. It seemed like a fun thing to do. And then of course, my mom, for some reason my mom said you’d be, you can do anything you want. You can be a rockstar. I’m thinking in retrospect, she heard me sing. I sound like a cat that got its tail stepped on.

Pamela Bardhi: Oh my goodness, I love that, David. I mean, where did that all go? Like the whole, and where would the passion come from for the astronaut thing? Where’d you grow up? And like, what was the motivation for that?

Damion Lupo: So I grew up in Alaska and it was probably just one of those things. You know, back in the eighties, we had the space program. That’s when the challenger blew up. And there was, like, we were trying to go into the stars, get touch the stars. There was probably something there, ultimately there was, the deeper drive was this pain point. As much so, we have drivers from either avoiding pain or going after pleasure. Astronauting sounded really fun. But, the pain that drove me more than that was the pain of being told that we were poor. We were broke, we couldn’t do the things that we wanted to do or that I wanted to do. I didn’t like it, I didn’t like being told no.

Started figuring out ways to say yes to myself the things that I wanted to do. At the time, when I was eleven, I was playing video games. I started a business, hired my parents and had a wholesale retail business doing that. That was because there was pain and that, ultimately when I went to college. The second time, the pain was, I felt like the bookstore was ripping everybody off. Char they were overcharging for used books that they held for five minutes in between semesters. And I got really annoyed with that, and so the pain was, everybody has this gouging that’s happening. So I started a bookstore in my dorm room and effectively put the other bookstore out of business. Which was really irritating to the school and they threw me out.

But I did pay for school in a week and it was just more pain. And that’s been this struggle. It’s like the underdog. Like I feel like I’m being abused and I know I’m not the only one. So finding solutions for both me and for other people is, that’s the genesis of businesses and all the things. The 70 plus businesses I’ve started over the last 25 years it’s been some type of pain. Something that I feel is not right or could be way better. Legacy systems tend to maintain their dominance or try to keep control. Keep the new refreshed ideas and energy out to protect their legacy. Cash flows, but that’s where the entrepreneur and the underdog entrepreneur comes in. Disrupts them and that’s where the innovation happens.

That’s what my life has been the last 25 years. Especially the last decade, has really been to think deeply about how we disrupt things that need to be disrupted. Not just to just. I used to get into arguments as a kid just because I wanted to argue. And I’d argue with people even when they agreed with me. So I don’t think it’s necessarily good to go disrupt something just because you like to disrupt. But like where’s the problem? Where’s the thing where you can actually impact people and help a lot of people. The more people you help, the deeper impact.

All of a sudden things like money go away. Like there’s, there’s so much wealth that gets created. If you have, if your focus is on helping more people. Most people are trying to figure out how much cash to get for themselves, it’s the wrong focus. The money comes as a side effect to the impact you have on the larger number of people in a more meaningful way. And that’s the big hack, if you will, for prosperity and financial abundance that most people completely miss. Trey.

Pamela Bardhi: Oh my goodness. I’m so with you, David. There’s so many things that you mentioned there that I want to unpack. Because you said you started your business at eleven, which I love. Then you put your college bookstore out of business by the time you were in college. And they threw you out. It’s amazing. That’s amazing.

Damion Lupo: It was a little early, I think Amazon has done that to all the bookstores. Whether it’s Barnes and Noble or borders or all the college campuses. Now they’re trying to figure out how they sell more overpriced pencils and sweatshirts. But even though I tried to order, it’s kind of funny. I tried to order a sweater or a sweatshirt for my college and it ended up going. Being bounced over to, Amazon system. So you know, they’re, ultimately you have to decide who do you want to compete with? And I like competing with places that are archaic, that think that they’re untouchable because they’ve been there forever.

And, I just think it’s more interesting. There’s so much fat there that can be cut away, and so much good you can do by becoming more efficient. The world’s rife with those opportunities because it’s just how humans are. We get, we kind of, lethargic and we don’t want to keep innovating and disrupting ourselves. So we just sort of stick with what is working until somebody comes along and just blows us away. Because they’re ten times better.

Pamela Bardhi: Right. Everything’s about efficiency these days, too, which is amazing. And also, like, cost savings and all of that. There’s no better time to be an entrepreneur than now. But, I mean, you started way back when, so I would definitely love to hear the sequence of the businesses. Because you say, you know. Scaled 70 companies and people are like, oh, my God, you know, this is amazing. 

You know, the entrepreneurs are like, oh, my God, I’m listening. Would absolutely love to hear the journey of how that all kind of flowed together. Which ones were the most successful, which ones had their obstacles and pain points and all of that. Because you had mentioned, like, your intention was to disrupt and also to create efficiencies where it needed. And basically disrupt for the better anything, especially things that were archaic. So I would love to hear the sequence of how that all kind of came together leading up to frame tech now.

M founded EQRP to help people become financially free from financial shackles

Damion Lupo: Well, one of the interesting things, one of the few things that I’ve done that’s been very consistent or like old school. I had an insurance agency, and there was a path, it used to be, there’s a path. If you have an insurance agency, you do a certain series of calls and processes of marketing. You’ll build a book of business, and then you have this cash flow stream. You can play golf or goof off for decades and decades. It used to be like that, but then the Internet completely disrupted that. So now it’s harder and harder as margins get squeezed. When I was doing that, it was less than two years. And I thought, this is, I don’t want to do this, it was like arguing with my soul.

My soul was like, this is not, you’re not going to shine here. This is not why God put you on earth. So I went off and started doing real estate, and I did real estate in a different way. I did it to solve a problem. The problem was, many people would like to have homes, but they can’t qualify. And so I went into this creative financing space and figured out how to buy houses without any money. Bought my first house with a credit cardinal, which is a terrible idea, by the way, but I did it. Then I solved this problem for a lot of people that wanted to have homeownership and have families in their homes. Did that without them having to go through the traditional financing and banks.

Did that for a number of years, and it was. So I learned a lot in that process and I was narrowly focused. Then I got into trouble when I made a ton of money in 2004. Five made millions of dollars in cash, like, not just equity. But like literal cash, and thought, oh man, I’m 10ft tall and bulletproof. I went off and started developing things around the country and ultimately got whacked in 2008. And learned that leverage goes both ways and ended up losing 25 million out of 20 million. Which means I was negative 5 million and homeless. That created an opportunity for me to really ask better questions, like, what am I doing here? Am I here for more money or am I here for more impact? What is the purpose of.

So every one of these different businesses, different pieces I had with the real estate. Helped me to learn a lot of things to not do and, and some things to do. But the whole process, that ten year journey. Put me in a place where I needed a deeper philosophical and spiritual understanding of life. It wasn’t just about a better technique for marketing or making money, it was about asking better questions. Like, why am I here? That question was answered with, I’m here to teach people how to become financially free and to break the financial shackles. Because right now I think money is modern day slavery, it’s how we’re all in bondage. And people don’t even know what to do about it. It’s being manipulated by the Federal Reserve and these out of control politicians.

If you don’t understand the system, it’ll be used against you, and you’re basically the food. It’s like the Matrix. You’re the fuel for the system. So there was a shift. Then about five years after that meltdown, I said, okay, what could I do that would help the most people? What came up was being, giving people a chance to use retirement money to go invest in things outside of Wall street. That was where EQRP was born, and it gave people this control over their 401 ks and iras. For a decade, it’s been empowering thousands of families to do that, and then that evolved into other things. And so each of these things was part of a process of giving people more freedom.

So if you boiled everything down, it came down to, I was giving people more freedom. Anytime I went away from that and tried to make money, I got hammered. Like, when I went to, I flipped four houses and lost four of them to foreclosure. That was a good example of, I was trying to get the money instead of serving people. Flipping a house isn’t necessarily serving people. When you’re thinking about how you can juice as much cash out of the thing. There was a wrong intention. I wasn’t trying to find, I wasn’t trying to create this beautiful thing in the neighborhood.

I was trying to figure out how to make 50 or $100,000 in a few months. And I just believed that that was the wrong energy, and the universe was giving me feedback. So switching gears and focusing on how do I find what’s out there that I could do that creates more freedom for more people? That’s when the universe kicks back and says, right path. Then all of a sudden, this magic happens, and there’s flow. It’s getting to that point where you really know, what am I doing? Who am I? I’m all about figuring out more freedom, because I think more freedom is better than less freedom.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that. Damian, there’s quite a bit to unpack there. I’ve been on a similar journey as you, which I love.

Many people are struggling with alignment, purpose, and trying to find that flow

You were mentioning something that’s really important, that a lot of people are at this critical state right now. Where, you know, it’s, we don’t even realize how much money is controlling us and how intrinsically money motivated we are. I mean, I’m in real estate development and real estate, and all the time I get asked. People want to get into real estate, I want to make more money, so on and so forth. And I’m just. I’m always telling them, I’m like, yeah, but, like, what do you, is it that you really want? Right.

Many people are struggling with alignment, purpose, and trying to find that flow. You will never find flow unless you’re living in your truth and in your right path. Right. So how with you, I would love to kind of dive into that piece just, just for a second here. Because I think it’s super important. How did you find your alignment? And what, and because, how did you get to these questions? Essentially, because these are really amazing questions that you were mentioning that how you figured it out.

The question is, what’s your purpose? What are you actually trying to do

But that would be super, super key. Because I know that there’s a lot of people in this space right now that are struggling. That are like, you know, either they are super successful and they’re just like, I don’t feel fulfilled. Or they’re stuck and they don’t know what else to do next. And they keep, like, working and doing all the things and they’re like, why isn’t this working for me? You know?

Damion Lupo: Yeah. The question is, how do you serve more people? And, until I asked that question, that question came up. There was a process of almost two years that I worked after this meltdown in early 20. Twenty two thousand ten s, I was working with a therapist. Who became kind of a therapist coach and then a dear friend. It was really asking, like, who am I? And what’s it was really trying to figure out the truth, and so the question was, what is true? We get deeper into the truth about who you are and what you’re about. When people are, when people say, well, it’s not working for me, the question is, well, what’s your purpose? What are you actually trying to do? If you’re trying to make more money, that is never the purpose. That’s a side effect.

So that’s where people get stuck. Because they’re trying to figure out what they can do to make more money or different money or more efficiently. They’re never, the core question is not that it’s never that. It’s when you’re serving better, more people, ultimately, more money happens, it’s a natural side effect. It could be in real estate, it could be in business, it could be a million different things. But serving people, it’s also deeply fulfilling. And so not only does the money show up, but the happiness shows up, and you can have a great job. That’s where you’re looked at with a lot of success and admiration. You got great titles, but if you’re not really serving people, if you’re just going through motions, and I would imagine.

Quite frankly, a lot of attorneys are in this space where they go through motions and what are they really doing? They’re just part of a system. Most of my experience with attorneys. I’ve put a lot of attorneys kids through college with all the different legal stuff over the years. But that’s one of those things where, is there a deep fulfillment? My experiences, a lot of them, I didn’t feel, the fulfillment. I felt them going through motions, charging a lot of money redistributing wealth. And I didnt see them doing something that was serving people in any meaningful way. Saw them just going through motions, and I think a lot of people end up going through motions. Once you ask the right question and figure out the why. You dive into that, you get lost in it, you become obsessed with that thing.

And what’s really cool is when people look at you like, you’re crazy, and they say, I love this one. People say, you’re all focused and no play. Johnny is all the things to criticize people that are deeply obsessed about something. But right now, the Olympics are going on. I promise that everyone that’s in the Olympics is obsessed, and they don’t have any balance in life. They have this one thing that they’ve been obsessed over for years, and now they’re there. They’re winning gold, and they’re in the Olympics, and so the question is, should you be doing that? The answer is most likely yes. You should be going for the thing that makes you obsessed. Because otherwise, you’re going to live a life of quiet desperation, tiptoeing safely to death’s door.

You’re going to end up going, getting there. And saying, wow, I have a lot of regret about what I didn’t do. Humans are really weird about this. We’re the only species or the only thing that literally grows to, like, a quarter of our potential or half our potential. There’s no tree in the woods that says, okay, I’m halfway up. I’m done. They grow until they die, they keep doing it. But humans are strange because we have this frontal lobe and the power of choice. We tend to stop, and then we wonder why we’re miserable. It’s because we’re not on purpose. That’s where everything changes when you find that purpose. But you got to ask better questions, and you got to be willing to be a little crazy. At least from other people’s perspective.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that.

Business is a spiritual game, Damien says. You’ve got to be right with mind, body and spirit

Damian. There’s so many things you said that I absolutely adore, like, trees grow until they die, and that’s the truth. Like, you know, are you living just going through the motions? And some people really, like, the first step is self awareness, right? For anybody who’s stuck in a certain place, this goes for anybody. I tell everybody this, and this is one of my favorite things in the whole universe. Business is a spiritual game. So I heard that from when I was sitting in the crowd and Tony Robbins said that everything stopped for me. I was like, holy shit, he got it right dead on. Because your business is an extension of you, right? Oh, of course. You’ve got to be right with mind, body, and spirit and yourself in order for business to be in order.

Damion Lupo: That’s a missing element for a lot of people, they think it’s just something that they do. The reality is, business is a part of who, of our being, and it is an extension. To say it’s not, to just cut it off, then you’re truly going through motions. There are certain people that work for me that will talk about how they wake up in the morning. They were literally dreaming about all the things in the business because there’s a spiritual component to it. And there are certain people at 05:00 they’re gone and their mind is somewhere else.

They’re focused on football or volleyball or drinking or hunting, and that’s fine for them. It’s just a different approach to life. And is there more balance there? Yeah, but, I mean. When you’re talking about 40 or 50 hours a week and you don’t have that spiritual element to it. You’re giving the best parts of your life to something that you don’t care that much about. It’s not spilling over. I would challenge that. Is that really the right place for you to spend this bulk chunk of your adult life? Probably not. Right.

Pamela Bardhi: Cause do you really want to get to it by the end and say, shit, I was just going through the motions.

Damion Lupo: Unfortunately, that’s where most people go. I mean, I had that experience with my father towards the end of his life. And in the few weeks before he died, he made that comment. He said, man, you know, there were so many things that I wanted to do. And he didn’t do them because he was playing safe, he was. Any sports team that starts playing not to, not to lose ends up losing almost every single time. Because your energy is not that of a winner, it’s not that of a competitor. It’s that of somebody playing, and it’s really unfortunate, but that’s how most humans are playing. They’re trying to figure out how they can get enough money so they’re safe and they’re secure.

And it’s unfortunate, that doesn’t really work, even if you have a pile of money. I’ve known many people that have been customers, clients, friends, over the years. That ends up with a million or two or three or four or five, and they still don’t feel safe. It is not about how much money you get. It’s literally how big your spirit is and how much strength you have in your experience, your muscle. It’s like people ask, they ask Henry Ford, they’ve asked me what happens if all of this stuff goes away. I’m like, you can take the stuff away, but you can’t take the experience away. I just go create it again, I mean, I’ve lost all my money four different times.

Now that I’m in a place where I’ve created more than I’ve lost 1020 times over. And then that’s because you can’t learn less. You can’t unlearn your stuff. I mean, unless you get punched in the head by a mule where it knocks all that sense out of you. But the reality is you’re going to have that, and most people don’t have it. They’ve just stumbled through life and they have this pile of money, which leads to a lot of fear around. Can’t lose this because I don’t have time or really any way of doing this again. Because I’m not even sure how it happened the first time. It was almost an accident.

Pamela Bardhi: Jeff, I love that. Damien. I mean, you mentioned so many amazing things throughout that, because, I mean, people, there’s really never enough money ever. So it’s like this whole topic of fulfillment is amazing. And I appreciate your vulnerability when you said I’ve lost everything four different times. It’s like, here you are getting back up again. But look at this time now, you did it 1020 times over, which is absolutely amazing.

You were mentioning the different industries that you dove into. And so ending with real estate, how did you tap into the construction market

You were mentioning the different industries that you dove into. And so ending with real estate, how did you tap into the construction market? I love that you were mentioning, I did flips and they ended in foreclosures. That’s hilarious, but I mean, if it wasn’t in alignment, it wasn’t in alignment, right? So it’s just, this is pure honesty. Like, there’s things in real estate that I haven’t done that great. That I’m like, oh, crap, I’m never doing that again. Right, you learn your lessons as you go. You think you can handle and then you can’t, you make your mistakes and you move forward. But I would love to hear how you got into the space of where frame tech is now. Just like that whole journey, because that just, that sounds amazing.

Frametech is a company that helps build better houses in America

Robert.

Damion Lupo: Well, here’s one of the things that I’ve learned, and I share this with people. If you ever hear me talking about trading stocks or trading anything and flipping a house is trading a house. It’s then, do the opposite of whatever I’m doing, I’m the world’s worst trader, I’m going to lose money. So you can just make money by doing the opposite of me. But what’s happening there is you’re not really creating any value when you’re flipping things. You’re flipping stocks, you’re flipping a house, it’s really not, value. You are just moving things around, it’s how the financialization of the entire system has happened. With mergers and acquisitions and people trying to squeeze margin. And then banks and hedge funds making a ton of money and the average person getting squeezed more.

My question to myself was, what can I do that’s going to do something meaningful and impactful? Usually that boils down to, you got to build something. A few years ago, I had some people that were working on a project in Arizona. They had a new idea for manufacturing, of all the framing for houses and apartments. This came from decades of them being in that business. But also a huge problem in America. We’ve got between five and 10 million units that are missing in housing that we need to have today. We’re building about 1.2 million a year, and we need 1.8 million. So we’re going backwards. And the reason we’re going backwards is because after 2008, there was a fallout for all the construction.

The trades people just went away and they haven’t come back and were not, we don’t have enough people building. We don’t have enough builders doing these things, and the way that things are done are very inefficient. To give you an example, the last great innovation in construction was 1954, which was 70 years ago. It was the nail gun. Before that, it’s just hammers swinging against nails. There’s really been very little innovation. Most of the way houses and apartments are built in America. They are done the same way they’ve been done for decades and decades and decades. So these guys had this idea, and when my business partner and I looked at their idea. At first we thought it was crazy, and there’s no way it’s true. And then we met with them and we said, wow, this is actually true.

You guys know what youre talking about, and we like this, so we’re in. We want to help you, so well bring the capital. And over lunch, we committed to $40 million to build this plant because it was solving a giant problem. Let me tell you something new. If you’re building a manufacturing plant in America, it is freaking hard, and it may be hard to do in China. But, in America, there’s typically so much red tape and it’s just hard in general to build manufacturing. Elon said the same thing. Easy to build a truck, really hard to build a manufacturing facility and build 100,000 trucks. So what we said was, there’s an opportunity here to help solve the housing crisis. If we put all these pieces and all these people together, that’s what we’ve done.

Building this company called Frametech, that not only does it do things better, it does them exponentially better. For us to take an idea for a house or an apartment, an average house we get. That takes two months to frame. We’ll take the designs and have a completely framed house in two weeks. So it’s four times faster. And in the process, one of the biggest things that’s really terrible about the manufacturing process with houses. When you’re building them there’s tons of waste. There’s an average 40 yard dumpster or two per house full of trees. Not only is that wasteful and terrible for the environment, but you’ve got a ton of wasted money.

In our process, because of this process of what we’re doing with the wood, we have 99% less waste. We basically have sawdust, we are not wasting wood, we have a trash can full of sawdust and some corner cuts. But not a dumpster full of wood. And because the thing is, all the components, the walls, the trusses, everything that we’re building is done inside of a manufacturing plant. Our tolerances are super tight and the quality is consistent. I’m not exaggerating when I say the quality is ten times better than anything else that’s produced. So you see these three different things, when you put them together. We’re able to disrupt this market and deliver something that solves a huge problem with a far superior product.

That’s not even talking about all the things we’re doing for the people. How we look at people as a family and not a cog and a balance sheet or a p and l statement. Just the impact on the housing problem and the communities and the housing shortage, it’s a massive impact. Because it’s really hard, very few people will do it, and they just, there’s been no incentive. So we’re creating a new standard, the frametech standard. That is very different than trying to flip a house, where you’re just trying to get some money. This thing has gone from zero to 463 million in just over two years in value. And that’s because we’re creating a ton of value, because we’re building something that’s going to change the world.

Pamela Bardhi: Oh, my God, I love that, Damian. I absolutely love that. And the thing is, because you’re serving, that’s how these numbers have gotten so great.

You’ve scaled 70 different companies, many of them did not work

I would love your opinion on this, because you’ve scaled 70 different companies, right. When it comes to this one, what is it that you did differently that is really making this blow up? The way that it has that’s compared differently from, like, your other businesses? And then what were some of the biggest lessons from your previous businesses that you were able to incorporate in?

Damion Lupo: So all the businesses stair step on top of each other. Many of those 70, more than half did not work, or they ended up losing money, they were great opportunities. Either you win or you learn, and most people look at it differently. They say, I won or I lost, and I looked at every one of those businesses as a stair step. When I first started, I was doing things on my own. I was my own attorney and my own accountant. Today, there are teams of attorneys and accountants. Everybody that’s on the team is an A plus, we don’t have any average, or lukewarm. We don’t even have any b students on the team, we may have people that were. That dropped out of school, but they’re at the absolute extreme tip top of their industry,

They’ve got specific execution intelligence, and they’re all obsessed. So the difference here, the reason this is working. Is because everybody’s rowing in with a fierceness that you just don’t see in general in business. Businesses wonder why, they just kind of trudge along and wonder, they don’t get traction. It’s because they don’t have an incredibly obsessed team that are playing at the highest levels. That are willing to do whatever it takes. Frame tech, is comprised of people exclusively that are of that mindset. And so we also attract those types of people. People come to us and say, I want to be on the winning team. Because they know that this is a winning team, they see how fast we’re doing it. They see the success of it, and that’s the difference.

In the past, I didn’t understand that, and quite frankly, I wasn’t ready for it. So if you’re not ready to be that, if you’re not leading by example, if you’re not completely of that spirit. There’s no way in the world anybody at that level is going to want to come hang out and play with you. It’s, you have to shift yourself. That doesn’t happen because you go, like, I love Tony Robbins. But you’re not going to change your entire life in one weekend. Like this takes years of practice. The actual, the rhythms where they harden into your cellular makeup, your DNA gets tweaked. Not because you had a vaccine or an mRNA, but because you’ve done the thing. And you’ve gone through the motions for years and years and years and you keep learning.

Every time you screw something up, you go, cool, what did I just learn? What? Why did I go, what was in that for me? Why did that happen for me? It is not, nothing happens to you, it happens for you. Everything happens for you. When you leverage the power and the compounding effect of all those experiences most people have the same year. They’re like, I have 20 years of experience, and my answer is no, you have one year experience. 20 times you’ve done the same thing. You’re going through motions, you’re in a merry go round. This is like fricking Groundhog day. And then the truth is, when you go and you have one year and you leverage it into the second. It’s not 20 different years, it’s this compounding effect.

That’s where 20 years into something, you turn something from a napkin to a half billion dollar organization in two years. The overnight success story took 25 years of compounding effect from all the different things that were attempted and flopped. And you learn from, and all the people that did that, and you bring everybody together. Then you have this magic that happens overnight and everybody’s amazed, and they say, I want to do that too. I say, great, in 25 years. You will have been, you will have gone through the things to be ready to accept the overnight success story. Everybody says, no, I want to do it in 24 months. 24 months later, they’re literally on the same merry go round.

Pamela Bardhi: That’s so true. Everyone thinks it’s an overnight success. And it’s like, man, you only knew, you know, everything that it took to get here was it. What famous philosopher said something like. Picasso painted for 25 years in order to charge x amount for one of his paintings or something like that? I was like, that’s so crazy. So it’s not, it’s not like what he charges for the hour, you know what I mean? It’s like all those years that have been put in to get someone to be paying for that hour. Like, I forget what the analogy was, but I was like, this is mind blowing stuff. Because it takes years to get to that skill set in order to get it to where it is today. Right?

Which is exactly what you’re saying, it’s never an overnight success. The same thing really happened to me, like, I started working when I was about ten years old. I ran my parents restaurant by the time I was 18, I had two restaurants by the time I was 21. And then I started flipping houses after that, after I hired a coach and then scaled up my development business. Then all of a sudden made it to Forbes and Time magazine, and everyone’s like, oh, my God, Pam. I was like, you guys have no idea how many screw ups I had prior to that. Like, I was like, guys, this is 20 something years of the making, pretty much like, it did not happen overnight.

I backed myself into a wall so many different times and now it’s just, it’s a whole different game, right? So that’s something that I say that all the time, and that’s the whole reason this podcast was even birthed. Was because I was seeing that people were looking at what’s happening on social media. And be like, oh my God. Loving where I was at. Oh, my goodness, this happened so quickly. I’m just, I’m like, no, no, we want to unpack.

The journey of how we got here, like, how you were mentioning or everyone must look at you now. Oh, my God, Damien. Look at, you’ve got this huge multimillion dollar, you know, construction company, and, oh, my goodness. You’re like, I’ve lost it all four times, right? Four times. And I rebuilt and I kept things going, kept things going in order to get here. Like you said, it’s that 25 years to get this to this one year, right? Which is amazing. So I’ve just, I love that, and I love your heart and intention to serve. I think that part is the most exciting and the most beautiful, the minute I find I.

When you make it about the mission, everything else goes into flow

When you make it about the mission, everything else goes into flow.

Damion Lupo: I think you have to have, if you don’t have a mission, you’re doomed from the beginning. I wrote a book about five years ago called Unicornomics. And it’s the foundational 15% that gives you an 85% likelihood of success. It was based on 50, 60 companies at the time that I launched. The things I learned, as well as people outside of me, that I was leveraging their stuff, too. Realizing that there’s a formula and what most people do is they don’t get the foundational parts right. Which is why nine out of ten businesses fail in the first ten years or the first five years. Another nine out of ten of those fail after the next five years. It’s because they didn’t get the foundational stuff right. If you get that stuff right, imagine if you had an 85% likelihood.

That means on average, out of two businesses, ones going to be a success, 85%. So why would you not do the foundational 15% right? Because you dont know better and you’re delusional about what you think it takes. And so when you have that playbook and that formula, it really does change the game. The funny part is, when you write a book like that, and then you don’t do everything in the book. People say, hey, you wrote this book, how come you’re not doing this? It’s always kind of a funny conversation when that comes up, so it’s one way to keep yourself accountable. Write the rule books and then give it to everybody and say, this is our book. Then they say, well, okay, you wrote it, let’s do it.

Pamela Bardhi: Absolutely, and there’s so much that goes into it too.

What was the best financial lesson that you think every entrepreneur needs to know

And even from a practicality standpoint. For entrepreneurs, what was the best financial lesson that you think every entrepreneur needs to know? Because you mentioned that financial literacy piece is really, really critical. So for entrepreneurs that are listening right now, what are your thoughts on that, Jeff?

Damion Lupo: One of the biggest lessons is that when I look back, if I said, okay. What would I tell myself 20 years ago? It’s always a good question for anybody, and the answer is, forget about what other people think about you. Go learn faster by screwing up faster and make the mistakes sooner, and then learn from them. And realize that when you make a mistake, when you lose money, it’s made up anyway. I remember when I started doing real estate stuff and I was printing money. Was making it up, and I thought, wow, that’s all in my head. So this idea, this very archaic idea of time for money. When you think about poor middle class people, they trade their time for money.

Rich people and ultra rich people trade their money for time. They’re buying time all the time. And so they’re willing to spend $100,000 for somebody that has an answer off the top of their head. That takes them 15 seconds to deliver, and it’s because they want the solution, the actual outcome. There’s a big barrier to success and wealth. When you’re saying, well, I need to not make a mistake. And I need to figure out how to sell my time, that’s incredibly dangerous for people. You’ve got to do better than that.

But the biggest thing was literally deciding that, that mistakes were okay, and including losing money. Losing all the money, losing more than all the money, and realizing that you can make it up. And when you lose all the money, you learn a lot about yourself, and that’s a huge leverage point. Most people aren’t taught that. They’re taught to be A students or B students. Don’t fail, don’t make 50% wrong, because then you’re a complete failure. The reality is, in business and in the real world, 50% right, you’re a billionaire. That’s how that works. I love that.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that. And it’s interesting how our systems change and shift our thoughts and don’t really teach you what’s really important. Right.

Damien: You have to understand that the future’s coming

And with that, this is my favorite question, and I always love to lean into this. But for you, Damien. What would your older self tell your younger self based on what you know now, business, life, whatever.

Damion Lupo: It would say that the future is going to arrive. There’s a combination, and you have to find this. It’s different for everybody, but you have to understand the future’s coming. If you ignore that, you’ll wake up one day at 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. And you go, oh, crap. At the same time, if you’re always living in the future, you’re going to miss the entire experience of life. So there’s got to be this presence. That’s when the key is, the sooner you fall in love with the mission than you’re present.

You get lost in the journey, and you’ll end up with a future that’s really, really magical. And so you’ve got both. But if you don’t fall in love with your life the way it is, you’re not going to be present. You’re going to be looking at the future, and eventually, you’ll get there and you’ll say, what the hell just happened? So I think that the key is, really fall in love with something that’s meaningful. That mission, that thing that serves other people, and it’ll change everything about your life.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that, Damian. Oh, man. I love it. I love it.

The first frametek plant comes online this fall; second coming in 2024

And in your world, what’s going on in the next three to six months? Next three months? Like, what’s happening in your world?

Damion Lupo: The big thing that’s coming this fall, in the fall of 2024, is Frametek. First plant comes online and it produces. This has been a dream of our founder, our patriarch, Marvin, for the last 30 years. He’s been in this industry for 50 years. To be able to see his dream come to life, and being able to see the first plant of many. Many that are going to roll out across the country, that’s a pretty powerful thing. It’s right around the corner, literally, this fall will be producing. And, our second plant comes online in a couple of years. We see these things all over the country, and we have our locations. So the next few months are going to be pretty powerful. Because that’s literally the proof of concept that’s going to change the world.

Pamela Bardhi: I cannot wait, and I hope to visit that plant because it sounds absolutely legendary. Oh, my goodness. And where’s the first one going?

Damion Lupo: First ones in Camp Verde, Arizona, just about an hour north of Phoenix. So we’re purposefully building these things in smaller areas, tertiary markets, where there’s. We don’t have the kind of jobs that are in main metropolises like Dallas. Where we’re putting these plants in places where people want to live. They want to be disconnected from all the concrete, they want to have families and more of a different lifestyle. And so we’re purposefully putting them there.

And what’s interesting is these communities are very supportive because we’re bringing in. We’ll be the largest private employer in the area, and obviously, that’s very good for communities. It allows people to stay there and not have to leave and raise their families. So that’s the first one’s there, second one’s in Casa, Grande, south of Phoenix. After that, we’ll be rolling out in Texas, Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee. All over the place that you guys are going to know frame tech because you’re going to see it everywhere.

Pamela Bardhi: I absolutely love that, Damien. Oh, my goodness. This is such fantastic news that, like, follows right around the corner. So I’m super psyched for you and the whole team, this is amazing stuff, my friend. All the nuggets you dropped today, all the wisdom, all the stories, everything. I’m so, so, so grateful for you, and I know that everyone listening is like, Damien’s awesome. Where can I find him, where can we find you, my friend?

Damion Lupo: You’re going to find me at the frame tech plan, so if you want to come check it out. You can either do it online, go to frametech, frametec.com, comma, check it out, see what we’re doing. If you want to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn. You’ll see a lot of stuff about frametech there, too. And you’ll notice there’s a healthy obsession around frametech. It’s fun to watch that and maybe be inspired for your own path and your purpose. Whatever that is to give you a frametek experience. So check it out, be inspired, and I hope everybody learned a few things here.

Pamela Bardhi: Thank you so much, David. Appreciate all your love, all your insight, all the nuggets, everything. What Frametec is about to launch and do is going to be absolutely incredible for the industry. I can’t wait to see it rolling out because I have a huge passion for the housing crisis as well. I’m in the shipping container, side and on the development side with that and adus. That’s my realm in a nutshell. And, you know, we’re both here to try and save the world and serve more people. So I’m super grateful for you, my friend, thank you so, so, so much.

Damion Lupo: Appreciate you having me. Thanks so much.

Underdog is always dropping on Thursdays. Catch us next week

Pamela Bardhi: So that’s it for today’s episode of Underdog. Catch us next week. Always dropping on Thursdays. And remember, if you’re interested in real estate or want to learn how to create more money and magic in your life. Check out meetwithpamala.com and let’s chat. Sending you so, so much love.