How to Start a Company with Dimitry Toukhcher

In this insightful discussion with luxury bespoke tailor Dimitri Toukhcher, we explore his journey building a global fashion brand worth millions. Dimitri shares tactics that helped him close huge sales, emphasizing boldness, rapport building, and reading people.

He contends most success stems from learned skills - not innate traits. We cover why direct sales develops critical expertise like handling rejection, turning strangers into friends, and “selling yourself.” Dimitri argues universities increasingly fail at teaching these social competencies crucial for influence and leadership.

Overall an eye-opening look at timeless methods for getting ahead in business and life. Mastering human relationships unlocks doors nothing else can.

Dimitri Toukhcher: [00:00:00] See people over plan and under execute. I was all about execution. The first day I went out, I had no fabrics. I had, I bought a magazine with some suit pictures, literally at a home hardware order book.

I went into Blake's law firm in Alberta. I was cold calling. I had five meetings. I ended up with six sales. Cause on my way out after five sales, I met someone in the elevator that we ended up going to a boardroom and they bought some stuff as well. So I put up about 40, 000 worth of orders my first week.

Again, I had no product, no sample, just a magazine.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, this is Malcolm Collins here with Dimitri. I actually met you when we were recording for Just Pearly Things. Oh no, before that, at the ARC conference he runs LGMG, which is the company that makes things like Jordan Peterson suits, if you're familiar with those sort of wacky suits, but they also make, you know, more conservative outfits as well.

So, so worth checking out and what I wanted to do with this episode, because we've had some episodes on how to like make money or start companies which are our listeners seem to really like. And [00:01:00] you went from my understanding being an encyclopedia salesman to building this, this quite large company.

I'd love it if you could walk through the process of that.

Dimitri Toukhcher: So every company is a little bit different, right? Like when people say like, what does the CEO do? How did you start your company? There's not one sort of formula that everybody follows, you know, in our case, we're a direct sales company. So, you know, when I was in university and our company is LGFG, it's like, it just stands for look good, feel good, lgfg.

com. So when I was in university, um, I just, I needed a way to make some money. And I guess, you know, not everybody. Not everybody responds the same to authority, like, in my case, coming from the USSR, like, authority wasn't sexy to me, and so going into a very large company, like, I did a co op term for the government of Canada, working in public works and government services, and I despised working in a government office, it was just so slow, and everybody was so mediocre, and slovenly, and, and just, you know, lazy.

Malcolm Collins: I want to hear more about working in the government to start, because I, [00:02:00] I started my career working at, like, a, a cubicle office? No, it was a start up, but it was... Dramatically more efficient than when I worked in like, even academia. Like academia was slow. I've heard like government, government work is even worse.

Can you talk about like office structure?

Dimitri Toukhcher: What happened? Well, lemme, lemme tell you a couple examples. Like, I'll tell you my personal experiences. They may be anecdotal, but these are my experiences. So like, I was a sequel coder, so I was supposed to design like an online intranet portal where government workers from our department could log in and view.

So this, this government department built like roads and bridges and things like that. And we had to compare like the budget that was set for us for the year versus the budget that we actually spent and we Needed to be able to query it very quickly, right? And so about two months in I finished all the sequel stuff and and We launched the thing and we started searching like month by month and we could see that we were for the year Dramatically under budget, which was great.

wHich was great. And then my my my supervisor who was like the department head She was like Hey I see that we're like 200, 000 under budget for [00:03:00] the year. I was like, this is great. She's like, my God, we're going to have to get the best pizza party ever. And I thought she was joking and she wasn't. We had like a month of just pizza parties.

She literally said, we need to spend 200, 000 so that we get the same budget next year, otherwise they'll lower our budget. Yeah, I was like, this is taxpayer money. Like I'm not at this point. I'm like 22, but I understand you're just throwing taxpayer money away. This is just wasteful. She's like, yeah, but like, they'll give us a lower budget.

I'm like, can you imagine if you're a CEO of a company and it's your money and your company's money? And your employee spends 200, 000 on pizza in a month. It

Malcolm Collins: was wild. As some larger companies begin to develop policies like this, like if they get so large and bureaucratic and regulated, like you're talking like the airline industry or something and, and this is just wildly inefficient.

It's one of the things that my wife, she's running, she'll be running for office in this next cycle. She wants to replace a large portion of local government with AI to like use AI crawlers to detect this type of behavior. In budget systems, but like, I, I completely [00:04:00] agree with what you're talking about.

That's horrifying, but it's a good place to start because we're starting with like the least efficient corporate structures. Now, what did you do after that? Yeah.

Dimitri Toukhcher: So, so, so kind of concurrently in my summertime, I got recruited to sell encyclopedias door to door, which was a completely opposite experience.

So now instead of, you know, being in an office with many, many people, lots of bureaucracy, things move slowly and nothing really seems to happen ever. I'm outside by myself knocking on doors and I either, you know, get chased off a porch or if I do my, you know, if I execute at a high level, I'll get a check right there then on the spot because it's like, you know, you knock, you show, you sell, you take a check, you're done, right?

Yeah. And so this is like the complete opposite. And obviously the results come very, very quickly in direct sales because, you know, right away, if you're, if you're moving forward or you're not. And so that experience, I did that for, I ended up doing that for six years. I actually bought my first home in Vancouver when I was a third year student at UBC, um, because I'd done so well in door to door sales.

Right. So I learned, I learned a skill that was very, very useful, which is the skill to be able to sell a product to a person. [00:05:00] And, by the way, leave that person quite happy at that transaction, because, you know, they have a long cancellation policy in Canada, and I didn't seem to have a lot of cancellations, so people like the transaction.

I'm like, this is good. And so when I finished my university degrees, I was like, okay, I have

Malcolm Collins: one before we go further. I want to, I want to stick on this point for a bit. Encyclopedias. I feel like our younger listeners may not know what those are.

Dimitri Toukhcher: So, I mean, this was a, this was a condensed encyclopedia, but there are books that basically like give you information.

Our case, what we were selling were more like study guides for school, l