A Little Bit About Joseph:

Joseph Pamic is an experienced entrepreneur and investor based in Ottawa, Canada. He is currently the Vice-President of Power-Tek, a commercial multi-trade contractor that provides electrical, refrigeration, plumbing, and general contracting services.

Under Joseph’s leadership, Power-Tek has grown significantly through strategic acquisitions and expanding into new geographies and service offerings. Prior to Power-Tek, Joseph worked in private equity where he helped acquire and grow several small and medium-sized businesses.

Joseph enjoys mentoring young entrepreneurs and is actively involved in his community. In his spare time, he trains in boxing to support cancer research as a participant in the annual Fight For The Cure fundraising event.

An entrepreneur at heart, Joseph finds motivation and passion in building successful businesses and helping others achieve their goals. He prides himself on building strong relationships and delivering excellent service to clients.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

JP McAvoy: Hi, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us on today’s show. We’ve got Joey Pamic. I’ve known him for years, have put many deals together with him and watched him as he’s grown his career and his business. One of the proverbial serial entrepreneurs. He’s got a background in private equity, and he’s been building a local company to much success. Here’s my conversation with Joey Pamic. 

Joey, thanks for joining us here today. How are things looking in your world?

Joseph Pamic: Hey, yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Things are great.

JP McAvoy: Things are good. Always good. I’ve been looking forward to this chat for a while, you and I’ve talked about how we’ve worked together through the years, obviously, and bought and sold a lot of businesses. It’s been your pedigree, you’ve cut your teeth doing just that. First, I guess in Toronto now doing it in Ottawa, what led you down that path? When did you decide that’s what you wanted to do for a living?

Joseph Pamic: Great question. I think it came up some point during my undergrad, really having no idea what I wanted to do having this, seeing and hearing about investment banking, private equity, hedge Fund, and the lower mainly towards money when I was a naive, whatever, 18, 19 year old got me interested in that, in this whole world, was lucky enough to land a job and start a career down this path.

JP McAvoy: That’s great. And I love how you allude to the young, naive money, money, money. We just think back to the day, what that all meant, and how it evolves? You have put a lot of money to work. And that’s the reality of things is money creates the ability, to create more to buy, to grow. And you’ve done just that. I guess, as you say, from school, I had an inkling that you might be involved in this. You got your schooling in Ottawa originally and ended up in Toronto. How did you get there?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. I did my undergrad here in Ottawa, Bachelor of Commerce at Ottawa U, and had no idea what I wanted to do career wise, was coming up to graduation. At the time, I was studying for the CFA, Chartered Financial Analyst, and was going down that path. So when I graduated, I wrote level one. I passed level one, but I was without a job because I did not plan ahead of time. Some of my classmates did and were scouring the job boards and found a role in Toronto working for a large mutual fund company called CI Investments. In there, they wanted someone who spoke French and I was fortunate enough to have learned French at a young age and worked at CI as a financial service representative.

JP McAvoy: There you go. The first one, the title is your, there’s your proverbial intro position, right?

Joseph Pamic: That was it. Not like my friends going into investment banking, but it got me to the city and got me down a path that ultimately led me to where I wanted to be, or where I am today.

JP McAvoy: I think it’s been bought and sold a number of times. It’s obviously a huge funder that has grown in that shaping forum. How long were you there? How long did you stay with CI?

Joseph Pamic: That’s a good question. So when we start at CI, they start you off in a training class. And there was kind of, I don’t know, maybe a dozen of us going through this. Two or three months’ intro program together to learn what the mutual fund industry was all about, and they said that one of you will not be here in three months. And I guess I was that cliche who left at three months. I was fortunate enough to find a job working for a boutique private equity firm, and I was the one who left at that three month mark.

JP McAvoy: And that’s which is fairly common, especially that intro position, you get on with something like CI, a lot of fun. And then there’s spin offs. I’ve seen it sort of regularly, and you really got a chance to roll up your sleeves and get to get your hands dirty, really start doing deals once you hit the private equity fund.

Joseph Pamic: Yeah, exactly. So when I moved to Toronto, you’ll see I took me to Toronto, that’s where the finance capital of Canada is. And that’s why I want to be there to network and to learn about the ecosystem. And then I was researching firms trying to find my way into smaller firms that didn’t have the same pedigree as some as my peers that went to more desirable universities and programs like that. So I was trying to be kind of scrappy and tenacious, and found a fund called Lynx Equity Limited, which specialized in acquiring small to medium sized businesses. At that point, they’re focused only on the Canadian market. They looked for companies doing between half a million and 2,000,000.00 of EBITDA, and they wanted someone to join as a junior accounting analyst was the title. Wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it got me into the firm industry, so I went for it.

JP McAvoy: There you go, getting your foot in the door and then really starting to see deals. Maybe it was from where you and I, there’s been other business dealings and other ways that we found each other in the past. But I think I started getting the odd question that would come through to me where you were working on something and you were seeing something as you put a deal together. How did you structure those first deals? I would say that very early on, you were swimming with the sharks. You were doing it. You are the frontline, you were making deals happen from a very early time. So I would imagine there was a lot of job training. It’s not that type of stuff that you really learn in university. What were some of those lessons you learned early on?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. No, no, that’s right. I was in that kind of accounting role for six months, then moved over to the analyst and kind of grew up throughout that private equity hierarchy. And yeah, links with a small firm, and it was very much, here’s our way of doing things, here is kind of training. You got to watch the partners negotiate deals, what they’re looking for, learn how to do diligence through them, and kind of learn how to put it all together and get across that finish line after a couple of months in negotiations and a few months of diligence. So there was a lot of it. It was think or swim. It was learning, it was trying to keep up. Eventually, it got to a point where I got a grasp of what we were doing and was able to do it on my own. But yeah, it was an interesting period because these small companies, as you know, don’t have perfect information, perfect financials, perfect data, perfect record. So a lot of it is trying to really understand what they do, how they do it, find the skeletons in the closet, under cover those risks, and make sure that what we’re investing in is worth the risk.

JP McAvoy: And there’s an art to it. I like the way you just describe that. Especially a smaller company. Oftentimes, it’s not that they haven’t invested the tens of thousands, hundreds of 1000s, sometimes millions of dollars required to put everything in perfect order. But that provides some of the opportunity or creates some of the opportunity. You mentioned learning from some of the partners. You’re learning the way that things are done. Joey, what are some of the things that are in the real world, things that you have to think through when you’re trying to put a deal together? When you’re actually looking at it at a business and talking to a business owner and say, hey, look, we think there’s an opportunity here for us to do a deal, but we need to do this, this and this. What are some of those things that come up in those early stage conversations?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah, number one, it’s all the relationship with the seller. We’re talking about small companies. The people are everything whether it’s the seller, the employees, the customers and suppliers. The system is very small so you need to get very good at building rapport with those sellers. Because ultimately, you have to believe or disbelieve what they’re telling you. And some of that is beyond what’s in the documents and what are in the statements because things are not always captured perfectly. So being able to build rapport, understand and get people to like you and to trust you, that’s probably the most important soft skill that isn’t taught in school, and that most people probably don’t associate with private equity. Especially in the junior ranks modeling, your 12, 14, 16 hour days on excel. Yes, that’s part of it. But that’s a much smaller portion of doing deals, especially in the small to medium size where there’s a lot of intangibles.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, sure. And as you see, those are the things that you’re learning from the partners from the people that are actually showing that you got to build relationships, oftentimes, for these types of companies. It’s somebody’s baby, they’ve given birth to it, they’ve grown it up. They might be in a spot where they’re prepared to move on by themselves and they want to know that there’s going to be left in good hands, or maybe their legacy is going to continue.What are some of the things that you’re able to do to build that rapport with time? And obviously, you’re trying to get deals done as well so you want to make sure that it doesn’t take a long time to get to completion. So what are some of the ways to actually build that rapport and give the comfort that a seller may be looking for?

Joseph Pamic: Oh, it’s funny you asked that because I just came back from lunch right now with a prospective seller. I reached out to them, they have an interest in selling. But instead of jumping to, here’s the non disclosure documents, send me your financial. It’s kind of taking the time to say, let’s go grab lunch, let’s talk, let’s meet face to face. That’s easy to do when that’s an opportunity in your city because that’s not a lot of time, not a lot of mind to go and do that. You can’t do that with every opportunity. But with this individual, it led to a good two hour conversation about how he got into the business, what he likes about it, why he wants to sell, where he’s at in his personal life. That pays dividends down the road. If we can achieve a letter of intent and agree on acquisition terms, you need to get through three to four months of diligence. And there can be a lot of challenging times throughout that where people have different opinions, different viewpoints. And those can be challenging as far as continuing relationships. I would start off on this footing, makes a much easier path ahead.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, for sure it does. Finding ways of working together. I know working with you, I know working with others as you’re putting a deal together, you’ve got a willing buyer, you got a willing seller, and it was a common goal just seeing a transaction close. There may be bumps along the road, as you say, some differences of opinion, differences in numbers, right. Obviously, the seller wants to see more. Why would I prefer to pay less? Trying to arrive at something that works for everybody is a challenge. If you’ve laid the groundwork, you’ve got a structure for doing it. And then the ability to work through the differences, or the bumps in the road as they do arise. What’s an example that you can share where things have come off the tracks that have derailed and either not gotten back on at all for whatever reason, or you’ve been able to salvage the situation. Can you think of any? Going back to your war story chest here, give me an example of something that may have occurred that you think, oh, I wish that had to happen differently? Or they say, we’re glad that it actually worked out this way.

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. Well, we’ve been on deals together that haven’t got across the finish line due to sellers changing their mind about key terms. They want to sell their business, they want to stay on for a transition period, which is very common because there’s a lot of knowledge that they have that needs to be passed on to the new owner. And at the 11th hour they say, oh, by the way, we want to increase the rent that companies pay into our own facility. We want to increase what our salary is. And although those may be expenses the business could afford to take on, that does burn the trust. And in buying a small company, you’re really investing in the sellers, and that trust is paramount. And without that, you don’t want to necessarily go ahead and do the deal. But I’ve seen that happen before where it got completely derailed because that foundation of trust has been burned. It’s really tough to come back from that point. There have been deals where people have not disclosed certain things. Back in my Toronto days, we were acquiring a company and there was a major lawsuit from their largest competitor that they didn’t disclose until it came up in legal searches, which you do typically towards the end of a transaction.

JP McAvoy: Typically as you say this, is it gonna be a trust factor? Oh, by the way, you forgot to mention this, it becomes an issue.

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. So that, again, that was a breakdown of trust though we did not pursue the deal task at that point. I’ve seen things like that several times where stuff comes up in diligence, or people’s perspectives change and you can’t get a deal back on track. And sometimes, it’s just about finding a solution or a common ground. And it’s much easier to do that when neither party feels like they’ve been deceived.

JP McAvoy: And it’s business. So you’re trying to put something together here. It’s interesting to say that, and you and I know from working together as well, you’re not gonna pound a square round, square hole here, round hole, square peg, whatever you want to say. I mean, if it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to happen. There’s always the deal that we had, isn’t it?

Joseph Pamic: There are plenty. We live in this time where ETA is a term used quite often Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition is a very popular topic. The concept of a search fund. All these are very common MBA career prospects for those who want to be entrepreneurs, but don’t have their own idea of wanting to create a business. They don’t want to go from zero to one, they want to go from one to two, or one to ten. AThere is this gap or this point in the market where a lot of baby boomers are retiring, and they need to find a succession plan. And a lot of their children aren’t interested in taking over their blue collar businesses for a variety of reasons. So there’s a plethora of deals, either ones that are currently being marketed by bankers, or brokers, or intermediaries, or just a lot of people who don’t even know the world exists. And you can go and just reach out to say, hey, have you thought about selling your business? What’s your succession plan? I can drum up a company, probably a day if I spent my whole day focusing on just sourcing.

JP McAvoy: And as interesting as you say that because I work with people and work with brokers who are putting deals together, that’s never been your approach. You literally pick up the phone, and what’s that conversation look like? It’s interesting that you’re able to do that, and then it was a great success. What’s that conversation look like? How do you get to the decision maker and then start having the conversation about possibly putting the deal together?

Joseph Pamic: It takes a little bit of hard work and foraging to find out that information. If there’s an industry that I’m interested in buying in on a certain geography, I will search that company name and that geography and try to get a list through industry associations or through websites to find out the owner of that company, the name of the company, hopefully find their email, you can get that email addresses. I did this one time where most emails are first name@domain, first dot last name, first initial dot last initial and you can get that email address. I did this one time and an individual emailed me back. I emailed him and he was so curious as to how I found that email address, and he refused to believe that I literally guessed the combination and the domain name as the website name. So that was easy enough. But some people are very receptive to cold call, cold email approaches. Some are in that camp where they don’t like it, whatsoever. Trying to reach out to the donors. And if they’re in the right demographic and they’re not aware of the M&A world, they’re not aware of transactions, they don’t have friends or colleagues who have sold their business, it’s a very foreign concept to them. But the last three deals that we’ve done together, two of those have been proprietary. There was no broker or intermediary involved. There was companies that I had reached out to out of the blue, and serendipitously, the owners were at an age where they were interested in selling, and we were able to structure a deal.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, and that’s just it. Brokers are doing the same thing. So they’re actually beating the phones calling and reaching out to people, you’ve just always proven to have the mental ability to go do it yourself, which is great. And you’ve put some great deals together for that. So it’s interesting that you did that in Toronto for some time. And then, I guess, what was the order of operations here because you end up doing, even as you mentioned MBA. It’s interesting that you were cutting your teeth, and I’ve had a lot of people that are quite successful business operators, owners on their own and then they elect to do an MBA. You can sort of fall into that category, as well. What inspired you to do the NBA? Have you found that you’ve learned things through the NBA, maybe textbook, whereas you’ve been actually doing it and had seen it and were doing it in reality. And so what were the two differences between those things?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. I have a passion for learning, for reading, and MBA is just such a common degree in the business world, especially in the high finance world of Toronto. It’s almost a required stepping stone to get beyond a certain point especially in this kind of investment world that I always knew I wanted to do, the timing was never right. I was progressing in my career, I was fortunate to be promoted beyond the point where people typically go and get an MBA and come back. I was still advancing the ranks, but I still wanted to do it for the learning, for the network, for the pedigree, for a variety of reasons. I’m very happy that I did. But yeah, I did that after my time. At length, I then did my MBA. It was a fantastic experience. It was a different program. It was one where you, it was a full time. You work full time and study full time. I was working for a family office investing on their behalf at that period, so I was definitely busy. But I like being busy and I thrive in it. And the learning is different. MBAs are geared towards individuals going to work for large fortune 500 companies. A lot of the courses, a lot of material, a lot of the professor’s, they’re gearing their material toward that career progression. But there’s always things that you can take from how a large company does something and apply it to what a small company should be doing. I tried to look at most of the learning with that lens. I knew I did not want to go work for a large company, I didn’t want to go work for anybody else. Seeing the way Lynx did things was truly inspiring. And the founder of Lynx, Brad Nathan, was really a pioneer in starting this lower mid market private equity, especially within Canada. I knew what I want to get from the program from the teachings and some of the lessons really applied. Some are a little more difficult to apply to the world that I was going into. But overall, it was extremely valuable.

JP McAvoy: I guess the vernacular, or the language that you learn. I’ve heard from people like you, they said, look, I know I can do it. I also want to learn the methodology behind how, what some of the larger companies may describe things as and then apply them on a day to day basis, on the things that you are doing on a day to day basis. So you get to the MBA, you face the MBA. I guess you were spending the time at the family office at that time, then you get into and move over to Power-Tek right into the current role that you have now, which I think was a big shot in the arm for Power-Tek as you came in and immediately did a series of transactions applying the learnings again from, I think as we described out of school, cutting your teeth in the school of hard knocks, and then learning a little bit from the MBA as well and putting all into practice now. How does the future of Power-Tek of what you’re doing look in your eyes? What is it? What will the next three to five years look like from your perspective while current trends continue?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. We’ve been at Power-Tek for three and a half years now. We’ve acquired three companies throughout that period, we’ve expanded to new geographies, new service offering, new clients, new industry that we’re servicing. Our focus has been trying to grow the business but by doing so responsibly and trying to diversify to mitigate risk. Power-Tek is a commercial multi trade contractor. And right now, the economic climate is such, building is questionable. Interest rates are up,  we’re seeing slowdown and building, but we don’t just serve as the new condo development world. We service large facilities, research facilities, universities, the city, retail, you name it. So we’ve been really trying to diversify to strengthen the company to combat the cyclicality that exists within the construction market. Over the next three to five years, we’re going to continue to look for strong companies to acquire, and look for strong leaders to hire, to build the best company that we can. We’ll continue to look for other services that we’re not in right now that are adjacent to what we’re offering that would help continue to deliver a one stop shop to our customers. We’re constantly trying to make our customers’ lives easier by making ourselves do what they need. So for example, we do work at the hospitals in town, we start up doing electrical work there. Well, now we can do refrigeration, plumbing and general contracting. So we can be what they need, make their lives easier, and secure more business from one customer because we offer more services. So that was kind of the plan when I came in. That’s what we’ve done over the past three and a half years, in the past three acquisitions. I’d say, probably tripled in size throughout that period, and we’ll continue to look for the right opportunities. We’re not trying to force any acquisition because you add more businesses, more people, more customers, more suppliers. It makes things challenging. So it’s about being really selective for the right future partners and opportunities.

JP McAvoy: But doing it methodically, as you say, that growth, that methodical growth covers more areas expanding, it’s interesting to hear you talk of, it’s actually by diversification that is actually creating a more secure, stable business in that sense. Which is interesting, because you’re operating in an industry that can be difficult. It has its ups and downs, as you say cyclical. So it’s great to think of the ways of protecting yourself through those different cycles. As I say, three to five years. I mean, the growth of the company specifically being addressed. But what do you think the markets look like? What do things look like both, we’ll say locally, but beyond what business looks like in the next three to five years? It’s difficult to read the tea leaves, but where do you think we’re gonna be in three years? I think it is going to be up? Are we going to have major struggles? Are we going to be facing a recession? What do you think things look like, as I say, the next three years?

Joseph Pamic: It’s challenging. The Bank of Canada paused the rates last increase, and the most recent data we saw was that inflation continued to increase. So we’re hopeful that things get under wraps. But it seems like this is going to be a longer battle than the Bank of Canada or anyone business owners want to see. That being said, we operate in the construction space, a large driver of construction is immigration and housing needs and there is this huge shortfall of housing, especially in the province and in the city. So there’s two dynamics at play. And one is the cost is going up, but the people are going up, so the demand is going up. And that’s keeping the market stable after the decline that we’ve just seen. So it’s hard. It’s hard to say where we’ll be. But again, plays into our thesis of what just continued to diversify.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, yeah. I’d like to ask that question just to get a general sense from those that come on the show. And otherwise, how they see business in the next couple of years. Because it’s interesting that you say rates, and you say inflation, these things, obviously, all have an impact on your business, everybody’s business, and they go forward. The other thing that we’re looking at is that technology. AI, Blockchain, these new technologies emerge, obviously for the most part construction, but expanding beyond. How much are you taking advantage of any of the new technology offerings that are now becoming ubiquitous on the business front for many of these companies?

Joseph Pamic: I think construction has been notoriously slow to adapt to new technology. When I joined, the bulk of our technological infrastructure was Microsoft Excel, various workbooks and spreadsheets, nothing that spoke to each other. So we’ve undergone building out our own ERP platform and implementing that. That’s been a lot of work, but it’s taken us a lot further and made our business a lot more streamlined, which has helped enable the growth that we’ve achieved. And then we continue to look for, how can we implement AI into the business? We’ve been using Chat GPT for simple things, like writing proposals.

JP McAvoy: It’s amazing how quickly you can generate something to work with.

Joseph Pamic: It’s also easy to teach younger staff if you want someone to have some level of technical knowledge. Or oftentimes, the field staff, or the technical experts, and the office staff are the management experts. But they don’t actually have that same transferable skill set, especially on the junior level in the office, and they may have to write reports about what it is the field is doing. You can go on Chat GPT and say, walk me through the steps to install ABC, and they will give you a very comprehensive list of what goes into that and they further prompt it to explain more to you. That is making our staff more knowledgeable, and it’s being more efficient with our time. We don’t need to involve multiple people in some marketing material that we would be drafting. So that is probably the most that we’ve used, and we’re not even scratching the surface. I think there’s a lot of tasks that go on within a business where AI can be implemented. The amount, we’ve reduced a lot of the paper within our business, but there’s still a lot. A lot of the back office is very traditional in how it operates. Invoices get sent in, a human puts those invoices into the computer, the system, and then sent it out for approval, it gets sent back for approval. So we’ve automated that piece. But there still is this required component to take an email invoice and then put it into the system manually and then continuing through that process. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. It’s trying to find the right solution for small business.

JP McAvoy: Yeah. It’s interesting you say that construction is slow moving because there’s so much physically that needs to occur on a construction site as well to make things happen. But even from that, as you say, the slow moving industry. Making use of AI, it’s going to change almost every area of our lives, touch every area of our lives. And obviously, it’s already having an impact on your business as well. It’s great to hear that you’re making use of that way, how accurate it is. I mean, as I ask this question across different industries, there’s all this discussion of hallucinations, or the information that comes back from Chat GPT, how accurate as you ask it, or you’ve seen people using it to ask it, to instruct on how to do various tasks. The response, have they been pretty good, generally?

Joseph Pamic: I would say for the most part, when it comes to the technical side of our business, I am far from an expert.

JP McAvoy: Yeah. I get it, you’re the MBA, sure you take abuse from some of the guys on that basis.

Joseph Pamic: I’ve spent very little time on the tool, so I can’t answer it. But from a finance perspective, if you plop in numbers and say model this out, it can do it. It cannot, as far as I’m aware, export to excel yet. It can’t export to PowerPoint. But I’ve done and I said to draft a PowerPoint presentation with the slide, with this topic, and it will give you 12 slides full of content that you can then take into PowerPoint and create your own show. So I think they can make your tasks and your life a lot more efficient. But there’s still a lot of human oversight to use it to its fullest. You can’t just take what’s in chat GPT and present that out as a finished product. There will inevitably be mistakes or will have the wrong tone for plenty of issues like that. But as a starting point, it’s great.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, for sure. For sure. That’s why I say that I’d like to ask that question across different industries, and most are saying that it’s fairly good. You obviously have to look at it, and make sure it’s producing answers you’re comfortable with. But it certainly gives you a great starting point, a great place to go from. Jpey, fascinating to have this conversation to watch, as I say, your career as it’s evolved, but also the growth of the business has occurred. It’s great to work with great people who are doing this type of thing. What motivates you? What gets you going? As you say, you’ve put these deals together, you’re clearly a motivated person, what are some of the things that drive you every morning every day?

Joseph Pamic: That’s a hard question to ask. It’s changed a lot over time from when I was young and naive and money was everything to now where there’s a lot more desire for work life balance and lifestyle freedom and supporting one’s family. Those are the drivers that are more important than anything else. Trying to create that level of security for myself and my loved ones, I think, is kind of the number one driver. I’m lucky to enjoy what I do. I was looking for something and fell into it, and have really prospered.

JP McAvoy: You’ve got a passion for it. You got to zest for it. It’s great to see it. You’re bringing it to deals, and it’s great working with you because we look at stuff and you say, it’s clear that you enjoy it. You enjoy putting deals together, you enjoy making things happen. You’ve done that well ever since I’ve known you.

Joseph Pamic: I love what I do. The work itself, I find this challenging, and it’s rewarding, it’s stimulating. And then the benefits can be great as well. It doesn’t come without risk, and it’s always trying to navigate the risk. But the goal is to get to a point where you can take less risk.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, for sure. And I think you began this conversation, I have been remiss for not saying this, we began this conversation with your time being scrappy, pulling things up and getting things done. Let’s talk about the Fight For The Cure. You got something coming up with that in the next little while. What’s your training look like? And what is the event expected to look like?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. So Fight For The Cure, it’s a large fundraiser here in Ottawa for the Cancer Foundation. I signed myself up as a participant and didn’t know what I was getting into.

JP McAvoy: As a victim, it’s great that you’ve put your name for it, though.

Joseph Pamic: Back in March when they started the process, they picked 12 individuals to host six boxing matches. The goal is every candidate is going to tap their entire network to raise as much fun as possible. For the foundation last year, they raised something like $1.2 million in one night, so we’re going to try and match or beat that. But yeah, it’s training four to five days a week. It’s learning a new sport that is stressful, but it’s also been really great because the physical really helps with the work I find. Training just puts you in a mindset to be focused and that transcends other parts of your life. And that’s been fantastic. But we’re getting up to the finish line.The play day is October 28, and we’re getting there. So it’ll be exciting to go and step in the ring. I’m looking forward to it.

JP McAvoy: Are you nervous?

Joseph Pamic: Absolutely.

JP McAvoy: As you say, you’re not a professional fighter, so you’re gonna be getting in there and showing. That’s great.

Joseph Pamic: It’ll be a great experience. I’m less nervous about the fight or getting hurt, more just you’re in front of thousands of people, the Ottawa community, people who I know, family there, we’re putting on a show. I’ve never been a showman, but it will be interesting.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, that’s gonna be great. So congrats on that as well. Thanks so much for doing this, I really appreciate having some of the things that you shared here. First of all, anybody listening, interested in maybe donating for the Fight For The Cure, but also interested in maybe selling their business or working with your business, what’s the best way to reach you?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah, email is probably the best way, joseph.pamic@power-tek.on.ca. It’s a long one.

JP McAvoy: But as you say, I’m gonna take from you just guessing the emails because you’ve actually reached out to these companies, oftentimes, just by guessing emails. Yours is one maybe not the best to guess, but it’s still possible. So you want to just say it one more time?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah, joseph.pamic@power-tek.on.ca. Or you can find me on LinkedIn, Joseph Pamic.

JP McAvoy: That’s great stuff. So thanks so much for that. And Joey, I liked any shows with one thing, as I say, when we talk, what motivates you both in business and in life, but maybe one thing or maybe a list of things if that’s easier that you’ve heard over the years, or maybe that you heard earlier in your career that’s resonated with you. Something that somebody listening here might say, oh, that’s a piece of advice that I had to take with me for the rest of the day, the rest of the week after I’ve listened to the show. Is there anything you can think of, any mentor, anybody that said anything to you in the past that really stuck with you that he has found has worked for you that you might be able to pass along to another?

Joseph Pamic: Yeah. I think that number one is just trying to navigate the stress of career and life is trying to put things into buckets, or this person called them parking lots. What can you deal with now? What goes in the parking lot to deal with later? If you put it in the parking lot, don’t stress about it because you’ll get dealt with and you can’t do anything about it. Now, I found a very applicable way or framework for approaching things. It’s easy to have 5, 10 things on your plate at once, and you can’t tackle that many things at once. But if you know that you’re tackling them systematically and you’ve got this process that works for you, that was something that I was explained or taught a number of years ago, and it’s kind of stuck with me as far as trying to manage the complexities of a business or life.

JP McAvoy: All the things that we gotta get through, that’s just simple. Thank you for taking the time to park with us here today. Really appreciate the chat, and look forward to having you next time on The Millionaires Lawyer.

Joseph Pamic: That was great. Thanks for having me, JP