From Cigars to Call Centers: Peter Roth on Pivoting, Cold Calling, and Resilient Entrepreneurship

Host Brenton Harrison interviews entrepreneur Peter Roth, who runs Scalify Call Centers (building remote outbound cold-calling appointment-setting teams for home services and real estate) and MDCWholesaleCigars.com (a long-running cigar wholesaler that recently expanded to B2C). Roth shares immigrating from the USSR as a child, his father’s necessity-driven entrepreneurship, and learning business through family ventures in Denver. After college he realized traditional jobs weren’t a fit and launched a cigar kiosk that grew into a successful cigar bar, later forced to close due to Colorado licensing limits, landlord conflict, and COVID timing. An HVAC remediation effort led to an HVAC partnership, then solar sales growth to 130 reps, where cold-calling call centers emerged as an effective lead engine and became its own business. He emphasizes networking, recurring-revenue models, “delusional” confidence/optimism, and recounts an employee’s attempted takeover via Slack ownership that cost clients and revenue but exposed operational weaknesses.

00:00 Show Introduction
01:27 Meet Peter Roth
03:04 Immigrant Roots
06:40 Growing Up Denver
08:00 Choosing Entrepreneurship
11:39 Launching Cigars
14:06 Cigar Bar Shutdown
17:18 Pivot To Call Centers
18:40 HVAC Detour Begins
20:56 Building Sales Team
22:23 Adding Solar Upsells
23:03 Selling HVAC Pivot
23:32 Scaling Solar Sales Team
24:29 Accidental Call Center Breakthrough
25:33 Demand for Call Center Services
28:04 Outbound vs Inbound Explained
29:18 Best Niches Homeowners Real Estate
30:32 Transferable Entrepreneur Skills
34:46 MRR Over Projects
35:56 Employee Coup Crisis
38:58 Rebuilding With Perspective
42:07 Networking Lessons Learned
44:58 Optimism Relationship Superpower
45:52 Podcast Wrap Up

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