EW 016 – How A 27-Old Business Owner Built An Unbreakable Mindset Through Adversity And Growth – How President Chris Vasiliou Helps CTK To Win Everyday

Gordon Sheppard (00:01.038)
Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Vasiliou (00:03.847)
Gord, thanks for having me.

Gordon Sheppard (00:05.548)
Well, I'm really glad to have you on because we're gonna hear a really unique story given your age and stage. And in fact, the amount of responsibility that you have and the amount of responsibility that you took on from an even younger age to get to where you are now. And I know a lot of people are gonna really enjoy hearing about your story, hearing about your win and that kind of thing. But most people haven't met you that are listening to the show. So if you had to introduce yourself at a party and tell me about you and then tell me about your company.

What would you tell people?

Chris Vasiliou (00:36.293)
Well first off, I'm not much of a party goer, but if I was, what would I tell them about myself? Well, my name is Chris Vasiliou, owner and president of CTK. We are an electrical, low voltage and security contracting company. So we deal with everything from your power distribution, lighting, fire alarm on the electrical side. On the low voltage side, you have your fiber optics cabling, structured cabling, network cabling.

And then finally on the security front, we deal with camera systems, card access systems, intrusion alarm systems. We do a little bit of audio visual work in between that as well, video conference systems, paging systems. So we essentially walk into an ICI, industrial, commercial, or institutional build, and would take care of your systems in that build. And that's everything from service work to renovations to new construction.

Also share we're based in Vaughan, just a hair north of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Gordon Sheppard (01:37.806)
Yeah, and in one of the certainly biggest markets with a huge demand and upside from a let's build lots of houses in Canada point of view, maybe around the world is kind of what a nice time to be in that type of industry. In terms of yourself, tell us about how old you are and your title and maybe a little bit about yourself, go ahead.

Chris Vasiliou (01:55.257)
Yeah, so I'm 27, started this journey a few years ago now. I've got a couple of companies now, both built from the ground up. And yeah, I do operate as the president for both those organizations. We just brand both as CTK. Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (02:16.152)
There are not many 27 year old presidents of a serious enterprise like yours. What does that feel like? Or maybe you wouldn't even know the difference because it's all you know kind of growing up, but like, are you aware of that for being young and having that much responsibility or is it just something that you do naturally?

Chris Vasiliou (02:33.423)
You know what, given sort of my background and how I got to where I've gotten thus far, it's not really something that I realize or think about, you could say. From my perspective, it just is what it is and I'm doing what I have to do, want to do, and passionate about to continue to progress the business, businesses forward now.

Gordon Sheppard (02:59.832)
Well, and you got me going there, which is like, there's a story for how you got here. Take us back a little bit, maybe to the beginning of that story and tell us a little bit about some of the ride along the way that got you here.

Chris Vasiliou (03:03.611)
Yeah.

Chris Vasiliou (03:09.107)
Yeah, well, it's certainly been one heck of a journey to get to this far.

So a little bit of a backstories to how I got my start and how things sort of became what they were here at CTK. So I'll go way back to 1999, my dad Alec, he started a small scale structured cabling company. He had that business for many, many years. That company operated as Cable Tech, Cable Tech Systems in and around the greater Toronto area. Small business here.

dealing with around that million bucks revenue.

Level but hey, it was all good paid the bills. Everything was just fine Yeah in 2014, unfortunately, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. So naturally Keeping up with the day-to-day became a little bit more challenging for him And as a result he decided to take on a business partner in 2017 someone he knew very very well And you know the boxes were checked essentially. So what he did was he made the legal entity of cable tech in

active and then started a new business with this partner, know, similar industry and niche and all that. I ended up joining that new legal entity in 2018, fresh out of school. I was 20 at the time. And yeah, so I've got humble beginnings. I worked from the ground up on the tools every day, getting my hands as dirty as you can get and eventually, you know, got half decent at what I was doing. So that led to a little bit more project management and responsibility.

Chris Vasiliou (04:47.574)
Where things get a little bit interesting in the story is...

as I started in this business I noticed relatively quickly that this business partner was unfortunately taking advantage of my father and his health. not a great situation. Yeah, I got to a point and I won't go into too much detail here but we noticed the guy was stealing money from the company. We were very concerned about certain fraud accusations and what not. So it was not good and certainly not a situation that we want

to be a part of. So ultimately in October of 2021 I took what was really just an empty shell of cable tech and reinstated it.

Ultimately, I ended up streamlining the name to CTK and as I'll share later, we were growing and I needed a name more limitless to the services we were providing, branching out to electrical, expanding across the country, this and that. So CableTac became CTK, but where things get a little bit even more interesting is so mid October, October 13th, 2021, I restart CableTac now CTK. Of course, my dad comes with me. We get out of that really toxic partnership and

Three weeks after I start, right in the middle of COVID, let's not forget that, both the company and my father personally get sued for five million plus a million in damages. So yeah, and I pointed out earlier that we were dealing with a pretty small business here because now all of a sudden, very quickly, I'm 24 now at the time, I've got a $6 million lawsuit to deal with.

Chris Vasiliou (06:32.163)
a very very interesting learning experience. To dive a little deeper here, I was accused of everything from fraud to theft, all kinds of crazy things. At one point the ex-partner now hired a private investigator to follow me around everywhere I was going. So being 24 and having a black SUV follow you around for a couple of weeks is a very unsettling feeling. I can assure you that and I wish that upon no one. Long story short, we ended up disproving

Moving all of that took us several, several months to do that. I look, anybody that started a business, any entrepreneur or business owner listening to this knows that it's hard to start. I don't know the stats exactly, but a high percentage of new businesses fail. And that's really what we were, let alone adding COVID to the equation and an enormous lawsuit with crazy accusations and throwing as much mud against the wall and seeing what sticks essentially. But long

Long story short, the only real reason we survived that is because while all these really negative things are occurring, well let's talk about the positive now. We started with just structured cabling, we branch off into security, I ended up starting an electrical division as well in early 2022. So now we're able to sort of bundle what's typically three or four contractors on a job site into one company. That one stop shop mentality that's really branding your convenience, your responsiveness, your flex.

not our services because you can get commoditized very quickly in the construction industry in particular if you're selling your services. So we ended up creating a pretty good service offering for our clients which ultimately led to explosive growth and really helped us pay off legal fees and whatnot and just it got us out of the really tough financial situation that we were in because really like we had a choice.

either win and make this happen or go bankrupt in the process. And personally, I didn't really feel like watching my parents lose their home. So we had to find a way to win and just continue to drive this thing forward far greater than it's ever been before. So thankfully we were successful in doing that, which was not easy given COVID as well, but we found a way.

Gordon Sheppard (08:58.51)
Unbelievable what a like honestly, please if you'd started out saying well I'm 57 and I have gray hair and you know what I mean? You've described a lifetime of opportunity in a very short period of time and you're there's a there's a grin or a smile or a positivity About the way you're explaining it like and no doubt that it was very difficult this I so what I heard in there was a toxic partnership I heard a legal scenario that you had to kind of work through and again prove yourself and also then on the positive side

Chris Vasiliou (09:05.094)
Really.

Gordon Sheppard (09:27.394)
reorient the company to a growth perspective, which is remarkable because there's a pivot in there that's pretty important to, like you said, go from commoditized to a one-stop shop, which brings you higher value. And we could actually have a whole episode about margins and the things that you obviously understand in terms of what it took to get it to that level, which gets you telling back on the story right now and how you even sort of are still standing up through all that. What is it about your resiliency or?

Chris Vasiliou (09:40.796)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (09:54.946)
What secret sauce have you got going that got you through that and got you to where you are now?

Chris Vasiliou (10:00.231)
You know what, the... It may be hard to hear this, they're...

to those listening but there really is no secret. If you're looking to start a business, you need to be able to put in the work. It takes time, it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of energy and that's just the reality of it. There's no quick way of becoming successful or jumping to the finish line. No, you have to start the race so to speak, run every single step of it and then you get to the finish line. Whatever that finish line may be for you obviously we all have different

goals and whatnot. yeah, really it just comes down to developing an unbreakable mindset, I would say. You really need to...

learn how to not let things affect you, not let scathed by things and look let people say and do what they want to do. You run your race and just focus on yourself. Don't worry about what's going on around you just keep figure out a way and find a way to keep on moving forward regardless of what you have to do.

Gordon Sheppard (11:09.496)
That's remarkable. So develop an unbreakable mindset, right? Easier said than done, but you've put in the work. I can hear you're knocking Gladwell's 10,000 hours. sounds like you've got 20,000 in there somewhere because you started young, which is pretty neat. And it gets us to this moment to say, well, if you had to describe your biggest win in business then in the last couple of years, given that sort of lead up to this, what would that win be? How would you describe it?

Chris Vasiliou (11:20.359)
minutes.

Chris Vasiliou (11:32.934)
Well...

I would say, and obviously there's more to the story which we can get into if we need to, as the last couple years have progressed, but the biggest win really is the fact that I'm still standing here today. I haven't let all this negativity deter me from continuing to move forward and to develop that unbreakable mindset that I spoke about a minute ago. So really what it comes down to is, look, as cliche as it is, I'm not the first person to say this and I'm sure I won't be

the last but it comes down to never giving up really never give up and continue to put your best foot forward to not give up and not get in that mindset of all things are getting too difficult and maybe we should call it quits maybe we should just find a job we gave it a try no keep on going and for anyone listening that's a young entrepreneur or you know hey any age entrepreneur doesn't really matter just keep on going because good things will happen if you just

just don't let up. So that's really the biggest win, the fact that I chose not to give up and continue to develop that strong mindset.

Gordon Sheppard (12:44.558)
That's remarkable. So never giving up is the win. And I always jump in here in the podcast to talk, to break that down a bit. I introduce the anatomy of a win. And that means we're going to explore the strategy, the work plan, the people, the operations and the results behind never giving up in this case. So the strategically, you know, if you look at strategy, often there are things in there like values, goals, mission, purpose, promise, whatever sort of words you like to use in strategy. What's a highlight?

from the strategy that you would say contributes to this win for you.

Chris Vasiliou (13:20.615)
What's a highlight? It is very rewarding when...

you see your company growing when you can justify bringing on new staff and being able to afford the new staff as well and you're being strategic about it. But I'd say the biggest highlight and not to sound too selfish as I say this, but it's the personal development that I've gone through and some of very hard life lessons you have to learn and learn very quickly or else the consequences are pretty severe. So in terms of the highlight, I'm really happy with as terrible as it was.

You know, we don't have to talk about that, but the self growth that I got as a result of going through this and all the spin off problems that occur as a result and the mental impact is brutal. I would wish that upon no one having gone through that, but it's all the soft skills that you pick up. you know, we spoke about the mindset, I'll throw in discipline, consistency, being self motivated. Like these are all soft skills that you just can't teach. You need to go.

out and experience them and develop them and I'll throw out one more word and that's resourcefulness. Being able to, okay when everything's just on fire around you, taking a step back and saying, okay what are my options, what really are my options here, right? Plan A may not work all the time and that's okay, don't expect Plan A to work out all the time but what's my plan B, C, D and E? And I don't mean, oh I'll just go find a job or we'll close the business down, no if,

Going a little bit to the right isn't going to work out well can I go to the left, can I go center left, can I go center right, can I go center, can I go far left? What can we do here to continue to make this machine move forward?

Gordon Sheppard (15:11.726)
That's remarkable. again, strategically in the highlight there's that personal development that you've got in there, which is somewhere in there based on your values and your upbringing in there. we had to go all, there's something combo in there about what kind of puts that together. So we've heard a little bit about the never give up part. And I'm going to say the strategy might include the bundle of all the things that you're talking about to make sure that you're executing on that bundle. Anytime we have a strategy, in this case, never give up over time, no matter what the obstacles.

We always have a timeline and we started to hear about that timeline. If I take you back to when you were 20 years old or what, you know, those moments that were happening, we heard about some critical moments along the way. Your dad's health is a factor in here. There's a partnership thing as a factor. There's a lawsuit thing as a factor. There's pivoting in a sense, the business to become all inclusive for certain aspects. So you're not commoditized. Those things are occurring along the way. These are some of the highlights along the timeline. Did we miss any?

along the timeline for what you're describing for what it takes in a sense to never give up any other

Chris Vasiliou (16:12.007)
Yeah, sure. So I would say...

and especially catering to the younger generation out there. really paid. Look, let's talk about reputation for a moment. Let's start with that because you only get one reputation, right? Sure, your business may work out. You may need to file for bankruptcy. You can always start another business. You can always go a different direction, but you only get one reputation. And I think that's very, very important to talk about. And the best way to maintain a good positive relate reputation and relationships with people you're working with

is just do good ethical business. Don't try and screw people over. Don't try and make a quick buck on someone because you'll get a temporary gain because that's all it is. It's a temporary gain if you're going to do things a little bit unethically. But long term if you really want to make it so to speak, make sure that you're holding yourself to a very high standard in regards to your reputation. And that's what ultimately helped me grow and just

have the machine grow is doing good honest work, people are going to want to call you back and going to want to work with you because they like you, they know you're reputable and they can count on you. So that's a, I think that's a very key takeaway. Be ethical and make sure your reputation is in good order.

Gordon Sheppard (17:35.104)
Remarkable, right? And it really speaks to, again, when we think about the work plan thing, it's funny that it's not, it's a combination of all of these things that you're putting together. So there's not like one big day or one big deal. It sounds like just a consistency and continuity of all these things that you hold as important that you're executing on, on a day-to-day basis from the work plan point of view. So we said strategy, work plan, there's people involved anytime, right? We're talking about never giving up. We've heard a lot about you and your attitude, which is wonderful.

You know, we've gotten a really good sense of who you are and why you do what you do. You didn't do this alone. Who are some of the other key players involved in never giving up along the way and what were their roles and their attitudes?

Chris Vasiliou (18:18.232)
Yeah, so I'll start with my dad, Alec. He had to step up as well and unfortunately making

Certain decisions became very difficult for him as the Parkinson's continued to get worse. obviously, naturally I had to help him through a lot of that but You know, shouldn't downplay the role that he played, you know He had some tough decisions to make it, you know I kind of twisted him up his arm a little bit here and there to make sure we were Keeping the thing moving forward. But yeah, he's definitely critical part right as of now as of today He does some more project management with us. So he's a little bit more focused on that. He's got his

focus and that works for him. He still wants to be involved in the business. He's not ready to retire just yet. Yeah, so he's still going. And another individual. Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (19:08.728)
Well, yeah, and who's the other individual? Yeah, please, because I'm really curious where you got your support from. I can't imagine you just sort of went and sat in a dark room and figured this all out, right? There's got to be some other people in there.

Chris Vasiliou (19:19.143)
Yeah, yes and yes and no.

I'm fortunate enough that I have some great parents. I just touched on my dad, parents were very supportive and I like to think raised me okay to have good values and whatnot. Have a very supportive fiance that's been with me through all of this. Yeah, she stuck with me, which was great. then from more of an operational business side of point of view, I'd like to point out our VP of operations, Jason.

But one hell of an individual and yeah, you know, he's one of those guys that is great to work with, great person to be around. We have a lot in common as well from personal side and yeah, no, we wouldn't be here and we wouldn't have been able to grow the last three and a half years now without his support and his drive to want to, you know, contribute to the machine.

Gordon Sheppard (20:15.81)
really does take that village, right? When we're talking about getting through these things and somewhere in there, we, you know, if I was in my half day or full day workshop now, we'd have all the stakeholders up on the board and we would go through all their roles and responsibilities. There's a few more, there's some customers in there that are be interesting that you could talk about, I'm sure, along with some of other people around the legal advice that you've gotten along the way. And again, how nice to have this core, to support you through this never giving up, win. we said strategy, work plan, people, operationally. You had to get through some things.

to sort of survive in a sense. You had to figure out about the partnership, ownership. You had to figure out legal. You had to figure out growth. There would be some capital issues in there somewhere if you're going to expand and do those types of things. Any highlights on the operational side besides the fact that you should be given an honorary degree as a lawyer for surviving all those things that you've had to survive? I mean, you had to learn on the fly pretty quick. Any operational highlights that contribute to never giving up?

Chris Vasiliou (20:51.761)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vasiliou (21:14.439)
operational highlights I would say it's so we'll talk specifically to the construction industry of course that's that's what we're in

It's picking out key opportunities and learning how to capitalize on them. So let's go back to when we just started in late 2021. We started with what we knew well. I'm a low voltage guy. That's where I started. I know my cabling, I know my fiber and naturally that spread out into the security industry as well. I saw an opportunity to branch off into electrical. Electrical work is very complimentary to low voltage and security because generally speaking, and if you're,

in

50 different services, but isn't really good at any of them You need to make sure you're keeping that tree trunk solid and adding things that complement your business and from my perspective Electrical was was one of them I can take that a step further if you'd like and talk about what we're doing today, or should we hold off on that? Okay, So now that we're a lot more established on the electrical side being that called the systems contractor

Gordon Sheppard (22:46.04)
Jump in, let's hear it.

Chris Vasiliou (22:54.441)
here. My next thought and this occurred last year, mid last year, said, okay, where do we go from here? Right? We're established, we have a national presence, we're on the up and up. What's next? Well, what complements electrical low voltage? A couple different directions we could go with this, but my thought was this, okay, if you're an electrical or low voltage contractor, you're typically dealing with X amount of percent of a scope of work on the job site, right? Well, who's dealing with a hundred percent of that? Well, it's the general

or contractor, the builder, right? So why not just be the GC?

That's what we're currently undergoing. I'm not going to claim we're something that we're not, but the next step for us and we've been working towards this over the last several months is, well, let's just be a full-fledged general contractor, but not lose focus to what we do well, and that's the electrical low voltage and security work. So essentially we're in the process of becoming that GC that can actually self-perform some of the work. Why is that an advantage? Well, if you're a general contractor that can self-perform,

for

Gordon Sheppard (24:30.616)
Well, you're living four lifetimes in a short time already in terms of what you're doing. It's pretty remarkable to hear. And again, the highlights that we've heard operationally along the way are, one, again, deal with the partnership thing. That's operational nightmare. There's all kinds of things in there. There's the legality around lawsuits, dealing with lawsuits that you've dealt with as well. There's also then digging in and pivoting your business to expand the growth. you've got an eye to margin here. You can hear clearly as a business owner, you understand.

how to make money in this as well, which is gonna allow you to do those other things. So you're looking, you're not sitting on your laurels in a sense. You're actually able to go and expand and think about what that looks like in the future. Funny enough, if we ran into you in 10 years, there would have been four other things that you're gonna be saying, well, then I got into nuclear power, whatever you're gonna do, because I have no doubt that you've got that sort of acumen to sort of make things happen. That's pretty cool. So we said strategy, work plan, people, operations. Finally, there's results. You got this far.

you're proud of never giving up sort of the main win for the whole thing. How do you sort of qualitatively and quantitatively measure the results? Somewhere in there you're making some money, let's just say, because you're in business, you're doing your thing. So is it a dollar thing? Is it the personal growth side? What are the results that you like to talk about having gotten this win?

Chris Vasiliou (25:49.231)
Yeah, that's a very good one. Good question and sometimes very difficult to answer.

I would say look, it's very easy if you're looking at your KPIs or whatever the case may be, okay, how are our sales? How's the bottom line? All that good stuff that a lot of people listening are probably very familiar with. But I like to measure it on a slightly different scale and that's more so the intangible scale and it goes back to reputation again. If we have customers that are calling us back saying, yeah, we've got this bill going up here or we've got a few service calls to do there and then you get those referrals where this major company

that she did work for across the country wants to refer you to this major company that also does work across the, or has buildings across the country. That's a really good thing. So we, as hard as it is, and I don't think we're perfect in measuring this yet, I don't know if there's a perfect way in measuring it to be completely honest with you, but we could sort of measure the success in how referred are we and what's the feedback we're getting from our customers. Are they actually happy with our people that are on site doing the physical work?

happy with us here at the office. That I feel like is, even though it's a lot more difficult, it's a, in my experience, a better way to measure things because the business and the money and the revenue, top line revenue, that'll all come with that good reputation and those referrals you get from it.

Gordon Sheppard (27:15.63)
Sounds like a real recipe for measuring the right things that actually drive your business. And like you said, there's the traditional things that we're supposed to look at, but in fact, you've got a good sense of reputation and you're building that reputation consistently. Again, every day as we kind of go along. Well, so nice to have you on the show and learn about some of your backstory, about you, about what you've done with your business in this short amount of time. If you had to kind of summarize or leave a lesson behind for the leaders who are listening to learn from you.

What would you like to sort of end this off with as sort of closing thoughts?

Chris Vasiliou (27:49.495)
Sure, let's say this, good things take time. They take time and they take effort. Nothing will happen overnight. Don't expect it to happen overnight. Good things take time. So stay focused, stay disciplined and keep on going because if you have that sort of discipline and mentality, you'll make it. I can just about guarantee that.

Gordon Sheppard (28:14.766)
Chris, thank you so much for being on the show.

Chris Vasiliou (28:17.721)
And thank you very much for having me. I appreciate your time.