On this episode of Escaping the Drift, we sit down with David Royce: founder of Aptiv, EY National Entrepreneur of the Year, and the man who turned a college summer job spraying for bugs into a nine figure exit to private equity.

Before selling Aptiv for a number that made hundreds of his employees six and seven figure earners, David was a broke BYU finance student who sold zero pest control contracts in his first five days on the job. He went to a bookstore, bought half a dozen sales classics from Zig Ziglar to Brian Tracy, committed to 90 minutes of reading a day, and finished that summer as the top rookie in the entire company.

In this episode, David opens up about the moment his boss casually mentioned selling his pest control business to Terminex for 10 million dollars, the ego he had to swallow to walk away from a Wall Street M&A career, and the white collar approach to a blue collar industry that built one of the fastest growing service companies in America.

We dive into why the secret about unsexy industries is they have sexy margins, the Wall Street Journal data showing 43% of the top 0.1% of earners own boring businesses, and why door to door still grows companies seven to ten times faster than digital marketing. He breaks down the surgical software his team built to knock the right neighborhoods, the customization touches that separated Aptiv from every other pest control company, and why he gave 25% of the company away to his managers on the way out.

If you have ever sat in a white collar job wondering what AI is about to do to your career, this conversation will hand you the playbook the wealthy have been quietly running for decades.

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💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space.

➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company.

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