Adam Torres and Damion Lupo discuss FrameTec.
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Show Notes:
What role does failure play on the road to success? In this episode, Adam Torres and Damion Lupo, Founder & CIO at FrameTec, explore Damion’s journey as an entrepreneur and FrameTec.
About Damion Lupo
Damion Lupo, Chief Investment Officer, brings a dynamic blend of experience in private equity real estate, entrepreneurship, and finance. His career is marked by a passion for innovation and a deep understanding of market dynamics.
About FrameTec
FrameTec™ is a pioneering manufacturing and framing services provider revolutionizing the construction industry through innovation, robotics, AI, sustainability, and efficiency.
With state-of-the-art facilities and a patented process, FrameTec™ employs human-in-the-loop automation to expertly manufacture roof trusses, floor trusses, and exterior and interior wall panels. By combining automated manufacturing, direct shipment of finished products to the build site, and on-site framing services, FrameTec™ accelerates construction timelines—erecting structures in days rather than weeks.
Through a vertically integrated and patented process, FrameTec™ seamlessly incorporates robotics and AI to take projects from design to vertical construction without the need for an additional framing contractor. This approach exponentially enhances quality, precision, and efficiency over traditional framing methods.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I have a return guest on the show. I saw his name come up on the list.
I’m like, wait a minute, I know Damien. I have Damien Lupo coming back onto the show. He’s founder and CIO over at FrameTec. Damien, welcome back to the show, man. That’s good. It’s good to hear your voice. Good to be back. How? Well, you hear my voice all the time because I’m one of your favorite podcasts to listen to.
It’s okay. Joking, Damien. Just you and Joe Rogan, man. Just you guys. Come on. Thank you. Thank you. So I feel like I’m looking back at my record, man. I think the last time you were on here was maybe like 2021 or 2022. A lot has happened. I know on our end over the last couple of years, I’m sure for yourself as well.
Man, where do you want to start? Like, what have you been up to? You know, it’s interesting that time goes by really fast and I’ve noticed that what I popped my head up and I looked around and I was visiting Austin like year and a half ago. And I was like, this place is completely changed because I hadn’t been there in a few years.
And I said, what, what happened? Three years went by and what happened was I got really deeply, narrowly focused on something that was really big, big vision. And I just went deep into it. Yeah. And time just went by because I was obsessed and passionate and, had this huge purpose and this, vision with a world class team and time changed.
and so that been what’s really happened. I’ve noticed my time experience has changed because the level of, impact and, this obsession has been higher than I’ve ever had in my entire life. That changes everything when you can find that. Hey, man, I got goosebumps over here. Get into the obsession, man.
Tell us what you’ve been working on. So, a few years ago, I had, some friends come out and, say, hey, we’ve, got this idea. These guys have an idea to solve the housing crisis. And I said, all right, I mean, that’s, cool. I’d love to see what you’re talking about. And we looked at this idea, and the idea was we have a new way to, frame houses, and it will literally speed the process up by four times, and, it’ll do it.
Way better quality and it’ll do it with 99 percent less waste. And I was like, okay, that’s cool. So what how can I help? And they said, well, we need 40 million. And I said. All right. You know what? I like this. Let me, let me meet these guys. So ended up meeting with these operators and sat down and I was like, you know what?
You guys are the exact right people that I want to be in partnership with. I said, and this is over like a lunch meeting. I just sat there and, what it was, is it was, it was 70 plus companies and 30 years of business knowing that from my experience, the right people are what makes the deal work, not the idea.
And what I was sitting in front of was the right people to execute. And I said, you guys have your money. And so my, community and I came to the table and so far, we put about a hundred million into it and we have a, we turned that napkin into the future framing and now we’re producing and expanding into Texas and out of Arizona.
And we’re, we’re literally going to solve the housing crisis. Like that is a very cool thing to be a part of man. No wonder why you have been on the show. Thank you about time to get back on the show to let us know that and announce it. I’m in what I want to go back and stay in that early days just a little bit longer.
And I’ll tell you where I’m going with this one. A lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives, a lot of some, some that are, you know, first time, or they’re thinking about things like, how did you. No, like, how did you have such conviction at that time? Like, this is, you know what, this is it for, for you that you’re going to spend a significant amount of time on that.
I’m just curious There is no, you know, unfortunately, there’s no hack where you can’t read a book by Tim Ferriss. And I love that guy. And I love this book, especially the first one, right? The four hour week, week, work week. I’m like, that’s great. I can hack and I learned some good things. But what has happened is I’ve realized over the last 30 years that there is no shortcut.
Okay. To creating wealth and creating impact and understanding business and how to execute and how to all the things that have happened the last three years were set up by the previous 25 years of all the bumblings and all the mistakes and all the trauma and the blood and the mud. And so it was, it was relatively simple and straightforward when you, once you have the emotional intelligence and you have the scar tissue and you have the cellular memory of doing things, then when you meet guys and they say, we’ve got this thing and you understand this is the right team.
It’s really easy to pull the trigger. If you haven’t been through the things and learned the things and stepped on your own stuff, you really don’t, you don’t have the confidence to make that decision. So when I said, you’ve got your 40 million dollars for this 1st plant, I knew I was certain that these are the right.
People to execute, but it took all the other things, all the other businesses that didn’t work and the lessons and the trauma. Yeah, you have to go through that stuff and people kind of just want to shortcut that. But that’s not how it works. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I want to shortcut it still. Sure. Yeah. No doubt.
Everybody wants everybody impatient right now. No, it’s, a natural tendency. We were impatient. We’re greedy. We’re like, we have all these things, but that if you understand the principles. Yeah. Of how wealth is created and how freedom is created. There’s a process. And the cool part, Adam, is that anybody can do that if you’re willing to do the work.
And so it’s not like, Oh, well, they’re smarter than me or they’re wealthier than me. And so they, it must be easy for them. No, you just have to decide that I’m going to stick with something, be resilient, do the work. And there’s literally no glass ceiling. You can just take yourself wherever you want to go.
Yeah talk to me a little bit more about that in terms of like your, your mindset around money and, and that concept, like your, your, what, like what built this foundation for you? Like the confidence, like to be able to do that. There’s a shift. 25 years ago, my focus was on going out and, and buying real estate, making money.
It was, it was, it was. Really money focused and in that process the first 10 years. I was out there in the real world adulting I lost I had made many millions of dollars and then I lost it ended up losing 25 million bucks and being homeless and And it was going through that process and somebody told me in the beginning They said you need to go bankrupt a couple times then call me and we can work together And I was like that’s stupid and I didn’t realize how much wisdom they had that you’ve got to go through some stuff And part of the reason you go through this stuff is you learn what’s real and what’s real is that when you start focusing on other people’s benefits, when you focus externally versus internally on your own stuff, the money becomes a side effect that will overwhelm you in terms of how much is created, but if you’re focusing on money, it’ll never be enough and you’ll never, the universe won’t conspire with you.
It’ll conspire against you. So it’ll be hard. It’ll be a grind. The moment you shift gears and you start saying, okay, how can I serve more people to my greatest potential? It’s unbelievable. Both. I mean, it’s truly crazy that you see this, this wealth impact. Other people get more and you just end up with this side effect of, wealth and freedom and money and, that’s, the biggest shift focusing on other people versus yourself.
You’ll get taken care of. Zig said it. If you help enough enough other people get what they want, you can have anything you want. Love Zig. Thank you. You made my day, man. I like a good zig reference. It’s great. Damien, what understanding we have this process, there’s a lot of things that we, there’s no magic, you know, magic thing that’s going to get take anybody at the top had to go to the top with the ZIG reference.
That being said, if there was something that you could go back and you could say you avoid that, you know, you could pay forward on that, what would that be? the biggest thing is your environment. It’s, like, if you put yourself in a toxic environment, you’re going to end up with cancer. You’re going to end up with bad thoughts.
You’re going to, it’s going to be a mess and you’re going to be poor. Like it’s just going to be a bad deal. The moment you take yourself out of the environment, and I’m talking about where you are, where you physically are and where, where you, where you mentally are, and this has everything to do with the people.
The thing that I would say is take yourself out of the equation with the other, the wrong people and find the right people. And people say, well, what does that mean? What it means is. Figure out who you’re spending all your dang time with, both physically and who you’re listening to. If you’re sitting there watching the news six hours a day, and you’re hanging out with your high school friends, and they’re all at a certain level, and you want to go beyond that, you’re in trouble.
Like, the moment you say, I’m going to go spend more time with people that are where I want to be. And I’m going to start absorbing their, thinking and they’re doing, it’s kind of like this osmosis. If you’re around people that are 10 times wealthier and 10 times fitter than you, you’re going to end up being a lot fitter and a lot wealthier in a few years because it’ll naturally become your norm.
Yeah, that’s great. I like it. Environment. Environment’s so important and thinking about where you’re at, how you’re at. And that is a good one. I mean, I think, I think that was one that I knew pretty early on. And I think it was just lack of knowledge. I was just always kind of hungry. And like, I want like, man, I just something I don’t know here.
Like, other people are doing this. How come I can’t right? Like, somebody’s got the knowledge. Where is it? And how do I get it? Yeah. And you know what? There’s a key to that because it’s the knowledge is important. The experience of doing something like you can go and get a PhD and understand how economics work and you can be broke.
Like one of my buddies 25 years ago, his father was a PhD and they were on food stamps. His father never went and did anything with it. So the education and the knowledge it was interesting, but it wasn’t the most important thing. It was it was the execution. It was the action on on the stuff and then you develop wisdom and that’s the difference between coaching and mentors.
Mentors have done it. Coaches have great information. But when you say, yeah. What’s your instinct? They don’t have instincts. They have techniques. Mentors have instincts because they’ve actually experienced what you’re talking about. That’s what you want to get yourself to the point where you have the emotional intelligence and that literal cellular DNA where somebody asks you a question or you’re presented with a situation or an opportunity.
When those guys sat down and said, well, here’s what we need. We need 40 million. It wasn’t an academic thinking or a logical process. It was instinct. I said, Yeah, I’m putting up my money and my, community is going to go for this because they’re going to trust that I’ve done, I’ve done things and I’m coming to the table with decades of experience.
And so everybody followed that if I had just said, well, I’m real smart. Nobody would have followed it. Nobody would have done it. But that’s that’s the difference. And let’s reflect on it a little bit longer. So that I, that concept of being resourceful. and it doesn’t have to be just related to money and raising money, but just resourcefulness in general.
How does that, how does that play a role for what you’re doing? It goes back to this question that the age old question, or at least the one that I, I remember a long time ago, the question was, how can I do something instead of saying, I can’t it’s our mind shut down. As soon as we say, oh, you know, that’s expensive.
I can’t afford that car or I can’t do that thing. Or, you know, I can’t ask that girl out or that guy out. Because I can’t. And the moment you change the question, you say, how could I do that? It’s a very powerful thing because your mind is like the ultimate supercomputer. And what’s what’s funny is you can take it to an extreme and get yourself in trouble where you’re like, Oh, I can do anything.
And then you get you do things you shouldn’t do. So there’s two questions. How can I and should I do that? And when you’re thinking about the purpose behind something, like, should you go do the thing that’s going to change the world for the better? Should you go ask that person out? Should you go put that donut in your face?
No, you should not. How can you add that donut to your plate? Easy. But should you? No. So you, there’s a combination of, being honest about what matters to you and then your, your resource, resourcefulness happens automatically when you ask that one question. How could I do this? It’s unfreaking real what your mind will come up with and all the resources that will show up.
It’s like providence. It just happens when you ask that question. Man, Damian, this has been a lot of fun having you back on the show. I’m liking this. And I’m excited to continue to watch the, journey of this particular project for you frame tech and the work that you’re doing to solve the housing crisis.
I mean, this is a great story. People are listening to this or watching this and they want to follow up. They want to connect with you and your team. They want to learn more about frame tech or just, or any of your entrepreneurial ventures. How do they do that? You can check out frametec.com, FrameTec.
com and actually, you know what, normally I shouldn’t do this terrible idea, but I’m going to do it anyway, I want to give you guys an opportunity. I wrote this book. It’s a 10 page book. It’s it’s the 10 steps to 10 million and it’s literally a 10 minute read and I wrote this thing based on taking myself from zero to millions back to negative 5 million and then going to 10 and really, and then over 100.
So I created these, this 10 step process and I did this because there’s principles and if you follow the principles, no matter what you’re trying to do, it’ll allow you to exponentially grow. And so I want you guys to download this. It’s at turnkeyretirement. com. You’ll download it. You’ll stay in the loop.
I’ll be able to email you and share things that I’m doing, frame tech and all that. But really, this is an opportunity for you guys in 10 minutes to get to understand the principles and then apply some things that will change your life based on actual real life experience, stuff that I’ve done been through.
It’s not theory. This is real world. Perfect. And how do people connect? Let’s leave that again. Turnkeyretirement. com. Just go grab that thing and you’ll, be connected to me and I’ll be able to communicate and you’ll be able to email me back. Perfect. So really easy way to stay connected.
Wonderful. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put that website in the show notes. So you can just click on the notes and the link and just head right on over. And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Damien, man, welcome, welcome back on the show and thanks again for coming on. Thanks Adam.
It’s been a pleasure.