Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Fri, 04 Apr 2025
How do you make the best decisions, maintain company culture as your business grows, and attract and retain incredible talent? Serial entrepreneur, business founder, and bestselling author Darius Mirshahzadeh believes the answer lies in core values. By properly leveraging and implementing core values within your company, your teams will speak the same language, make better decisions, build a thriving culture, and scale to incredible success. In this episode, Hala and Darius discuss his unique journey into entrepreneurship, how to build a core value-driven organization, Darius’s six core values, the difference between good and bad core values, and the Scale M.A.P. Method for business growth. In this episode, Hala and Darius will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:12) Meet Darius: Entrepreneurial Beginnings (02:48) Lessons from a Hardworking Father (04:49) A Life-Changing Loss (08:01) Interning at the White House (17:48) The Birth of Twin Capital Brokerage (21:39) Struggles and Resilience in Business (25:01) Building The Money Source (29:41) Stepping Down as CEO (35:09) Travel Plans Disrupted by COVID-19 (35:50) The Accidental Personal Brand (36:05) Introduction to Core Values (38:16) The Importance of Core Values in Business (41:52) Personal Core Values (45:30) Creating a Core Value Driven Organization (50:11) Developing Core Values for Startups (52:12 The Scale Map Method (01:01:09 Bootcamp and Mastermind Programs Darius Mirshahzadeh is a high-growth CEO, serial entrepreneur, and culture-building mad scientist who was ranked #9 on Glassdoor’s list of Top CEOs of Small and Medium Companies in the US. He is the author of the bestselling book, The Core Value Equation, and the host of The Greatness Machine podcast. Darius has led organizations that have won numerous Stevie awards, been named “#3 Best Place to Work” by the San Francisco Business Times, and have landed at #40 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies. Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify OpenPhone: Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at openphone.com/profiting Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - Receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold Factor - Get 50% off your first box plus free shipping at factormeals.com/factorpodcast Rakuten - Save while shopping at rakuten.com Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free, at aka.ms/profiting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at linkedin.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services - yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Entrepreneurs, side hustle, Startup, Starting a business, Passive income, Online business, Solopreneur, Founder, Networking, Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset.
Chapter 1: Who is Darius Mirshahzadeh and what are his entrepreneurial beginnings?
Super hyped to be here. You're my good friend. Always happy to have my friends on the show. You are a serious serial entrepreneur. You have so much to say about the peaks and pitfalls of entrepreneurship. And I can't wait to get your core value insights and more information about your scale map methodology. So
From my research, I found out that you've had an entrepreneurial spirit from the very beginning. Your dad was an immigrant from Iran, literally the epitome of the American dream. He was an entrepreneur. He had many gas stations, real estate businesses. Did you always know you were going to follow in his footsteps and become an entrepreneur?
Chapter 2: What life lessons did Darius learn from his father?
You know, like half of me wanted to do that. And the other half of me wanted to like become an actor and a comedian on Saturday Night Live. Like if you had asked me when I was 18, I was like, actually, I wanted to be Howard Stern. So like, which is not ironic that now I love podcasting. But yeah, no, I was like business and like enjoying experiences with people were like my two things. So yeah.
Yeah, I know. I always felt like an affinity towards I love making money and I love selling. I was always like the kid that would win the candy selling competitions. I mean, crush those competitions. So for me, like starting a business or was not like this far out idea that was kind of a natural next step for sure.
Yeah. And I think that's a lot different from a lot of the immigrants that grew up in America. A lot of their parents, you know, had regular jobs or were doctors or engineers or and kind of were told to follow in that traditional path. And so your father, he taught you that you don't make the money selling the gas, you make the money selling the gas station.
So talk to us about some of the entrepreneurial lessons that your father taught you.
So my dad was old school, born in 1939 in Esfahan, Iran. His father was a business person, was a really successful business person. He was kind of like ADD business guy. I mean, some of it was a victim of circumstances. There was a revolution in Iran. He moved here. He had to support his family. Didn't have a great speaking of the language, although he did get his MBA in the United States.
He came here late in life. So for him, that's how he had to support his family. And again, he grew up around entrepreneurs. So for him to start gas stations and do real estate and stuff like that was not unusual. My mom was a social worker, which is the other end of the spectrum, who worked for the county.
Smart lady, social worker, father that's getting up and building his own businesses every day. When you see that, you're like, oh, that's an option. Like going to college. I mean, both my parents had their master's degree. So going to college was not that was definitely an expectation as well. But I remember my dad would always say, like, I'm building these for you guys.
And now I had to go to work in the gas station at a young age, too. He was like, hey, you're 10. Great. You're going to work. So my summer vacations and I grew up in upper middle class, Southern California. So all my friends were like going to summer camp and, you know, having fun and going to like the water parks and the magic mountain and six flags and stuff like that.
And I'm like legitimately putting on a Texaco t-shirt, getting up and going to work at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Cause my dad's gas stations were kind of outside of LA and in a hundred degree heat cleaning gas station bathrooms when I was 10. So it wasn't a very glamorous entrance in the world of business. It was like, oh, this is what running your own business is.
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Chapter 3: How did a White House internship shape Darius's career path?
That's just how it is. And that's how it kind of was in our culture. family. And so I was either working at the gas station, or I was working around the house. And so it wasn't like this, like me and my dad throwing baseball in the backyard. I don't think I threw one ball with my dad. It was always business. And but yeah, he did not take care of himself.
And when I was 18, he got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And by the time I was 2021, his MS had gotten really bad, it turned into dementia. And He loves cigarettes. My dad was like an avid smoker. He ended up getting diagnosed with lung cancer in my senior year of college.
And so I saw this person who was a workaholic, who was all about business, who basically by the time I was old enough to maybe have a relationship, because again, in that old school culture, you start to have a relationship with your dad like when you're a man. He was downward trending really quickly then. And it was my 22nd birthday. My dad got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
And we didn't even tell him he had it because he had such bad dementia at that point. And he passed away in August of that same year. So yeah, it was hard. And there was mixed emotions. I had a pretty complicated relationship with my dad because of how I was describing our background together. And some people would say, my dad was my best friend. And I was like, yeah, not me and my dad.
I respected him. He was a hard guy and he was hardcore. And so to lose your dad at that young of an age is hard for anybody. But it just gave me an insight into life's short. And I had lost my grandmother when I was 14. She was 62. My dad was 60 when he passed away. My mom was 48 when my dad passed away. She got diagnosed with cancer right after that.
So by the time I was 22, I had lost my grandmother, my dad, and my mom was a survivor of cancer. And so I had set a really different perspective, which was, I don't want to live a life that I just go work my ass off, and then 20 years, 30, 40 years from now, I'm done. And it was, hey, how can I live a much more engaged life? And I didn't really understand that then.
It wasn't until much later that I realized that that's why I kind of got into some of the things that we're going to talk about around
values and purpose and how do you be live and engage life but for me that was a lesson taught at a young age which is hey life's short and you need to go and like make it happen and really make the most of your time because you're gonna blink and it's gonna be over with
Yeah, and we'll definitely get more into your purpose and all of your core values and things later on to learn more about your philosophy on life, basically. Your later years in college, you ended up working at the White House. You worked as an intern for the Bill Clinton administration. And so you've got some amazing stories with this internship.
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Chapter 4: How did Darius Mirshahzadeh build Twin Capital Brokerage?
So I'm in this department doing total admin work. And I was like, there's got to be a better way than this. So my business self's like, all right, how do I get out of this work? And I figured out that the interns have a president of the interns. And so I run for president of the interns.
This is so like me. Like, I feel like we're so similar, but go ahead.
It's me versus, and by the way, there's two groups of people in this internship program. A ton of kids from Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a ton of people from Arkansas, and then me. And I go to UC, and they're like, I'm a smart guy. I'd probably go to an Ivy League if I applied myself, but I didn't. I went to UC Santa Barbara, which is like a party school.
And I'm there, and it's me versus this nerd. And by the way, I'm graduating college. So a lot of the people are younger than me. So I'm 22. Most of the people there are probably 20. So I'm 22. I'm definitely way cooler than the kid I'm running against, who's this kid from Harvard. And I just crush him and win. And I become president of the interns.
And this was something I realized when I was in high school, because when I became president of my class and vice president of my school, I got to get out of everything because I was the liaison for the teachers. And I'm like, oh, this is the way to do it. You go become it's like student leadership, but for the interns.
And I ended up spending the whole summer putting on throwing parties for interns and social events and organizing them. And it was, it made a really boring job, a really fun job. The part that answer your question though, is, is I realized I was doing this admin work. This is my third internship that I had. And I called my mom up and I go, mom, I had a realization. She said, what's that?
I said, I am never going to have a job as long as I live. And I said, the only way I will ever have a job where I'm not the boss, and let's use the White House, for example, is if I was president of the United States. So it was this epiphany that like, I have to be the boss.
And literally in this job in the White House, I said, I would never work for the White House again, unless I was president of the United States. Now I'm 22. Maybe I'd take an advisor role now if they wanted me. But yeah, it was a really eye-opening experience to be at this top-of-the-game, best internship that you could have in the whole world and to say, I don't want to do this.
I want to work for myself. But yeah, it was a cool experience.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Darius face with Twin Capital Brokerage during the 2007 financial crisis?
And I held my ground for a second. And then I was like, look, I'm sorry. I apologized. And they basically let me off. And they did not fire me. And I think, honestly, the only reason I didn't get fired was because my father was so sick. But I was like, this is such bureaucratic bullshit. And I ended up leaving a few days later. But yeah, it was it was really eye opening.
I was like, wow, this is like weird that you would give this big thing to go work for free and not get the one thing you want and have no control over it and do all this admin work. And I was at this great opportunity. And yet all I saw that it wasn't a good fit for me. And at that moment, I sat down and I said, I am 100% unemployable. Like I can never have a job.
And it was this thing where I was like, if I ever take a job, it'll be to figure out what they do to go do it for myself. And I was 100% convinced of it. And it never changed after that ever.
I love this story so much. And I know I keep saying I'm like relating so much to your story because when I was 22, I was also like president of the interns at a radio station. And also I got fired. You didn't get fired, but I got fired for putting like a text message and sending a text message to my coworker that got went viral across the station. And I got fired. You didn't.
But we did the same thing when we were 22. Because when you're 22 and you're feeling unfair and you're ambitious and driven like us, you kind of just go haywire sometimes and make mistakes. But hey, it taught you that you didn't belong in that kind of environment and that you wanted to actually work for yourself and not work for free and be treated unfairly.
So there were some good lessons, I think, that you got out of that.
Yeah. You know, also like this is 2000. So being 22 and being like, I'm going to go be an entrepreneur in the year 2000 was not normal. That was really rare. Right. And so it was a great lesson to learn, but it was very rare. And it was a gift that led me to be able to then go and build.
Yeah. And so speaking of that, you built your first business with your twin brother called Twin Capital Brokerage. And by the time you're 25 years old, you built an Inc. 500 company and you were the 40th fastest growing company in the US. So that's crazy. Tell us about how you started that business with your brother.
I moved back home after my father passed away. We had this event promotion business. It tanked. It was the first business I ever had that lost $100,000, which is like, that's a lot of money to lose when you're 22. But I lost that business. My brother was in the mortgage business. So I have a twin brother. I was always kind of like the student leader jock and he was like the troublemaker.
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Chapter 6: How did Darius grow The Money Source into a major player in the mortgage industry?
So Naval Ramakant says, you need to pick the right space to be in. And that space was a dead space and it was broken and I just couldn't win in it. But I just didn't have any quit. So I just kept fighting for it. I was standing on a broken foundation.
So knowing what I know now, it was, there was a lot of time and anguish spent and there was opportunities all around me that I was, I was living in San Francisco. So what was happening in 09, 10, and 11 in San Francisco? Airbnb, Uber. You go down the list of all these amazing companies that were born then, and I'm over here getting my teeth kicked in in this space that's just demolished.
And so was it the right thing to do? I don't know. Hindsight's always 20-20. But yeah, the pain sucked. Like it just wasn't worth it. I had some amazing things happen to me during that time. I had my first child and I got married and I did live in a great city. But professionally, I struggled so badly for so long that it just it wasn't fun. And I think that there's an element of grit to win.
Like in order to win, it doesn't always come easy. And you have to have some thick skin and you have to be willing to overcome obstacles. But to a point. I was very depressed during that timeframe and I just couldn't get out of my own way. And I learned a lot about how do you, how do you re-engage to activate yourself if you get stuck? So I learned a lot then about that.
And the big thing is you have to win a little bit. You can't just lose constantly. And for us, because the foundation of that industry was broken, it was a ton of false starts. It was like five false starts. I probably started seven different companies then. And I just couldn't get any traction. But eventually, you know, Tenacious de-worked. We had a really big win in 2011.
And then our biggest win was after that in 2013, which is the business I just exited a year and a half ago.
Yeah. So tell us about the money source. I want to understand how you ended up creating that business, how you grew it to a thousand employees, how you exited. I'd love to learn more about that. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. The interface looked like it hadn't been updated since 2003.
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Chapter 7: How did Darius's past experiences contribute to his success with The Money Source?
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Yeah. So because I didn't have enough capital and mortgage, you need to have capital to build your platforms because it's not like VC. VC, you use capital to burn your runway to then get to your next round of capital. Mortgage, you need to capitalize the platform to go lend against it. And so I didn't have enough to really do it competitively. So what I ended up doing was doing partnerships.
So I did a partnership with this company called Pacific Union Financial in 2011. And we grew it from essentially nothing to about $75 million in revenue overnight. We had not a perfect exit from it. We had a disagreement with some of our partner there.
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