
I'm Vince Adamo. I spent 33 years running international bank operations in New York. I retired once. It didn't stick. I've spent the last decade working with service business owners — first as the owner of a painting franchise, then as a coach to 200+ owners across 15 states. The patterns repeat. The fixes work. I do this now because I'm good at it and because I missed the work.
I started in international banking in 1975.
Continental Bank International, Senior Checker, the entry-level role most people in the industry started with.
Two-hour commute each way from suburban Connecticut.
I made it through 33 years of that.
The roles built on each other: Westpac Banking Corp, Girard Bank Int'l, Standard Chartered, Banco di Napoli, Crédit Industriel et Commercial
By 2003, I was promoted to Vice President at Wachovia. I ran international bank operations: about 140 staff in New York, London, Taipei, and Hong Kong. We moved bank-to-bank money for global clients, every day. We tracked the value of nine different financial portfolios in real time. The 24-hour payments system we built is still how that bank moves money around the world.
The 24-hour international payment operations capability we built is still core to how the bank moves correspondent money.
Then April 2008 happened.
Operations got offshored.
I took the severance and walked out the door at 51 years old.
I started training as a yoga teacher in 2003 — partly because I’d watched 9/11 happen and lost a friend in the towers,
partly because banking-career stress was real.
I obtained my 500-hour yoga and meditation certification in 2005.
So when banking ended, I opened a yoga studio. Ran it for about two full years. Sold it.
In March 2010 I opened a home painting franchise.
Built it to consistent profitability.
By 2014 I was traveling monthly to Ann Arbor to train new incoming franchise owners.
By 2015 I was full-time on the franchisor’s training and coaching team.
From 2015 to 2022, I coached over 200 service business owners across 14 states, Texas, Arkansas, New York, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Iowa, Arizona, Illinois.
Same patterns, over and over.
The businesses that scaled and the ones that stayed stuck did six things differently.
The ones that scaled didn’t always work harder. They worked on different problems.
I moved to Arizona in early 2016.
Retired in June 2022 at 64.
I tried retirement.
Traveled, lost 85 pounds, learned what a carnivore diet meant, got my A1C back to 5.6 without medication.
Watched a lot of YouTube and created a successful channel of my own.
Three years was my limit.
Adamo Advisors is the business consulting practice I built on coming back.
The math is different now, AI changes what’s possible operationally for service businesses in ways that didn’t exist when I retired.
But the underlying questions haven’t changed.
How does an owner who still runs the business day-to-day break the next ceiling without breaking what got them there?
How does a $1M business become a $3M business without 3x the owner’s hours?
How does a service business become something with resale value rather than a job that pays well?
Those are the questions I work on now.
If your business is in the $500K to $10M range and you recognize yourself in one of those questions, we should talk.
We offer practical business advice for service business owners.
A division of Damo Works LLC. Phoenix, Arizona.

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