DJ Rezac | How to Succeed in Business and in Life by Making Time For Two
Smart Business Revolution

DJ Rezac is the Owner of Time42 Coaching and KB Building Services which provides commercial janitorial services along with carpet cleaning and hard floor maintenance in the Omaha, Nebraska area. Through Time42 Coaching, he provides programs to help business leaders, families, dads, and athletic groups with motivation and tools to grow their businesses and to excel in life. DJ has been a member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) for over 20 years, is married to Lisa Rezac, and together they live and raise five kids in Omaha, Nebraska. 

In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran interviews DJ Rezac, the Owner of Time42 Coaching and KB Building Services, to talk about how guiding leaders can positively impact a business and create a fulfilling family life. DJ also talks about the benefits of being a networking organization member, how losing a big client can adversely affect a business, and how you can measure your success as a parent or spouse. Stay tuned.

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Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

  • DJ Rezac’s background and how he bought a 1984 janitorial family business 
  • How losing a key client impacted DJ’s business and the role Entrepreneurs’ Organization played in helping him through the tough period
  • The 2008-2009 economic crisis’ positive impact on KB Building Services — and how guiding leaders at EO served DJ’s business and family
  • DJ’s advice for entrepreneurs reluctant to volunteer as an organization’s leader
  • How DJ has been able to move out of KB Building Services while still owning it, and how he monitors the company’s performance
  • How DJ transitioned from a cleaning business to coaching and came up with the name ‘Time42 Coaching’
  • DJ talks about his strategy for measuring success as a parent and spouse, discusses his Dare to Dad program, and explains how he reacted to being told his kids were born on third base
  • The peers DJ respects or admires and how to get in touch with him

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Sponsor: Rise25

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Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90xAtariEinstein BagelsMattelRx BarsYPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk,  and many more.  

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

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Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where we asked today’s most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, your host for the revolution, John Corcoran.

John Corcoran 0:40

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. Every week I get to talk to interesting CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of companies and organizations ranging from Netflix to YPO, to Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, OpenTable and many more. Go check out the archives and get some great episodes in there. I’m also the Co-founder of Rise25, where we help connect b2b business owners to their ideal prospects. And before introducing today’s guest, I want to give a big shout out to Doubledare Executive Coaching and Scott Anderson who made this series possible. If you’re looking for an experienced executive coach who has been in the trenches as an entrepreneur to help you break through a business plateau, Scott Anderson and Doubledare Executive Coaching offer a proven system to scale your life personally and professionally. His 30 plus years of experience as a proven entrepreneur started over a half dozen companies. Also he has a master’s degree in clinical counseling, check out doubledareyou.us for quick online assessment and schedule a free business blueprint from Scott. That’s doubledareyou.us. Visit Doubledare today. 

All right and my guest is DJ Rezac. He is the Owner of Time42 Coaching, he’ll explain what that means in a moment. And also KB Building Services, which provides commercial janitorial services along with carpet cleaning and floor maintenance in the Omaha, Nebraska area. Through Time42 Coaching, he provides programs to help business leaders and families and dads and athletic groups with motivation and tools to grow their businesses and to excel in life. He’s also been a member of EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization for 20 plus years, and he has been married to Lisa. And together they live and are raising five kids in Omaha, Nebraska. And we’re talking about that. This episode of course is brought to you by Rise25 Media. We help b2b businesses to get clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with podcasts and content marketing. Learn more by going to rise25media.com or emailing us at [email protected]

Alright DJ, such a pleasure to have you here today. And I’m glad that Scott told us all about you. You’ve got a couple of different businesses that are really interesting. And let’s start with your mom and your aunt started a family business 1984 which you end up purchasing from them. And tell us a little about how you end up going to the family business. Did you do it right after college where you often hear this story from people that say, Oh, I didn’t want to, I don’t want to go into the family business. And then somehow they end up back into it anyways. In the family business.

DJ Rezac 3:04

Yeah, well, first, yeah. Thanks, John, for having me on. But yeah, you’re exactly right. So I’m growing up. I’m a teenager, and I’m part of the forced labor crew. Right. So what are you doing on Friday night? Usually, man, you’re gonna have a vacuum in your hand.

John Corcoran 3:18

So your cleaning office? Yeah.

DJ Rezac 3:20

So I’m cleaning buildings, right? You know, a real sexy job for a high school sophomore. Yeah, but I did not go in right away. So my dad owned bars and restaurants. And my mom and my aunt had started the janitorial company. So the cool part is I was around entrepreneurial spirit the whole time. So I graduated from college, and I opened up a pizza place, right. And the only thing I knew about pizza was how to eat it and how to order it. And so I hit the ground running in Lincoln, Nebraska with a pizza place and and kind of navigate and find my way through a lot of times just because I’d watched my dad in his business, and my mom and my aunt and their business with their stick to itiveness. And that’s I think what a lot of entrepreneurs just need in the beginning is just the grit to just grind through those tough moments. And so, so I did that on my own for about 10 years, I ended up, you know, expanding the pizza place to owning two or three more bars and kind of doing my own thing. And then when I sold them, I was looking for another business to buy. And at that time, my mom and my aunt were kind of looking after about 20 years for an exit strategy. And so that’s when it kind of just, you know, became clear like, Hey, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m moving back to Omaha, it might be an opportunity to buy a business. At that time. It had 25 employees, about 1 million in revenue. And, you know, like I told my wife Lisa, I’m like, I I I used to cook and now I’m going to clean it like isn’t that every woman’s dream, right. And so that’s how it ended up. So I ended up buying it from them in about 2003.

John Corcoran 5:11

Now, the timing wasn’t great. Or shortly thereafter, it wasn’t great because you lost a key client. And you also had, I don’t know, if you describe it as a sweetheart deal with your mom and your aunt, but they, they kind of had a good deal. So talk a little bit about what that experience was like.

DJ Rezac 5:27

Yeah, so Lisa and I had just had a set of twins. So Dominic and Caroline, we had fraternal twins, we just purchased the janitorial company. And soon after six months after I bought it, we got fired from our biggest account. And so again, we’re doing about a million in revenue, this was going to cost us about a half

John Corcoran 5:50

1,000,000, 50% of your business,

DJ Rezac 5:53

God percent of my business was gone overnight. And it was due to an error that we made, and that we found. And, you know, we went to them and said, We screwed up and begged for mercy. ” And we didn’t really get any, and it was a cold, hard truth in how cutting business could be and how scary it could be. And so it was kind of a big punch in the gut. As an entrepreneur. You know, I was struggling, right? And you know, that voice inside your head that says, Do you have what it takes? And you know, this was a big punch that said, No,

John Corcoran 6:33

you weren’t a pretty seasoned entrepreneur by this point, you’d run your restaurants and expanded it, you know?

DJ Rezac 6:40

Yeah. But I think also, you’re always kind of your own worst critic, I think when you’re an entrepreneur, and so all of a sudden, you’re looking at the balance sheet, and you’re, you’re watching the p&l, and it’s you’re losing $15,000 a month and, and you know, I got a set of twins at home. And thankfully, Lisa, who was a CFO of a in an I read, you know, was bringing home a good income. But as fate would have it like that, you know, that wasn’t enough for me to like, you know, make a move and really get going. We got pregnant again.

John Corcoran 7:18

What did you do to survive the loss of the big client? Did you have to do layoffs? Did you?

DJ Rezac 7:23

Um, did Oh, well, we, I still have a pair of my wingtips. I have holes in the bottom of them. I just walked. I just knocked on everybody’s door. I just mean, I was just sold, sold, sold. But that moment didn’t come until after you know, for a lot of times I just ran and hid. I just you know, I didn’t really deal with it. I didn’t deal with it until we got pregnant again with the second set of twins. And so that that was the second blow. Right. Lisa said, Hey, I’m pregnant again. And it’s twins again. And this time, she followed it up with and by the way, I’m quitting my job at about $10,000 a month. So while I had kind of, you know, just moved the chess pieces along and kind of did what a lot of entrepreneurs I run into, they kind of pretend or tell the lie that they’re, you know, their trading activity for productivity, right. They’re just looking busy. I had to do something about it. And so what I did is I just started walking door to door. And it was literally because I was scared. And I didn’t know what to do. And so we were lucky, we ended up kind of getting an account. We started cleaning movie theaters. I don’t know if you know this, John, but I didn’t know it at the time. But movie theaters pay weekly, which was incredible for cash flow. Yeah. And you know, I told this movie theater, I said, I’ll do such a good job after I do a good job at your first movie theater. I need you to give us more. And that eventually led them to give us four movie theaters. Wow. And so it was through hard work and really building a good team that could get the job done that made that pivot point.