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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 thi
Published on 2 years, 1 month ago