Todd Zegers brings a wealth of experience, entrepreneurial spirit, and a passion for innovation to his role as CEO of CXtec. With nearly two decades of leadership in IT asset disposition (ITAD) and reverse logistics, Todd has been a driving force in shaping sustainable, customer-focused technology solutions that deliver real value. supports enterprises throughout the world in rethinking how they build, support, decommission, and upgrade their IT infrastructure hardware to redefine their IT strategy towards a sustainable course.

John Shegerian: Get the latest Impact Podcast right into your inbox each week. Subscribe by entering your email address at impactpodcast.com to make sure you never miss an interview. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and Impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so excited to have back on the show again, my long-time and great friend, Todd Zegers. Welcome back to the Impact Podcast, Todd.

Todd Zegers: Thanks for having me again, John. Appreciate it. It’s always a good time.

John: It’s always a great time. You’re always doing so many fascinating things, and today is no different, but I’m going to hold the surprise for a second. First, I want you to, for our listeners and viewers who hadn’t had the opportunity to listen to some of your past episodes on the Impact Podcast, talk a little bit about your background, where you grew up and how you got on your fascinating career journey, Todd.

Todd: Yeah, listen, I was born in Iowa. My dad was a Motorola guy, so he wanted to get the heck out of the snow, so he moved to Arizona when I was nine. I grew up out here. I’m in Arizona now. But he wanted to get out of shoveling snow and get into the warmer weather. So, I pretty much grew up in Arizona. I did a stint in California recently with my time with Ingram Micro but we’re back in Arizona in the sunshine and just making sure we’re out of here in June and July when it gets to be not quite so fun to be here.

John: You know, as you and I’ve gotten older, we’ve teased each other about age, and I’m of course much older than you. But obviously, dad had foresight to get out of that cold. It was a smart move at the time you got out, and you followed with that wisdom. You’re still in Arizona and that’s just wonderful and beautiful place to live and raise a family and also, it’s good on our bones at our age.

Todd: Yeah. Exactly.

John: Hey, talk a little bit about, dad was with Motorola. You are also following in your dad’s footsteps in so many ways in that you’re in the greater electronics industry. Talk a little bit about your career path leading up to what we’re going to be talking about today, your new and amazing and wonderful position with CXtec. Before we get talking about that, talk about your career journey in electronics and all the great and impactful work you’ve done historically.

Todd: Yeah, it’s funny, my dad always told me when I was younger and going to college, “Make sure you get to do something in the computer industry,” because it was blowing up much. Like I’m sure we tell our kids now to get into AI and ChatGPT and all this other kind of stuff. That’s kind of what that was back then. I was playing around at ASU, and I was in the poker world trying to be a professional poker player and realize that wasn’t going to be a good career. Some of my buddies got a job over at Insight, the big hardware bar[?] here in Arizona. They started selling computers, hardware, and software and making a bunch of money. I’m like, “Oh, let me go try this.” So, I did that and was really successful. Those are the days where you got to make a hundred phone calls a day and people hanging up on you. It was not an easy job and not for the timid, but I found some success in that. I did that for three years at Insight. I saw in 2002, 2003, I had a business mentor who was talking about how all this procurement of all these devices, if you think about Y2K, all the panic buying, how much equipment was being sold at. It was going to be this big mountain of e-waste and refurbished product coming out of the industry, and where is it going to go? There’s a huge opportunity for it. So, he pitched this idea of starting an ITAD company. And I said, “Let’s do it.” I cashed out my 401(k) and stock and sat in my front living room, found a few partners who I could self-service and have them delivered to, and we’re off to the races. I started an ITAD business in 2003. When I built that, it was more of a platform business. Sold that business to Cloud Blue, as you know, to Ken Beyer and team over there. The five years I was at Cloud Blue, I led inbound sales and marketing. So going out and generating clients who want to sign contracts with us. We built a great business there. Ingram Micro bought us in 2013. Shortly after joining Ingram Micro, Ken Beyer, who was the CEO of Cloud Blue, took on a larger role than Ingram, running all of the global supply chain. And I kind of started leading the ITAD business. We took it from a US-based business with some international presence to a global ITAD business, serving clients directly in 20 or 30 countries around the world. So it was a fun ride. I got to see a lot of the world. Learn a lot of great things in Ingram Micro. Obviously being a distributor, you’re very tied into the IT and the channel and everything that comes around the IT world. So, I was very fortunate to have the path that I did and then decided it was time for a change. I guess it was beginning of 2023, decided to go do consulting for a while. So, I got to really lead into the industry, get to meet a lot of great people, work with guys like you and your team and so many other players in the space, and learning about what everybody’s doing out there. The biggest thing is learning about all these different new technologies and innovations that a lot of these companies are coming out with that we could partner with and do business with. So, as a consultant, it was great to see that. When you sit and run a business all day long, you kind of get your blinders on your goggles and you’re focused on your P&L and presentations and managing everything versus seeing what’s going on out there. The last couple of years for me has been great, to meet a lot of really great people, a lot of quality partners that can add a lot of value, which is obviously going to translate into a lot of the strategies and the great stuff we’re going to do at CXtec now.

John: Nice. So, talk a little bit about CXtec. When did you decide to take the role as the CEO of CXtec? And share to listeners a little bit about why you chose to join them, because you had a great thing going. You built a great and very successful, well-known business at Circular Integrity. And what’s CXtec’s greater mission?

Todd: Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t looking, right? I had a few companies reach out to me, recruiters saying, “Hey, do you want to look at this?” I was really never interested, but something I keep telling people, “I’m a Christian, man.” I keep telling them, “God kind of touched me,” and said, “Hey, you need to listen to this.” The recruiter that reached out to me started talking about the business. I was decently familiar with CXtec, but when they started talking about what the opportunity was, there was just a light that went on. I think CXtec has a ton of great capabilities. There’s a lot of different arrows in the quiver to serve our clients. I feel like it’s not too small to where I can’t go out there and be competitive and play against the big boys and really make moves, and it’s not too big to where it’s heavy and bureaucratic and hard to get things done. Obviously, H.I.G. is the private equity firm that owns CXtec. So that was a big caveat of getting to meet that team and understanding how well I would jive with them and what their mission was for the business. I was very clear that if you want someone to come in here and cut costs and turn things around and do that, that’s not my gig. I want to go build something, and they were fully behind that. So, meeting them and then meeting the CXtec leadership team, Peter Belyea. He was the retiring CEO. He was a great guy. He’s built a big organization that’s 40-something years old. It’s got a lot of great culture and great people. And again, coming from Iowa, that Midwest culture I’m used to, I feel like the people there are just amazing people, south of the earth. They’ll give the shirt off their back to help you out. A lot of veterans have been there that still have a lot of energy. I was really surprised — lots of times, if a company’s been around for a long time, it’s a little bit of a boring environment, and that was not the case there. It’s a really a sales-focused organization in which you have to have a lot of energy to keep that up. Then I just thought about the opportunity to have such a great asset with financial backing and growth potential, to have that horsepower behind me to go build something special again. Again, I never thought I’d want to go do this again, but the light just clicked. I’m like, “Wow, there’s so much I can go do with this organization, with the team we have and the financial resources.” So that was it. [inaudible].

John: So you live in Arizona. You live in beautiful Arizona, CXtec as their headquarters, I think you share with me, what, in Syracuse?

Todd: Syracuse, New York. Yeah.

John: And also other offices in Atlanta?

Todd: Yeah, so CXtec acquired Atlantix Global in 2019. We have a big operation in Atlanta, just north across, well, depending on traffic, half an hour to three hours north of the city. Then we’ve got our big sales corporate headquarters office in Syracuse. Now, we have a physical operation where we do a lot of our networking and telephony product refurbishment and configuration services there, as well as stocking up some new products. For our cabling business, we have a big cabling business where we create fiber optic cables, Cat6 cables, patch panels, etc., that are kind of built on demand for data centers. Most of those companies really built the service around the data center. We’ll obviously be adding a lot of capabilities around all the other IT type of devices that our customers need help with.

John: Well, the way I look at it is, you’re Baker Mayfield, you’ve got tremendous experience already in other teams. You’ve had a winning record. You’ve got a hell of an arm. You’ve got a great brain. And now you’re going to take over a new team. There’s so much to do, but there’s only so many hours of the day. Now, what are your priorities coming right out of the gate as the CEO of now this new venture you’ve taken over?

Todd: Yeah, I think with the different types and lines of business we have has really unify all these different brands in a kind of a one CXtec message. So, when people come and talk to us, it’s not just focused on cables or just on some refurbished hardware or some services. It’s understanding the breadth and diversity of capabilities that we have. Our new tagline coming out will be the circularity experts in the technology life cycle. So, whether you’re looking to have new product, managed product, third-party maintenance services, cabling services, iPad services, etc., we can help provide all those things with, obviously, security, sustainability, cost-effectiveness, transparency, clean data. Obviously, data is a big thing these days for our clients or IT asset managers who need that information. The word integrity, right? I think guys like you and me, and hopefully a lot of others in this space, the ones that have been around for a long time, do it with integrity, and that’s why we’re all still here. This is an industry where there’s a lot of shortcuts presented to you at a regular pace, and if you try taking those shortcuts, you may not be around long. So, John, I think with all that in mind, we’ll focus around the IT supply chain to figure out where we fit, but growth is really our biggest mantra right now. We want to grow. We think there’s a huge opportunity to grow out there. We’ve got almost 60 salespeople that are selling our products and services and capabilities out there, which is different than most traditional ITAD space, but we’re not quite on bar. We’re kind of somewhere in between there. So, we’re going to bolt on and figure out what services really make sense. Which, this first month that I’ve been here is to live and focus on learning the business, meeting the people, understanding what makes us tick, which I think I’ve done a good job of. And in the next month, we’ll be really focusing on talking to our customers. What do our customers love about us? What do they hate about us? What are we missing out there? And what can we go either build for them organically through investments? What partnerships can we come bolt on that will help serve all those needs so they can come to a single pane of glass to the CXtec representative and get all of their life cycle solutions type capabilities there? We’ll look at whether it’s geographic expansion from capabilities of delivering ITAD services or finding new products that our customers are used to buying refurbished products. So, what other refurbished products can we typically take the market that they may want to buy?

John: So, you have already a partner ecosystem and you’re going to continue to build that out with more VARs, MSPs, distributors, etc. Is that how this works?

Todd: Yeah. And obviously some of those will be vendors. But you know me, I like to really focus on partnerships that needs to be a bi-directional partnership.

John: You’re great at that.

Todd: There’ll be some things that partnerships won’t make sense because obviously if we’re going to go do that ourselves, I’d rather just go make the organic investment. But certain sectors are, like, we’re never going to go and start refurbishing printers. So if our customers are looking for refurbished printers, I’ll look for someone who’s really good at providing refurbished printers and figure out how do we partner to where we’re going to bring them some incremental growth leverage. But maybe they have customers who are looking for data center capabilities that they don’t have. So, I think there’s a lot of that out there. And again, in the two years of doing the consulting piece, I learned a lot of different things I wouldn’t have known previously. I feel we’re both [inaudible] to what we’re doing here.

John: That’s great. Todd, for our listeners and viewers, to find you and your colleagues at CXtec, you can go to www.cxtec.com. It will be in the show notes as well, so you don’t have to write it down if you’re driving or working out in the gym right now or something of that nature. Todd, you’re one of the godfathers, for lack of better term, even though you’re still very young, of the ITAD industry, and with the massive success that you have already in your wake, being from your own startup to CloudBlue, then to Ingram Micro, now at CXtec. What does the ITAD space look like? Dad was right. Obviously, Dad was right about sticking in the electronics industry, but what does ITAD look like in 2025 and beyond?

Todd: That’s a good question. It’s going to be an interesting one. If you think about the different device types that kind of fall into our sector, you can think about PCs and laptops first, you have this Windows 10 support going away with Microsoft, and there’s hundreds of millions of laptops and PCs in the market right now that aren’t going to fit, that our customers have to pay additional service fees to keep those maintained. So, it’ll be interesting to watch what happens in that space. Is there going to be a demand for those and where is that demand? If there’s low demand and also there’s a ton of supply in the market, which we’ve seen for the last couple of years now with the post-COVID hangover, it’ll be interesting to see what that dynamic looks like. It’ll be interesting to watch how HP talks about these AI PCs. So, as PCs start coming out with AI capabilities, which I don’t think you’ll see a lot of adoption because of the cost of it and what the real practical use of an AI PC, I’m not sure what that would be quite off the gates. But AI is going to be such a driver on… If you think about it as customers, over the years, you go like the AS/400 and the same client model, then you go back to where it’s more distributed assets and kind of this breathing of technology, is that going to happen with the AI side as it relates to PC? So, it’ll be interesting to watch how that happens. And obviously, whatever happens there, we, in this business, are at the tail end of that, so we have to figure out, in four years from now, our AI PC or non-AI PC is going to be just complete scrap and throw away, to where it’s going to be your business, and some of the big shredders[?] and you’re harvesting the raw materials. And if you think about that aspect even flowing into the data center, if you think about, whatever may or may not happen with Trump’s tariff situation and if China or Southeast Asia shoots back to us and they’re going to impose tariffs on us moving product over, a lot of them will get sold out of these data centers, a lot of it’s going over to the Asian market. Not a whole lot of that is staying in the US. When you think about like GPUs and the federal government doesn’t want those devices and those products and commodities leaving our shores, where does that leave us? Is there other applications that we can use for US manufacturing of these GPUs? The customers want to go to these kind of white box servers where we can just cobble these things together. What’s the practical application? I don’t know. The GPUs all of a sudden become a commodity for recycling to recover rare with minerals. I don’t know, right? These are the big questions, I think all of us, yourself included I would imagine, are really going to try to watch to see what’s going to happen. Listen, none of us have a crystal ball. And after Trump’s gone at four years, someone else would come in and rip that off and go sign the Paris Accord and we’re back very focused on the environment again. So, it’s an interesting time to be in this space. I think I was talking with my friends over [inaudible] earlier about what’s coming in the future. And as the leadership changes, the priorities tend to change. And I know Aaron on your team was involved with the coalition of American electronics recycling. If you think about the e-waste export legislation we’ve been trying to pass for years and years, whoever’s sitting in the chair, if it’s a blue democratic person, maybe they’re focused on EPA and environmentalism. If it’s someone in a red seat, you’re talking more about China and counterfeiting and everything else. So, we’re always kind of getting yo-yoed around a little bit, but I think the folks that were in this space that may not have had a lot of experience during COVID, anyone with the polls could have done well with ITAD during COVID, because everything was just easy. Now, it’s not so easy. Costs are up, values are down. You got these macro headwinds coming into us. You got tariffs and governmental changes coming. So, people who are not paying attention to shows like you and going to the ITAD summit, for example, are really getting educated in what’s coming out and listening to Jim Puckett and what he’s talking about, what R2 is talking about from a Syrian perspective. I think now, it’s more important than ever for people to really pay attention to what’s happening in this space, because if you don’t, you get left behind real quick.

John: Yes, well said. And you just brought up some of the key points a little while ago that leaders like you are focused on, sustainability and transparency, tracking and data protection, and also domestic recovery of the commodities and keeping things domestic. Whether we’re sitting here in the US or whether you’re sitting in Canada or Japan or other countries, everyone is now very, very much wanting to get untethered from being reliant on critical minerals from other countries. That’s changed drastically since you started as a very young entrepreneur on this fascinating and important journey leading the ITAD industry. Similarly, leadership has changed. Talk a little bit about as a young entrepreneur or before you ever sold the CloudBlue, running a company, and talk about being a leader today in 2025. How different is it being a leader today than 25 years ago when you were just a young entrepreneur starting off?

Todd: It’s funny you should ask that because along the other window panes I have open right now is my New York sexual harassment training that I have to take because I’m now looking for a company that’s based in New York. It’s things like that. I think from a compliance perspective, it’s through the roof and not necessarily a bad thing. I realize that these mechanisms are put in place for employees’ protection and for the good of all people. But when you think about whether it’s on the HR side of the house, all the things you have to do now to stay compliant on the finance side, I mean, it’s tremendous. Even if you’re a privately held company, the information you have to provide and be able to access and report on is just through the roof. Obviously, we’re owned by a private equity company, so it’s not much different than being owned by a publicly traded company. But, yeah, the leadership is different from that perspective. When you think about work from home, that is a huge dynamic that has changed. I told my team at Ingram years ago, as we were going into COVID, like how hard it was. And I said, “Listen, guys, when we come out of COVID, it’s going to be even harder, because everybody’s kind of ran to home. We kind of get settled in here, but now, how do you start going back to the office?” Because there are guys like me, I love going back to the office. I would be there seven days a week if I could, working with my team, but there’s some folks that don’t want to be there at all. There’s a lot of different views on that. I tell my sales team all the time, “Listen, if you’re hitting your numbers, I don’t care where you’re working, you can work on the beach as far as I’m concerned.” Then there’s a mentality of, well, if they’re not hitting the numbers, should they be in the office? Well, if they’re not hitting the numbers, then it’s a person problem. It’s not where they’re sitting. We need to resolve that and how do we empower and train those folks to get up to speed. There’s a longer list of how leadership is different today than where it was in the past. And again, I feel like when things were status quo pre-COVID, it was kind of an incremental, like your knowledge had to grow with GDP. It was fairly simple. But you throw this COVID mix there, you throw what AI is going to do in there.

John: True.

Todd: I tell our team all the time, “It’s not the AI [inaudible] and put us out of business. It’s our competitors using AI better than us is what’s going to put us out of business. So how do we make sure we’re staying at the forefront of that?” We’ve got folks that have been at this company for 20 or 30 years. I’m 50 years old, and so I’m smart enough to be dangerous and find things that are going on with AI. But these kids that are coming out of college who live and breathe and sleep and stuff, those are the ones that I want to focus on getting into our organization and looking at how we do things and how we make things better through the power of AI and using platforms and tools to sit on top of that. They don’t have to have a 20-year history in ITAD to understand how to use it better. They can look at our system and tell us in five seconds more than I can learn over a course of a month.

John: Well, you and I are basically AI immigrants and they’re AI natives.

Todd: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it.

John: That’s the way it is. And like you said, they’re going to put a fresh set of eyes on things and teach us. The younger generation is going to teach us. So recruiting down there is really… But also I’m sure you have to wake up now and also look at geopolitics. Whether you want to or not, you have to be a student of the geopolitical situations around the world, because any of those can affect us with regards to reverse logistics and pricing and all sorts of myriad of issues which affect both our revenue and profitability.

Todd: Yeah. Like I said, you have to be very close to what’s happening in this business right now if you want to be relevant in the next couple of years, for sure.

John: Talk a little bit about the CXtec. What do you expect to accomplish this year and what are some of your long-term goals in the years ahead, Todd?

Todd: Well, I think that one thing, number one, is just getting to know our customers and really getting into the weeds with our clients and understanding what their pain points are. What are the things that they need today that they can’t find in the market? And then, again, thinking ahead a couple years from now, what do they see of their needs and capabilities are going to be, both from a from a geographic perspective, from a capabilities perspective, and just from a technology perspective, because I don’t know what XYZ customer may get themselves into. If you think about IoT and what comes along with IoT is, A, how do you handle those devices? Is there a secondary market flows? And by the way, what data is residing on those? And is that important data? How do you get rid of it and certify it? So, I think understanding those things will help us position on what we’re going to do long term. I think immediately though, we’ve got a lot of customers that are asking us for a lot of other products and services. So, we’ll start again bolting on some pretty quick ones as far as additional ITAD services in the US and outside of the US, additional types of products that they’re looking to buy. If they’re used to buying used network switches, why would they want to potentially buy refurbished laptops or mobile phones or whatever that may be? So, I think we’ll do a lot of that. I think there could be some opportunistic M&A out there right now. Again, this is a tough environment [inaudible] CXtec bank[?]. But another reason why I’m here is we’re still a very profitable company, even though the times are tough across our sector. There’s others out there that aren’t doing as well right now that may need a lifeline. And so if I can help some of them find a lifeline by pulling them in, or if there’s just someone that’s running a good business that we feel is a good fit for us, we’ll absolutely entertain some M&A. So, I think we’ll do investments both mostly organically, but potentially inorganically, if the opportunity’s right, the synergies are there, and it kind of bolts on capability. We won’t buy to buy customers just to buy a [inaudible]. We’ll buy because we want to, again, make sure our customers have more stuff to acquire from us. I think there’s going to be a lot of good talent out there. There are generations who have been doing this for a long time where there’s some good IP and expertise to bring an asset, we could bring on. But I think if you talk about, [inaudible], maybe one of the professors today, and he’s in the supply chain school. I talk to him all the time. He’s on my advisory board, just become a good friend over the years. But when you get these kids that are coming out of supply chain school, they’re so into environmental, sustainability, circularity, and everything else. So, I feel like there’s so much great talent that comes out of school that understands supply chain generally, both forward and reverse, but also the sustainability aspect. Listen, these kids are going to be around a lot longer than we are and they got to make sure this planet is something they can inherit and pass on their kids. There’s some real passion in that and a lot of energy in that. Again, getting them into an office may be is a challenge, but we’ll figure that part out.

John: This is called the Impact Podcast, and Todd, all of your ventures have made huge impacts. Talk a little bit about sustainability and the impact that CXtec makes to the environment, just by the nature of the important and great work that you guys do.

Todd: Well, I think number one is, if you think about just extending the life cycle of the device, so whether that be extending the life cycle of what’s already in use today or if you have a user that’s coming on board who wants to use a product that is potentially refurbished, I can tell you right now, they’re one of our OEM relationships that we’re going to help them out on. I’ve already talked with our CAO, and we’re going to start procuring and using refurbished laptops internally. There’s no reason[?] a salesperson is not doing CAD drawings in all these high end. We don’t need AI PCs. We’re using spreadsheets and a web browser and maybe some email. I think our ability to be able to provide refurbished devices… And by the way, like in our data center networking side, we have what’s called Equal2new. We sell these refurbished devices with a lifetime warranty. We stand behind what we sell and we want to make that last a long time. On the enterprise side, there’s that piece of it. On the more distributed asset side, there’s that component of it. But we do have like what’s called third-party maintenance. So, if someone has an older device that’s out of OEM maintenance and they want to extend that life and the OEM costs 10 grand, we charge them two grand. Obviously, it makes a lot of sense because we can support that. So I think, us keeping devices alive a lot longer is really our core business. Again, we want to focus on circularity. I’m even thinking about things, and I’m still learning the cabling business. But how do we look at our CABLExpress business where we’re selling fiber optic cables, Cat6 cable, and patch panels? How do we start looking at sourcing recycled materials and put into those products? Now, what I’ve learned so far, I’m not an expert on fiber optic cables made of glass, so I’m not sure about how much circular glass you can get, but maybe there is. But I want to start looking at everything we do, both internally in the back office, as well as the products we create and the services we deliver. How do we make those more circular and sustainable in nature? We need to drink our own cat the end of the day.

John: Well, that just shows you what a great CEO and leader you are, because 20 years ago, when people used to hear the word sustainability, when you and I were first just starting off and running our companies, sustainability to the C-suite always meant more money, not a lot of ROI. But as you know now, A, you got to lead by example, and also sustainability can just means really resilience for the company that you’re leading and also could be great profit savings and a tremendous ROI.

Todd: 100%. And listen, at some point, I think ESG is becoming a very embedded part of big companies. Now, it will become like breathing. It will be a topic at some point, so it has become a second nature and part of our thing. I think things as simple as we start looking at our packaging, are we using plastic tape or are we using a paper based tape on our packaging? Where’s the glue coming from? All these little things can make a difference. If it’s you and I, or let’s say we’re Ford and Chevy, we’re trying to get the police department to buy our vehicles, then I can show them I’m doing seven things that are more sustainable, but on par with other vehicles. Quality-wise, prices, everything is the same. I feel like those differentiators are what’s going to help you win more. It’s deliberate on purpose because I think it’s the right thing to do, but I also think it’s going to position us to go out and win more customers and show our customers that we’re in it to win it and we’re looking out for their best interest as well. Because they start looking at their supply chain and where they’re sourcing from, if they ever get asked, “Hey, what’s your vendors doing here?”, we should hopefully have a nice package that we can hand to them and show them why we’re different than someone else.

John: You know, Todd, I know as a new leader of CXtec, you’re very busy. I don’t want to take up much more of your time. But I’ve known you for a long, long time and I don’t think I’ve rarely, if ever, seen you in a bad mood. Talk a little bit about your philosophy just on life and how do you stay positive. And someone who’s a serial entrepreneur with so much success that you’ve had, how do you continue to drive that success and stay positive all the time? Do you have some sort of mantra that you follow or some sort of routine that you follow that you want to share with our listeners and viewers before we have to say goodbye for today?

Todd: It’s funny, my pastor at church said a couple of weeks ago, and I still live by those things, he said, “Just get over it, just move on.” Bad things are going to happen, it’s part of life. And I can tell you, every bad thing, everything that’s ever made me upset in life, every wrong turn I’ve made, it’s all been a lesson. It’s why I’m sitting in this chair today. It’s pretty crazy, as you get older and older, you start really realizing how the universe is structured and how things are put in your place. I am in a good mood. I tend to be an optimist by nature because I’m always looking for opportunities and looking for new shiny pennies, and there’s always so many out there. So the second I get, I always tell people in the consulting business, any startup business for that matter, there’s days when I want to drink because I celebrate a win today. And there’s days I want to drink because it was quiet today and it’s hard. But every one of those days is a learning lesson in a growth vehicle that puts you in a better place. There’s always something better ahead, as long as you keep in focus. That’s why I like to change. I always want to try something new. That’s what keeps me on my toes and keeps me motivated.

John: But that’s also what keeps you one of the great leaders of our industry. And I’m so grateful for your time today and grateful for our friendship, Todd. Again, for our listeners and viewers, to find Todd and his colleagues and all the great work they’re doing at CXtec, please go to www.cxtec.com. Todd, thank you for sharing some time and also talking about your new venture here on the Impact Podcast. But more importantly, thanks for being my good friend and thanks for all that you’ve done to make the world a better place.

Todd: Likewise, John. Feeling is mutual. I appreciate you, man.

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