INTRO / PRE-SHOW MESSAGE
TONY: Hey, everyone, this is Tony. Before we start today's conversation, I want to give you a quick heads up. At the very end of this episode, I'm going to share a piece of music that's very close to my heart. My newest hit song. If you've ever seen those four words on every coin and every dollar in the US, hearing them on a song gives them a whole new weight. So stick around to the very end. I can't wait for you to hear it.
Welcome back to the podcast. Now every entrepreneur hits seasons where the pressure feels like too much. You know the numbers don't make sense, your energy is depleted, and the next move feels unclear. Sounds very similar, doesn't it?
Well, today's guest, Dave Burnett, has lived through all of that in a way most people never will. Before becoming an AI-driven business strategist, Dave was a hockey enforcer. How cool is that? His job was to take hits so others didn't have to. And that mindset of resilience followed him into business.
But the real story, guys, and why you need to hear this, is what happened later. He found himself staring at a seventy thousand dollars per month loss. Ouch. And he was unsure how to keep the company afloat. And then a traumatic brain injury nearly took away his ability to work more than fifteen minutes at a time.
Now, most people, I think, would break under that level of pressure. Dave rebuilt from it. In this conversation, we're going to unpack the systems, the mindset shifts, and honest lessons that he learned while clawing his way back. Lessons that you, and I think every entrepreneur, needs if you want to stay standing through your own storms.
Guys, if you ever faced overwhelm, financial pressure, burnout—like every day, right?—or the fear of losing momentum, this episode is going to give you a blueprint for getting back up stronger than ever. Let's begin. Let's go. Bring them on.

INTERVIEW – PART 1 (BACKGROUND & THE ENFORCER)
TONY: Hi, Dave. Welcome to the Tony Durso show.
DAVE: Hey, Tony, thanks so much for having me, I appreciate it.
TONY: Oh, the honor is mine. I'm looking forward to this. I love hockey. Separate, separate comment. But, you know, we're all here looking forward to how to learn about how to rise and be resilient. You know, as I mentioned, you were a hockey enforcer and now you're an AI-driven entrepreneurial leadership expert. It's very interesting, very cool. And could you fill us in a little bit, Dave, and tell us your backstory? How did it all start for you?
DAVE: Absolutely. And I don't usually start these conversations with talking about how many times I got punched in the face, and in this case, quite literally, about being the hockey enforcer. But that was one of the things that got me on my journey was understanding that if a role isn't built for you, then you should step out of it.
I was a teenager in Canada playing hockey, so what a hockey enforcer does, for those who aren't that familiar with the sport, at least, you know, thirty years ago, you would have somebody on the team who would go out and get the crowd all riled up because you would go out and fight somebody else and win the fight and change the flow of the game.
And I was actually a defenseman who wasn't a fighter, who wasn't an enforcer. And then what happened was I got in a situation where I was playing pretty high level. Guy from the NHL got sent down to the level, and I got called up to the level above me that I was playing, and we ended up getting into a fight. Everybody on the ice got into a fight. You know, it's the old saying: you go to a hockey game, a fight in a hockey game broke out.
And so everybody on the ice was fighting, and I happened to be paired up with the guy from the NHL. And we fought, and I won. And as a result of winning that fight, the coach looked at me and said, "Well, now, because you can fight, you're gonna fight."
So I ended up going up pretty much every game and just fighting and then fighting another guy the next game and fighting another guy, you know, six broken noses later, taking more stitches than I care to count. I said enough is enough. And unfortunately, the coach at that time, you know, had full control over everything in relation to my contract in relation to where I was.
So I ended up quitting the game of hockey. And as a result of that, I had to move on and figure out what else I was going to do with life, because taking stitches and punches to the face was not ideal. So I don't normally start off the business podcasts with that, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of background.
So I went to school and my first entrepreneur... I'll give you a little backstory. My first entrepreneurial journey was in school. I ended up doing a sampling business. If you've ever gone to Costco and seen people giving out food, that was my first business. Except here in Ontario, we could actually do that with liquor and beer. And so I did that in the liquor store and beer store. So I gave out samples of booze as my first business. I ended up having fifty employees working for me when I was in third year university, so that was a great start.
Sold that business to my partner at the time and then got into the promotional products business. So t-shirts, hats, pens, all those kinds of good things. And while in that business, I actually started a third business, which is now called Achievers.com. So me and a partner actually started up, it was originally called ILoveRewards, and it was the first—going back to two thousand here—it was the first digital online points program.
So that business grew and grew. I left it in two thousand and two. It continued to grow and get acquired by some private equity, and then sold to another private equity firm in twenty fifteen for one hundred and ten million dollars. So that was an interesting ride. I wasn't along for a lot of it, but it was a really interesting ride.
But what I did was I actually went through and carried on with a promotional products business, and you mentioned losing seventy thousand dollars a month. That happened in the Great Recession. I was, you know, all of a sudden there was no demand at all for promotional products. And I had lots of overhead, lots of staff. So I was losing seventy thousand dollars a month and realized I had to pivot.
So I went out and bought three thousand URLs, three thousand website addresses, and put up five hundred websites and got good at digital marketing, got good at SEO. So that's where my second business... Yeah, at that point it would have been my fourth business actually, was the AOK Marketing business because people discovered our websites. People discovered that I was good at SEO, and our competition actually asked me to do SEO for them.
So by twenty ten, I was doing SEO and our promotional products business came back from the dead. So I ended up with two businesses, which I still have today, which are AOK Marketing and PromotionalProducts.com.
And so you also talked about my traumatic brain injury. So back in twenty eighteen, we were doing some home renovations and the home renovations were going well. We're just about finished. We had some brick replaced on the front of our place with stone, and my wife said to me, "Hey, can you go and grab some of the stone? I want to line our path to be able to have nice looking stone on our path."
And these stones were four inches wide by ten inches tall by forty eight inches long. So big pieces of stone weighed one hundred and seventy five pounds. So I went out into the garage, got a trolley, brought it out to the front, picked up one of these stone pieces and was putting it on the trolley and was bending over. And I thought to myself, "Oh, I'm gonna really hurt my back. Like I'm not designed for this." And so I let it go.
And when I dropped it from about a foot and a half above the trolley, it hit the trolley funny. And the trolley came up and hit me in the side of the head.
TONY: Ouch.
DAVE: So I basically got a metal bar to the side of my head. On December fourth, twenty eighteen, I finished moving the stuff, went inside. I said to my wife, "Like, I got hit in the head," and she said, "Are you okay?" And I was like, "Yeah, I think so, but I'm gonna... I'm gonna go to bed and, you know, just keep an eye on me. I may have had a concussion or something," because I've had four or five concussions in the past because of numerous things. Hockey mostly.
But the next day I woke up and I literally couldn't function. I would spend fifteen minutes working—you mentioned this in the intro—I'd spend fifteen minutes working and then forty five minutes sleeping, and then fifteen minutes working and forty five minutes sleeping. I would do that all day until I got to five thirty. I'd have some dinner and I'd go to bed.
That was my life for four months. So that was into twenty nineteen and I continued on that way. Now the thing is, I have the worst joke ever because I don't remember twenty nineteen and I don't remember the first half of twenty twenty. So the worst joke ever is: So, I heard there was a pandemic. Like, I am the only person, I think, on earth who does not remember the pandemic, and I'm sure lots of people wish they could, but I wouldn't wish the brain injury on anybody.
So I ended up getting some alternative treatment in the halfway through twenty twenty, and September of twenty twenty, and I got my brain back. So I've taken this real initiative to make the most out of every day that I can. I hope that other people don't have to go through that kind of trauma to then have to try and move things forward. Everybody's got their baggage. Everybody has things that they have to go through. So I was doing that and, you know, just trying to be better the whole time.
And so where I am today is I was actually an OpenAI beta tester before I got injured. So twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. And then when my brain came back, I still had both my businesses because I've got great people who work for me, and they did amazing things through that time, because I can't even imagine what it was like to work for me through then. And as a result of that, I now do Geo or SEO for AI or whatever you want to call it. We help people get discovered through AI, through the ChatGPTs of the world, Geminis of the world, all that kind of stuff. So that's where we are today. Still have the promotional products business, but that's kind of the top level overview of where I've been. So hopefully that makes sense of how we're talking today.
TONY: Dave, what a story and so many questions I have. I feel sad and remiss for watching so many hockey games because I just... not trying to crack a joke, but it kind of comes out that way because my wife turned me on to hockey way back in the day, and we became hardcore hockey fans living in the Los Angeles area, you know, LA Kings. And the biggest excitement was when they would have a fight. And now, contrary or different than like wrestling or whatever. We knew that these were real. They were heated, they were heated exchanges. There was nothing fake about them whatsoever. Not that anyone says hockey fighting is fake, but it really created an extra adrenaline rush in the crowd. And, you know, to see that happen, it's like, you know, and now I feel kind of remiss for enjoying all that. And...
DAVE: You shouldn't.
TONY: I know, it's just I'm just my silliness is coming up and I'm very curious about The Enforcer. That sort of a tough you know, it's the tough guy attitude out there on the ice. And I'm wondering, how did that help you? Aside from the brain injury, which is a whole separate communication I want to talk about as well. I have so many questions, but I'm curious how that shaped your mindset as a business owner and leader.
And just before we get into that, I just want to tell the audience, this is Dave Burnett, and you can find him at AOKMarketing.com. He mentioned the company name, but it's AOK Marketing. And what a resilient rise that I mentioned earlier is what we're going to talk about and what you've done here.
So over to you now the first thing, the first thing I guess is how that mentality, you know, I've had many guests to talk about sports and things, how that's helped them in business. And I'm curious, how did that help you navigate to a very successful business, I may say?
DAVE: Yeah. Well, the training associated with being a high performance athlete is the bigger thing that impacted me, as opposed to the enforcer side of things. I mean, everything kind of comes together, but when you're playing at a high level of any sport or any activity whatsoever, you're spending so much time, you need to have discipline. You need to have time dedicated to do it.
And so I was a teenager. I was in Ontario at the time. We actually had thirteen... We had grade thirteen, you know, just we had a bonus year of high school, just so you know. So I would have been the equivalent of a junior or a grade eleven, when I was playing hockey and I was playing hockey where we had to drive three hours away to go play a three hour game and then a three hour drive back on the bus. And this would be on, like a Tuesday night.
So how do you keep up with school? How do you keep up with your practices? How do you keep up with, you know, this type of travel and still be able to succeed in various ways required a lot of hard work. So I was really lucky that I was able to do that kind of hard work and continue on, because when I ended up quitting hockey, which was halfway through my senior year, even though I had one more year of high school still to go, I basically had to really buckle down and get into university or college as a result of my grades, not because I was a college athlete anymore. I was actually going to go to the US, hopefully on a scholarship to Dartmouth University back before I quit. So I gave up any talks with Dartmouth. I, you know, New Hampshire wasn't too far from Toronto and it was all going to be great.
But when I stopped playing because of what was required of me as an enforcer, I stopped. I just couldn't do it anymore. It taught me a lot about being able to put up with stuff that you shouldn't be doing or don't need to do, and really kind of you have to, at certain points, take your destiny in your own hand and just move on to something else that isn't painful. Literally, that isn't going to result in, you know, damage to yourself, whether that's mentally or physically and doing the right thing for yourself sometimes. But you just have to... you have to leave that role. You have to leave that boss. You have to move on with life and do what you know is right. So the discipline associated with the practice, the discipline associated with making it through those things, was really helpful in terms of forming the entrepreneur that I have since become.


SPONSOR BREAK – ODOO
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INTERVIEW – PART 2 (THE INFINITE GAME & RECESSION)
TONY: All right, let's continue. And I'm thinking with this, you know, nine hours and this is after school, three hour bus ride, there, three hour game, three hour back. And then you still have to take care of your school and all. It's... Wow. It's formidable to consider for a younger person, a teenager who's going through school to do that.
And I'm thinking of your formative years on the ice and what you've learned and what you've been through. And I'm wondering, are there... you may have mentioned some, but are there like strong, hard core lessons that have really helped you grow the business that you say that you feel is because of that, because of those formative years, especially in hockey and being an athlete, I really kind of want to drill into that a little bit.
DAVE: Yeah, I mean, what it really helped me do, and Simon Sinek kind of... I didn't really understand it at first, but Simon Sinek put it in a great way that helps me understand what I was going through at the time. So what helped in terms of formative years was that hockey, a hockey game has a very specific, defined start, middle, end. There's very specific rules about somebody winning, somebody losing. And at the end of the game, people cheer and go home and, you know, do all that kind of stuff.
Business is very different from my perspective. There really isn't that same kind of winning. What there is, is business is an infinite game as opposed to a finite game. So a hockey game is a finite game. Business is an infinite game. The difference being there's no real defined start, middle, end. There's no real way to win. Even if you are the most successful business in the world, that's only for a period of time. I mean, you can look at history, all the different successful businesses, how they've, you know, risen and fallen.
And so for me, it became really: How can you stay in the game? How can you keep going? How can you pivot? How can you change as opposed to defining, winning and losing because you only lose in business when you give up?
So for example, I started my first business in ninety seven. This is before Google was invented. I now do SEO for AI. Like it wasn't even... it wasn't even a thing. It was literally hadn't been invented yet. I mean AI, you know, what predates that significantly? It's the fifties and sixties when it first started, but Google didn't. So how do I have a Google agency?
So the only way that I did that was understanding that you need to change, you need to pivot. You need to continuously learn. So the ability to be able to adapt to circumstances, change what you're doing, provide value to people, has really been the biggest lesson that I've learned is that this is not a finite game until you decide you quit, which is what I did in hockey, which just ended that game. But this is something that since then, the business game, you just don't quit. You just keep going. So that was really formative for me in terms of my perspective on business.
TONY: Kind of like drilled in the mindset of just don't quit. Just keep going, just keep going, and just keep going. Because that is really the simplified way to success. There's a lot to "to keep going." It's just a couple simple words. But that's really the, the pure essence.
DAVE: Well, and the other thing, if I may add, there's also the hours and hours of lonely practice, lonely strife, learning the lessons in the dark, you know, by yourself at whatever time of night. For me, for hockey, it was taking, you know, another thousand slapshots. It was doing whatever may be that I needed to do to work on that skill that I didn't have.
It's the same in business, right? Everybody's like, "Oh, this amazing thing happened. Like, you know, the business sold for one hundred and ten million dollars." But the reality is that was fifteen years after it was formed, and gone through several iterations, and I left it early on, as I mentioned. But, you know, everybody thinks, "Wow, that's amazing." But they don't see all the hard work. And I can't take credit for a lot of the hard work in that particular business. It's the behind the scenes when you're alone, when nobody is patting you on the back, when you're doing the same thing over and over again, when you're facing that thing that you just can't figure out and how it'll work and you don't know the answer.
I mean, love him or hate him, but Elon Musk said it very well. He said, "It's like staring into the abyss while you're chewing glass," because you don't know what's coming next. And there's a lot of pain through the whole process. So I'm not trying to turn anybody off from being an entrepreneur. You just got to choose and know that you got to choose your "hard" is the way I think about it.
You are going to choose hard in the form of, "I'm going to work for somebody else, and I'm going to do my best job I can, and then I'm going to retire at X date, and I'm going to have X amount of money that I've earned." That's hard. You're going to choose hard in the form of a boss you don't like. Or you can choose hard in terms of being an entrepreneur and having uncertainty that the buck stops with you. And can you make the next paycheck? Are you going to lose seventy thousand dollars next month? Are you going to make one hundred thousand dollars next month? You don't know how it's going to turn out because there's so many external factors.
And so you're there grinding away. It's hard. Nobody talks about really, at least not a lot of people talk about how hard it is, but it is hard. And you need to... you need to just keep going because there is no stop.
TONY: That's the thing. There's no one else really to depend on. When you're the entrepreneur, it's you. You've got to work. You've got to put in the eighty, hundred hours a week, whatever it takes. It just doesn't matter because you’re whole family, your livelihood, the payment of your bills all depends and rests on your shoulders.
DAVE: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, totally.
TONY: And I think in terms of the order of your life, the business where you were, you lost seventy thousand dollars a month? That was before you had the brain trauma. It was before. All right. What happened that, you know, I mean, to lose seventy thousand dollars a month. It's not necessarily something sudden, though. It can be. Was something happening? What was happening? How did you realize it? What did you pivot to? What changes did you make?
DAVE: So it did actually... it was coming. So this was the Great Recession. So dating myself back into two thousand and seven. And what happened was I'm working in Canada working with Canadian branch offices of US corporations. So doing very well. And what happened was when Lehman Brothers went out of business in September of two thousand and seven, I thought, "Oh, we're in big trouble."
But what happened was business kept going till the end of two thousand and seven, because I didn't realize it at the time because of my lack of experience, but there were budgets that were already set for the rest of two thousand and seven, so we were doing fine even though the US was crashing, the market was crashing, the world was ending. You know, all that kind of stuff.
And then what happened was January first, two thousand and eight. The phone stopped ringing, like literally stopped. There was nothing going on. Nobody had budget. No events were happening. Nothing happened at all. So that January of two thousand and seven, when I had full staff still anticipating working everything, I just... there was nothing. There was no revenue. We went to basically zero revenue from a multi-million dollar company.
And so that just caused huge problems. So unfortunately I had to let people go the next month. Still losing money, still had to let people go, still losing money, still had to let people go. Had to let our office space go. Had to let everything go, move back into the house. And then the last person who I let go, other than my wife, was a woman who was pregnant. And I kept her on and literally put the last payroll that she was on before she went on to maternity leave on my credit card.
TONY: Wow.
DAVE: So because I'd run out of all the savings, everything was done. And we got down to just my wife and I in the business. And fortunately, with just my wife and I in the business, because she stayed home with the kids, we were able to make ends meet when we got rid of all the overheads. And, you know, I lost a ton of amazing people through that whole process, but they all understood. They're like, "The phone isn't ringing, there's nobody buying anything. We get it." So they were amazing even in that side of things. But it was really hard times. So did I see it coming? Yes. Ish. Could I have done better planning? Maybe. Um, but we didn't. It really kind of came on suddenly. You know, it was. It was kind of snuck up on you and then all at once. So that's how that happened.
TONY: Dave, what were you selling at the time and what did you do to turn it into something positive?
DAVE: So we were selling promotional products. So t-shirts, hats, pens, mugs, any of those kinds of things that you would get as a sales rep or you would give away at an event or all that kind of stuff. So sales reps stop selling, events stopped happening. And so we just... nobody wanted any of the products. It was one of the first things that got cut. It was optional expense for a lot of people.
And the same thing happened in Covid. No events were happening. Can you imagine in the middle of Covid, you know, somebody handing you a mug, you... it was radioactive, right? Like there is no way you wanted that mug. So again, the business went down to zero.
But what happened the second time when the business went to zero... First of all, that was when I was concussed. That was when I had my brain injury. And so I had, as a result of what happened in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, I had saved working capital. I had saved money so that I had a year's worth of full overheads covered in the bank in cash, and so said to my people, "This is the situation. We have enough money, we've gone to zero before. This is something that I've seen before."
So this was the other thing. The experience associated with seeing your business go to zero was really, really interesting. To be able to look at it again and say, "Oh, this is where we are. This is what happens. I recognize this." But at this time I had the second business, which I'd talked about earlier in terms of pivoting, going out and buying URLs and pivoting into digital marketing was how I got through that stage back in '07, '08. And by twenty ten, that business was going quite well.
And then in Covid, when everybody stayed home, digital marketing was huge. Everybody needed to sell digitally. So our digital business exploded while our promotional products business went to zero. So it was an interesting time. Plus I, like I said, I couldn't function. I was just... I mean, I would be on phone calls like this and I would take notes because it was before all these amazing AI reporters were around and I'd take notes, and then I wouldn't remember the call. I'd talked to a client, wouldn't remember the call, have to look at my notes again, talk to the client again, and wouldn’t remember the second call. Have more notes like it was. It was a very difficult time.


INTERVIEW – PART 3 (RECOVERY & BRAIN HEALTH)
TONY: Now that time is when you had your... You had that brain injury. The second time. Yes. Covid, I had brain injury. So as you mentioned earlier, during our Covid period, you had that's when you had that. And you mentioned something early on. You said there was a point where you were able to get your brain back. Can you tell us what was it? Maybe there's something that we can learn to help become more, more aware as well of what we're doing?
DAVE: Yeah, absolutely. So I went through all the traditional channels to try and figure things out. I went to doctors. I went and saw a concussion specialist who treated the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Toronto Argos and the Blue Jays. I went to all the people. I went to all the top doctors in all the cities in Canada, and they basically said, "These are the treatments." I saw neurologists, all these kinds of things, and they gave me all the treatments that you should do.
And part of it was becoming disciplined about your day, disciplined about your food intake, disciplined about your habits, your sleep, and all that kind of stuff. So I was doing all the right things, but I still wasn't getting better.
So actually, I went into some alternative treatments which I would have thought were like kind of woo-woo crazy stuff. And I was recommended a treatment that's called Cereset Brain State Technologies. And what it is, is it's actually a... imagine a cap that you put on your head with brain sensors on the outside of your head, and then you have like, earbuds in your ears. And what it does is it actually detects the electrical frequencies in your brain.
The front two parts of your brain should be balanced with each other, and the back two parts of your brain should be balanced with each other. And that creates a good scenario where your brain is kind of in sync. My brain was completely messed up, and as a result, I had all kinds of inflammation from the injury, but also because my brain was out of sync.
So this auditory, basically all it does is it puts tones in your ears, higher tones in your brain would adjust, and it corrects the balance of the electrical signals in your brain. So with ten treatments, ten hours, like one hour a night for ten nights, I would go and I got this alternative treatment, and at the end of that, I was fine. My brain was back. I could sleep normally, I could carry on. I could remember things. And it was... it was life changing for me.
A complete alternative therapy that I highly recommend to everybody if they've got concussion issues. Check it out. As one of you’re... I don't know, maybe not. Don't leave it as your last resort waste eighteen months of your life. But, um, that's what I would recommend. That's how I fixed it. So when my brain came back, now I can remember conversations. Now I can start to think strategically. But I had all of the benefit of all of the discipline from the right kind of food, the right kind of energy, the right kind of daily planning. That really is what's setting me apart at this point.
And it was a second lease on life. Like, what would you do if you, you thought tomorrow you were going to wake up and not remember, like the last thing you remembered was a year ago and it was just amazing to wake up and remember the day? It's just such a gift that nobody understands until it's been taken from you. So now at my age, you know I'm coming up to fifty. I want to be able to squeeze every last drop out of every minute of every day, because I'm so grateful to be here and remembering and having this wonderful conversation. So I just... it's amazing.


SPONSOR BREAK – SHOPIFY
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INTERVIEW – PART 4 (TIME MANAGEMENT)
TONY: All right. Let's continue. You learn not to be... not to take things for granted and to be grateful. Now, when that treatment finished and you were able to start remembering your past experience, your life. I mean, you talk about your life that all just came back. The training, the lessons, the discipline. Everything just started coming back.
DAVE: Well, no. So I did remember everything from twenty eighteen and before, but I didn't remember anything. I still don't remember anything from twenty nineteen or twenty twenty, but I also it enabled me to sleep normally. It enabled me to be able to look at screens for a reasonable amount of time. It enabled me to just basically function as a normal person, and apparently not tell the same story every time you pass that landmark, you know, you tell that story. Apparently, I would do that every time. To my family, who are amazing for putting up with me, I'd pass a particular landmark, tell the story the next time, pass a landmark, tell that same story. And I had to pretend that they hadn't heard it before. So no, it was very hard on myself and very hard on everybody around me.
TONY: So, Dave, in terms of our audience, entrepreneurs, business owners, I'm just thinking with this and I'm playing back this conversation, I'm thinking, what can I learn from this? I have more questions, but I'm just thinking gratitude. Being grateful is probably the one of the key most things to just also not take for granted? Because when you recovered, that's the one thing that you say was the most important is, is that ability to remember and know that these things happen, which we truly we, we take for granted. We don't think about that at all as a blessing, as a gift.
DAVE: No. Its gratitude is the biggest thing. I mean, I learned some amazing coping mechanisms. I have very tight control over my days now, as a result of not knowing what my day tomorrow was going to look like or what my day yesterday even was.
So I learned a lot of things through this process, one of which, and I've actually got a kind of sitting here on my desk for those... If this is recorded, this is a... it's a ten by ten square. So the math, I'm going to geek out a little bit here on actual things that you can use, but it's a little bit of geeky in a day. There are one thousand four hundred and forty minutes. You usually sleep for seven or eight hours, so if you sleep for seven hours and twenty minutes, that's actually four hundred and forty minutes. So that leaves one thousand minutes left every day that you're awake.
If you take one thousand minutes, divide it by ten. You end up with one hundred blocks. That's what I just held up as a sheet. That's a ten by ten sheet of one hundred blocks. So I take a look at that. Every day I write the time that I wake up, which is usually between five and six. That's when I start. I usually kind of follow up with people on my team. I've got people on my team who are in Europe and East of us, who are early risers and follow up with the team for half an hour. So by six a.m. I spend between six and eleven and I have no meetings. I work on strategy in my businesses. I work on the key constraint. Whatever is happening in the business that needs my most attention at that moment, to try and fix it, to move it to the next level, whichever business it might be in?
And then from eleven onwards, I basically usually am in meetings, but I book my meetings from five thirty backwards so I get the longest period of uninterrupted time working on my business that I can. So, you know, my first meeting of the day will be at five to five thirty. Then the meeting before that will be four thirty till five or however it works out. Working backwards.
And what that does is it enables me to work on the most important things. But I also am much disciplined that okay, at five thirty I stop, go upstairs because I'm working in the basement, work from home. Go upstairs. Have dinner with the family till five thirty. My kids are twenty and twenty one ones away at school. The other one commutes from home. So they only want to see me so much.
And you know, I spend an hour and a half with the family, and then from seven till nine I go back to work, and then from nine till ten, I'll spend an hour with my wife hanging out, watching Netflix or whatever it may be, and then I go to bed and do it all over again.
So I'm very, very disciplined when it comes to my time because I don't know how much of it I have left. I don't know how much of it is going to get taken away from me. So I'm going to maximize every bit of every day that I can. And when you actually organize your life this way, it really, really... you're amazed at how much you can get done because you just don't usually do the simple math.
Like if you spend one more hour a day working on something, just one hour, but every day, and you do it for an entire year. If you divide that by forty as if it was a working week, you actually get nine weeks more productivity by spending one hour a day on something. So the question is, could you change that one hour of that Netflix special into something more productive that's going to be learning for you? Is it going to be something that you could have to further yourself, or is it something to keep up with AI or whatever you whatever interests you? You just ended up with, you know, two months of additional time by taking that one hour per year.
So how much can you accelerate your life by taking two hours? By maybe working from like, what I do is six a.m. to eleven a.m. on a Saturday. That gives me five more hours a week just by doing that. And I do it on Sundays. So now I've gotten more hours. So how much more time? How much faster can you move if you've got this additional time that you're allocating to whatever it is that interests you? And you know, it may not be for everybody, but it's one way to maximize the time that you've got.
TONY: Totally agree. You know, fifteen years ago I wrote and produced my first and only song, which I put on my podcast and was downloaded over two million times. Wow. And I never wrote another song. And then, believe it or not, I think I listened to this interview a couple months ago. I'm talking silly because I stopped watching as much as I could or should or not should or could. But I just stopped watching so much and I just started focusing on my passion, and I started songwriting again.
And then a couple of months I've created an album which is going to come out in... By the time this interview hits, my album will probably be out, and I never thought that I had it in me and I... it just work hasn't changed. I still do what I do on podcasting and everything else in running the business, but I just created extra time for me in something I loved that my passion and I surprised myself in coming up with songs that people love and a product that I never thought was possible simply because I changed my habits from viewing somebody else's creations to creating my own. It was just as simple as that. I didn't even know I had that in me. So that's why I say a couple of months ago, I was listening to this interview because I took that advice and it's that powerful.
DAVE: No. It's amazing. And congratulations on that. I look forward to hearing it when it comes out. Or I guess when other people are hearing this, maybe it is already out and it's, you know, it's spending that hour creating, as you said, instead of consuming. It's just kind of a choice.

INTERVIEW – PART 5 (AI, SEO, & THE FUTURE)
TONY: So, Dave, uh, last couple of things here as I want to go over AI. You've... you do a lot with AI. I like to understand better your business and talk about AI, and maybe it's something that we can look, look upon and focus for our business. It... Things have changed so much, so fast. I can't even get over the changes. So. But let's start here. Tell us about AI, the future, what you do and kind of like let's take it from there.
DAVE: Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, I was a beta tester for OpenAI. So I've seen the changes as they were coming out. So they started out with different models. Right now you've got ChatGPT and ChatGPT five and all those things, but started off with Ada and then Babbage and then Curie and then DaVinci, and then DaVinci two and DaVinci three and DaVinci three point five. Is ChatGPT. So that's how they name their models.
And so through this whole process, I was watching it change large language models. In particular, I was watching how it was changing, how it was getting better. I was trying to do with those earlier models what you can now do with ChatGPT, interact with it, chat with it, and have it write your content, whatever it may be that you're using it for.
And so what happened was when ChatGPT was released in November of twenty twenty two, some of our business was content for our clients on the marketing side. So it's a marketing agency, digital agency. And what happened was by January thirty first of twenty twenty three, so less than three months later, our content business went to zero. And losing all those clients and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of revenue was a big hit to us. And so I was like, okay, this is obviously going to impact me, and so how can I do this?
So I spent... I spent two weeks in February. I literally stopped working on anything except for AI. And I finally got caught up to where it was, you know, all the different options, not only ChatGPT, but what else was out there caught up. And then all of a sudden in March of twenty three, they released GPT four. I was like, okay, fine. So I had to learn more. I had to learn more things, and then all these different things started to come up. So I, I do training for the Canadian Marketing Association and the PRSA, which is the Public Relations Society of America, on AI and how you can use it in marketing and a few different things.
So as a result of that, what I did was I got good at how to use the tools, how to use AI. And as things started to change and evolve, one of the things we do in our business is SEO. And SEO historically is all about page authority. So if you're a... you're Starbucks, you just Google Starbucks, you're going to get some information about Starbucks and that'll show you there. If you if you Google a Starbucks near me, you're going to get three or four local results plus a map. Or if you Google Starbucks Frappuccino, the Frappuccino page is going to come up.
So the question in SEO has always been, "How do I get my Frappuccino page to show up? How do I get my Frappuccino page to rank?" That's basically the whole battle of SEO. And SEO is basically comes down to three things: technical SEO—so how well your website is, how good your website is from a machine perspective; content—so how good your website is from a person perspective; and then backlinks—so do other websites like your website. So that's really kind of... that's all SEO is. I know people try to like make it as crazy black box, but that's really as simple as it is.
When AI has come along, it changed from page authority, trying to get your Frappuccino page to rank, to entity authority. And what that basically means is what your online footprint looks like. So from a Starbucks perspective, there's all kinds of articles about Starbucks. There's things in the paper or the, you know, the virtual papers. There's all kinds of comments on Reddit. There's all kinds of things, questions that are asked on Quora, all these different independent third party resources that give Starbucks a really good footprint. And we call that their entity authority.
So in order to get found for through AI, you need to have good PR, you need to potentially maybe even have a Wikipedia page. You need to have the information about your site on different directories to be the same everywhere. Because if you move from one office to another, the machines may not know where you’re actual office address is, for example, and you really need to have what's called a knowledge graph. And a knowledge graph is something where it talks about how your website, what your website is about, how it relates to other things, and then think of it as kind of a website on top of your website, just for the machines. So you need to have all these things to really make your website accessible to the machines and show up in the ChatGPTs of the world. Because you said things are changing. Lots of people are just using ChatGPT as their search engine now. So we have to adapt. And that's what we do is we help people adapt, get their businesses shown on AI in the chat models and help them on that side of things.
CLOSING MESSAGE
TONY: Every entrepreneur I know eventually discovers the same truth. Success isn't just about intelligence, capital, or opportunity. It's about stewardship of time. Dave's story reminds us that time isn't guaranteed. It can vanish overnight through market crashes, illness, or events. We never saw coming, but when we recognize time as precious, everything sharpens. Focus improves. Distractions fall away. Purpose becomes clearer.
So here's the question to carry forward into the next part of this conversation. If you treated your time as your most valuable investment, what would you change starting tomorrow morning? Because businesses don't transform in a single breakthrough moment, they transform when leaders decide their time will no longer be spent by accident, but by design.
Before we continue, I just want to take a moment to thank you for being here. Thank you. Your time and attention truly matter to me, and I appreciate you choosing to spend part of your day with the Tony Durso show. If today's conversation is giving you something to think about, I invite you to follow the show and share it with someone who might benefit. That simple act helps these discussions reach more entrepreneurs and leaders who care about building something meaningful.
And if you're not already receiving my Elite Entrepreneurs newsletter, you're welcome to join us. A couple times a month, I share insights from conversations like this, along with practical ideas you can apply on your own journey. It's free, thoughtful, and designed to help you move forward with clarity and purpose. You'll find it at TonyDurso.com. And if you'd like to explore another creative side of what I do, you can hear my music anytime at TonyDurso.com.
All right, let's continue. I'm thinking with this because it's different. It's new and it keeps changing. For example, I see such a glut of posts on social media and I see more and more obviously fake information videos. I mean, it... I see we just watched the video last night because it was entertaining, but we recognized right away this is just fake news. It's just made up. But we got caught in the trap because of the title. Whatever it was, the title just caught our attention and I'm just thinking like, there's such a glut happening and I'm looking at I look at my future guests, I look at past guests, I look at, you know, big marketers in the industry, big podcasters, and I'll see where they put something out. Very little, very little views. I'll see that and I'll see where they put something out, which has a zillion, zillion views. And I know well they paid for advertising, but I see the change happening regardless of the size of the person showing.
I'm wondering what the future hold is for us. I mean, it's so hard to tell because back in the day when you and I were growing up, companies had ten, fifteen, twenty year strategy plans. Today, things change overnight. I'm not even sure what question to ask, Dave. Just. I just see so many changes happening. Maybe you're like, "Oh yeah, let me kind of frame a reference it this way," because I'm not sure where we're going to go. What do you think about all this?
DAVE: Yeah I agree one hundred percent. So one way to think about it is truth becomes very, very important truth. And your source of truth is super important. So take a look at your website. And that is the one thing you can control. You can't control what is on Facebook or any of the other YouTube or media or anything that else that could potentially be generated. But you can control what's on your website. So that should be your source of truth.
Whether you're an individual thought leader, whether or whether or not you have a business, your website is still just as important as it always was. And this isn't an outdated concept. This is talking about the future and truth. Because the machines... people lie to the machines even more. They lie to each other. So you need to have something where the machines can reference as a source of truth. So this is the knowledge graph that I was talking about. So one way to think about it is you build a website that has information for people, all the marketing fluff, all the information that makes them want to click and, you know, dig into things. You need to have another website that's a layer over top of that that's built for the machines. That's not as fluff. That is very factual, that's very much oriented for the machine, so that they can read and understand what your website is about with having without having to sift through three paragraphs or a page to understand, okay, you know, Dave and AOK Marketing, they do Geo or SEO for AI as an example.
So what you need to do... The reason why I say this is actually super important is you have a source of truth, but where things are going, I got a glimpse of most recently when Claude—Anthropic is one of the large language models, like a ChatGPT—they came out with something that was called Imagine with Claude, and what it was, as you would type, it would actually generate software for you based on whatever it is you were trying to do. So if you needed like a, I don't know, a calculator, it would actually build the calculator for you in software, and you could actually click on it and use it as a calculator.
So the reason why this is important is because not necessarily because of that, but because what we see, every pixel of what we see online is going to be generated for us. Right now, Google serves us up results basically based on our preferences, but we still see the web page that they reference for us. ChatGPT or whatever else builds and serves us the information that we ask it to, but it's generated a generated prompt result based on whatever we put into it.
So what happens when every pixel... So imagine opening up ChatGPT or a browser, you know your equivalent of your browser, and it never actually goes to the internet. It just generates the internet for you. So say you wanted to book a trip instead of actually going out to Expedia.com and finding the trip and bringing it back. It just generates the Expedia.com interface in your ChatGPT instance and says, "Here's this trip to Morocco. Would you like to book?" And then you can you can just say yes, and it'll book it for you because it has your payment information and your trip is done.
And you never visited Expedia.com, you never went to a hotel website, you never went to that airplane. You know, the flights, you never did any of that. You were all inside the ChatGPT interface, and you could have that ChatGPT interface look like you're on The Simpsons. It could be generated to look like you're in The Matrix. It could look like, you know, ancient script, whatever you want it to look like, it will know your preferences, and it will take the information it finds and render it, present it to you in whatever way you want to see it.
So it's even more important today to make sure that your site is searchable, discoverable, and the machines know exactly what you have on that site because they're going to take that site even though you spend all that time on that beautiful website, they're going to take it and they're just going to take the information. They're going to present it to other people the way the other people want to see it. So that's the future that I see. Not too far off in the distance. And so we'll see whether or not that actually comes true. But I've got some heavy bets going that way.
TONY: I am going to think about that quite a bit more and, and look at my website in, in that regards. I really, really appreciate that. That's a very good look at a possible future and it makes good sense. Once again, this is Dave Burnett with talking about his resilient rise. We've talked about from being the hockey enforcer to AI driven entrepreneurial leadership. And you can find him at AOKMarketing.com. Very, very thought provoking, very deep here because this is our future and what's going on. We didn't... we didn't expect some of the things that have happened and things are going to change even faster. So I'm definitely going to look into that. Dave, I just want to thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about that and getting us stimulated on this and what is going to happen to our future, because it's not going to be the same tomorrow. It's just not going to be the same. Things are going to change. So I like that. It was very good. Thank you so much, sir.
DAVE: Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And yeah, it's I'm grateful that you have me on the show. And hopefully some people that listen to this got a little bit out of it. But the only other thing I could say is everybody needs to play around with AI, whatever your comfort level is, you know, you heard about some toys, there's some different things out there. You know, when I say toys, I mean different AI programs and things. There's some great websites out there that you can test things. And, you know, if you're looking to play, just just spend some time and play. That'll really help you out.
I mean, we actually built something called LLMs.com where you can actually find your own AI visibility as a person or as a, as a company. So those are some of the ways that we're adapting to it. But I love to see the way different people take this potential future and adapt for themselves. So thank you so much for having me on, Dave.
TONY: Are we going to be are we going to find your link to that AI site? Is that through AOKMarketing.com we'll be able to kind of get a glimpse on that?
DAVE: No, it's actually a different site. So you just go to LLMs.com and it's its own it's its own site. And you can sign up there for free and run three reports and get insights as to what is going on and how your competitors are doing and how you're doing with AI. Because the other thing is, when you actually search for yourself on AI, you've actually done some training for your particular model that you're using. If you use ChatGPT, it knows you, it knows what you want to see. So it'll give you slightly different answers than it would give me or would give you. Tony, you know, as opposed to the people listening. So having an independent third party that's connected into the API, which is what we do to make sure that we get as unbiased information as possible to see what the actual machines, what they actually know is very important at this stage.
TONY: Oh. Thank you. You dropped. You dropped a bombshell. I'm going to go check that out. Dave. Thank you. Once again I sincerely appreciate it.
DAVE: Thank you, thank you. Bye.
TONY: Wow that was amazing. So much good advice. I'm definitely going to check out that site. What do you think guys? Was that good? Great. Great conversation with Dave. Okay, do us a favor. If you like this, share this with your friends. Tell them about Dave. Tell them about AI. Tell them about this. LL... If I have that right, I'm going to listen to this again. Make sure I have that written down. Right.
Just amazing what he's been through. This just shows that no matter what has happened, you can still push through and persevere and become extremely successful. It's just a difference between wanting to do it and not. And yes, there's hard work and yes, there's a lot of things. So I may make it sound simple, but it can be done. So please, I recommend checking this out.
Again, going through this and wherever you are getting this guys, please follow the show. It helps to bring more amazing guests to you. It's totally free and it helps us grow. All right, let's use this and let's help you move on your journey to success. Things to remember. Just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. We talked a lot about that today, so good seeds do good deeds and I'll see you on the next episode.



SONG INTRO & FULL SONG LYRICS – “IN GOD WE TRUST”
TONY:
Before we close today’s episode, I want to share something special with you. This is my 
Brand-new song, inspired by four powerful words printed on every US coin and every dollar. 
It’s called “In God We Trust.”
Walking by a bus stop
Not even a book
Feeling everything is just plain old stuck
A dime on the ground
I held it to the light
What it said restored my sight
In God we trust
The words shine through
Guiding my steps in all I do
Through trials and storms
I find my place
In God we trust
Amazing grace
Yeah
I took the next bus
Though my pocket had no fare
I told the driver my life
With a humble prayer
He gave a smile
And said, go on son
I knew then
That my hope had begun
In God we trust
The words shine through
Guiding my steps in all I do
Through trials and storms
I find my place
In God we trust
Amazing grace
I found a diner
With a crowd at the door
And asked the kind lady
If I could do more
She smiled and said
You can stay if you try
with a dime in my hand
I whispered on high
When the road feels heavy
And hope runs thin
That coin reminds me
Where faith begins
One small coin
Yeah
The truth so wide
In God we trust forever
My God
In God we trust
The words shine through
Guiding my steps in all I do
Through trials and storms
I find my place
In God we trust
Amazing grace
Forever we sing
In God we trust
Forever we say
In God we trust

FINAL CLOSING / SIGN-OFF
TONY: And that is In God We Trust. The song that truly came to me as a gift from God. I hope you enjoy it and I'd love to hear your feedback. Thank you for listening and thank you for spending this time with me today. I hope this episode and this song gives you something meaningful to take with you. And by the way, this song is part of my very first album, which is now out. If you want to hear more of the new music, visit TonyDurso.com/music. That's TonyDurso.com/music.